LAUGH. SEE?”
— J.R. “Bob” Dobbs
Looking Out, Looking In
(A recent sermon.)
SOMETIMES, A LITTLE PERSPECTIVE CAN be a good thing. A lot of perspective? Even better.
That point is illustrated in this week’s Torah reading, when Joseph admonishes his brothers after they fib that their father told them to tell him not to be angry with them for selling Joseph into slavery. Not for the first time, Joseph replies that their action was part of G?d’s plan all along. Otherwise, he couldn’t have rescued them from the worldwide famine. Joseph tells his brothers they can finally let go of their guilt. He gives them an object lesson in perspective.
In David Michie’s charming novel, The Dalai Lama’s Cat, there’s a conversation between two Buddhists about performative, ego-driven spirituality. One of them said that some people wear their spirituality like a badge, rather than living it sincerely and without a word about it to anyone else.
My copilot read me that passage, as she often does when she comes across something shareworthy. We had a brief but intense discussion, as we often do, which prompted her to ask me, “How do you keep your ego out of your religious practice?” (Followed by: “Wouldn’t this be a great topic for a sermon?”)
For me, spiritual practice is worthless without proper perspective. To hold on to that perspective, there are three things I try to keep in mind at all times – I’m not always good at it, but they do support me when I need them. The three are backyard astronomy, a quote from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, and one from Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai.
First, astronomy. Here’s how big and empty the Universe is: Imagine the distance from the Sun to the Earth as being one inch. On that scale, a lightyear, the distance light travels in a year, is about a mile long. On that same scale, our closest star would be just over four miles away, or about from our synagogue to distant Stage Gulch Road. Our best telescopes can peer across about 14 BILLION lightyears and observe hundreds of billions of galaxies, each galaxy containing hundreds of billions of stars. And in all of that all-encompassing emptiness, there is only one of each of us: ephemeral, irreplaceable, unique.
Which leads to this quote from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, who tells us: “You may be unique – but you ain’t special.”
The second quote comes from Pirkei Avot, a book of wise rabbinic sayings collected about two thousand years ago. In it, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai says this: “If you have studied much Torah, do not take credit for yourself – for that is what you were created to do.”
These three things – astronomy and the pocket wisdom of two rabbis – keep me from overflowing with egotism. And as a fervent blogger and writer of short stories trying hard to be noticed in today’s “attention economy,” I need all the ego-checking I can get. My question to you today is: “How do you keep your perspective?”
Pass the microphone around the sanctuary. Afterward, thank everyone for their participation with a hearty, “I think Joseph would be proud!”
Aside
July 4, 1776 – January 20, 2025. Magna dum duravit.
Audiomobile
“COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE COGITATE…”
So ran one of the many “found sounds” (today called “samples”) on the pass-around tape collages that were a fringe benefit of membership in the Neo-Pagan Society of Diablo Valley College in the early-to-mid-1980s. (Accent on “fringe.”)
My initiation into this three-part sonic conspiracy – which included “Mr. Bird” and “Zoro X.R. Troll” – came about on receiving from Zoro a postage-stamped 60-minute cassette tape with no explanatory note save “PLAY ME” written on its label. Curious, I popped it into my boombox and pressed “Play.” My ears were happily assaulted (in machine-gun succession and no particular order) by excerpts from: Alan Watts, William S. Burroughs, The Grateful Dead, Firesign Theater, a straitlaced radio preacher, Mr. Bird’s paranoid brother, Tom Robbins, Zoro’s favorite inspirational readings, The Beatles, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and various other audial offerings now hazed by time and headspace, as well as Zoro’s drawled invitation to add to, subtract from, or otherwise mess with “this here tape” before sending it either back to him or on to Mr. Bird.
The process was simple:
1- Wire up two cassette recorder/players from output to input (this also works just as well, if not better, if you have one two-bay cassette player/recorder).
2- Load output player with whatever you like: music, spoken narrative or poetry, movie/tv soundtrack, sound effects, live microphone, &c., as limited only by imagination and source material.
3- Load a cassette into the input recorder, press “Record,” and engage the Pause button.
4- Play a section of the output tape.
5- Disengage input ‘s Pause button to record as much output as you want, then re-engage.
6- Switch output sources, the more incongruous and/or thematic the better.
7- Repeat process until you lose interest. (WARNING! It’s addictive.)
To simple, mad minds like ours, the results were vastly entertaining, and inadequately depicted in writing: “output1 (click) OUTPUT2! (click) OuTpUt3? (click) oUtPuT4…” ad infinitum.
After it was exchanged for a while, the tape had mutated into something very odd and layered indeed. One surrealistic iteration included dialog between myself and elements of David Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust.” Another had Mr. Bird and Zoro calling out each others’ names in weird voices and at unexpected intervals. Yet a third featured Jim Morrison repeating the lyric “learn to forget” over and over and over.
For whatever reasons, we three eventually drifted away from this collaborative creation. Yet I still have a copy of the original tape kicking around here somewhere, plus one which I slowly built up over a period of nearly 20 years, always meaning to send it on to my colleagues.
Perhaps, one day, I will.
The Zine Scene
A LONG TIME AGO, IN a post office far, far away, our mailbox was fraught with wonder and excitement.
