The End of the Story

A memoir of writing, zazen, and the problem of wanting.

L.S. Lowry, Going to the Match, 1953

Part I. Literary Materialism

1.

I was tired of disliking myself. I was drinking too much, smoking too much pot, watching too much porn, not exercising enough. My bad habits—so normal as to be made fun of on sitcoms and to constitute the neurotic weight of many bro-comedies—were somehow more shameful than serious addictions. Why couldn’t I be a coke addict or weirdly addicted to taking LSD? I had taken a lot of mushrooms up to this point in my life, after all. But no, my habitual excesses were incredibly common, only adding to my sense of shame—not even in my neurotic tendencies was I unique. It was 2008, my mid-twenties. Externally, I probably didn’t appear to have any terrible problems, but a deep dissatisfaction and anxiety percolated beneath my living. I felt like I was in a frustrating meeting about workplace policies, but I couldn’t leave until the meeting was over, and that meeting was life in its entirety.

I was doing a post-doc at East Tennessee State University, which meant teaching two composition classes and two literature surveys, four classes per semester, making just above the poverty-line. My girlfriend lived three hours away, over the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Spartanburg, SC. I had spent the years after high school getting three degrees, becoming increasingly distanced from physical life, no money in the bank. I was learning to be a writer. The town felt appropriate: Long-abandoned by industry, the empty mill buildings of downtown were barred or used as flophouses, homeless moving through the streets beneath the stunning backdrop of the Blue Ridge. It was staggering to witness such natural beauty juxtaposed with human dilapidation. A general sense of poverty was everywhere.

I read a lot, though more slowly than others. I related to some. In “The Visiting Privilege,” a story by Joy Williams, a character says, “We all live in a meaningless world. That’s it, okay.” Yes, I thought. Josef K in Kafka’s The Trial has no idea what he’s on trial for, and by the end of the book he dies “Like a dog!” Right, I thought. Dogs! Frederick Barthelme was my teacher, a big bear of a man with an enormous intellect and weird humor. He once closed the blinds in his office, aimed a desk lamp at my face, and interrogated me as part of an advising process—Who are you? he asked. What do you want?

Uh, I think I have to take this Modernism class, I said.

Hmm, he said. But why are you here?

He seemed the one gentle, wise writer I admired.

But I couldn’t see things clearly. Something glitched in my brain. The stories I read, when placed atop reality, didn’t line up, everything just off, double-imaged, like a child’s tracing of a photo that, once-lifted, never gets aligned again.

Another misalignment: My reality seemed meaningless, a superficial landscape of pure entertainment built upon actual life, like a palimpsest made not to better navigate the world but to become more confused by it. This vision—a low-level understanding aching behind my more conscious lived experience—infected everything I saw and did: When I ate McDonald’s, I saw that McDonald’s was entertainment for my mouth; when I went to the movies, I saw that movies were entertainment for my eyes; when I listened to music, I saw that music was entertainment for my ears; when I sat like a dim creature in my apartment watching porn, a story I was working on open in another browser, I saw that porn was entertainment for my body; pot and alcohol were entertainment for my soul, and literature was entertainment for my intellect and emotions¹.

I disliked my own desire to be constantly entertained, and I disliked the way our culture preyed on this desire, making me desire more. I disliked that literature was tied into this. But what was below it? The desire for more desire? My wanting seemed the source of everything I did, and within literature I saw only more vain wanting, vain striving to be entertained, as well as thoroughly approved of, albeit in some higher or more transcendent form.

America was a place where we were free to be entrapped by our own wanting. Weirdly, we all seemed okay with this: We were little cave-dwellers, afraid to step into the daylight, amused by shadows cast by screens. We wanted to be entertained, and then be approved of, applauded for our good tastes and interesting takes. It wasn’t simply that we were a materialistic culture. We were beyond materialistic. We were meta-materialistic. Objects of desire existed in our minds before we got them in real life—the screen was a kind of limbo for desire—whether that was a burger or a publication or sex or a vacation. We were turning ourselves into commodities. Branding was just coming into being. One had a brand. Was a brand. Identity was now on sale. With our screens, we commodified who we were: Staring at ourselves staring at others staring at us. In doing so, our souls had atrophied, restricted within rigid ideas of ourselves, gazing out from within, dumbstruck by the god of selfhood in its myriad forms, no longer seeing what was actually there. Just stuff. Our self, another thing in a world of things. I began to grow suspicious of my work: Was it any different than a Marvel movie? Was it any different, in the final sum, than McDonald’s? Was it just another commodity masquerading as “art”? Wasn’t literature, like everything else, focused on the author, the ego, the small self?

