Cummings

“"i thank You God for most this amazing
day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun’s birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any–lifted from the no
of all nothing–human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)"

e.e. cummings, 1894-1962

NOTHING IS SO DIFFICULT AS TO BE ALIVE!!!!!! which is the ONLY THING WHICH YOU CANNOT LEARN ever, from anyone, anywhere: it must come out of you; and it never can, until you have KNOCKED DOWN AND CARRIED OUT all the teachable swill of Cambridge etc.”

~a letter the poet (ee cummings) wrote to his younger sister in 1922, when she was struggling to leave the family home and move to New York.

… Outwardly, Cummings was a well-behaved young man; according to Malcolm Cowley, "he was intensely shy and private in the Cambridge fashion." Yet… this shyness concealed a strong sexual appetite, which Cummings both longed and feared to indulge. He blamed his repression on what he called "my New England downbringing," which "tried its best to make [me believe] that 'virtue' and volupté are opposites." And his father, the pastor, was the living symbol of that sexual Puritanism. "I led a double life," Cummings recalled, "getting drunk and feeling up girls but lying about this to my Father and taking his money all the time." More generally, he wrote, "FEAR & SEX go together in my life. With sex I associate, also, GUILTINESS."

It was only in his senior year, when he finally moved out of the Irving Street house, that Cummings had the opportunity and the audacity to overcome that guiltiness. As an adult, Cummings would become an emblem of the sexually liberated Twenties. His poetry has a sexual frankness, a delighted naughtiness that still makes it very popular with adolescent readers:

may i feel said he (i'll squeal said she, just once said he)
it's fun said she... (let's go said he, not too far said she
what's too far said he, where you are said she)...

… Cummings and his friends loved to explore the bars and brothels of Boston. He took advantage of his newfound freedom, as he later recalled, to "roam that surrounding world sans peur(without fear), if not sans reproche (above reproach)." It was on one of these expeditions, with his classmate "Tex" Wilson, that Cummings parked his father's car in front of a prostitute's apartment, only to emerge to find it towed away… the woman, "thinking she was doing a good deed...rung the Reverend at three in the morning to tell him his car had been seized by the Boston police."

… In the ensuing fight, Edward Cummings wailed to his errant son, "I thought I had given birth to a god." … Cummings senior and junior often thought about each other in quasi-blasphemous terms… if Estlin was God the Son, it was only natural for Edward to become God the Father. "My father," the poet recalled as an adult, "is the principal figure of my earliest remembered life; when he cradled me in his arms, i reposed in the bosom of God Himself; & when i rode on God's shoulder i was king of the world. His illimitable love was the axis of my being." It must have been difficult for this God to learn that his only son was, in fact, all too human… To the end of his life, Cummings declared his profound respect for his father. Certainly any father would be proud to receive the kind of encomium Cummings delivered in one of his Norton lectures:

“He was a New Hampshire man, 6 foot 2, a crack shot & a famous fly-fisherman & a first rate sailor (his sloop was named The Actress) & a woodsman who could find his way through forests primeval without a compass & a canoeist who'd still paddle you up to a deer without ruffling the surface of a pond & an ornithologist & taxidermist & (when he gave up hunting) an expert photographer (the best I've ever seen) & an actor who portrayed Julius Caesar in Sanders Theatre & a painter (both in oils and watercolors) & a better carpenter than any professional & an architect who designed his own houses before building them & (when he liked) a plumber who just for the fun of it installed all his own waterworks....” ~ Adam Kirsch

"In his work, Cummings experimented radically with form, punctuation, spelling, and syntax, abandoning traditional techniques and structures to create a new, highly idiosyncratic means of poetic expression. Later in his career, he was often criticized for settling into his signature style and not pressing his work toward further evolution. Nevertheless, he attained great popularity, especially among young readers, for the simplicity of his language, his playful mode and his attention to subjects such as war and sex.

The poet and critic Randall Jarrell once noted that Cummings is “one of the most individual poets who ever lived—and, though it sometimes seems so, it is not just his vices and exaggerations, the defects of his qualities, that make a writer popular. But, primarily, Mr. Cummings’s poems are loved because they are full of sentimentally, of sex, of more or less improper jokes, of elementary lyric insistence.”

