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In mapping Real-Making content, certain axes line up: analytical against imaginal, ordinary against non-ordinary. Lately a lot more imaginal content has been arising when I sit down to write on the weekends. The last newsletter, for example, sandwiched my adult bio into a weird tale about a startup trying to operationalize a Buddha's omniscience. @meekaale had a nice thread of reactions. It included a hope for a continuation of the story:
More auto-mythology is coming this edition, but it will mine a different vein. I've been working in parallel on an analytical piece that tries to develop an approach to asymmetries in care—others not caring about the same things we do and vice versa. I’m especially concerned with how this affects contemporary political discourse. A Twitter thread has been collecting annotations of related philosophical literature as I organize my thoughts. It’s a hard topic, as it turns out.
Finally, I'll be capping Real-Making newsletters going forward at 2,000 words. If the content requires more length, I'll serialize. That's happened with this one. Should make things easier to digest.
I'll be visiting San Francisco 8/06 through 8/13, and I'll be in LA from 8/16 through 8/23. Be in touch through Twitter if you are Real-Making reader who'd like to meet up. DMs are open.
The Miami Connection
I once got an interesting reaction in grad school when I told someone I was from Miami, FL. They acted surprised and responded, "Oh, I would have thought you come from a cold, dark place." Dear readers, I am in fact from a hot, bright place. I dream of Sun Fried Buddha.
And yet, the nature of my Miami Connection is not obvious. In many ways Miami functions as shadow to my obvious. It is unschooled paganism. It is up-regulated craving. It is the city least concerned with bien pensant respectability I have ever known.
Excess in Miami is unashamed. Light refracts on its downtown pedestrians through a perplexity of unsellable office space. Happy hour on Ocean Drive bathes celebrants in crisscrossing waves of industrial cooling mist. 60oz Mojito bowls are regularly brought to table at 2-for-1 prices. Sub-fine pieces of Pop Art hang in the city's toilet stalls, prison cells, and best galleries. At all hours of the day, odd bits of flesh are unleashed on an unsuspecting public for unknowable reasons. House music is an enabling condition for any event to occur. A continuous soundtrack of oontza-oontz is laid down for everything from divorce proceedings to grocery shopping. Novel commercial services are abundant and often negotiated in improvised pidgin languages. Exactly what's being transacted remains a mystery to all parties, but everyone leaves the exchange no less satisfied. And the beach... the beach is simply always there and available. You don't even need to look for it under the paving stones.
My Miami Connection is not really about all that, though. It's where I reckon with family and my ancient, twisted karma. This has lately been on my mind as I lurch towards fatherhood this fall. If there is something about my spiritual life that will always remain un-Buddhist, it’s how I relate to the reality-distortion fields engendered by these sources of personal inexorability and stubborn attachment. I treat them as a gift. There is a romance to samsara I just don’t want to quit.
On a recent trip to visit my parents in Miami over the July 4th holiday, I found a talisman from the old Caribbean that set these feelings into proper relief. It's a poem written by my grandmother, Salvadora Miranda, under a pseudonym, Tahoma, to my grandfather.
I've started confabulating a multi-generational story that traces the spiritual arc of my family. It centers on a fake life I’ve elaborated for my grandmother's alter ego. All coincidences with real life are better thought of as fabricated. It is ultimately my story, not their history. There will be Masonic conspiracies, odd theories of the paranormal on film, intellectualist appropriations of Santeria, Carmelite nuns conducting rites of passage at quinceañeras, anachronistic encounters with Vajrayana Buddhism, a fugue of U.S. Marine landings, and Jesuit seminarians discussing the meaning of the life after seeing Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Along the way, there will be a profound discovery about the actual source of the brokenness at the heart of modernity. It's not, as countless Romantics have felt, the mathematization of the world picture and its extension to society through optimizing regimes of enclosure and control. It is, rather, the abstraction and regimentation of the human singing voice into an equal temperament melodic scale. The decline and fall of the Modern West is set in motion most decisively by J.F. Bach's “Well-Tempered Clavier”. Middle C is now made of demons. Modernity has gone off the rails because of it. Every time someone resolves a G7 chord to tonic, infernal mischief is let loose on the world. There's a lot of pretty singing out there, and it's a problem. COVID superspreader choirs are the least of it.
Ok, I'll say more. Here are the first episodes of the The Tahomaid.
Ch. 00: The Cat Itself
It was January 1st, 1999, my 21st birthday. In my own calendar system, that would make it the first year AACE (After Aleph Common Era). It was also the first night in my new residence at 90 Cedar St, Somerville, MA. The neighborhood, like all surrounding neighborhoods, comprised a grid of densely packed two-story houses. I had just moved into a room on a half-basement floor. To be honest, it was more cell than room, but it was comfortable enough. Just beneath the ceiling, a small window had been carved out of an exterior-facing wall. The only thing I could see through the window were people's feet, but it was late at night, so there were no feet. My view onto the world was left clear and groundless.
I was trying, fitfully, to find congruence with my new bed. A neighborhood cat was in heat, and it was not helping the situation at all. Her infernal wail kept me tangoing with wakefulness all night. Interestingly, some vivid dreams emerged from the dance. In one there was an old rotary phone. Its metallic buzz would not stop, and my ears would also not stop ringing. I felt that permanent damage was being done, but with heroic laziness I resisted the temptation to do anything about it. Finally I relented and stirred far enough from slumber to reach for the phone.
