Who's on the toilet?

A free spirit, the Zen monk Ikkyū (1394–1481) writes rebelliously of institutional Buddhism – “that stone Buddha deserves all the bird shit it gets / I wave my skinny arms like a tall flower in the wind” – which perhaps freed him to make insights beyond his professed order. Shinkichi Takahashi (1901-1987), a rebel also, was educated with easy access to western thought, writing in one poem, “A quail has seized God by the neck // With its black bill, because there is no / God greater than a quail. / (Peter, Christ, Judas: a quail.)” Takahashi sees God in all phenomena and “All the phenomena in the universe: myself.” Though freeing, such an approach can be reductive in its formulaic nature, rather than accumulative toward deeper and deeper understanding – the difference perchance between a rolling stone and the snowball effect. Zen and the western ethic have also mixed in some of our greatest American poets, namely Jim Harrison (1937-2016), a follower of Ikkyū and Takahashi both who keeps close the vulgar and addresses the depraved realities of life. An illustrative example comes from his book After Ikkyū and Other Poems:

I went to Tucson and it gave
me a headache. I don’t know how.
Everyone’s a cousin in this world.
I drove down a road of enormous houses
that encompass many toilets. Down hallways,
leaping left or right, you can crap at will.
A mile away a dead Mexican child slept
out in the desert on the wrong side of a mattress.

A true Zennist in that he believes he is a failed one, Harrison unlike Takahashi and Ikkyū approaches the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek in acknowledging the vanity of forever being withdrawn from the world; first, he gets a headache, then reaches out with “Everyone’s a cousin in this world,” and finally speaks to the injustice he sees. Feeling in and thinking about the world is important, and Harrison says in another poem there is “no happiness outside consciousness.” Of course, regardless of whether a Zennist is a racist or a humanist, like Harrison, he is perhaps called first to act ethically without reason – to help the child “out in the desert on the wrong side of a mattress.” His own private moral argumentation – It’s just a Mexican kid and not my own or “Everyone’s a cousin in this world” – is irrelevant. The point is, however, that Harrison threw himself into the world first and experienced a falling before any attempt at withdrawal. This brings us to Žižek’s point of the exceptional Zennist. He says his friend Kojin Karatani found some minority of Buddhists, where they claim, “the true Nirvana in the sense of getting over of your false self, it’s not withdrawing into you but it’s precisely to fall fully, that as far as we speak to our self, we are not ready fully to fall. So if you read Buddhism in this way, who knows, maybe something wonderful can happen.”

Taken from an article published in Local Ground(s): Midwest Poetics.

 

Location: Tucson, AZ, USA

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