What is it that thus comes?

The I

This morning I was led to a little story that I found here in Sweeping Zen.  This is a piece of it:

The Chan Master Nanyue  Huairang visited the Sixth Ancestor, Huineng.
Huineng asked him, “Where do you come from?”
Nanyue   said, “I come from the National Teacher An on Mt. Song.”
Huineng  said, “What is it that thus comes?”
The Master was without means [to answer].
After studying with Huineng for eight years, he finally understood the previous conversation.
Thereupon, he announced to the Ancestor, “I’ve understood what you put to me when I first came:  ‘What is it that thus comes’”
Huineng  asked, “How do you understand it?”
Nanyue   replied, “To say it’s like anything wouldn’t hit it.”

What is this "I"?  Any way you describe yourself feels woefully inadequate.

Then on I went to my collage group, where I created a vertical piece.  I'd like to show you a photo of that, but my computer is refusing to do it.  You could see it if you just picked up your monitor and rotated it so the blue patch is in the upper left. But I found I like it turned this way much more.

What we all love about creating collage together is the non-thinking.  None of us tell stories with what we do; we play with shape and color.  Knowing that art doesn't have to be representational is one of many reasons it's good to live in the modern age.  Our assignment this morning was think quilt.  I am also always reminded of Joe Brainard's earnest advice:  just glue something down.

So I began in the upper left, with that lovely piece of blue handmade paper, my intention being Patchwork.  I thought I would work from left to right, one row at a time, the way you make a patchwork quilt.  We all murmured a bit about quilts we knew as girls, when women made quilts out of old clothes, and their function was to keep you warm.  But soon we settled down and the silence became absolute. So often, art feels like a sacred practice.

It seems that the main purpose of any assignment is to give me something to rebel against.  Sure enough, I didn't get far before I felt my plan to imitate a quilt was boring, so I left it.  Then it got to be fun.  Especially when I found the letter i.  I decided the collage was about "The I" - the self, this one, and its place in the universe.  The last thing I did was put the i in what is now the lower left-hand corner.

There is always a lot of space in my collages; I remain intrigued by the space everywhere, inside and outside this body, the idea that the shape of the empty spaces is as important as the images in it. And also, as I face my often-frightening old age (my back really hurt today), I feel better remembering how small I am, how big the universe, how spacious.  Collage is a somewhat more impermanent art than carving stone.  I like that about it, too.

The Fifth Noble Truth

Moon, by Joe Brainard

Now, I prefer to think of the Buddha's founding insights as The Four Realities, but most places they are known as The Four Noble Truths, and you can look them up.  Over the years I have revisited them often, testing whether they make sense.  Now I have come to believe that something important is left out.  The Fourth Noble Truth lays out what is called The Eightfold Path.  It is a formidable prescription for effort in every area of your life, involving wisdom, ethics, meditation and mindfulness.  What is missing is how you begin.

I have seen hundreds of people begin meditation because they wanted stress relief, people who did not want to take it any further, to look at how they lived and what concepts they carried around in their minds.  Some of them last, in a way, going to a meditation group once a week or filling seven bowls with fresh (city) water every morning, but most don't.

You will not stick with it, you will not really do it - not even with that one little part, daily meditation - unless you begin with a fervent  vow to get yourself out of your misery.   That's going to emanate from really seeing and feeling your misery. 

I remember - feeling my way out of the dark room of cancer, a room cluttered with black boxes in which there was a door with just a crack of light around it to indicate it was there.  I'd known a few happy people.  I thought maybe happiness was possible.  That door out of my misery - it was clear to me that I had to get to it myself.  Medical science was adding to my misery, I won't go into that here.  My family had, as usual, failed me utterly, abandoning me after all showing up pro forma in my hospital room.  In my journal I noted it had been 17 days since my surgery, and my mother had not called me.  Ditto what I thought of as friendships - they didn't go to this level. They turned out to be social distractions.

The church brought me dinner every night for a week, but each of those women refused to come in and visit when I asked them to, and each time my heart dropped, I was so terribly lonely.  The therapist I had been trying to work with before the diagnosis was one more nice girl who wanted to explain me to understand my poor mother couldn't face my cancer.  Jesus, it was my cancer.  My minister wanted to show me how wise he was, told me she didn't choose to become an addict.  Everywhere I turned, no one heard me.  On top of this, what I had been trying to work with before the diagnosis was the appearance of memories of sexual abuse after my father's death. Well, I'm feeling bad just touching down on all this. That's about all the memoir I can stand.

I could sit on the bottom of that for only so long before I decided somewhere in my gut, Dammit, I've got to do something.  Some of us are like this.  We will goddamnit do something!  This sort of will - even courage - is a gift, a lucky accident of dna and karma, and a certain persistence was something I had cultivated in my life.  Lucky there.  And all I could think of to do was a healing visualization I'd heard three different unrelated times in my life.  More luck.

I knew enough about forming new habits to decide I would have to work at this, do it every single day.  I further decided I couldn't stand to spend ten minutes at it, but five was not enough, so I made it seven minutes (with the kitchen timer).  I tied it to a reward.  If I did it, I let myself watch the 11 a.m. rerun of Law and Order, which distracted me from my nightmare.  I did it sitting in my recliner.  Things unfolded from there.

I believe that realization of our suffering, and that vow, are essential.  You will not make that vow until  you understand that no one else can help you.  Happiness will not fall from the sky.  It will not "happen."  It's not in that "relationship" you hope will "come your way."  You have to get to work.  Only then will you begin to practice as though your hair is on fire.  That's the Fifth Noble Truth, or maybe it's the preliminary practice.

Graceful gestures

The New York School has for me a certain radiance and youthful charm. I gather it was the end of the age of irony, that is, AIDS hit and a lot of things became dead serious. Frank O'Hara seemed to take himself less seriously than some other spontaneous poets like Ginsburg. He presents in this poem as a charmingly theatrical friend just chatting. The image above is by another sweet star of that era, painter Joe Brainard. A critic said of him that he showed beautiful could be interesting.

Poem (Lana Turner has Collapsed)
by Frank O'Hara

Lana Turner has collapsed!
I was trotting along and suddenly
it started raining and snowing
and you said it was hailing
but hailing hits you on the head
hard so it was really snowing and
raining and I was in such a hurry
to meet you but the traffic
was acting exactly like the sky
and suddenly I see a headline
LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!
there is no snow in Hollywood
there is no rain in California
I have been to lots of parties
and acted perfectly disgraceful
but I never actually collapsed
oh Lana Turner we love you get up