abracadabra

After a long hiatus, here is a post from February when the blog went dark for a while.  The Small Kitchen itself never goes dark, even after nightwatch, even after the lightswitch is flipped.

*******************

Today in morning service, during the three bows at the end of service, someone’s cellphone went off, its ringtone set to the Steve Miller Band song Abracadabra. It was one of those perfect taut moments in a formal setting that feel heightened out of proportion to the actual thing. It was just someone’s phone ringing. But it was before 7 a.m. in a room full of silent people bowing. I’m usually hypertuned to laugh at these moments; I go right back to cracking up in church with my cousin, the woman in front of us turning sternly, you girls hush up! But by then it’s too late, that only makes matters worse. The containment provokes the laughter. I could feel that cascade effect of mirror neurons hearing S in the row in front of me trying not to laugh. I could feel the effect of mirror neurons, triggering more laughter after I was already over it. I don’t mind this. I like that feeling of being part of a larger organism that these mirror neuron moments bring on.

As any poet knows, part of the beauty and utility of a formal practice is what happens when the form is broken. Set it up so you can break it. Ask Gerard Manley Hopkins, who knew how to stretch a sonnet. His sonnet That Nature is a Heraclitean fire and of the Comfort of the Resurrection is perhaps the first extended dance remix. But he went straight to the 12″, the plain old sonnet is implied. the implication of the 18 line version with its lines that wrap is that the subject is too vast to be contained. it’s different from if he had just written a poem in that exact same form with no sense of the sonnet as a springboard.

All this was bringing to mind a story Lynda Barry told in the workshop she recently taught in San Francisco. What I remember of the story is this: a paralyzed person was able to move a cursor by thought alone. In an experimental setting, the researchers were trying to sort out whether this was just a fluke, or whether the person could actually communicate in this way. So the person moved the cursor to A. That looked intentional so everyone felt encouraged. Then B, yes. The alphabet. That great sign that all is well. But wait, the next letter was R. disappointment spread through the room. But then A then C and soon everyone could see where that was going. He finished the word, spelling Abracadabra without “touching” anything… So what is touch if this is possible?

Mind over Matter. But is it “over”
Maybe it’s “and” or “with” or maybe there’s no difference…

Aaron Danforth, epilepsy patient: “I have to think of the word ‘move’ to get it to move to the right.”

mind over matter

but the light is so nice in here

Yesterday I was supposed to meet my friends Djinn and Richard in the morning to ride to Golden Gate Park and I could feel myself veering toward staying home, thinking, The light is so nice in here right now.

Staying inside because a slice of sunlight is so inviting, when it is fully possible to go out into full sun, felt very familiar to the sensation I’ve been acutely aware of lately, my apparent preference for my projection of a person over the actual person. The most expensive form of this is when desire leaves no room to experience, say, an actual conversation as it’s happening in real time. Missing the person sitting right in front of me. Anticipatory longing.

Do I need to say I left the shaft of sun to warm my concrete floor and went downstairs to get my bike?

But the sensation made me want to find the following passage from Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson (occasionally I do read other novels). I skimmed through the book looking for it even as I walked down the stairs to get what, for the sake of economy, the need to move swiftly from one proposition to the next, I earlier called “my” bike, but now, in appreciation for the serial generosity one is often subject to, I will say was actually Richard’s bike. My back tire was flat. And that even “my” bike is actually Zach’s bike, which he is so kindly lending me because “my” bike is in Truro, MA. And that bike is actually Marnie’s, which she so kindly gave me.

Also, I do not endorse reading while walking down the stairs, or while crossing the street, though I have done both within the last two days. Here is the quote. I sustained no injuries finding it:

When she had been married a little while, she concluded that love was half a longing of a kind that possession did nothing to mitigate. Once, while they were still childless, Edmund had found a pocket watch on the shore. the case and the crystal were undamaged, but the works were nearly consumed by rust. He opened the watch and emptied it, and where the face had been he fitted a circle of paper on which he had painted two seahorses. He gave it to her as a pendant, with a chain through it, but she hardly ever wore it because the chain was too short to allow her to look at the seahorses comfortably. She worried that it would be damaged on her belt or in her pocket. For perhaps a week she carried the watch wherever she went, even across the room, and it was not because Edmund had made it for her, or because the painting was less vivid and awkward than his paintings usually were, but because the seahorses themselves were so arch, so antic and heraldic, and armored in the husks of insects. It was the seahorses themselves that she wanted to see as soon as she took her eyes away and that she wanted to see even when she was looking at them.