I wanted something else, though I couldn’t say what. Writers reported on times, places, worldviews, personal and historical events, broken society and cultures, the internet, social media, attention spans, religions, identity, oppression, wars, politics. A lot of writers wrote as though thwarted desire represented the whole sad truth in this new godless world. But how these troubles were actually handled was not the focus of these books. That wasn’t art—that was therapy.

Instead, things happened—artfully, comically, tragically, many of these books seemed to say—and then more things happened, and a character persevered in the face of it all, and it was all weird and confusing, desires being thwarted or realized, but grace or understanding, if it got in there, was there only through longing, or sometimes only through prose-style. More than anything else, writers passed down aesthetic sensibilities. I had never read a book of literature that could be applied directly to a life situation. That was my brain glitch—what was writing for again?

Aside from a few, most writers wanted fame: I saw the tendency in myself and had heard it openly from others. Williams, McCarthy, DeLillo were judges, looking out, purveying, above their creations like God, preaching that things were a particular version of ill, but they offered no remedies, as they weren’t really preachers. They were artists. William Gass, who explicitly suggested that a writer is to their work as God is to creation, seemed more like a constructor of consciousness, but his consciousnesses—wonderfully verbal and poetic and literate—were so attuned to art that you sometimes had to wonder where life went, if art subsumed it.

I read the existentialists, Nietzsche and Sartre in particular. Sartre explained that life was purposeless: People were free to give it any meaning they chose, a concept that seemed freeing at first. We were free to choose whatever we wanted. In this way, French Fries had enormous power—wanting erased meaninglessness. Unless you looked too closely.

2.

I wasn’t always anxious and depressed, I should note. A cycle had started, sometime in college, in which I went from neutral, okay, pleasantly moving through the world with all the common minor irritations and annoyances, to descending into a pit where everything seemed dead. During 2008, the descent periods got longer. Pleasant moments were gone quickly, the world back to grey and murky. A hangover occasionally graced me with a mind and body that was so foreign that I felt emptied out—my thinking and feeling stopped, a thing I sought—and I was able to see the world again without interference, as if from a new reference point, just to the side and behind my head, outside me. Then, the feeling would pass and I would feel like shit, until I smoked or drank or wrote or jerked off again—ultimately making me feel even more sick and wrong and creaturely. I cycled through dullness, pleasure, fantasy, escape, anxiety, self-consciousness, a sense that something was wrong with me, and then depression, meaninglessness—all within the space of a few hours. Generally, however, my being felt fixed, permanent. That is what depression really is—the never-ending sense that things don’t change, can’t change. This depression and its attendant anxiety seemed to be who I was. Some other part of me struggled against this notion, which only amplified it.

In class one day, after thinking I’d taught Emily Dickinson well, feeling that the students were engaged, all of us contributing to an elucidation of her work, a student who’d been having mental health problems stayed after, and asked me why I kept teaching depressing poems. He was visibly irritated, a weird energy coming off him, hair wild, clothes hanging loosely off his body. He smelled. I was vaguely repulsed and didn’t know what to say. Go see your counselor, I thought, ugly and cruel, immediately annoyed at myself for thinking it, but the thought hung there, like a moon in front of my vision. I told him it was a survey class, we had only spent two days on Dickinson, and we were finished now. Normally, when students asked questions, I said, Good question, but now, I was stuck in defensiveness and irritation. Dickinson has a sense of humor, I tried to offer. It just seems so hopeless and pointless, he said. How are you okay? I was surprised again. He was thin, small. I wanted to reach out and straighten his glasses. But his eyes wanted something, they were looking at me. I could see he was looking for help.

How had I missed this? Still, I remained guarded, defensive, and didn’t know what to say. Was he messing with me? Pot made me self-conscious in those days, and I felt as though everyone had a window into my inner life. Could he see that I was actually nervous teaching the class, unsure whether what I was saying about Dickinson was true, helpful, or even interesting? Was he actually pitying me?

It's a survey class, I told him again, I’m sort of teaching what I have to teach. His eyes looked too wide, white all the way around them. If there were things he didn’t want to read, he could try to research the authors first, and I’d give him alternative choices. He nodded but his face dropped. A week later, he dropped the class.

3.

When I wasn’t teaching, I read online a lot, but I stayed very far from the scene. I suspect this was a combination of low self-esteem and arrogance, as well as a growing sense that I was spending too much time online. I wanted what I felt were very basic, reasonable things: To become a good writer, moderately well-known and have a career. These desires would create the final version of who I was to be—that’s not exactly how I was thinking, of course—the sense was there, but it was beneath actual thought, like a program running in the background of my consciousness. While these wants seemed reasonable, I felt them intensely: I really wanted them, though I had no clear idea why I wanted them. In place of success or money, I had somehow chosen to value this—probably a basic mimetic desire, though who I was mimicking I couldn’t say. And the new online literary scene exacerbated this. Or my watching exacerbated it. I watched this new online world blossoming, with both interest (and validation when I liked a particular writer) and vague disdain. People were connecting online, this was true, but they were also showing off, getting seen. I felt an aversion to it, but I also disliked that I wasn’t a part of it, and was too cowardly to really try to be. Or maybe I sensed that it was bad for me. Whatever the case, I was jealous, and I saw that I was losing some unspoken battle.

