Changing the Subject

by Stephen-Paul Martin

  Then a flash, a thunderclap. The rain abruptly stops. Something hovering over the canyon vanishes in the gathering light. I don’t know what it was but something is making me say what it was: a globe of rain that came from the other side of time and space, collecting billions of animals, pairs of every species that the human race hasn’t killed off yet, reducing them to microscopic versions of themselves, taking them all to a place that’s free of predatory bipeds, restoring them to their normal size, commanding them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, except of course that it’s not the earth, and there won’t be any dominant species turning it into the earth.

  Suddenly the earth feels terribly small, terribly empty. I start to feel abandoned, but my dogs haven’t left me behind. They’re waking up, lifting their heads from my lap and sniffing the sunlight. The canyon is full of water almost up to the mouth of the cave, more than a hundred feet above the path where we take our walks. Looking south I see that the city is gone, completely submerged. There’s nothing but surging water all the way to the place where the sky comes down.

  THE HEALTH OF THE NATION

  Ten months ago, at a Zen retreat, I stared at a blank wall for seven days. The technical term for this strange behavior was meditation, and the ultimate goal was to break down the boundaries that separated me from the underlying unity of all things. But the lotus position was painful, and the pain kept getting worse. I felt no special connection to the universe, no underlying unity, except in the suffering I shared with the other people in the meditation hall. We sat motionless for hours, wishing we could get up and shake the tension out of our bodies, wondering why we were sitting there in a silence that only emphasized how banal and disturbing most of our thoughts and feelings were.

  Actually, I knew why I was there. The reason had been bluntly summed up in the headline of a British newspaper in response to the November 2004 Presidential election: HOW CAN 59,054,087 PEOPLE BE SO STUPID? Like millions of non-conservative Americans, I was in shock in the weeks following the election, overwhelmed with disgust, embarrassed that I lived in such an aggressively mindless nation. At the same time, I didn’t like the way I was wallowing in rage and contempt, hatching violent fantasies about punishing those who voted for Bush. I told myself that a more humane approach would be to view their ignorance with compassion. But was there room for compassion with a monster like Bush in the White House? Wasn’t the nation badly in need of re-education camps? Shouldn’t progressive people have been taking definite steps to secede from the union, or to move to a more intelligent part of the world? Angry questions like these wouldn’t leave me alone, yet I wasn’t prepared to do anything about them, and the impotence of my rage was getting painful. I needed something to clear my thinking. Though I’d been avoiding Zen for more than a year, I felt it was time to get back to the meditation cushion, so I called the teacher I’d been working with for the past five years and asked him to make a place for me in the Zen center’s next retreat.

  The term retreat is misleading. The Japanese word sesshin is closer to what really happens. I’m not sure what it literally means, but it refers to an induced crisis, a deliberate and concentrated assault on a person’s normal state of awareness, a process similar in function to the initiation rituals shamans undergo in preparing themselves to become magicians and healers. I’d always been intimidated by the physical demands of sitting in the lotus position for hours on end. Even during my daily thirty-minute meditation sessions, I was in pain. But my teacher repeatedly insisted that true Zen progress could only be made in sesshin, and many Zen writers had echoed this opinion, so I was glad that I was finally ready to put myself to the test. I reminded myself that in the past I’d always learned something valuable from challenging situations. But as the days passed and I sat in pain on my cushion watching my thoughts keep cycling through the same frustrating patterns, I had to wonder if I hadn’t been right in keeping Zen at a distance.

  Still, the experience wasn’t pointless. The silence I maintained throughout the sesshin gave me a new understanding of spoken communication. More than ever before, I saw how much mental energy is caught up in the process of talking, in our ongoing need to be prepared for whatever conversations come our way. As silence accumulated in my body over the seven days of the retreat, I understood why so many mystics become hermits, leaving the pressures of verbal interaction behind, releasing themselves from the need to perform in language, no longer trapped in the distorted mirrors people unavoidably hold up to each other. Since it was only my first retreat, I was still firmly trapped in my own distorted mirrors. Nor was I about to become a hermit. But I left the meditation hall with a strong desire to remain silent. So I got in my car and drove forty miles to the mountains east of San Diego, where after a strenuous climb I reached one of my favorite spots in the world, the summit of Garnet Peak.

  I sat on a folded blanket resting my back on a smooth rock. North and south there were mountains as far as I could see. Behind me the sun was going down. At my feet was a cliff, a sheer drop of six thousand feet, looking out on a desert that ran east for thirty miles to a shallow inland sea, backdropped by another range of mountains. An unassuming silence rose from the desert into my body. Perhaps because of the hours I’d spent on my meditation cushion, the words that normally would have been narrating the passage of time faded into the twilight, and I was left with no thoughts or feelings about myself or anything else, no response to the vanishing landscape or the stars coming out above the mountains. At some point I began to get cold, so I wrapped myself in my blanket. I remember how nice it felt to get warm. Then the eastern sky began paling ever so slightly, the vague silhouettes of the mountains became more distinct, and I knew that the sun would soon be coming up. Ten hours had passed in what seemed like no time at all.

