Loon Lake (17 page)

But the caretaker had turned and headed back to his garden shed with
its straw brooms and clay pots and small pyramids of gravel. Warren experienced the uncanny sense of a sharply learned lesson. He slept that night at a Western hotel in the downtown section of Kyoto and found in the nightstand drawer a volume in English that seemed to be the Buddhist equivalent of the Bible. Gautama was an Indian prince kept at home by his father so as not to see life in any aspect but its most luxurious. But one day he went out and saw a beggar, an old crippled man, a monk and a corpse. He was thus able to conclude despite his own royal existence that life was suffering. Why couldn’t he have figured that out without leaving the palace? Warren wondered. If death exists, life has to be suffering. Did his father hide death from Gautama? How was that done? The book said the cause of all suffering was desire, the desire to have the desire to be. Perhaps a prince would never experience the desire to have, but how could he avoid the desire to be? If desire by its nature is not gratified before it realizes itself, does it not exist in palaces too? Does it not exist especially in palaces? Nevertheless, he liked the story. He trusted Gautama Siddhartha and the simplicity of his reasoning. Not many people could get away with that sort of reasoning. He trusted the eightfold path for defeating desire and transcending suffering.

Early the next morning Warren went back to the monastery. The place was a shambles. Doors and shoji walls were splintered and torn everywhere. There were recumbent bodies on the verandah, and in the garden a monk lay in a pool of vomit. All the walls were torn and hanging, bodies lay about as if dead. There was even a body lying across the crest of the tile roof. The monastery looked as if it had been bombed. But even as he gazed at this dismal scene he heard the sound of small tinkling bells coming from somewhere in the main monastery building, and though the bells were soft and delicate they had the astonishing effect of rousing the Zen Buddhists from their drunken stupor. One by one they groaned, rose to their feet and staggered off.

And then around the corner came a man in white holding a staff of temple bells. His head was shaved, he was stout, the folds of his neck were like ruffles of a collar. He walked right up to Warren and inquired in heavily accented English if he could be of help. I want to discuss with someone the possibility of enrolling here for Zen training,
Warren said. Of course, the monk said. If you don’t mind waiting more than two moments but less than six, I will approach the Master for you.

More than two but less than six, Warren thought as he waited in an anteroom beside the front gate. That’s a few. Shortly thereafter he was escorted by the monk to a small room with a beautiful Bodhisattva
pratima
and a vase of flowers and straw mats and cushions, and without having to be told, even by himself, he dropped to his knees and bowed to the resident Master, who was seated and facing him with a face of genial amusement. It was the old caretaker. On the one day off of the year for all his followers and monks, he, in perfect realization, had stayed where he was. The Master was smoking a cigarette. Another monk came by and listened. He was laughing and telling the monk, in Japanese, about his first meeting with Warren. Gusts of smoke came out of him. As the story was elaborated, the Master rose and began to act it out, and there to Warren’s astonishment was a perfect imitation of himself, the way he carried himself, his walk, the tone of his voice, the shock on his face as the lath slapped his cheek. The Japanese laughed till there were tears in their eyes. Soon Warren began to smile and then he too exploded into laughter. He would come to understand in the months to follow that the Master so perfectly realized whatever he chose to do, that a kind of magnetic field was formed in which whoever was in his presence drew on its power. That is why interviews with the Master were so highly prized. His perfection was an impersonal force that you could feel and hope someday to manifest from yourself on a continuous basis. If he laughed, it was perfect laughter, and you had to laugh too. If he chose to cry, everyone around him would have to weep. But where did it come from, how did it happen? All Warren could work out was that the Master lived totally to the fullness of his being each and every moment of his existence. He was completely of the moment, then and there, in which you found him. Nothing of him was deadened by the suffering of his past life and there was no striving or fear in him for his future.

Would the Master feel a need to write poems?

No, because poems are the expression of longing and despair. Yes, because if the Master is one in every instant with what he sees and hears
and feels, the poem is not the Master’s written need but the world singing in the Master.

No, because the poem is a cry of the unborn heart. Yes, because the poem perfectly embodies the world, there is no world without poem.

