from Startles

 

Startles

No doubt, I’m an awkward Buddhist. No, there is no no doubt. Can’t be two places at once, unless you are. Imposter of prosody, I limp. Here with the donkey, there with the cloud, if it’s imagined. Even faux transcendence is better than this, no?

That is, if transcendence gets us out. Expats of natural time, clutching our memories as truth’s pearls. The ocean, Buddha said, though he’d not seen one. Led by our noses to the shore, where water is water and is also greater than itself. Let my feet stay in damp sand, my hair in the “firmament.” All words are doubles.

The rain keeps us in, but we still hear it. Sound shorn of wet, plunkers plunking. A man in a regal blue shirt played an instrument in the cemetery; not xylophone but more like a workshop table being struck with a hammer. Around him, people in masks picked up sticks around the grave. As the mortician said, the acoustics are very good.

If the beat of the rain runs in accordance with my pulse, does my pulse spatter? The matter on the sidewalk is now kept behind a wall by instagram, except when it isn’t. It’s brain matter, arm matter, child matter, everything that ought to matter. Mother and child, father embracing white sheet covered corpse. Our meditation teacher said she’d cover the corpse later.

But that was metaphor, that corpse. The body, unmoving, rendered as log, as plank, as half a cross to bear (without the wheels). Even as metaphor, it’s heavy, but we feel less anguish over it. The man in the cemetery bangs his mallets, but we can’t see what for. The mongoose is a prospective corpse.

My body is useless before the animal on the road. Compassion knows us connected, but no umbilical gives my blood to him as nourishment. How do we make an action out of helplessness? The return to self precedes the exit into community. Or does it?

I know that kindness matters, but it’s not armed. If it were, I could zip-tie small children with my love, throw grown men into unmarked vans with my caring. I want to think the outcomes would be different, but I’m piss poor at logistics. The woman is but two steps removed from the man who (was) disappeared. Soon so many more of us.

If only disappearance could return to the world of magic, rabbits escaping back into their tall hats, children running to follow them. Transcendence isn’t magic—Thoreau could tell you that— nor is it unentertaining. Hire a mystic for your birthday party, and you might grow younger yet. More time to witness history unfolding inside and outside of time. Put metaphors of blood and flesh here.