  Had I gone to sleep? Certainly that was the most obvious explanation. But I didn’t feel drowsy, had no sense of having opened my eyes to wake up. Besides, I find it impossible to sleep outside, even under the most pleasant conditions. Perhaps I’d been in a trance of some kind, an altered state induced by the retreat. If so, there was nothing hypnotic or ecstatic about it. The meditation technique I’d been practicing was not designed to put the mind in a trance. For the next few days I played with explanations. But finally I had to accept that I didn’t know where the missing hours had gone. I’d just been sitting there with no verbal awareness, no words to give time and space the shape I’d known since the day I was born.

  When I told my Zen teacher about it a week later, I was disappointed with his response. He offered no explanation. Instead he nodded slightly and told me to keep meditating each morning and attending retreats whenever I could. I’d been hoping he would tell me that I’d taken a crucial step in my Zen practice, that I’d had a rare glimpse of the unconditioned reality that exists outside the verbal cage of perception. But even before I saw my teacher, I was skeptical of my desire to make what happened on the mountain seem more significant than it really was. If anything, my years of practicing Zen had taught me to question the imagery of visionary experience, distancing myself not just from mainstream religious teachings, but also from those mystical and esoteric traditions that supposedly offer a more authentic approach to the unknowable.

  But something told me that those ten missing hours were important, that I shouldn’t just dismiss them. I wanted to believe that if I could recover that gap in time, approach it without reducing it to conventional description, I might be making a serious contribution to a new kind of mystical practice, something that had nothing to do with religious doctrines of any kind. I had no intention of developing my own system of belief. I had long since outgrown the arrogant assumption that the universe can be systematically understood. In fact, I was convinced that far more harm than good had come from religious leaders who thought they knew what others ought to be thinking and doing. What appealed to me about Zen was its technique of destabilizing human arrogance, humbling its practitioners by leading them into radical uncer
tainty, relentlessly making them see that any assumption they might make about anything, no matter how logical or factual it seemed, was nothing more than a verbal house of cards.

  But my own verbal house of cards collapsed when I got angry at my teacher’s reaction. I hated the smug little smile that accompanied what he said. I knew he was only doing his job, that a Zen teacher needs to keep forcing people to question their thoughts and perceptions, especially when they show signs of becoming attached to what they believe. But I thought his dismissal was too formulaic, too automatic, that he should have explored what I said before he told me to forget it. Though at the time I tried to set my irritation aside, I found it increasingly difficult to meditate at the Zen center and attend the teacher’s dharma talks.

  Instead, I began taking long walks through a part of San Diego I didn’t normally visit, a neighborhood that was mostly abandoned brick factories and warehouses, with a few huge old houses on the verge of collapsing. On one of these walks, I bumped into someone standing on a corner. I quickly apologized, but before I could take another step I got the distinct impression that I would see him two more times, the first time by choice and the second time without knowing it. He was otherwise non-descript. He might have been over a hundred years old and might have been only twenty. He nodded at the book in my hand, Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, a Zen classic that obliquely suggests that walking aimlessly can become a kind of meditative practice. He said he knew Basho’s book backwards and forwards, especially backwards. I started to laugh, but he wasn’t smiling. I didn’t want to laugh at someone trying to be serious, so I put a serious look on my face. But I knew he knew I was faking it, so I decided I’d better express my true feelings, and I was just about to laugh, when I realized that laughter was no longer the authentic response. The lack of authentic response erased the previous ten seconds, and I felt like a film running backwards, moving back to the initial impulse to laugh, only this time I heard him say that he knew Basho’s book backwards and forwards, but he stopped without saying especially backwards, which cancelled the laughter again.

  I didn’t want to keep standing there looking baffled, so I mentioned my experience on the mountain. He nodded eagerly, then looked at his watch and said he was late for work. I was turning to walk away when he asked me to come to his house the next day to talk further, pointing to a dirty white frame house wedged between brick factories at the end of the street. I told him nothing could keep me away.

  But something almost did. Though I’d seen his house, written down his address, and walked up and down the street where he lived many times in the past few weeks, I lost my way, convinced that all the streets in the neighborhood looked alike. I’d never had this impression before. In fact, the main reason I liked walking there was that it was one of the few areas in San Diego where each street had its own character. Nonetheless, I got so lost that I was about to give up and go home, cursing myself for not having gotten his phone number. Then suddenly I was in front of his house, and he was standing in the doorway smiling, assuring me that everyone who came to his house got lost.

