Showing posts with label Zen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Zen. Show all posts
Thursday, 14 May 2015
Don't go back to sleep!
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don't go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want
Don't go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth
across the doorsill where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don't go back to sleep!
Jalal ad Din Muhammad Rumi (1207-1273)
From The Essentail Rumi, p. 16. Translated by Coleman Barks
* *
Life and death are of supreme importance.
Time swiftly passes by and opportunity is lost.
Each of us should strive to awaken.
AWAKEN!
Take heed!
Do not squander your time!
Dogen Zenji (1200-1253)
Evening Gatha
* *
Dogen and Rumi were contemporaries.
One in Japan, one in Persia.
How amazing!
Tuesday, 2 August 2011
Bowing to Basho
Reading a Korean novel, apparently a modern classic, very interesting.
On the surface only one voice, that of the narrator who is also the central character. After the death of a woman he loved, he reads the diary she left for him; the novel alternates between his voice and hers - hers is clearly different and we are aware of him reading in parallel to ourselves and how deeply some of the things she writes affect him. It is very good.
The title is The Ancient Garden: a love story, by Hwang Sok-Yong (Picador 2009), translated by Jay Oh. More and more aware of translations and translators, my main gripe with Jay is that he/she uses the American term 'dirt' which betrays the true meaning - the lovely word 'earth' would be so much better.
I am keeping track of the characters by listing them in the prelims, as well as the names of places. It is difficult to remember names that are so different that one can't even tell if they are male or female, and has no idea what they sound like.
The book speaks to me. In particular, on p. 195, describing an atmosphere and a way of paying attention:
On the surface only one voice, that of the narrator who is also the central character. After the death of a woman he loved, he reads the diary she left for him; the novel alternates between his voice and hers - hers is clearly different and we are aware of him reading in parallel to ourselves and how deeply some of the things she writes affect him. It is very good.
The title is The Ancient Garden: a love story, by Hwang Sok-Yong (Picador 2009), translated by Jay Oh. More and more aware of translations and translators, my main gripe with Jay is that he/she uses the American term 'dirt' which betrays the true meaning - the lovely word 'earth' would be so much better.
I am keeping track of the characters by listing them in the prelims, as well as the names of places. It is difficult to remember names that are so different that one can't even tell if they are male or female, and has no idea what they sound like.
The book speaks to me. In particular, on p. 195, describing an atmosphere and a way of paying attention:
Even in silence when [...] the air is not moving, it is soon altered by a grasshopper or a locust jumping out of the grass forest and hopping over the path. Or a frog jumping into water.A bow to dear old Basho.
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
Black lake
Today is uninterrupted, I can write. Am listing future phone calls and letters as I think of them. P guards the gate.
Yesterday evening, poetry reading with my Whitireia classmates at L's, a nice evening. We may keep in touch after the course is over.
The poem I read is called - for the time being - Away from here. Here is the last bit:
I would like to be that lake now -
black, silent, reflecting cloud, rock and snow,
the ruffle of a small sharp breeze, and then still
again. No fish, no bird, no other being.
Is it an ode to Death - frozen stillness except for the breeze? ...no fish, no bird... - so much non-life. Except for ...no other being... someone is there, maybe me? maybe not? The breath of air, wairua, ruffles the water.
Ruach noshevet al pnei ha mayim... A wind breathes on the face of the water, says the Israeli poet Rachel (my translation). Ruach can mean both wind and spirit, I realise. More and more biblical. Checking Genesis 1:2, and the words ruach and al pnei ha mayim are there - but God's spirit (ruach elohim) 'hovers' over the water, merachefet, not noshevet.
Or is this poem about longing to be a Zen person in a black robe, anchored on a black cushion? Noshevet has for me the connotation, the sound, of the passive tense of Yashav, he sat. In the feminine - she was sat.
~~~~
Watched the Leonard Cohen documentary I'm your man and the music is in my head all the time, wake up with it, go to sleep with it. I'm dying to sing that song- If it be your will. Found Anthony singing it on You tube, better than LC himself - took down most of the words. Seeing/hearing the MacGarrigle sisters in the film - a flashback. We must be the same age.
