Roses and Garbage

Thich Nhat Hanh, The Heart of Understanding:
Commentaries on the Prajnaparamita Heart Sutra
Parallax Press, 1988

A beautiful rose we have just cut and placed in our vase is immaculate. It smells so good, so pure, so fresh. It supports the idea of immaculateness. The opposite is a garbage can. It smells horrible, and it is filled with rotten things.  But that is only when you look on the surface. If you look more deeply you will see that in just five or six days, the rose will become part of the garbage. You do not need to wait five days to see it. If you just look at the rose, and you look deeply, you can see it now. And if you look into the garbage can, you see that in a few months its contents can be transformed into lovely vegetables, and even a rose. If you are a good organic gardener and you have the eyes of a bodhisattva, looking at a rose you can see the garbage, and looking at the garbage you can see a rose. [p. 31]

In twenty years, Thich Nhat Hanh will still be with us.  But will we recognize his many forms? The Heart of Understanding will be of service in cultivating that recognition, and many others as well.  In this commentary on the Heart Sutra, based on talks during the 1980s, Nhat Hanh introduces his understanding of interbeing. 

All these decades later, this short text can help us recognize our habitual denial of interbeing, particularly when it come to U.S. politics. For example, can we remain serene and un-triggered when reading the following passages? … “In this  … situation, each side  is pretending to be the rose, and calling the other side garbage….You have to work for the survival of the other side, if you want to survive yourself….do not hope that you can eliminate the evil side. It’s easy to think that we are on the good side. And that the other side is evil….We are not separate. We are inextricably interrelated.   The rose is the garbage.”

The Good News of Translation

1.

Thanks to __________, I  Was Able to Read_______’s  _________  [Language]

 

Richard Fein, Yankev Glatshteyn, Selected Poems [Yiddish]
Hillel Halkin, Sholem Aleichem, Tevye the Dairyman [Yiddish]
Nili Wachtel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Meshugah [Yiddish]

Martha Collins and Thuy Dinh, Lam Thi My Da, Green Rice: Poems [Vietnamese] 
Mobi Ho, Thich Nhat Hanh, The Miracle of Mindfulness: A Manual on Meditation [Vietnamese]

Cedric Belfrage, Eduardo Galeano, The Book of Embraces [Spanish]
Andrew Hurley, Reinaldo Arenas, The Color of Summer [Spanish] 
John Lyons, Ernesto Cardenal, The Origin of Species and Other Poems [Spanish]
Samuel Putnam, Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote [Spanish]

Alexander Burry and Tatiana Tulchinsky, Anna Politkovskaya, A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya [Russian] 

Vietnamerica

Thuy, Cafe Ventana

1967

Today’s Email: “Thank you for signing up for the [New York Times] Vietnam ’67 newsletter. Over the course of the next year, we’ll examine the participation of the United States in the long war in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam ’67 newsletter will arrive in your inbox weekly.”

“Participation”
“Long War”

Journalist Bernard Fall writing in 1967: “It is Viet-Nam as a cultural and historic entity which is threatened with extinction. While its lovely land has been battered into a moonscape by the massive engine of modern war, its cultural identity has been assaulted by a combination of Communism in the North and superficial Americanization in the South.”

“Extinction”
“Moonscape”

Two Teachers

For two of my teachers
I give thanks:

Cao Ngoc Phuong
Khuu Vinh Ngoc Thuy

I first read Phuong’s autobiography
Learning True Love:

How I Learned & Practiced Social Change in Vietnam
When it was published in 1993

Current Reading

Citizens

 

 

A Singer

In 1969 or 1970, I began to re-evaluate my whole concept of what I wanted my music to say…. I was very much affected by letters my brother was sending me from Vietnam, as well as the social situation here at home. I realized that I had to put my own fantasies behind me if I wanted to write songs that would reach the souls of people. I wanted them to take a look at what was happening in the world.
–Marvin Gaye

 

A Journalist

1.
The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting. –Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

2.
She had first traveled to Vietnam in 1955, glad to see that the U.S. was making good on its aspiration to set the world right. By her second visit in 1963, she had sobered up. Seven years later, she began a stint as foreign correspondent for the New York Times, she had a hard time believing she was in the same country as before.
She had compassion and understanding for the U.S. troops, as she had for the Vietnamese being displaced, bombed, and killed by those same troops.

