The most adventurous part of my adventure occurred before I ever got to the monastery, but I think that “bon voyage” must have helped, but the trip very nearly became the Zen Mountain Massacre. Fortunately, I was helped by a couple of bodhisattvas along the way and made it to the monastery in time to begin the retreat despite my GPS unit, usually very reliable, trying to take me down a road with a washed-out bridge. I had driven happily through the Adirondacks and down into the Catskills, avoiding the Northway (I-87), which would have been more direct. Around sundown I found myself in Lexington NY on a road that both the satellites and my new iPhone said would get me where I wanted to go. What neither of these smart devices knew was that floods last spring had washed out a bridge. The road ended in a barrier. As it turns out, Zen is all about barriers, but I’ll come to that later.I notices a car parked at the Lexington Municipal Building and pulled in to ask for directions. An very helpful woman who I think was probably either the mayor or the town clerk pulled out a map and sent me back onto a route that would get me down to Mt. Tremper. Of course I missed the turn in the dark. Time was now running short — I really needed to be at ZMM by 7:00 in order to begin the retreat with everyone else (the liturgy waits for no one) — so I pulled into a diner, where the waitress and a couple of patrons helped me with some local landmarks. I headed back down the road but missed the turn again and came back to the diner. This time the local bodhisattvas were very specific & I found my turn, where, weirdly, the GPS picked up again and started reading out the turns. (Master D?gen says that practicing Buddhas often don’t know they are Buddhas, but I can tell you that there are Buddhas in Lexington NY.) I made it with about fifteen minutes to spare and within half an hour found myself sitting with about a hundred other people — something I had never experienced, having done zazen by myself over the last couple of years.

This is where things get more difficult to describe. Despite being in my street clothes & despite having just driven for seven hours & having been completely lost — an experience that in the not so recent past would have tied me into six-dimensional knots — I was calm. I was even happy. After an hour of zazen (broken in the middle by five minutes of walking meditation) there was a service I understood very little of. In Zen Buddhism one stands for most parts of the service — doing honor to the Buddha & the sangha, yes, but also stretching one’s back. Bowing & doing repeated prostrations is also very good for the back, it turns out. After the service I was given a snack, since I had missed diner, and I went to bed — a dorm type room with four other men. It was 9:30. It took me a long tiome to go to sleep. I wasn’t really wound up, but the strangeness of finding myself in this place after so aggressively secular a life kept me suspended in a kind of amazement.

Around 5:00 the next morning the monk with the bells came around to wake everyone up. The bells are not particularly loud — not a great clanging — but they persist long enough to make sure everyone is awake. The schedule allows just enough time for everyone to cycle through the bathrooms and make it down to the dining hall for a quick cup of tea or coffee before morning zazen. Again, we sat for an hour & then there was morning liturgy. Who knew that Buddhists have hymnbooks? Made the liturgy & chanting much easier to follow. Then we had breakfast & then Caretaking practice, i.e., work. I vacuumed all the cushions in the zendo & dusted the woodwork; later, I would wash dishes and chop vegetables in the kitchen. Then came lunch & some instruction in other areas of practice. Dinner. Sitting. Liturgy. Sleep. Here’s the official schedule. On Sunday people from the local community bring their kids what one can only call Zen Sunday School in the dining hall and some of the parents join in the zazen & liturgy upstairs in the zendo.

And after lunch on Sunday I drove home — by a more direct route. The weather had been perfect on the way down — very lucky for January — and was even more beautiful for the drive home. In fact, it was so beautiful it made me laugh. Heading up into the Adirondacks at sunset, the whole sky to the west lit up in orange-gold-red with dramatic pulsing blue-black shadows and a shaft of yellow sunlight shooting straight up from the center of it all. “Ah, this must be that enlightenment they speak of,” I mused. Really, it was a cheesy New Age Zen movie sort of sky & it wasn’t through with me yet. Descending the Western slope of the mountains down toward the St. Lawrence Valley, I turned a corner and there was a huge — & I do mean really huge — full moon rising directly in front of me. I got home without the cosmos playing any more ironic jokes on me & dove right into getting ready for the semester to begin. I’ve only just now caught up enough to write this description.

I notice that I have stuck pretty exclusively to more or less objective description of the retreat at ZMM; as already noted, I find it very hard to talk about the spiritual side of the experience. Hell, a couple of years ago I would have scoffed at the very notion of the spiritual — the whole concept was so tainted for me by my early experience of fundamentalist Protestantism that I just completely dismissed that whole realm of consciousness, except occasionally when it arose in the secular context of poetry. I have been making notes about my reading & meditation & I am going to try to write something soon in this space that does not betray the very deep qualities of the experience, if I can.

Based on a story by Son Nam, the film looks at the lives of young men whose parents, landless peasants, barely eke out a living as share croppers on large tracts of rice land, using their buffaloes to cultivate the paddies. The buffalo is the most valuable thing that the peasants own & the death of an animal is a disastrous event — literally a matter of life & death — for a family. During the rainy season when the floods come even the poorest peasant must hire buffalo herders to take the animals to pasture. Kim, the hero of the story, is the son of such a poor family & he refuses to go to work as a laborer for a landowner, so he takes the family’s two buffaloes himself when the floods come, one of the animal dying of starvation during the journey. The death of the animal marks the beginning of the disintegration of Kim’s family & the rest of the film chronicles his life after he joins up with the Lap, the leader of the largest “gang” of herders.

