Zazen or Ah Zen?

photo of Eugene O’Neill by Alice Boughton

There’s an argument to be made that if everyone were mindful and lived in the moment, that little art would be produced. Are Waiting for Godot or Madame Bovary about living in the moment? It’s certainly unlikely that Flaubert did. However, both had to be conversant with a non Zen attitude (even though there are scholars who have made Zen interpretations of Beckett’s work), as was Chekhov, whose three sisters are constantly dreaming about going to a mythic Moscow that’s the representation of all their dreams and desires—ditto the windmill chasing Cervantes describes in Don Quixote and the “pipedreams” that Eugene O’Neill’s characters suffer from in The Iceman Cometh. Cervantes, O’Neill, Chekhov, Beckett, and Flaubert all understood the enormous power that that  which has yet to be has over that which is. But the sensibility is also a description of imagination. By allowing the imagination to fly from what is to what could be, almost all creators are charter members of the romantic movement, even though the styles in which they work might flirt with the most advanced forms of post-modernism. Yes, it can be argued that all imaginative work partakes of the romantic agony. Even though actually influenced by Zen, John Cage’s 4’33," a work in which there is time, but no sound seems to be reaching for something beyond itself. If nothing else the open space allows in an ineffable flow of non-existence. Any thought, feeling, or even melody can occupy the emptiness, the black hole opened up by the artist’s erasure of all signposts of a familiar present--at least in so far as musical form is concerned.

Home Run Hitter

Larry Cutler is a former minor league baseball player whose name is immortalized in the City College Hall of Fame for having hit .429 as a second basemen in 1954, making him the leading hitter in the Metropolitan Collegiate Baseball Conference that year. Larry has also been a political activist and Marxist, and most recently a reader of the great works of world literature. He has read Remembrance of Things Past, Anna Karenina, Don Quixote and Finnegan’s Wake. He's probably one of the only former professional baseball players who is now grappling with Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. He takes what can only be called an anti-capitalist approach to literature, claiming that the attempt to look for results distracts a writer from the project at hand. He recently asked why Gravity’s Rainbow and Finnegan’s Wake are so hard to read. It seems like a simple point, but it epitomizes some of the key questions of so-called modernism in writing and painting.  His point about difficulty recalls the famed Bauhaus equation: form follows function. Form follows function the way style follows content. Euphuistic or overly ornate prose is an affectation that can have comic results. The writer affects profundity by self-consciously creating gnarled sentences that are hard to figure out. This form of reticulated prose is disconcerting since it deceives both the reader, who thinks he is missing something, and the writer, who is under the delusion of saying something, even if he would be hard put to explain it. Joyce, for one, was up to something else. His difficulty derives from the attempt to mimic the workings of the human mind, which is no mean feat. This is the kind of discussion with which Mr. Cutler is intimately acquainted, as he is with the careers and earned-run averages of almost any significant baseball player you can think of. He also knows a thing or two about a manifesto called What is to Be Done by one V.I. Lenin.