Postmodernism, Zen, Deborah Hay - Preliminary Notes

1. The following are excerpts from Dogen's Uji (The Time-Being). 

"An ancient buddha said:

For the time being stand on top of the highest peak.

For the time being proceed along the bottom of the deepest ocean.

For the time being three heads and eight arms. 

For the time being an eight- or sixteen-foot body.

For the time being a staff or whisk.

For the time being a pillar or lantern.

For the time being the sons of Zhang and Li.

For the time being the earth and sky."  

"[To his student Yaoshan's query: But what is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming from the west?] Zen Master Daji replied:

For the time being have him raise his eyebrows and wink. 

For the time being do not have him raise his eyebrows and wink.

For the time being to have him raise his eyebrows and wink is right.

For the time being to have him raise his eyebrows and wink is not right.

What Daji said is not the same as other people's words. The 'eyebrows' and 'eyes' are mountains and oceans, because mountains and oceans are eyebrows and eyes. To 'have him raise the eyebrows' is to see the mountains. To 'have him wink' is to understand the oceans. The 'right' answer belongs to him, and he is activated by your having him raise the eyebrows and wink."  

2. I just have to get it down that dancing Deborah Hay's choreography, learning her non-language, and seeing gratefully puts me in the same state as reading Dogen's barely-words, parsing Nagarjuna's arguments, and reading the minded-images of Fernando Pessoa, Frank O'Hara, and Anne Carson. Something about the impossible task of "putting forward the unpresentable in presentation itself" without caring for formal goodness or beauty. Of living from the nerve. More interested in putting the phone down and looking at the looking for truth present through all points of the gaze. 

3. What got me here:

• Jean-François Lyotard's essay, "What is Postmodernism?"
• Deborah Hay's My Body, the Buddhist
• Dogen's Uji
• Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquietude
• Frank O'Hara's "Meditations in an Emergency"
• Kant's Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime
• Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space
• Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson 
• Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse
• Louise Gluck
• Shunryu Suzuki's Zen Mind Beginner's Mind
• All of Rilke's Elegies

Dead Person

1. Seeing puts you in relation to other human beings. It's hard to be in relation to others when you have your eyes closed. It's hard to see when you're only listening. It's impossible to see when you're judging. 

2. Let seeing serve you. Be served by seeing, like a meal you would serve to a friend. When we see, we depend for existence on each other. If not x, then not me. If x, then me. 

3. None of us can do it. Mutual commitment. Endless task.

4. When we walk there's no need to turn your fucking head because your field of view is constantly moving. 

5. Relax your mouth, take the cadence of a normal conversation, and speak fake words without sounding like you're speaking a foreign language. Loosen language. Deconstruct back-of-throat. 

6. Time is in my hands. I'm not ruled by time. I get to use it as I wish. When there's no music, we must be so smart about how we use time so we don't get caught in it. Time and my timing is my music. 

7. Sensation comes from seeing. 

8. A celebratory feeling senses my body I feel alignment underneath these fingernail cells round two gets a ten I didn't ask about round 2 was all surface and no-content yes-membrane clean glass for skin white button-down smelling like a Bushwick laundromat I once patronized you thought the dead body on the street beneath the sheet was me and you were so relieved when I walked in the door you felt a feeling caused by an uncertain belief a hypothesized reality the tragic and possible inevitability that makes us all the same much like the way I wonder around through you and in this movement I feel love and mystery and seeing I love to dance and sing and learn with you I wonder how much about me you already know I wonder how much of me I will learn through you I will never know how much of us travels through a you-caused-by-me, a me-caused-by-you

Seed

1. I have to devise a way to keep myself interested in being here. You look so beautiful in this light. Thank you. I turn my fucking head to avoid getting attached to what I think I'm doing.

2. I made a seven-part dance that represented my development into the beautiful whirling dervish my dad told me about when I was young. A poet and a whirling dervish. What's a profession or vocation to a meteorological phenomena, an unexplainable event. I didn't want to represent anything in that moldy gym; I wanted the old lady's vibrational acceptance of the emptiness in the room. 

3. Outside of emptiness I think of what to say. A difficult conversation awaits me and I don't want to make the same mistakes. I wonder how we know what we want. I wonder about this. 

