HinesSight

Yin and Yang news stories

Maybe “yin and yang” isn’t quite the right term to describe the relation between these stories. Maybe there isn’t any relation between them at all. Maybe they are just two stories, each being what each is. Still, somehow they seem to say something about the polar ends of the human condition, not that I know what the two ends consist of, nor what value should be attached to each end.

The June 23 issue of Time magazine featured a cover story, “Why Harry Potter rules,” all about J.K. Rowling and her fabulously successful series of five Harry Potter books. I’ve only made it partway through the first book—must be getting too old for this sort of reading, though “Lord of the Rings” captivated me as a near-adult—but admire Rowling’s ability to create a whole fresh world of magic, and keep it up through so many volumes. After reading the cover story, I found another reason to admire her.

Catie Hoch is a girl with a rapidly spreading cancer that began in her kidneys. During her chemotherapies and operations she began reading the Harry Potter books. Then, Nancy Gibbs, who wrote the cover story, says, “In January 2000, when it seemed as if her treatment options had run out, Catie was back home, her chances of living to read Book 4 looking very slim. That is when an e-mail arrived form someone in Britain who had heard about the 8-year-old girl in New York who loved Harry so much.” The author, J.K. Rowling, kept writing to Catie.

“Gina [her mother] watched the friendship unfold, watched a stuffed owl and a toy ginger cat arrive in the mail as gifts. ‘I couldn’t believe it when the first e-mail arrived, but what I really couldn’t believe was that they kept it up,’ she says.” Then, the cover story ends with this, which I found most moving:

“A month after Catie Hoch’s ninth birthday, doctors found that the cancer had spread to her brain and that she had only a few weeks left. That was when the phone rang. Over the next few days, Rowling read aloud to Catie from Book 4, which was finally finished but would not be released until summer…The family resisted putting the call on the speaker phone. ‘That was Catie’s time with Jo,” Gina says. ‘We didn’t want to intrude on their privacy.’ The last few times Rowling called, Catie was too sick to come to the phone. She drifted into a coma and died on May 18, 2000.”

“Rowling wrote to her parents three days later. ‘I consider myself privileged to have had contact with Catie,’ she wrote. ‘I can only aspire to being the sort of parent both of you have been to Catie during her illness. I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart all right.’ Catie’s parents established the Catie Hoch Foundation to help young cancer patients. In November a check for $100,000 appeared, from Catie’s favorite English friend.”

And then, for a marked change of gears, we have men hunting naked women in Las Vegas. Fellow humans, we are an interesting species, that’s for sure.

Lies and Liars

Proving that television isn’t a total wasteland, last night we stumbled upon C-Span2 coverage of the Book Expo America convention in Los Angeles. That doesn’t sound like stimulating viewing, but we picked the right time to be watching, as we got to see a hugely entertaining panel of politically-inclined authors: Molly Ivins, Bill O’Reilly, and Al Franken. This was stuff you don’t get to see on regular talk shows—the uncensored insults and anger. Ivins was rather mild, though we didn’t hear all of her remarks.

Then O’Reilly, host of the inaccurately titled “No-Spin Zone” on Fox (I believe) and author of a similarly named book, blabbed on for his fifteen minutes about what an accurate reporter he is, how they never have to make retractions on his TV show because their research is so extensive, how proud he is that he has gone beyond distinctions of liberal and conservative in his No-Spin search for the truth, and similar self-serving, egotistical blather.

It thus was a joy to have Al Franken take to the podium, hold up a draft cover of his upcoming book, "Lies: And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them -- a Fair and Balanced Look at the Right," and ask O’Reilly if he could supply him with a better photo of himself for the cover. “Anything with your mouth open” would be great, Franken said. Franken then launched into an amusing dissertation about the lies put out by O’Reilly and other right-wing TV and radio talk show hosts—much of the time looking directly at O’Reilly as he trashed him and his peers. Franken’s point was that we don’t have to take this right-wing crap anymore. It is time to call them on their lies.

Franken then went into a hugely amusing riff about O’Reilly’s claim to have won two Peabody awards for his work on “Inside Edition,” and Franken’s efforts to get O’Reilly to admit that no Peabody awards had ever been given to that show. O’Reilly clearly was fuming as Franken spoke way over his allotted fifteen minutes, having built up too strong a head of liberal steam. The poor moderator, Pat Schroeder, had a difficult time handling O’Reilly and Franken when Al finally sat down. O’Reilly was seriously pissed off after being called a liar on national TV by Franken, and Franken was just as piqued at O’Reilly for having been so No-Spin sanctimonious, when he has no problem putting his own spin on awards that he never has won. O’Reilly claimed that he had forgotten that it wasn’t a Peabody that “Inside Edition” had won, but Laurel and I thought this was a pretty lame excuse. Could anyone really believe that they had won a Nobel prize, if they hadn’t?

Anyway, it was refreshing to watch Franken take on the right-wing jerks who mangle the facts, and then claim that they are the ones standing up for Truth, Justice, and the American Way. It also was refreshing to listen to someone who has both a great sense of humor and the guts to call it as he sees it. Franken mentioned that Ann Coulter had called him a friend in her book (Coulter is another conservative commentator who is even more obnoxious than O’Reilly, except she is attractive, slim, blonde, and wears short skirts on her TV appearances, which are four substantive points in her favor).

