People say you need closure. \u00a0But does that mean that there are no more stories to be told?<\/p>\n
I woke up this morning with two imperatives: 1) a sense of real or imminent closure, and 2) the need to tell this tale. \u00a0It’s a tale biofather told me, and I’m pretty sure he never told another soul on earth. \u00a0It was because he couldn’t shake it. \u00a0Because he knew I’d understand it. \u00a0Because he himself was shaken to the core. \u00a0He had to give the story out in order to get rid of it himself.<\/p>\n
He was a good story teller. \u00a0He was a meticulous painter. \u00a0I was about to say ‘magnificent’ \u2014 which clearly oversteps. \u00a0By his own admission, he saw painting \u2014 Chinese painting \u2014 a lot like chemistry. \u00a0Follow instruction, practice due diligence, and you’ll be fine. \u00a0He saw it as an entirely technical skill. \u00a0And despite all those visits to Buddhist temples and shrines, he was adamant that he didn’t have a spiritual bone in his body. \u00a0Not even one of the little bones.<\/p>\n
He’d been doing Chinese brushwork for about thirty years when this thing happened. \u00a0Could be more. \u00a0As I recall he was 72 at the time. \u00a0He’d already completed his PhD dissertation in Art History on “The Art and History of the Jewish Traders on the T’ang Silk Road” (1989). \u00a0So this was after. \u00a0His hands were already shaky by then \u2014 I can see that in the notations of his dissertation draft. \u00a0It must have taken tremendous force of will to keep on painting.<\/p>\n
Does closure include forgiveness? \u00a0Or just a sense that there’s nothing else to do or say? \u00a0I don’t have any of those things. But what I did wake up with was a certain degree of peace. \u00a0A quiet ripping asunder (I guess that’s the expression) that says, okay \u2014 that’s your separate life, and this is mine.<\/p>\n
I spent so many decades feeling sullied by him. \u00a0Contaminated. \u00a0Not just the radiation. \u00a0But that lack of empathy for others. \u00a0I just didn’t understand it. \u00a0He’d show me his photo albums, that he kept out on the coffee table, proudly. \u00a0Not a human in sight, just art. \u00a0Statues and statues of Bodhisatvas, Kuan Yins, and Buddhas. \u00a0Ceramics and some scrolls. \u00a0Most of the scrolls were just rolled up in the attic. \u00a0So much art, he didn’t know what to do with it.<\/p>\n
Turned out (I discovered this morning) that he did have ‘family photos.’ \u00a0And one whole volume were pictures of me and my family. \u00a0They were all the pictures I’d sent him year after year, event after event \u2014 he’d kept them after all. \u00a0Just like all the letters that I’d written. \u00a0He kept every single one. \u00a0Sometimes with notations, maybe even drafts of possible replies. \u00a0He just didn’t answer them. \u00a0How was I to know?<\/p>\n
I’m not saying maybe-he-was-a-better-person than I thought or knew. \u00a0I had only a glimpse of who he was. \u00a0His friends all thought him grouchy. \u00a0The old lefties thought he’d more than sold out. \u00a0But they’d stayed friends. \u00a0His wife thought all the grumpy snarky comments were his sense of humor.<\/p>\n
“You don’t feed a dying dog,” \u00a0Ha ha ha ha ha.<\/p>\n
So. \u00a0No, that didn’t help.<\/p>\n
But this story. \u00a0This story shows a small crack in his certainty about the world. \u00a0His adamance. \u00a0His conviction he was right.<\/p>\n
He was on a trip to Thailand. \u00a0Or Burma. \u00a0But this was Borobudur, I think. \u00a0 Central Java. \u00a0Magnificent ancient temples. \u00a0I had remarked how, for a solid former Soviet-style communist and atheist he spent an awful lot of time at temples. \u00a0It’s all technical, he would reply. \u00a0He was interested in architecture too.<\/p>\n
So. \u00a0There was this little Buddhist monk there.<\/p>\n
Milton was walking around taking pictures with his fancy cameras that he kept slung around his neck. \u00a0He was a large man with a large voice. \u00a0He looked over at the monk, who was surrounded by a small crowd. \u00a0As a scientist, he was interested.<\/p>\n
This is how he told me the story. \u00a0I am not making this up.<\/p>\n
“It looked like the monk was giving something out,” he said. \u00a0“And if there was something to be given, I was going to get some too.”<\/p>\n
So. \u00a0He strode over to the little crowd, and it parted like the sea as he walked through it. \u00a0When he reached the monk, he was ready. \u00a0He stuffed a dollar bill in the monk’s hand, and snapped a picture in the monk’s face. \u00a0I have a feeling you can see this quite precisely.<\/p>\n
There was absolute silence as the monk took his hand.<\/p>\n
A silence beyond a worldly silence.<\/p>\n
He began traveling back through time. \u00a0He met the monk’s teacher. \u00a0And the monk’s teacher’s teacher. \u00a0Further back and further back \u2014 to the great beginning. \u00a0To the Buddha himself. \u00a0And each teacher gave him a teaching. \u00a0All the way back, to the Buddha himself.<\/p>\n
How often is it that those who receive such visions are undeserving? \u00a0Or is it that they just so need it the most?<\/p>\n
At some point, the monk let go the light touch on his hand. \u00a0The little crowd was there again. \u00a0Each person eager to hold for just one moment the little monk’s hand. \u00a0They all slowly veered off someplace different through the ruins. \u00a0Milton stood there.<\/p>\n
Uncertain.<\/p>\n
What just happened?<\/p>\n
How and why?<\/p>\n
When he got back to West L.A. he tried to write about it, but he couldn’t. \u00a0Tried to understand it, but it made no sense. \u00a0It undermined his entire cosmological understanding. \u00a0How he thought the universe worked. \u00a0How he thought painting worked. \u00a0How he thought human experience was designed. \u00a0He was strongly committed to the materialist argument (no matter from which side of the argument you explored). \u00a0He couldn’t make the pieces fit anymore. \u00a0He struggled with it for a while. \u00a0At least long enough to share the tale, and shake his head. \u00a0Not in awe. \u00a0Not in wonder. \u00a0But in lack of comprehension.<\/p>\n
I wanted him to write it up. \u00a0What else can you do with things like this?<\/p>\n
He woke up, or was it, from a Buddhist perspective, just the opposite?<\/p>\n
“Acchh<\/em>,” he said. \u00a0He shook out his shoulders. \u00a0Shrugged off the event. \u00a0And it was gone.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So. \u00a0A kaddish for Milton G. Nobler. \u00a0Who claimed not a spiritual bone in his body. \u00a0Yet practiced a spiritual practice \u2014 of\u00a0Chinese painting for over forty years. \u00a0He, in his last decade, was given a glimmer of another possibility. \u00a0Too late, perhaps \u2014 but he was scientist enough to admit that life just might not be as it appears.<\/p>\n And I understand now my need to tell this story. \u00a0I’m afraid, in this regard, the apple doesn’t fall very far from the Tree.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" People say you need closure. \u00a0But does that mean that there are no more stories to be told? I woke up this morning with two imperatives: 1) a sense of real or imminent closure, and 2) the need to tell this tale. \u00a0It’s a tale biofather told me, and I’m pretty sure he never told…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[250,216,222],"tags":[497,496,407,226,283,376],"class_list":["post-3079","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","category-kaddish-in-two-part-harmony","category-tzaddik-stories","tag-biofather","tag-buddhist-monk","tag-chinese-painting","tag-dads","tag-milton-nobler","tag-shared-visions"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3079"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3082,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3079\/revisions\/3082"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beitmalkhut.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}