Biology of the Worst Kind

Bad News for Sentient Beings

Bad news for sentient beings - I'm failing dismally at lovingkindness.  Actually, it's Buddhism I'm failing at, I'm still quite moved by sentience.  Six weeks into a three month online Buddhism course I feel myself slipping away from my resolution to stick with it to the end of the course.  It's like that moment when you begin to fall out of love with someone.  You hang on as if all was well, but it isn't and you can see you're going to have to admit it pretty soon.

Everything was fine when I was sitting twice a day counting breaths, nothing fancy just a bit of concentration.  But then came Lovingkindness practice, and the Precepts.  Compassion meditation is due any day now, and soon Appreciative Joy and the Four Noble Truths.  Oh dear, oh dear.  Aside from the fact that even the idea of being nice makes me feel bilious, I just don't think the world will be a better place if I think nice thoughts.  Anyway, none of it (apart from the concentration exercises) seems to require meditation, so much as a bit of thought and common sense.  The drawbacks of greed, lust, selfishness, killing, lying that the Precepts would have us not do, can all be worked out by a halfway alert brain.  My objection to religion is that it gives metaphysical reasons for elementary social behaviour.  Buddhism tells you that there are consequences to 'unskilful' actions, Christianity and Islam offer you heaven hereafter for being good.  Judaism isn't quite sure about what happens next, but is quite definite about what should happen now.  Buddhism offers broad moral truisms where individual thought ought to be.  People who don't care about social cohesion have long since stopped being frightened of hell or karma.  The secret's out.  Not causing suffering is a choice that you have to decide to make.

But this Lovingkindness business seems indiscriminate.  A blanket proposition.  I can't do Lovingkindness (May they be well, may they be happy, may they attain bliss) but I can manage an ordinary basic respect for life.  My heart-centre gets indigestion at the prospect of understanding why stupid, warmongers (say) are the way they are, and loving their humanity while deploring their actions (Compassion).  I want to be as angry as a human being should be at people who are causing the death of others.  There are, says the teacher on this course, good things happening, as well as bad.  Yes, but bad trumps good, just ask those starving to death or being blown to rags.  Unless, of course, you stop thinking of particulars and deal in broad generalisations designed to justify our pacifity.

All I was really after was a bit of interior silence to listen in to.  A little wilderness at will is what I want.  Quite why, all these years after the Sixties', I should have imagined I could take Buddhist theology any better than any other theology, I don't know.  No, I am not Leonard Cohen, nor was meant to be.  I really must stop coming up with these little projects - as the Poet keeps telling me, they're invariably not exactly what I mean, just a way of fidgeting.  The inner woman will have to settle for whatever secular silence she can find.

Hamster Wheels

If they made a gym for old, miserablist, life-refuting types like me, it would be loudspeakerless and screenfree. Just the grim creak of gears and the clang of weights.   Well, maybe a couple of screens in front of the bikes playing Le Chien Andalou and The Red Desert, possibly backwards.  As it is, my gym vibrates with the beat of Life and Fun, in spite of the fact that more than half the punters are over 50 - doubtless there, like me, because their doc told them to or else.  Everyone wears headphones and are probably trying to listen to Tammy Wynette or Frank Sinatra, or Roy Orbison or Thelonius Monk (at any rate I am) above the thud, thud, thudding of the overhead speakers offering the sort of rhythm someone thinks inspires people to exercise.  It inspires me to find a management person and beg him to consider turning down the sound before I get hearing damage trying to blot it out. 

Huge TV screens, unavoidable if you are on a bike, rower or cross trainer, show BBC1, ITV, BBC News 24, Channel 4, MTV and Sky Sport.   From left to right there are people buying or doing up houses, trying to make a killing at the auctioneers, dancing fit to bust, and expressing their dissatisfaction to a studio audience that their sister is a prostitute, while the sister looks on sulkily.  I sit in front of BBC News 24, though that means that MTV is also in my line of vision, where young women are doing things with their bodies that I suppose they think is sexy because they are the kind of things bodies do in bed.  Dancing is, of course, vertical sex, but they look as though they're trying so hard you wish a little middle age on them so they can get a rest. 

The subtitles on News 24 announce that university tuition fees are going up.  I start palpitating with fury and my cycle speeds up at last to the minimum rev I'm supposed to be achieving.  We - that is my lot as well as the government - didn't pay tuition fees, and we got grants that could be lived on.  But the Welsh tuition fees are exempt from the rise, say the subtitles. Because no one wants to be educated in Wales?  Is it a buy one university, get one free offer?  No.  The next subtitle is either a complete non sequiteur or means something: most Welsh students stay in Wales.  So is the idea of cheap tuition fees in Wales a way to keep the Welsh in Wales?  I don't know.  Or could the subtitle writers not think of anything else to say?   If you are listening to Tammy Wynette while you watch the TV you get a very skewed version of the world.  But it has a certain charm.

