REPOST: another potpourri post -- the one under the bodhi tree

I usually foist cat videos upon you at the end of posts, a casual ta-da, my te-deum wannabees. Here's one to begin with, for a change.

It's been a big day for Dobby, RuntChild of Marmy Fluffy Butt, and Friend to All. We discovered yesterday that he had his first health issue in four years of life: dread dandruff around the base of his straightforward, stumpy tail.

"Hark! I'm on it," I yelled, or something like that.

The ensuing stream of information from my astute googling of "dread dandruff, base of stumpy tail" mostly consisted of attempts to sell pet products, from dandruff-control shampoo to very expensive food and supplements. I finally hit on some non-commercial sites that all recommended beginning with a Washing of the Cat before spending big bucks on vets, all-salmon diets, and cat whisperers.

 I shared this with Fred, who snickered.

We don't bathe our cats unless there is a compelling reason having to do, usually, with Kling-ons of the Poo Variety, or after unfortunate encounters with, say, a skunk. Our cats are now all indoor pets and don't encounter much in the way of Stink Inducers. They just don't require bathing. I brush each adult cat daily, and grab Buddy the Freakishly Large Kitten whenever I can. 

Dobby happens to have a grooming fixation. You don't even have to make a brushing motion to brush him, just hold the darned thing at an angle and he proceeds to brush himself across the bristles, purring in an insane manner.  One of my first thoughts upon finding the flecks of crusty leavings was that we were going to end up on an episode of Intervention.  He must be grooming in secret.  He probably has a stash of secret brushes and hair product.  When he yowls at me about needing a few moments to himself among the  litter boxes, he's really meeting his over-coiffed feral friends by the back door, trading mousse.

Yeah, well, anyway. I got the message: Fred was not going to be much help in the quelling of this never-before-bathed cat. It's not that he is mean or anything, it's just that when he has his Mission Face on, the animal that is his beloved pet becomes an abstracted goal. The last time he cornered Marmy (in my office), he scared her so badly that she lost control of her precious bowels. In. my. office.

So I decided to give Dobby a good wash this morning, while The Manor slept.  Let the success or failure of the undertaking lie on mine own shouders, alone.  {put-upon-sigh}

It went really well. I whispered sweet nothings to his twitching ears and wild eyes, and Dobby kept his considerable cool. I think I was even efficient. And now that the cat is happy and dry again, there is nary a sign of the dread dandruff.

None of which has anything to do with this video.
Nope.
This was recorded during the last minutes of the Pre-Bath Era.  Buddy had been following Dobby around in a worshipful fashion, as The Dobster had somehow regained control of the Gang of Three.  Dobby feels called to entertain the huge kitten -- in this instance, with flicks of his small, dandruff-afflicted tail.

We can only hope the rest of this potpourri post will be as tight as its introduction.

One of the functions of my Potpourri Series posts, in gustatory terms, is to be a palate cleanser. They're usually pleasant little amusements of the bouche, cutting through the unctuous as well as the outright greasy -- and the saccharine, the cloying saccharine.

My favorites are the traditional fruit sorbets. Maybe a shot of Calvados.

If you need to make a run to the grocery store before continuing, go on! We'll hold your place and promise not to say or do anything meaningful until you get back.

{whistle::whistle}

Ready? Okay, then.

In the course of speaking with folks these past few weeks, I've not worked very hard at subterfuge. Feeling disgusted with my life and what I've done, and not done, with it, I've steadfastly broadcast that disgust.

Or, if not feeling so explicit, I've challenged my inclination to annotate the truth when I happen to write it. By detailing myself to death, I have the delusion of being more accessible. Yes, I know, your experience doesn't bear this out!

I wrote the following about all that roughly two weeks ago, and didn't know what to do with it. But you know what the primary thought behind a Potpourri Post is? Why, none other than "whose blog is it, anyway?"! So, read it, don't read it, I don't care. It just had to be written, and now, it has to be published -- much in the way people must publish legal notices.

I needed something to happen, but had no clue how to shepherd that need.  And so I hurt my back this morning, at roughly 4 AM.  As a happening, that will have to do, and what it has done in only six small hours is interesting.


