Because superficial irony (nurtured by pseudo-science, inflated by cybernetics) casts a shadow on our so-called postmodern era, it colours any practice or thought that might be genuinely other. This is how Buddhism is apprehended: not as daring existential quest or a rigorous asking of questions to which there cannot be an answer, not as radical appreciation of impermanence, but instead as path towards happiness, catechistic absorption in exotic pseudo-answers…Buddhism as the exotic branch of the Disney store.
Impermanence reveals the tragic nature of existence. What if impermanence itself is liberation? This is the radical contribution of Zen: loss, mourning, separation felt as liberation. I am no longer the person who woke up yesterday morning. Each thing slips away and every moment I breathe a new and free existence. I do not ‘truly’ exist; hence I am free to create myself, provided I do not know who I might become. To this freedom and non-attachment we arrive through an excess of love. The pseudo-radicalism of those who use Zen to exhibit an iconoclastic infantilism has precious little to do with the teachings of Zen, a teaching that is radical because in love with the world, radical because it is not religion but art, a deeply affirmative art.
This life is a dewdrop, and yet…
We arrive at the fierce weightlessness of Zen having miraculously survived Saint Sebastian’s martyrdom. Not before. Zen ordination is being ordained to a homeless existence. Sky above my head, naked earth at my feet. Only on the surface such initiation resembles being thrown into Heidegger’s icy sidereal ‘being’. Heidegger’s neutral being is an abstraction, an anti-hyperbole, a professorial equation.
Grafted into the elemental kernel through hearth and dwelling: growing up in their proximity we sigh with pleasure or gloom. Before being able to dance, one learns how to walk.
* * *
By absorbing an event, pleasant or unpleasant, the event becomes experience. By declaring that I have desired such experience, I embrace it fully. Resentment, sorrow, pain and nostalgia become the sap that spurs me towards the future. I am grateful to the nameless melancholy that greets me unexpectedly on Monday mornings in autumn, grateful to the sense of displacement and the farewell whose trail is a faint song. I am grateful to this sadness because now I can give it a liquid face and a name: distant love, impossible love.
The dawn would kill me if it didn’t live already within my heart. I am its accomplice and I invite the visible. I wait with reverence for light’s nimble steps. I await the vision of an ancient song, dawn. Part of me rebels, vacillating in Mnemosyne’s damp dark wood of reverie.
Light filters through subdued, irresistible. A hushed lament of joy.
The promise is uncertain, unreliable. Even the idea of a ray of light dissolves the shadow…
In the darkest hour the steps of dawn.
The last fragment of the mosaic is complete: I am fate’s accomplice. Grateful to each lover who broke my heart, for a broken heart is an open heart, open to the fragile beauty of the world.
Thank you for disappearing over the horizon.
In the darkest hour the raven is preparing to fly away – away from my room and gone for good. Never more? Never more. That’s good. I am fate’s accomplice. I am fate.
The train left and the station turned black & white. Eurydice wanders happily in the realm of the shadows.
The cage is empty and the baby falcon has become an eagle.
Morning’s first light, sounds from the drowsy street.
I open the curtains to the day and I smile in the midst of tears at the miracle: the autumn rain has turned to snow.
“There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbours will say,” Cyril Connolly wrote, and we believe he was right.
Perfect Edge seeks books that take on the crippling fear of other people, the question of what’s correct and normal, of how life works, of what art is.
Our authors disagree with each other; their styles vary as widely as their concerns. What matters is the will to create books that won’t be easy to assimilate. We take risks, not for the sake of risk-taking, but for the things that might come out of it.
Speed of Angels Page 8