Jinzu

“passes through fences, walls and mountains unhindered as if through air”

The Six Supernatural Powers

Shohaku Okumura is here at City Center, talking about the Dogen Fascicle called Jinzu, or, in Carl Bielefeldt’s translation, “Spiritual Powers”

Okumura gave this translation today, “activities which cannot be measured with our discriminating mind.”

Bielefeldt, in his introduction says that in the text, these powers become “the welling up of the world itself.”

Yes. Otherwise it’s a parlor trick.

Words like magic and supernatural are misleading. We need them because we tend to underestimate reality. For example, did this bowl of solid chocolate appear in the small kitchen today by means of supernatural power, or is it the welling up of the world itself?

We can keep being surprised, or we can, as the Vimalakirti Sutra says, be “disciplined by miracles.” I think one of the main reasons we like to think magic exists as some kind of exception is because it lets us off the hook. If we accept that the world includes huge bowls of (vegan!)chocolate then I think that leaves us with somewhat more responsibility to operate at a level closer to our actual powers.

To provide some context, Shohaku explained in early Pali texts, the six supernatural powers are clairvoyance, clairaudience, mind-reading, knowing past lives, flying, and the power to stop deluded thoughts.

All extremely useful.

Here is an elaboration from the Samaññaphala Sutta:

He then enjoys different powers: being one, he becomes many — being many, he becomes one; he appears and disappears; he passes through fences, walls and mountains unhindered as if through air; he sinks into the ground and emerges from it as if it were water; he walks on the water without breaking the surface as if on land; he flies cross-legged through the sky like a bird with wings; he even touches and strokes with his hand the sun and moon.

And it was good to be reminded of these capacities, because after the lecture, I offered to make 8 more copies of the handout, a 2-sided 14-page document.

Sounded simple enough, but it turned out that to complete the task, I had to draw on all six of these powers.

I find it very useful, when, for example, changing a toner cartridge, to bear in mind the flexibility of the physical world projected in such frameworks. At those moments–it actually said “Toner life end”– it’s easy to adopt an adversarial relationship with matter, but as the Dalai Lama says, all that meditating is good training for dying. So I just pressed down on the blue lever, and instead of being convinced it was designed for vexation, I let the cartridge release. I removed the yellow strip, as it said. Moved the wire cleaner from one side to the other. And clicked in the new cartridge.

Comet Presentation Materials

Today I stopped by the California Academy of Sciences to return two library books I’d barely read. The Eye of the Lynx, and In the Blink of an Eye. I checked them out because I wanted–and still do want–to research the evolution of the eye, as I’ve been thinking of it in relation to how it feels to have Obama as president.

The feeling of an axial shift preceded by a long era of increment. A long era requiring faith.

The difference between a light sensitive patch on a flatworm and the eye of an eagle.

I did manage to come away from my faint encounter with In the Blink of an Eye with this amazing description of a volvox:

“a hollow sphere, about a millimetre in diameter, where the wall is made up of cells, each with a rhythmically beating hair appearing like a tail. The movement of the hairs is coordinated to move the entire sphere in one direction.”

I find that somehow very encouraging.

On my way upstairs I passed a cart at which three docents were in the process of making three comets. They were on the second. It was bubbling in what I remember to be a brownie pan.

The best part though was this bin, labeled “comet presentation materials.” I like thinking that to make a comet, all you need is some Palmolive dishwashing liquid, tall kitchen bags, latex gloves, a rag, and a few cups.

Now of course, as anyone knows, you need a few more items to produce a comet.

You need Windex.

If you study the back wall of the bin carefully, you can read the Windex label through the milky plastic.

Also you need some peat moss, sand, spring water, dry ice, and something that was marked “organic compound.” I tend to avoid products where I recognize all the ingredients except for one, an ingredient which has a very broad range of interpretation, such as “spices.”

