Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky
Novelist, journalist, poet and Zen teacher from Glasgow, Scotland, now based in Portland, OR, USA
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Posts tagged "Zen"
They were words that came out of nothing, but they seemed to him somehow significant. He muttered them over again.
Kawabata, The Sound of the Mountain
Hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art if you are always yelling ‘Look at me’ like a three-year-old who has just shit in the sandbox.
Jim Harrison, the Dalva notebooks
When asked to recommend “Zen books,” my friend Deb Saint Sensei says, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or any other D.H. Lawrence book.”
I agree with her. I think people in the West have a tendency to get confused between Zen and an Asian fetish, and so to overlook the rich Zen tradition in Western literature. Here are a few other great Zen books:
Hombre by Elmore Leonard
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Savage Night by Jim Thompson
Cast in Doubt by Lynne Tillman
Dalva by Jim Harrison
The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown
Drive and Driven, by James Sallis
Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell
Fish, Soap and Bonds by Larry Fondation
Blues for Cannibals by Charles Bowden
The Burglar by David Goodis
I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond
Love and Rockets by the Hernandez brothers
Three to Kill by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Mystic River by Dennis Lehane
The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins
Also, the poetry of Burns (who wrote in both Scots and English), Stevenson, Wordsworth, T.S. Eliot, Philip Levine, Czeslaw Milosz, Norman MacCaig, Wendell Berry and James Tate.
It has been suggested that the way to solve this problem is to stop having Zen teachers, and for sanghas to be peer-run. I think this would be even worse, because the most deluded people tend to have the biggest egos, and such people quickly become de facto leaders. In teacherless sanghas, at best the blind lead the blind - and, more often, the blind lead the partially-sighted.
I suggest that the solution is not to have no teachers, but more teachers. I have always encouraged my Zen students to practice with other teachers, and I have some students who don’t identify me as their teacher but as one of their teachers. Those who practice at The Sitting Frog Zen Center may view me as their teacher, or Daishin Stephenson Sensei, or both of us, or neither of us, or one or both of us and also teachers in other sanghas. It is about each person’s own practice, their own awakening from the self-centered dream - their own enlightenment.
Almost two decades after his death, Melville House has published all five of his “Factory series” or “black novels” in the U.S. Mulholland Books’ website has a remembrance of Raymond by his friend Maxim Jakubowski, and the Los Angeles Times will soon publish a fine essay on Raymond’s life and work by Patrick Millikin.
I ordered his most infamous novel, I Was Dora Suarez, a grotesque masterpiece that is said to have made his editor vomit. I read it when it was first published, but hadn’t read it since then until now, and on re-reading it I was struck not by how shocking it is, but by how innocent, and deeply romantic, it is.
The protagonist of the Factory novels is an unnamed detective sergeant. In this book, he investigates the murder of Dora Suarez, a gentle, wounded prostitute who was dying of A.I.D.S. Along the way to finding her killer, he discovers that a London club has been deliberately infecting prostitutes with H.I.V. so that, having nothing to lose, they would have sex with the club’s wealthy, H.I.V.-infected customers.
The most shocking thing about this is that Raymond does not actually realize how evil people can be, as evidenced by his naive belief that rich people with H.I.V. would only have sex with other infected people, when of course the reality is that many of them would just fuck as usual without concern for whom they might infect. Raymond claimed this was based on fact, but it and other details of the brothel strike me as too folkloric. Also, I was in the U.K. and working as a journalist during this period, and am certain I would have heard about such a thing had it actually happened.
The detective - whose child was murdered by his wife - believes that he loves Dora Suarez, whom he never met while she was alive. Of course he is in love with someone he has imagined, based on his readings of her journal, but it is his romantic yearning for her that drives him to find her killer. The detective might be insane, but he is the sanest person in the world he inhabits.
Raymond’s brilliance seems to have been willed into existence. It is astounding that such a bad writer was able to write so many good books. At its best, his prose is clumsy. More often it is amateurish and packed with cliches. I estimate that at least a quarter of this novel consists of the detective’s threatening colleagues with violence and suspects with prison, repeated so many times that it could be mistaken for a parody by Stewart Home. It could make for a drinking game - take a sip every time the detective repeats a threat and you’ll be drunk long before you finish the novel. True, this is a realistic depiction of police behavior, but it makes for tedious reading.