But that this was based on a single lunch Franken had with Coulter during which, Al said, he was too courteous, because he didn’t tell Coulter the truth: “I can’t stand you, and you are wrong about everything.” Franken can pull this stuff off with his engaging smile and wry attitude. Most anyone else would sound like a jerk if they uttered such sentiments. With Franken, you just wish that he would run for office, so you could finally vote for someone who truly says what he believes, and believes what he says.

For some more perspectives about O’Reilly’s twisting of the truth, here’s a site that comments on the Peabody claim (at the bottom of the page), and another anti-O’Reilly site that also disputes that claim.

Sustained by Drunkenness

I read the Tao Te Ching again over the weekend, looking, as always, for some inspiration and answers to life’s big questions. Of course, right off the bat the first line of chapter one demolishes this ridiculous expectation: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” Damn! I should be able to learn the secrets of the universe from a book! Except…wasn’t the universe around for, oh, some twelve billion years before there were books? Hmmmm. Maybe what made it possible for books to eventually be written is something far different from what is in books—words, concepts, ideas.

Laurel and I have been struck recently (not that this is a new revelation) about how shaky is the ground on which we all try to sustain ourselves. Of course, we have our idiosyncratic personal supports, which are different from other people’s supports. But almost everyone tries to sustain him- or herself by leaning on props that are something other than him- or herself. And those props are prone to falling over. People. Organizations. Political parties. Nations. Ideologies. Philosophies. Nature. Everything around us is changing and changeable. Disappointments are inevitable when we expect to find a firm grounding on ever-shifting sand.

Expectations have a lot to do with dissatisfaction. This is an obvious observation, but it bears observing nonetheless. What is happening is what is happening. And what isn’t happening is what isn’t happening. (If I keep on in this vein, I’ll have written a New Age book). So, how do we accept reality, whatever it may turn out to be? Chuang Tzu, an ancient Taoist sage, has some nice advice in a treatise called “The Full Understanding of Life.” Yes, these are just words. But they point toward a way of being that is anything but conceptual.

Chuang Tzu says, “The perfect man attains to be without form, as it were, and beyond the capability of being transformed….He will study with delight the process that gives beginning and ending to all things…In this condition, with his heavenly constitution kept entire and no crevice in his spirit, how can things disturb his serenity?” Wow. That sounds great. Having achieved that, I could probably even watch Fox News and not feel my blood beginning to boil. The key, it seems, is remaining continually drunk. Not on alcohol. But on something else that inebriates, and is all around us—maybe it even is us. This next Chuang Tzu paragraph is cool:

“Take the case of a drunken man falling from his carriage. Though he may suffer injury, he will not die. His bones and joints are the same as those of other men, but the injury which he receives is different: his spirit is entire. He knew nothing about getting into the carriage and nothing about falling from it. The thought of death or life, or of any alarm or affright, does not enter his breast. Therefore he encounters danger without shrinking from it. Completely under the influence of the liquor he has drunk, it is thus with him. How much more would it be so if he were under the influence of his Heavenly constitution.! The sagely man is kept hid in his Heavenly constitution and therefore nothing can injure him.”

Now, if I could just find that Tavern where the Liquor of Life never stops being served, and hangovers are unknown. I’ve heard sages say that it is so close at hand that we can’t see it because of its nearness, not its distance. Got to keep looking, I guess, though more and more I wonder if it is the looking that prevents me from finding it.

Stephen Hawking and me

Watching the "60 Minutes" piece about Stephen Hawking last Sunday, I came to realize that Stephen and I have a lot in common. To wit, I've read every page of "A Brief History of Time" and so, I must presume, has Stephen. The reporting was that millions and millions of copies of this book have been sold, but only a few dozen have actually been read (a slight exaggeration, perhaps, but not by much). "This is a book," said a minister with a sense of humor, "that you buy and put on the shelf, never to be looked at again, like the Bible."

I've also read Hawking's new book, "The Universe in a Nutshell," from cover to cover, so this must put me in even more exalted company. However, since evidently I like to read books that few other people read, the disturbing implication is that I like to write books that few other people would want to read. This isn't new news for me. It just reinforced my resolution to keep my writing as simple and straightforward as possible.

I've finished my initial attempt at rewriting my first book, "God's Whisper, Creation's Thunder." I took out a lot of unnecessarily complex stuff, and toned down the preachiness and moralizing. Now, I'm making my way through the 450 pages of "Return to the One," my new book about Plotinus's spiritual/mystical teachings, trying to look at the book afresh through a typical reader's eyes.

It's pleasurable, in a painful sort of way, to take out a pen and cross out passages that I labored to write, and rewrite. This bears not a little resemblance to spring cleaning, when you peruse all the beloved crap that has accumulated in your house and summon up the guts to start throwing it in the garbage can. The first few tosses, you wonder "But maybe I should keep this..." Soon, though, it feels better to get rid of what you don't need, than to hang on to it. Same with writing.