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Part Two

The Orphaned

Dark

Dissolving the Fictions

On a Thursday evening in late spring you can hear children at play in the street through the open window. And birds yattering away, clamoring for territory, for mates, for the pure joy of it—who knows? The zendo is silent. Sixteen or seventeen people sit in two rows, one of which bends around the ell in the attic room. This is the old zendo of our early days on the third floor of a century-old Victorian pile, our spiritual director’s home.

Many of those sitting in the silent room first came to the zendo as I did. I was in crisis. I was scared. For the first time I could actually see the bottom of the barrel, and it was the abyss. My drinking had taken control of my life. No single moment went by without planning for it in relation to drinking. My marriage was tearing badly at the seams. I had found I could not write without drinking to give me that creative buzz, but by this time, I had to drink so much just to get the buzz I couldn’t hold a pen. My job was just a matter of time. The inner life, my spiritual being where my writing lived, was dying almost as assuredly as my body was. For seventeen years I had practiced Transcendental Meditation with fair regularity but without a guide. I had been on a plateau for years and had now come to the cliff at its end. I gave up meditation. This was not for me a small thing. It was connection. I was not sure to what, but it was real. Now it was gone.

Most people who knew me then assumed my first real step toward recovery was when I agreed to go to counseling, but that was more than a year after I first made an appointment at the Zen Center of Syracuse. I knew I needed help and I thought I knew where to begin. I suppose I also thought, quite wrongly as it turns out, that if I got my spiritual act together, the drinking and all of the other problems would take care of themselves.

I was in the local New-Age bookstore and saw a poster for the Zen Center. I asked the manager about it and was told it was “the real thing,” not just a hangout for aging hippies (as his store was). I called the number. The woman’s soft voice on the phone assured me she was the director. She asked me some questions in a hesitant tone and we made an appointment. I later understood her hesitation. Many odd people would call the Zen Center, and she needed to make sure their interest in Zen was real.

I arrived at the appointed time, standing nervously on the front porch, noticing the toys there. Young children lived here too. A small, pleasant-looking woman, with cropped grey hair, answered the door. She asked me to remove my shoes, something that has since become a habit in my own home, and took me through a bathroom and up a back staircase off the kitchen to the attic. The house was a happy clutter of books (piles and groaning cases), art (every available surface had a picture), artifacts, toys. Off the attic landing was a door. She opened it to a long room, radical in its uncluttered purity. The zendo. We sat facing one another, and I have no recollection of what we discussed. I was overwhelmed with a sense of homecoming. I knew I had found my teacher, someone who, should I ever be able to have some sort of insight, would be able to see and affirm that I did.

By the time of this pleasant spring evening I had been through rehab and had been sitting for a few years. It is evening but there is still light enough to see by. We are all enjoying the natural waning light of day. The room is silent. There are a few more women than men. Ages vary: a few students, a few adults with families, adults going back to school, adults with jobs of various kinds, a professor, a researcher, a macramé artist, a painter or writer, a couple of individuals from industry—the usual mix in a lay practice near a university.

Whatever each individual’s inner struggle, there is a palpable sense of enjoyment in the room. After a long day of work it is good to sit with these good people, share silence and peace. Each of them had once felt that sense of coming home I experienced on my first visit. It is renewed as we sit together in the gloaming.

Mothers begin to call the children in. The birds’ roosting songs draw to a dose. A dog barks in another neighborhood. Darkness deepens in the room. You can touch the stillness. Out of nowhere her voice booms: “Are you waiting for your life to happen? Or are you tasting it now?”

He Whose Face Gives No Light Shall Never Become a Star

Deep frost. Sun and moon

at once in the dawn.

Our utter impermanence.

Sudden bitterness

springing all unbidden

at a word

that we will fail again

to be human.

Birds

sleep in the throat.

Behind the ribs

it is a bare open country.

This empty vessel overflowing.

Lullaby of the Dreamcatcher

Hush. Be still.

The road is gone.

Speech and truth sleep

and only your dream

stands against darkness close at hand.

It is the place of night

and of time,

darkness without shore.

Your dreams

caught at the window

hang like stars.

In Samuel Beckett’s Endgame, Clove asks Hamm, “Do you believe in the life to come?” Hamm replies, “Mine was always that.”

I once loved a woman who was always angry with me. She said I lived my life vicariously, trying to fulfill someone else’s expectations of what my life should be, that I was waiting to finally get it right for everyone, and only then could I live my own life. She said she wasn’t going to wait for the real me forever. She didn’t stick around, and I didn’t learn, though as I look back perhaps what she wanted was her version of me.

