"The secret of writing about Zen practice is sincerity, and if you can fake that, you've got it made."
My riff on a quotation from George Burns. Or Jean Giraudoux, or Groucho Marx, or any of several other posited sources. It's likely an old saw from Yiddish theatre or similar Jewish art form. Not only are many proposed authors [none of whom claimed to invent it] Jewish, but the quip itself has the distinct salt of Hebrew insight.
(Photo of a 'George Burns' variety rose courtesy of Nadia Talent and Wikimedia Commons.)
Though this seems at first glance avant-garde sculpture, in real life it's the famous one-legged torii of Nagasaki.
You can fill in its backstory yourself.
This Shinto devotional object was just another spirit gate, like thousands of others in Japan, until retrofitted for the Atomic Age by the US Air Force. The survivors took its still standing, despite the instant destruction of their entire city and the amputation of over half the monument, as an icon of hope. While rebuilding their home, they carefully preserved this gate, unmoved and unrestored, in front of the shrine that no longer existed behind it. (Though it soon would again.)
Today both are close-pressed by modern urban development, quite unlike the quiet neighbourhood in which they started, though neither has travelled so much as a yard since the day they were built.
And though all of this is as Shinto as it comes, I can't help but find commanding Zen significance in it, too.
To me, that war-veteran torii's silhouette – gates being a foundational metaphor for us, too – speaks to the nature of enlightenment practice. You practice where you are, how you are. If you lose a leg, you practice on the other.
And if an atomic bomb annihilates everything you know, you practice in the remains.
Nothing to do with machismo; it's just that you have no alternative.
I'm particularly touched by the Little Apocalypse – the tidal wave of concrete that drowned shrine and spirit gate in a matter of decades. Because while I struggle to imagine their Great Apocalypse – it's just more horror than my mind can honestly grasp – I've lived, and continue to live, the little one over and over.
Thus the sight of that silent, single-minded symbol of trust and true nature, standing up to its chin in a mindless race to oblivion, has special relevance for me. In that sense, notwithstanding religious distinctions or the brutality it's survived, we're comrade monks.
It's simply the most succinct expression of Things As They Are that I have found.
Today humanity is flirting with holocaust at least as hot as WWII. Given the geo-engineering challenges we choose to ignore; our growing embrace of political ideologies long proven suicidal; and the diplomatic tools we beta'd at Nagasaki, this could reasonably be the end.
It's difficult for me as a historian, a Zenner, and a decent guy, to remain in harness in the midst of our extinction.
So, what to do?
Well…
Sit down.
I'll also be keeping a photo of the one-legged torii of Nagasaki somewhere in the house, where I can see it.
(All photos courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Contemporary view also courtesy of Frank Gualtieri. View of torii after blast from bottom of stairs also courtesy of U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, 1945; Committee for Research of Photographs and Materials of the Atomic Bombing; Nagasaki Foundation for Promotion of Peace; and the Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Museum. Torii's eye view of the devastated city also courtesy of 林重男 [Hayashi Shigeo].)
(Radio operators are weird about their equipment. We love to look at it. I take photos every time I set up in a new place. This time it's on the second floor of a friend's house, to a longwire antenna running through the sliding door behind it to a tree at the edge of the property. All of which is fascinating, I'm sure.)
This is Nicola White, my favourite mudlark. (Yes, I have a favourite mudlark. I also have other mudlarks, who, while not my favourite mudlark, are also brilliant. If you don't have a favourite mudlark, what are you even doing?)
Ordinarily I unspool a mudlark video here and there for a bit of exotic foreign beachcombing. Because the seaweed is always greener on the far side of the planet. And let me tell you, us New Worlders are missing out; what Nicola finds in the Thames – midtown London, mind you – is better than anything I'll find in the North Pacific, ever.
But that's just the inescapable luck of the draw. Consider, for example, that I'd rather not dig clams there. Some things you got, some things you ain't. (Second Noble Truth, with a worldly-dharma chaser.)
But this one drove me mad. I'm talking physical pain. Because this time, my girl Nicola outed me as a bad monk, a self-righteous Buddhist, and a very strange man.
It starts about 1:40 – the video opens at that mark when you click on it – where, if you look carefully at the mud... you'll see a washer.
And boy, does that trigger my greed! You can see it right there. It's within reach. The camera places you right behind the hand. "It's right there! Just right! No, don't pan away!"
But that happens a lot in mudlarking videos. What is less common, happens next.
Another one. Just as good and just as near.
Then another. And another.
I counted at least half a dozen before Nicola wandered on, for a total of about a minute and a half of torment. And God knows how many other rings lie just out of frame.
Needless to say, she walks right past all of them. Because she's after, like, actual stuff. Interesting stuff. Thought-provoking stuff she can use in her artwork. (That's what Nicola is: an artist.)
She's probably got enough of those to hold the duration.
But if you're a fudo maker, that dreggy hardware shines, if only metaphorically, right off the gloomy muck. (Looking remarkably like ours, come to that. Amazing how similar the UK is to the North Coast.)
I'm telling you, that's powerful iron. Those guys contain enough disdain for suffering, each one, to make Mara incontinent for days.*
And I could reach out and take them, if my arms were 5,000 miles longer.
