01 August 2024
IN PRAISE OF WALKING
Early one morning, any morning, we can set out, with the least possible baggage, and discover the world.
It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away.
That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.
Walking is the human way of getting about.
Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical and meandering.
There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves.
A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.
There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them.
Walking is a mobile form of waiting.
What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.
To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.
The most distant places seem most accessible once one is on the road.
Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes.
In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it walking I am pleasantly tired.
The pace of a walk will determine the number and variety of things to be encountered, from the broad outlines of a mountain range to a tit's nest among the lichen, and the quality of attention that will be brought to bear upon them.
A rock outcrop, a hedge, a fallen tree, anything that turns us out of our way, is an excellent thing on a walk.
Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all contribute to the dislocation of a persistent self-interest.
Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant.
The most lonely places are the most lovely.
Walking is egalitarian and democratic; we do not become experts at walking and one side of the road is as good as another.
Walking is not so much romantic as reasonable.
The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement.
Pools, walls, solitary trees, are natural halting places.
We lose the flavour of walking if it becomes too rare or too extraordinary, if it turns into an expedition; rather it should be quite ordinary, unexceptional, just what we do.
Daily walking, in all weathers, in every season, becomes a sort of ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences are registered clearly.
A stick of ash or blackthorn, through long use, will adjust itself to the palm.
Of the many ways through a landscape, we can choose, on each occasion, only one, and the project of the walk will be to remain responsive, adequate, to the consequences of the choice we have made, to confirm the chosen way rather than refuse the others.
One continues on a long walk not by effort of will but through fidelity.
Storm clouds, rain, hail, when we have survived these we seem to have taken on some of the solidity of rocks and trees.
A day, from dawn to dusk, is the natural span of a walk.
A dull walk is not without value.
To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we can have.
For the right understanding of a landscape, information must come to the intelligence from all the senses.
Looking, singing, resting, breathing, are all complementary to walking.
Climbing uphill, the horizon grows wider; descending, the hills gather round.
We can take a walk which is a sampling of different airs: the invigorating air of the heights; the filtered air of a pine forest; the rich air over ploughed earth.
We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends.
There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to myself again.
Is there anything that is better than to be out, walking, in the clear air?
It is quite possible to refuse all the coercion, violence, property, triviality, to simply walk away.
That something exists outside ourselves and our preoccupations, so near, so readily available, is our greatest blessing.
Walking is the human way of getting about.
Always, everywhere, people have walked, veining the earth with paths, visible and invisible, symmetrical and meandering.
There are walks on which we tread in the footsteps of others, walks on which we strike out entirely for ourselves.
A journey implies a destination, so many miles to be consumed, while a walk is its own measure, complete at every point along the way.
There are things we will never see, unless we walk to them.
Walking is a mobile form of waiting.
What I take with me, what I leave behind, are of less importance than what I discover along the way.
To be completely lost is a good thing on a walk.
The most distant places seem most accessible once one is on the road.
Convictions, directions, opinions, are of less importance than sensible shoes.
In the course of a walk, we usually find out something about our companion, and this is true even when we travel alone.
When I spend a day talking I feel exhausted, when I spend it walking I am pleasantly tired.
The pace of a walk will determine the number and variety of things to be encountered, from the broad outlines of a mountain range to a tit's nest among the lichen, and the quality of attention that will be brought to bear upon them.
A rock outcrop, a hedge, a fallen tree, anything that turns us out of our way, is an excellent thing on a walk.
Wrong turnings, doubling back, pauses and digressions, all contribute to the dislocation of a persistent self-interest.
Everything we meet is equally important or unimportant.
The most lonely places are the most lovely.
Walking is egalitarian and democratic; we do not become experts at walking and one side of the road is as good as another.
Walking is not so much romantic as reasonable.
The line of a walk is articulate in itself, a kind of statement.
Pools, walls, solitary trees, are natural halting places.
We lose the flavour of walking if it becomes too rare or too extraordinary, if it turns into an expedition; rather it should be quite ordinary, unexceptional, just what we do.
Daily walking, in all weathers, in every season, becomes a sort of ground or continuum upon which the least emphatic occurrences are registered clearly.
A stick of ash or blackthorn, through long use, will adjust itself to the palm.
Of the many ways through a landscape, we can choose, on each occasion, only one, and the project of the walk will be to remain responsive, adequate, to the consequences of the choice we have made, to confirm the chosen way rather than refuse the others.
One continues on a long walk not by effort of will but through fidelity.
Storm clouds, rain, hail, when we have survived these we seem to have taken on some of the solidity of rocks and trees.
A day, from dawn to dusk, is the natural span of a walk.
A dull walk is not without value.
To walk for hours on a clear night is the largest experience we can have.
For the right understanding of a landscape, information must come to the intelligence from all the senses.
Looking, singing, resting, breathing, are all complementary to walking.
Climbing uphill, the horizon grows wider; descending, the hills gather round.
We can take a walk which is a sampling of different airs: the invigorating air of the heights; the filtered air of a pine forest; the rich air over ploughed earth.
We can walk between two places and in so doing establish a link between them, bring them into a warmth of contact, like introducing two friends.
There are walks on which I lose myself, walks which return me to myself again.
Is there anything that is better than to be out, walking, in the clear air?
—Thomas A Clark, 1988
POETRY AND THE SACRED
Don Domanski
A Ralph Gustafson lecture, 2005
My talk this evening is about poetry and the sacred. It's a theme I've kept going back to for over thirty years now. For me, there's an intimate connection between the two, so intimate in fact that I can't really separate them out, one from the other. It's been the reason why I have continued to write; otherwise, I don't honestly think I would.
There's an umbilical point somewhere that nurtures both, like twins fed from the same source. By sacred, I don't necessarily mean religious, or spiritual in the New Age sense of that word. I mean the fundamental experience one has with time and space, with the seemingly endless corporeality that flows into our consciousness. I mean how each thing holds a mystery, simply because it exists, because existence itself is sacred. The fact that something exists at all has continued to amaze me, and the forms, as well, have amazed me. I don't mean this in a sentimental way; true amazement asks far more from us than the recognition of beauty and form. Amazement also demands that we see the darkness inherent in everything, that we see the destructiveness implicit in creation and its attending grief. Poetry helps to enhance and deepen our experience of existence, not just by the use of words, but by the fact that despite their use something else is carried along with them.
At the heart of poetry is a pre-verbal reality, a calling forth from a core within our being. There is something in poetry that pushes us beyond language. It's as if the language used negated itself and opened up well beyond linguistic meaning, into a realm that has far more to do with communion than communication. Poetry derives its energies and interests, to a great degree, from an extralinguistic view of itself and its meaning. It transcends what is written on the page. Poetry carries us, not just on the backs of words, but also on the spaces between the words.
This is why some teachers have a difficult time teaching poetry; they are always looking for meaning, while sometimes driving their students to distraction with the search. It becomes a game of Where's Waldo, but poor old Waldo isn't there. There is no objective meaning. Meaning is what you bring to the poem, not just what the poet has written. Meaning is very arbitrary. In the end, the poem is the integrity of a moment lost in the enormity of that moment and found again on the far side of any linear meaning. The words themselves point to where no words can go, where the textual intent becomes secondary to where the poem is directing us.
