It is early morning and although we are our fifty-something teacher selves, my sister and I are required to get up and go to school as pupils. Given our understandable reluctance to comply, The Authorities have felt it necessary to send a social worker* to jolly us along in the cheery, blinkered, no-nuance manner they call 'no nonsense'. She's a youngish woman who looks like a vicar's daughter and primary school teacher from the fifties, an ex-Head Girl who's now a spinsterish frump in a tweedy coat, her skirt, blouse and cardie a palette of mud, snot green and corpse-skin yellow. She thinks prayers at assembly of the greatest importance and has a long list of stuff she'd like to see banned. Come along, time you were dressed. I pull on a pair of trousers of that hue kids produce when they mix up every colour in the paint-box, and team them with a shirt of bluish, greyish, greenish wretchedness. Are we ready to go? Chop chop! No dawdling!
Then, of course, I wake up. Why, it was all a dream! A dream in which a cheerfully bossy schoolma’am, her mind as conventional as the white lines in the middle of the road, orders me around, forcing me back to my dull old school, wearing an outfit the colour of goose shit and gravy. At no point did I say, ‘look love, leave us out with your weeny little brain, will you? I want colour, warmth and wit, perfumes and spice, santurs, neys, dastgas and ragas. So fuck off.’ No. I meekly acquiesced. The message from the old dream-maker is pretty obvious, I reckon. ‘Brighten up, man, will you? Look what you are letting yourself get pushed into! ’ It makes me feel like responding ‘give me one good reason to brighten up - the dull, washed-out colours are all I can see at the moment, and their dullness seems like to persist.’ A neighbour up here in’t North where I now am said to my mum the other day: ‘it doesn’t get better, Shirley, does it?’ meaning life, aging, losing your mind as this neighbour now is, afraid to go to town alone as she will get lost in streets she’s known for seventy-five years.
So here’s something to meditate upon in 2012. All my Zen books are at home, so I had to make my own addition to the Mumonkan:
''The monk Bing, styled Fang, nicknamed Dong, came to Feng, keeper of the pass at Wong.
‘My mind is troubled,’ Bing Fang Dong said, ‘for I see nought save loss and poverty and weakness and annihilation ahead of me, and I contemplate it with foreboding, and my days are soured, and I am oppressed by the myriad things. How have the patriarchs remarked upon this?’
Master Feng rose gravely from his meditation cushion and throwing off his robe, let forth a great cry:
'Hold it! Flash, bang, wallop, what a picture!
Click, what a picture, what a photograph!
Poor old soul, blimey, what a joke,
Hat blown off in a cloud of smoke!
Clap hands, stamp your feet, bang it on the big bass drum.
What a picture, what a picture,
rum-tiddly-um-pum-pum-pum-pum,
Stick it in your family album!
Stick it in your family,
Stick it in your family,
Stick it in your family,
AL-BUM!!!! '
On hearing this, Bing Fang Dong was fully awakened.''
Commentary:
What does it mean, that the Zen masters of old were always so fiercely joyful? They were not exempt from the ills that flesh is heir to, no more than anyone else. Indeed they must have suffered in physical terms more than we do, living as they did before aspirin, penicillin, dentistry, vaccines or anaesthesia. Yet they thought existence a fine joke. How can this be? You must answer at once, or it is disgraceful!
Happy New Year.
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*I reckon she's the mother of the announcer at Peterborough station who almost always says 'the train at platte-form four is the sixteen twenty five...' probably in obedience to a memory of the parental admonition: 'talk properly; there's a tee in 'platform', Beverley!'
6 Comment(s):
if all your zen books are at HOME, you need to make it a goal of yours to get back home one day
KΑΛΗ ΧΡΟΝΙΑ!
Indeed. A comment worthy of Dogen Zenji!
Επίσης!
I have never read so many ways of describing that colour - you are a superb wordsmith....and also, when you going to write a book?
You know, I've only just realised how many references to depressing colours there are in that piece: you should be writing a book, not me, you are much sharper and more literate.
I can't concentrate long enough to write a book - and I haven't noticed enough to write anything of book length. And your black dog has come to visit. He's sleeping a bit, but he's here.
The bloody black dog - sorry to hear that. My latest attempt to deal with him involves meditation and a kind of quiet acceptance of the fear and gloom. I can't yet say if this works. Anyway, I hope he leaves you soon.
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