It really was a horrid job, but I didn’t have much money—nothing outside of the little modeling I was doing on the side. And the worst of it was that the building was hermetically sealed. None of the windows would open, so we had to breathe that same foul recycled air all day. I was constantly drowsy. When I couldn’t fight the sleep anymore, I would go up to one of the empty floors of the building, pick one of the empty offices, stretch out on the gray industrial carpeting, and take a quick nap. In most cases such naps would be disastrous, because I’d come back to all the wrong furniture in all the wrong rooms. Then I’d have to act angry and say things like “Okay, you guys, hey, come on, don’t tell me you guys are fucking up again! Can’t I go make a phone call to the boss man without you messing up this goddamned furniture?” They would just laugh and whisper behind my back. They could see right through me, and we all knew it, but I went on with my act anyway, and they grumbled as they proceeded to rearrange the furniture.
As for my nights with Meg, they were strained and strange. When I wasn’t out meditating at the Zendo, I was reading books on Zen. Thinking that it was destroying my meditative consciousness, I cut back on my beer intake, and it was like losing a relationship with my best friend. The evenings with Meg were sober and quiet. I’d also given up telling her stories about my day, because I felt that it was bad to dwell so much on the past. It wasn’t very Zen. Meg missed the stories most of all. She missed them more than I did and tried to convince me that to be able to tell a good story about the immediate past and be very present in the telling of it was to be very present in a very Zen way. “After all,” Meg said, “aren’t there hundreds of little stories about Zen, little Zen anecdotes all over the place? Aren’t the stories told to illustrate the philosophy of Zen?”
“Oh yes, yes,” I agreed. But I was not one who could tell such Zen stories, because I was just a novice and I knew nothing of the subject. I thought I’d better shut up for a while and meditate until I got closer to some insight. So at night I would read Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Meg would read A Brief History of the Oriental Rug.
I really don’t know why we continued to live in the big city. I think it was just our inertia. I was using the Gulf & Western Building as a sort of thermometer and figured we would move once it got filled up with furniture—that is, if Meg was ready to give up her museum job. Ever since Bobby Kennedy was shot and Phil, our cat, ran behind Meg’s first framed piece of art and smashed it, she had been shying away from art. She saw these disasters as a kind of sign, I think. She was suffering from despair and mourning the loss of Robert Kennedy. I wanted her to go back to art. “Please,” I said, “why don’t you start drawing again?” I’d begun to realize that all this time Meg had been doing a kind of Zen with her charcoal landscape drawings. I didn’t see how she could give them up to study rugs, of all things—rugs! But she wanted to travel now and saw those Oriental rugs as the magical flying carpets that would get us out of New York City. I think she secretly saw, as many of us did then, the decline and fall of America, but was unable to talk about it. She just wanted to flee from it and have a foreign experience. And she saw order in the patterns of those rugs beyond anything she could ever accomplish in her drawings. They were patterns that calmed her, ancient patterns.
As for me, I was planning to take a big retreat at the Dogen Zen center in the Poconos as soon as we filled the top floor of the Gulf & Western Building with that god-awful gray-and-chrome furniture. In order to get it done I’d even taken up smoking cigars. This seemed to make the furniture men trust me more, or at least respect me and listen when I’d act angry. I was smoking those cheap rum-soaked crooked cigars and suddenly the right furniture started ending up in the right place without me even having to be there.
We finished filling the top floor in early spring and all of us celebrated with a few bottles of Andre champagne. I’ve never been more happy to be out of a job.
I rode up to the Dogen Zen center in the Poconos with a bunch of fellow meditators from the Upper West Side Zendo. Everyone was jabbering away, because we all knew we were going to have to stop talking for seven days as soon as we got there. The thought of seven intensive days of meditation with no talking had me more than a little claustrophobic.
There was a long dirt road that led into an old converted hotel next to a trout stream. It was spring and trees and bushes were just budding.
The hotel was divided into separate dorm rooms for men and women, as well as a kitchen and a main recreation room that had now been converted into the meditation chamber. It was all done in a blend between a sort of Japanese restaurant and an American hunting lodge. Best of all, there was an authentic resident Japanese Zen master to guide and instruct us in our meditations. I was longing for enlightenment. I was hot for it, and couldn’t wait to begin sitting.
Sitting was exactly what we did. We sat and sat. We sat for fourteen hours a day. We were up at five-thirty in the morning and were sitting by six. After a short morning sitting there was breakfast, then a sitting until lunch, then a short rest, then an afternoon sitting, then dinner, then an evening sitting, and to bed by nine. I never dreamed I would do such a crazy thing to myself: to sit with my eyes open staring at a white wall while counting my breath from one to ten over and over again. I never could have done it without the others, and of course our Zen master, who seemed to be the most highly charged and awake man I’d ever come across. He was vibrating.
His name was Hara Sho Roshi and he was a fiery little speedball with a shaved head, dressed in the most colorful Japanese robes. He looked like a big bullet, like a decorated bomb, like something you might load a big circus cannon with.
We wore only plain brown cotton monks’ robes, which felt kind of sexy to me. At first I didn’t wear any underwear under the robes, but then I realized that might detract from my concentration.
