Zen and Writing

The proper placement of a tree in a forest by a god, God, forest spirit or Goddess or dryad must be pursued with appropriate attention paid to the overall pattern of overhead foliage, so as to provide an optimum level of light and shadow for warring paint-ballers.

I am sad that I was unable to find that possibly lost and probably injured kitty cat who was wandering near whole foods. He/She looked sad and if only I had seen where he or she went I might have been able to aid their return to the safety and comfort of a warm bed for the night, protecting them from cars or a greater distance from home. Of course, it could have been a stray. One of those cats who makes their living on the streets of Philadelphia, picking through the Whole Foods garbage and fighting over scraps. If it was one of those cats then it will be fine, cause those cats are tough, those cats are hardcore. More hardcore than me, by a long shot, but at the same time being much cuter, too. True American heroes.

Peter Mathiessen’s major application of Zen to writing (no big surprise here…) has to do with beginner’s mind. The author must, of course, be highly distrustful of words. The words have grown sour, and as symbols they have lost meaning by becoming too commonplace. They must be placed in such a way as to evoke a new understanding, a new consideration of what each word refers to. “Wonderful” is insufficient, better instead to describe a state of wonder. To describe a state in which a person, with the openness to the fantastic that exists prior to closing one’s conception of the possible, the conceivable, the probable and the true to a rigid framework set in place by his or her highly limited prior experience.

The goal of the author, then, is to show the reader something they have never seen before, or to show them something they have seen before in an entirely new way. The role of the author is to do the legwork of investigating, stretching, redefining, and elaborating upon the many words of the English language, and in so doing providing a spacious new understanding of the world to the reader. After all, we are plagued by this convoluted means of thought in which all things are filtered through our semantic, syntactic and verbal understandings of the universe. All experiences are sadly filed away into a very small number of unexciting pigeonholes. One aim of Zen is, of course, to shatter these pigeonholes and to view each thing as it is, as a unique manifestation found only in the present moment. The aim of the Zen writer, then, must be to attempt to share this newfound freedom of perception and understanding with the reader, who has turned to this book for something new because they are blind to the fact that there is something new happening all the time, that this moment happening right now is happening for the first and final time, and that it is happening for their amusement.

He also speaks of suchness, that quality of suchness, of being just so, that is utterly indescribable, defying all words because words are intrinsically bound and the true quality of all things found in the real world is that no clear boundaries can be found.