.

in the scales of help and harm,
why have there been so few (if any) bloody Zen crusades?
and why no recorded history of Zen charity?

think about it ...

today I held a 16th C. Zen ceramics tea bowl in my hands.
touched my skin to centuries of thought, fingers cradling
form while knowing how easily it could pass for Modern,
just as Zen stone gardens approximate pure abstract
expressionism and just as Japanese haiku poetry
anticipates a (post) modern mistrust of language
(for its limitations). this potter created a (Zen)
sense of materials-and-process by not hiding the
the molten flow of glaze that solidified into hard
lumps on the side of the bowl, nor worried about
the orange peel texure (pin-holing) covering its
surface, but had instead hoped these elements
would force the beholder to experience its form
directly, without analysis, through its curious
imperfections. a contemporary ceramicist might
consider them to be glaze flaws, but I found
them charming, little surprises dripping off
the edge. its unevenness, its roughness left
to reveal the humanity of its maker centuries
later and continuing to show how it could not
get into his hand without first coming from
his heart. and so I experienced his form not
just as another thing that fits into the
general category of a bowl, but as a unique
manifestation of one potter's hands, one mind,
heightened by an awareness of its process marks
made visible.

just like the medievil Zen monks who engaged in
their comedian-straightman exchanges between master
and pupil, not unlike the 1940's "who's-on-first"
shtick of American film, almost always Ionesco-esque
in tone and tenor, Theatre of the Absurd-esque.
intentionally absurdist dialogue so as to break
down the veil of rational analysis, to get at
the kind of knowledge that is not accessible by
words alone, as if to reach an intuitive sense
of mind that moves beyond words to the world in
which it moves within, this comic parody on logic.

parodies of logic expressed in a tea bowl.

I've just spent the past few weeks holding myself
up to the light. incessantly scrutinous
self-examinations, as if to rationalize my
particular imperfections rather than simply trust
in these unique ideosyncracies as a driving force.
as the medievil Zen masters understood so well,
what an absurdist's pursuit!

“You cannot run away from a weakness;
you must some time fight it out or perish;
and if that be so, why not now, and where
you stand?” (Robert Louis Stevenson)