There's been an increase in my ability to focus but a marked decrease in my tendency to edit myself to shreds.  i'm ashamed, i'm so ashamed.


Which means that you, Dear Reader, may be the loser in this unbalanced equation. Oh, stop rolling your eyes.


I appreciate those of you willing to wait around as I cycle through the Crap of Life, being careful to jot down every bewildering, self-aggrandizing detail.  Maybe you feel relief at being invited to someone else's train wreck?  [That's okay.  If I can serve as Object Lesson so that you may avoid some catastrophe or other, why, Hallelujah and I'm glad to be of use.  If you just get off on my misfortune, well, may the Bird of Paradise fly up your nose.]  i'm ashamed, i'm so ashamed.


One of this blog's functions is to siphon off the incredible head of self-pity I manage to work up in the course of ordinary time.  Disguising my dedicated victimhood as justifiable anger fools no one;  Passing it off as a transitory reaction to a transitory situation is fundamentally dishonest.


So don't worry, Dear Reader, I am taking myself to task.


This hasn't been a Pity Party, here, of late.  No, this has been a Clemency Hearing for an Angry, Self-Referential, Wannabe Dadaist -- anything any pretense any snobbery any available snoot or snark, just so I don't seem a run-of-the-mill sorry-for-myself Loser.


It's a straight-jacket, it's solitary confinement.
i'm ashamed, i'm so ashamed.


Withdraw sense!
Violate expectations!
Question convention!
Do these prison duds make my butt look big?

That's right, I know I am in a prison, and I know it is of my own making.

A lucid moment, then? Sure, for a few more paragraphs. There is a certain sense to then writing about the robes of Buddha.

Right?

Ha! All I remember is doing some housekeeping in the middle of the night, and spending a serene few minutes oiling and sprucing up one of my Buddha statues. As I reviewed that litany of "i'm so ashamed," my mind reached for the comfort of a Jesus, a Buddha. [It may also be that Steve Jobs' life and death were preying on my tired brain.]

I went back to the computer that dawn and finished writing that unpublishable post, this way:

Anyway, the Board of Pardons and Paroles tells me to "[p]lease leave, if you don't mind," and The Warden bakes me sheet cake after sheet cake decorated with Pithy Sayings like "We left the doors unlocked" and "Here's a VISA Gift Card and the keys to my car."


Still I persist, defiant, defending meaninglessness with shrill, more-better words, all the while dressed in this silly orange jumpsuit.  What do I have to do to escape the Bad Fashion inextricably associated with my Bad Karma?  Awake the Buddha within?


I am not wasting my life by stewing in anger.
I don't subject the people (and critters) I love to oxygen-depleting roars of frustration.
Never, ever have I wished ill on another person.


Well, not unless you've been listening closely or paying attention.


I tend to leave out an important part of my story.  The playing the hand that's been dealt part.  The no one is responsible for my happiness but me part.  The this is my one shot part.


But back to the crux of the matter:  looking good while suffering, the Buddha art of dressing.  See, Buddha was Buddha because no body could be as oblivious as Buddha. Buddha is always good for a smile!


The only answer to "What did Buddha wear?" is that he wore traditional mendicant clothing, which was usually a rectangle of recycled, pieced-together cloth that was then washed and dyed with vegetable matter, ending up a color most often labelled as "earthy," which in turn has elicited "ochre" and "saffron."  The one calls up a little low brow, the other wiggles a little high brow, but who may say that another is attached?


Anyway, that is what Siddhartha Gautama chose to wear in his seeking life, both before and after he sat under the Bodhi tree.


Of course, at the end of the day, even if all is as it is, there are still people who cannot sleep for worry. These are the people who create need -- in this case, the need for a tradition based on established rules that no one had yet bothered to tease out.


Worried people are pure trouble.  Take, for example, the most obvious of admonitions for this, or any instance, of robing discussion:  "To make a Zen Buddhist robe, one should be a Zen Buddhist monk."


See what I mean?


