March on Washington

Despite a very full schedule of conference presentations in Washington, I did manage to see some sights, some of which will never be seen again.

It was nearly a full moon my first evening in town.

Yeah, that little white speck in the middle right.  It was crisp and cool, with the smell and color of autumn leaves, something I hadn't experienced for a long time.  My cheeks were rosy and tingly. And dry. Still, a nice evening for a walkabout.

I strolled down to K Street, which was under occupation.

It all looked like any homeless campout in Hawaii, except for the creative take on the D.C. license plate (which actually reads "Taxation Without Representation."  I didn't know that.)  It all would have seemed utterly ordinary except for the police on watch.

I wanted to get close enough to photograph the really interesting thing, a police horse with a really huge head, patiently waiting in his van to be useful.  My friend R noted, "You wouldn't want THAT charging at you."  (Later, back at my hotel, I watched an episode of Frasier, in which he and Niles buy their Dad's beloved but pastured police mount as a birthday gift. It's sad.  They're both too old to do much of anything.)

Just below K street was the Treasury Department:

And the White House:

Everything was very benign.  It seemed like there should have been...news.

There could have been. But even the newspaper office was dark and quiet. There in the outdoor atrium, another monument to the obsolete: a Merganthaler Linotype that had been used to set most of the important hot-lead stories of the past.

I fingered the Linotype's "etaoin shrdlu" keyboard, which summoned a security guard out of the inner lobby. "Oh sorry, sorry," I said, "but this is SO cool."  "What is it?" she asked.  I wound up giving a little lecture on the history of printing and journalism, there in the outer lobby of the Washington Post, inspiring her to be even more protective of the artifact.  Oddly, when I emailed the photo of it back home to my husband, he told me he and our son had just an hour before been having a discussion about Linotypes.  The synchronicities of this trip were beginning to weird me out.

Not QWERTY, but ETAOIN SHRDLU

In its bizarre and complicated mechanical presence, I was thinking of the Linotype and the real freedom and power it represented in its time before offset printing, desktop publishing, email, blogs and Twitter. I once composed headlines on a Ludlow, its little letterpress cousin; I still have raw lead blocks and type I set from those days; I use them as paperweights to hold my Chinese painting paper in place on the table.

The Linotype was still on my mind the next day when I stumbled into the Laogai Museum, a little monument to the lack of a free press and expression, a sort of Chinese Holocaust Memorial.  (I've never been to that place, having grown up in a time all too aware of the Holocaust.  I don't need to see all the photos and shoes and eyeglasses to remember the horror.)  But the Laogai...I hope my Visa statement for a book I bought there doesn't hinder my visa application for my next China trip.  I probably should have paid cash.)

It took me two Harps to sober up at my new local on Dupont Circle where I also enjoyed some French onion soup and shepherd's pie.

If you get bored in Washington, there's something wrong with you.

PHONING HOME

An element in classical Taoist practice and philosophy is the concept that the physical body, the structure of one's life even, is a patterned microcosm of the larger phenomena and forces in the universe and society. The dynamics of yin and yang, the wu xing, the bagua, the hexagrams, all can be used to understand and describe the world --from the internal processes of your digestion and inner spiritual progress, to the forces of nature and socio-political events. We may long to be hermits, separate from the dust and noise of the world, but it's hard to do that in today's society; we are left to create the hermitages inside ourselves.

I have been thinking about this after a blog-o-pal observed how technology --particularly cell phones and digital media players-- contributes to the noise, virtually addicting their users, blocking them from any spiritual understanding or development. Or at least that's what I think he meant...he may beg to differ. "The master does not own an iPod," he says. This thought was ironically communicated via the internet.

Like practically everyone in China, our Taoist master in Wudang was always on his cell phones, sometimes dueling cell phones; he used one of them to provide quiet background music for our Eight Brocades practice. Sometimes a sound track can be useful; other times it is distracting. Indoors it can add to the practice; outdoors it competes with the sounds of nature. I'm reminded of the singing speaker-rocks on some of the mountain trails, annoying Buddhist music but certainly much more tolerable than the Maoist-propaganda broadcast (with no on/off switch) to an earlier generation used to imposed noise. Because of this, perhaps the Chinese can tune it out more easily.

"On my way home, just leaving the temple...."

Yin Yang Phones

My other teacher, a scholar-meditator, carried a laptop and could sometimes be found updating his website.