As Buddhists say, you shouldn't confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In other words, you shouldn't think that believing in the teachings of the Buddha means you're a Buddhist, but rather you should look to where the teachings are pointing. Believe in the moon, not the finger. Poets, the politics of poetry, the prizes, etcetera, are meaningless in the face of the moon itself. Often, the moonlight is lost and we forget why the poems are there, why we're standing outside, looking up at the night sky.
The poem, as Archibald Macleish said, shouldn't mean but be. Creating being is the Great Mystery re-enacted on the page and in the psyche. Once it was considered stealing fire from the gods; in our society, it's keeping a sacred fire alive amid the destructiveness and greed that is an ever-present darkness we must navigate daily. Donald Hall once said that poetry in this culture is a revolutionary act. Not just the writing of it but the reading of poetry as well, an act of rebellion in a world so bent on hiding the experience of the sacred.
Mindfulness, one of the main components of poetry, has become a subversive act in a civilization so fixated on the self. It's a sad commentary on our society when opening up our hearts and eyes has become seditious behaviour. Without mindfulness, there is no poetry, no art, no spiritual development, only the barrenness of a self separated from the rest of existence.
It takes a great deal of effort to see what's in front of you, whether that's a stone, a mountain, or another person. After much watching, after much witnessing of the metamorphoses from object to presence, you find that everything is self-luminous. If you observe something long enough, its being comes forth, the isness of the thing is made manifest. You end up feeling the sacredness of its presence in time and space. In Ulysses, James Joyce says it well: "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods." What you're experiencing is the being of what has been attended by your sight and patience. What you're feeling is a connective pulse, the conjunction of seer and seen, the prime ritual of the sacred. This is what the great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart meant when he said, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." The watcher and the watched are one and the same, as the poet and the reader are one when their spiritual centre of gravity has been altered by the poem. The poem can allow us a perspective beyond the culture and iconography used to create it. The poem has no culture or language to steadfastly support its framework; it is more an act of nature, operating outside the constructs of a given society.
Art, in the end, will save us from "culture," from the rigid notions we have of the world and our place in it. The forgotten dimensions of our lives are given back to us; we are returned to our deeper selves, shown again our interconnectedness with the universe at large. That nuclear moment can happen while viewing a painting, reading a poem, listening to a piece of music, etcetera. It can also happen while seated on a hill overlooking a landscape, or staring into the night sky, or simply watching someone drink a cup of tea. All you need is mindfulness, openness to the moment offered. Poetry comes from these moments, from the longing to reanimate them, to give them new life and energy, to capture at least some of the wonder they contain. They come from our desire to cross over, to connect and interact with a larger view of reality, to break out of the confines of our small definition of the self, that claustrophobic fear of leaving the comfortable routines that define us. To these moments, language is an impediment, the weight of cliché, common usage, etcetera, pressing down heavily on each line written.
Metaphor is one way to re-establish our relationship with the textual possibilities; it sidesteps many of the pitfalls that lock language in a low, weak orbit around the individual. If the cliché that poetry allows us to see with fresh eyes is true, metaphor, to paraphrase Eckhart, is the eye that both the world and the poet use to see each other. It creates sight where there was none; it releases us to new expectations. Reality shifts and we are carried along with the movement. "Metaphor," to quote Cynthia Ozick, "is the mind's opposable thumb." It allows us to grasp meaning in one of the mind's darkest places, in that gap between the meanings themselves, in that fissure created by polarities, where light falls to blackness. To find the connection between dissimilar things is to place a flame there. In that deep chasm lies the consecrated space, the sacred ground of all spiritual traditions. The poet can bring back to our modern consciousness much of what has been lost during our journey towards mechanized existence. From the pilgrimages poets make, we are reminded of the heart's great need for wonder, its longing for a transpersonal dimension in our lives. Inside each of us is a desire for expansion outside of our ordinary self, to extend our understanding of nature, the universe and other people. Poetry is one way that this can be realized.
Our brains have evolved to exist and navigate in a narrow range of reality. For example, we see things as solid, when in fact they consist mostly of empty space. Few of us are aware that we are living on a planet travelling at 105,000 kilometres per hour through the vastness of space, and that our galaxy, the Milky Way, travels at 210 kilometres per second. We see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum; we live within the scale and orders of magnitude that present themselves to us. We judge all of this as normal and often pride ourselves on being realists. The truth is, like any other creature, we have strict limitations on what we can perceive.
Likewise, language itself seems real, something we can depend upon. We think with it, we communicate with it, we use it to have imaginary conversations with people, even with people who are dead. We rely on the solidness of words, but like objects, they are made up mostly of empty space. They don't define, they indicate, they suggest reality. Language and reality are always in a state of becoming. Neither reaches formation, neither is ever totally realized. Actuality is always elsewhere. We move towards it, but it keeps well ahead of us. What we have as human beings are possible moments of a larger dimension. Most of us trust only to our five senses, the five reasons that hold us to a view of the self as something distinct from the rest of existence. Poetry tries to reach out and connect with more than our senses allow, attempting to discover what lies beyond the confines of our narrow perspective.
Poetry asks that we reshape ourselves, and in that reshaping discover the sacredness of what surrounds us. It lies everywhere and in everything. Christ says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, "Break a stick and I am there." A monk once asked a Zen master, "What is Buddha?" He answered, "A stick of dried dung." The divine is every place where we open our eyes. You can think of it as emanating from God or nature; it doesn't matter, because there are no words or concepts that can contain it. The poet can only point to it with what exists between the words he or she writes. That contradiction is the beating of an angel's wings; it's the presence of the lover, the ecstasy of dogs running, the readiness of your name to release you. The poem is affirmation that there is more to reality than what we are taught to perceive or expect, that the impoverishment of our five senses can be enriched, and the very definition of ourselves can be amplified, and that we can increase our own significance by increasing the significance of the world.
Art in all of its forms has the ability to bring us back into focus, to open possibilities, provide ground to stand upon, and behold beingness, that most sacred of treasures. This is exactly what good poetry can accomplish. It can show you the aliveness of things, which we usually don't see, or see very superficially. Whether the poem is positive or negative is only secondary, what matters is that the poem is rendered with as much complete openness as possible. The poem doesn't have to be a "feel good" experience for it to have a spiritual dimension, for it to open the psyche to new realities. Pollyanna is not the patron saint of the arts. Poets needn't be moralists, or pillars of virtue, but rather instigators of new emotional patterns with which to approach the undeveloped faculties that lock us into time and culture. The cosmogenic push of the poem's instinct can see past the infantile ego of both the poet and the reader, if only momentarily, to show the potential that lies all around them. The poem is an ancient mediator in the long dispute between the cherished self and the deeper knowledge of the plenitude, which exists outside its narrow definition of reality.
We are taught to accept the view of the world we've inherited, the indicated circle of "reason" handed down generation after generation. For many, anything outside that protected boundary is unknown and therefore dangerous: "there be dragons" and a frenzy of likely horrors awaiting the traveller. Art has acted as both arbitrator and translator in that struggle with chaos, regardless of whether it's internal or external. At times, the more conservative among us are right, there are dragons out there. Sometimes the poem itself is a dragon, its green and regenerative fire burning away the petty notions we've accumulated about phenomenality. The motif of terra incognita is rich with possibilities, both positive and negative, but richer still is the chance for rebirth.