Your register apologizes for rendering nonlinear thinking in linear language, the apperceptions of oneness in dualistic terminology. However, there is no difficulty representing the absolute physical torture of Warren Penfield’s commitment to Zen meditation. He could not physically accomplish even the half lotus, his spine threatened to snap, his legs seemed to be in a vise; even the mudra—the bowl-shaped position of the hands, the thumbs lightly touching, a simple relaxed representation in the hand of the flow from right to left, from left to right, the rocking crescent continuity of the universe intimations of stars and ancient Eastern recognitions—became under the torment of his distracted physically weeping thought a spastic hand clench, a hardened manifestation of frozen fear and anguish, the exact opposite of the right practice, the body imprisoned, the mind entirely personal and self-involved and then God help you if you nod off every now and then as who could not, sitting like a damn beer pretzel twelve, sixteen hours a day he comes along and hits you with the damn slapstick the goddamn yellow-skinned bastard the next time he hits me with that stick I’m going to get up and wrap it around his goddamn yellow neck and break a goddamn Buddha doll over his goddamn shaven head this is not right thinking but tell me Gautama enlighten me if what you say is true why is it so difficult to attain wouldn’t it all make a lot more sense if everyone could do it if everyone could be it without even thinking without being anything less before, without the death of my darling, and men drowning in the cold black coalwater of collapsed mines miles of coalstone sinking slowly upon their chests, or bullets perforating them like cutout coupons supposing I do attain it, supposing I find the right understanding what then what happens outside me how do I help Local 10110 of the Western Federation of Miners, Smelters, Sheepdippers and Zenpissers, and then there’s the food, look what we wait for when at last the cute little tinkly bell rings and we may unpretzel ourself and try to regain the circulation in our swollen limbs, little bits of pickled leather, or some absolute excresence of the lowest sea life lightly salted or a congealed ball
of rice dipped in some rank fermented fluid that smells to me like the stuff we dipped the pigeons in to kill the lice.

No, there is no problem expressing the inner record of Warren Penfield’s quest for enlightenment: the whining despair, the uncharacteristic epithet, the rage, the backsliding giving up and consequent self-nauseation, the stubborn goings on, all of this silent, in a temple hall of inscrutable meditators, all of whom reminded him of the immigrant kids in the Ludlow Grade School around him totally serene and insulated in their lack of language the feeling what do they all know that I don’t know why don’t the storms of self taste fire and thunder across their brainbrow, why aren’t they as sick and unsure of their dangerous selves as I am of mine, leading then to the false Zen-like casuistry as, for example, if we are to press ourselves on the world sticking to it like a decal, if I am one with the rocks the trees the stars why is my memory invalid and why then are the images of Clara on our beds of slag in the cool mountain dusk of Colorado forbidden me, I am my memory and the images of my past are me, and if I am the rocks and stones and trees, Wordsworth, rocked round in earth’s diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, why are my phantoms less real why are the ghostvoices of my mama and papa less real why is the mud of the Marne less real why must I exclude exclude, if everything is now and mind is matter is not everything valid is not meditation the substance of the mind as well as its practice?