Entertaining questions, Shel, pictured here, explained that most comets end up being pulled into the gravity field of the sun. That the sun exerts a greater pull than the earth seemed to put the man next to me at ease. Good, he said. He was wearing a bright orange sweatshirt, and in this context, it lent him a kind of authority. I kept having to remind myself he was not also a docent. He asked, What about asteroids?

Shel started to break apart the second comet with a rubber mallet so he could use the rocks for comet #3. “An asteroid is a failed planet,” he said.

I wonder if he holds himself to this kind of standard. Is he on his way to something, which, to become, he may or may not aggregate all he needs?

Shel! Whatever you may or may not become, we love you as you are today, in your orange coat, the dear force field of your hands rolling out local comets.

Also, if what you say is so, what is a planet?

glergle

What?

Shundo was standing at the sink, rinsing a cup, as the person next to him pressed down on the coffee carafe, and left the kitchen. “Glergle,” he repeated. scooping coffee into his french press, “the sound of the empty coffee thermos.” The sinking feeling that you’re going to have to be the one to make the next one.

I had just been cycling through a round of thoughts on the same phenomenon in relation to the vase on the landing between the first and second floors. As I came downstairs, I noticed as I had for several days that the water was getting cloudy. (The person who usually makes the beautiful arrangements was away.) And I continued walking, thinking about the fine line between being responsive and overfunctioning.

Each time, I think, Yes, I could take it to the courtyard, empty it and make a new arrangement, but do I have 15 minutes to devote to that? Not now. (Apparently I have 15 minutes to devote to writing about not doing it)

This morning as I passed it again, I was thinking about Daniel Goleman’s book Social Intelligence which talks about experiments in social psychology which inquire into the array of conditions in which people respond to someone in need. One setup included a man lying on the street in distress outside a rectory door. The priests who walked out the door largely walked by the man, not registering his distress in their focus on being on time to deliver a sermon. Goleman’s point was that in order to help someone, we have to notice their suffering. And the larger point was the urban trance people get into about encountering more situations than they can respond to.

But what about when you do notice it and decide you can’t respond? When is that skillful? And within that is there another way to respond that is actually possible and that might help? As in, maybe I’ll take the vase to the flower area on my way to this meeting that is about to start in 3 minutes.

Click this Lotus

I’m sorry, you will have to wait to hear about McDonald’s.

Listening to this talk by Enkyo Roshi will be of far greater benefit:

Nothing is Hidden:

or What I learned from Ronald McDonald and Mr. Checkers

Advisory: this post contains “adult language,” one “adult situation,” and partially unbuttoned fast-food uniforms.

At San Francisco Zen Center, in the practice periods, intensive periods of study, each Thursday morning, the regular schedule of zazen and service is abbreviated so a student can give what is called a “way-seeking mind talk.” In these talks, a student tells her story–as she understands and can name it on that morning–of how she came to be sitting in a room of people whose eyes are held at a 45-degree angle at 6:30 a.m. telling them how she got there.

These talks chronicle an arc of awareness, a sense of a mind getting to know itself. They often single out specific traumatic events as turning points, recounting new permutations of what other human beings and circumstance can levy onto the self —an emergency tracheotomy on a premature infant, as recounted half a century later through that blessed, resealed trachea; an off-hand reference to a parent in prison, suicide attempts, –one after another, tales of extremity and their attendant moments of clarity, of determined recommitment to life.

These accounts are registered in the assembly with extremely subtle facial responses, the kind Paul Ekman studies, the kind long-time meditators are said to be better at detecting than the average population. Faint variations that say, I’m here with you, or That was funny; or That was tragic, or That’s just like my life. An upturned corner of the mouth, delicate nostril flare, lift of the chin, sometimes there’s outright laughter, relief at the prevailing nervous suspension, and of course, much sniffling.

There is a feeling of temporal dilation in the room, but still there’s a clear boundary: 7:20, by which time, if the talk hasn’t tapered off into, “well, I think that’s about it,” or “does anyone else have a question?” a bell might ring to indicate the time. This audience was woken up by a different bell at 4:55 a.m, and they haven’t yet eaten breakfast.