In order to quell this uneasy, unceasing thinking, I did some hiking in East Tennessee, but the vast views of the river valley below instilled no awe. I wanted awe. Where was the awe? John Muir said that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to the entire Universe.” I searched for the hitch but couldn’t find it. Everything I grabbed onto was just itself. The mountain felt like a dead stone. The trees were also dead—part of Buffalo Mountain had burned, the tree stumps charred. The clouds in the sky were not my clouds. The town below, in the valley, could have been filled with aliens. Winter was everywhere, grey and dirty. The picturesque town with rolling hills, old southern houses, walled in by the Blue Ridge Mountains, felt overly, irritatingly quaint.

My apartment was part of an old house, sectioned into four small flats. The wood floor was dark and beautiful and slick, and I would sometimes run and slide on it in socks like in that one Tom Cruise movie, feeling a little joy. Except for the two classes a day I taught, and hanging out with my girlfriend on the weekends, I saw no one. I read journals, online and in print, and tried to write in what I viewed as their styles: “Take a look at our issues to see what we like” almost every journal advised. I wrote, wanting and waiting. When publication arrived, I was happy for a moment, then it was gone. Nothing seemed to happen—there was no sense of anything changing, no sense of drama or action, no plot to my life, just repetitive days spent looking at my email wondering when something might occur.

Just when I thought my creative life should be flourishing, it was not. The stories I wrote all felt false to me. I’d think about how I kept trying to sound like myself, but I had no idea what I sounded like. Did I know how to sound like myself? Did I even know how to listen to myself? Was my problem that I listened to myself way too much? This manner of thinking made me awkward and unclear and self-conscious in person. Hovering beneath all this was the multiform belief—built out of stories, reading, classes, teachers—that I should be well-known for my writing. But how? And why? Why should I play the attention-seeking game that everyone was playing, desiring, weirdly, themselves? When high, this seemed horrific, a terrible aspect of my personality staring back at me. When not high, it receded into the background, not that big of a deal.

4.

Then, in midwinter, I got sick. It lasted a week. Aches through my legs, a vibrating, humming illness in my back, horrible fever, sweating, freezing, coughing on my futon with the dirty sheets. I stumbled to my classrooms, put notes on the doors: Dr. Rossi’s Classes Cancelled. I put the note on the wrong door and received an email from my chair that I needed to come see her. I didn’t eat for two days.

On the worst night, in which I hallucinated someone breaking into my apartment, I thought the illness might never end. The dark walls of my bedroom flashed red and blue, as though police were outside, though there were no police cars on the street. Snow fell in coned lamplights. Someone banged on my door in the vestibule of the house. I shouted, There’s someone here. The banging continued. You can’t come in, I yelled. I’m sick. Stay away. There is someone here. I am here. The banging didn’t stop for hours. I began to cry and rolled over on my futon, eyes shut, trying to sleep. I dreamed of writing prose that wouldn’t end. Words from a thousand mouths closed in around me, a cacophony of voices. It was frightening—I wanted it all to turn off, the constant stream of thoughts, the constant wanting, the constant desire for recognition, I was so sick of making stories up.

When the fever broke the next morning, I was starving. I ate chicken noodle soup from a can. It tasted better than anything I’d ever eaten. My energy began to return. I realized the banging had been my neighbor from the basement, an artist and hippie-type, dreads and dirty clothes, a white kid, who’d been installing some kind of art project, hammering and battering away, making a light show. He was out on the driveway now, early morning, working again, cigarette dangling from his lips. I saw the sunrise for the first time in what felt like forever, cresting over Buffalo Mountain. I felt wiped clean, empty, personless. The sunrise was beautiful. I was grateful for it. The sun’s rays felt as though they were prying open long-closed parts of my heart. I wrote a story that began, "If I lived in a hut, a lot of my problems would be solved.” The feeling of personlessness, identitylessness, lasted the day. People seemed friendlier. I felt freed from something, but by the next day I was back, able again to see nothing but myself.

5.