The depiction of the life of these herders is remarkably like the wild west, with drinking, dope-smoking, fighting, murder, & rape. The one thing the herders have is a kind of freedom — they are not farm laborers working for someone else. The plot of the film works out Kim’s coming of age & his coming to a kind of understanding. Throughout everything, the buffalo stands as a symbol of mute persistence in the face of nearly impossible adversity. The critique of French colonial economics is subtle, but clearly present in the story. It is not an accident that a French patrol walks past without concern while Kim is burying the remains of the family’s buffalo. Throughout, the hardness of the peasant’s life is set against breathtaking beauty and the characters are presented sympathetically but without any hint of overwrought romanticism.

In looking around just now for commentary on the film, I discovered this post on the All In One Boat blog, which gives a fuller account of the story. The blog itself looks interesting as well, dealing with the environment, poetry, religion & all sorts of things I’m interested in — I’ll  certainly look in again from time to time. And here is the NY Times review of Buffalo Boy.

Ozu’s Late Spring is literary in this sense. Late Spring is about as far from the noise & movement of contemporary movies as it’s possible to get. From the middle of Ozu’s career & shot in black & white, the film consists mostly people talking to each other & key events happen away from the camera, while seemingly minor events are lingered over. Transitions are straight cuts, with the occasional use of a static shot of a building or landscape. These transitional frames feel very much like still photographs and sometimes invite a symbolic or metaphorical reading with their inclusion of lonely trees or clocks. Key dramatic moments are often implied rather than fully dramatized: one important plot turn takes place during the performance of a Noh drama when two characters merely look at each other and nod, with a third watching and “reading” this brief & conventional interaction.

For the contemporary Western viewer of Late Spring, the motivating problem of the story may be hard to grasp. (Assume that narratives have motivating problems or conflicts and that this is true across cultures (I think it is); nevertheless, conflict gets expressed in different ways in different cultures. And what is recognized as a particular sort of conflict in one culture might be seen is a very different light in another.) The twenty-seven-year-old Noriko lives with and cares for her widowed father, a professor. Both the professor and his sister would like Noriko to get married, but Noriko, despite being attractive and apparently happy, resists.

And it’s not that Noriko doesn’t like men, or is shy. She flirts with her father’s assistant and might have married him except that he is already engaged. One even gets the impression he’s have broken his engagement to marry Noriko. She does not want to get married because she feels genuine filial piety, a concept foreign to the West but highly developed in many Asian / Confucian cultures. This is one of the things that made this film feel so psychologically strange to me. It took me a long time to figure out that Noriko really did want to stay home and care for her father & that she genuinely preferred this to getting married, which she well understood was the expected thing to do. Actually, staying home with her father and getting married were both “expected” of her in post-war Japan and therein lies the conflict of the drama. Noriko is caught between two equally compelling social responsibilities, one traditional and one modern.

Noriko’s wedding is not dramatized. She is shown in her bridal regalia leaving to get married, then her father and a woman friend — a divorcee we’ve met earlier, a friend of Noriko’s — are shown in their wedding clothes in a bar drinking sake. The implication of this final scene is that the father will marry this not quite respectable woman rather than the woman to whom he nodded during the Noh performance, ironically proving himself to be more modern than his younger daughter, who even in marriage continues to represent the traditional Japanese virtues of filial piety and self-sacrifice.

The first half of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce presents a flyover of post-9/11 politics & culture in the West — it is what I think would have been called a work of political economy before that term went out of fashion with the rise of economics as a science. Zizek is a fluent, even sprightly, writer who can explain difficult concepts clearly and whose point of view can thus come to feel completely natural to the reader, who, if I am at all typical, adopts the author’s assumptions as if they were his own. This is a very effective rhetoric, if that’s what it is — style as rhetoric — but the reader must be on guard so as to not be swept away on a current of enthusiasm, which, admittedly, can be a pleasant experience, especially with a maestro as charismatic as Zizek.

Two big concepts emerge from Zizek’s essay, which is conveniently divided into two parts: 1. An analysis of the ways in which neo-liberalism & late capitalism effectively subvert & incorporate insurgent political movements. Zizek is particularly interested in the way that movements on the political left suffer this fate, but it would be interesting to see how he’d think about the so-called Tea Party movements on the American right, which will almost certainly be absorbed by the neo-liberal Republican Party. The genius of neo-liberalism is its ability to absorb insurgencies & naturalize them, making them safe for domestic consumption, as it were. 2. A thesis about Human Nature in which the capital letters are appropriate. Zizek sets himself up as a champion of “communism” as a mode of life that depends on the assumption that there is a core set of human values that unites all people across any supposed cultural divides. In this, he directly opposes the position of Theory in all its manifestations over the last thirty years, which has held that human nature is a variable construct. In my view, Zizek’s second thesis consists of a great deal of wishful thinking, but perhaps that is because I have been ensnared by theory. In any case, I have a student who, along with a bunch of Dickens and Tolstoy, has just read The Fountainhead this summer: I have recommended Zizek’s book as an antidote.

Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others came along at just the right moment for me. I have been reading William Vollmann’s big book Imperial, about the California county where my mother was born & where I spent a lot of time growing up & looking, too, at the separate volume Vollmann published, under the same title, of his photographs of people and places in Imperial County. Sontag’s book is an attempt to understand the usefulness of images — photographic images in particular. In this late essay, Sontag revises and even reverses her earlier (more aesthetic?) view of photography as a technology of distancing & comes to an understanding of the photograph – particularly the war photograph — as a necessary, if never sufficient, moral document. The second half of this book strikes me as the epitome of what an intellectual discourse looks like: full of passion & doubt.