Meditation 78 (more or less)

28 June 2020

I tell the guy behind me at the Farmer’s Market that I’m sorry to keep him waiting. No such thing as time, he responds, it’s all a construct. He sells tea a level below, advises strongly against tea balls, which don’t let leaves breathe. They come into the hospital, a nurse says, crying that they can’t breathe. We tell them they’ll get better, but they don’t. He puts water and leaves in a big carafe and lets them sit overnight. The woman who sells coffee tells me it doesn’t matter to anyone else, but she knows which beans are best. Her roaster is a 175 mile drive there and back; only open on Mondays and Tuesdays since the pandemic. She can’t get her Square to read my credit card; she’s kept me so long she might give me more coffee. Time matters more when you can’t breathe. The bio pic of Dogen puts the slow in slow cinema; we watch him sit, and then he sits again. It’s episodic, a kind of meditation porn, where the point is to get from one meditation pillow to the next. All imaged thoughts are surreal, like a train running out of a boy’s forehead, or a giant girl watching her small self from the back. How to release them into an appropriate size and space. The girl thinks going over parallel bars might do it. I consider the violence it would take to free me from repetition. I saw myself drawn as a cartoon and then chopped to bits. Drop the name, someone said, so I did, and it resembled mine. The “conceit of deceit” is about thinking you have a self, Norman says. Let my name be like Murphy’s ashes, swept up in a bar and flushed down a compost toilet. In due time, something will grow out of it.

--Volcano