The Trip

Trip, n(1):
3. A short voyage or journey; a ‘run’. Apparently originally a sailor’s term, but very soon extended to a journey on land.
5. slang (orig. U.S.) a. A hallucinatory experience induced by a drug, esp. LSD.

In my last I recalled three authors who pursued the Zen form of enlightenment and tried to present it to the “Western mind”. Dr. Suzuki wrote as a scholar; Hubert Benoit went further and attempted a series of self-help books to complement his own psychotherapeutic practice; Terence Gray—former Egyptologist, theatre director and successful racehorse owner—was inspired by Benoit to write his own Zennish self-help books (such as Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon) under the pseudonym of Wei Wu Wei.

I’ve learned that following others isn’t my way. Nor do I blaze a trail for others to follow. My route is a zig-zag of trial and error. I’ll do my own thing & speak of it, as the moment dictates; and the best way I’ve found is to go off on foot with no defined purpose. There I may haply kiss the joy as it flies; try and bottle some of its essence into a digital voice recorder; trip on fresh air and see what happens.

Into the Precinct

precinct, n: 1. a.: The area within the boundaries (real or imaginary) of a particular place or building; the interior; the grounds; esp. the (consecrated) ground immediately surrounding a religious house or place of worship. [OED]

My nearest consecrated ground seems to be around the traffic-lights, where the West Vale Road is intersected by Ledborough Avenue to the south and The Pastures to the north. As I entered that precinct I reflected that I must travel light, leaving baggage behind. What is baggage? An overstuffed intellect. What do I need on my pilgrimage? The answer comes readily: just enough to know what to do, moment to moment.

Same thought, same place, as nine years ago, in a post called “Knowing”. I can’t explain the coincidence. As for the thought itself, I think it arises from awareness of how hard it is to be a human being. We’re not born with fur coats like other animals. We can’t go hunting and gathering for food like our first ancestors. We lack a full set of instincts to guide us through life. We’re driven to construct a more and more complex environment, with ever more rules and artificiality. We are readily persuaded that we require more and more intellectual baggage. I know I have too much.

I end up hampered by the debris of all my yesterdays; defaced by their scars, scabs and suppurations. Outstanding debts and misdeeds will hang heavy on our steps. I’ve taken a damp sponge to wipe the chalk-board clean. Let me be a gardener, weeding useless habits from the garden of my selfhood. All I need is to know how to live my ordinary life; leaving spaces to slip through . . .

. . . Into the Zone

zone n: (orig. U.S. Sport). A state of perfect concentration leading to optimum mental or physical performance. Chiefly with the, esp. in in the zone.

I dictate these words while out walking, letting my feet choose an old route, one I know from way back. See for example “Waiting”. I take footpaths whenever I can—this one beside the railway station right now—with no plan but to keep on going, do what the occasion demands.

Rain is forecast any time now. Cloud-patterns are changing minute by minute. They’re heaped-up and layered. Behind the ones in front are others catching the sunlight. The nearest ones a blurry grey, the far ones delicately shaped.

I know this route so well, the main one and all its little variations. All I need do is walk and obey the momentary impulse, noting the possibilities and little signposts. I know when I’ve entered the Zone (a mystical variation of the OED’s definition above); for now I have to cross the road, with its traffic coming from various directions, and it’s an effort to drop out into the mundane world of physical hazard, to keep my wits about me, to know what to do (just as at the Precinct, whose traffic-lights may be hazardous for a pedestrian). As soon as I revert to peaceful byways with little traffic, I can let conscious mind lie fallow to every impression that comes along.

Fallow adj. 2.
b. Uncultivated
c. Fit for tillage; ploughed ready for sowing (obs.)

Passing an abundance of spring weeds I’m transported once again to the time I lived in Holland for a few months, aged five. I used to go on my own to school, wide-eyed, noticing everything, encountering new things every day. So when I’m in this special state and see some human or seasonal manifestation, or detect a certain scent, I’m open to remembering my first encounter with it; and always surprised when it takes me to that brief period in Holland.

I was living with my “aunt”, who spoke good English, as most educated Dutch people do. But at first, when I was out on my own, I lacked language. I’ve recently taken to watching Dutch films on DVD, using the English subtitles but letting the lilt of the language & recognized words remind me. And it’s just as it was in my first days there, and all of my visits since: a hinterland, outside the flock looking in. But in school I learned Dutch rapidly, and forgot it as rapidly when my first Netherlandish sojourn came to its abrupt end.

This Valley Path lends the wayfarer a power of transportation to times past or never-existent. I’ve reached the two shallow ponds where numerous springs lift their eddies above the surface and spread ripples. The new houses no longer look like intruders, but add a dignity, like a silent audience to Nature’s phenomenon.

