Do You Want to Make Something
Out of It?
Zen meditation and the artistic impulse
by Zoketsu Norman
Fischer
published in Success, Singing Horse Press, 2000
Allen Ginsberg
begins his essay entitled Meditation and Poetics with this paragraph, "It's
an old tradition in the West among great poets that poetry is rarely thought of
as 'just poetry.' Real poetry practitioners are practitioners of mind awareness,
or practitioners of reality, expressing their fascination with the phenomenal
universe and trying to penetrate to the heart of it. Poetics isn't mere picturesque
dilettantism or egotistical expressionism for craven motives grasping for sensation
and flattery. Classical poetry is a "process" or experiment- a probe
into the nature of reality and the nature of the mind." And the poet Philip
Whalen makes the same point in a poem when he say something like "I don't
want to be another pretty poety-boo; I want to be a world."
For me this
sense of making poetry or art, any art, as an heroic and grandiose undertaking,
whose cost and goal is everything, sounds about right- providing you don't get
too excited about it, seeing it as anything more or less than any human being
is doing, or would do, if he or she reflected for a few minutes about what is
a worthwhile and reasonable way to spend a human life. So: 1) art isn't just another
job, it's an endless exploration, and as with any exploration there are proliferating
avenues of pursuit and no final successes and 2) art is a necessity for humans,
and we all need to find a way to participate in it.
The reason we need art
so desperately I would say is that the world and we ourselves persist in being
made. There is something exhausting and troublesome in the madeness of the world
and in the madeness of ourselves. What is made has always the quality of limitation
or unsatisfactoriness. Madeness captures us into a vicious cycle of desiring more
madeness or better madeness, and the madeness we get only makes us want to make
improvements or additions. Art making is an anti-making. It is an anti-making
because it is a making of what is useless- this is what make art art, that it
is useless, that it doesn't do anything, that it is something inherently unmade
and this is the source of its liveliness. Any piece of art stares us in the face
with the fact of its being what it is uselessly, it is a record of a person's
commitment to the confrontation with the made, a confrontation one is bound to
come away from second best, and yet one does it, and reaches a peak of exaltation
in the doing of it, and the art work facing the viewer or hearer is a phenomenal
testament to that useless confrontation, which by virtue of its supreme failure,
calls our life into question. If you really look at a piece of art or hear a piece
of music or poetry or see a dance, you walk away wondering about your life. This
is what these objects are supposed to do, this is why artists make such sacrifices
in the doing of what they do- because this doing is the undoing at least temporarily
of what has done them in in their lives and would do them in to the point of death
or madness if it weren't undone in the process of making art.
One of the qualities
of art work that has always impressed me is its unstable nature. The artwork is
its physical presence- its words or notes or paint- and yet it isn't that. If
you are hit in the face by a plank you will definitely be hit by it and will feel
the effects of it no matter whether you believe in planks or not, no matter whether
you are in the mood for the sensation of pain or not. But if you make an effort
to experience an art work you may not experience anything at all- it may strike
you as a meaningless hunk of this or that, hardly worth a second look. Or it may
strike you as profoundly moving one day, and completely beside the point the next
day. Imagine an artwork sent from one gallery to another for a major show. Of
all the people that will come into contact with that work- movers, curators, technicians
who hang the work, security guards, the perhaps thousands of people who will file
by to see it - of all these only a few, a very few, will actually experience it
as an art work, and even those few might come back to the gallery the next day
and not at all be able to fathom why the day before the work moved them so, or
even if they could say why it moved them, and explain it, that would only be a
memory. The actual experiencing of the painting has occupied only a few seconds
or perhaps minutes in the hours and hours of human contact with the work. In other
words, real experience of art is extremely rare, and it is fleeting, unstable.
The poet Paul Valery said of poetry, that it is "completely irregular, inconstant,
involuntary, and fragile, and that we lose it, as we find it, by accident."