The poet must perform some degree of self-annihilation to experience the full fluidity of the poem rising out of the ground of being. The sanctum sanctorum cannot be reached with your name intact. The poem as it is written down must precede you, not the other way around. If the poem doesn't lead the way, you're left with dross, with your opinions and beliefs formed during a lifetime of culturally acceptable ideas. To go your own way, you must be reborn to some degree each time you sit down to write a poem. Death and rebirth are a common theme in the traditions of all people. For the poet it is a necessary practice in order to cross over to the far-reaching space outside his or her personal views.
The sacred does not give itself readily to people whose heads are clogged with preconceptions and personal judgements on what a poem should be. Rather, the poet needs to be receptive to a long series of potential influences that can alter his or her basic percepts regarding what defines a poem. In part, the function and value of poetry is to cheat reason, to break away from its hold and censor. Reason is the serpent in the garden, it whispers in our ear that there is no larger panorama beyond its scope to behold. The pride of reason damages our ability to see the multi-dimensional possibilities inherent in our spirit. "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason," to quote Novalis. To write, to really write, one must die to reason for a while in order to give birth to the ambiguous self, ready to explore all the unreasonable possibilities. The mystery lies in those redemptive words that come forth when we break free of our prejudices, allowing language to sharpen our sensibilities to a point of entry beyond mere reason.
Bounded by certain aspects of our daily consciousness, we become numb to much of the world; so much of it becomes dull and gives back no light. Art and poetry are not a panacea for all our ills, but they can help us to focus in on what's important, what calls to us around every corner, under every stone. Deepening our lives essentially means to be aware, to answer the call from life itself, to practise the veneration of its numerous forms. This has nothing to do with religion, per se; rather, religion and art grow out of this veneration, this deep need to bow our heads before wonder and being. Without art or religion, human beings still have this irresistible urge to acknowledge the awe they feel in the presence of creation.
An atheist can feel that as deeply as a believer, the magnitude of the experience can be exactly the same in either case. No amount of negation can push aside this longing for reverence, it wells up, regardless, in every human being. This yearning for the sacred is the driving force behind all true art, even if it isn't recognized as such. If we listen quietly we can hear that sigh of creation, world sustaining, spinning galaxies, balancing itself on the tip of a rabbit's hair, drifting to the ground on a birch leaf. The whole round of existence and every piece of it is revelation; every square inch is the totality of time and space nestled into form. Every atom is the ultimate expression of mystery, the mystery that things exist, that we have the ability to be conscious of them. The universe unfolds like the meaning of a single poem and that meaning is simply to be. The greatest mystery, held in every grain of cosmic dust, in every blade of grass, is existence itself. This is the first and last wonder, beyond words to describe; only the wordless poem can accomplish this. Only the poem we are always trying to write, but can only point to, that singularity immersed in the continuum of itself, without any possibility of secondary interpretations. Wordless, it comes to us without an attendant personality; without a meaning we can grasp with language. Yet we all know of it, feel it in times of intuition beyond the nature of names and forms, it is the connective tissue between heart and mind, stone and star. It is this living moment, alive now in the presence of all beings, in the isness of all objects.
A Ralph Gustafson lecture, 2005
My talk this evening is about poetry and the sacred. It's a theme I've kept going back to for over thirty years now. For me, there's an intimate connection between the two, so intimate in fact that I can't really separate them out, one from the other. It's been the reason why I have continued to write; otherwise, I don't honestly think I would.
There's an umbilical point somewhere that nurtures both, like twins fed from the same source. By sacred, I don't necessarily mean religious, or spiritual in the New Age sense of that word. I mean the fundamental experience one has with time and space, with the seemingly endless corporeality that flows into our consciousness. I mean how each thing holds a mystery, simply because it exists, because existence itself is sacred. The fact that something exists at all has continued to amaze me, and the forms, as well, have amazed me. I don't mean this in a sentimental way; true amazement asks far more from us than the recognition of beauty and form. Amazement also demands that we see the darkness inherent in everything, that we see the destructiveness implicit in creation and its attending grief. Poetry helps to enhance and deepen our experience of existence, not just by the use of words, but by the fact that despite their use something else is carried along with them.
At the heart of poetry is a pre-verbal reality, a calling forth from a core within our being. There is something in poetry that pushes us beyond language. It's as if the language used negated itself and opened up well beyond linguistic meaning, into a realm that has far more to do with communion than communication. Poetry derives its energies and interests, to a great degree, from an extralinguistic view of itself and its meaning. It transcends what is written on the page. Poetry carries us, not just on the backs of words, but also on the spaces between the words.
This is why some teachers have a difficult time teaching poetry; they are always looking for meaning, while sometimes driving their students to distraction with the search. It becomes a game of Where's Waldo, but poor old Waldo isn't there. There is no objective meaning. Meaning is what you bring to the poem, not just what the poet has written. Meaning is very arbitrary. In the end, the poem is the integrity of a moment lost in the enormity of that moment and found again on the far side of any linear meaning. The words themselves point to where no words can go, where the textual intent becomes secondary to where the poem is directing us.
As Buddhists say, you shouldn't confuse the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself. In other words, you shouldn't think that believing in the teachings of the Buddha means you're a Buddhist, but rather you should look to where the teachings are pointing. Believe in the moon, not the finger. Poets, the politics of poetry, the prizes, etcetera, are meaningless in the face of the moon itself. Often, the moonlight is lost and we forget why the poems are there, why we're standing outside, looking up at the night sky.
The poem, as Archibald Macleish said, shouldn't mean but be. Creating being is the Great Mystery re-enacted on the page and in the psyche. Once it was considered stealing fire from the gods; in our society, it's keeping a sacred fire alive amid the destructiveness and greed that is an ever-present darkness we must navigate daily. Donald Hall once said that poetry in this culture is a revolutionary act. Not just the writing of it but the reading of poetry as well, an act of rebellion in a world so bent on hiding the experience of the sacred.
Mindfulness, one of the main components of poetry, has become a subversive act in a civilization so fixated on the self. It's a sad commentary on our society when opening up our hearts and eyes has become seditious behaviour. Without mindfulness, there is no poetry, no art, no spiritual development, only the barrenness of a self separated from the rest of existence.
It takes a great deal of effort to see what's in front of you, whether that's a stone, a mountain, or another person. After much watching, after much witnessing of the metamorphoses from object to presence, you find that everything is self-luminous. If you observe something long enough, its being comes forth, the isness of the thing is made manifest. You end up feeling the sacredness of its presence in time and space. In Ulysses, James Joyce says it well: "Any object, intensely regarded, may be a gate of access to the incorruptible eon of the gods." What you're experiencing is the being of what has been attended by your sight and patience. What you're feeling is a connective pulse, the conjunction of seer and seen, the prime ritual of the sacred. This is what the great Dominican mystic Meister Eckhart meant when he said, "The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me." The watcher and the watched are one and the same, as the poet and the reader are one when their spiritual centre of gravity has been altered by the poem. The poem can allow us a perspective beyond the culture and iconography used to create it. The poem has no culture or language to steadfastly support its framework; it is more an act of nature, operating outside the constructs of a given society.
