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