The Ten Thousand Things
1. The Ten Thousand Things
That the self advances and confirms the ten thousand things, is called delusion;
That the ten thousand things advance and confirm the self, is called enlightenment.
Dōgen
The central question for me, always — am I going forth? Am I staying open to whatever the ten thousand things are bringing me? Or am I smearing my own expectations, narratives, on what’s in front of me?
I touched on this a bit in the last newsletter, about tourism. About the kind of tourists who go forth to experience the thing they expect to experience. Who seem to be impervious to surprise. To the things of the world arising toward them.
Graduate school was, overall, not a good experience for me, but what was good, was getting to hang out with Gary Snyder, and the course he taught at UC Davis on Zen in Ancient Chinese and Japanese poetry. It was one of those seminars where half the participants are other professors. Gary basically came in once a week, gave us a dharma talk, and then we looked at Classical Chinese and Japanese poems. It was worth every awful thing I went through in 8 years. That class alone.
This is where I encountered Dōgen, as well as had a chance to really examine, with a bunch of very smart people, what an art might look like that leaves enough space between the thing itself and the grabby human self, for us to experience that gap, that essential gap we need in order to see, once again, that the grabby human self is not the world. The world is the world.
I’ve lived with this Dōgen quote above my desk, written on an index card, for so long that to me it seems self-evident, but perhaps we should take a moment to put Dōgen into context. “The 10,000 things” is a Taoist concept that is expressed through the idea of tzu-jan, self + thus, self-so, self-arising. As David Hinton notes in his introduction to The Wilds of Poetry:
… tzu-jan is meant to describe the ten thousand things emerging spontaneously from the generative source, each according to it’s own nature, independent and self-sufficient, then eventually dying and returning to that source, only to reappear transformed into other self-generating forms. That source is Tao…
This is why the Tao is often represented by water. We’re all used to water changing forms, from stream to lake to ice to vapor to clouds to rain to stream again. But we also understand that all these forms are expressions of water nature.
Taoism and Zen are intertwined, especially in their emphasis on meditation practice where we discover, by sitting, that we are not our thoughts and feelings. Our thoughts and feelings are separate from us, arising like water vapor. On the cushion we watch them appear and go, appear again and go, appear once more and go.
If we sit long enough, we may achieve moments of “empty mind” where we are able to watch this happen, without grasping at the notion that those thoughts, those feelings, those bits of self floating past, are in some fundamental way us.
I have a very lax sitting practice, but nonetheless, it has informed my adult worldview. My creative life started on the West Coast, at UC Davis, at Olympic Valley, among a group of writers that includes Gary Snyder but also Jane Hirshfield, Robert Hass, Alan Williamson, Brenda Hillman. Zen was very much in the air, as a philosophical and aesthetic practice.
When I got to the University of Utah for my PhD, I was shocked by Ivy League professors who sniffed about Snyder: Well he’s an interesting environmentalist but he’s not much of a poet. Or the Americanist who dismissed me when I tried to discuss Thoreau’s interest in Buddhism. The hippie stuff doesn’t interest me, he said.
2. Robert Ryman
One reason I’m still thinking about those Robert Ryman paintings, is the way they left space around themselves. From what I’ve read, Ryman was not a Zen guy, but he was a Jazz guy. He started as a Jazz musician. A horn player. Jazz is very Ten Thousand Things. Jazz is about the music that arises, the moment as it happens, the next moment that comes from that moment. Improvisational. Collaborative. Invested in the kind of estrangement that causes us to hear the music with fresh ears.
The Ryman paintings felt very Ten Thousand Things to me. They felt like paintings that had arisen out of the Tao, paintings that expressed their painting-nature, and then Ryman moved on. A lot has been written about Ryman and process, and how he is not a “process painter.” From what I’ve read, Ryman liked to set himself an experiment, and then see what happened. What I find most exciting, aside from the absolute un-reproducibility of his work, is the way he insisted that “the painting is the paint.” Insisted that the painting is not a representation of something else, but is, and is only, itself.
The works are nearly impossible to talk about. In one of the collections of essays I ordered when I got home, Yves-Alain Bois examines this problematic. The essay is called “Ryman’s Tact,” and in it, Bois wonders:
Why is it so difficult then, for me and others, to approach [Robert Ryman’s] work and express our excitement about it? … It’s not as if the historical development of the process itself isn’t of primary importance, or that Ryman’s inventiveness doesn’t express itself in the making; it should be clear that in this sense he drives himself to experiment, and the story of these experiments never fails to interest me. Yet … the narrative of process establishes a primary meaning, an ultimate, originating referent that cuts off the interpretive chain. … Since this element of process is not insignificant, why isn’t it expressed? Because process doesn’t interest Ryman as such. … with respect to modernism, Ryman (perhaps without realizing it) works with a lethal delicacy; that simply reflexive discourse cannot be carried on with regard to his works; that in forcing reflexivity to reflect on itself he has moreover — quite simply — indicated the limits of our critical discourse …
They are nearly impossible to talk about because they escape our discursive frameworks. They simply are.