The story I prefer about how the first codification of the traditional three-piece Buddhist robe came about goes like this:

After his enlightenment, he began to teach and many of those who heard his teachings – mendicants, former teachers, householders, even his own family and royalty – left their pursuits and followed him forming the Sangha of monks and, later, nuns. Their clothing was not codified, and various sutras refer to a variety in dress, some of it fairly fantastic. Tradition has it that those who ordained with the Buddha, as well as the Buddha himself, primarily wore the mendicant clothing of that time, essentially the same worn in India today; they all wore some version of a simple, serviceable, Kashaya robe.


This caused a problem for a Buddhist king named Bimbasara, who wanted to pay homage to Buddhist monks but was having trouble picking them out of the crowd. One day, he complained and asked the Buddha to make a distinctive robe for his monks. They were walking by a rice field in Magadha at the time, and Buddha asked Ananda, his personal attendant, to design a robe based on the orderly, staggered pattern of rows of the rice padi fields.

The progression then becomes predictably sorrowful: how to distinguish among monks by depth of study, power, wealth, or breeding; how to work in the fields with such billows; how to stay warm; and the enduring problem of symbols -- how to use them as distinguishing marks, in a world where they still matter and your indifference to that is completely feigned?


The bars of my prison are insubstantial.  The work I do, in words, the work that really makes me sweat, barely keeps enough stiff steel in those things to support the hint of a plaster ceiling.  Even the most malignant of talk, the nastiest of recollections, weeping sores and raw bloody hurt, over and over and over -- slithering in thick salve -- can't link those syllables into any kind of meaningful chain.


I used to think that the Buddhas and the Jesuses of this world were, above all, supremely abstracted men. They attracted adulation because of the blank canvas that being vague afforded.  They were safe, safe and dangerous. They were walking permission, benevolent, tall and broad and big!  Letting everyone pause that extra special, most needed second, that little empty moment where we can hear what's right and bask in it.  Darned if they don't expect us, though, to then stroll the stroll.


I'm wrong, of course.  In the middle of all that placidity and reality that bends and drapes, are Fudo Myoo, Angry Buddha, Acala -- flaming sword and rope.

Acala Vidyârâja is one of the Vidyârâjas (Myôôs) class of deities, and a very wrathful deity. He is portrayed holding a sword in his right hand and a coiled rope in his left hand. With this sword of wisdom, Acala cuts through deluded and ignorant minds and with the rope he binds those who are ruled by their violent passions and emotions. He leads them onto the correct path of self control. Acala is also portrayed surrounded by flames, flames which consume the evil and the defilements of this world. He sits on a flat rock which symbolizes the unshakeable peace and bliss which he bestows to the minds and the bodies of his devotees.


Acala transmits the teachings and the injunctions of Mahâvairocana to all living beings and whether they agree to accept or to reject these injunctions is up to them, Acala's blue/black body and fierce face symbolize the force of his will to draw all beings to follow the teachings of the Buddha. Nevertheless, Acala's nature is essentially one of compassion and he has vowed to be of service to all beings for eternity. 

And Angry Jesus, we shiver with delight at Angry Jesus!  Sure, there's the old toss the money-lenders from the temple, and he heats up the Queen's English over scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites"!  My favorite pissed-off Jesus, though?  That'd be The Case of The Withered Hand.  [The business about the Sabbath is a smokescreen.]


"Jesus looked around at them with anger, for he was deeply grieved that they had closed their hearts so."


That's where I think compassion comes from -- that space between active anger and paralyzing grief.

It was at this point that a good sleep happened along, and I escaped pain and prison in the camouflage of snooze. The truth may well set me free but I will opt for sleep every time.

Dobby is strutting his stuff, proud of his new sheen, and enjoying the dandruff-free life of a care-free cat. Me? I'm still ashamed of myself, still fighting when being would be easier. Back to not sleeping but -- thank goodness -- resisting the urge to write.

Be good to yourself, Gentle Reader.

Put Your Hands on the Magic Gams: Praise the Lord!

Unfortunately for you, quite happily for me, this blog continues to be a reliquaire -- the shapely sainted scent of this cut-glass bowl of -- well, let's be nice and continue the tired appropriation of potpourri.