Putting receiver to ear was a shock, for on the line was the cat itself, the cat in heat. Something strange was happening, (stranger even than a real cat calling me on a dream phone). The cat was crying out to me, but not in a standard cat voice. It was singing to me in a hymn that was the phone's own ringing! Between the phone and the cat was not the slightest bit of difference.
I recognized the tone of the cat-phone's voice as being Middle C. Recognition came not from any innate sense of perfect pitch, but by simple association. My roommates at 90 Cedar St were in a local band, the Maya Deren Collective.1 The Middle C key of their Farfisa organ, bought secondhand at a flea market, had recently gotten stuck in place. They were attempting to make lemonade of the situation by becoming a Terry Riley "In C" tribute ensemble. The resulting drone had became the master tone of our waking world. It was my constant companion, and it's dominion now extended to my dreams.
Hearing the cry of the cat-phone was enough to wake me to base reality. Unfortunately, the cat crossed the threshold with me. All four of her claws were latched onto a grate over my window. Perched there, unpityingly and inexorably, she looked down on me without any hint of recognition. I was just part of the scenery to her, no more meaningful than any other 165 pound bag of inedible meat. Splayed against my portal to the world, she held herself firmly in place. She continued to wail. I then realized something. Even if this cat could have spoken, I would not have understood her. We shared no common points of reference, no shared form of life. I felt a poignancy in that. This infernal feline would forever stand between me and a night's rest under the moonlight. And I didn't even know how to call her by her name.
Ch. 01: The Last Manifestation of Tahoma
Sleep did return, however, and with it more dreams. In one I began to see my grandmother, Salvadora Miranda. As we will have reason to learn, my grandmother is not just my grandmother, and sometimes she smokes cigars that are more than just cigars.
In this dream she manifested in that form that was her more-than—the form of her enlightened power display, Tahoma; priestess of trickster wisdom and the rumba; priestess of troubled births and the good death; priestess of life worlds disclosed on the back of inexorable rhythms.
Tahoma was exiting the ocean at Simonton Beach in Key West. Her hair was uniformly white and standing up on all ends. Her gaze was fixed on me, Gorgon-like in its intensity. In her many arms and voices, she wielded the signs by which the world had come to know her:
The words of the traditional Santeria spell to send one’s spirit into the body of a cat
The Tantra of Great Bliss
An incense burner filled with smoking tobacco
A baptismal ladle filled with rum
A quinto drum
A hand always free and at-ready to strike at drum
She wore a brilliant white gown to match her hair. It was being progressively weighed down by water, for she was sliding back on her heels from the shore at the edge of the beach. The tide seemed to be pulling her back in unrelentingly. As I watched her slowly withdraw into the sea, I felt helpless. It was as if I was back in a dream from childhood and trying to run away from school bullies while remaining stuck in place.
As Tahoma began to fade completely into the Florida Straits, I could make out the sound of her voice. She was singing to me. Her song was being reinforced by a terribly powerful rhythm coming from her quinto drum. The last refrain I could make out was,
Ya viene
Ya he realizado
Amor que mata
Santo, Santo
Por qué no me quieres
Ya más pa’ na’.
Her song was in C.2
Ch. 02: The Birth of Tahoma
The story of how the woman born Salvadora Miranda came to manifest in the world as Tahoma is a difficult one. It begins at dusk on another beach, Varadero, a popular resort ninety miles east of Havana at the end of a winding peninsula.
It is 1933. Salvadora sits with my grandfather, Alberto Segrera, watching an early moonrise. Being with him on that beach was already a breach of several protocols. My grandfather was a recently graduated law student from the University of Havana. In time honored tradition, he’d discovered in law school that his true calling was engaging in unlawful political activity. He'd joined the ABC, an opposition group to the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado (Cuban President, 1925-1933). Core membership were students or recent graduates of the University. Police bombings were a common tactic. Only a misguided agreeableness or sense of filial piety would fail to call them what they were, terrorists.
The group was organized as a hierarchical network of cells with radically local knowledge of each other. Each member communicated with only two other people—the member from whom they received orders and the member to whom they gave orders. The person designated to give my grandfather orders was Fernando Miranda, brother to Salvadora. My grandfather would make regular visits to her house, where she lived with her brother and the rest of her family. She was studying to become an assessor of rural schools for the government. A love affair was thus sparked under these inauspicious conditions—furtive glances exchanged as one party contemplated political violence and the other worked to join the national education bureaucracy.
Eventually the furtive glances turned into their own clandestine network of signs. The protocol of that network was buried in Miami in the 1980s with my grandparents. The world will never know it. But by means of that protocol they found themselves on the beach at Varadero with a mutual understanding that events had reached a pivot. Machado's police were aware of Alberto's membership in the ABC and had orders to arrest him. Passage for exile to Key West had been promptly arranged. He was to leave in a few hours in a small boat named El Papa No Se Rellena. As they looked at each other and the moon with some anguish, my grandfather spoke his first words to my grandmother in a natural language: “Will you marry me?"
To Be Cont’d…
The band first appears in Real-Making 02: A Disco Bardo
It’s coming
I’ve finally realized
Love that kills
Santo, Santo
Why don’t you love me
No more for nothing
I hope you don't mind my saying that I love the decision to limit to 2k words. I find that I have to read these in a bit of a scattered manner and go back and forth to make sure I'm noticing connections, and so each added paragraph doesn't just add complexity linearly.
This one was amazing! I can't believe that's how your grandparents met. I'd also never considered the algorithms terrorist cells might use to keep information secret. It reminds me a lot of the write up read down type policies on computers.