I think it is a fantastic thing that people place such enormous value on something
like this, something so evanescent that we are really hard pressed to say whether
it actually exists or not. I suppose, to some extent, we value art out of long
habit, or perhaps because it has become a good business: in art's aspect of non-art,
it can become just as much a commodity as anything else people will pay good money
for, probably even moreso, because some sorts of art are even more subject to
sudden economic inflation that a software or gene-splicing stock. Yet, at bottom,
there remains the mystery of the uselessness of art, of the shifting and unmade
quality of it, and of the tremendous need that we have for the unmade and the
undone, no matter how unstable or accidental our experience of it may be. The
experience of it is precious and life changing always.
I want to go a little
further in considering what the actual experience of this unmadeness might be.
In ordinary waking life we do make clear and hard and fast distinctions between
separate things. This distinction making is what perception and thought is all
about, and all day long we have perception and thought, piling one thing on top
of the other, until there is a great weight of them. We define ourselves in the
same way among or within our perceptions and thoughts, and get buried in the process.
Life is very practical and very weighty, and there is a great deal of the conflict
that comes from the bumping into each other of the various perceptions and thoughts
which cannot occupy the same space at the same time. So there are decisions and
considerations and there is desire for organization, yet there is less organization
always than one would like, because as soon as the world is organized, along comes
another one, and there is disorganization again, then the need to make something
else to counteract what has just been made, and the weight of it wants to pull
the house down. It is a persistent thought of mine that the problem of being human
is historically always more or less the same problem, but it is tempting to imagine
that in our current historical period all of what I have been saying is more true
than it appeared to be in the past. There seems to be, simply, more going on,
more piling up, more that cries for organization and will not be organized.
The
work of art, by contrast, is entirely organized and therefore peaceful. Formally
it may not be organized at all, but our experience in appreciating it, if we are
fortunate enough to be in the situation of having such an accident befall us all
of a sudden, is that of organization, radical organization. Artistic form is the
expression of this sort of organization that is essentially an unpiling of the
piling up of distinctions that make up our lives. The work of art unpiles everything
and undoes us in the process; it raises a million questions that amount to one
question: who are we and what we we doing here? This question is the essential
question that undoes us every time because we never can answer it. So it keeps
us fresh and it allows our life to fully enter itself.
What I mean by organization
I suppose is a feeling of connection or inclusion or completion beyond thought.
In the light of the experience of the work of art the world makes sense because
it is no longer made of weighty and disparate parts; it is a world of nuance and
shimmer: what I would say we call beauty though this word has become fairly useless
because it has become confused with pretty. Beauty is not necessarily pretty:
it is, rather, this accidental sensation, before we think about it and therefore
make something of it, of connection, unmadeness, uselessness, perfection, freedom.
Again Valery, "I recognize it (he speaks here of the poetic experience,
but I think his remarks can be extended to any sort of art) in myself by this:
that all possible objects of the ordinary world, external or internal, beings,
events, feelings, and actions, while keeping their usual appearance, are suddenly
placed in an indefinable but wonderfully fitting relationship with the modes of
our general sensibility. That is to say that these well known things and beings-
or rather the ideas that represent them- somehow change in value. They attract
one another, they are connected in ways quite different from the ordinary; they
become (if you will permit the expression) musicalized , resonant, harmonically
related..."
What Valery is describing here is a tracelike state that is
more real to us than the real world we live in every day. It is a state that is
oddly brought on by a formal arrangement of ordinary stuff in such a way as to
discreate the ordinary stuff, take it apart, which is so startling, when we actually
notice it, that we become literally entranced. The Jesuit poet Gerard Many Hopkins
once hypnotized a duck with a straight white chalkline drawn on a black table.
He held the duck down against great resistance, drew the chalkline, pointed the
duck's eyes at the chalkline, then lifted his hand. The duck kept staring at the
chalkline and did not move. Hopkins wrote, "They explain that the bird keeping
the abiding offscape of the hand grasping her neck fancies she is still held down
and cannot lift her head as long as she looks at the chalkline, which she associates
with the power that holds her. This duck lifted her head at once when I put it
down on the table without chalk. But this seems inadequate. It is most likely
the fascinating instress of the straight white stroke." (Hopkins p 123) Instress
is the term Hopkins coined to refer to the potentially torqued nature of anything
purely perceived without too much definition; he considered it clear evidence
of the nature of God. The duck in this case was mesmerized, Hopkins says, not
by becoming habituated to the hand on her neck, but by virtue of her utter fascination
with the chalk line as such. For us, art is that chalkline; it points to the instress,
to use Hopkin's term, of each thing in our perceptual world.