In 2009, in midsummer, I moved away from East Tennessee to be with my girlfriend in a small town in South Carolina. It’s warmer here, she argued. We have friends. She was right, and anyway, she had a good job. I took adjunct work at what amounted to a community college. That first semester, I taught out of one of several trailers that were converted into four classrooms. The floors were warped or poorly constructed, uneven, and sometimes I tripped—the ball of my foot jamming into a higher part of the floor—when walking to the other side of the room. Students came to class reeking of weed. Some wanted to learn to write, and I did my best to help them. Most of them just needed the credit to move on and get their nursing degree, start making money. That made sense to me.

My girlfriend and I lived in a little townhouse that had one bathroom, one bedroom, and a room in the back big enough for a ping pong table. There was a bamboo grove in the backyard that I liked. We had five cats, a German Shepard, and any number of strays my girlfriend found at the time. The most expensive thing we owned was a Dyson Animal vacuum. My girlfriend held a rescued baby raccoon like a newborn. It drank milk from a bottle using its human-seeming hands, clutching the nipple. My girlfriend was the most gentle person I’d ever known, but we still fought like we were both insane when we got drunk. She threw a potholder at me, I threw a burrito—I’d find dried beans, pieces of lettuce, a shard of shredded cheese every once in a while stuck to the wall or on the back of a dining chair. The future didn’t exist. We did what people did: We worked, looked forward to Thursday night, drank, looked forward to Friday night, drank, looked forward to Saturday, drank and did drugs. It was the last years of our twenties. One night, drunk and irritated, I went for a walk late at night. Before I knew what was happening, I was running down the sidewalk of our neighborhood—I was trying to get away. I was trying to get away from myself.

Months passed like this. Then, in early 2010, I began playing soccer again because my girlfriend was playing. Just come out one time, she said. It’ll be fun. You’re good. I said I wasn’t sure, it had been a long time, but eventually I agreed. I had given up the sport when I was ten or eleven to pursue basketball. Then in high school, I switched to track. There’s a brute fact to racing, animal strength and speed, and I had some of that, but only up to a point. But with soccer, my lean frame, easy quickness, basic intelligence, and subtle athleticism had an outlet—I got good with the ball at my feet and was nearly impossible to stop in the midfield. Over the next fifteen years, my wife and I would play pickup soccer with the most eclectic group of people I’d ever been around: Immigrants from Mexico, Bolivia, Spain, Columbia (legal and illegal), white kids on the local high school teams, people from the nearby soccer club, refugees from Nigeria. This wasn’t the pontificated and performative diversity of university culture that I sat through in meetings as an adjunct. Nor was it the theoretical post-colonial world—this was just people. It was amazing. My being a teacher or even the hint of my being a writer didn’t matter. There were no questions, as at the gallery openings, the readings, the conferences, like, So, what kind of fiction do you write? Oh, are you an author? Who are you reading? Where do you teach? Questions that I hated, and which I knew I had to reciprocate: How would you describe your poems? Oh, you’re a visual artist as well? Art was not at the forefront of these events; identity was.

On the soccer field, everything was different. Only playing good soccer mattered, and, for the first time in my adult life, I wanted to do only what mattered.

Part II. First the Physical, then the Spiritual Body

1.

During the summer of 2010, my physicality returned with an intensity I couldn’t have predicted. Writing began to fall into the background of my life, on the far horizon, distant and small and barely glimpsed, like a rabbit at the edge of the woods, nibbling grasses. Rather than going to openings and readings, I worked out more. When I played soccer, I wasn’t a name, wasn’t a writer, wasn’t even Alan—I was the ball at my feet looking for the next pass, a quick ball to the top of the box, one-timed back to me on my right foot, slotted into the left corner of the net. A game felt more real than literary life, which itself had come to feel like a game. And my self, which I had disliked, I began to feel gentle toward again.

In the mornings, I taught classes to mostly bored students in that awful trailer, then, in the afternoon, I went and did soccer workouts, typically three or four days a week. You’re way too into this, my girlfriend, newly my wife, said. I found a wall, a field, and trained. I would do sprints, dribbling skills through cones, fartleks with the ball at my feet, juggle, pass to myself off the wall three hundred times, take two hundred shots hitting spots I marked on the wall, right foot, left foot. I could see where the ball would go and make it happen in reality, as though there was a simulated game in my mind occurring just before the physical action—there was a mechanism in my mind that would slow games down in important moments, a freeze-frame button. I couldn’t see writing, I couldn’t really see my life, but I had an ability to see a soccer field. During workouts, I taught my body to get extremely tired, then go even harder. I came home feeling as though my mind had dissolved in my skin, and I was just a body walking through the world, thoughtless and happy.

One day on the field, after a pickup game, I got a drink of water. I was drenched in sweat, a hot and humid summer day. My face and arms were sunburned. My legs buzzed. There was a bruise on my thigh from a hard tackle, which had led to a testy moment with another player. Alan, stop, my girlfriend said right after the tackle, when I’d made a feint, passed the defender with the ball on my right foot, and he tackled me from behind. Don’t, she said, coming between me and this other guy. I pointed in his face, yelled, I beat you. You were beaten. I felt vaguely like Darth Vader. You didn’t beat shit, the other player yelled back, grabbing my hand and tossing it away.

