invitations.
Gone! Gone! The old happy days of slaughter!
Hasegawa laughed. He said he’d been raised to accept the inevitability of the fact of convergence. But now he too went back over what he’d written and tried to devise ways of making it better.
All right. Mugen gazed around then said, You go knock on the gate of the Great Virtue. They’ll tell you about a wonder-bonze whose Zen roared like a blazing fire. He scratched violently in his armpit then examined what he’d rooted out. Of course back then you’d also find this old fraud climbing over the monastery walls at night. Talk about greed!
You being him.
Me being stupid.
All right.
The topic being greed.
Hasegawa smiled. Meaning mine?
Meaning ours.
All right. Hasegawa went out to the edge of the bamboo grove to piss then came back and sat where he’d been sitting. What I try to make never seems true. So I try the words different ways. If I can’t fix it, I throw it away. But I can’t throw away what it should have been. So I keep that.
Try spitting straight up, Mugen said. Maybe you’ll learn something.
They watched the fireflies, each tiny light disappearing then reappearing a certain distance from where it had extinguished itself, weaving webs of transience. No walls for the ego’s self to climb out here, Hasegawa said.
Ask about the marvellous bonze they lost. They’ll tell you he could sit zazen all day and drink rice wine all night. Local whores called for him by name. You can still hear echoes of them shouting for joy: Hey, good girls! Come upstairs! Crazy old Mugen’s riding his little pink pony tonight!
So your pride’s still with you?
You can’t keep what you write if you don’t like the words ?
Hasegawa thought about it then said, You can describe the world as being simpler than it is, and a reader will take comfort in your easy answers. Good is rewarded, evil punished, and lost children are restored to their mothers. Or you can declare how it’s impossible to say anything really true about the world, and your reader will think you’re a profound fellow with deep thoughts. Or you can say: Here it is. Just this much, but absolutely this much. And then press at what it is and press and press at it until you push through to its original state, and those readers who persevere will follow you into the depths of the beauty of the essence of being.
Well said ! The recluse bonze leaned to the side, lifted one buttock, and released a long slow sonorous fart of remarkable resonance and duration.
I guess you don’t agree, Hasegawa said, smiling. He stroked the weather-worn boards of the veranda, scraping together seeds that had blown up there, feeling a pile take shape under his fingertips . I showed some of what I’d written to Old Master Bashō. He made a few corrections, said it wasn’t entirely hopeless.
So then that’s what you have, said Mugen. Red marks on sheets black with ink.
Hasegawa squared-up his seed pile then started another.
So here’s mine. One hot summer day some few years ago, the much admired Zen-hammer Mugen left the Old Imperial City of Miyako. Birds wept to see him go, and the eyes of fish were filled with tears. A golden nimbus shone around the noble bonze as he hiked without hesitation into the forest, left foot right foot, left foot right foot, straight as a shot arrow. Went right on through blocking bushes and tangling vines, streams and rocks and trees no obstacle. Where he’d been became where he wasn’t. Finally reached here. A nameless place not encumbered with obligations.
Other than the ones you brought with you.
Other than them, Mugen said. But you probably want to know why the wonder-bonze never went back to the Great Virtue . He might tell you he got tired of city dust, but that’s not true. He liked the dust, liked to stir it up. And you might think they wouldn’t have him with all his hopping fleas and crawling lice. But that’s not the case either. They wanted him, wanted his big
Gone! Gone! The old happy days of slaughter!
Hasegawa laughed. He said he’d been raised to accept the inevitability of the fact of convergence. But now he too went back over what he’d written and tried to devise ways of making it better.
All right. Mugen gazed around then said, You go knock on the gate of the Great Virtue. They’ll tell you about a wonder-bonze whose Zen roared like a blazing fire. He scratched violently in his armpit then examined what he’d rooted out. Of course back then you’d also find this old fraud climbing over the monastery walls at night. Talk about greed!
You being him.
Me being stupid.
All right.
The topic being greed.
Hasegawa smiled. Meaning mine?
Meaning ours.
All right. Hasegawa went out to the edge of the bamboo grove to piss then came back and sat where he’d been sitting. What I try to make never seems true. So I try the words different ways. If I can’t fix it, I throw it away. But I can’t throw away what it should have been. So I keep that.
Try spitting straight up, Mugen said. Maybe you’ll learn something.
They watched the fireflies, each tiny light disappearing then reappearing a certain distance from where it had extinguished itself, weaving webs of transience. No walls for the ego’s self to climb out here, Hasegawa said.
Ask about the marvellous bonze they lost. They’ll tell you he could sit zazen all day and drink rice wine all night. Local whores called for him by name. You can still hear echoes of them shouting for joy: Hey, good girls! Come upstairs! Crazy old Mugen’s riding his little pink pony tonight!
So your pride’s still with you?
You can’t keep what you write if you don’t like the words ?
Hasegawa thought about it then said, You can describe the world as being simpler than it is, and a reader will take comfort in your easy answers. Good is rewarded, evil punished, and lost children are restored to their mothers. Or you can declare how it’s impossible to say anything really true about the world, and your reader will think you’re a profound fellow with deep thoughts. Or you can say: Here it is. Just this much, but absolutely this much. And then press at what it is and press and press at it until you push through to its original state, and those readers who persevere will follow you into the depths of the beauty of the essence of being.
Well said ! The recluse bonze leaned to the side, lifted one buttock, and released a long slow sonorous fart of remarkable resonance and duration.
I guess you don’t agree, Hasegawa said, smiling. He stroked the weather-worn boards of the veranda, scraping together seeds that had blown up there, feeling a pile take shape under his fingertips . I showed some of what I’d written to Old Master Bashō. He made a few corrections, said it wasn’t entirely hopeless.
So then that’s what you have, said Mugen. Red marks on sheets black with ink.
Hasegawa squared-up his seed pile then started another.
So here’s mine. One hot summer day some few years ago, the much admired Zen-hammer Mugen left the Old Imperial City of Miyako. Birds wept to see him go, and the eyes of fish were filled with tears. A golden nimbus shone around the noble bonze as he hiked without hesitation into the forest, left foot right foot, left foot right foot, straight as a shot arrow. Went right on through blocking bushes and tangling vines, streams and rocks and trees no obstacle. Where he’d been became where he wasn’t. Finally reached here. A nameless place not encumbered with obligations.
Other than the ones you brought with you.
Other than them, Mugen said. But you probably want to know why the wonder-bonze never went back to the Great Virtue . He might tell you he got tired of city dust, but that’s not true. He liked the dust, liked to stir it up. And you might think they wouldn’t have him with all his hopping fleas and crawling lice. But that’s not the case either. They wanted him, wanted his big
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