Though working within ancient traditions, these guys use state-of-the-art technology. Technology that has replaced the obsolete tools of swords and gourds. (Will the cell phone someday become symbolic?)

The challenge, like that of quieting the noise of one's own mind, is to know when enough is enough. Having mastered my new car radio, I am enjoying Teaching Company CDs, and certain music on my iPod soothes me on commutes home. I have yet to succumb to the actual radio parts -- I have been more likely to choose silence over NPR, even.

Worse than the noise of technology though, there is the noise of society, i.e., that hell of other people. I am constantly bemused by a running theme in the Chinese and Korean drama I have been studying (possibly an addiction, more likely just something I have to explore to its zenith so I can let it go, an exercise in attachment to Vincent Zhao and Song Il-guk). The theme is of the orphan, the long lost family member who returns to revenge or heal the family from which he was stolen or abandoned...usually well before he knew there even was such a family. (Not infrequently this discovery is made during a death scene, at which point you learn the person you are in love with is...your brother.) Perhaps my own condition of only-childness --solitude comes naturally to me-- makes this puzzling. What is it about bloodlines and geneology that makes one person more family than another? It appears that the sibling is the most family-validating relationship in the here and now, even more than parents and children, which are projections of self into the past and future. I have friends (who have siblings) who say, "You are a sister to me." I treasure that, but not completely sure what it means exactly. I'm not sure what my reaction would be to someone who arrived at my doorstep to announce, "I am your half-brother; during the war, your father and my mother...." Soap opera fodder.)

Carried to an extreme, the notion of siblings might explain the arguments over useless islands claimed by various nations; family is just nationalism on a smaller scale. Homesteads and remote islands...whom do they belong to? And when someone wants you to be on their side, they want to make you family, ohana, with invitations to big noisy family dinners, political rallies, school reunions, family-expanding ceremonies. I've always felt like a spectator at these things, celebrating my own sacramental moments privately or with a chosen few.

As a Taoist-leaning only-child, I sometimes step back and wonder. What's with all this noise?

"Can You Come to Tea?"

RADIO WU WEI

I have been struggling with my new car radio, which is far from intuitive and has a manual written by so-called tech writers whose resumes must include the production of countless VCR manuals. The radio's buttons are tiny, the legends hard to see. But it's JVC so it must be good? I managed to get it to receive local radio stations and playback from my iPod, but, like MS Word, it has countless unnecessary and unintuitive features and options. Somehow I locked the CD player, the feature for which I bought it in the first place, to play Teaching Company CDs so I could learn something on my daily work commute. Alas, the radio would display nothing but the cryptic ODAA-I, whatever that meant.

I was all ready to just buy another radio, when I thought, "I'll give it one more try and then call customer service." Observing the time-honored tradition of RTFM, I retrieved the cryptic and convoluted user guide, printed in four languages, and noticed the big print on the manual's back page:

With my Hello Kitty pencil's point, I activated the reset button, and, woo hoo, now the CD player works. I reset my four favorite station presets (who actually needs 15 FM station presets and another 5 AM?--to say nothing of an option to allow user-entered text-based IDs for the favored stations, like FOX TALK NEWS, or HIP HOP CLASSICS or OLD FART OLDIES. Perhaps this comes naturally to folks who have been sending text messages on phones for the past decade). I think I have finally mastered the sequence of actions needed to set the radio clock, although it seems like it should do that automatically.

I admit all this digital technology is so cool, but I have never had the patience of a young friend who said, "When I get a new device, I just spend an hour or two with it figuring out all the commands." I want a wu wei radio. On-off. Volume up-down with a knob. A couple of push buttons for favorite stations. Maybe another button or two to activate the iPOD or CD.

At least I didn't embarrass myself with a call to a tech support rep who would have thought I was an idiot, muttering to himself, "RTFM."

TECHNOLOGY

Sometimes it sucks.  I have a new Tai Seng DVD wuxia series I am watching, but the first DVD in the set has some problems. (May be all six of them do, but don't know yet.)  A few minutes in, it completely freezes my Apple DVD player forcing me to shut down, restart, and execute a special command to eject the disc.  To return the flawed product (the receipt for which I have since discarded), I would have to go back to Wal-Mart, where I shop like twice a year (for the huge container of berry-flavored Metamucil I can only get there). When I'm in Wal-Mart I'm never quite sure where I am...they're exactly the same in Florida, Colorado, Pennsylvania, possibly even Beijing (although the cast of characters is probably different there...I'm not sure what Chinese Wal-Mart shoppers might look like). 