It's very hard to shut the eyes when cycling, even if you're going nowhere.  It must be some kind of evolutionary throwback that makes you keep your eyes peeled on the move, and evolution never had to plan for bikes that stayed still.  I want a gym that is silent and dark.  The sight of other people making great efforts to lift a pile of weights or row on a stationary steel beam is like hearing people have sex in the next room.  Ugly and ridiculous.  Obviously, it only takes a second to grasp that I'm watching them while I lift a pile of weights etc. and I have to suppose that the sound of me having sex is no prettier or more moving than when I hear them (though of course in fact it is). 

Only two things keep me going back to what I realise I've just described as a hellhole: the endorphins begin to dance as I go through the routine, and I slip into some delightful alpha rhythm mode that is almost as good as beginning to fall asleep; and afterwards there is a spa thing, or a jacuzzi or whatever it's called and a steam room that I get to drift off in equally alphaliwise as a reward for my earlier efforts.   In other words, it is quite like sex, but  without having to take another person into account.  That kind of sex.

My whole aim in life until now has been to find a way of remaining quietly on my sofa while not starving or freezing to death.  It's worked quite well.  Now I'm beginning to think that maybe hamsters have quite a nice life, running round on their endless wheels.  But is it too late for me to change?

Lovingkindness, lack of

I'm fifty-nine which is a foolish age.  At every decade after twenty I've skipped the 9 and gone straight to the next.  So I'm sixty.  And it's almost October.  In the autumn of my autumn.  I need the extra time to get used to it.  I suppose my entire cohort is baffled by it.  Everyone I know is.  Every generation is, I suppose, but mine was peculiarly unsuspecting that they would grow old in the regular way.  Everything was different for us, why not our own trajectories?  First there was the cold war.  We knew that we would die in a nuclear wipe out.  And when we didn't, we celebrated by going to Biba and fitting into tiny clothes that promised us we'd never get old and fat. 

And then it took us so long to grow up.  I was still sleeping on a mattress on the floor in my 30's.  Rock and roll was here to stay.  My daughter grew up with the impression that Mr Tambourine Man was a lullaby.  The Poet didn't have a proper job until he was fifty (so fuck-all pension then).  Reading Kensington Gardens by Fresan - lovely novel playing around with the Sixties generation and J.M.Barrie.  He says that we were the first generation really to  understand Peter Pan because we had got the knack of how never to grow up.  We failed to work out how not to grow old, though, and completely ordinary ageing processes are astonishing us.

Then again it may feel the same for all generations and what my generation is spectacularly good at is making a noise about everything that happens to us.

So now I'm as good as sixty, I thought I might knuckle down to working on the inner woman, as I have been failing to do all my life.  I'm at the gym raising my heartrate and lifting weights three times a week, doing one on one yoga classes, and doing elementary meditation exercises.  I have a short term enthusiasm problem, according to the Poet.  A tiny bit of mania that dances around the depression that I keep at bay with medication and being a writer.  Hardly time to do any work on the novel in between my mental and physical improvement programmes.

It's all going fine except for the meditation.  I'm happy to fail and fail better at mindfulness of breathing.  A nice austerity about it.  But Metta, or Lovingkindness as I can hardly bear to type, is flooring me.  I am not loving or kind.  Somewhere in my chest cavity there is supposed to be a limitless abundance of lovingkindness that can be radiated to individuals, humanity in general, and all sentient beings.  Sentient beings I can manage, just.  The rest, no matter how I put my attention in my heart centre and work at radiating, there's little progress.  Still, I thought there's no harm in trying to be a nicer person, though in truth I'm not sure that's right.  Philip Toynbee who got religion said he only wanted to be with utterly good or utterly bitchy people.  It was a problem for him.  For me too.  But I don't think much has changed in me.  Listening to Blair's conference speech (I am the lost messiah but I will be with you always...') and I was raging again, as I have been since the invasion of Iraq (well, long before).  My heart centre is filled with loathing and venom for the man who has finished Thatcher's dirty work and made socialism of any kind irretrievable.  And the anger extends to the voters who think a devotion to commerce, the market and self-interest has nothing to do with the social and moral absenteeism that is increasingly around.  The sentimental claptrap about Blair's farewell is disgusting, but that's just a cover for the only thing that matters to New Labour, which is being in power at any cost.  There is no fucking point in being in power if you don't improve the lives of people, if you don't redistribute wealth.  I'm sick and ashamed of all of us - and we, my generation, were supposed to be the ones that changed everything because we understood that a life devoted to commercial or political power was not much of a life at all.  The best of us have withdrawn and just diddle about in our own back yards.  The worst are running the world. 

Imagine being my age and still so angry.  Disappointed, of course, that's what is to be expected at five minutes to midnight of a life, but raging anger isn't very grown up, is it?  Well, that's what my lot didn't do, grow up.  Maybe the lovingkindness work will kick in and I'll learn to shrug.