zenscribe

What is the shape of afternoon, in the garden, in spring?
Birdsong is the constant outline, coming from nowhere and everywhere, the sound of within.
The swallow's rhythmic coo is the call of the inside of the world -- the inside that has no outside.
Mind is shapely.

The master asks, "How do you stop a distant temple bell?"

A day of Zen practice in Paris
with the Wild Flower Zen Sangha and
Amy (Tu es cela) Hollowell Sensei

May 18 (Sunday)
9h30-17h30

Come one, come all. Beginners and experienced practitioners welcome.
Registration (required) and information: zenscribe@free.fr

Behind words, within, beauty lurks. To open the space around words, to free them, I try other tongues. One language limits more than two or three or more.
Tree is arbre is baum. Willow is saule is weide. Elm is orme is ulme. Birch is bouleau is birke. And yet the mot word wort is not the arbretreebaum.
New language facilitates detachment from the word-illusion: that a tree is a tree. Neither is it an arbretreebaum, although the word that is not a word offers an opening to "what" it truly is, to the what that cannot be said or named, to the beauty that brims, to "it," to "cela," to "es" or "das."
Beauty lurks. Words unveil it when they are themselves unveiled.

***
Master Shuzan held up his staff, and showing it to the assembled disciples said, "You monks, if you call this a staff, you are committed to the name. If you call it not-a-staff, you negate the fact. Tell me, you monks, what do you call it?
Mumonkan (The Gateless Gate), Case 43

On the corner
the building
is gone
with a figure
I can’t
remember
brushed
on its gray
shutter
an unavoidable
curve
an unrecognizable
spiral
I didn’t
know
every-
time was
a climax
looping
out of reach
toward
destruction.

"Don't try to figure out who you are," said the Zen master Tozan Ryokai. "If you try to figure out who you are, what you understand will be far away from you. You will have just an image of yourself."

And Eka, the student who would become the successor of the Zen master Bodhidharma, said it another way: "Because I know myself very well, it is difficult to say who I am."

Who is it then? Or what? And where?

Writing my "book," or reading, walking in the rain along a Belgian canal, riding the Métro on a holiday afternoon, letting the cat out and in, pulling on a black sock, sitting at the window, I am always seeking what without fail eludes me: the say of it.
I want the last word of the perfect tongue.
And yet I already know the words of that language can't be had or said.
I can only renounce. All I can do is find where I fail, where the word escapes and how.

Often in the afternoon, I turn from the Boulevard Raspail onto the Rue Emile Richard, which on each side is lined by parked cars and the stone walls of the Montparnasse cemetery. It is a straight street, and narrow, and on clear days it is bathed in the setting sun. Motor traffic runs only south, but pedestrians go both ways. All along, plane trees rise from the earth, each starting alone before joining together to hold the sky in perfect silence and dip as one with the still wind. Looking up I am stunned again by the familiar twists of strange branches. Theirs is always the bare truth.

Please forgive zenscribe's unforeseen absence in the blogosphere: The server was serving.

Which serves as a flagrant example of what is so often forgotten or overlooked: The constant disappearance of all I know.

There is the sudden hail of hail and then the sudden not-hail of hail, the no-more of hail. Now is the hail of non-hail, in dissipation.

The whole day of words is wordless. I rest.
To be quick, I must be quiet.
Phone calls are answered. A friend offers tea. The stairs lead up and down, but one by one, nowhere. Thus I go.

***

A monk asked Ummon, "What is speech that transcends the buddhas and goes beyond the patriarchs?"
Ummon replied, "Farm rice cake."
Shoyoroku (The Book of Serenity), Case 78

Yesterday in sitting I see it: My thoughts wander, and "I" follows, running in aimless circles along trails that just double back onto themselves. This is going nowhere, blindly, incessantly yearning to come and arrive. Then for a half-second "I" turns to find in a still clearing the silent face of death looking back, unmasked, calm, ageless. I meet it, eye to eye; we meet, eye to eye.

I see it: I must die, take leave of the thought frenzy leading only to thought frenzy leading only to thought frenzy... The subject (I) must die to become free of the objects that are keeping it alive as subject but are killing the irreducible essence of endless life in the limitless wild fields of being: les contrées sans balises.

I see it: I must die to live.

"La vulnérabilité des choses précieuses est belle parce que la vulnérabilité est une marque d'existence."
Simone Weil, La pesanteur et la grâce (Plon, 1947)
"The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a sign of existence."
Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (Routlegde Classics, 2002)

"Pour les Anciens comme pour les mystiques, ce champ qu'ils s'accordent à reconnaître comme celui de la divinité se situe au-delà du plaisir et du déplaisir, au-delà du bien comme du mal. Quiconque veut y pénétrer et s'y aventurer, doit consentir à s'y perdre."
Catherine Millot, La Vie Parfaite (Gallimard, 2006)

"The Ancients and the mystics alike situate the divine field beyond pleasure and displeasure, beyond good and evil. Whoever wishes to penetrate and venture there must consent to lose him/her self there."
Catherine Millot, The Perfect Life (Gallimard, 2006)


***

"Think neither good nor evil. At such a moment, what is the True Self of Monk Myo?"
The Sixth Patriarch of Zen, to Monk Myo (Mumonkan, Case 23)

If you knew there was nothing to get, would you keep grabbing?
If you open to the abundant nothing, what is there left to grab?

In the garden this morning, I am looking where I always look.
Blossoms stand ghostlike in abundant tree foliage. A dead leaf hangs captive in the frayed strands of a flag, flit-flapping. Undergrowth and overgrowth fill the day's holes with unknowing.
I watch.
New faces of color and light emerge.
The more I look, the less I know what I see. Or who.
"Je pourrais passer le reste de ma vie simplement à dessiner deux chaises et une table,'' said Giacometti. ("I could spend the rest of my life simply drawing two chairs and a table.")

How can it last,
this headline world
of shortcuts
carved daily in no
space and time?