On the side of the field, game over, I still felt the hum of the confrontation. The grass was scorched brown. People were talking, drinking water or Gatorade, laughing, eating bananas, and the hum of life around me felt warm, pleasant. There’d just been another argument in the game, as well—a call someone questioned—but it felt good. It was alive, real in a specific way. Things were not meaningless. They were not meaningful, either. They were something else. At the edge of the field, tulip trees swayed in the wind, and above them, white cumulus clouds moved gently in the blue sky. The sky looked back at me. I was momentarily stuck there—where was I?

2.

Soccer had naturally curbed my drinking, smoking, and porn use. I realized those things were in the way, and they had lessened simply because my focus had changed. But suddenly I wanted them gone. I didn’t even want them gone, something in me just shouted: STOP. It felt as though there was no choice to be made. It was made already.

Instead of reading another book about Buddhism, which I had been doing intermittently for years, trying and failing to meditate on my own, I watched a Youtube video of a monk named Yuttadhammo. He was from Canada, moved to Thailand, wore the saffron robes, had a shaved head, lived as simply as possible, and taught on Youtube. I purposely sought out what I believed was the most original form of Buddhism, Theravadin, which focuses on individual liberation, the arhat principle. That if one meditates enough, lets go of thoughts and emotions, learns to see through and beyond desires and aversions, stills and quiets the mind, meets life with a balanced clear-headedness, eventually the practitioner experiences the cessation of suffering. In the Theravadin tradition, meditation had a goal: Calm the mind in order to develop insight into its workings, in order to be free of clinging and aversion. I learned the tradition of Mahasi Sayadaw, meditating with the labeling technique: If I had thoughts, I labeled them “thoughts”; if I had emotions, I labeled them accordingly—“anger, anger,” “fear, fear”—then let them go.

I went to a local temple, met a small, shy Cambodian monk, who gave me the Paticcasamuppada, Dependent Origination. I did Vipassana practice for about six months. It wasn’t the case for me that I couldn’t meditate right away: I was able to do it immediately. I quickly went from five minutes, to ten, to fifteen, to twenty-five, to thirty-five, often meditating for up to an hour, just sitting in our guest bedroom alone, moving from my forehead down to my throat, hovering at my chest, moving to my navel, and expanding into a resonance like an unending bell, rippling from my center and out. I loved meditating. It was as though my body and mind had been starved of it, had missed it, even though I’d never done it before. Boredom was even interesting.

But before long, the whole thing began to feel claustrophobic. I seemed to be doing more in meditation than outside it. I was so busy, always checking my thoughts, almost looking for them to arise, always working on letting them go, like writing stuff down on a to-do list that I’d already done so that I could cross the things on the list off. I felt I was clinging to the thoughts because of how often I was noticing them. Or, because I was more intent on labeling, I wasn’t seeing them clearly, too hung up on getting the technique correct. In other words, insight meditation felt too rigid, too distanced from life. Everything I did was becoming conceptualized: I am opening the door now, let it go; I am entering my car, let it go; I am having thoughts about dinner, let it go; I am having sexual thoughts, let them go. Vipassana practice over-tuned my awareness. Shut up, I began to think—not unlike the STOP which had brought me there.

Likewise, Yuttadhammo, this online teacher, began to seem strange: There was a dullness about him. Though the Cambodian monk I had met was kind, gentle, he too seemed far away, cloistered even when present with me. Both of them seemed less composed than asleep, less present than being watchful of being present, like they were constantly going, I’m present now, no now, no no, now. On his Youtube channel, Yuttadhammo frequently appeared tired or bored. He answered questions haltingly. This person asks, he’d read, his computer screen reflected in his rectangular glasses, blocking his eyeballs, making him seem android-like, how do you know when you get somewhere in meditation? He would take a long moment, and then, as if picking his words up from the bottom of a well, or decoding an ancient scroll, say something like, There are many ways to know you’re getting somewhere in meditation. Many things will not hold your interest anymore. Yeah, I thought, like being alive. I was viewing a version of spirituality that drained one of vitality. Yuttadhammo’s skin was pale, wan. There was no energy in him and very little humor. Those rectangular glasses and the bad lighting of some far away temple rooms in Thailand made him look like a computer programmer who’d been imprisoned by Buddhists. Then, the Cambodian monk who I’d been learning from absconded, disappeared from the local temple in the middle of the night. What happened? I asked a friend who knew all the monks at the temple, and who had been a monk himself. No one knows, he said. A week later, my friend got a text: It was a picture of the little monk. He was smiling, wearing jeans and a t-shirt, living in a houseboat in Baja.

