"Longya's Thief in an Empty Room" from Eihei Dogen's 300 Koan Shobogenzo

The Main Case - A monastic asked Zen master Judan of Longya (Zhankong), "When do the teachers of old get stuck?" Longya said, "When the thief slips into an empty room."

Capping verse - When the mind is empty, the eyes are finally clear. Shining through detachment and subtlety--the root of creation.


Just to avoid any confusion or misunderstanding between you, the reader, and myself, the writer, I’ll make it clear right off the bat: for me, ideas, concepts, and theory are not methods for acquiring objective knowledge but rather catalysts for subjective experience of life; my life; anyone's life. While I admit I’m not averse to being able to posit a thesis that many can agree on, what’s more important to me is to instigate reflection. Similar to the manner in which a koan operates, activating consciousness of premises, assumptions, and prejudices in a dialectic process leading to the emptiness of knowing, so I hope to illuminate my subjects, not by shedding light on them, but by casting shadows, tracing their forms in darkness, in silhouette relief, to know them only by inference, by what they are not. My tools? Arbitrarily constructed in language and consciously divided for the sake of an intellectual pursuit: my mind (reason and awareness), my body (instinct and corporeality), and my spirit (presence and desire).

Tuesday, November 30, 2010

I'm bleeding.

I’m bleeding.

Here, right in front of your eyes. Can you believe it? I guess that depends on what you believe. Do you believe a person can be honest onstage?

It begins as a faint ripple. Sometimes in the tightening muscles just above my left knee. At other times in a slight relaxing dip of my right shoulder. More often it’s a strangely subtle magnetic pull upwards of my left wrist, which causes my left hand and fingers to curl and twist inward, as if conserving energy, like the last imperceptible throes of a leaf in autumn.

The genetic anomaly that is the extra joint connecting my last lumbar to the tip of my pelvic bone then tugs my torso down and around to the right, the opposite direction of my curling hand, causing my whole body to suddenly appear like the moment when two strands of a double helix slowly join, point by point, in a heretofore unprecedented combination. This moment of conception, when the lazy spark that first moved me now begins a slow climb along the randomly jagged, razor’s edge that is my dancing body, wants a way out, to find itself in the mirror of your eyes. It wants to know what you came for, to witness the image that it can never live up to.

My left hand reaches out, attempting to break its own grasp on itself. Flailing, it fails and sharply darts back to my abdomen, still grasping, now frantically. In distant sympathy, my right hand methodically meanders towards my center as well, while my brooding, confused consciousness slowly manifests itself through a wrinkled brow, tightened lower lip, and eyes afraid of the surrounding darkness.

You have a question on your mind, one that came prepared with its own answers, ready to speak at a moment’s notice, to frame the image that you now struggle to outline in black and white, the image reflected in but unmatched by my body at present.

My body begins to collapse under its own weight, unsure of how or why to stand. My hands claw at the clothes hanging on my body, fragments constructed for anonymity, a blankness now soaked within by osmosis that I beg my body to comprehend. I am falling to the earth below while lifting, dragging myself desperately upward to an imagined heaven.

As my hands finally lift beyond the limits of my body held down and pulled to its eventual dissolution by gravity, my eyelids gradually lift as well.

I see you seeing me.

I believe.

Why?

Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)