I said a moment
ago that the experience of art is an experience of connection beyond thought.
The curiosity of it is that the experience, as a human experience, can't take
place anywhere else but in thought or perception. This is exactly why it is so
hard to pin down what an artwork actually is, and it is its unpindownable nature,
always the case, but lately more appreciated and examined than heretofore, that
probably accounts for the history of art in the century that is now drawing to
a close. This has been the job of this time: to point out directly and baldly
that doubt and accident lies at the heart of what art has always been. And in
doing this one comes close to the boundary between art and life and immerses the
boundary itself in doubt and accident. The words art and life become quite indistinct
and imprecise. One could substitute for both the word reality, or being. That
the job of all art or living is to appreciate and authenticate what is- our life
simply as it appears- to serve as reminder, as instance or exemplar, of that.
Viktor Shlovsky, the Russian literary theorist, said, "to make a stone stony:
that is the purpose of art."
Why don't we experience a stone as stony?
Why do we persistently forget to come alive to the world as it is in front of
our faces? Why do we have to go to all the trouble of making art so that we can
return to where we are and have been all along? I think it is because of the way
thought works in us. To be present in the midst of our being what we are is a
pure sensation that we can never exactly apprehend. It is fleeting and ungraspable.
Thought is always coming a second afterward, telling us something, singing a song
of the past. Thought includes the aroma of our being alive, but it also includes
so much that is made, so much of doing and piling up, that it tempts us necessarily
away from ourselves. To find within our thought and perception (for perception
is already thought) a settled free and unmade place takes effort, and this is
the effort of art. Valery again, "There is no other definition of the present
except sensation itself, which includes, perhaps, the impulse to action that could
modify that sensation. On the other hand, whatever is properly thought, image,
sentiment, is always in some way, a production of absent things. Memory is the
substance of all thought........thought is, in short, the activity that causes
what does not exist to come alive in us... Between voice and thought, between
thought and voice, between presence and absence, oscillates the poetic pendulum.."
This
reminds me very much of the saying of the Heart Sutra, form is emptiness, emptiness
is form...
All of what I have been saying is I suppose a Zen perspective on
art, although I have a strong resistance to the idea of a zen perspective on anything
for reasons that are probably obvious from what I have said already. So take the
words zen perspective please with a grain of salt, and understand them as shorthand
for a way of looking at the world that is essentially unmade and undefined. We
can't get away with that of course. We will always have to be someplace and called
something so we will have to use terms somehow in the hope that we will remain
willing to have them deconstructed right before our eyes, and to find their deconstruction
amenable. In the practice of zen meditation we are not trying to do anything other
than to undo everything and simply be present as directly as possible with all
phenomena that arise. This necessarily involves a moment by moment letting go
of definition and perception and thought. I do not mean that we would attempt
to become stupid blankminded and unthinking. Rather that we would let the world
come and go as it naturally does, without trying to stop it at some arbitrary
point of our own conscious or unconscious choosing. Which of course is what we
do try to do by making a world up, piling it up, as I have said, and becoming
its victim. In zen meditation we happily enter a radically simple, even an absurd,
situation- just sitting still and breathing- so that we have the possibility of
seeing how this troublesome world is made. Although we may not be able to do anything
with this meditation practice, it does serve as a kind of training, helping us,
by familiarity, to become directly used to the actual situation that prevails
more or less within being. Meditation practice is a return, over and over again
every moment, to that particularly odd situation, which we can see as time goes
on exists in the middle of any situation, no matter how simple or complex.
Zen
master Dogen wrote a well known text called Genjokoan, which I translate as Koan
of the Present Moment. In this text he kindly extends the notion of koan, or fundamental
meditation object, to our simply being within the present moment of our lives.