3.

In fall of 2011, I was still playing soccer, still teaching, but writing had been replaced with my interest in Buddhism, which had begun in 2002. I had taken a class senior year to satisfy my philosophy minor. The class was called “Eastern Philosophy.” I took it on a whim. A friend of mine said I would like it, and though I had no idea why he had said that or what Eastern philosophy was, I signed up.

A wild-eyed, bushy-haired professor spoke differently than other profs, dressed differently, had us do yoga and meditate, and stressed that, whereas Western philosophy was the philosophy of thinking, eastern religions were focused on the body and the mind together. There was no mind-body dualism here. When we eventually made it to Buddhism, I had the distinct sense that I knew it all already: A person was not a separate essence, identity, or soul in the world—which was similar to what Sartre had said—but was no-self, an integrated part of all existence. You couldn’t separate individual beings out like we did in the west. This made intuitive sense to me. What was a tree, for instance. Was it just a tree? Was it separate from the dirt it grew in, the fungus, the insects, the water it sucked from the ground, or the sunlight that photosynthesized it? Everything felt alive and awake in a way I had never known before. But then the class ended.

I had understood the concepts and ideas, but didn’t develop a practice until nearly ten years later. Then after having practiced Theravada-style insight meditation for six months, I knew it was time to look again. Was I supposed to be meditating and letting go of things, or was I trying to hold on and get to something, the big goal, the arhat ideal? I was confused. How could you let go and try to get somewhere at the same time? I looked into Tibetan Buddhism but disliked the aesthetic even more than I disliked the chintzy Theravadin dressings. I dabbled with Transcendental Meditation, but when the price tag came up, I walked away. Then I began reading about Zen, and its meditation practice, zazen. “Zazen is the direct expression of your true nature,” I read in Dogen. Zazen is practice without a goal. Why? Because everything is inherently perfect, the world is undefiled, completely incorruptible. A being is a manifestation of universal energy, of change, the dance of life and death.

The practice of letting go suddenly made more sense. Meditation was not getting somewhere, it was the STOP I had experienced already, and it was why I hated the internet, why I so disliked the attention culture, why I was so sick of entertainment, why I’d been disliking myself: None of that was me. Of course you couldn’t get enlightenment. You could only realize you were already enlightened. Bodhidharma visits China to spread a form of Buddhism, Emperor Wu brings him in for an audience. When the Emperor asks Bodhidharma who stands before him, Bodhidharma answers, I don’t know. When the Emperor then asks what is the highest meaning of the holy truths, Bodhidharma says, Vast emptiness, nothing holy. I looked up pictures of zendos online. Black zafus—round cushions—atop square zabutons—flat mats upon tatami flooring. Upright bodies in dark robes, heads angled down, doing nothing. I looked up calligraphy and recalled I had read Ryokan. I read him again:

One narrow path surrounded by a dense forest;
On all sides, mountains lie in darkness.
The autumn leaves have already fallen.
No rain, but still the rocks are dark with moss.
Returning to my hermitage along a way known to few,
Carrying a basket of fresh mushrooms
And a jar of pure water from the temple well.

There were koans too, hundreds of mysterious stories meant to illuminate the original ground, the luminous mind of being—the vast emptiness—from which all things arise. Enlightenment was practice; practice was enlightenment. This was not self-improvement; it was clarifying the mind, dropping self, and practicing reality. It was finding a hermitage of the mind within reality. I would try Zen Buddhism.

4.

With no teachers in the area, I found one through the internet in Japan, a man who ran an online zendo. I poured myself into studying: I read many books, all directed by my teacher. And my teacher taught me zazen. The body should be upright, but not rigid; the mind should be focused, but not overly so, open and aware; the eyes, which we kept open, should not be focused on one point, but should take in the whole room, symbolic of panoramic awareness, as if gazing at the snow-capped peaks of distant mountains.; thoughts should be let go, like they were clouds; when we got caught by thoughts, we returned to just this, seeing the space between thoughts, but also seeing through thoughts—what is beyond thought? We practiced Dogen’s phrase “dropping body-and-mind”, the zazen of relaxing into spacious awareness, relieving oneself of a fixed, rigid identity, letting both body and mind dissolve on the ground of meditation, into the original primordial mind. This could only be done by sitting, sometimes for decades. It began with moving from boredom to what Chogyam Trungpa called “cool boredom,” a sense that nothing has to be done and yet everything is totally refreshing. You can never understand what this really means through language.