When this public footpath was closed for the several years of building work, I pined anxiously, for I see the network of paths as the backbone of England, sacrosanct for as long as common law reigns. And when that law is swept away by some catastrophe which takes the hi-tech infrastructure with it, these paths may be all we have left, as the Stone Age faithfully resumes from where it was interrupted.

Now is mayflower time on the hawthorn trees. Now is time to be in the groove and follow this path, the one I’ve chosen; or which has chosen me. Hearts lift up, birds sing, feet’s rhythm is steady, God’s in his heaven.

On the grass verge separating path from stream, three mallard drakes in file follow a she-duck, who separates from them, stands in front of me, mutely, while the drakes shift idly at some distance away. She has a limp. She’s in my path so I stand, too. I don’t know how long this would go on, ducks having their own sense of time and priority. Perhaps she’s hungry & weak, hopes I have bread for her. Now other walkers are arriving from ahead and behind. When I turn back, no ducks are to be seen.

I see an abandoned football in a little grassy space enclosed by an iron fence. In a sudden flash, it reminds me of Australia, when I was three, in Bassendean.

There’s an age-old feeling, a genetic imprint no doubt, when you walk straight for a few miles, just for the sake of it, encountering only minor hazards, remembering the route from previous seasons, choosing this or that minor diversion; judging, sniffing the air, identifying each aroma—or not. To have a nose and eye for detail, a compendious memory, an alert sense of purpose: these are the skills of a hunter-gatherer, and this is my favourite thing now. To choose this kind of choicelessness, this is now my calling. Wayfaring, where truths are stumbled upon, just as I stumbled upon the title for this blog.

I’ve just walked down Beech Close & the alley where I heard an angel whispering “Infinite are the Depths”. The thought was so big that it has always been a surprise since to see how short is the alley, especially the white-painted wall on one side, at which I was gazing when the words came. And now I note that the house with that wall has been sold.

This is so complete, I could spend my life just walking, were that practicable. Infinite blessing lies in this; and if I could carve out just a little, in words, to put in imperishable form, it would be enough.

I keep returning in thought to that time in Holland. I imagine my aunt wondering if my mother would ever come back, just as her brother never came back from his war in South-East Asia. Did she know he was not my father, that I was the random child of her sister-in-law, dumped on her reluctant threshold? After that initial shock, when my mother dropped me off with no goodbye after our rough sea passage from Harwich to the Hook of Holland, I adjusted, forgot her; till one day she returned with equal suddenness and no explanation, and brought me back to England.

I had mixed feelings about her return. First I cried. The mother who had dropped me out of her life was now the stranger who suddenly snatched me back again, pulling me by the roots just as she had done in Australia, just as my grandparents had done when they disallowed my broad accent for offending their ears. This time, I had re-created myself as a Dutch boy; new life, new language learned. I had overcome the difficulties, learned to live with my aunt, her aged parents and her baby. Like her late brother Jan Jacobus Mulder, she was tall, wilful, short-tempered, yet dignified and elegant. She was not maternal, but neither was my mother. Any cuddling and adoration I’d ever had was from other women, such as Joy Edwards (pictured). Auntie Non was steady, my life had become normal.

Letting me walk to school alone, aged five, wasn’t neglectful in 1947 Holland. I guess there was a general sense of blissful safety in that country so recently ravaged by the Nazis, after its liberation by the Allies. It was a time for cleanup after the departure of uninvited guests. In the scale of things, a small uninvited guest like me just had to muck in like everyone else, and consider himself lucky, as indeed I did. There were few cars, many carts drawn by horse or mule. Free-roaming dogs were my main anxiety.

Now I find myself in a place beyond memory, a secret annex of imagination. Every so often, something triggers an impression from a pool of unidentified experience within me. It’s as if my best memories are of things which never happened to me. Perhaps they are memories of childhood fantasies, whose raw material came from books or observations of someone else’s happy family life, and elaborated; just as the bower-bird makes a nest from bright-coloured scraps, to attract a mate.

In the Zone, I reconnect with my real and fictional past, as it wafts before me like scents, flavours, nameless feelings, which I envisage as dwelling in a non-existent place, all gathered together, where the plants, like the plane-tree I’m passing now with its strange flowers, are faintly scented. And in that place, I am a rich kid and have it all.

Indeed, I am a rich kid, in this moment. For what other definition could there be, but the state of being content, devoid of envy, and having enough? I want nothing more than this: to play truant from the mundane, on a spring day.

The Precinct looking west

The Precinct looking north

Cloud patterns . . .

. . . changing . . .

