I've been meaning to post on this found teisho since I launched Rusty Ring, away back in the Kamakura Period. Somehow I always found a reason not to; afraid to cock it up, I imagine. But conditions have conspired to kick me into gear.
It seems we've entered the Age of Vengeance, wherein no limitation on the godlike All-Seeing I will be endured. Both Right and Left are stomping about, meting out "justice" from a position of self-declared moral superiority, yet in style remarkably similar to a pogrom. (And also to each other. Here's a koan: if you must become your enemy to defeat him, can you?)
As for insight; empathy; forgiveness; compassion; the instinctive restraint that governs men and women of good faith…
Get a rope.
In such times, a hermit monk could do worse than invite his brothers and sisters To See the Invisible Man.
Robert Silverberg's seminal contemplation on the nature of true decency first appeared in the inaugural (April 1963) issue of sci-fi pulp Worlds of Tomorrow. I became aware of it in 1985, when it was faithfully adapted for the first revival of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone.
For those 20-odd minutes I was riveted to the television; though still in my early 20s, I'd lived enough to recognise the unflinching truth Silverberg was burning into my screen. It's nothing less than a Jataka Tale on the gulf that separates bourgeois morality from the real thing.
In this case, we have a man sent up the river for the crime of "being an arsehole". (No wonder Silverberg's utopian society has done away with prisons; with laws like that, there'd have to be one on every block.)
Will their ingenious, diabolic alternative sentence turn this egocentric bastard into a productive citizen? You'll have to see it to find out.
At this writing, two uploads of the Twilight Zone segment are available on YouTube:
- an integral print over Spanish subtitles has survived there since 2015
- and dendrochronology pins this old-style three-parter all the way back in 2008 CE.
The entire series is also available on DVD.
With track records like these, and any good luck, you'll be able to find at least one of them. The writing, performances, and direction are all excellent. Allowance allowed the changing norms of television production, it's aged very well.
If on the other hand you prefer to read the original, then by truly miraculous wrinkle of the Enlightenment Super-Path:
- the entire April '63 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow is freely available in ebook form, or...
- if you'd rather have just the text, the Ru-net offers it here.
For the rest, I'll leave you with my war cry:
"That which does not kill me, makes me kinder."
It's a simple insight that I realised soon after I become a monk.
It also explains why my own society frequently hates me.
(Mad-scientist chortle.)
(Photo from a screen-cap of the Twilight Zone episode.)
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