Essay In Zen Buddhism | Robert Wexelblatt

Turning-points cannot endure simply because points occupy no space.  It’s around points that events pinwheel like nebulae.  It seems plausible that the cosmos began at a turning-point which is to say nowhere.  

   That is what I had written but it was not where my mind had flown.  I was recollecting things I didn’t want to think about, that I’d expected not to think about once my hair was shaved off.

    The world is not the problem.  You are.  
    Beauty is the sunlight that desire blots out.

    Dalton Haskell and Jesse Bolhanov began fighting at ten minutes before two. Their struggle was bound to be short-lived.  Haskell had taken up a position to the left of the doorway through which Bolhanov would be likely to enter the corridor.  Perhaps one or another of us noticed that he was agitated, but then it was hardly unusual for Haskell to be in a state of nervous agitation, like an oversensitive barometer.  He was quick to notice a slight; in an earlier century, he’d probably have died in a duel before the age of thirty.  
    That day in early March we had one of those storms that miss being blizzards by two or three degrees.  The cold front rushed down the hills and across the quadrangle pushing an avalanche of rain from the north.  The downpour shimmered like samite sheets hanging out in the wind; it drove sideways, splashed upwards from the huge puddles that quickly turned the campus into a collection of fens and ponds.  Buildings still being heated as if it were February smelled of steam heat and dank wool.  Hair hung in ringlets or lay flat as leather over foreheads.   Shoes squelched on the slippery linoleum floors.
    Sarah Coughlin, vainly trying to fix her hair, laughed while telling Derek Halbswinger how a girl named Hallie had goofed up a translation in her Greek class, mistaking of the child for under the foot.  In his imperturbable way, Harley Avison leaned against the wall eating a pear as water ran down his signature motorcycle jacket.  Mrs. Wessel, the Chemistry secretary, chugged her way down the slippery linoleum bearing a thick file, intent on reaching the copying machine in the Dean’s Office before anyone else.  With her blond hair streaming like the drowned Ophelia’s and her thighs visible through a drenched, clingy cotton skirt, Lisa Hoffman argued with Sheila Gilliam about their psychology research project.  The inseparable trio of Harmon Schwartz, Latesha Gurney, and Natalie Westerfield prattled in their customary fashion about student government business, giggling as they pretended to towel each other’s hair with tissues.  Most of us just waited silently for the only class that never bored us.  Nobody paid any attention to Dalton Haskell.
    He leapt at Bolhanov from the side, aiming high in order to take him down at once which he might have reckoned to be his only chance, as Jesse outweighed him by at least thirty pounds.  He threw his arms around Bohhanov’s neck so that for an instant it seemed like an embrace.  Bolhanov staggered to his left but managed to keep his footing despite the slick floor, probably because his book bag absorbed some of the shock.  Sliding down Bolhanov’s side, Haskell grappled desperately with his opponent’s stout knees; and here he had, in one respect, some success.  Bolhanov reeled, but, unfortunately for Dalton, fell right on top of him.
    Astonished, we all watched the two of them struggling messily on the linoleum.  Harmon, Latesha, and Natalie, who were closest, jumped back.  Harley Avison glanced over and kept chewing his pear, nonchalant.
    “Get off, you bastard!”
    “What the hell?”
    “Off!  Ouf!”
    “I’ll—”
    “You—”
    What they said after that wasn’t so intelligible.  Dalton’s efforts to get himself out from under Jesse were as useless as Jesse’s to pin Dalton down and hold him still.  However public their fight, we assumed the quarrel was a private matter of no concern to us.  Our only duty was a civic one, to return the hallway to a civilized condition.
    “Cut it out!” Natalie commanded just like the Vice President of the Student Government she was.
    “God, it’s so juvenile,” Harmon sneered, prudently taking a step backwards.
    “What’s it all about?” Latesha wanted to know, asked nobody in particular, clearly frightened by the violence.  
    Derek Halbswinger, a big fellow himself, tried to pull Jesse up.  Mrs. Wessel asserted her double authority as the eldest person in the corridor and as a departmental secretary by threatening to fetch the Dean.  I decided to help Derek and together we managed to pull the two apart.  Jesse got to his feet rubbing his face and muttering.  It took both of us to hold Dalton Haskell down;  we got our knees wet.
    “Wanna get up now?” Derek said, his chest heaving.  But neither of us was ready to let him go.  His face didn’t look right yet.
    “What’s this all about?” I asked Bolhanov, who hung over us, blotting out the light.
    “Ask him.  Ask him.  He’s nuts.  You’re a fucking psycho, Haskell.”
    “Just ask him what he said about her,” Dalton said, spitting a little.  “Go ahead.”  Then, as though suddenly realizing his position for the first time, he begged us to let him up.  “Quick.  Before she gets here,” he pleaded.
    We let him up.
    The one o’clock classes were already filing out and the corridor grew so noisy that hardly anyone heard what Sarah Coughlin said.  She addressed herself to Derek but I was still beside him and I overheard.  “Jealousy,” she whispered.  “They’re both crazy about her, of course.”
    “Oh,” said Derek, still trying to catch his breath.  
    It was at that moment I caught a glimpse of the lolling figure of Harley Avison and saw his face, normally so contemptuous and affectedly slack, now quite transfigured.  He was looking down with keen interest.  I thought he must have caught sight of something fascinating on the floor, an earring maybe, or a snake.