4. A beautiful sensation. A sensate knowing. A sensational to-do list. A sense of future in this moment. And this one. 

5. I hope we make the piece that needs to be made. No, we will make the piece that demands to be made. I already love it and you.

Turn Your Fucking Head

1. Turn your fucking head. Patience. You will never know the ways the universe is affecting your body right now. Questions. I’m a pig, drinking it all in. Gratitude doesn’t look any certain way. It doesn’t appear, it simply is. Appearing and being being the same, I turn my fucking head. 

2. What we see is who we are. Flatten perception by moving perception. Change perception by moving perception. It’s not about what you’re doing but how you’re seeing. This is the future of dance. 

3. I don’t have any questions anymore. It’s not a practice but a dance. It’s our dance. I’m emotional saying that. 

4. I thought I would say some words to you. I live here now.

5. It's unknowable. There is no knowing. 

6. How is my head moving? Turn your fucking head. My eyeballs came out of the back of my head and came around to meet anything but myself. 

7. Turn your fucking head to cease being attached to anything but and so for yet yourself. 

I Have To Go

It's always the simplest image that impresses the deepest direction. Maybe I have seen many images in my life. Maybe I have lost interest in shrouding my eyes or pretending to see things that aren't there. Maybe I have always inclined toward basic symbols of direction and equation, position and time. 

Difficult Integration

1. Forming a channel between coincidence and no coincidence, the breath is the conduit for our words. Maybe the task is atomizing communication until it's nothing but bare breath, traceable by/through/to attention. 

I lost the ability to speak last week. My experience of the world was made of attention, time, and perception. I felt myself descend into something simple. My bones felt hollow and deflated, my skin felt easy, my eyes felt extensive. I watched a father and his daughter drink tea on a bench. I watched Chidi cry. I watched Cal's hair shroud his face like seaweed. 

I danced when I got home while eating yogurt after feeling so pointless. The movement was blissfuly unifying. I wasn’t sure what to do with my time. I kept wanting my watch, thinking it would somehow change things. I laid on the floor and saw through my arms and stood on my back and meditated from shoulder to tendon. My body felt like a sibling. Movement impulses were unified and un-judged, maybe pre-judged. 

Pre-verbal, pre-concept, pre-judgment: This is where I was for a couple hours I think. 

        I'm time, we're space. 

2. I think often about how to create efficient systems and minimize waste. I can’t afford to waste anything, least of all time. I think often about the immaterial resources that I spend everyday and aim to build into my routine processes of replenishment. Patience, compassion, attention: My most critical resources. 

And time––that foreigner of a mother––which evades saving. That time only wants to be lost. She only wants to be adored from a distance of mourning. We never wake up together. I never want to get out of bed. Time fucking hates me. She pierces my fingernails unto themselves and snatches my eyeballs from the screen. I check everyone’s Spotify like an OCD father and forty million opportunities slip through my fingernails. Time is a vinegar solution I spray on a perennially smudgy glass table. That time is the rug that always gets bought, or the shoes that I hope anyone is happily wearing now. Time steals sometimes. I really feel it to be true. 

I need to pick up my watch. What will change then? 

3. I make lists to remember things. I think this does something my mind alone can't do. I remember that as a human I've evolved to think and say what I'm thinking to others. Even though I'm not happy about this fact, it remains in my head. I can't ever get everything out of my head. Something alway stays, stains, stares me back in the face. 

Standing on my feet and walking on my heels, clutching you five times this way and a couple times that. Looking at you looking at me I felt very strange in a room with wooden floors and a couple people who I can tell try to avoid me. Whatever I do I can never seem to get away from myself. I can never get the full idea out. I can’t stop eating carbs even though they hurt my teeth and sit in my organs like dried glue. I didn’t want to eat the same breakfast. I want something different. You talked too much. I didn’t like the way my body looks. 

I couldn’t find my breath in that room. I feel like I forgot how to write. And even though I told myself before that the feeling of something is evidence of its existence, I wish I could do something other than what I’m doing right now. "All it is is offerings and responses," I hear anyone say. 

4. I picked up my watch and it did everything I thought it would.

5. I talk to myself while walking and notice that it sounds like English isn't my first language. My words are playful and striving––always directional and hopefully simple. I just want to make the basic image easy to see. I start thinking about the whole mother tongue mythology and about language as a very long event. I will spend my entire life learning a language of particulars. I have to make peace with this fact.