Recently I discovered when some of the seeds of this apparent attitude of mine were planted. I never went to kindergarten. When I started school in first grade, parochial schools were crowded, often fifty students to a class. Maybe I wasn’t ready. I found most of the work easy and boring. I would spend the entire day staring out the window, wishing I were outside (I threw myself absolutely into recesses and always came home dusty and grass-stained). But mostly I was dreaming, making up stories, my mind afire. I had to spend nearly every day after school because I had not completed the work with the other kids. Usually I could get through the incomplete work quickly, especially when the terrifying second grade nun, Sister Sarah, was watching, her grey face peering through the glass of the classroom door. But I began to learn that people had expectations and that in order to get them off my case I had to start pretending to fulfill their expectations. I never thought that the expectations might have any value for me. They were their expectations, after all. By the time I was ten I had forgotten why I was pretending, and so living other’s wishes became real.

Many of us have such stories where someplace between then and now we have gotten lost. The way back is easier than we could have imagined. It is right here in whatever we do each day. The “practice” at the Zen Center of Syracuse is a lay practice. It is founded on the simple understanding that if Buddhist practice cannot help ordinary people live ordinary lives more completely, then it is not much good for anything. One should not have to become a special case or live in extraordinary circumstances in order to grasp the fundamentals. Zen emphasizes ordinary day-to-day things because when we grasp the essential emptiness in the least thing we simultaneously apprehend it in the universe.

The novelist Masao Abe has said, “In our daily life, there are moments when we are here with ourselves—moments in which we feel a vague sense of unity. But at other moments we find ourselves there—looking at ourselves from the outside. We fluctuate between here and there from moment to moment: homeless, without a place to settle.” He goes on to add that only humans experience this divisive self-consciousness, that plants and other animals just are what they are.

On the positive side, while we live self-consciously, we think and create human culture, science, art—we think how to live and how to develop our lives. But we do it looking from the outside and are thus separated from ourselves. Abe says, “So far as we are moving between here and there, between inside and outside, looking at ourselves in comparison with others, and looking at ourselves from the outside, we are always restless. . . . Insofar as one is a human being, one cannot escape this basic anxiety.”

In a talk on Sufism, Thomas Merton, in an aside, cites Martin Buber: “In Eden Adam and Eve could do only good. It was their nature to do good. They could not be or do otherwise. There was not in their frame of reference anything other than good, so there was no real good in the sense that it is something opposing of evil. Evil was not in the picture. What they came to desire through Satan’s temptation, was to see themselves doing good.”

Abe goes on similarly about this theme, “God created a tree as a tree and saw that it was good: it is in suchness as a tree. . . . Everything is in its own suchness. It was the same when he created Adam and Eve. . . . They are just as they are . . . .” But, as we know, according to Genesis, Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. This is more than a question of ethics. Abe suggests, “The eating of the fruit suggests the making of value judgments. . . . The ability to make value judgments is a quality unique to self-consciousness. . . . By means of self-consciousness we also make a distinction between oneself and others. As a consequence of this distinction, we become attached to self, making ourselves the center of the world.” This is the sin of Eden. And it is ours.

Buddhism regards self-consciousness as ignorance, a loss of awareness of the reality of our suchness. Our outside view of ourselves is a basic ignorance inherent in human existence. Masao Abe continues, “As long as the human self tries to take hold of itself through self-consciousness (out of which feelings of inferiority, superiority, etc. develop), the human ego-self falls into an ever-deepening dilemma. At the extreme point of this dilemma, the ego can no longer support itself and must collapse into emptiness. . . . The realization of no-self is a necessity for the human ego. . . . We must realize that there is no unchanging, eternal ego-self.”

This is not the end, but rather a point of departure. Suchness is our ground of being in the world, living without “otherness,” without conflict, so each day and each ordinary activity becomes a good day and a good act. This is what is meant by the saying, “everything is empty.

Talking to God

It is odd how the lessons we are given are sometimes not learned for many, many years. When I was about four I was playing one day in my grandfather’s studio. It smelled of wood ash, oil paint, and turpentine. It was on the second floor of the 200-year-old house he and my grandmother rented. There was a fireplace, and there were beamed ceilings, dark with age, and bookshelves built in between the corner windows that looked right out over the old coach road. I was moving chess pieces (red and white, oddly enough) around the sloped surface of his desk (the very desk at which I write now), pretending they were soldiers. He shuffled into the room in his slippers, baggy pants, and old cardigan. He stood over me for a few minutes, hand on my shoulder, silently watching me. His hair was still dark, and his teeth were brown. He asked if I would sit for him. I knew what this meant. He was working on a portrait of his youngest son, my uncle Brian, then in the navy. He needed me to sit still with my uncle’s naval cap on my head so he could get the pose and angle right. I agreed because I knew he would talk to me. I loved to hear him talk.