There were about thirty of us, men and women, all sitting in a row cross-legged on round black cushions, just staring at a white wall, counting our breaths. I sat there counting my breath, watching my thoughts flow, watching the numbers come up out of my nose. There goes a number 7, there goes a number 6, there goes a number 5 floating right across the room. Now, when I say I was “watching my thoughts,” they weren’t exactly thoughts so much as they were images and memories that would come in from the storage in my mind. In fact, I’d say that everything I have told you so far about myself came to mind in one form or another in the first two days of that seven-day sitting.
The best time at the Zendo was mealtime. No one was allowed to talk, so all you could do was chew and taste, just chew and taste your food. It was a simple vegetarian diet with lots of brown rice, but I’d never had such a pure and intense taste sensation before. Original sin, I began to think, was not Adam eating the apple but Adam not eating it slowly enough to really enjoy it. We couldn’t do a running commentary about how things tasted; we just tasted. It was the same when we walked outside for our fresh-air breaks. No one said things like “Oh, what a beautiful spring day! Oh, look at those red buds!” or “My God, isn’t that silver shine on the trout stream just wonderful?” Instead we became the silver stream and the red buds. Just like it said in the books, it happened. Without words or commentary we became a part of it all and blended with those spring breezes and the land and the light around us. It was all new and glorious and very confusing. At times I thought I was getting closer to enlightenment.
Then around the third day of sitting things began to get more than a little claustrophobic. I was stuck in my past. Memory felt almost like a substance now. Memory felt like the only thing that was real. I was trapped with myself and wanted desperately to get out, but had no idea what there was outside of myself. Memories of my past played over and over again. Memories flowed into horrors of hindsight and regret, thoughts of how I would do things differently if only I could relive them, if only I could come back with the knowledge that I had now. That would truly be heaven. Then I’d realize I’d forgotten to count my breath an
d I’d be back in the numbers again.
Every morning Hara Sho Roshi would give us a little talk after breakfast, just a little talk to help fuel our meditations. The first morning he said that to study Zen is to study ourselves and to study ourselves is to forget ourselves. This was wonderfully paradoxical, I thought, but I was frustrated that I couldn’t quite figure it out. He said only then will we be free to return to what he called “Big Mind.” He said before we were born we had no feeling and were one with the universe. He called this “mind only” or “Big Mind.” Then at birth we are separated into individual minds, but we can still have the experience of Big Mind as we sit here in small mind. We can still experience the ground from which we came. He told us that many sensations and images would come and go, but they are just mind waves from our small mind and we should not get attached to them. We should just let them come and go until we reach the calm of Big Mind at last.
I had no idea what Big Mind could look like, would look like or feel like once it came, but I sure was hankering for it. At the same time I knew that if I wanted to come into it, I’d have to give up all my hankerings and just sit and count my breath from one to ten.
And so it went into the third day: a torturous review of my small, sad mind, my small life with no Big Mind in view, nothing larger than myself and my memory over and over. Then, some time on the afternoon of the third day, the black-and-white porn movies began.
I had no sense that I was creating them. It was as though they were being projected on the wall, and for a while I wondered if the two people sitting on either side of me could see them, too.
They started with images of the most splendidly erect penises and full, rolling balls. I hadn’t seen many penises in my life outside of a few photographs and that one time at the Boston bus station when I absentmindedly looked down while urinating and the man at the next urinal was fingering his giant erection while smiling up at me and winking. I stopped peeing. My dick shriveled and I got out of there real fast. Why, I wondered, could I take so much pleasure in looking at my own cock but be completely repulsed by the sight of someone else’s? And here now on the Zendo wall were these giant disembodied erect cocks with balls with little fluttering wings like butterfly wings growing out of them. These cocks were flying and diving all over the place. They were soaring on the white plaster walls of this Poconos Zendo, and I didn’t know what to make of them. I think because they were disconnected and kind of fetishized things unto themselves, I could enjoy them. If they were attached to some big hairy male body I might have been repulsed.
But I couldn’t figure out who was making them up. I didn’t feel like I was doing it. And the more I tried not to hold onto them (sure that they were small-mind ephemera), the more baroque the images seemed to become. Soon the wall was also full with vaginas, as though my mind were creating a weird Garden of Eden, inhabited only by sex organs. The vaginas looked like fleshy butterflies in flight. They were deliciously swollen, pink, puckering vaginas, with a little edge of black hair around them. They would fly and then stop and flutter and pose and then start flying again all around the zooming cocks. The whole wall became a film of a springtime meadow of cocks and cunts. The cocks were soaring and diving into the butterfly vaginas. When they got to one, they’d glide in and pump real hard for a moment and then fly on to another vagina, like bees pollinating a flower. The cocks never seemed to come or spurt or wilt. They remained erect, like hot buttered corn, just pumping in and out. In and out, in and out they’d go.
