Greasing the Wheels

This past weekend I attended a workshop at the Ho Sen Dojo of Antwerp called “Breakthrough with the Brush,” led by the zen sensei (teacher) of the brush and pen, Kaz. For the first two and a half days we learned the rudiments of Ancient Chinese calligraphy and some of the primary ideograms.

Without a doubt, this was one of the most intriguing three days I have experienced. As someone who is nearly 45, I believe that it is imperative to continue to try and learn new things in order to stay young at heart.

The danger of learning new things at a middle-aged stage of one's life is that one may become frustrated at feeling inadequate or perhaps even childlike. However, for me, this is the exact reason that I enjoy being in such situations. It has allowed me to see the world through new eyes, as a child, with the experience of an adult.

There is something to be said to be in the presence of a “master.” I have had the good fortune of having several “masters” in my life, with languages, with yoga, with swimming, and various other aspects of my life. In each instance, it is such a joy and honor to be part of that learning experience. To be in the presence of someone who has obtained such a level of expertise or craftsmanship is truly inspiring.

The most amazing aspect of the learning process this weekend was how Kaz would literally take us by the hand so that we could feel the Master’s hand at work. For each ideogram we did, we would go up to the table where Kaz was and then sit down with our brush in hand and he would put his hand around ours and guide us through the process after we had tried several attempts on our own. It was easily one of the most powerful learning experiences I have ever had.

In yoga and zen and other meditative and mindful processes, the breath is essential. For me, it was a deep connection to be able to move with Kaz in his breath as he would lean over behind us, taking the hand, moving the brush and the ideogram would “magically” appear. However, what was crucial in the process was to completely let go and let Kaz move your hand. It was not a collaboration, but a surrender to a “higher power” if you will. If you truly let go, and let Kaz, then the results were profound, it was as if a spirit moved through you.

As I wrote above, the title was “Breakthrough with the Brush,” and it was. I have been very stuck with writing on these blogs, as is apparent by the lacuna in the past few months. I have numerous pages of themes that I had jotted down and wanted to post on, but the actual sitting down process and writing had eluded me. I was stuck, profoundly stuck.

In one of my favorite books, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig speaks through the semi-autobiographical protagonist about the phenomenon of being stuck. Being stuck can be with a myriad of things, from staring at a blank page or computer screen to not being able to fix the carburetor on your motorcycle. Whatever it is, being stuck is a very unpleasant feeling. It can lead to feelings of hopelessness, despair, frustration, anger, and failure.

It is within those moments of being stuck that our mettle is tested. It is within those moments of being stuck that we can either go into the problem or flee from it. However, fleeing from it is merely temporary and usually compounds the problem. It is a band-aide for a bruise, in other words, it is not worth much. Taking a break from the problem is one thing, but fleeing it is another.

I think that I have fled the problem lately instead of taking a break. As such, I needed to get to the core of the problem, to go deep within in order to get un-stuck. This past weekend at the Antwerp zen center did just that.

The process of zazen is one of the pillars of zen thought. Zazen ultimately stems from dhyana, or deep meditation from the Sanskrit. Bodhidharma was purportedly the first Indian Buddhist to go to China, bringing with him the concept of dhyana. The story goes that Bodhidharma sat in deep meditation in front of a wall for nine years. This was the origin of what has become zazen, or wall meditation. It consists of sitting in the lotus position in front of a blank wall and engaging in “unfocused” meditation in order to clear the mind.

This may sound quite odd, but it is a very profound experience if you let go and give yourself over to the process, just as we had to give ourselves over to the process of letting Kaz essentially become our hand. Both in the early-morning zazen sessions and when Kaz took my hand, I completely let go of be-ing Robert and was moved to a fascinating new level of experience.

My wheels had been stuck for some time now. It has led to frustration, anxiety, feelings of failure and just plan “blah.” However, letting go, completely and truly letting go and literally falling into the wall in the deepest stages of my zazen and feeling Kaz breathe as he guided my hand, was the grease that has un-stuck those wheels. In the former, I was able to feel my ego dissolve into the bigger picture and with the latter, to actually “feel” what it was like to be a master myself.

It has allowed me to walk out of my door now and to see a brand-new Antwerp and consequently Belgium, one that I will be writing more about now again that the wheels are unstuck. The concept of zazen meditation is that when contemplating the mountain in deep meditation, it at one point is no longer a mountain, but then afterwards, is again a mountain.