He posed me as he wanted, with the cap at a rakish angle over one eye. I thought that it looked stupid and pushed it to the back of my head where I knew it would stay on. He fixed it again. Again I pushed it back. I wore all my cowboy hats like that. He said, “Damn it, keep it like this. Look, let me tell you a story.” And while I became utterly motionless, he began a story that had been going on for some time. It featured a glass mountain that was wondrous to see but slippery to climb; a character named Injun Joe of dubious reputation; a number of giants, trolls, and elves; and an absolutely terrifying Big Bad Wolf with yellow eyes, blood dripping from his huge yellow teeth—something that filled my nightmares for many years later.

At some point the story petered out or he became absorbed in some problem on the canvas. Things grew quiet. I could hear the old mahogany grandmother clock, brought over from Ireland and called that because it was smaller than a grand father clock, ticking loudly and slowly downstairs. “Granpop?” I asked suddenly, “Why do you paint?” He paused, brush in hand, a dark lock over his brow. His eyes, often bleary, became very clear and looked at me as though he had never seen me before. “Well, my boy,” he said, “Art is a way to talk to God.”

Shortly after that, he finished up and freed me to go. I shot down to the kitchen. I had been smelling baking for some time now and had to see what my grandmother was up to. The kitchen was a long, low-ceilinged room that looked out on a dirt road and parking area between the rambly old stone house and the dairy farm next door. As I entered the kitchen I heard the milk pump start up in the barn. My grandmother was leaning over a low table, her hands white with flour. She was making potato rolls, small yeast rolls for which she became famous. There was a wooden bowl filled with fresh-baked ones. I watched, fascinated as she pushed the lively dough with her hands, took an old milk glass dipped in flour, and cut circles with it in the dough. Then she took up each circle, brushed it with butter on half of one side, folded it tenderly, and lined it up on a baking sheet. It was all done with economy, speed, and a kind of tenderness I couldn’t explain but which was palpable to my young eyes. She did it as intently as my grandfather touched the brush and layered the color on the canvas.

“Gran?” I asked, “Why don’t you paint?”

She said, “I’m not an artist.”

“But don’t you want to talk to God?”

She paused, letting the dough spring back over her fingers as she kneaded. “What do you mean, my little one?”

“Granpop says art is a way to talk to God.”

She turned to me, flour up to her elbows, wisps of grey hair about her face, her black eyes boring a hole into me. “My home is my art.”

Hell Is Being without Space

Some mornings I wake up poor. The poverty of longing floods my consciousness with a hollow pain. The dust of regret is a bitter grit on my tongue and stings the corners of my eyes—even before I am out from under the covers. It is like waking from a dream of standing outside my own house, knocking and knocking, with no one answering.

Enough! Or Too Much

Endless witless poverty.

At four below

cold is the first affirmation.

Cleaning the kitchen floor

without whys or wherefores,

we trouble the councils of the wise.

What do we know

brother slut, sister hole?

Love overlooked, solitude, fear.

Low sun through the window.

Kneel on the warm tiles

until you remember

every flake of snow ever.

Lullaby of the Thimble —after Rilke

Close your eyes.

What is it?

What do you seek?

What have you lost?

Remember the girl

who lost her silver thimble?

“What are you looking for?”

an old man asked her.

She said, not far from tears,

“I am looking for God.”

Taking her hand, he said,

“Just look—

what a beautiful thimble I found today.”

There is a love that is the affinity of shared harmonies and there is love that is a self-sanctifying gesture, loving one’s own image of what another should be. When I am poor such thoughts just confuse me. I will lie there wondering what are the reasons I stay in my life? What are the layers of me that come from others, the oughts and shoulds, the visions of others I’ve accepted and learned to fill. There were times when I wanted someone who needed to be there, to sacrifice on my account as I would on hers, whose eyes with mine looked in the same direction. Even now that such an arrogant and adolescent dream has faded (and I would rather not want at all, or rather, if I must want, at least be with someone wholly in the world), I wake muddled, almost weeping.

