1. KOANS

This week, I restarted a meditation course which I’ve already finished twice. The several sessions I’ve so far re-completed have not yet prompted enlightenment. Perhaps this is because the course occurs through an app.

It’s a koan meditation course, which means every session has a story in which you are told/not told how to become enlightened. The most common forms of these stories are:

A) A student asks a teacher what enlightenment is. The teacher replies with a seemingly non-sequitur answer. These range from ‘rice in the bowl, water in the bucket’ to ‘dried shit-stick.’
B) A student is shocked into awakening by something apparently ordinary, e.g. the knock resulting from a piece of broken tile hitting a rod of bamboo.

In these stories, enlightenment, or kenshō, is consistently associated with the mundane; the teacher guiding the sessions on my app, Henry Shukman, continually promises me that everything needed for awakening etc is all already here, since everything must occur within consciousness. If we only pay attention to the world – to sight and sound and touch and light and colour – then something can happen. (Not that you should be asking me about any of this, clearly).

While writing the above paragraphs, I tried to adopt this idea.

I am sitting in the outside section of a coffee shop so that I can vape – my current vape is pretty obnoxious; big, gold, has a touch screen – and this outside section is deserted due to wind, but for one table, opposite me, at which two finance bro-looking characters are sitting. I have tried to listen very closely to their conversation to see if it will provide a modern equivalent of sweeping a broken bit of tile into a rod of bamboo in a courtyard and therefore prompt awakening.

The wind, unfortunately, has obstructed most of their conversation but I am able to reproduce the following:

‘There’s no way they wouldn’t employ you, it’s institutional knowledge.’
‘Thanks, boy. I think twelve months should give me enough time.’
…
‘Dude, she was fucked. Cigarettes, boy.’
‘Do you really have no intention to stop vaping?’
(The dude on the left was, like me, vaping; though rather than a hard-drive-looking thing, he had a more demure-looking disposable pink tube. As he was, by my guess, late thirties, he was surely too old for demure-looking disposable pink tubes.)

This, also, did not produce awakening. But perhaps the fault was in me, rather than in the material.

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2. SHOULD YOU CUT YOUR HAIR?

If the Zen idea is that looking closely enough at anything can produce awakening, then there’s a corollary to this in literature: get close enough to any subject and the result will be profound, literary.

To me, the most obvious instances of this principle are always Joyce’s Ulysses and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time(which is the correct English version of the title btw, incomparably better than the dry Remembrance of Things Past). Ulysses, trivially, is about one day in which two blokes walk around Dublin and the wife of one of those blokes has an affair; the Search is trivially about the life of a posh-ish French dude who wants to be a writer but never quite manages to be one.

Non-trivially, these are two of the most important works ever produced. There are many reasons for that, but the headlines for me personally are:

For Ulysses: how close Joyce is able to get to consciousness itself (both as a form and as a subject); rendering it with such felicity that some have argued the stream of consciousness in the Western mind is language based because of Ulysses.
For the Search: By trying to include everything, analyse everything to the nth degree, or as much of everything as is actually possible in a novel – how much Proust recreates the richness of life itself.

But I’ve been thinking about how this closeness=importance principles operates in more of a middle ground, when we’re not dealing with epics and monoliths, but how can it be used to make seemingly vapid situations interesting.

This happens in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘Bernice Bobs her Hair,’ which is by no means his most famous story, but has also received surprising attention in the Fitzgerald scholarship. The plot runs thus:

Bernice comes from Eau Claire to stay with her cousin Marjorie Harvey, in a city presumed to be Saint Paul. Marjorie is one of the most popular girls in Saint Paul, which we are told, but which we can also identify by Fitzgerald’s classic identifiers for popularity: 1) she is cut-in-on every few feet during dances; 2) she has many beaus. Bernice, on the other hand, is described by one of these beaus – whom Marjorie forces to dance with Bernice – as ‘sorta dopeless.’

After fighting for a while about Bernice’s being ‘sorta dopeless,’ Marjorie begins to coach Bernice about how to be popular with boys. (Her advice is more-or-less lifted from a letter that Fitzgerald wrote to his sister). The coaching is very successful, especially the development of a ‘line’ from Bernice about how she’s going to bob her hair (a fairly salacious thing to do at the time). Soon, she too is 1) cut-in-on and 2) has beaus.

Unwittingly, Bernice steals Majorie’s ‘heavy beau’ (one of the beaus must always be heavy) and Marjorie is enraged. She calls Bernice’s bluff about getting her hair bobbed, and not wanting to back down, Bernice, finally, as the title suggests, bobs it. It looks terrible. (Bernice, does, however, get her revenge on Marjorie).

—

Why does this story work?

It shouldn’t, really; or, at least, it shouldn’t work as a piece of serious literature. It’s about a popularity contest involving two wealthy girls; the story’s climax is a haircut.

And it wasn’t a piece of serious literature, at the time it was published – Fitzgerald wrote short stories in order to support his novels, and they were deliberately populist; he was known to remove all the best bits from his stories and save them for his novels.

And yet, undeniably, the story works. It works because of how convincingly Fitzgerald is able to enter the world of Marjorie and Bernice, how many nuances of the social hierarchy he is able to identify, how fantastically he captures their voices:

‘Well, you’e got to learn to be nice to men who are sad birds. You look as if you’d been insulted whenever you’re thrown with any except the most popular boys. Why, Bernice, I’m cut in on every few feet—and who does most of it? Why, those very sad birds. No girl can afford to neglect them. They’re a big part of any crowd. Young boys too shy to talk are the very best conversational practice. Clumsy boys are the best dancing practice. If you can follow them and yet look graceful you can follow a baby tank across a barb-wire sky-scraper.’

Basically, he uses all of the technical elements which make fiction pleasurable and interesting to read – though he deploys them seriously in a context which we wouldn’t normally take seriously.

(And thus, if I’d listened closely enough, perhaps those finance bros could’ve given me a decent short story, if not awakening.)

3. THERE’S ALWAYS ORGANISED RELIGION

This happened the other week. When I was walking from my apartment to the nearby Vida (non South Africans read: Costa/ Starbucks), I cut through the parking lot of an office block, and was confronted by a well-dressed elderly couple (I assumed they were a couple). They clearly wanted me stop and they looked nice enough so I did.

‘Do you have a few moments to talk about our lord and saviour Jesus Christ?’ the man said. He actually used those words. He had an Italian accent and was wearing a purple scarf.

The woman proffered a pamphlet towards me. The front page confirmed that they were Jehovah’s witnesses and not helping the stereotype. She’d nodded as she’d handed it over in such a way that made me wonder if she was Italian too but didn’t speak English.

‘Well you see, I’m Jewish,’ I said. ‘But thanks all the same.’

‘But you know that Jesus was Jewish?’ she said, without a trace of an accent.

She stared at me after that, as if what she’d said would prove to be a revelation; as if I would look back wide-eyed and retort, ‘Well, you should have said! That’s okay then, I will convert, don’t mind if I do.’

—

So, you know, if this zen stuff isn’t your speed, and you also don’t want to cut your hair, there is always someone ready to convert you to something.

—
See you in two weeks,
Blake