A classical koan presents us with an insoluble problem. The only way to extend
ourselves into that problem completely is to stop trying to solve it, in other
words, to stop trying to make something of it, and simply to allow it fully to
be what it is, which would necessarily mean that we would take it so personally
that it would be our life. In Genjokoan Dogen points out that we do not need to
take on some old saying of the masters in order to confront directly the issue
at hand; in fact each moment of our lives, if we would let go of our definitions
and protections and elisions, and lean fully into it, begs the question. What
is to be done? What is this moment after all?
Here is a passage from Genjokoan.
"To study Buddhism is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the
self. To forget the self is to be confirmed by all things. This confirmation is
the dropping off of body and mind of one's self and all others. It is enlightenment
that dissolves all its traces, and the tracelessness goes on endlessly."
"To study Buddhism is to study the self." This means that one looks
deeply and honestly at all points at the way in which one's life actually unfolds
- looks, enters, and allows. This is always interesting, always provides a path
forward, no matter what it is that arises. That anything arises at all is always
miracle enough, whether we like it or no, so there is no judgment or resistance
necessary, and even where there is judgment or resistance there is a settling
into that with appreciation and awe.
"To study the self is to forget
the self" means that once you practice in that way your definitions and hedges
against yourself fall away, and you can be perfectly happy going on with life,
simply life, without any need to make anything out of it.
"To forget
the self is to be confirmed by all things." Allowing things to be as they
are without any protection is to appreciate the materials at hand. In everyday
living, as in artmaking, which might not be so different after all from everyday
living, there is a sense of form and presence in each and every thing that comes
forward in the present moment.
"Dropping body and mind of self and others"
is harder to see for it expresses the freedom that one would feel in the renunciation
of everything, being willing to live as one is right now, without any need to
hold onto life now or in the future, and to see that everything shares in this
already.
Finally ("enlightenment dissolves its traces, and the tracelessness
goes on endlessly") this sense of life as anything distinctive dissolves-
it doesn't look like anything. There is the sense that in the useless and unmade
space and time of actual living there is a subtle endlessness and namelessness
that is delightfully available to everyone at all times.
I take this vision
of Dogen to be more or less descriptive also of the process of making art- of,
anyway, the sense of artmaking that I am advancing here, which is I suppose, after
all, following Ginsberg and Valery, an inherently religious one. I do not want
to conflate art and religion of course. I recognize that they are not the same
thing, and yet I suppose it is inescapable that I am arguing that what we call
the aesthetic impulse is at bottom identical to what we call the religious impulse.
Certainly the cultural history of Zen, particularly in Japan, would attest to
the close relationship between the two activities.
Insofar as both art and
religious practice always manifest in the world as we know it as particular things,
both have serious built in problems. Religion solidifies into doctrinaire narrow-mindedness
or institutional power-brokering, or usually both, and art solidifies into money,
if it is successful, and despair if it is not, a defeat in either case. I do not
think I am the first to point out that art in our radically mercantile society
is more or less doomed to becomes commodified, and that it is generally made for
the wealthy, and becomes for them in various ways a kind of sanitized and enriched
currency. Even artists who do not make economically valuable artwork must create
economically attractive explanations to attract funders to pay for the generally
high costs of the art habit. Even poets, who need only about $10 worth of materials
to create their works, must vie for these dollars. Despite this, I do not think
the situation is hopeless, and that is why I have taken the time to think about
this topic. Because I believe that if the artist can be clear about the nature
of the project that he or she is finally concerned with, and actively work at
being clear about it, for clarity is never a given, it needs constant revision,
just as if the religious practitioner, which is any of us, can be cl ear about
the project he or she is engaged in, I think it is possible to proceed with liveliness
and integrity, despite the difficulties. Life well and seriously lived has never
been without these difficulties; it is part of the fun and simply a given in the
situation. A certain amount of complaining is probably normal but it would certainly
be counterproductive to give one's self over to complaining entirely.
A final
quote from Valery, " The mind is terribly variable, deceptive and self-deceiving,
fertile in insoluable problems and illusory solutions. How could a remarkable
work emerge from this chaos if this chaos that contains everything did not also
contain some serious chance to know one's self and to choose within one's self
whatever is worth taking from each moment and using carefully?"
And a
poem of Dogen:
Being as it is,
What's that?
In a waterdrop
Shaken
from a duck's beak:
An image of the moon