My wife of many years lies next to me, rumpled in sleep. I can find myself angered by her vulnerability while longing for intimacy with her. Do I want, for example, sex? It was often deferred, especially in our troubled years just before and into my early recovery, for good and not so good reasons, which were nevertheless seen as normal—to keep peace, to force nothing, to maintain a semblance of harmony. Deferral in sex led to deferral in all important areas, so that I began to live vicariously. I settled into inertia and monotony in our relationship as a result of fear. A fear of facing what? That I saw the relationship only in terms of myself? Only partly. Guilt over the grief my drinking brought her and our children? Perhaps. Real intimacy? That meant taking the initiative to share in the evolution of the relationship, even when it did not match the dream I thought we created when we were courting. For many males sex is the only model for intimacy. When intimacy is needed and sex is not possible we turn the perceived failure back in on ourselves, turn it into anger.

It is said anger is self-loathing turned on others. I can believe it. Anger is a power trip, the last resort of the powerless and the assumed right of the powerful. Because it is destructive it seems strong and, so, desirable to the weak. Anger tries to control the present outside of the self. Anger not expressed becomes resentment. Resentment is a way we try to control time, to deny change or its possibility, to deny that the feelings of the past have no value in the present. When all wrongs of the past are washed clean, so are all rights! Anger is a cry for “me” to have power outside of the self, refusing to accept being as it is, to blame, to fear, to focus all away from the self. Anger destroys—destroys even its source. I used to think some anger was justified. I do not now. Suppose one lets go of power altogether?

But there have been mornings when I awake poor, longing for some physical expression of intimacy, of acceptance of my being in the world. Feeling alone, helpless, unable to express my longing—afraid it will sound like mere selfish desire instead of a need to share our sense of being, I become angry. The feeling comes. Its arrival is not anticipated or thought out or even desired. Long years of habit simply leave the door open for it to enter.

When it does enter I begin to create fictions of the wrongs done to me. I seek out, almost unconsciously, my wife’s weak spots when she wakes. I look for the buttons to push. It doesn’t take long for her irritated response to the tone of my voice to justify my anger, to define and affirm my loneliness, to push the resentments forward. Eden’s sin, to see oneself doing good, turns ugly as I try to see myself justified, right—hating myself for it, denying the hate, pushing on.

One such morning we bickered over the bedclothes. This was when the children were small and I was home during the day. Who was the most restless sleeper? Who mussed the bedding? Over breakfast, would we use the good silver or not for the guests next evening? Can’t you even say goodbye without that tone of voice? What tone? And so on. The variations on this theme are as numerous as all the known and unknown Dharma brothers and sisters ever. The cycle must be broken. Who will break it if you do not begin with yourself?

Hanging out laundry in bright, beautiful March winds, I muttered to myself, if only this, if only that. The four-letter words I learned from a Danish boatswain, for whom I worked as a deckhand, were getting good exercise. I jammed the clothespins on the line. My fingers were numb. The winds were bright and the temperature below freezing. The cold made me angrier. Early songbirds had returned, but their song was not sweet to me. To me they were squawking over nesting rights. The wind caught a frozen sheet and slapped it in my face. The tape in my head suddenly jammed. There was just the fluttering laundry and the chattering birds. In the empty silence of my brain another song began to emerge, a distant melody just beyond the edge of hearing, but not of awareness. What was it? Faint, faint. I reached out for it. It was the lullaby of death, cleansing the loathing, reminding me life is what we have to share.

The Most Sublime Act Is to Set Another Before You

It is a bitter thing, all morning they bickered—irritations by the bedclothes, fault over tomorrow’s spoons, raised voices at the back door, silence pegging the clothes on a frozen line.

Windy day.

Just this fluttering,

blameless

as the chattering birds.

Lullaby of Death

For though our life may be a thing to share, who is there in this world to share our death?

—Brodsky

It’s okay.

It’s nothing at all.

It does not count.

Nothing has happened.

Everything remains the same.

I am I. You are you

and the old life

is unchanged, untouched.

Whatever we were

we are still.

Call me by the old familiar names.

Speak to me in the easy way

you always used.

Habit of Being

I am hopelessly domestic. As much as I love to travel, I love being home more. We have a genius for comfortable clutter in our house and I revel in it. I would rather have company than go visit. There is little as satisfying as preparing a meal or sitting by the fire reading to the family, or simply watching the afternoon light stream across the kitchen table transforming ordinary tableware, jars, and bottles into timeless resonant beings and messengers of truth.