Art, in the end, will save us from "culture," from the rigid notions we have of the world and our place in it. The forgotten dimensions of our lives are given back to us; we are returned to our deeper selves, shown again our interconnectedness with the universe at large. That nuclear moment can happen while viewing a painting, reading a poem, listening to a piece of music, etcetera. It can also happen while seated on a hill overlooking a landscape, or staring into the night sky, or simply watching someone drink a cup of tea. All you need is mindfulness, openness to the moment offered. Poetry comes from these moments, from the longing to reanimate them, to give them new life and energy, to capture at least some of the wonder they contain. They come from our desire to cross over, to connect and interact with a larger view of reality, to break out of the confines of our small definition of the self, that claustrophobic fear of leaving the comfortable routines that define us. To these moments, language is an impediment, the weight of cliché, common usage, etcetera, pressing down heavily on each line written.
Metaphor is one way to re-establish our relationship with the textual possibilities; it sidesteps many of the pitfalls that lock language in a low, weak orbit around the individual. If the cliché that poetry allows us to see with fresh eyes is true, metaphor, to paraphrase Eckhart, is the eye that both the world and the poet use to see each other. It creates sight where there was none; it releases us to new expectations. Reality shifts and we are carried along with the movement. "Metaphor," to quote Cynthia Ozick, "is the mind's opposable thumb." It allows us to grasp meaning in one of the mind's darkest places, in that gap between the meanings themselves, in that fissure created by polarities, where light falls to blackness. To find the connection between dissimilar things is to place a flame there. In that deep chasm lies the consecrated space, the sacred ground of all spiritual traditions. The poet can bring back to our modern consciousness much of what has been lost during our journey towards mechanized existence. From the pilgrimages poets make, we are reminded of the heart's great need for wonder, its longing for a transpersonal dimension in our lives. Inside each of us is a desire for expansion outside of our ordinary self, to extend our understanding of nature, the universe and other people. Poetry is one way that this can be realized.
Our brains have evolved to exist and navigate in a narrow range of reality. For example, we see things as solid, when in fact they consist mostly of empty space. Few of us are aware that we are living on a planet travelling at 105,000 kilometres per hour through the vastness of space, and that our galaxy, the Milky Way, travels at 210 kilometres per second. We see only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum; we live within the scale and orders of magnitude that present themselves to us. We judge all of this as normal and often pride ourselves on being realists. The truth is, like any other creature, we have strict limitations on what we can perceive.
Likewise, language itself seems real, something we can depend upon. We think with it, we communicate with it, we use it to have imaginary conversations with people, even with people who are dead. We rely on the solidness of words, but like objects, they are made up mostly of empty space. They don't define, they indicate, they suggest reality. Language and reality are always in a state of becoming. Neither reaches formation, neither is ever totally realized. Actuality is always elsewhere. We move towards it, but it keeps well ahead of us. What we have as human beings are possible moments of a larger dimension. Most of us trust only to our five senses, the five reasons that hold us to a view of the self as something distinct from the rest of existence. Poetry tries to reach out and connect with more than our senses allow, attempting to discover what lies beyond the confines of our narrow perspective.
Poetry asks that we reshape ourselves, and in that reshaping discover the sacredness of what surrounds us. It lies everywhere and in everything. Christ says in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, "Break a stick and I am there." A monk once asked a Zen master, "What is Buddha?" He answered, "A stick of dried dung." The divine is every place where we open our eyes. You can think of it as emanating from God or nature; it doesn't matter, because there are no words or concepts that can contain it. The poet can only point to it with what exists between the words he or she writes. That contradiction is the beating of an angel's wings; it's the presence of the lover, the ecstasy of dogs running, the readiness of your name to release you. The poem is affirmation that there is more to reality than what we are taught to perceive or expect, that the impoverishment of our five senses can be enriched, and the very definition of ourselves can be amplified, and that we can increase our own significance by increasing the significance of the world.
Art in all of its forms has the ability to bring us back into focus, to open possibilities, provide ground to stand upon, and behold beingness, that most sacred of treasures. This is exactly what good poetry can accomplish. It can show you the aliveness of things, which we usually don't see, or see very superficially. Whether the poem is positive or negative is only secondary, what matters is that the poem is rendered with as much complete openness as possible. The poem doesn't have to be a "feel good" experience for it to have a spiritual dimension, for it to open the psyche to new realities. Pollyanna is not the patron saint of the arts. Poets needn't be moralists, or pillars of virtue, but rather instigators of new emotional patterns with which to approach the undeveloped faculties that lock us into time and culture. The cosmogenic push of the poem's instinct can see past the infantile ego of both the poet and the reader, if only momentarily, to show the potential that lies all around them. The poem is an ancient mediator in the long dispute between the cherished self and the deeper knowledge of the plenitude, which exists outside its narrow definition of reality.
We are taught to accept the view of the world we've inherited, the indicated circle of "reason" handed down generation after generation. For many, anything outside that protected boundary is unknown and therefore dangerous: "there be dragons" and a frenzy of likely horrors awaiting the traveller. Art has acted as both arbitrator and translator in that struggle with chaos, regardless of whether it's internal or external. At times, the more conservative among us are right, there are dragons out there. Sometimes the poem itself is a dragon, its green and regenerative fire burning away the petty notions we've accumulated about phenomenality. The motif of terra incognita is rich with possibilities, both positive and negative, but richer still is the chance for rebirth.
The poet must perform some degree of self-annihilation to experience the full fluidity of the poem rising out of the ground of being. The sanctum sanctorum cannot be reached with your name intact. The poem as it is written down must precede you, not the other way around. If the poem doesn't lead the way, you're left with dross, with your opinions and beliefs formed during a lifetime of culturally acceptable ideas. To go your own way, you must be reborn to some degree each time you sit down to write a poem. Death and rebirth are a common theme in the traditions of all people. For the poet it is a necessary practice in order to cross over to the far-reaching space outside his or her personal views.
The sacred does not give itself readily to people whose heads are clogged with preconceptions and personal judgements on what a poem should be. Rather, the poet needs to be receptive to a long series of potential influences that can alter his or her basic percepts regarding what defines a poem. In part, the function and value of poetry is to cheat reason, to break away from its hold and censor. Reason is the serpent in the garden, it whispers in our ear that there is no larger panorama beyond its scope to behold. The pride of reason damages our ability to see the multi-dimensional possibilities inherent in our spirit. "Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason," to quote Novalis. To write, to really write, one must die to reason for a while in order to give birth to the ambiguous self, ready to explore all the unreasonable possibilities. The mystery lies in those redemptive words that come forth when we break free of our prejudices, allowing language to sharpen our sensibilities to a point of entry beyond mere reason.
Bounded by certain aspects of our daily consciousness, we become numb to much of the world; so much of it becomes dull and gives back no light. Art and poetry are not a panacea for all our ills, but they can help us to focus in on what's important, what calls to us around every corner, under every stone. Deepening our lives essentially means to be aware, to answer the call from life itself, to practise the veneration of its numerous forms. This has nothing to do with religion, per se; rather, religion and art grow out of this veneration, this deep need to bow our heads before wonder and being. Without art or religion, human beings still have this irresistible urge to acknowledge the awe they feel in the presence of creation.