After a while the cocks and cunts got connected to bodies. Then things really got hot, let me tell you. I’d never seen anything like it in my life, so I knew I wasn’t recalling it from some pictures I’d observed in the past. A body pile of naked men and women, the most outrageous combinations ever imagined, began to appear on the white wall in front of me. They were gobbling and pumping and gobbling and licking and sucking and pumping, like the sounds of a toilet plunger. No, hundreds of sucking toilet plungers. And I got so excited by this that I had a beast of an erection popping right up through the fly of my underwear, straight up into the brown cotton meditation robes, turning them into what looked like a Bedouin tent.
I have to say I’d never encountered anything like what I saw and heard on the walls of that Poconos Zendo. And I had no interest in transcending it. As I watched this, all my feeling, as well as my mind, drained like a giant waterfall, down, down until it filled up my cock and balls. It felt all right and good and I didn’t want to go beyond it. I was no longer experiencing small mind, I was sure, or my past history. I was experiencing for the first time in my life pure cock mind. I was stuck there, very much stuck there.
During the course of our daily meditations we were allowed one three-minute audience with Hara Sho Roshi in which we could discuss our particular meditation problems. We were asked not to discuss anything psychological, because he was not trained or versed in such matters. We were only to discuss the quality of our particular meditation practice. I really didn’t want to tell him about the flying cocks and cunts, yet at the same time I felt drawn to participate in at least one session with him just to see what he was like face-to-face. So on the fourth day I went to see him.
Everyone who wanted to see him would pass in silence to a small room just off the main meditation room and sit until we were touched on the shoulder by one of the resident American Zen monks. Then we were to go in and sit cross-legged directly across from Hara Sho Roshi and speak our Zen minds directly to him.
As I sat there waiting, I reviewed what I was going to say. Should I describe the porn films, I wondered, or reduce it to a simple statement like “I’m seeing a lot of strange things on the wall”? Then I decided that I would just try to be in the moment and take it from there, just see what came up while sitting across from him.
I was touched on the shoulder and led in and I was overwhelmed by what I saw. There he sat before me, Hara Sho Roshi, dressed in Japanese robes of silver, cream, and crimson. There he sat rock-hard in full lotus, like a beautiful Zen statue, like a Buddha. He sat with his back to the window, which looked out to the trout stream. The window emitted the most incredible white spring light, which spread and emanated like a silver aura off of Hara Sho Roshi’s robes. It was as though his robes were radiating that light, and as I looked closer I could see it growing out of the back of his head, like a silver halo. I just sat there stunned, looking into his dancing eyes, and for a moment the whole room seemed to be filled with love; and yet how could it have been? I hardly knew this strange head-shaved Japanese man.
Hara Sho Roshi said sternly and directly, “Sit! Speak! What do you have to say to me?”
I sat, feeling like this humble little boy back in Christian Science Sunday school. My whole body felt like the body of a young boy and I said softly, hearing the odd sound of my voice for the first time in four days, “I’m seeing a lot of strange things on the wall.”
And he, speaking now in the low, deeply centered voice of a Zen roshi, said, “Those are only small-mind waves that will pass. Soon you will be in Big Mind. Continue your meditations with vigor.” And then he dismissed me and I went back to the endless porn films on the wall.
Then on the fifth day it happened. It came completely unexpectedly, as I assume something like that must. It came like a great clear sky at the end of a storm. I was just sitting there on my Zen cushion with my spine and cock fully erect watching a particularly complicated daisy chain of naked men and women all intertwined in the most complicated pleasure connections. They were all moving together in one mindless pumping motion, as though they’d taken off their minds along with their clothes and checked them at the door. They were now engaged in this mindless superhump—the way we all might be in this meditation room, I thought, if only it was a hotel for swingers. (I was beginning to think that that’s what it might have been before it was turned into a Zendo. Maybe I was seeing leftover energy on the wall from the history of that place.) And just as I was contemplating that idea, ev
erything suddenly broke and went clear—just as clear as that time I had seen the stars on LSD. Suddenly there was no me observing. There was only the room and bare essential presence. It was as though I was the whole room and the whole room was me, and we were all sitting breathing together. The room had breath, everyone had breath, it was one big swelling breath, and we were all one with it. There was no boundary, and as I breathed I could feel the whole room breathe and expand with breath so that now the room was breathing and there was hardly any me left, only breath and a room and all of us breathing together, and at the same time there was just enough awareness left in me to feel the magnificence of it all, the magnificence and beatitude of what I guess was Big Mind, and my God, how sweet it was. I don’t know how long it lasted. It couldn’t have been very long, maybe a few seconds, and then it burst, just like a precious soap bubble.
It was broken by some grasping analytic mind in me that leaped on it like a tiger, ripping and tearing. This beast of analysis leaped upon this precious moment and tore it to bits: “What was that? How do I name that? How do I explain it to Meg or to anyone? How do I tell its story?” And then, poof, the Big Mind moment was gone, gone into a new memory, the memory of it blended now with other memories from my past, which blended with the porn films on the wall. I sat there for the next three days longing for what I thought was Big Mind to come again. I felt so very sad; I had looked through a window into a landscape that seemed larger than me, and yet a part of me. I’d experienced it and it might never come again. I felt so very, very sad that I sat there with tears flowing down and dripping onto my perpetual erection which poked up under my Zen robes.
Impossible Vacation Page 10
