SMOOTH LANDING

Chewing on my holy wafers unslept, wondering how the last day will shove on into the next, I overhear Gary Snyder in the kitchen on a humble brag. He’s up at the podium getting chauvinistic about Dōgen, a favorite of mine too. He’s been translated, oh la la, into French! and the postmodernists don’t know what to do with him. Well, hurting a postmodernist’s feelings is a lot easier than that, Gary. But no need to spill milk over cold potatoes—I couldn’t be happier for any translation of the scrolls…!

Sutra-scrolls here, sutra-scrolls everywhere… That’s one thing I vividly remember from Dōgen, sent John the quote on it twice or once. Not too far from “il n’y a pas d’hors-texte,” really, when you think about it. Except that sutra implies dharma-giving. The teaching of the Buddha: written on the very Suchness of What Is. We all like a formula. Yes, everything informs of enlightenment, and you needn’t even know how to look. You needn’t look to find ‘it’ ‘there’, for it is no ‘it’. So looking isn’t as scary as you think—nor is writing—when it’s sutra-scrolls all the way down and up. Nope, not scary at all, no matter how it squirms. Call me postmodern, but when it squirms it squiggles too, it makes a scribble, supplements the scroll with a new scroll-origin, and that’s delish. Deconstruction is easy if you look, and not too far from Dōgen if you think about it. But would either advise us to think about it? Either way, the scroll’s quite easy to edit, though getting the bits to fit together is always, admittedly, hit or miss…

As for me, adding to the sutra scroll has become something like a meditative practice. For a while now I’ve been thinking about becoming a writer. You get all sorts of nutty things in your head when you start to think like that. I bet Gary knows about it, though I wouldn’t be surprised if he was shy about it (I am too). What’s it mean to have a name? It means that everyone’s a writer. Everyone’s out there adding to the scroll, yada yada. Dharma or adharma: the choice is like freedom and sin for the Christians, where “sin” really just means: it doesn’t exist. The radiant source of being is also the source of goodness. All being is (beings are) good insofar as they rest in that source (a resting which, for the Dzogchens of the highest order, is essentially automatic). It’s only because we deviate from that source that we ‘go wrong’. We write dumb words not worth saying or hearing or recalling; thus do we disrespect and sully the very value of what we love. Call it selfishness, narcissism, evil, sin, whatever: the point is that, in the last instance, it don’t exist. Sin isn’t. Love wins. Granted, there’s big faith enscrolled in that perspective: that in the long run goodness will balance everything out. That the catastrophes and injustices will find a kind of reconciliation or recompense in the finally redeemed state of things, which the Buddhists potentialize as Right Now. The Christians came up with a Last Judgment for it, but Camus-Kafka told us the Last Judgment is each day. Can’t you tell? I agree with everyone! yes, though I don’t always know why. Maybe I’m a Buddhist, maybe I’m a Christian, or maybe I’m an absurdist (a “circumstantialist” I once feigned in a Tsongkhapa phase). Or maybe it is just because I have a name. Yes, it’s probably that, I have a name. Why question it further?

Anyhow, like I was saying, by now adding to the sutra-scroll has become a meditative practice for me. For all intents and purposes, I’ve given up being a writer. When you’re a poet it’s a constant chase for the felicitous phrase. See how the words seduced me to rhyme chase and phrase? When you do that poet thing, stuff like that just happens without you meaning to. I admit, it’s a fun perk (not that it gets noticed), but who could be satisfied with rhyming chase and phrase? No, the bar for felicity, let alone excellence, is infinitely higher than what combinations of words could convince of. And the higher up you crack into the topmost echelons of satisfaction, a) the more worrisome it is to wonder if others will ever agree with your judgments, and b) you wake up the next day disappointed, on your own terms, with what you’ve said—even if, c) the silent evidence remains, sedimented and compounding as an absolute security in your soul. Those words though, they were never all they were cracked up to be, that’s for sure. Only goodness does that… Still, even now when I’m pretending like I’m done with the writer’s worries, it won’t be true, I’ll be at least half-lying, because right here (Right Now) I’m editing, contradicting myself in praising this unending scroll-practice. Even when a poet renounces poetry (not that that’s what I’m doing) they have to make it poetic! The clever folks trained like me call this dialectics. I wonder how much Dōgen and Gary think about dialectics. Probably plenty enough, if we’re being real. It’s exhausting to pay attention to it. Like Bataille said, “Hegel did not know to what extent he was right.” (Don’t even get me started on being a scholar…)

Sutras everywhere, sutras flowing, sutras galore, sutras unstoppable! Ring the bells that still can ring, there’s a crack in everything, the light will get in yada yada like Cohen. The things you remember-without-remembering when “there is no outside-text” is often quite remarkable. I’m thinking now of John again, Adam and Jim (though I never call him that), all Buddhist-connected, Snyder-connected, Shōbōgenzō-electricuted chaps, on-going chapters in my life. Just imagine all the sutras we’ve imagined and exchanged! I can’t deny it: sometimes I played the poet, the philosopher, the theologian, the critic. Not to mention the jerk and ass! What fun we have spinning our threads, these “silkworms of our own” (Mr. Derrida again, reminding us that, whatever we intend to reveal, we cannot avoid being untranslatable singular-universals). At times the threads have frayed; we’ve jabbed into each other; gotten too close and had to withdraw; pretended we were somebody else; were too other. But the song goes on all the same. The globe turns and friendship never dies. I’m sure this has something to do with Buddha-nature, Christification, that sort of thing. But it all seems clearer to just agree that we have names. Written in the Master Scroll, the Book of Life, perhaps? Now we’re really dreaming up the Edge of the Tangible…

Yes, this sort of writing has as much to do with sutra-scrolling (better than doom-scrolling, I tell you!) as it does with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (old steady, old faithful, which no one’s heard of). Inconsistency is not a factor when you release the mind to hiccup what it’s after. Factor and actor rhyme automatically. You needn’t set a precedent when sutra-language comes ready-made; just shove along the day, however it can, from morning into breakfast, take a breath and go back to Gary or hit snooze. It’s all autochthonous when you really get down to brass tacks. There’s a memory and it passes; the deconstructionists call it a trace of presence; the buddhists call it arising and setting ohne svabhava. But however you square down the pre- and post- of the modern, the heart will always look yonder for something else, the Wild in Gary’s case, metafictional awareness in John’s, for others there’s no word to abbreviate it but the heart searches for it all the time nonetheless. It is themselves-in-each-other, I bet. I know it to be true: they, we, are always there, inside the exact same scroll I’m in, and therefore everywhere. I admit it to myself, admit it to yours: there is no outside-scroll. We are all in it: yet another passage in the pages of an anarchivable love…

So, what shall we do to salute it? Another day of scrolling, up and down, back and forth, yes? Sutra-scrolling, hurrah? Let’s call it that! Let’s make a compact, let’s promise to always call it that. Enough of all the other gloomy lying attributes! Dōgen is no liar, neither is Gary or Jacques. Today is a day inside the scroll, a day beyond our wildest dreams, a day into which we are writing ourselves without having to. A day of gracefulness and peace, if we mean it to be. Such a day does not know how to end. It will never end. Today I rejoice in this, our one more day together, a day when we don’t have to stop meditating, don’t have to stop scrolling, this day when we’re alive and so are some of our friends—how plentifully the magic of the wish-fulfilling gem goes on!

—Dec 2, 2024/Jan 5, 2025