I set the timer for eight minutes and it rang - ages ago.
Yesterday evening, poetry reading with my Whitireia classmates at L's, a nice evening. We may keep in touch after the course is over.
The poem I read is called - for the time being - Away from here. Here is the last bit:
I would like to be that lake now -
black, silent, reflecting cloud, rock and snow,
the ruffle of a small sharp breeze, and then still
again. No fish, no bird, no other being.
Is it an ode to Death - frozen stillness except for the breeze? ...no fish, no bird... - so much non-life. Except for ...no other being... someone is there, maybe me? maybe not? The breath of air, wairua, ruffles the water.
Ruach noshevet al pnei ha mayim... A wind breathes on the face of the water, says the Israeli poet Rachel (my translation). Ruach can mean both wind and spirit, I realise. More and more biblical. Checking Genesis 1:2, and the words ruach and al pnei ha mayim are there - but God's spirit (ruach elohim) 'hovers' over the water, merachefet, not noshevet.
Or is this poem about longing to be a Zen person in a black robe, anchored on a black cushion? Noshevet has for me the connotation, the sound, of the passive tense of Yashav, he sat. In the feminine - she was sat.
~~~~
Watched the Leonard Cohen documentary I'm your man and the music is in my head all the time, wake up with it, go to sleep with it. I'm dying to sing that song- If it be your will. Found Anthony singing it on You tube, better than LC himself - took down most of the words. Seeing/hearing the MacGarrigle sisters in the film - a flashback. We must be the same age.
I set the timer for eight minutes and it rang - ages ago.
Monday, 6 October 2008
Enthusiasms
A confession: Two non-writing projects of mine are going awry at the moment and it is difficult to write while this is happening. The 3 hours of writing should come first, but the compulsion is strong to try and get things moving on those fronts, and once the phoning and talking about them starts, whatever peacefulness there was is replaced - for a while at least - by agitation and a churning stomach.
Months ago, someone lent us a DVD of a film about Leonard Cohen and his songs, entitled I'm Your Man. It was almost lost, then found again, then about to be returned unseen, and finally last night, when there was nothing else to do, we watched it, transfixed. When it ended we re-watched the songs we liked most, it was after midnight when we said, This is madness. The songs are still going through my head. They were not sung by LC who is in his seventies, but by other people, wonderfully. Rufus W. sang the Halleluyah which is well know, but that was not the best, the best was Anthony, singing If it be your will - straight to the heart. Wonderful words all along. Good interviews with LC himself. They showed some footage of him and his Roshi, very fat and old, and neither of them at ease, a surprising thing to notice about a Zen master.
The DVD is also at Wellington's Central Library. The lovely library.
That was my most recent enthusiasm. There was another before that - two in two days - a book I spent the entire Saturday reading: Portrait of the Artist's Wife, by Barbara Anderson (1992, VUW). My original perception of her as a writer was formed by a play she wrote entitled Gorillas, which was put on by the local amateur theatrical group. That group can do a decent job, but the play was ghastly - and does not feature in the list of her publications on the Book Council website, so something must have happened to it (maybe it became something else?)
The Portrait was gripping: as if a dear friend were telling a story about something that has happened to her, that has changed her. The story progresses naturally in time, a relief after bumpy flashbacks encountered elsewhere.
In particular - and this is a personal view - to the point of tears, I was touched by the loving portrayal of the elderly refugee couple from Vienna, Olga and Otto, who tutor and mentor the main character. That generation has all but vanished now, but the portrait is true, true.
Reading Elizabeth Smithers' Professor Musgrove's Canary. Reading aloud has its rewards - the smell of stone, I wondered? Ah yes, stoned...
Struggling with a new Robert Hass book bought extravagantly new - it includes a ten-page essay on Rilke, which I am trying to complete the reading of, have tried twice so far, admittedly before going to sleep. From a second hand bookshop: Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney's for my own bookshelf, to keep. No CK Williams anywhere, yet.
