The Gateless Gateless Gate of the Poem

In him, another dialectic appears, trying to find expression; the contradiction of the terms yields in his eyes by the discovery of a third term, which is not a synthesis but a translation; everything comes back, but it comes back as Fiction, i.e., at another turn of the spiral. Roland Barthes Spring in Lingnan, cold. My mother gave me two hours to return from the market with at least three wén in change, not to come back with less. I drifted out, hungry but happy, collecting loose pine and bamboo branches from the woods by our house, and meandered slowly to the market. After a long winter, it was a perfect day for robe and sandals. A group of monks, having arrived from the north, gathered in a circle at the market. I walked past them with my giant bundle of sticks, to the stalls. Bao, the old man, bought them all for four wén, and I was free to wander back to the monks’ circle. They were shouting—competing, it sounded like—and I couldn’t hear, so I edged in closer. I finally made my way to the clearing. A man in a bright red robe, shaved bald, with a giant nose like a bird of prey, shouted at the people around him theatrically: All conditioned phenomena! Are like a dream! An illusion! A bubble! A shadow! Like dew or a flash of lightning! Thus we shall perceive them! I sat down, dizzy. I remembered my father’s face, who died when I was a kid. The face was like the face of the moon. No different. But it was his face. The monk was still yelling, but I was sitting and wasn’t sure who I was. I didn’t even recognize my body. My hemp robe, my belt, my sandals, were like the dirt and the wood poles and cloth of the stalls. I was no different; I was part of it. When the men stopped shouting, the circle cleared. I still sat in the dirt. “Hey kid,” said the monk with the nose like a bird of prey, “are you ok?” “I feel like a bag of sand fell on my head,” I said. “What,” I asked him, “ were those lines you read?” “The Diamond Sutra,” he said. “And where,” I asked, “are you from?” “From the Gunin Daiman monastery in the North of China.” So I walked there. My mother hardly looked at me when I left. I picked wood and sold it as I went. I shouted the lines I’d heard at the top of my lungs. And after thirty days I arrived, kneeling in front of a monk with a lavish embroidered cone on his head. “You,” he said, “are from the barbarian south. How can you become a Buddha?” In response, I yelled the lines I’d heard. They accepted me, but put me to work in the rice shed. It was hard for me to operate the hulling machine. I had to step on the treadle to lift the pestle: step off and the pestle drops and pounds the rice. But I was skinny, much too skinny. So I tied a stone from the river to my waist to make me heavy enough to operate the machine. It was not an easy life, but something in me had changed and was content. All day, alone or with others, rain or sun, I shouted the same exact lines: 切有為法，如夢幻泡影，如露亦如電，應作如是觀 * That’s the legend of Huineng (638-713), the sixth great patriarch of Zen, who seems to have been hit with the lightning bolt of nondualistic understanding as a young man. Zen—and, to some extent, poetry—sees the world as nondualistic. Nonduality, from the Sanskrit Advaita (“not two”), points beyond divisions. It’s tricky to define because language itself is dualistic. The nondual can only be perceived by what it’s not: not personal, not time-bound, not separate, but impersonal, timeless, indivisible. “Non-duality,” Jane Hirshfield says, “is not the negation of multiplicity in favour of some idea of the absolute; it is also not the nihilism so many Westerners think Buddhism to be.” Poetry describes unlanguageable space. Take the shortest poem ever written in Italian: “Mattina” by Giuseppe Ungaretti: M’illumino d’immenso. “I illuminate myself with immensity.” This poem presents no “self” as narrator in time and space—but self as an unlimited field of experience. Assuming that the world is nondualistic, as I think it is, then using nondualism as a lens allows us to let the world be what it is. But if I’m not writing about my false “self,” then what will my subject matter be? In this famous Zen koan— A monk once asked Master Joshu, “Has a dog the Buddha Nature or not?” Joshu said, “Mu!” —“Mu” means “no” or “not” (in Japanese), but more importantly, it’s a kind of non-answer, rejecting the question itself. If we pause to consider “Mu,” we are working against all the prepared answers of our dualistic minds. Keats’ notion of Negative Capability works in a similar way, embracing uncertainty rather than knowledge. Keats applauded people “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” This sense of not-knowing—“being in uncertainties”—is an embrace of the nondualistic world. Poetry, like Zen koans, can interrupt our dualistic minds. When Lorca begins a poem—“Woodcutter. / Cut my shadow from me”—we as readers are unable to process this with our usual literal way of thinking. We’re forced instead to shift our perception from one kind of psychic space to another. The poet Chase Twichell says that neither Zen nor poetry can be paraphrased because the literal-focused mind can’t process them: Zen is said to be a “mind-to-mind transmission.” The best poems are exactly that: they leap from one mind to another without