I have gone through a rather profound transitional stage in the past few months, and perhaps now, I again see the Fries With Mayonnaise which were for a while no longer Fries With Mayonnaise, but which are again, and ones that I now see with a new awareness and mindfulness.

River Swells.

riverrun past Eve and Adam’s...

So “begins” Finnegans Wake, or at least the first five words that one encounters when opening the book.

Finnegans Wake, or simply, the Wake as it is most often referred to amongst Joyceans (namely those of us hopelessly afflicted by being aficionados of the Irish Bard...) is arguably the most important book in my life. Or, at least one of them, but its presence in my life is ominous, omnipresent, and omniscient.

Likewise, Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha shares the literary pole position in my heart for favorite books. Both could not be more different, yet more the same, so it goes. The former is considered the most difficult, confounded, self-absorbed, narcissistic exercise in futility of language, while the latter is often scoffed at being too simplistic, naïve, and claiming to be a quest for losing the self, becoming the anti-narcissistic book. So, what then do they have in common? All, and no-thing, but most importantly, they are both about a river.

Joyce’s postmodern linguistic Frankenstein is topically about the River Liffey that runs through Dublin, though simultaneously about every river on the planet, condensed into no less than 800 different rivers in the well-known chapter on ALP, the universal Mother. Siddhartha, on the other hand is a “tale from old India” with a focus on an unnamed river, which teaches Siddhartha the magical power of the sacred syllable “OM.”

When I was young-er (I still feel young, despite being 42), and dumb-er (still dumb, but just aware of it now), then I gave a talk in Zürich, Switzerland at a Joyce Symposium, my first of many to follow over the years, about the relationship between the Wake and Siddhartha, arguing that they were more or less the same book, just different.

Having given, what I thought was a dazzling presentation for a young whippersnapper, complete with one of my in/famous Fulton diagrams (if you know me, this needs no further explanation, though I will post a picture of the original when I can find it again for a visual aid), I put down my felt-tipped marker and waited for shouts of “bravissimo, bravissimo, encore, encore.”

Rather, silence. Crickets more like. Only, unlike Beethoven , I wasn’t deaf, it truly was silent.

Now, silence is good and bad, and with a presentation, there is a fine line between death and victory, a hair’s breadth.

The silence was broken by Fritz Senn, the über-Swiss Joycean, who is in/famous for making or breaking young Joyceans on the spot, the former usually being sprite, young good-looking female Joyceans, the latter often look more like me.

In his typical faux-Socratic self-deprecating irony , Mr. Senn threw out this chestnut, more or less, as such, saying, in his Swiss manner, “Now, it is my humble opinion, and I don’t claim to know anything about anything, but there is one thing that I have noticed about the Wake and that is that there is a uncanny ability for people to talk a great deal about the Wake, but actually not understand it at all.” That was the first and last comment of the presentation, and I sat down.

Well, some twenty years later, having worked much more extensively on Joyce and having read Siddhartha several more times (I taught myself German to read it in the original, so it must be important to me), I would give the exact same presentation, the echoes of Mr. Senn’s deprecation notwithstanding.

Which was: the two books are the same, and they are about a river, and in that river, everything happens all the Time at all Times and covers all Space and it is contained in the sacred syllable OM, though protracted to the tesseract of A-U-M-Silence (hence I tell myself the silence at the end of my presentation was actually fortuitous...always look on the bright side of life, “whistle, whistle/whistle, whistle”) as described in the Advaita Vedanta classic, the Mandukya Upansihad...

Sunday was a beautiful day in Antwerp. Though 99% of the denizens might disagree evinced by the dearth of human beings out that morning, I found it to be phenomenal, to use my daughter’s favorite adjective.

It was very cold, grey and foggy as Dickens’ London. I was tooling around my bike in the Waste Land of avenues and streets and ended up on the banks of the Schelde, the river that made Antwerp a viable metropolis for hundreds of years. Down towards the South, where it becomes more river and less commercial property, I sat by the river, and wept silently, though not out of sadness.

Sitting there for some indefinite amount of Time, watching the muddy swells roll plashing against the nearby hull of the good ship Helenic, listening to the plaintive, feline calls of the gulls, and feeling the cold, damp caress of fog on my cheek, I sat, and tears did in fact come to my eyes, though I did not even notice when, how, or why, yet, I wasn’t sad, not at all, but rather I just was, and I was indeed a lone a long the...