Also CL Stead's My Name was Judas. That will have to wait till I have written more and read more poetry.
And constant companions, read for the calm and the wisdom: Charlotte Joko Beck's classic Everyday Zen (S. Smith, ed., 1989, Thorsons), and the quarterly fascicles of Mountain Record, from Zen Mountain Monastery. Daido Roshi included a lovely sci fi story by Terry Bison in one of his talks - here is just a small excerpt:
“They are made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet and took them aboard our recon vessels and probed them all the way through, and they are completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals, the message to the stars?”
“They use radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them, the signals come from machines.”
“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I am trying to tell you—meat made the machines.
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You are asking me to believe in sentient meat?”
“I am not asking you, I am telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they are made out of meat.”
If you want the rest of the story, and the rest of Daido Roshi's dharma discourse, which is entitled Perfection Revealed, you can find it here. (The sci fi story is in italics half-way through).
Months ago, someone lent us a DVD of a film about Leonard Cohen and his songs, entitled I'm Your Man. It was almost lost, then found again, then about to be returned unseen, and finally last night, when there was nothing else to do, we watched it, transfixed. When it ended we re-watched the songs we liked most, it was after midnight when we said, This is madness. The songs are still going through my head. They were not sung by LC who is in his seventies, but by other people, wonderfully. Rufus W. sang the Halleluyah which is well know, but that was not the best, the best was Anthony, singing If it be your will - straight to the heart. Wonderful words all along. Good interviews with LC himself. They showed some footage of him and his Roshi, very fat and old, and neither of them at ease, a surprising thing to notice about a Zen master.
The DVD is also at Wellington's Central Library. The lovely library.
That was my most recent enthusiasm. There was another before that - two in two days - a book I spent the entire Saturday reading: Portrait of the Artist's Wife, by Barbara Anderson (1992, VUW). My original perception of her as a writer was formed by a play she wrote entitled Gorillas, which was put on by the local amateur theatrical group. That group can do a decent job, but the play was ghastly - and does not feature in the list of her publications on the Book Council website, so something must have happened to it (maybe it became something else?)
The Portrait was gripping: as if a dear friend were telling a story about something that has happened to her, that has changed her. The story progresses naturally in time, a relief after bumpy flashbacks encountered elsewhere.
In particular - and this is a personal view - to the point of tears, I was touched by the loving portrayal of the elderly refugee couple from Vienna, Olga and Otto, who tutor and mentor the main character. That generation has all but vanished now, but the portrait is true, true.
Reading Elizabeth Smithers' Professor Musgrove's Canary. Reading aloud has its rewards - the smell of stone, I wondered? Ah yes, stoned...
Struggling with a new Robert Hass book bought extravagantly new - it includes a ten-page essay on Rilke, which I am trying to complete the reading of, have tried twice so far, admittedly before going to sleep. From a second hand bookshop: Stevie Smith, Dylan Thomas and Seamus Heaney's for my own bookshelf, to keep. No CK Williams anywhere, yet.
Also CL Stead's My Name was Judas. That will have to wait till I have written more and read more poetry.
And constant companions, read for the calm and the wisdom: Charlotte Joko Beck's classic Everyday Zen (S. Smith, ed., 1989, Thorsons), and the quarterly fascicles of Mountain Record, from Zen Mountain Monastery. Daido Roshi included a lovely sci fi story by Terry Bison in one of his talks - here is just a small excerpt:
“They are made out of meat.”
“Meat?”
“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet and took them aboard our recon vessels and probed them all the way through, and they are completely meat.”
“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals, the message to the stars?”
“They use radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them, the signals come from machines.”
“They made the machines. That’s what I am trying to tell you—meat made the machines.
“That’s ridiculous. How can meat make a machine? You are asking me to believe in sentient meat?”
“I am not asking you, I am telling you. These creatures are the only sentient race in the sector and they are made out of meat.”