Images ~ Cummings in a hammock with his father and sister, Elizabeth

~ Painting of e.e. cummings by John Bedford

First love

“Don’t look at the name, look at the face. You won’t recognize the name, but look deeply into the eyes. You will recognize them,” I am about to write to my first love, a boy who broke my heart more than twenty years ago. I was fifteen, Roberto was seventeen going on thirty… He called me his “baby” and I was… He took me on a fancy yacht that sailed from Lausanne to Evian in France, just for dinner. Dressed up, we sat on the deck at a round table shared with couples twice our age, sipping champagne as though it were something we did every night. Yes, an evening cruise to France for dinner, just the two of us...

We were in love, and of course that meant forever. Shoeboxes in my closet quickly filled with letters from him. I would sit on the floor of my closet, pulling letter after letter out of the box, not so much to read his effusively devoted words as to clasp them to my nose, my heart, until I was sure I could feel him sitting beside me. I was impervious to the objections raised by my Jewish grandfather… I was sure, true love could overcome all hurdles, break down all boundaries, and cross all lines of religion and race.

A mere four months later, he had found himself a real woman, one whom he could take to bed, a place his fifteen year old “baby” could not even imagine going. And that was it. Over. I knew from the first few seconds of our phone conversation that something had changed. “I have a new girlfriend, from Panama,” he told me. “A real woman.” There was no place or time for negotiation. That was it. I called him back a few days later, sobbing, when the reality finally sunk in and the shock wore off. He was drunk and pretended not to recognize my voice.

Fast forward twenty three years. The betrayal and anguish have become simply threads in the tapestry of my life, woven together with threads of great love, bliss, maturity and development. Hindsight’s 20/20 vision has enabled me to see the obvious shallowness and immaturity, albeit very real intensity, of the love I felt at fifteen. Those four months have become one of thousands of brush strokes upon the painting of my thirty-eight years, barely noticeable amidst the solid background of peaceful contentment with flourishes of deep gratitude, understanding, wisdom and joy.

Enter facebook …I type in “Roberto Silvo, Panama.” There he is. The picture is too small to recognize, for it’s of a man standing in a mountainous panorama. I dare not invite him to be my “friend.”… I send a message. “Are you the same Roberto Silvo who went to ITC in Switzerland and the Hun boarding school of New Jersey.” The answer comes back… “Yes, that’s me. But I’m a little fuzzy on you. Did you go to Hun?” I have changed my name… moved to India, and taken vows of renunciation…

The urge to respond is strong. Nearly irresistible. I want, for some inexplicable reason, to have him “face to face” again… I realize that the urge is… to be fifteen years old, dancing in a dark room in a quaint village of Switzerland, at a time when the greatest concerns were whether to choose badminton or tennis for the afternoon activity… The urge is, of course, impossible to fulfill. Life either moves forward or it stagnates in the past … I stood up, off the carpeted floor of the closet in my parents’ home, and brushed myself off more than twenty years ago. It is senseless to try to squeeze my thirty-eight year old being back into a closet sized for a heartbroken teenager. I do not respond to his message which asks who I am. The curtain has dropped and life has moved forward.”

~ Sadhvi Bhagawati Saraswatiji, Ph.D was raised in an American family in Hollywood, California and graduated from Stanford University. She was completing her Ph.D. when she left America in 1996 to come and live permanently at Parmarth Niketan Ashram in Rishikesh, India. She has been living there for the last twenty years, engaged in spiritual practice and dedicated service. She was officially initiated into the order of Sanyas (monastic renunciation) in the year 2000, by her Guru, His Holiness Swami Chidanand Saraswatiji.

God's Gender

"Many religious and spiritual traditions describe God with a specific gender. For example, although there are those who worship Mother Mary, Christianity is dominated by a Father God. A lot of modern Hinduism is also directed at male deities like Shiva or forms of Vishnu.

Some modern faiths speak in terms of a Father-Mother God, likening it to a personal choice or a genderless or androgynous divinity. What this is leaving out is direct experience. When the means to direct experience is lost, traditions devolve into systems of belief. This has happened repeatedly throughout the ages.

