no complex whole, no real answer in the way we want the real to be.
Our history of dissatisfaction is getting pretty long. The duality inherent in these ways of knowing continues to feed our persistence. We demand defining judgment to affirm ourselves, but it has never been forthcoming into the conditional we experience. At the same time we know in a literal way that we are not visitors. It is the paradox of being and the burden of mortality. This is it. We are afraid.
Unknown answers
scatter empty roads,
brittle leaf music.
Part One
Death of the
Fathers
The End of the Rational Ideal
What makes a life? What makes its choices? Who am I when I stand before another? Before myself in a mirror? And the many things are all mirrors. Who is this when I am alone and nameless, sitting in the woods with sleeping trees and snowy dusk? The answers are always conditional.
Is it where you live? I have an American passport, but I was born in Munich of an Irish mother and an Irish-American father who was then a soldier stationed there after the war. I have a German birth certificate. Does this make me German or American? I know what I have a right to claim, but that does not answer the question. I can claim citizenship through my grandparents. My paternal grandfather was from Belfast. Does that make me Irish or English? It depends upon whom you ask. My grandmother, his wife, was Czech. Her country does not even exist now as it did for her. What does that say about me? Nothing.
I have lived for more than thirty years in upstate New York. This is not Westchester County or the Hudson Valley, but the real upstate that has its own weather section in the Farmer’s Almanac. Up here that thirty years makes me merely a “long-time resident.” My wife is a “native,” born here as her mother was. But I have also lived and worked or studied in Liberia, the Canary Islands, England, and Puerto Rico. I used to consider my roots to be in the rural Delaware Valley, where I was a small child. Now, I don’t know.
Perhaps it is what you do? I used to hate that question. In America the common way of finding out who a person is comes from posing a question about what they do. “Hi, I’m Bob. I’m an engineer. What do you do?” It saves a lot of probing guesswork. One is either this or that, and whatever our stereotypes about that happen to be, we find ourselves satisfied by them. And it is true that many people identify themselves with their work. Can you think of any medical doctor who would not say he or she was a doctor when asked who they were? I could say, for example, that my dad was a grocer, for he worked in grocery stores, supermarkets, and the food business most of his adult life. But that hardly explains the complex and troubled man who gave me a copy of Voltaire when I was only fifteen.
When our children were small, I stayed at home as the primary caregiver. This was unusual at the time. My wife’s career in industry was just beginning to blossom. I had by then been a teacher at a small prep school in Pennsylvania, a lecturer in American literature at a Spanish University, and a freelance writer with one book to my name (from a small press that immediately after went out of business). I also had sold the independent bookstore I had founded and operated for seven years. I worked at night teaching business communications and American literature at the adult education extension of the local community college. I wrote poems while the children napped, and I created paintings on weekends.
I learned quickly not to say I was a homemaker. People would wince as they tried to place a Betty Crocker template over me and my firm handshake. Nor would I say I was a poet or an artist. Despite national poetic figures as wildly different as Robert Frost and Allen Ginsberg, the stereotype of the Oscar Wilde aesthete tiptoeing through the tulips was what I felt came to mind for many of the people I would meet. I’d say I was a writer and taught at MVCC. That was okay. It had a ring to it. But it wasn’t who I was.
Even after fourteen years working in rare books and manuscripts at a research library, with an MLS and professional publications, I do not call myself a librarian. After doing consulting work for UNESCO in Germany, I find I could also call myself a documentalist, but I don’t. For six years I’ve worn the shaved head of an ordained Rinzai Zen monk, but unless people ask me about my head (and some do!), I rarely mention it, despite my deep involvement as a clergyman in our community. It is because of who I am that I am a monk, not the other way around.
Perhaps it is the way you live or what has happened to you? Are you handicapped? A widow? A Catholic? A Jew? A victim (of what)? And me? I’m a drunk, an alcoholic. Twelve years ago I went into rehab and have been working recovery ever since. For six of those years I taught meditation to other alcoholics and addicts at a local rehabilitation unit. My twelfth-step work. When I finally went for help, I was a tenth of an inch from losing everything—job, family, life. I have absolutely no doubt that if I had continued as I was I’d be dead now. This is the real thing. I am not afraid to talk about it but neither do I advertise it. I was told that if I wanted to get better I had to completely change my life. Yeah, right, I thought. I was 41. I was me. I could be a good boy and not drink anymore, but I could not change who I was. I was wrong. I am not the same person I was twelve years ago. I could not have predicted who I became, nor how substantively different. Clearly, being an alcoholic is not a defining characteristic.
Vanity is such a subtle thing. Twice a year I am supposed to attend intensive “retreats” called sesshin at a traditionally-run Buddhist monastery in the mountains as part of my training as a monk. It is the kind of training one comes to realize has no end point. It is a life-long way of keeping in shape spiritually. One of the two sesshin is always supposed to be Rohatsu Sesshin. This is an eight-day affair that takes place in the first week in December, ending on December 8, the day that traditionally marks the Buddha’s enlightenment. It is the most demanding and the most rewarding sesshin, with up to fourteen hours of meditation a day. The mountains can be beautiful in December. One year a heavy snowfall wiped out power in a three-county area and temperatures in the zendo dropped to thirty-three degrees. But we just put on long johns under our robes and sat in a silence so deep (no heat pipes, no water running, no lights humming, no white noise), we could hear the snowflakes settle outside. We were transported back three hundred years to a monastic experience impossible almost anywhere today.
In December of 1997, I was sitting through my eighth Rohatsu and my fifteenth or sixteenth sesshin at the monastery. Compared to some participants, I was still in my sesshin adolescence, but I was not a newcomer. I knew from experience that the first two or three days are the most difficult, rather like a wilderness canoe trip, and then one toughens up and truly enters into the rhythms of the extraordinary silent dance sesshin becomes. But this time I did not toughen up. Pain in my legs and back increased each day. The little sleep we got was erratic at best for me. By the sixth day I was nearly passing out from pain. But I refused to say anything to anyone. We do learn how to deal with pain and I was convinced I was failing to do so in some way, weakening in my resolve. Certainly Rohatsu in a Rinzai monastery breeds a kind of samurai attitude, a sense of toughness—we are the Dharma Marines! This may be helpful in some circumstances, though I am not so sure what they might be. It nearly killed me, at any rate. I would not let myself see something was indeed wrong with me—not a failure of will (ironic in this ego-eradicating environment) but of body. I would not listen to the warning signals. I was very sick.
It took some time for the doctors to get it right because the symptoms are easily disguised as something else. Besides, men who grew up as athletes, as I did, tend to hold on to the notion that they are immortal and don’t need doctors anyway, so I didn’t even mention at first some of the things bugging me. I thought they’d go away by themselves. But I was finally diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a