An atheist can feel that as deeply as a believer, the magnitude of the experience can be exactly the same in either case. No amount of negation can push aside this longing for reverence, it wells up, regardless, in every human being. This yearning for the sacred is the driving force behind all true art, even if it isn't recognized as such. If we listen quietly we can hear that sigh of creation, world sustaining, spinning galaxies, balancing itself on the tip of a rabbit's hair, drifting to the ground on a birch leaf. The whole round of existence and every piece of it is revelation; every square inch is the totality of time and space nestled into form. Every atom is the ultimate expression of mystery, the mystery that things exist, that we have the ability to be conscious of them. The universe unfolds like the meaning of a single poem and that meaning is simply to be. The greatest mystery, held in every grain of cosmic dust, in every blade of grass, is existence itself. This is the first and last wonder, beyond words to describe; only the wordless poem can accomplish this. Only the poem we are always trying to write, but can only point to, that singularity immersed in the continuum of itself, without any possibility of secondary interpretations. Wordless, it comes to us without an attendant personality; without a meaning we can grasp with language. Yet we all know of it, feel it in times of intuition beyond the nature of names and forms, it is the connective tissue between heart and mind, stone and star. It is this living moment, alive now in the presence of all beings, in the isness of all objects.
31 July 2024
FINAL CHAPTER
AMONG OTHER THINGS, a sesshin is a social experiment in an ideal laboratory. How better to explore the social matrix than by putting twenty people who agree to silence and are committed to spiritual practice in a space of twelve hundred feet for a week? Strip them of habit and routine, domestic comfort and relationship, take away their choice in what and when to eat and block their access to digital and other addictions, not to mention the work that supports, fulfills, or frustrates them. Disrupt their sleeping, snacking, and defecation habits. Wake them at five in the morning, bring them to their cushions and a blank wall ten hours a day, leave them at the mercy of their brains, minds, and feelings about each other. See how often they connect, collide, or panic. How much love they feel for each other, how much anger, fear, resentment, paranoia, lust, joy, compassion. How much they change as the week goes on and the boundaries between them thicken or disappear. How often they feel that they’ve arrived here at last.
Roshi rings a different, larger bell to wake us. We have thirty minutes to repack our bedrolls, get to the toilet, slap water on our face and brush our teeth, change into our sitting clothes, and, working together, rearrange the cushions we’ve slept on. Neatly, of course, exactly six feet from the wall we face and exactly in line with each other. Incense is already burning, its fragrance pervading and settling the room. By 5:25, be on your cushion. Do not under any circumstance be late.
At 5:30, the first of our three morning sittings begins with another sound of the bell. After the third sitting, we have a simple breakfast, which is no less formal, silent, and orderly than our sitting but—unlike at many other Zen centers and monasteries—devoid of ritual and liturgy.
Most of us eat with a bundled nest of black lacquer bowls, called oryoki, which Roshi brought to us from Japan. The bowls are wrapped in brown napkins, covered with a larger cloth of the same color, and include a set of chopsticks in a black pouch. We unwrap the napkin and spread our bowls on them, then take them to the kitchen, serve ourselves, and bring them back to our cushions. When Roshi rings the bell again, we eat in silence together—no less attentive to each bite than we are to each breath when we meditate. As Roshi often reminds us, eating is a continuation of our practice. Pursued with such concentration, it is vivid and intense. Though simple and unvaried, meals during sesshin can seem a first-time experience, a rediscovery of taste and texture and the pleasure you’ve missed in the compulsive, distracted eating habits of your ordinary life. When we’re done, a pot of hot water is passed around, and, after cleaning the chopsticks and bowls with our fingertips, we dry the oryoki items with a small dish cloth we’ve packed with them, rewrap them carefully and neatly. Finally, an empty bowl is passed around for waste water. Unless you’re a beginner, you know that the water you pour into this bowl must not contain even the tiniest scrap of food. Roshi explodes at the sight of food wasted. “Whoever leave this food losing lot of virtue!”
A work period follows breakfast. We brush each cushion carefully, vacuum and mop the floors, wash the windows, clean the bathrooms, vacuum the stairs between our loft and the building’s entry three floors below, sweep the sidewalk outside the building. Roshi circulates while we work, making sure we’re alert to what we’re doing—vacuuming, for example, along the seams in the floor rather than perpendicular to them, mopping with attention (“sincere mopping,” he calls it), and, if you finish your job before others do, offering help or finding another job to do. Resting while others work is another way to make him lose his temper. “You watching others work, you losing lot of virtue!”
At ten o’clock, we turn toward the center of the room for the morning liturgy. Like everything else in his presentation of Zen to Americans, Roshi has simplified it for us, in part because our chanting is loud, and he seeks in vain to avoid disturbing the neighbors above and below us in the building. Our service is the same every day, every sesshin, and in the midst of it, for all its simplicity, one can feel the whole of our lineage present in the room. While Roshi maintains our speed and rhythm with a small wooden drum called a mokugyo, we chant a series of sutras in either Pali or Sino-Japanese. The meaning of the words is sometimes clear, sometimes not, but the music and rhythm we make together is hypnotic and enveloping. In fact it helps not to know the meaning of the words you chant, so you can concentrate on breathing together with the sound you make and the sound of the drum. Though the sutras progress and elaborate on the dharma vision, everything we chant, like every instant of our meditation during the course of this week, is expressed in the first sutra we chant—the Heart Sutra. Though subtle and mysterious and finally (as Mailer understood) ineffable, the text is endlessly examined and pursued by scholars and teachers of Buddhism and comparative religion. It is a description of the radical understanding at the root of Buddhism, the realization of emptiness, or sunyata, that Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, one of the great Buddhist heroes, arrived at while practicing zazen (here called prajna paramita). We recite it every day—first in Sino-Japanese, then in English. Every line expresses the vision that brought us here, the reason we take our seat on our cushions and the freedom we’re offered by doing so, the inexplicable truth of the present moment, accepting things as they are. For me, this first morning, every line reminds me of Mailer—his vision of the “ineffable” and our endless arguments about Nothingness.
Avalokiteshvara Bodhisattva, the Bodhisattva of compassion, doing deep Prajna Paramita, clearly saw that the five Skandhas are Sunyata, thus transcending misfortune and suffering. O Sariputra, form is no other than Sunyata, Sunyata is no other than form. Form is exactly sunyata, sunyata exactly form. Feeling, thought, volition and consciousness are likewise like this. O Sariputra, remember, Dharma is fundamentally Sunyata. No birth, no death, nothing is defiled, nothing is pure. Nothing can increase, nothing can decrease. Hence: in Sunyata, no form, no feeling, no thought, no volition, no consciousness; no eyes, no ears, no tongue, no body, no mind, no seeing, no hearing, no smelling, no tasting, no touching, no thinking, no world of sight, no world of consciousness, no ignorance and no end to ignorance; no old age and death and no end to old age and death. No suffering, no craving, no extinction, no path, no wisdom, no attainment. Indeed, there is nothing to be attained. The Bodhisattva relies on Prajna Paramita with no hindrance in the mind. No hindrance, therefore no fear. Far beyond upside down views, at last Nirvana. Past, present and future, all Buddhas, Bodhissattvas rely on Prajna Paramita and therefore reach the most supreme enlightenment. Therefore know: Prajna Paramita is the greatest Dharani, the brightest Dharani, the highest Dharani, the incomparable Dharani. It completely clears all suffering. This is the truth, not a lie. So set forth the Prajna Paramita Dharani. Set forth this Dharani and say: Ga Te Ga Te Pa Ra Ga Te Para Sam Gat Te, Bhodhi Sva Ha. Heart Su Tra.