However, the divine can be directly known. This first arises in one of 2 ways:
The Impersonal is genderless being, pure existence. Words like She or Father are meaningless although It may also be unsuitable. Hence words like That.

The Personal is our highest ideation of divinity, usually in a form we can relate to. Our personal highest ideal may appear as a masculine or a feminine figure. Direct experience can happen well before awakening but really flowers in the God Consciousness and further refinement stages if that’s being cultured. In Refined Unity, there is that potential for God Realization.

How our mind might favour a style of divinity may or may not match what later flowers from a deeper reality. This isn’t something driven by the mind. It arises out of our affinity with  specific styles of being.

As we go deeper into Brahman, we leave behind form and duality. Gender becomes a near meaningless distinction. Yet when we go still deeper beyond the beyond and discover pure Divinity, there is a tendency to shift back to gender again. Not because of duality but because of how we relate to an effulgent, all-giving Divinity.

In most cases, it seems people are inclined to see pure Divinity as Divine Mother. This is because of the nature of the direct knowing. Also we know the Shakti’s before we know the power. It would not surprise me to find some who relate to the source of the source as masculine though. But usually they’re referring to an expressed aspect of the divine.

Each of us are unique combinations of laws that emphasize a style of experience of the world that fills in yet another puzzle piece in the wholeness of Being. Don’t try to figure it out in advance. Instead, allow it to unfold as it is."

~ Davidya (ढविड्य)

aka David F. Buckland                                                             

Images ~ The Angel of the Divine Presence Bringing Eve to Adam by William Blake,

~ Ardhanarishvara represents the synthesis of masculine and feminine energies of the universe,

~ Davidya

Strip

“The truths job is to strip you.
No matter where you find yourself, in the greatest heaven or the greatest hell,
you will always find the cosmic Buddha (truth) undoing your buttons on the front of your shirt…
you’ll always find that the cosmic Buddha will be taking off your garments.
No matter what clothes you wear, the great compassion of the truth will always be stripping you.
The Great Death is the willingness to be totally stripped.
The final liberation. Including stripped of our own awakening and our own enlightenment…
You can’t even want to hold to something that’s ultimately real.
If you want to hold on to it, you know that’s not it. (truth, reality)
Nothing really dies. It just changes form. How can you want what already is?
Somebody that has a belief, (in heaven, etc.) at the end of their life, they’re going to be very afraid.
At the time of death, our belief (about death) isn’t worth very much.
Death is an experience. And all experience is an illusion.
But only by measuring the truth by what is eternally always present.
All this experience is nothing but a display of our true nature… is temporary.”

~ Adyashanti, The Great Death (Quote courtesy of Davidya (ढविड्य) aka  David F. Buckland, MA)

Image ~ Lord Byron on his deathbed by Joseph Denis Odevaere, 1826

Aitken

"Early on December 7, 1941, Japanese bombers came low through the gap in the mountains of Oahu and sank the great warships in Pearl Harbor, and, by the law of unintended consequences, doomed the Japanese empire and exported Zen Buddhism to the United States. The Japanese invaded Guam, and among the Americans working there was a civilian in his mid-twenties, thin, physically awkward, scholarly, looking for a direction. The Japanese army decided his direction for him by hauling him off to an internment camp in Kobe, Japan. Unlike prisoners of war, interned civilians were accorded no special cruelty, though stragglers were shot. The young man keeping carefully in line was Robert Aitken….

In the internment camp a guard lent him a book called Zen in English Literature, by R.H. Blyth, an English translator in love with Japan. Aitken read the book over and over; it made him happy in dark circumstances, offering a link between his own tradition and the meaning of life. When the camps were consolidated he met Mister Blyth, as he always called him, who had also been interned. Blyth was a mentor in an unlikely place, and introduced the newcomer to Zen, koans, haiku, and the value of surprising events.