If you want the rest of the story, and the rest of Daido Roshi's dharma discourse, which is entitled Perfection Revealed, you can find it here. (The sci fi story is in italics half-way through).
Wednesday, 28 May 2008
Clutter
Missed a day again. An old friend in hospital, sudden phone call from her husband. Took Coetzee along, instead of poetry. Didn't get to read anything anyway. Went again today. She'll recover well.
Am now reading my fellow students' sonnets for tomorrow's critiquing sessions. Ran into Kay unexpectedly at Aro Video, told her of our experience with a possum in the Cobb valley. I should write the story.
On my desk a book by Richard von Sturmer, entitled Suchness, Zen Poetry and Prose. Published in 2005, by HeadworX Publishers (NZ). Funded in part with the assistance of Creative New Zealand. Wonderful photo on the cover. Reminds me of the first photo I ever took, of snow and a river, one of my best photos. Beginners mind. Mysterious poems, interesting essays towards the back.
Have not had time to settle down seriously with this book, lent by Bill. Shall take it along tomorrow and see if I can keep it longer. Stupidly, instead of reading the book, phoned the Porirua von Sturmers in the phone book. He lives in Auckland.
My desk is swamped with bills, and other must-do things not related to poetry. The house has not been cleaned since we got back.
This morning lying in bed, cosy and warm, an almost perfect haiku formed itself in my mind - totally gone by now (it is evening). I wonder at the complete confidence I had then that the words and idea would remain, and at the equally overpowering certitude that they are gone forever, which is what I am experiencing now.
Am now reading my fellow students' sonnets for tomorrow's critiquing sessions. Ran into Kay unexpectedly at Aro Video, told her of our experience with a possum in the Cobb valley. I should write the story.
On my desk a book by Richard von Sturmer, entitled Suchness, Zen Poetry and Prose. Published in 2005, by HeadworX Publishers (NZ). Funded in part with the assistance of Creative New Zealand. Wonderful photo on the cover. Reminds me of the first photo I ever took, of snow and a river, one of my best photos. Beginners mind. Mysterious poems, interesting essays towards the back.
Have not had time to settle down seriously with this book, lent by Bill. Shall take it along tomorrow and see if I can keep it longer. Stupidly, instead of reading the book, phoned the Porirua von Sturmers in the phone book. He lives in Auckland.
My desk is swamped with bills, and other must-do things not related to poetry. The house has not been cleaned since we got back.
This morning lying in bed, cosy and warm, an almost perfect haiku formed itself in my mind - totally gone by now (it is evening). I wonder at the complete confidence I had then that the words and idea would remain, and at the equally overpowering certitude that they are gone forever, which is what I am experiencing now.
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
More Bodil
I went back to the writing bits in The Price of Water - the main protagonist, a Bodil clone, argues with her French friend Madame C about writing and happiness:
Madame C says: "Please taisez-vous [shut up, but more politely] and write. Write your happiness, shut up and write."
They then have a huge argument where the Bodil character says that it is impossible to write happiness:
"Writing your happiness turns into platitudes. Happiness writes white."
"Write it," she says. Curt and hard as a diamond.
[...]
"Simile, Madame C., simile is the death of everything, a rose fresh as the dew is a rose fresh as the dew. Everything written is fabricated, wrecked. Only what is, is."
That last sentence is Zen-like and therefore irrefutable-seeming.
Madame C was right: she did write her happiness into the book.
Madame C says: "Please taisez-vous [shut up, but more politely] and write. Write your happiness, shut up and write."
They then have a huge argument where the Bodil character says that it is impossible to write happiness:
"Writing your happiness turns into platitudes. Happiness writes white."
"Write it," she says. Curt and hard as a diamond.
[...]
"Simile, Madame C., simile is the death of everything, a rose fresh as the dew is a rose fresh as the dew. Everything written is fabricated, wrecked. Only what is, is."
That last sentence is Zen-like and therefore irrefutable-seeming.
Madame C was right: she did write her happiness into the book.
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