—
THOUGH IT FEELS painfully slow and plodding in the first couple of days, our schedule seems to accelerate, becoming almost comforting as the days go by. In retrospect, it can seem as if the whole week passed in the blink of an eye. We sit from 10:30 a.m. till 12:30 p.m. and then have our biggest meal: Roshi’s miso soup, which is the best I’ve ever tasted; rice cooked according to the recipe at Ryutaku-ji (also the best I’ve ever had); salad prepared by Kazuko or one of the other students who’s been assigned to kitchen detail. In the years since Roshi arrived in New York, the menu hasn’t changed. After lunch, a ninety-minute rest period hopefully allows us to catch up on our sleep, but on this first day, for me at least, it is filled by another rush of thought and memory, no sleep at all. At 1:30, after the rest period ends, we return to our cushions for tea. Roshi makes delicious sencha, the tea he’s brought from Japan, and brings it from the kitchen himself. As the pot is passed from cushion to cushion, it is followed by a bowl of cookies—Pepperidge Farm, of course. One cookie for each of us, great excitation as the bowl approaches, ridiculous impatience as one waits for Roshi to ring the bell that grants first-sip, first-bite permission. Oppressed as I am on this first day by the routine and deprivation of sesshin, the combination of sencha’s caffeine and this single hit of sugar and chocolate produces a rush of energy that seems like a flash of coffee. My confidence returns. For a moment, once again, I’m happy to be here. I cannot doubt that most others in this room eat and drink with equal excitement.
After tea, we enter upon a recitation in English, one of two readings we’ll alternate from day to day. Each is profound, a great Zen classic, well known not just to us but to any student of Buddhism. As usual, we begin with “Song of Zazen,” by one of our most important ancestors, Hakuin Zenji. Of all our readings, it has always been the most helpful and profound for me. On this first day I hardly notice what I’m reading, but I do get flashes, single phrases or sentences, just enough to make me realize how far from Hakuin I am as I read.
If you concentrate within and testify to the truth that Self-Nature is no Nature, you have really gone beyond foolish thought.
…
The thought of no thought is thought. The form of no-form is form.
…
At this moment, what more need we seek? This very body is the body of the Buddha.
Any one of these lines, properly understood and embraced, is a summation of what we’re doing here, what Zen and Buddhism are all about. I have chanted them many times over the years, but on this first day they only remind me that I am not yet in sesshin. The self-nature that Hakuin calls “no nature” remains quite the opposite for me. I want the self I’ve left behind—can’t bear the distance I feel from it. I’ll need a lot more sitting to see that the thought of no-thought is thought. Just now, I’m exclusively fixed on the thought of no-thought. There is no indication of awareness beyond the fixation. Does it help if now and then I think about emptiness? How can I be surprised that I think of Mailer so often? I’m no less attached to my dualistic mind than he was.
After the reading, Roshi gives a talk or what—to signify that it’s not a lecture but a spontaneous presentation of his practice—we call a teisho. Most days, it is based on one of a series of koans called the Mumonkan in Japanese, the Gateless Gate in English. He’ll use them as a launching pad and then improvise around them. Since koans are alogical, they are not answered rationally or intellectually but, as the word teisho reminds us, with the energy, immediacy, and concreteness of zazen itself. Most teachers take on these koans many times. Like his peers and predecessors, Roshi’s teishos will always be spontaneous and free-associative. It is no exaggeration to say that he is answering the koan each time he speaks of it. His interpretations of any particular koan can differ as much from those of other teachers as they do from previous teishos he’s given on it.
For his first teisho, he chooses “Gutei’s One Finger,” a famous koan that is familiar to most of us in the room.
“Today I read Gateless Gate case three.” Since he doesn’t trust his English pronunciation, he passes the book to me, sitting on his right. “Larry-san, please you read.”
I take the book and read aloud:
Master Gutei, whenever he was questioned, just stuck up one finger.
At one time he had a young attendant, whom a visitor asked, “What is the Zen your Master is teaching?” The boy also stuck up one finger. Hearing of this, Gutei cut off the boy’s finger with a knife. As the boy ran out screaming with pain, Gutei called to him. When the boy turned his head, Gutei stuck up his finger. The boy was suddenly enlightened.
When Gutei was about to die, he said to the assembled monks, “I attained Tenryu’s Zen of One Finger. I used it all through my life, but could not exhaust it.” When he had finished saying this, he died.
On the second day, Roshi’s choice is a koan that has been very important to me. He once assigned it to me and, after I worked on it in vain for almost a year, could not resist giving me the answer. That answer, and the question that precedes it, have remained as dramatic and instructive as they were when he first assigned it to me. As I listen to his teisho, I will feel, as often, that I understand it for the first time.
“Today,” he says, “case five, ‘Hang from a Tree.’ Larry-san, please you read.”
I take the book again.
Master Kyogen said, “It is like a man up a tree who hangs from a branch by his mouth; his hands cannot grasp a bough, his feet cannot touch the tree. Another man comes under the tree and asks him the meaning of Bodhidharma’s coming from the West. If he does not answer, he does not meet the questioner’s need. If he answers, he will lose his life. At such a time, how should he answer?”
After teisho, we have two more sittings and then dinner, which as usual is a mix of lunch leftovers with fruit salad for dessert. Another rest period follows dinner, during which we’re allowed to go out for walks in the neighborhood. Of course you try to remain in sesshin as you walk, keep your eyes from wandering. If you’re not successful, you pay a price for it. Anything your eye comes to rest on can reawaken the desire you’re trying to erase on your cushion. Returning to this loft after a trip in the Phenomenal World can seem like reentering a submarine which is already in deep dive. After my first, distracted walk on the first night, I vow not to go out again until sesshin is over, but the urge to go out is too strong to resist. After dinner, every evening, I slip into my street clothes and return to the world outside.
During this rest period, the dressing room has been emptied, cleaned, and set up for our interviews with Roshi—two cushions facing each other. In many Zen centers or monasteries, especially those of the Rinzai school, interviews with the master or teacher are frequent. Sometimes, they can occur twice a day. As often, Roshi’s style with them is unconventional. Believing that they can distract us from the sitting, which is our main purpose here, he limits interviews to one for each of us on alternate days. There is no interview on the first day, so we meet with him three times at most over the course of the week.