Nor is it difficult to render the casually developed outer circumstances of this monastic life, the old Master becoming at some times demonic in his teaching, a destroyer of ego, of humble ordinary lines of thought, an army of right practice, right understanding overwhelming the frail redoubts and trenches of Warren’s Western mind. One day they were in the temple and he came in screaming, naked, climbed the Buddha like a bee alighting on a flower and bending it with its own honeygravid weight and they watched shocked and stunned as a beautiful polished wood Buddha toppled to the floor under the Master, an act of profound desecration with sexual impact, and the Buddha lay split like a log, a piece of wood the aperture of an earthquake and nothing was ever said of it again.
He was a violent old man, one day Warren was admitted for his counseling and the Master threw a cup of cold green tea in his face and that was the lesson of the day. One day he lectured them all, a particular holy day and he shouted at them saying you were all Masters when you first came through the gate and now look at you, I have more respect for the horse that pulls the shitwagon than I have for you—screaming and growling and trilling in the Japanese way of singsong, Warren prostrate with all the rest. But everyone took it as material to be pondered and worked out, it was only a style of pedagogy and only someone stupid enough to take emotions seriously would be shocked threatened or angered by the serene antics of the realized Buddha spirit of such a great Master. Warren finally reached the preliminary kindergarten stage of getting his own koan, a paradoxical question to form the empty mind of meditation. Each devotee received his own koan like a rabbit’s foot to stroke and treasure, an unanswerable question to torment him month after month, perhaps year after year, until enlightenment burst over and he was able to answer it when the Master gently asked it of him the hundred millionth time. Warren walked in bowed, kneeled on the straw mat. The Master was smoking and making each breath visible as a plume of cigarette smoke and Warren knew the standard koans, the famous ones, there were actually collections of them like college course outlines but the one given to him he had never heard before or read anywhere and it was delivered by the Master with a shake of his head, a sigh and a glance of helpless supplication at the ceiling: Penfield-san, said the Master, if this is a religion for warriors, what are
you
doing here? Warren thanked him, bowed and backed out of the room even though the Master looked as if he was going to say something more. Later in his first pondering of this infinitely resounding question he squatted by his favorite place, near the garden gate beyond the gravel garden, and saw through the slats as for the first time the beautiful little girl who swept the street.

I
drove out of the mountains through the night and found the way to Utica, New York, coming into city streets in the rain at three o’clock, passing freight yards, warehouses. She was asleep, I didn’t want to wake her, I bumped the car gently across the railroad tracks and headed south and west toward Pittsburgh.

I wanted to log as many miles as I could before Bennett got up in the morning.

By dawn I was clear-eyed exhausted, feeling my nerves finely strung, the weariness in the hinges of my jaws, you are never more alert. Red lights in the dawn at intersections between fields, I saw the light of dawn shoot clear down the telegraph wires like a surge of power, I passed milk trucks and heard train whistles the sun came up and flooded my left eye suddenly it was day commerce was on the roads we had survived Loon Lake and were cruising through the United States of America.

I woke her for breakfast, we walked into a diner—some town in Pennsylvania. Clara in her fur jacket and long dress and Junior in his knickers and sweater. Someone dropped a plate. Clara is not awake yet—a hard
sleeper, a hard everything—she sits warming her hands on her coffee cup, studies the tabletop.

“This won’t do,” I said, steering her by the arm to the car.

“What?”

“It’s asking for trouble.”

I found an Army-Navy Surplus Store. I bought myself a regular pair of pants, work shirt, socks, a wool seaman’s cap and khaki greatcoat. I bought Clara a black merchant marine pullover and a pea jacket. I made her change her clothes in the back of the store. Then I did.

Mr. Penfield had pressed upon me about eighty dollars in clean soft ones and fives, bills that looked as if they had spent years in a shoe box. I added to this the forty dollars or so of my own fortune. The clothes had come to twenty-eight, and another dollar and change for breakfast.

“What kind of money do you have?”

“Money?”

“I want to see what our cash assets are.”

“I don’t have any money.”

“That’s really swell.”

“Look in my bag if you don’t believe me.”

“Well, how far did you think you could go without money?”

“I don’t know. You tell me.”

It was the best of conversations, all I could have wished for. I scowled. I drove hard.

We took the bumps in unison, we leaned at the same angle on the curves. I didn’t know where we were going and she didn’t ask. I drove to speed. I stopped wondering what she was feeling, what she was thinking. She was happy on the move, alert and at peace, all the inflamed spirit was lifted from her. She had various ways of arranging herself in the seat, legs tucked up or one under the other, or arms folded, head down, but in any position definitive, beautiful.

Come with me

Late that afternoon we were going up a steep hill along the Monongahela, Pittsburgh spreading out below us, stacks of smoke, black sky, crucible fire. By nightfall I was numb, I couldn’t drive another mile. We were in some town in eastern Ohio, maybe it was Steubenville, I’m not
sure. On a narrow street I found the Rutherford Hayes, a four-story hotel with fire escapes and a barber’s pole at the entrance. I took a deep breath and pulled up to the curb.