stopping to explain exactly how they did it. Poetry cannot be paraphrased because it can’t be apprehended by a purely literal mind. I think this is why so many people are afraid of it, or think they dislike it. In our culture, out of necessity, we’re used to living in a mostly-literal mind, and poetry demands that we enter it with another kind of mind. There is nevertheless transmission because we can and do understand the nondualistic world beyond the literal. In fact, the literal—which we cling to for support—limits our perception. Dualism is the figure in the cave staring at the shadows on the wall; nondualism is the figure stepping out of the cave and looking at forms directly. Poems disrupt the literal, pointing like a finger toward nondualistic perception. Language, poets know, can never convey what it wants to convey. So poems, as literal signifiers, must always fail. But when poems—such as Twichell’s “Makeshifts,” below—point to the end of language, they urge the reader toward the nondualistic. Nothing has a name it can’t slip out of. The waterfall is solid ice by late November; the white pines vanish under snow that’s blue in the morning, pink in the dust. Here’s a little bouquet—ice and evergreen and sun, three moments arranged for human looking, though it’s only the husks of their names that I’ve gathered and paralyzed. The waterfall of solid ice refers, I think, to a literal thing in the world, which perhaps the poet came across on a walk. And I believe that she saw that blue-pink color of the snow. In the second stanza comes a shift and an admission: that the three moments of the first stanza—ice, evergreen, sun—are not actually real but “husks . . . gathered and paralyzed” by the poet. So Twichell disturbs what we thought was a simple nature poem, meant perhaps to ground us in a landscape. The poem is more like a spider wrapping up the “husks” of words: a trail that leads to the unknowable. The poem convulsively interrupts our reverie of white pines in the snow by reminding us of the poetry-making process: a fabricated construct. This interruption, like a koan, wakes us up out of our dualistic slumber. As Twichell says, “Poetry’s not window cleaning. / It breaks the glass.” * Film, too, can break the glass. Antonioni’s L’avventura (1960) urgently pushes against a dualistic thinking. Like Twichell, Antonioni is fascinated by what happens when we run out of language. Film traditionally relies on plot, narrative, and dialogue—dualistic tethers to our literal lives—to carry the spectator along. Antonioni rejects these, following, in discursive slow-cinema mode, Anna, her boyfriend Sandro, and her friend Claudia. Anna disappears, and Sandro and Claudia fall for each other. Sandro and Claudia seem like amnesiacs: they love each other, they change their mind, they run away. Dancing with delight, then falling into despair. Antonioni achieves this sense of amnesia through a framing device. He simulates a kind of doorway effect—the psychological phenomenon in which one suffers short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway—by showing Claudia continually passing through archways, doorways, thresholds. Watching Claudia and Sandro—passing through doorways, changing their minds, forgetting who they are—has a koan-like effect on us as spectators, disrupting our notion of what is real. Huineng seems to have experienced something like the doorway effect when he heard the lines shouted at the market. And we, as spectators/readers, can experience a doorway-effect feeling while experiencing transformative art. L’avventura leaves room for not knowing, for Negative Capability. Like an Ashbery poem or a Pollock painting, the film will not commit to be one thing or another. By not privileging one side of the binary over the other, the film embraces nondualism. The characters are not exactly psychological, so it’s hard to know if their not knowing is because they are wealthy and bored, or “modern” people trammeled by old modes of thinking. It almost doesn’t matter; the filmmaker isn’t interested in providing answers, but only in providing us a mystery with no way out. The last five minutes take place in Taormina, Sicily. Claudia, discovering that Sandro has cheated on her, runs off onto the empty streets in the early morning. She stops in a piazza, surrounded by an apocalyptic bombed out tower, a tree, and Mount Etna in the distance. Claudia stares at a tree for twelve seconds; the tree rustling in the wind, reflecting her turbulent inner space. She cries convulsively, and then stops as if she’s learned something. Sandro arrives, sits on a bench. A long static shot: Sandro weeping on the bench. Claudia approaches. Diegetic sounds from the hills: train whistle, wind, dogs barking. And—impossibly—ocean waves, as on the island where they lost their friend Anna. Claudia puts her hand on Sandro’s head: an act which Antonioni called “pity,” not forgiveness. The camera pulls back to an establishing shot: the characters small and Mount Etna, an active volcano, in the distance. Antonioni’s characters are ephemeral, all of them—not just Anna—“missing” or in the act of disappearing. They resemble, more than psychological characters, “husks” that Antonioni “gathered and paralyzed.” Critics begged Antonioni for exposition in his next film. He replied, Mu!