In monasteries, these meetings are called dokusan, but Roshi calls them kansho. The name refers to the bell we ring twice before entering the room. With a cushion just in front of it, it’s set up in the hall outside the room. Another of the treasures he brought from Japan, it hangs from a carved wooden stand about a foot in height. You strike it with a small wooden mallet, and the way you do so—the force and arc of your hand, the gap between first and second strike, and so on—will vary according to your state of mind. Weak and frightened, distracted, anxious, egoistic and vain, calm and confident, present at the moment or somewhere else—as Roshi often reminds us, he will clearly perceive, when he hears the sound behind the closed door of the kansho room, the current state of your practice.
The interview itself can vary in length from a few seconds to ten or fifteen minutes. Longer meetings usually indicate breakthroughs in practice or psychological breakdowns that require Roshi’s therapeutic support. With another bell that stands beside his cushion, he ends your interview and invites the next in line to announce him- or herself with those two all-revealing strikes of the bell. Let no one say that Zen, as Roshi likes to believe and often asserts, is minimal about its ritual.
My first meeting with him occurs on the second night. Though sesshin until now has been stressful and confusing, I’m actually a little high as I approach this first encounter. Early in the last sitting, I remembered a statement by Dogen—”Practice itself is enlightenment”—and realized that it applies as much to my work as zazen. It wasn’t the first time I’d made the connection, but it seemed to be so. A series of insights followed. In my office, as on my cushion, it’s the process that matters. What I’m doing from moment to moment, word to word, sentence to sentence—why should I think it different from the breath I follow on my cushion? My problem is I’ve been too goal-oriented, focusing on the book as a finished product, ignoring the great adventure I face every time I sit at my desk, not to mention the joy I find in facing it. No wonder I’ve been so frustrated and depressed! If I take Dogen’s point of view to my desk, I’ll feel as happy there as I do (sometimes, anyway) on my cushion!
I strike the bell twice, enter the room, and, following the ritual, drop to my knees, place my head on the floor, and lift my hands beside my ears. Excitement with my insight makes me impatient as I rise from the prostration and take my seat on the cushion before him. Our knees are almost touching. I look into his eyes. “I’ve had an amazing insight, Roshi.”
He closes his eyes for a moment and then rings his bell to dismiss me and summon the next student. A moment later, I’m back on my cushion, my insight nowhere in evidence.
The fourth day, as usual, is the hardest. Now and then I let go—but not quite. Pain intensifies and moves around—back, knee, neck, and always, of course, the mind. Thought accelerates. Zen has never been so clear, so tantalizing, so stupid and self-indulgent. From moment to moment, it seems impossible, impossible to doubt, absolutely clear, hopelessly confused. As Dogen often stated, Zen is nothing but a practice in faith. Faith? It seems to me I’ve experienced it again and again during these first days, but of course my memories of it are nowhere near it and my yearning to find it again seems only to make it less likely. My yearning for it is very intense but self-conscious and intellectual. Is it possible that nothing contradicts faith like the idea of it? I have a mind to ask Roshi that question when I meet with him that evening in kansho, but again he rings me out as soon I take my seat in front of him.
The fifth day and the sixth seem to take their cue from his dismissal. My mind seems dull and empty, void of energy. I’ve not forgotten the many times I’ve seen this void produce insight and exhilaration, but the memory sends me deeper into the void. Thoughts about emptiness seem vivid and profound and, a moment later, hollow and pretentious. I have a chance to meet with Roshi that evening, but I cannot bring myself to do so. My years of Zen have often brought me to this nadir, but it seems more perilous this time, a slope on which I can’t find grip or purchase. I try to blame my contradictions on my brain, thoughts of brain damage looming almost happily for a moment, but they are clearly strategic, disingenuous. I’ve often turned against Zen, but it’s never frightened me so much, never seemed to me so circular and seductive, so elusive, so magnetic. Is it possible that real brain damage is the dream of freedom from the brain? What’s more egoistic than ideas of compassion and altruism? What’s more self-conscious? How on earth did it ever occur to me that I knew more about Zen than Mailer, not to mention Beckett?
—
THE LAST TIME I met Beckett was at lunch in Paris in 1984—five years after our first meeting in London—at the hotel restaurant, near his apartment, that he’d always preferred. He was as warm and friendly as always but much frailer, unsteady on his feet. As usual, he plied me with questions about my work, wanted to know if I was “still looking at the wall.” Of his own work, he said, as usual, that it was going nowhere. “I’ve written nothing worth keeping since Worstward Ho last year.” Not for the first time, he mentioned that a single sentence had haunted him for years: “One night, as he sat, with his head in his hands, he saw himself rise and go.”
As before, he let it hang that afternoon, but the image would eventually evolve into one of the thirty-one fragments of his last published work, Stirrings Still. “One night, as he sat, with his head in his hands, he saw himself rise and go….Seen always from behind whithersoever he went, he wears the same hat and coat as of old when he walked the roads. The back roads.”
Stirrings Still, a three-part prose poem, would be published a year before his death, in 1988. Shortly before that, he wrote me, in his last note, that he’d moved into a “Maison de ratraite” called Tiers Temps. It was a home for the elderly not far from the apartment he’d shared with his wife for the last twenty-five years. Barney Rosset, his devoted publisher and friend, would soon meet with him there to deliver the proofs of Stirrings Still.
I was never able to visit him there, but I know from the notes of those who did that his room was elemental, almost monastic—one bed, one chair, one table—accessible to a small courtyard with a single tree and pigeons he was fond of feeding. There were of course a number of other residents, aged and/or infirm. Since he was a wealthy man by this time, most of his friends found the situation unsuitable, but he was comfortable there. As his biographer Anthony Cronin noted, “With one side of his nature, he had always had a surprising need of people; and it is possible that he found the rather intimate arrangements and little rituals of…Tiers Temps, including the presence of the other inmates when he left his room, soothing and comforting. The simply furnished room and simple regimen…were somehow in tune with his rejection of the vanities of the world, and with the spirit of his work.”
Though at first he considered Tier Temps a temporary expedient, he soon began to consider it his home for the foreseeable future. In fact, he would never leave it. One of his last visitors, the Irish poet Derek Mahon, spending half an hour over a glass of Jameson’s with him, was impressed by his self-sufficiency: “He seemed buoyant, if unsteady on his feet, and tremendously relaxed, as if to demonstrate the logic of his previous paean a l’outrance, the older you get the better it felt. It seemed to me he was unquestionably having fun as the corporeal envelope disintegrated and the end drew nigh. He positively twinkled.”
Buoyant though he was, he was sinking rapidly. His respiratory problems were increasing. In early December he was taken to the hospital, and after several weeks of fitful consciousness, he died on December 22, 1989. In his summation of this moment, Cronin reminds us of two sentences from Beckett’s book on Proust, written fifty-five years before, when he was thirty-one. “Whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valueless. Death has not required us to keep a day free.”
—
THE SCHEDULE is different on our last day. A brief cleaning period follows breakfast and then a brief morning service, a teisho, and finally, two periods of zazen in which we’ll each of us have a chance to meet with Roshi again. For his teisho, he chooses another famous koan. “Today I talk case twelve. ‘Zuigan Osho Calls to Himself.’” He hands the book to me. “Larry-san, please you read.”
Every day Master Zuigan Shigen used to call out to himself, “Oh, Master!” and would answer himself, “Yes?” “Are you awake?” he would ask, and would answer, “Yes, I am.” “Never be deceived by others, any day, any time.” “No, I will not.”