    If to search for the true way is already to have found it, then if you haven’t found the true way you weren’t searching for it.  You only believed you were or you mistook the true way for mere wavering. If you seek the true way in the true way then, in that moment, you will have found it.

    What Harley was staring at were the bare feet of Professor F. who must have taken off her sodden shoes as she came into the building.  Her feet had a powerful impact on me as well.  I had never before regarded feet as even capable of beauty. On the contrary, it had been my opinion that feet are as ugly as the English word for them. The very sound’s malodorous, base, repellent.  Feet.  Freud didn’t have a good word for them.  A child may be beautiful but not feet, the parts of our bodies constantly mashed against the earth, with toes reminding us against our will of our simian and arboreal forebears.  The contorted and tortured feet of ballerinas give the lie to their superhuman grace.  At the seashore, the shy and fastidious instinctively bury their feet in the sand.  Girls on couches in the summer unconsciously draw their bare feet up out of sight.  Podiatrists are the butt of jokes.  
    The naked feet of Professor F.’s were a revelation to me.  Was it because they were really such beautiful feet or was it because they belonged to Professor F.?  

    What is teaching without love?  A mere recital, full of letters and devoid of spirit.  What is love without teaching?  Mere stagnant sentiment, a fire that consumes itself.

    Her long hair was sopping wet.  It lay black and plastered to her head, whose fine shape I could see for the first time; water dripping from her raincoat made a little circle around her feet, a moat or as though she were in the middle of some fountain in a Roman piazza.  Her eyelashes and cheeks ran with rain as if she had been crying, maybe from excess of happiness.   I got a good look at her ears for the first time, a surprisingly exciting revelation.  Drenched through and through, all she could think of was to laugh at herself.  “Forgot my umbrella,” she explained with touching self-deprecation.  The shape of her skull, of her ears, the nakedness of her feet, all these were the marks of an unsuspected vulnerability that, to me, felt erotic.  I could see plainly that Avison too was in love with her, just as helplessly infatuated as Haskell and Bolhanov, that he was even painfully in love—and so, I acknowledged, was I, so were all of us.  I was convinced of this on the spot, saw it as certainly as if a bolt of lightning had lit up the scene, which, even if it had not been a stormy day, would still be the inevitable simile for the sort of surmise you get at a turning-point.  How could I have been unaware of it?  We’d attended to her all through the semester, since early January, answered her leading questions, appropriated her earnestness with something more than admiration, and had ended by losing ourselves in that unwavering, disciplined seriousness of hers, than which nothing could be more attractive.  Two little lines rose from her eyebrows when she was presenting us with a difficult idea, lines those on the forehead of a concentrating child drawing with crayons.  Though her voice was powerful and distinct, even somewhat metallic, you could see how tender her body was, how much it resembled her delicate care for her students.  She was without self-consciousness, as though disembodied, losing herself in her texts but finding us in them.  She addressed us, we felt, individually, for with her “the class” was only a legal fiction.  We loved to listen to her ineffable mixture of intimacy and distance.  She was entirely oblivious to her charm or the deep lake of love in which she had submerged us all.  