After the war, with funding to study haiku and koans, Aitken returned to Japan, leaving his wife and infant son with friends. This led to his unmarrying; “I had no choice, really.” By this he meant that he was obsessed with the big questions and could have no peace or joy without solving them. When he remarried it was to Anne Hopkins, an heiress with a gracious and floating physical presence. For their honeymoon they went to Japan and straight into sesshin, a period of intense Zen meditation. It turned out not to be her idea of a honeymoon, although it was a source of amusement later on. Anne was a part of all he did in Zen, and she cofounded and funded his zendo. It began in their living room in Honolulu, and something of that informal tone always stayed with his groups. Anne moderated his emotional connections with colleagues and students, and he found it hard going after she died.

His most influential early teacher was Nakagawa Soen, the reluctant abbot of a great temple in Japan. Soen spoke good English, liked Beethoven, and was a notable haiku poet. The relationship had a high degree of whimsy. When Aitken visited Soen in winter, and they went for a walk by the Japan Sea, Soen stripped down. “Remember,” he said, “Zen is not asceticism!” and plunged in. Once Soen was giving sesshin in Honolulu and gave a great yell. Aitken found himself joining in. Soen thought Aitkin was on the verge of enlightenment and started yelling and whacking him with the Zen stick in an effort to push him over the edge. Aitken was yelling too. “But nothing happened” he said later, forlornly. “I don’t think those methods work.”

Aitken ended up studying with Koun Yamada, who had been Soen’s high school roommate. After the war Yamada had taken the problem of suffering seriously; he trained very hard and became the poster child for massive enlightenment experiences. Yamada had a literate, innovative, and practical mind. Some of his students found enlightenment quickly; others Yamada would drag or inveigle into the koan curriculum, coaching them in the hope that they would find their feet by stumbling along. Aitken was his test case for that theory.

When the time came, Bob wasn’t so sure he should teach. He muttered, “I just can’t do this, I can’t teach,” to Taizan Maezumi at the Zen Center of Los Angeles, and Maezumi invited him to stay for a while. It was Maezumi, he said, who really made him a teacher. Maezumi didn’t quite fit the idea of a Zen master either—“I could smell the sake on his breath,” Bob remembered, “but he was completely clear and he held my feet to the fire till I understood.”

Bob… was always feeling around for the meaning of events, and I found that to be one of his best features. He was not the shiny, self-assured, clear creature that Zen masters were advertised to be. He was timid and anxious, and put down other teachers, out of a kind of embarrassed competitiveness. But he knew that he judged and assessed others because he judged and assessed himself, and when he was least certain he was most interesting and helpful to be around.

In Zen there is a famous koan about whether a dog has buddhanature, and that was the koan he worked on for twenty years, trying to settle the matter of his dog… In an interview he held out his hand and I met Hakuin, the great medieval koan master, embodied in a little room while outside it rained and rained and inside there was light, nothing but light. I never forgot that dawn. Sometimes his understanding seemed deep and other times not so much, but his rule-bound meticulousness was fine for me, because I didn’t expect someone to understand my feelings or mirror me; I wanted to know what the tradition thought and how it could deepen me and those to come.

I hadn’t been aware that I had any strong reaction to my old mentor’s death, but… I dreamed that I was following Robert Aitken and Thich Nhat Hanh up the steps to a big temple. They went in and I was a few steps behind. It wasn’t a matter of personal feeling—these weren’t teachers I would have imagined following, and they didn’t agree with each other either. I was just following them, entering the same great temple they entered. In the dream personal feelings and opinions didn’t matter, as they don’t matter in life. We have all followed the old masters up those steps, and it’s not the temple we expected. That’s the point of Zen—the day we have is the good day, that dog has buddhanature after all.”

~ John Tarrant, Lion’s Roar, Sept. 2010

Check in

“Awareness is always there, but it doesn’t do you much good until you bring consciousness to it, even for brief moments. Don’t be too concerned with how long you can sustain it. It’s more important how often you check in. If you keep checking in, the sustaining of it happens on its own. At any time during the day, you can touch into this ground and bring consciousness to it. You can make the choice to be aware of it. An important thing is the willingness to make a choice. Whether there is a chooser or not, there is certainly the experience of choice.”