Zen was a philosophy of action. Meditation was an action. Buddhism was a philosophy of action. The action was that of the self undoing the self through the self. It was consciousness watching consciousness through consciousness until the entire structure—the intricately fabricated psychological self which was housed in an equally intricate and seductive materiality—wore itself out, dropped away, or was totally flipped inside out.

A heater clicked on, rain fell outside the window, on greening plants and trees, a cat arrived in my lap, left again, warmth there. Sometimes I would sit for an hour or more. My mind and body, after an initial struggle, would settle into the present moment, and expand. Sometimes the wall would become transparent. An intense energy would fill me, the dimensions of my body would become less recognizable. Sometimes this was terrifying. It felt as though I’d dissolve into the world. When that began to happen, I would remain there, on that boundary, until something released, and the dissolving did happen, but I was still there. Scattered energy would coalesce down my spine. The room would feel as though it was inside me, and thoughts would arise from the void.

One afternoon, my girlfriend and I went to picnic at some shoals. It was a late summer day. We played in the water, ate a snack, hiked around the woods, and eventually, as it became late afternoon, I decided to meditate in the flowing shoals. I sat on a rock, my legs in the water. My girlfriend lay on the rock behind. The water gurgled and flowed, and the sky began to slowly darken. The warm air cooled. Clouds moved beyond an old brick mill building, the shell of a building, just the walls up, windows and interior long gone. The moon rose full and yellow in the empty window of one of those buildings. The water flowed and babbled and gurgled. The moon rose higher. I couldn’t tell if the moon was in my mind or if my mind was touching the moon. Everything was pristine, as though made new.

I studied, sat, played soccer, studied, sat, played soccer. My days became more ordered. My wife told me I was like a different person, always in a good mood, more present with her, more attentive. The nagging self-consciousness, the sense that things were dead, had slowly evaporated and then reversed. She began to meditate with me. At the same time, I alienated people: A close friend was upset. I wasn’t hanging out anymore. In a cheap Mexican place, we ate chips and talked and he said I was breaking his heart. I was cold, distant. He used the word selfish over and over. He was right, in a way. It was the kind of selfishness, I hoped, that would lead toward selflessness.

Months passed and practice deepened. I paid attention. I entered the living room after meditating. My girlfriend was sitting on the sofa, petting one of our cats. A lamp was on. Our German Shepherd was lying on the floor. He looked up at me. It was 2012, summer. My girlfriend was no longer my girlfriend: She was my wife, and I was her husband. Time vanished. The house was contained by the heat. The heat itself was given by the tilt of the Earth’s axis, its orientation to the sun. The sun moved through the galaxy in the same way the planet moved around the sun. The galaxy floated through space. I sat down next to my wife, floating in the galaxy beside the galaxy of her mind. The two galaxies touched. The room was small, contained in vastness, and my awareness of that vastness had returned. I wasn’t thinking of what I needed to do, of what should happen next, of what tomorrow would look like, of how I was being, or how I shouldn’t be being. It felt impossibly, amazingly rare to be sitting there, reading with her, the cat, the dog. Everything—even inanimate objects—seemed alive and were worthy of gratitude.

I began to read with interest: Mary Gaitskill, then David Foster Wallace, then Thomas Bernhard, then Lydia Davis, then Nicholson Baker. I could see what they were accessing, and suddenly, without trying to, I wrote a story. I paid no attention to how I wrote it. I didn’t try to write something perfect, as I’d been doing; I no longer wanted to write a perfect story, I just allowed myself to trust what I could now see: My own mind, how it worked, how it grabbed onto things, how it wanted a drink to feel better, how it wanted to smoke to escape, how it wanted porn, how it got frustrated, how it wanted a name and attention for itself, how it wanted to be praised for its creativity or thought impressive for its suffering, how it tried to grab and grab at beauty and make it its own. How all these things distanced me from life, how it all arose from emptiness. I felt awake and open. The story was picked up a few weeks later and went on to win a Pushcart Prize. Later, I wrote a story about the Canadian monk I had watched on Youtube.

In these new stories, I finally saw the expression that I had longed to know but never allowed myself to: A prose style of representational consciousness, the mind struggling with its awareness of itself, struggling with wakefulness, struggling with what it was. I also saw how my little viewpoint would be different, had always been different, but now I had a way to express it, and that expression—in its own very small way—would be both an offshoot and a response to tradition. It was what had been happening to me in East Tennessee and the years leading up to it—I just couldn’t see it. I was constantly grasping and repulsed by that grasping, trying to be no one and someone at once—I was spiritually confused, resisting everything, flipping from mind state to mind state, completely unaware. I had taken writing—something that had initially felt spiritual—and had turned it into an egotistical game. I had taken my deepest desire and had made it a materialistic and selfish concern.