. . . and changing again

On the Valley Path:
spring below, storm sewer above, on its way
to a purification plant.
Nature & technology both recycling water.

Mayflowers

My mother lacked maternal instincts but
this and other photos show that Joy
Edwards & I had a thing going in 1945
(Bassendean, Western Australia)

My “aunt’s” late brother Jan Jacobus Mulder
& my alleged father;
who for good reason looked nothing like me;
a secret which I finally discovered

Holland 1947, school group (detail). I don’t
suppose I’m amongst the pupils.
Click for full picture.

Full Circle

My previous post started with a trip to buy milk from a supermarket, and the sense of a “tangible perfection”. I don’t know what triggers these things, but the next time I went to buy milk something else worth the telling occurred. This time it was more of a thought, a realization, an inner voice rather than a wordless feeling; and the voice said something like “You have it all, so why don’t you take it? There it was in you all the time, but you weren’t ready. Now you’ve been ready for a while.”

I wondered why I didn’t hear this before, this message so full of meaning. Sometimes one gets decipherable dreams, that tell us something we’re unaware of in waking life. I don’t seem to get those any more. The message comes in a fully waking state, like suddenly encountering a mirror to the soul, or hearing the advice of a kind, wise friend. It was no trance either, for this time I went by car, stopping off at the shop on the way to somewhere else. I’m used to these angel-whisperings, if the term isn’t too fanciful. Over the years I’ve noted in these pages numerous “moments”, and what they seemed to be saying. Sometimes the words come first and the deeper understanding afterwards. Quite a few have occurred on that short stretch of road, near the traffic lights. In an earlier and more Christian age, I might have made a modest roadside shrine there, as if the place were sacred and out of gratitude to Our Lady or other saint. Similar gestures were made in pagan societies.

The inner voice conveyed that I’ve grasped something, It gave me an instant certainty, that the truth revealed in that moment would never go away. A realization had come to stay. It was very similar to that instant healing of ten years ago, referred to in my last; when I knew I was better, definitively and with no lingering shadow of doubt. That certainty has held solid ever since. This time it was the realization that any spiritual quest has been fulfilled; an integration has occurred. There is a profound and tangible inner calm; my restlessness and habitual folly is stilled.

It is apparent that there are magical powers in language, for good and for ill. Words are the mechanism for human thought. To put it crudely, we either manage them or they manage us. It has taken me ten years and half a million published words to reach this point. Of all the magic inherent in language, consider just two aspects: narrative and naming. From our earliest days, stories have held us “spellbound”. They are the connective tissue of memory; memory is the connective tissue that builds the individual sense of “I”. So powerful is language that it can take us beyond experience, and lead us totally astray into confusion and lies: the black magic of propaganda, that we pick up from the ambient culture and reinforce for ourselves. Or, as in the case of these occasional “whisperings”, language can give us wise guidance; much more to the point than anything I ever got from a guru.

And then there is naming. This is where language starts. As soon as there is naming, there is linkage. When the toddler learns to say “dog”, it learns an abstraction. Dogs come in all shapes and sizes, but it learns the quality of “dogness”, which links every member of this class of animals. Perhaps, as we get older, we learn the power of the word “realization”, which can link all the instances of direct knowing in our lives; so that perhaps we will become more sensitive to them.

And then, there is the magical power inherent in describing these things to the stranger, the unknown reader, a few cyber-friends scattered across the globe. I can’t talk about these things face to face with anyone. Only in writing, this writing, can I tell the things for which I struggle to find words, yet seem to me profoundly important. In books, sometimes rare ones, they find confirmation. And sometimes I have been drawn to books for the vistas they open and the promises they make, even though I couldn’t understand them.

Perhaps I became intoxicated with the idea of “realization” by a book on Zen that I saw in a shop window in the Latin quarter of Paris. It was Spring and I was twenty, sleeping rough, mostly beside the central-heating boilers of the prestigious École Polytechnique. (You could get in by squeezing through the window-bars.) By day I often sat by a bank of the river Seine, where the beatniks gathered, and that is where I started to read it. Later I obtained shelter with George Whitman at his bookshop “Mistral”, before it was renamed “Shakespeare & Co”.

George had adopted the custom of offering hospitality to writers, not just his friends but strangers who just turned up. The list includes Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Samuel Beckett, Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, to mention a few I’ve actually heard of. We hardly exchanged a word during the many days I remained there, but one day we had this brief conversation.

“So. What kind of author are you?”
“I’m writing a book on Zen Buddhism.”
I made it up on the spur of the moment, fearing he would throw me out otherwise. He merely grunted. The conversation was over, like one of those enigmatic encounters between master and monk in Zen writings. He resumed the topic days later.
“So why are there so many books on Zen Buddhism? What’s wrong with Mahayana? Why don’t you write about that?”

