...
I ran across this image today... or something quite like it before I fiddled with it... and it struck me as a good way to express something important. People have such jackass ideas about Zen, about enlightenment. I sometimes think, and maybe I'm just consoling myself, that at least half of my difficulty is about the essential need to smack that confusion off them. Anyway, this image might say something else to most people, but to me it screams the bedevilment of life after kenshō for someone whose air sculptures run deep, for someone whose life force has been all we-can-fix-this since she can remember herself in an autonomous moment. Pft.
Maybe we can, but we don't.
So I'm in my underwear by the window, and a buddha is so entertained by me, gleefully making fun of my every breath, partying on my couch. Every ache or pain, every gasp of dissatisfaction, every drop of frustration, every scream of stultified compassion, every gulp of moral outrage, every goddam thing that goes wrong, and he's squealing with delight, giddy, giddy, giddy, slapping his knee, poking me in the ribs, blowing smoke rings and gobbling doughnuts, a galactic bowl full of jelly beans.
Who you goin shoot? Them? You?
It's a falsetto giggly tone of my atmosphere, not the rumbling omniscient sound.
No. The gun is just symbolism.
Who's going to be saved by it? Your public? He-he-he-he-he....
Gales of laughter down the hall and back up it. The sound of Mark Knopfler singing Brothers in Arms twangs around a hanging basket and laces itself around the furniture, and around the giggler too. Tickling him even more. The house and the neighborhood nearly drop away, but my mortification keeps them up. I can shoo it off. I did it before. Spent a couple days there. I need to do it now, tie the gun to a helium baloon.
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