Actually, this motley collection calls more to mind those jeweled and funky medieval reliquaries in the form of the various holy body parts they contain. My favorite, and, I believe, the most salutary? The Magic Gams of the Saints.

Put Your Hands on the Magic Gams: Praise the Lord!
(to the right, Reliquary of Saint Blaise, Dubrovnik)

The Ho-Hum-itude of your generic reliquaries: your fancy boxes, studded with tiresome jewels and enamel work; your larger fancy-schmancy boxes in the form of romanesque churches and spired cathedrals; your humongous fancy boxes shaped like Ye Olde Ubiquitous Coffins, your musty grinning ossuaries that approximate real worship space (Chinese feng shui dates back a good pretty bit)?

They are patently inferior to the free-standing chasse legs of a more enlightened era.

Still, reliquary legs can pose the occasional conundrum, as noted in this article about the infamous three-legged Saint Chad back in 1996:

Scientists examining the relics of a 7th-century saint venerated in Birmingham have discovered that his casket contains three legs rather than the customary two.

Radio-carbon dating, however, has established that five of the six bones in the reliquary of St Chad may well be genuine, since they date form the 6th or 7th century; one of the bones which Catholics have revered for 1,300 years is a century or two older than the rest. The Oxford archaeologist who carried out the test believes that that bones from three bodies were jumbled together when the saint was reburied.

St Chad, or Ceadd, who died in 672, was the first Bishop of Mercia, with his seat in Lichfield, where he was buried. He had been, briefly, Archbishop of York, before he was removed from the post by St Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury. His bones had been moved to a new church in 700 and were kept in Lichfield Cathedral until the Reformation, when Henry VIII abolished the cult of relics.

St Chad's brother, Cedd, was also a saint and founded a monastery where St Chad was later abbot. On hearing the news of St Chad's many-legged state, one distinguished Catholic historian joked that the extra leg might belong to St Cedd.

The Archbishop of Birmingham, the Most Rev Maurice Couve de Murville, has authorised continued devotion to the relics - provided it is directed at all the bones equally.

See? I've good reason to prefer a more fitting fitted container-for-the-thing-contained. Something less a dime-a-dozen casket and more a Glamorous Gam.

Actually, the simple stories of the travels and travails of saintly relics can be enlightening of the human spirit -- frail and heroic -- as well as just plain hilarious. More about the relics of Saint Chad:

According to St. Bede, he was immediately venerated as a saint and his relics were translated to a new shrine. He is considered a saint in the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches, and is also noted as a saint in a new edition of the Eastern Orthodox Synaxarion (Book of Saints), in response to increasing attention to pre-Schism western saints. His feast day is celebrated on March 2.

Chad remained the centre of an important cult, focussed on healing, throughout the middle ages. This was centred on his tomb, behind the high altar of the cathedral, and his skull, in a special Head Chapel.

At the dissolution of the Shrine on the instructions of King Henry VIII in about 1538, Prebendary Arthur Dudley of Lichfield Cathedral removed and retained some relics, probably a travelling set. These were eventually passed to his nieces, Bridget and Katherine Dudley, of Russells Hall.
In 1651, they reappeared when a farmer Henry Hodgetts of Sedgley was on his death-bed and kept praying to St Chad, when the priest hearing his last confession, Fr Peter Turner SJ, asked him why he called upon Chad. Henry replied, "because his bones are in the head of my bed". He instructed his wife to give the relics to the priest, whence they found their way to the Seminary at St Omer, in France. After the conclusion of penal times, in the early 19th Century, they found their way into the hands of Sir Thomas Fitzherbert-Brockholes of Aston Hall, near Stone, Staffordshire. When his chapel was cleared after his death, his chaplain, Fr Benjamin Hulme, discovered the box containg the relics, which were examined and presented to Bishop Thomas Walsh, (RC) Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District in 1837 and were enshrined in the new Cathedral of St Chad in Birmingham, opened in 1841, in a new ark designed by Augustus Pugin.