Roshi shifts from side to side on his cushion, stretches his neck and shoulders, and then stares at us in silence for several moments. He often does this, but the stare seems much longer than usual. Finally, he says:
Your master awake. Already waken! Zuigan Osho called to himself every day, “Master!” and answered “Yes sir!” Maybe you think, “Who is calling, who answering?” Only called and “yes!” Answer “yes!” Every second individual, independent. No connection between “master!” and “yes sir!” No connection! You independent yourself! Don’t think this about Zen master or karate master. Or tea master. Those are phenomenal point master. Essential point, everyone is master. If you following outside environment, you become slave. Of your ego. Your selfish. Your dualistic mentality.
His talk is shorter today—a bit less than half an hour. As usual, I understand him now and then, see exactly what he’s talking about. It’s essential nature to which he refers, all beings’ essential nature, the essence that is formless, empty, a function of the present moment. For a moment, I get it exactly, realize as never before, with a rush of energy and happiness, my own essential nature, but then the energy void I entered yesterday engulfs me once again. Finally, it’s clear to me that I’ve made no progress. It’s all conceptual for me. Like he said, I’m a slave of my dualistic mentality. But how does it help to know it? Where is such knowledge produced if not within the brain that produces the dualism? It’s a circular prison in which I’m trapped, a brain that makes everything dualistic while producing these wondrous images of nondualism, and seven days of sitting have only made it more efficient, more dogged and malicious. By the end of his talk, I feel like I’m in a wind tunnel.
After the teisho, as usual, we have a recitation, the simplest we do. It’s called The First Step in Zazen. I’ve always found it simplistic, a collection of spiritual clichés, ideas that I, like everyone in this room, have entertained for years. I’ve never understood why Roshi includes it. Its author, however, is not one to underestimate. He is Zen master Soyen Shaku, a seminal figure in Rinzai Zen. In 1893, he was one of four priests and two laymen who represented Zen at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago. He was D. T. Suzuki’s teacher and—even more important, in the view of those, like us, who are committed to the particular path of Rinzai Zen—the pivotal master of Nyogen Senzaki. Senzaki established one of the first zendos in the United States, in San Francisco in 1922. By mail and then directly, he formed a close friendship with Soen Nakagawa Roshi, and the connection between them was crucial in the history of the Zen Studies Society and American Zen in general.
As usual for this recitation, Roshi opens the sutra book and begins the reading. We join him in the second sentence:
Zazen is not a difficult task. Just free yourself of all incoming thoughts and hold your mind against them like a great iron wall. Think of your own room as the whole world, and that all sentient beings are sitting there with you, as one.
Make a searching analysis of yourself. Realize that your body is not your body. It is part of the whole body of sentient beings. Your mind is not your mind. It is but a constituent of all mind. Your eyes, your ears, your nose, your tongue, your hands, and your feet are not merely your individual belongings, but one in joint ownership with all sentient beings. You simply call them yours—and others. You cling to your own being and consider others separate from you. This is nothing but a baseless delusion of yours.
Just free yourself of all incoming complications and hold your mind against them like a great iron wall. No matter what sort of contending thoughts arise in you, ignore them and they will perish and disappear of themselves. And just as soon as your thought expands and unites with the universe, you are free from your stubborn ego.
Then you will enter a condition where there is no relativity, no absoluteness. You are now transcendent, far above both discrimination and equality. You have nothing to receive and there is nothing to receive you. There is no time, no space. There is no past, no future, but one eternal present.
This is not the true realization, but you are walking near the palace. Just free yourself from all incoming disturbances, and hold your mind against them like a great iron wall. Then someday you will meet your true Self as if you have awakened from a dream and you will have the happiness you never could have derived otherwise.
Zazen is not a difficult task. It is a way to lead you to your long-lost home.
Knowing the lines by heart, I recite them with fleeting attention, expecting nothing. After all, I’ve been reciting them for more than twenty years without particular benefit or insight. Why expect more this morning?
But the dullness of the recitation has somehow relieved the dullness of my mind. When I turn to face the wall again, one line persists: “Zazen is a way to lead you to your long-lost home.” How is it I’ve never made this connection? Zazen is home and home is zazen and where else, after all, do I want to be? This breath is home. Now is home. This breath and this breath and this breath. Obvious though it is, the connection has energy and velocity that circulates in my body. It seems to me I’ve never known home before. What is it but the present moment, things as they are, the contentment, the freedom from desire, which has suddenly enveloped me? Now is the only home I can know. I can’t lose it and it can’t be taken away. The space and time I’ve sought for years is the one I’m in right now. Even my brain, busy as usual, is home. The thoughts it’s generating are happening now. THIS is the only home I’ll ever have, the only one I want.
My stillness persists for two minutes, I’d guess, maybe a bit longer. Then all at once I begin to shake. My body seems to be invaded by an external force, an energy I can’t control. The first signs of it are slight tremors in my feet and hands, but they quickly proliferate, moving into my forearms, my calves, my neck. Soon I’m enveloped by tremors that seem almost epileptic. My body seems like a battleground, separate from me and out of control.
The shaking continues for several moments but then stops as suddenly as it began. The cessation is almost as disorienting as the attack it replaced, but after a moment, I feel at home again, suffused again with tranquility and happiness. How is it possible that such a storm has left no damage in its wake? If anything, the stillness I feel is deeper than before.
It takes but a moment to understand what happened. It’s obvious, isn’t it? The contentment I felt—and feel again—is nothing less than the essential nature that Roshi is always directing us to acknowledge. But essential nature, as he reminds us, is formless, and the brain of course deals only in form. Again I see what I’ve seen so often—nothing disturbs the brain like emptiness, and emptiness is nothing but the present moment, things as they are. Isn’t this the brain damage I’ve suspected all along? The frantic insistence on form that zazen challenges? Isn’t this why I’ve had so much trouble with my book? Books are form. This is empty. Mailer and Beckett were all about form. Beckett fought it, Mailer embraced it, but different as they were, they were locked in the same dilemma, obedient to their brains. And I’m no different! How can I pretend that I’ve approached the truth that Roshi teaches? The “long-lost home” I knew a moment ago—what was it but freedom from brain damage, the endless desire my brain is programmed to produce? The shaking was its response to contentment, the formless condition it can’t tolerate. For the first time in my life, I knew total freedom from brain damage, but my brain rejected the cure it was offered!
Two hours later, before the lunch that will terminate sesshin, I have my last interview with Roshi—the last, in fact, that I’ll ever have with him. In all the years I’ve studied with him, I’ve never been so impatient to see him. The words explode the moment I sit down. Home and shaking, home and emptiness, not-home, shaking again and home again—I describe the whole of my journey to him. “At last I got it, Roshi. Everything you’ve been teaching us. Essential nature. My long-lost home. I got there at last. But home is empty, and the brain makes form. Of course, it could not accept what I found. That’s why I started to shake. Home humiliated my brain! I got there at last, Roshi! That’s why I was shaking!”
Roshi shuts his eyes for a moment and then fixes them on me.
“Larry-san?”
“Yes?”
“Shaking is your long-lost home.”