When last buying that Metamucil, since I was in le plus grand magasin  (a nod here to Target), I also was checking out the cheap DVDs on offer ( where I found Jeremiah Johnson, a truly great  movie, kind of Western wuxia, with Robert Redford, that I believe I saw in its premiere** in 1972 in Pocatello, Idaho, (which geologically is really part of Utah), and the Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I have never seen, but maybe it's time to find out what THAT is all about.) Then I discovered that our local Hawaii Wal-Mart has a respectable section of wuxia and kung fu videos. (Maybe I wouldn't have found this stuff in the Ocala, Florida, Wal-Mart. But then I wasn't looking, I was buying cheap household supplies for my aged father.)  On my Metamucil run, for a good price (the price you pay for enduring Wal-Mart) I bought Shaolin Grandma (subject for a whole 'nother blog post); a not half-bad Korean movie called Shadowless Sword, and a couple of multi-disc Tai Seng series. (I feel really guilty because for these I should have patronized my Chinatown vendor, but I will be back there soon, before Chinese New Year, and will certainly spend some bucks. Maybe I will ask her to stock Metamucil.)

Alas, Sword Stained with Royal Blood is giving me trouble. The Wizard, not a fan of the Mac DVD player, suggested I view it with VLC.  But I decided to test it first on the DVD player connected to our rarely used TV, where it plays just fine.  Except that the DVD player remote control doesn't work, so I can't select subtitles or control the DVD in any way. I asked the Wizard to investigate.  Indeed  something's wrong.  Why would anyone design a device controllable ONLY through a remote?  He can't determine if it's the remote or the IR sensor on the DVD player.

"I need a detector.  I need to order a new tool!"  Which he is enthusiastically now doing on line.

In the meantime, I have learned that the DVD DOES play on VLC on my Mac, (so I don't have to go back to Wal-Mart) although it occasionally burps and reverts to the Cantonese track from the preferred Mandarin, and loses the English subtitles. I can easily recover, but really something is wrong.  I hope it's only this first DVD.

In any case, it's a good story, from a Louis Cha wuxia novel.  They didn't have technology in that setting...except for fine sword production.

I wonder what would happen if I greeted the Wal-Mart greeter with a sword in hand?  Ideally with the receipt for the faulty (Chinese) product impaled on its tip. Prease to lefund this?

**I have the idea that I saw this movie in a theater in Pocatello with Robert Redford actually introducing it.  It was sort of a big deal.  But I could be imagining this, or conflating it with some other event. This may be why I now like to occasionally order shoes and bags from Robert Redford's Sundance catalog.

ONE FINGER POINTING AT THE MOON

Last night I was a grateful guest at a fundraiser for the nature education non-profit with which I have some history of affiliation. At the outset I must say it was a lovely event, catching up with folks I hadn't seen since last year, nice food, wine and margaritas under the stars, and it probably raised more money than was expected in these times.

I was seated as usual with a table of academics, a nice variation from my usual social life with defense contractors. A younger couple was demonstrating the bazillion clever apps on their iPhones: a finger painting program, an easy way to view real estate listings with pictures of bathrooms and kitchens, YouTube searching for a '70s era video of David Bowie and Bing Crosby, ambient sound programs to help you sleep, light sabres, a flashlight! And you can make phone calls! Like a digital Swiss army knife.

At one point I tapped the shoulder of my dinner conversation partner whose eyes had begun to glaze over. I pointed up to the trees where the 98.5 percent waxing gibbous moon had just made its appearance over Diamond Head. It seemed like a Zen moment, because we had been talking about my Wudang meditation retreats and her travel to Ireland and, perhaps, a walking tour in Japan.

I was struck that this event, designed to support nature awareness through education, was going on a little oblivious to the spectacle unfolding above and beyond. The noise of the live auction and the preoccupation with virtual technology seemed alienated from the purpose. And I believe our preoccupation with technology --which I am using right now of course --tends to increase this alienation from nature.

I paid my way at the event; I bid high for a piece of art at the silent auction. But I think more importantly, I pointed my finger at the moon. At least one person noticed.