Kill the Buddha
Please allow me to put the last three weeks of my existence into some order, more for my benefit than yours. I think I am on the cusp of a major shift in perspective tectonics. A dull feeling hovers above my middle tongue and bumps the invisible membrane separating the cheek and jaw from the rest of the natural world. I feel universe-barred from doing anything rash, and the most desperate move I can imagine is to stop dead in my tracks and sit for the summer season like a wet log in the woods, mushrooming toward October. I returned last Saturday from South Carolina more confused a man than I have ever been, and emptied of any true self-made emotion. Two weeks with my mother, whose memory and autonomy is failing, pulled me away from thoughts about everything else important in my life—wife, children, grandchildren, income, outgoes, friendships, art, culture, politics, genocide… I was nearly a blank slate again, bald on top with capable limbs and high blood pressure.
And I thought my best foot going forward would be to cull all ambition and obsession with art, lock up my phone and computer in a box, and sit out the summer in the backyard watching the birds until I had satori. There would be time for enlightenment and also nurturing the human relationships I’ve neglected while being just another victim to the greed and degradation of a dog-eat-dog society. I was ready to leave the world behind again in order to reconnect with it, in a manner how I repeatedly imagine one needs to reconnect. By disconnecting. Which is doomed to failure if no one else is doing the same thing. I am constantly haunted by a past that would never exist in its present if the society was Internetted like ours. The lone philosopher of that day would push herself to devise a plan to re-Buddha, while her contemporaries texted dates and gossip, and the really dumb ones gambled their bitcoin away on the casino apps. Thoreau played Buddha with a tiny house in Concord where every neighbor knew how to defecate in a bucket and cultivate a garden, with occasional stops to gossip along High Street. Now I want to imitate that life today? With Space X?
Daft!
Furthermore, I have always considered Prince Gautama to be a loser in the sense that he abandoned his wife and child to make friends with a buffalo boy under a Bodhi tree. A very selfish child-man, like any privileged purple-robed Pope or pedophilic President. As a practicing painter and Zen enthusiast, I know that the wavy experience of enlightenment can only occur with repeated dives into suffering and society, never via the abandonment of it. Which is nearly impossible to do cleanly for any sensitive human being. I was telling Rose this morning that I am a misanthropic humanist. Which means I loath humanity yet at the same time feed its potential with enthusiasm. There are times I hate the species to distraction, yes, but then children are born, hence their potential to cast away their parent’s prejudice. Likewise, there are still adult societies rejecting the capitalist system, voluntarily or not, for the mutual benefit of all living species. It also helps that human populations in the spoiled countries are experiencing a global recession in baby-making. Who wants to gift their unborn a plastic waste pontoon bridge linking the continents?
So although I am often captivated with thoughts of leaving the world behind, (especially after feeling its dulling allure during my South Carolina visit), it will act more like a hit and run into society for the remainder of my breathing days. The future needs more rage and anger, rather than private little self-improvements through spiritual exercises. Meditate on ways to admonish the masses, creatively. I’ll be sure to take my pleasure time watching the birds and feeding gladness, humor and humility to my family and friends. However my work will be spent killing the nasty Buddha everyday with uncommon purpose and integrity.
Yesterday was Black Ivory’s first podcast in three weeks. I let the team down by failing my one job: to hit the “Go live” button on the Substack app. So here are the last 6 episodes, sped up in a dream. You missed a good one. Edgeworth Johnstone got a badge-maker! Emma Pugmire danced with her umbrella at a strawberry festival in Cambridge! And yours truly cleaned up the mouse guano in his studio. So sorry world. This will have to do.
I won’t forget again.
Love your perspective on the Buddha. He WAS a selfish manchild, or at least I got that impression from reading Herman Hesse's "Siddhartha"