Nonfiction

 

 


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Jack Brown

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“It was rare that I escaped the confines of Columbia when one fine fall Saturday in October 1943, demerit free, I was given a 12-hour pass starting at noon. I wasted no time in abandoning ship and hotfooting it over to 128th Street to catch the subway bound for Times Square, the heart of the great U.S. metropolis. With a quickstep, I boarded and held on in wonderment as the electric-powered marvel, like a giant mole, sped through dark tunnels. At each stop, more people squeezed in than out so that we hung suspended from straps gripped firmly in hand while those without were kept in place by bodies closing in on all sides. At Times Square, all exited en masse into the brightly lit station, where throngs more were waiting to get on. I couldn’t distinguish which of the passages was egress and was carried by the crowd up and out of the mole’s hole into the crisp autumn air tainted with the exhaust of cabs, buses and some private automobiles. I stood on the sidewalk as long
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The stuff of art

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 This vignette is taken from a documentary for family I recorded in 2014. The material was also used for a poem . In it, Sr. Bernadette recounts her experiences around the 1980s and 90s running a home for women and children who had just come across the Mexican border to El Paso, Texas.
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Who's on the toilet?

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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
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