When I gave my talk last year, I focused on a cascade of revelations and intentions brought about by a string of very thorny breakups, so-called losses, and strokes of fortune. Yes, they are indistinguishable. And now, whenever I mention a new fact about my life to my friend Stephen, his face takes on a wide-eyed genuine disappointment, confusion and shock: I can’t believe you left that out of your way-seeking mind talk! For him, the way-seeking mind talk is the primary point of reference, the hegemonic text for knowing anyone, as if you are supposed to include every important incident, overshot gesture and course correction, relationship, and part-time job in your life.

Though I only briefly managed to mention at the very end, working with Stanley Kunitz, a profound influence in my life, Stephen remembers my talk as being very heavy on Stanley, and yet considers grave the following omissions: 1. my brother is a magician 2. my first job was as a hostess at McDonalds* **

I thought I might reconsider my talk, now, through inquiring into just these items, including some sub-items: *item #2 included attending training at a place called Hamburger University. ** item # 2 also included my first blow-job, though Stephen says it was right not to include that “blue material.” It wouldn’t play well in the Poughkeepsie that is the Buddha Hall.

What can be learned from my life by examining these biographical points, or as it is commonly phrased in these halls, these conditions of my karmic life?

Okay, let me consider first having an older brother who is a magician. Let me turn that over and over in my hand a while. Some lessons in form. What this does is to give you an opportunity to see someone sewing a cape out of black and white checked gingham and adopting a persona based on the motif of checkers. An identity that then embraces anything articulated in a checkered pattern. A whole identity can be built on fabric design.

When my brother was 18, Mr. Checkers was born. Perhaps it helped him through the transition to adulthood, becoming a holder for the imagination one feels pressure to yield at that transition. It is an identity he still inhabits today. What I want to believe is that the remnant of cloth was on hand already, maybe left over from an altar draping my mother was making, that my brother made his identity from what was “on hand.”

I prefer this, project it onto this memory because this is a cornerstone in my aesthetic. Resourcefulness. Responding to the environment. Finding function in what is in your immediate surroundings. I don’t want to think that he just came up with the name, Mr. Checkers and then went out and bought the fabric. If you can’t make magic from the material in your immediate surroundings, it’s no magic I’m interested in.

Having a brother with an alter ego makes gift buying easy, as unlike the full-fledged complex individual ego who may or may not still respond positively the licorice all-sorts so eagerly received last year, an alter ego is usually based on just a few prominent features with a high predictive value—you find a stuffed dog that happens to be wearing a checkered vest and you need look no further for your brother’s Christmas gift.

Watching him receive these gifts was a lesson in the constriction of identity. He had to like these iterations of his chosen self. If he didn’t like them, he himself had to change. So he accumulated caps, socks, an umbrella, all with different grades of checkers.

I watched him tape baggies into newspapers, which then became makeshift ovens in which he’d bake a cookie by passing a hand over the folded paper. I watched him fold playing cards into apples, prepping them for when he’d find them at the birthday party.

I studied the mirrors, the cut away doors, the knives with rubber blades. This meant I had training as a cynic. As he was lying to the audience, I pictured the baggie in the newpaper. I resented his smug denials of trickery and wanted him to let me explore how the trick was done. I wasn’t interested in the illusion; I was interested in how it was done, the actual details of the physical world, the way the baggie hung on the newspaper, how he measured out the flour, cracked the egg.

I felt betrayed – and ultimately bored — that he couldn’t see that I was a magician too and let me in on these secrets. He invoked a creed. But it just felt like he wanted to keep them for himself. Magicians’ catalogs arrived in the mail. Since I got home from school before he did, this gave me a chance to read them first, to see that there were whole stores devoted to these wands, capes and disappearing chambers. These were items I thought you had to receive by some secret transmission in midnight ceremonies, or have them custom-fabricated by fairies, or you had to be born into them. Our mail carrier handed them to me at the screen door.

It remains true today though that things like those screwdrivers that contain several different sizes of screwdrivers in their handles intrigue me more than these items designed to be good just for one trick. It still shocks me that you can walk into a hardware store and buy these marsupial screwdrivers. I thought my life had already assembled around these items not having been handed down to me.