~ Adyashanti, The Way of Liberating Insight

Men's Story

"Across societies, there are gender norms – dominant, mainstream expectations of how men, women, girls and boys should supposedly look, act, feel, and relate to each other, and what’s acceptable in these realms. We’re often taught that being a “real man” requires things such as being emotionally and physically tough; being big and able-bodied; being heterosexual; having lots of women; having power over one’s partner/spouse; not experiencing or expressing vulnerability, sadness or fear; being able to take care of oneself and others; and being financially successful.


Research around the world has found that rigid/dominant views about masculinity are linked in men with problems including homophobia, transphobia, rape-supportive attitudes, sexual and physical violence against women, violence against other men, bullying, substance abuse, risky driving, and behaviors that increase risk for sexually transmitted infections. Masculinity ideals which say that men should be tough and invulnerable are also linked with men’s lesser use of health care (including for mental health, injuries, cancer screening and HIV testing). In the U.S., men die years earlier than women of similar backgrounds, largely due to their higher rates of risky behaviors and lower rates of health-protective behaviors — patterns of behavior that are often linked with how men show their masculinity. Men’s enactment and experience of masculinity is also entwined with and shaped by other identities they hold, including their race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion and socioeconomic status.


Also, when “masculinity” is defined through its contrast to a less-valued, stereotypical “femininity,” and when being gay is seen as being “like a girl” – which is the worst thing a guy can supposedly be – it contributes to homophobia and transphobia, which in turn contribute to problems for LGBTQQIA folks including elevated rates of substance abuse, depression, suicide, school dropout and experience of bullying and violence. Homophobia isn’t only a “gay people’s problem,” insofar as straight boys and men often go to great lengths to not “seem” gay.


Overall, boys and men often feel feel pressured to fight, show their toughness and virility, not express their emotions, sexuality or gender identity, and set aside parts of themselves – to try to fit into boxes of social expectation which, in fact, almost no one naturally fits into! And when individuals (of all genders) who buy into hazardous gender role ideas hold positions of power in social institutions, patriarchy, gender inequality and the marginalization of LGBTQQIA and other less-powerful groups become entrenched through policy. The personal and the political are fundamentally linked.
On the positive front, it’s increasingly recognized in the public health and social justice fields that working to shift gender norms in support of healthy masculinities is a productive and needed approach to improving well-being for all people.


Given all of these facts, we must create bold, ongoing, mainstream, public forums around the world where the impacts of dominant masculinity ideologies are critically discussed, where men’s beauty and humanity is celebrated, and where healthy forms of men’s human expression are highlighted and supported. We need many local revolutions in male gender norms and gender relations, toward healthy masculinities – for everyone’s benefit.





The Men's Story Project (MSP) was initiated by Dr. Jocelyn Lehrer in 2008 to help fill this gap. The core of our work is a scalable, research-based approach to creating live testimonial-sharing events, films and other media in which boys, men, and folks who identify in any way with masculinity publicly explore social ideas about masculinity through the lens of their own experience. MSP initiatives can be stand-alone, supplemented with community engagement campaigns, and incorporated into broader education programs. MSP Collectives can form around this work.
As a movement-building initiative, the MSP helps groups "crowdsource culture change" in social ideas about masculinity, in locally-led ways, through men's less-often-heard voices and stories. In each MSP production, diverse men share personal stories with an audience - with unusual candor - on topics including family relationships; men’s violence against women, violence between men; sexuality; gender identity; bullying; homo/transphobia; HIV/AIDS; personal transformations; and intersections with factors including race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status and religion.

  

The stories collectively celebrate men’s humanity and note costs of stereotypical/dominant notions of manhood for the presenters and people of all genders around them. Multiple mediums can be used (e.g., prose, monologues, comedy, slam poetry, dance); the events are followed by audience discussion and a community resource/action fair. MSP presenters have included celebrities, other opinion leaders, students, activists, and men who had never previously been on a stage. Our testimonial-based approach to creating live productions and films is rooted in public health research and intended for implementation/evaluation by campuses, NGOs and other groups.
The MSP website and YouTube Channel highlight local initiatives. We hope the MSP will spread widely, highlighting an international emergence of men who are helping to transform masculinity norms and gender relations – towards health and justice for all."