    If seeking and finding are identical then all goals are illusions, and every quest is static.  If seeking is finding then seeking isn’t really motion, nor can finding bring rest.

    “You will please stop now.”  The Master’s voice, which was just like the ones used by actors playing Japanese prison camp interrogators, made me jump.  
    I put down the closely written pages of my essay, of which there were a dozen still unread, and stood before the Master, composed, awaiting the rebuke I expected to follow.
    He was silent for a full minute, sitting across from me on his mat, in his robe, with that disconcerting stillness.  He regarded me impassively.  I resisted flinching before this penetrating look, but it wasn’t easy.  
    As he took up his staff I prepared myself for a good whack across my shoulder.  But instead he leaned on it to raise himself to his feet.
    “I feel like some lunch,” he said.  “Care to you join me?”
    “Certainly,” I said, doing my utmost to be surprised at nothing.  “Excuse me, Master.  I’ll get my bowl.”
    “Oh,” he said as if the idea had just struck him, “what do you say we go into town?”
    This was too surprising not to be surprised at.  “Into town?”
    “It will make a nice change, don’t you think?”
    I lowered my newly shaved head and inclined it slightly.
    “Good,” he said.
    We got into the old Ford station wagon and I drove us down the narrow, winding, unpaved mountain road.  It was midday in late April.  The lower we descended the more trees were in bud and the warmer the air.  The Master rolled down his window.
    “The wind is invisible,” he remarked.  This did not seem exactly a question and so, since as usual I did not know how to reply, I said nothing.  For three weeks I had not managed to say a single thing that pleased him or, in fact, anything that hadn’t either angered or disappointed him.  For the last week, during my two hours’ free time in the evenings, I had worked at his essay assignment with fear and trembling, although not without losing myself in it at times; that is, not without moments of exaltation and vanity.
    “Where shall we eat?” I asked as I pulled the lumbering Ford onto the main street of the little town.  There weren’t a lot of choices.
    “Oh, you know, the diner,” he said casually and I obeyed.
    The shock of actually walking into the diner was greater than I had expected.  After a month on the mountain, accustoming my body to a simple and tasteless diet and hours of sitting punctuated by monkish farts, after the simplicity and minimal stimulation of the walls and floors of the zendo, the sights, smells, and sounds of the diner overwhelmed me.  Only a year before such a place would have seemed quite ordinary.  Now it struck me as crude, chaotic, and Western, in the worst sense.  I couldn’t understand why the Master would ever want to enter such a place.
    The pair of waitresses were too busy to do more than glance at us as we came in, but most of the patrons gaped openly.  There was a hush in which I heard whispers of astonishment and explanations on every hand as the Master and I made our way to an open booth.  Even the vinyl seat covers disgusted me.  But the Master seemed in high spirits.  He rubbernecked with a big smile, apparently delighted by everything and everybody he saw.  I felt abashed that I, who had wished for one, hadn’t once merited such a smile, while this greasy spoon and its coarse customers seemed worthy of unconditional approbation.
    “Are you hungry?” he asked with that bluntness which always seemed to me to conceal something not blunt at all, something mysterious and significant it was up to me to apprehend.
    “A little,” I admitted in a small voice.
    “Good.  I think we’ll have a fine lunch here,” he said practically licking his chops.
    One of the waitresses came over with two menus.  They were sealed in plastic. “You fellas take your time.  I’ll be right back,” she said and went over to the counter to pick up an four orders at once.
    The Master beamed.  “Imagine that,” he said.  “Fellas.  What a fine word that is.  Fellas.  And look at how she balances all those plates.”