This is what they confront us with, their existence, their marvelous existence.
3. Lavinia Greenlaw
As I was mulling these issues over during the past couple of weeks, I heard a podcast interview with the poet and essayist Lavinia Greenlaw. She speaks in the interview about her interest in “the empty metaphor.” She describes this in visual terms, she’s a very visual writer, in part because she’s had terrible eyesight for much of her life.
…there’s that moment, the moment when you reach the limits of your own knowledge and there’s a split second before the brain rushes in and explains something to you, when you see something as if you’ve never seen it before.”
The Ten Thousand Things arise, and stun you into silence, into witlessness.
I’ve only just started her new book, The Vast Extent: On Seeing and Not Seeing Further, but what struck me in the interview was how, like Daisy Hildyard in The Second Body, and Rebecca May Johnson in Small Fires, the move they each make when confronted with this moment of unknowing, this moment when the western dualisms we’ve all been trained to think of as real fall away — is to go in search of “scientific experts”. They dive back into dualistic thinking instead of looking to see if perhaps there are other epistemologies that might encompass these encounters with the empty metaphor.
As an American, I can’t help wondering if this is something about how the UK university systems work. I find it puzzling, and frustrating. It doesn’t, however, diminish my joy in these writers, my joy in finally not feeling so alone in my obsessions, in wanting to write about these moments where the world, the world of the Ten Thousand Things arises, and stuns us into realizing that the world is the world. The paint is the paint. The metaphor is empty.
And that this is good.
4. Representation
I think about these issues a lot these days because I’m working away at my memoir-ish project. I say “memoir-ish” because it’s becoming less linear all the time. It’s becoming the thing I have wanted it to be, and for the first time in decades it feels like I have company out here, in the hinterlands with these other writers, most of them women, who are trying to write in a way that leaves space for the absolute mystery that is the Ten Thousand Things arising.
For years I’ve been fighting with a marginal comment a well-meaning early reader wrote. I had, I think I still have, a section where I stated that it was impossible to get my brother Patrick on the page, and in that early version, this well-meaning reader wrote in the margin: why?
Why?
Because he’s not a character. Because I hate the way that narrative in particular, whether fiction or nonfiction, wants to capture a representation of a person and trap them in an interpretive framework that will render them legible and predictable for the reader.
My brother was not a character. He was a living human being, who like all our loved ones, had an interiority that was largely inaccessible to me. And that died with him.
One reason this book has taken me decades is that it’s taken a very long time to find a process, a method, a way of writing that doesn’t imply some sort of triumph over adversity. That doesn’t wrap it all up, That doesn’t demonstrate how it’s all right, how I’m over it.
One reason this book has taken me decades is that it took a very long time to figure out some strategies for leaving gaps, for leaving places where perhaps the mind doesn’t know what it’s up against.
Grief is a great one for doing that to a person. I’m still not over the shock of it. Mike Fitzpatrick, who is himself dead now, that big kind man walking through my front gate, reaching out a thick hand to steady my shoulder as he told me why Patrick hadn’t been returning my phone call all day.
There’s an empty metaphor for you. There’s a thing your brain will never catch up to.
5. What you know. What you don’t know. What you don’t let yourself know.
(A koan that Alexander Chee set for us all during a workshop several years back. The task of writing.)
A large part of my joy at the Ryman paintings, is that they refuse to explain themselves. You can’t photograph them. You can’t explain them.
He got away with it somehow. He got away with the painting is the paint.
I went to Paris to see the Rothko show, which was astonishing. I’ve read comments and reviews, oddly, often by men, who found it overwhelming, who didn’t like all the paintings there together, who felt it was too much and they couldn’t really see the paintings because there were too many of them, all in one place, vibrating off one another.
That was what I loved about it. It was very much too much.
The Rothko exhibition was what I expected. Amazing. Worth travelling all that way for. Something we’ll never see again in our lifetime.
The Ryman was the surprise. The Ryman was the thing I was hoping for, the thing I didn’t know, the thing I didn’t know I needed to know.
The empty metaphor. The thing itself. Arising.
Archives
Calendar
M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 |
15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 |
22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27 | 28 |
29 | 30 |
Leave a Reply