Chogyam Trungpa called this attitude of taking something sacred and making it an egoistic desire, spiritual materialism: “No matter what the practice or teaching, ego loves to wait in ambush to appropriate spirituality for its own survival and gain.” All along, my mind and body had been talking, letting me know that I was out of alignment, that my wanting was perverted. And my coping with the problem—escaping it, not facing it—exacerbated it. Now though, my wish to live in a mountain hut was being fulfilled, but the hut was metaphorical—it was zazen, the hermitage of the larger world—and for the first time, my problems were not really mine, they were constructions of the mind, of the self.

A friend told me that the end of this essay should focus on a kind of forgiveness. I agree that some sense of tenderness is necessary, here, as we’re coming to a conclusion, but in Zen we practice atonement: All my past harmful karma, born of beginningless greed, anger, and ignorance, through body, speech, and mind, I now fully avow. In this avowing, there’s presence: Looking at the self not as a victim of culture or circumstances, even circumstances that may be truly nightmarish, and admitting our own play, our own neurosis, our own theatre of mind, which we’ve mistaken for reality. And in that avowing, in that knowing, entering into the present, and understanding that suffering can be the rich ground of insight. Samsara is nirvana. Our suffering is something to be grateful for, for the path it provides. Our suffering isn’t what we think. The present isn’t what we think, either. Its vastness is so totally terrifying, and its peace is so horrifyingly total, that even when we believe we’re “being present” we’re actually not. There are too many subtle gradations of ego: Watching oneself playing the game of being meditatively present; watching oneself watching how nice it feels to be present; watching oneself being a person who focuses on being present. Then watching what’s watching, aware of awareness itself until the idea of forgiveness shifts to gratitude—and for my friend’s note, I’m grateful. It brought me here.

In the proceeding fifteen years, I have practiced various forms of meditation, but I mostly sit zazen. All the old traps in my conditioned mind have arisen over and over again. In the name of selflessness I have become more selfish, and my wife and I nearly divorced. Our old relationship had to die so a new one would be born. Our child got a blood disorder, and we felt pain and guilt and sadness. My aunt, who loved literature and made me feel that writing was worthwhile, died of Covid unexpectedly. My books were published and barely paid attention to—painful at first, but then nothing to worry about. I wore a walking boot for months due to soccer injuries. My wife nearly died from a rare infection. But amidst all that, I had found a path.

In the koan, Bodhidharma’s first disciple asks him to put his mind at rest. Some of us also want our minds put to rest, but we can play a little game where we are free of ego and restful, when actually that itself is just another subtler form of ego-deception. We can log out of the attention-economy and still play the game. We can turn off our screens and still play the game. We can write essays like this one and still play the game. We can become literary figures with interesting things to say about society, culture and self and suffering and still play the game. We can immerse ourselves so thoroughly in our suffering that we feel we are it, that we are somehow more accomplished because of this fact, seeing reality fully, but still just playing a little game. Bodhidharma tells the disciple to bring him his mind. Then Bodhidharma will put it to rest. The disciple goes into meditation, looking for his mind. He looks and looks for his mind. After many days, he returns to Bodhidharma and says, I have searched for my mind exhaustively and cannot find it anywhere. Bodhidharma replies, There, I have finished putting it to rest for you.

Literature, and story-writing in particular, have qualities other than this, of course. The two major figures from my PhD work exemplify two extreme degrees of what literature can be: For John Gardner (I had wanted to study only William Gass, but my advisor, Frederick Barthelme, insisted, correctly, that I also study John Gardner, since these two had something of a literary competition, bordering on a feud, and they were also good friends), the story writer creates a vivid and continuous dream for the reader through language; for Gass, the writer creates a sort of linguistic consciousness, as well as an art object, with language as focal point. For Gardner, the point of story-writing was mimesis of “reality”; for Gass, it was metaphor—the work itself became a metaphor for reality, a constructed whole, a world unto itself within language, rather than a mere reflection of so-called reality. For both, the notion that something is fictive and real at once is at play. Stories, strangely, for both, meant taking some aspect of life and making it seem realer or more primary to the reader—for Gardner it was story itself; for Gass it was language and perception. In simplified terms: Stories (whether language-driven or “tales”) make things real for us in a certain way. It was just this concept that I was beginning to struggle against. The most important lines of the Dhammapada are: “Our life is shaped by our mind / we become what we think.” Our thoughts shape reality, they don’t just reflect it—this was why I had always preferred Gass. But I was beginning to sense that those thoughts (and that language) could be just as much of a place to get lost in as a normal story, or as in, say, a McDonald’s. Not closer to reality, but further, in a fictive version that aped it in some way. On some level, it felt as though even language-driven “art” was playing a neurotic game within consciousness, with consciousness as the playing board. I began to suspect that everyone, including myself, was confusing the finger for the moon.

1.