But there is a sincerity to Raymond’s writing that makes its faults almost irrelevant. While Patrick Millikin was writing his article on Raymond, he remarked to me that he saw some Zen in the detective sergeant. I replied, “There’s a lot of Zen in Raymond’s work. No turning away from suffering, but finding compassion in the most horrific scenarios, and recognizing the unreliability of perspective.” The detective’s rage and compassion violently drag the reader through the meandering prose to a place where truth and beauty and love are not ideals but the only enduring actualities.
My cat Jimmy was at the vet’s yesterday. He had an ingrown claw that had become infected, so the vet fixed it, prescribed some antibiotics, and put a conical collar on him so he won’t touch the infected area with his mouth while it heals.
Although the collar causes him to bump into things, and is obviously uncomfortable, Jimmy doesn’t seem too bothered by it. The same is not true of my other cat, Maggie, Jimmy’s companion of 15 years.
She doesn’t recognize Jimmy.
With the collar, and the smell of other animals from the vet’s, he’s now unfamiliar to her. She hisses at him, swats at him if he tries to get close to her, and she can’t be consoled. She wanders around the house looking for Jimmy, not understanding that he’s the strange-looking, strange-smelling creature she just pushed away.
We humans are just as easily fooled by our perceptions, which are no more accurate than Maggie’s. When Jimmy’s collar comes off, and he grooms himself and replaces his scent, I expect Maggie will recognize her lifelong friend. Humans are more likely to hold on to beliefs and prejudices.
I have a chapbook by Los Angeles writer and artist Rebekah Weikel, called Recess. There is no text, and each of its 16 pages has the same grainy, black-and-white photograph.
To look at only one or two of the pages is to fail to see what is being shown. Start on the first page, look at the picture, see what it is, then go on to the second page, do the same, and continue to the end, and you may see something that is usually neither seen nor hidden.
Could you see it just by looking at one page for as long as it would take to look at all 16 pages? No, though if you do that you may see something else.
John Cage’s composition 4’33”, which consists entirely of silence, can only be heard when musicians are on stage, with their instruments, not playing.
Presenting nothing is not the same as not presenting anything.
From the beginning, in poems and songs, Cohen has been self-referential. In one poem, he repeats that the person he is addressing wanted “to cuckold Leonard Cohen,” then adds parenthetically that he likes that line because it has his name in it. The song “Famous Blue Raincoat” on his third album ends “sincerely, L. Cohen.” In “Field Commander Cohen,” on his fourth album, he accuses himself of betrayal and abandonment, and mocks his desire to be “nothing more than just some grateful, faithful woman’s favorite singing millionaire, the patron saint of envy and the grocer of despair, working for the Yankee dollar.”
Cohen may or may not have started out as a narcissist, but in those self-referential songs, which have the quality of liturgy, he transcends ego. As a religious poet, I suggest that he ranks alongside St. John of the Cross, Rumi and St. Francis.
His latest album, Old Ideas, which goes on sale today, may be his best. It is certainly his best since New Skin for the Old Ceremony (1974). He has made great albums since then, and all of them have been more dramatic than this quiet mix of meditation and desperation, but none as perfect as this. The title is accurate, but this album follows Ezra Pound’s maxim: Make it new.
The old self-loathing has become self-acceptance. In the first song, “Going Home,” he declares with humor and tenderness:
I love to speak with Leonard.
He’s a sportsman and a shepherd.
He’s a lazy bastard
living in a suit.
In “Show Me the Place,” he prays:
Show me the place where you want your slave to go.
Show me the place I’ve forgotten I don’t know.
Show me the place where my head is bent and low.
Show me the place where you want your slave to go.
Show me the place. Help me roll away the stone.
Show me the place. I can’t move this thing alone.
Show me the place where the word became a man.
Show me the place where the suffering began.
Cohen is an observant Jew and a Zen Buddhist monk, and, I think, for years now he has been the greatest living Zen poet. Dogen Zenji wrote:
To study the way of enlightenment is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.
This album, intimate and detached, personal and universal, with its exquisite melodies, heartfelt singing and enchanting poetry, is the work of an artist who has been actualized by myriad things.
the dog behind the fence
barks at the man walking by -
but his tail is wagging