    I opened the menu and lowered my head over it, intensely conscious of my baldness, my orange robe.
    One section of the menu, the largest, was headed Features from the Deep Fryer.  Some high school kid had used a ballpoint pen to turn Features into Creatures.  I looked for the salads.
    “A fine selection, don’t you think?” said the Master admiringly.
    More perplexed than ever, I said nothing.  Huge eighteen-wheelers and pickup trucks spewing fumes roared by outside.  The din in the diner gradually returned to normal.
    The waitress padded back, set her feet, flipped her pad.  I could pick out the dark roots of her hair.  “What’ll it be, fellas?” she said and the Master grinned up at her like an enchanted child.
    “I’m really hungry,” he said greedily,.  “Let’s see.  I think I’ll take the bacon burger, a double order of french fries, and a black coffee.”
    This was a man who subsisted only on vegetables that, it was rumored, had died of natural causes.  Horrified by this flaunting of our strict dietary rules, my mouth must have fallen open, for the Master looked at me and said, “Sounds good, doesn’t it?  What are you going to have?”
    “Just the garden salad and a glass of water.  No dressing, please,” I said softly.
    “Hey, whatever you want,” said the waitress, snapping up our menus.
    The Master looked out the window.  “A beautiful spring day,” he said.  “It makes me think of trout in cold streams. Donge’s Egyptian irises will be up by the end of the week.”
    “Yes,” I said.  Of course I wanted to ask him why he had stopped me reading my essay, why he had taken me down the mountain, what we were doing in this diner, why he had ordered a bacon burger and French fries, what it all signified, what I was meant to learn from it.  But I held my tongue, knowing that the Master was all too aware of these questions and that he was probably just waiting for me to ask even one of them to spring at me.
    In the next booth two men were discussing a married couple.
    “It’d been all right if only he didn’t knock her around her so much.  I mean, that’s why she took off like that.”
    “Don’t you believe it.  Fred never laid a finger on her.  That’s just what Selma’s giving out, but then you’d expect that from her mother, wouldn’t you?  It was that guy from up near Benton she took off with.”
    “Who?  You mean Skrowski?”
    “That’s the one.  Plumber.”
    “But weren’t him and Fred—?”
    “Oh sure.  They were pals all right, but isn’t that the way?  I mean Fred goes on night shift for two weeks and she starts in screwing his best friend.”
    “Nah.  It’s because he was always beating up on her.”
    “Aw, that’s bullshit.  You ever see her marked up?  Black eye? Bruises?”
    “Don’t prove nothing.”
    “Trust me.  She’s gonna turn up with that Skrowski, that plumber.”
    I could see that the Master was also listening to this conversation.  It too seemed to please him.
    The waitress returned with our orders and a big grin.  “Here you go, guys.”  She laid a small bowl filled of iceberg lettuce and two grape tomatoes in front of me and a large steaming dish in front of the Master.  The bacon burger was still seething with hot grease that was slightly red with blood and oozing cheese; rippled French fries of the frozen variety overflowed the plate.  The smell was so overwhelming I nearly retched.  “Enjoy your meal,” said the waitress with such excessive good nature that it seemed to me almost an affront.
    I stared with distaste at the plate in front of the Master.  
    Suddenly, he leaned over and grabbed my salad with his right hand while, with his left, he shoved the greasy burger and fries across the table in front of me.
    “You know,” he said, “I think I’d rather have this.  You don’t mind, do you?”

Robert Wexelblatt is a professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published eight collections of short stories; two books of essays; two short novels; two books of poems; stories, essays, and poems in a variety of journals, and a novel awarded the Indie Book Awards first prize for fiction.