Keiji Nishitani speaks of “the importance of sticking closely to everyday life and the problems that arise from that experience, that is, to deal with the problems contained in daily living.... The question is: What is the real face of our commonplace experience of Daily life?” He goes further, “True reality is encountered while staying in the midst of every day and returning ever more deeply into its depth and inner recesses. Even the great problem of life-and-death is clarified thereby and what is called ‘faith’ in Buddhism implies a kind of experiencing. Daily life is the basic problem and the last key to all problems. That is the standpoint of Zen and, more generally, the core of the Buddhist standpoint.” This is the force, the drive behind the Zen Center of Syracuse as a lay practice—what lay practice means, to have naikan or thoroughgoing intuition about ordinary things. The answer is not only in a remote temple but on your kitchen table.

On August 8, 1996, fifty-one years and two days after Hiroshima, a Buddhist monk was killed by the State of Arkansas. That is one way to tell the story. Another is that Frankie Parker had been on Death Row twelve years and his appeals had finally run out that August day. Both versions are true. In this case the “dead man walking” was one of our desaparecidos twice over. He was one of society’s throwaways, an invisible number in our brutal penal system. He was condemned to die. He was also a realized monk, ordained and trained while in prison in a remarkable transformation that was free of self-pity or pride, who could face death with equanimity. Frankie Parker was a confessed murderer, at one time one of the lost who saw violence as a real alternative, who could say: “How do you spread the Dharma if the person you meet is blind and dumb? The answer is a hug! Kindness, a hug is a smile, a smile that can be felt. Buddhism is not a religion or philosophy, it is not a psychology or a science. It is example. It is a method of liberation. I feel liberated and soon may be liberated from this world. I change as all things change. . . . I trust that I have not let you down in any way, I trust that this world will be helped in some way by my death. I took refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma, the Sangha gave me refuge. Thank you my friends. Y’all take care . . . live by example!”

For twenty-seven years Veronza Bowers has lived in maximum security prisons. He is a former Black Panther who claims he was framed by the Feds for murder back in the early seventies. He considers himself a political prisoner. It is possible. That is a period needing scrutiny. I do not know the truth of that part of his story, and all my wanting to do so cannot change what I cannot know. But I came to know him through my study of the shakuhachi, the bamboo flute, which is the only melodic instrument used in the Zen tradition. Monty Levenson, who made my flute, also made Veronza’s. It was through Monty that I heard about this prisoner who has been denied parole more times than he can count. In prison Veronza turned from someone committed to a violent solution to the racial question into a healer. A man, invisible to us for a quarter of a century, has used meditation and music to transform himself. He has studied shiatsu massage, acupressure, and is an honorary elder of the Lompoc, California Tribe of Five Feathers, a Native American spiritual and cultural group. In his words in 1996:

I have lived the past twenty-four years of my life as a federal prisoner with the Bureau of Prisons number 35316-136 appended to my name. For those of you who have never been inside a maximum security penitentiary, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to imagine it as a place where the plaintive sounds of shakuhachi can be heard. Ah! But it is true . . . . In the recreation yard of Terre-Haute Federal Penitentiary in Indiana, I first saw Punchy—he being pushed in his wheelchair around the quarter mile track (he had been paralyzed with a gunshot wound); me sitting under the shade of a lone tree blowing my shakuhachi . . . . The song in my heart reflected what I had just seen and my shakuhachi began to cry . . . .

Veronza arranged to work with Punchy to help his healing. “After a solid month (six days a week, two and a half hours a day) of breathing exercises, acupressure treatments, stretching, etc., we were basically where we were when we started. Punchy was locked up inside himself where I could not touch.” He arranged a meditation session in which he played the flute. During this he achieved a breakthrough of sorts. Punchy is recorded to have said, “It appears that I have allowed the flutist . . . to take me beyond the realms of my control. I can sense serenity, but the pain . . . oh! The pain! And why do I feel as if I’m not alone? . . . My body began to respond, my eyes opened. . . .”

Veronza goes on:

Ah! The breakthrough! On so many levels a small piece of bamboo, 1.8 feet long, had opened doorways which had previously been shut. Shakuhachi had done in one and a half hours what no human being had done in three years . . . . From then on we began each working session with shakuhachi. A healthy diet of vitamins . . . meditation and . . . weight lifting . . . stretching and more stretching . . . all combined so that by the end of the summer (ten months after our first meditation healing session) Punchy could do one hundred full squats non-stop, walk five steps on his own [and] walk behind his wheelchair with me sitting in it. . . .