  The front door opened into a dark wood corridor about fifty feet long. My shoes were pleased that the floor was polished wood. At the end of this corridor, we turned right, moving down another dark wood corridor, this one filled with identical black-and-white photographs of a crescent moon above a snow-capped mountain. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one slanting up then slanting down then slanting side to side. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one filled with whispered conversations about the ocean floor. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one filled with the sound of people coughing, suddenly replaced by the sound of a pile of coins dropped on a glass countertop. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one slightly shorter than the others, leading me toward a burst of barely suppressed idiotic laughter, as if I’d suddenly seen myself in a microscopic future, in corridors built by people the size of amoebas. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one half as long as the one before it, with skylights on the floor and sky-blue carpeting on the ceiling. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one slightly shorter than the one before it, and I felt my mouth opening as if I were going to speak, but instead I shortened my stride, compensating for the distance we’d been losing. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one half as long as the one before it—so short, in fact, that it appeared to be twice as wide as the previous corridor, making it seem that the passage of time was on both sides of us, instead of behind and in front of us. At the end of this corridor, we turned right again, moving down yet another dark wood corridor, this one leading us back to the open front door.

  He said: I’ve had a wonderful time. When can you come again?

  I said: I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve been here less than five minutes.

  He said: Actually, you’ve been here since noon—or maybe 12:15, since you were delayed. And now it’s almost time for dinner.

  I looked at him in disbelief and said: I might have been confused when I got here, but I wasn’t that confused. I know I’ve been here five minutes at the most.

  He smiled: Everyone gets that impression. But look at the sky if you don’t believe it’s almost time for dinner.

  The sun was going down behind the factory smokestacks, and the late March sky was darkening. Clearly, it was almost time for dinner. I apologized and tried to look sheepish, but he just laughed and repeated that all his visitors left with the impression of having been there only five minutes.

  I said: So how do you account for that? How do you—

  He said: When can you come again?

  I felt strange. But I didn’t want things to get even stranger, so I smiled and offered to come the following Friday.

  He said: That’s what I thought you’d say. I’m looking forward to it.

  He went inside and closed the door.

  At first I tried to make light of what had just happened, telling myself that my sense of time had somehow become distorted. I got a cheap digital watch at the corner drugstore. But as I reviewed the experience, I became convinced that I was in the grip of something more ominous than temporal dislocation, that my sanity wouldn’t be safe unless I went back to doing Zen in a supervised way.

  My teacher was pleased when I returned. But when I described my recent encounter, he simply asked me what I made of it. I asked him what he made of it. He asked me why I cared more about what he made of it than what I made of it. I told him that I assumed his interpretations carried more Zen authority than mine. He said that Zen authority was a contradiction in terms. He gave me a very faint smile that told me the interview was over. Again, it was all I could do to contain my annoyance.

  I wanted to slam the door as I left, violating what felt at the time like a pseudo-sacred environment. But I almost never express anger in such outwardly hostile ways, and the rage I repressed became a series of imagined slamming doors that led me to wander. Soon I found myself in a canyon filled with tall trees and abundant vegetation, a rare environment for San Diego. I was thinking about recent events in Washington, how thrilled I’d been a few days before when BITE, a group of activist poets, tried to assassinate President Bush. There was something absurd about writers trying to manage the tactical complexities of an assassination, but there was also something appropriate about it, since Bush, by his very presence, represented the death of the progressive imagination. Even though their plan had backfired and all of them were now in jail, their efforts had inspired billions of people all over the world.

  BITE had also written an essay, emailing it to major newspapers across the country jus
t a few minutes before their attempt to save the nation. The following day, right beside many front page accounts of the President’s narrow escape from death, BITE’s essay appeared in full, insisting quite convincingly that no U.S. President had ever been more deserving of assassination, claiming that their actions should not be classified as murder but as justifiable homicide. The time to bark was past; it was time to BITE, a name that was not an acronym but a verb. Predictably, millions of Americans were enraged. Talk of terrorist violence filled the airwaves. But a friend of mine who knew the editors of several radical magazines told me they were planning to publish lengthy reviews of BITE’s essay, calling it a marvelous piece of argumentation, a text whose authenticity was obvious in every word, especially since in this case actions had spoken much louder than words.

  But Bush was still President, and Republicans still had all the power. Something else had to be done. The BITE poets had called for others to follow in their footsteps, in the likely event that their plan failed. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person who felt called upon to take action. My plans would have gone beyond the removal of President Bush, also targeting Cheney, Rumsfeld, and top-ranking Republican congressmen. But I knew I lacked the courage to become the next assassin. Though I had many good qualities, the ability to take decisive actions under pressure wasn’t one of them.

  Had I told my Zen teacher what I was thinking, he would have praised me for being unable to construct a plan and pull the trigger, insisting that violence was never the way, that it always just led to more violence and never solved anything. I would have said that extreme conditions call for extreme measures. Killing abusive Republican leaders was not just a sacred action but a sacred responsibility. He would have looked down, shaken his head slightly, looked up at me with a twinkle in his eyes and sent me away with that condescending smile.