Somewhere in this morning's journeys, I fell in love with the pottery of John Hodge. A brief communion with a photo gallery of his work went a long way toward the erosion of my present wise-crackery. He explains: "Every piece of pottery that I make generates from clay or slip (liquid clay) that has been mixed in my studio. I have begun to think of this clay and slip as a source of energy which I enhance with special additions, including holy water and fountain from our favorite churches and fountains in Rome, and holy dirt from the shrine of Chimayo in New Mexico. I also added the ashes of ribbon that I got from the trash can in the apartment where John Lennon and Yoko Ono were living on Bank Street in New York City, when they were fighting extradition to England in the ‘70’s. Also included are the ashes of ticker tape from the John Glenn ticker tape parade in New York. I think of my pottery as a reliquary of positive energy."

Wouldn't it be a wonder if our lives were such a perfect fit? I am reliquary :: I am [sufficient] relic?

A mesh, a complement -- either of two parts or things needed to complete the whole --counterparts -- a safe and sacred conversation?

So I'm a leg woman. You might be partial to hands. Not to worry, friend, as hands and feet are number six in the hit parade of fetishes, according to the ever popular Women's Sexuality Correspondent Vanessa Burton at AskMen.com, certainly my preferred source for informed erotica.

John Hodge has made some fascinating hand reliquary:

.........................................................
Au sens premier du mot, un reliquaire (du latin reliquiarium) contient les reliques d'un saint chrétien.

For an interesting look at relics in Buddhism, and the democratization (and proliferation) of those relics -- a process almost identical to that of their Christian counterparts -- read the first chapter (or at least the last half of the first chapter!) of The impact of Buddhism on Chinese material culture by John Kieschnick.

Also, I ran across an interesting take on "relics, cremation and organ donation" at the Blog of the Dormition: Eastern Catholic Apostolic Orthodox (one John R.P. Russell runs the joint) -- a very nice, but painful, logical extension of learning about reliquary as a [strictly Christian] concept:

Within the Christian tradition, to bury the dead is a work of mercy – to burn the dead a desecration. The bodies of our departed holy ones are rightly venerated in altars, catacombs, and cemeteries, in reliquaries and ossuaries in reverent expectation of the coming resurrection.

In the light of traditional Christian respect for the corpse, ought Christians to regard the transplantation of human organs as a desecration or a veneration of the body?

Most Christians are firmly in the latter camp, believing with neither doubt nor hesitation in this modern medical miracle. Others hesitate. I have hesitated for years.

A compelling argument against organ donation, it has seemed to me, is the resurrection of Lazarus. Imagine that, upon his death, Mary and Martha had carved him up and used his organs to save other folks’ lives. This would put a whole new spin on Christ's command, "Lazarus, come out!" Would his organs, in obedience to their Creator, have jumped from the guts of their recipients?

Lazarus is not unique. The Seven Holy Sleepers, too, rose from the dead. Peter raised the dead (Acts 9:40). The bones of Elias raised the dead (2 Kings 13: 21). How, if some organs of these lived on, would their resurrections have occurred?

Would Jesus have wanted His organs donated?

If, indeed, our bodies are to rise from the dead, are not our organs to rise with them? What is a body but a group of organs? Significantly, our bodies will rise from the dead – our souls are not given new bodies. Body and soul are linked. The soul is the life of the body. Our bodies rise and, if we are saved, are glorified. They are made new, but are not recreated.

Compelled as I have been by these arguments, in truth, “the free gift of organs after death is legitimate and can be meritorious” (CCC 2301).

What is more, the practice of organ transplantation actually has ancient Christian approval. Sts. Cosmas and Damian, as here illustrated, once performed a miraculous leg transplant as a means of healing an ulcerated leg.

The workings of resurrection are mysterious – unplumbable. Our omnipotent God has taught us the greatest love is the gift of self – self-sacrifice. For the sake of such love, God, Who is Love, will surely make a way. Where I have seen contradiction, there is none.

No greater reliquary could there be for the organs of a departed loved one than the body of another – here is a reliquary of God’s own creation, “more precious than the most exquisite jewels and more purified than gold” (Martyrdom of Polycarp, c. 135). Here indeed is a fitting place to deposit our remains.


Saints Cosmas and Damian, unmercenary physicians, performing a miraculous transplant of a leg from a deceased Ethiopian. Attributed to Master of Los Balbases (15th Century).