I was caught off-guard. He may have disbelieved me from the start, but George was notoriously hard to fathom; never exactly friendly, but always good-hearted; never told me to go. Eventually I moved on, left Paris and didn’t return till 1995; and then I knew I must go and see him again. Nothing important had changed. George was still sitting at the till near the entrance, serving customers, most of whom were young and carrying backpacks. I re-introduced myself. Of course he wouldn’t remember me, but I told him of our conversation and confessed that I’d never written that book, hoping he’d absolve me with a smile. But he took it seriously, gave me a penetrating look and said “You have still time. Go and write it.” This was as good as an angel-whispering but I wasn’t tuned to that wavelength in those days.

And so I never gave it another thought till now. He is still right, I do have time, and now would be good. As a point of honour, let me fulfil a promise, no matter how bogus it was at the time, no matter that it was made to someone who died three years ago.

So I thought of starting my theme on the book which inspired it in the first place: La Doctrine Suprême Selon la Pensée Zen by Hubert Benoit. How could I write on this topic on my own, from scratch? Do I know anything except from other people’s books?

When I said to Ellie in a comment on my last, “I deem it time to hold posthumous dialogue with selected authors”, I already had Benoit in mind, He’s a dry and intellectual writer, I want to say “he thinks too much”, but I seem to have spent years in his company, trying to get juice from this book, in which he tries to reconcile “traditional Western metaphysics”, psychotherapy and Zen. What if I summarize his chapters, and then compare them with my own experiences? His entire focus, despite the long-winded path he takes to reach it, is satori, a Zen term which means awakening, or seeing into one’s own true nature.

I started on the task, but didn’t get far. My book wouldn’t be much fun for the reader; it would mean months of drudgery for me as a writer. It suddenly hit me that my true motive was simply to compare Benoit’s notion of satori, as presented specially for Westerners, with the realization that came to me near the traffic lights, on that latest errand to buy the milk. Apart from curiosity, it doesn’t matter in the slightest, for the thing is too simple to describe.

Before enlightenment: hew wood, draw water. After enlightenment: hew wood, draw water.

And the memory of a phrase, from Benoit’s book, I believe, suddenly comes back to me:

D’un seul coup j’ai complètement écrasé la caverne des fantômes.

(In one blow, I’ve smashed the cave of ghosts, i.e. stilled the nonsense of the chattering mind).

I can only write on my own terms and speak, as I have always done here, from personal experience. There’s Chinese Zen, Japanese Zen, and the efforts of Hubert Benoit & Terence Gray to translate Zen into Western terms. I don’t have anything to say about any of that. The belated promise I made to George Whitman, while his bones lie in the Père Lachaise cemetery, has disappointingly fizzled out within twenty-four hours.

But now I see the glimmer of an honourable way out, via another promise, made to a friend whose opinion I greatly respect, to write an e-book in a series of volumes, a simple omnibus version of this blog, in chronological order. Not exactly a new idea—I’ve been fiddling with it for the last seven years. Not exactly a promise either—I told her I was thinking of doing it, and she said “I’m glad you have taken the decision . . .” which is good as a commitment signed, sealed & pending delivery. It’s something I want to do and am able to do. Suddenly I see it (this blog, in whatever format it’s published) with new eyes, as a kind of Zen diary all along, the record of a mysteriously guided path to I know not where. Will this do, George?

As to what satori is, who has attained it, what disciplines Zen may prescribe, who cares? That’s all second-hand material, fodder for scholars. (Sometimes I like to play at being a scholar.) You and I each live within the horizons of our own landscapes. Here and now is the stage in which we strut, the arena of our developing awareness, with always the choice to live like Lao Tzu’s “good traveller [who] has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving”.

This is the Square du Vert Galant where I
started to read La Doctrine Suprême.
Click on the photo for a tale about it.

George Whitman, Allen Ginsberg,
Gregory Corso (& an unknown man
in an Afghan coat) some time in the
Seventies at Shakespeare & Co, Paris

An edition which set me off on a long quest

The English translation by Terence Gray

Biography of Terence Gray
former director of a modernist theatre
(the Festival Theatre, Cambridge, 1926-1933)
friend & translator of Hubert Benoit

I believe this man and this book
first sparked Benoit’s interest in Zen

Terence Gray’s first book on Zen published
anonymously under the pseudonym
Wei Wu Wei. I obtained a copy in ’63,
ignorant of his connection to Benoit

From the cover of “All Else is Bondage”,
another book on ‘Realization’ by Terence Gray.
Click for a PDF excerpt.