She knew she had privilege, of course; journalists could come and go, get the big story and give their careers a needed boost.

When she returned to the United States, she was obsessed. She admitted, “Turn the corner, people said to me in a kindly fashion. Forget the war. But I could not stop writing about it.”

Wartime during Life/3

We Expect the Germans

To know their own history
To tell the truth about their war
To refuse rationalizations and excuses
To act responsibly here and now
However many decades
Ago that was

The world expects the Americans
To know their own history
To tell the truth about their wars
To refuse rationalizations and excuses
To act responsibly here and now
However many decades and seconds
Ago that was

McNamara and Co.

“I’d chain all of the politicians to that haunting Vietnam memorial
and have them read—slowly—every name aloud.
Then the war would end for me.

Take all of them, all of them who gave us the war —
all of them who, like McNamara, began to doubt that the war could be won
and still kept it going.

Chain them to the memorial for several days,
if need be, and have them read each name aloud.
Wouldn’t that be something? Justice at last.”

—Adapted from Gloria Emerson, author of Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses, and Ruins from the Vietnam War

Compañeras

I needed to find other women who knew what I knew, and more. I needed to talk to women who had seen unspeakable things, who were without self-pity, who had faced the liars and lunatics, who had survived all of it and, in surviving, made a difference.

–Gloria Emerson, Winners and Losers: Battles, Retreats, Gains, Losses and Ruins from a Long War

Wartime during Life/2

November 12, 2007. Smithfield, NC.

After Reading Levertov’s Poem on the 1972 Christmas Bombing

for Andrew Wimmer and Suzanne Renard

Haven’t you had a similar fantasy
Sure, a different decade
A different civilization now being destroyed
Different men (sometimes)
Same crimes
Getting away with mass murder

Mind movies of righteous payback
(But like the Vietnamese woman said:
“The Americans cannot repay this debt
Because it’s too big”)
And after the phantasm runs its course
The daily discipline remains:

Channeling rage into the work—
Memory, resistance, eutopia

Mentshes/3

With Jim, Dan, and Mev, Upper West Side, 1995

 

What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand

For Brent Fernandez and Brett Schrewe

On Daniel Berrigan’s Night Flight to Hanoi

Night Flight to Hanoi is an account of Jesuit Daniel Berrigan’s odyssey in late January and early February 1968, when he and historian Howard Zinn traveled to Hanoi as representatives of the American peace movement. Their aim was to bring home three U.S. pilots whom the North Vietnamese had released. The narrative includes his decision to go, the waiting, the arrival, the tours into the grotesque and destructive displays of US military power, the testimonies of Vietnamese humanity and ingenuity, the meeting with the pilots, and the unelaborated denouement when the men are flown home—contrary to the wishes of the North Vietnamese—on a military plane. He and Zinn went in good faith around the world to promote peace between the two countries; the U.S. government, however, violated the agreement.

What is bracing in this account is Berrigan’s journey of solidarity, risk-taking, and accompaniment (example: sitting in the bomb shelters with the Vietnamese). So, what matters after such exposure and confrontation over the course of several days?

Seeing matters: “I have seen the victims. And this sight of the mutilated dead has exerted such inward change upon me that the words of corrupt diplomacy appear to me more and more in their true light. That is to say—as words spoken in enmity against reality.” [22-23] How Berrigan’s Jesuit brother Ignacio Ellacuría stressed over and over the imperative to confront realidad.

Remembrancers

Just Another Night at Café Illumination

After the talk on Operation Cast Lead
Carla Nguyen and I headed over to Café Illumination
Where we began processing what we heard

We sat outside as it was a balmy night
Odd how calm we felt
After the typical brouhaha and sparks flying

We were surprised
When an older man approached us
“Hi, the name’s Cal…|

I saw you at the Palestine speaker
Damn! — That one guy got pretty hot
And no one was there to support him”

We introduced ourselves
Carla bid him to sit with us
But he replied, “No, you are talking together