Thomas Tamm, whistle blower on Bush illegal wiretapping. Haunted to the point of depression by reviewing “stupid mistakes” along the way to hero status for moral courage.

I was reading Michael Isikoff's story on The Fed Who Blew the Whistle yesterday (12-16-08) — on Thomas Tamm, who leaked to the New York Times the existence of the Bush admin's illegal program to wiretap US citizens without following the legal FISA requirements. Because Tamm was not quite circumspect enough in the days before he decided to make his phone call to the Times, he has been hounded into joblessness and debt by the FBI hot on his trail. Even though he still feels that he did the right thing (and certainly he did), still, Tamm is haunted by the consequences of what he did—and what could yet happen to him. .... He says he has suffered from depression. He also realizes he made what he calls "stupid" mistakes along the way, including sending out a seemingly innocuous but fateful e-mail from his Justice Department computer that may have first put the FBI on his scent.

I can easily imagine him forgetting his face on the cover of Newsweek as a hero, his similar appearance on Rachel Maddow's show, and all the positive support he must have been getting all along from like-minded people all across the country — forgetting all that as he finds himself buried in What-if's, forever replaying the conversation with the colleague he invited to lunch in the innocuous email, kicking himself for not having just given her a phone call — depressed. (Like so many people, few of whom have done anything so fine.)

And then, also like so many people (mutatis mutandis), against the advice of counsel he interviews at length with Isikoff — telling the truth, getting the blunders off his chest and trying to get his view of the story across. Confession, penance, reconciliation. That old Judeo-Christian trinity.  All looking for peace of mind.

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The quiet mind sought through meditation practice is often understood as an escape from what amounts to self-reproach and -recrimination.

"The mind spends most of the time lost in fantasies and illusions, reliving pleasant or unpleasant experiences and anticipating the future with eagerness or fear."

"It is impossible to commit an unwholesome action — to insult, kill, steal, or rape — without generating great agitation in the mind, great craving and aversion. This moment of craving or aversion brings unhappiness now, and more in the future."

S. N. Goenka

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February 3, 2008

The Rural Life

A Track in the Snow

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

A couple of weeks ago, when the snow was at its deepest, I walked up the hill in the middle pasture after chores. By that time in the afternoon, I am often trudging through my thoughts, barely noticing anything around me. Part of the pleasure of chores is that they happen in the same light every day, though the hour changes as the days lengthen and contract. No matter what I’m doing, I am propelled outside by the falling light, which means that I’m often doing chores mid-paragraph. I imagine that the animals are mid-paragraph too, for we are all just going about our business together.

Coming back down the hill, plunging knee-deep through the snow, I stopped. There was the print of a bird’s wings. From their angle and size, I guessed it was a barn owl. I looked across the pasture and saw a squirrel’s track, which ended at the wing-print — no sign of a struggle, just an abrupt vanishing. Going up the hill, I had walked past these marks without even noticing them.

A week later, all the snow had melted, which left me thinking about a question of ephemerality. That wing-print was a solid fact, the remains of a bone-jarring collision between two animals. One life ended there, and another was extended, but the only trace is in my mind. If I had come down the hill in the fog of thought that surrounded me while I was doing the chores, I would never have seen the print of those powerful wings and they would have left no mark in me.

I have grown used to the idea that nearly everything around me in nature happens unobserved and unrecorded. A snowy winter sometimes retains a transcript, but even those are rare. The bills of animal mortality are almost completely invisible otherwise. Who thrives, who dies, there is no accounting at all, only the fact of thriving and dying.

That wing-print allowed me to glimpse the uncompromising discipline of nature. But it will stand in my mind as the model of an almost perfect ephemerality, a vision of life itself. The snow has melted away, taking with it the squirrel’s track and the arc of those wings and my own track up the hill and the burnished spots where the horses rolled in the snow.

Tolstoy’s anguish concerns his recollections of “infamies” and “evil, all that is painful to the conscience.” I have some infamies in my recollection. And I have plenty that is painful to my conscience, if nothing that I would call plain out evil. (Tolstoy likely himself exaggerated there.) But in my case, I find my recollections of these things almost always associated with a chagrin that I recognize to be more about having failed to maintain my self-image as some smooth and brilliant cool dude (that my parent world wanted me to be, as I supposed – something other than I was, for sure, something that would bring the child the love he felt he was missing). In other words, my recollections are more about having hurt my own self-esteem than about having hurt other people. Too often, what my chagrin tells me I am viewing as a screw-up or failure, my better self tells me I should view as my having hurt, betrayed or let down someone else.

My take on the Pushkin poem (in the margin to the right of the Tolstoy remarks I’m commenting on) is that Pushkin is definitely writhing in chagrin rather than feeling remorse – if remorse means a deep sense of regret and sorrow for having hurt another person. Of course, the wards of the psyche are filled with many ghosts, and it is quite possible that the chagrin we feel for having messed up our friendship with so-and-so may be a product of the abandoned child’s remorse as he blames himself for the parent’s not wanting, not loving him or her enough. That product haunts us still.

Leaving that alone for now, below here I’ve placed a small set of stories that illustrate in less dramatic language this anguish thing as others have experienced it. Something in me needs to demonstrate that the kind of tape that plays in my head plays as well in the heads of others.

This was in the New York Times for that date. If you Google this article, you will find it published this way, without stated permission, in a number of places. I tried asking the Times, but the process quickly became too Byzantine for my patience and my estimate of the seriousness of this lapse.

I like the concept of wholesomeness – as what one aims for in life.

My underlining, of course. I am highlighting what I take to be a very common condition among us. I would say it is usually unwholesome, a lack of presence due to a preoccupation with what the Fifth Remembrance reminds us we cannot change, our responsibility for our own actions. This unchosen daydreaming not only robs us of the promise of mental presence in the now, it also generates deleterious body response. We become both tense and distracted.

Klinkenborg does not give us the source of his own distraction, but he calls it “the fog of thought,” and it is the core of his purpose to break through that barrier to perception and give us his insight into ephemerality otherwise lost.