In those cultural Dark Ages of pre-public Internet access, creative folk could communicate through the medium of “zines” – homegrown/amateur magazines, usually (but not always) photocopied by the dozen at the local 24-hour Kinko’s. Zine subjects were limited only by the interests and imaginations of their creators: politics, music (mainly punk rock), personal essays, communality, underground comix, satire, movies, TV shows, media criticism in general, religion, cassette culture, spirituality, alternative lifestyles, history, science fiction, fantasy, sexuality – the list goes on.
At the hub of this textual universe stood Factsheet Five, the quarterly “zine of zines” stuffed with hundreds of brief reviews and publisher contacts. Each issue opened up entire worlds of conceptual adventure, and she and I would take turns devouring it and highlighting the publications we wanted to receive. Per-issue costs could be anywhere between a few stamps, a few bucks, or trade for “something interesting” — including one’s own zine.
We were both well-supplied to swap: she with her women’s spirituality “perzine” (personal zine) Sacred Wilderness and me with my elsewhere-described Far Corner, a UFO/paranormal satire journal. For those small but intense investments – thinking, writing, copying, and postage – we netted a substantial return from independent publishers all over the planet.
Factsheet Five has passed into the What-Was, having ceased production in 1998. Blogging, vlogging, Substack, YouTube content, and social media in general now fill the creativity gap once occupied by zines; they’re cheaper, have a potentially longer reach, and can be published and accessed with greater immediacy. As a result, the weekly post-box trip has become more prosaic and less exciting. But the memories remain, of a secret world populated by anyone who could afford to get their personal word out and connect with likeminded others. I like to think that, though the medium may have dwindled, the spirit hasn’t. Long live the revolution!
Pocket Theology
BEFORE WE BEGIN, LET’S HAVE an agreed-upon definition or two (c. OED, mostly):
mystic 1. one who believes that union with or absorption into the Deity or the Absolute, or the spiritual apprehension of knowledge inaccessible to the intellect, may be attained through contemplation and self-surrender. 2. one possessed by self-delusion or dreamy confusion of thought, especially when based on the assumption of occult qualities or mysterious agencies.
Strange words? Confusing? Off-putting, even? Granted. However:
skeptic an ancient or modern philosopher who denies the possibility of knowledge, or even rational belief, in some sphere.
Ethnically and religiously, I consider myself a Jew through and through (for some values of the word “Jew”). And as one who self-describes as mystic #1, it seems to me that “religion” is to “mysticism” as “cheering a team” is to “playing the sport.” Not content with worshipping the Divine, what I really want is to thoroughly and joyfully wallow around in It.
At the same time, experience has taught me to be leery of those self-proclaimed “mystics” who fit definition #2. That’s where skepticism can be handy; as noted elsewhere, I am wordlessly convinced of an indefinable, infinite, yet universal sentience laced through and underlying all existence. But human knowledge is only finite, and human certitude – even or especially the gut-level, immediate, intuitive variety – can be illusory and deceptive. So I also embrace the possibility that I could be completely wrong.
And I’m okay with that.
Given the universe’s detailed complexity, comfort with ambiguity is an important, even essential quality of any spiritual discipline. (As my friend Sputnik liked to interject during enthusiastic theological explanations, “Sounds about as good as any other damn thing.”) We cannot become so convinced of our own Inner Truth that we become dogmatic about it, especially at the expense of others. That way lies fanaticism, cultishness, and the darkest sort of militant, lock-brained fundamentalism.
To paraphrase Ivan Stang, another favorite philosopher: “‘God’ is not a fan club.” So join me on that field – and let’s play our hearts out.
First Graf: Sidereus Nuncio
PERHAPS THE GREATEST THING ABOUT Galileo Galilei’s first publication, translated from the Latin as The Sidereal Messenger, is his sense of adventure at being the first known human to telescopically observe and painstakingly chronicle the night sky.
Galileo recorded his unprecedented experience in 1610 CE, a time of adventurous European discoveries in general. His detailed and methodical observations will be thrilling to anyone also observing the same celestial sights for the first time through a simple 20x (read: low-power) backyard telescope. Science historian Albert Van Helden’s superb 1989 translation reveals Galileo’s excitement and wonder on every page, and adds valuable context via explanatory bookending and notes.
That era being one of grand aspirations and flowery speech, Galileo’s grateful bow to his patron, Duke Cosimo II de Medici, is fully titled, “SIDEREAL MESSENGER, unfolding great and very wonderful sights and displaying to the gaze of everyone, but especially philosophers and astronomers, the things that were observed by GALILEO GALILEI, Florentine patrician and public mathematician of the University of Padua, with the help of a spyglass lately devised by him, about the face of the Moon, countless fixed stars, the Milky Way, nebulous stars, but especially about four planets flying around the star of Jupiter at unequal intervals and periods with wonderful swiftness; which, unknown by anyone until this day, the first author detected recently and decided to name MEDICIAN STARS.” (That honorific didn’t stick; instead, the “four planets” are now called by astronomers the “Galilean moons.”)
Let us skip Galileo’s five-page introductory paean to the Duke de Medici and dive right into the first paragraph of the work itself:
In this short treatise I propose great things for inspection and contemplation by every explorer of Nature. Great, I say, because of the excellence of the things themselves, because of their newness, unheard of through the ages, and also because of the instrument with the benefit of which they make themselves manifest to our sight.