Knowing I can just have one of these screwdrivers, just as now, as an adult, I can have a whole avocado to myself, makes me have to rethink all the things I thought were hidden, like whether _________ really is _________.

But nothing is hidden, says the 13th century zen teacher, Dogen.

My brother tried to hide his tricks from me, but this strategy only made me less interested, rather than stoke his mystique, I just got annoyed with his secrecy and announced what I had been able to gather to the group assembled at and left the birthday party

So what did McDonald’s teach me?

to be continued…

What would that involve?

I had the great fortune of hearing Marilynne Robinson read yesterday morning at the MLA conference here in San Francisco.

This exchange from the last pages of Gilead feels so resonant of the circumspect way I frequently receive the generosity of existence:

The narrator, John Ames tells us, of his exchange with Jack Boughton,

“Then I said, The thing I would like, actually, is to bless you.”

He shrugged. “What would that involve?”

My friend Vajra offered me an orange as I was leaving the other day. No thanks, I just had one, I told him. I didn’t feel I had room in my backpack to carry anything else. He said, you shouldn’t be so stingy with these satsuma oranges. And I remembered, Yes, part of generosity, or maybe even, not stealing, is actually receiving what you’re offered. He agreed. I still didn’t take the actual tangerine, but did take the tipoff it had prompted.

The satsuma exchange felt like a warm-up so I wouldn’t miss it when the subject came up again that evening when Lou Hartmann gave a dharma talk. He spoke of his sense of dealing with the cognitive changes that come with being 92 years old. He talked of how when offering someone a newspaper article, he’d had something clear in his mind to say about it, but in his estimation, hadn’t managed to say it.

He may not have been talking about the exchange he and I had just had, standing at the bottom of the stairs a few days before, over a book review he’d set aside for me. I hadn’t noticed any struggle on his part, only my own mix of appreciation, overload, and hurry, again, on my way somewhere. Where? And the familiar feeling of having too much in the backpack that is my mind, and so i didn’t receive his offering with the space or appreciation it deserved.

But later I went and got the Book Review from his mailbox where he’d left it for me, and sat there and read it, in the strange and comforting light of reading something a friend has given you, puzzling through, what was it, that of everything that passes under his eyes, he wanted to pass on to me? It’s you, the friend, and whatever you’re reading, sitting there together. Lou, Carolyn Chute, Stacy D’erasmo, and me, sitting on the bench by the courtyard.

So much tenderness always there.

In Gilead, a few lines later, John Ames tells us,

“[Jack] took his hat off and set it on his knee and closed his eyes and lowered his head, almost rested it against my hand, and I did bless him to the limit of my powers, whatever they are.”

Later,

“Theologians talk about a prevenient grace that precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must also be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave–that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honor them is to do great harm.”

In this, I heard articulated my greatest ongoing operational problem as a writer, how to respond, with anything but overwhelm, to this constant sense of “receiving more beauty than our eyes can bear.”

Having asked Robinson countless times for instruction in this problem through her exquisite novel, Housekeeping which turns these “precious things” into sentences that keep opening and opening with, as Anatole Broyard says “a fondness for human beings we thought only Saints felt,” there in the Q &A, I could ask her in person for help. I can’t remember her exact words, what I mainly felt was the recognition in her face when I posed the question, the encouragement of that, the feeling of being blessed. And what I took from what she said was, Yes, it’s impossible, but we try, and we’re always writing something other than what we intend.

And as the sculptor, Elizabeth King told me once, we’re always doing more than we think we are.

What can we do, but work to “the limit of our powers, whatever they are?”

Put it in the small kitchen––someone will eat it.

Shundo said this of a cookie that was broken and therefore not suitable to serve for tea.  It is another exemplar of a category many small kitchen items fall into: the broken and perfect.  It is satisfying to see these  items find such swift dispatch.

Eating such a cookie is probably what led Dogen to say “no [creature] ever comes short of its own completeness.  Wherever it stands it does not fail to cover the ground.”

With an eye toward taxonomy, I wanted to take a picture of it, one peanut butter cookie, cracked along one of its forkscore lines, in a white bowl at the center of the table. But of course it was gone before I could come back with my camera.