New Year's is upon us again, and as usual I'm in a reflective mood. This time I've got the Cowboys Fringants' Ici-bas running through my head. Les Cowboys have an unusual gift for couching poetry in vernacular speech, and it only gains in power what it loses in polish. Since the group lost its lead singer to prostate cancer just last month, this song has been much in my thoughts.
The video itself is a significant, Cowboys-worthy bonus; like another, unwritten verse, pumping context into words that might otherwise read more grimly than intended. Note all the visual metaphors for growing up and growing old, and also the classic backstreet scenes from some Québécois town, all of which have an uncanny knack for being distinct and the same at the same time. This one – whoever it is – makes me homesick for my own.
And finally, of course, that heart-pulling winter: much more than a simple season, it's a kind of family member in Québec; a relationship hard to grasp beyond the Ottawa. None of which is hurt by an additional call-out to my enduring love of taking long walks through it, both in town and nearer home.
« Ici-bas » literally means the here-below, an expression that exists in English as well, but is much more current in French. It implies the fishbowl nature of the human lot -- its claustrophobic smallness, the impossibility of escaping it with our lives. And also the unity of our experience, whether we choose to accept that or not.
All of which made translating even the title tough. At last I went with Down Here, with its implied awareness of the great not-Earth, and the modesty of our little neighbourhood and our existence in it.
Follows the usual heartbreak of reclothing sublime images in clunky foreign syntax. Does « trafic » refer to backroom intrigue, or is it just traffic? Because it's both in French, and the writer almost certainly meant both. And what of « faucher » (to scythe), mostly used in these industrial times to describe what Death does. Strike down, we might say, but that would leave a richer metaphor by the roadside. Nothing English gets us there as completely and concisely; you just have to take your best shot and move on.
Any road, I suggest you first listen to the song while reading the lyrics and ignoring the video, to savour the full impact of the message. Then run through the video again, watching it this time.
Either way, it's a touching meditation on The Great Matter.
Best of luck in 2024, and may we remember and honour each other, here-below.
(Note: an English translation follows the French lyrics.)
Ici-bas
paroles et musique: Jean-François Pauzé
Malgré nos vies qui s’emballent dans une époque folle
Où un rien nous détourne du simple instant présent
Alors que tout s’envole
Avec le temps
Malgré la mort, celle qui frappe et qui nous fait pleurer
Ou bien celle qui un jour, tôt ou tard, nous fauchera
Je m’accroche les pieds
Ici-bas
Malgré l’amour celui qui nous fait vivre d’espoir
Qui parfois fait si mal quand on reste sur le seuil
D’une trop courte histoire
Sans qu’on le veuille
Malgré la haine qui souvent nous retombe sur le nez
Et les caves qui s’abreuvent de ce triste crachat
Je m’accroche les pieds
Ici-bas
Ici-bas
Tant que mes yeux s’ouvriront
Je cherch’rai dans l’horizon
La brèche qui s’ouvre sur mes décombres
La lueur dans les jours plus sombres
Tant que mes pieds marcheront
J’avancerai comme un con
Avec l’espoir dans chaque pas
Et ce jusqu’à mon dernier souffle
Ici-bas
Malgré les merdes, les revers, les choses qui nous échappent
Les p’tits, les grands tourments, les erreurs de parcours
Et tout c’qui nous rattrape
Dans le détour
Malgré l’ennui, le trafic, les rêves inachevés
La routine, le cynisme, l’hiver qui finit pas
Je m’accroche les pieds
Ici-bas
Ici-bas
Tant que mes yeux s’ouvriront
Je cherch’rai dans l’horizon
La brèche qui s’ouvre sur mes décombres
La lueur dans les jours plus sombres
Tant que mes pieds marcheront
J’avancerai comme un con
Avec l’espoir dans chaque pas
Et ce jusqu’à mon dernier souffle
Ici-bas
Down Here
words and music by Jean-François Pauzé
In spite of the way our lives spin out of control in this daft epoch
Where an anything can pull us out of the moment we're in
While it all flies away
Over time
In spite of the deaths that strike and leave us crying
Or the one that one day, sooner or later, will cut us down
I will plant my feet
Down here
In spite of the love that allows us to live in hope
But sometimes hurts so bad we remain stuck on the edge
Of a story cut too short
Like it or not
In spite of the hate so often blown back in our face
And the caverns storing up all that wretched spit
I will plant my feet
Down here
Down here
So long as my eyes still open
I will search the horizon
For the chink that will shine on my ruins
A light in my darkest days
So long as my feet will still walk
I'll forge ahead like an idiot
Hope in every step
Right to my last breath
Down here
In spite of the hassles, the setbacks, the ones that got away
The small wounds and the great, the wrong turns
And all that trips us up
In the detour
In spite of the boredom, the traffic, the unfulfilled dreams
The routine, the cynicism, the endless winters
I will plant my feet
Down here
Down here
So long as my eyes still open
I will search the horizon
For the chink that will shine on my ruins
A light in my darkest days
So long as my feet will still walk
I'll forge ahead like an idiot
Hope in every step
Right to my last breath
Down here
