# [D18:7M] Vision: [[The Koan is in the Stomach, the Demand is Inconvenient]] Hexagram: [[Eighteenth Hexagram]] Trials: [[Eighteenth Trial]] Symbols: #cloud #ism #arm #alien #bed #Koan-of-Inconvenience #prison #maze September 18th, 2009, 2025 1. Here’s a secret: When I first saw Maja’s MFA show in 2009, my first marriage approaching its ruin, and then looked her up on Facebook, I knew we’d eventually fuck.  When I finally met her three years later, now separated but not officially divorced, and we fucked, I knew it was forever. I could never have predicted, back then, how irrelevant I would soon come to feel in her shadow, how I would vanish inside it like a shivering squirrel who lost its nut beneath the hammer of a Nietzschian question. Six years in, Maja was pregnant and I was facing the end of something.  No longer allowed to fantasize about suicide, I began speaking with Bernardo, my new therapist.  Bernardo put me on the path to meditation.  He was the first to insist on it and the first not to suggest antidepressants.  He wanted to know what I was afraid of.  It was always the same: “The vanishing,” I said. “Death?” He said. “That you die and then life just goes on and you’re still stuck here anyway.  Death that won’t let you die.  You’re here but you’re not.” These were the art world years in which the Great Straightening-Out was in full swing.  The Great Birth Judgment.  A great moral frenzy superimposed over a great cash grab capriciously refereed by panicky group surveillance.  Our marriage might have been our own private affair, but it existed within the New Caste System, and I was at the bottom of it.  If I could have believed in any of it, I might have been happy to martyr myself.  But I had already grown up in a Christian Fundamentalist type thing, so I knew what I was looking at.  This was the Feuilleton Age of Hesse’s Glass Bead Game under management of a New Puritanism.  Bernardo was becoming a Quaker in our final months together as he was preparing for retirement.  He was reading The Cloud of Unknowing.  He said, in our farewell conversation, “I want never to make decisions for reasons anymore.”  Sometimes something is said, and then it lives forever in the mind and it changes you.  One receives it as one would a koan.  It lives for years as such until, if you’re lucky, you realize its not the koan but the response.  The koan is life itself, the predicament without a solution.  Such a predicament cannot be solved by direct or rational means.  II. Here’s another secret: All my life I’ve sought to make myself a master of some hidden knowledge.  I couldn’t tell you what the knowledge was supposed to be.  What I do know is that it has meant avoiding the truth of my own ordinariness. I might once have thought I was intelligent.  I don’t, particularly, now.  I only know how to turn conversations to those things I think most about. I don’t know how to decipher ancient  Egyptian hieroglyphs but sometimes I get to feeling like someone who does.  Hieroglyphs or alchemical secrets or the divine attributes of Ein Sof, or just some hidden message in the numbers and formations of birds, say. You know, those kinds of things.   I used to make students memorize the René Magritte quote: “We always want to see what’s hidden by what we see…”  I wanted them juiced up and sharp and curious.  As Art Cult Leader, I wanted faithful believers.  I so badly hoped one of them might look it up in its original context to see that I’d left out the end of the sentence, which reads, “…but it is impossible.”  If any ever did, they never told me about it.  I wanted someone to ask with all their burning soul, “but if it’s impossible, what are we even talking about!”  I needed someone to ask me this.  I need someone to ask. III. I want to see what’s hidden by what I see even if it’s impossible.  For example, I want to learn everything I can about Taoism, so I read the Tao Te Ching and Zuangzi and The Secret of the Golden Flower and practice the I Ching.  I wear the coins around my neck (for real).  I memorize terms and ideas and use them in conversation.  I’m not quite as pretentious as it sounds, I just yearn to experience another life, another world.  I often suspect this one isn’t real.  So I might do something like sign up for a Tai Chi class and then immediately realize, listening to and watching Master Daehan of Rio Rancho, that Taoism, for one like him, isn’t some separate category apart from life itself.  I bet I use the word more than he does.   Most people I know want to distinguish between this-is-just-religion and this-is-actually-real because we were all educated to believe this is a distinction that means something.  Who among us truly questions the language we use?  How it forms us, how it shapes and limits our attention and sensitivity to things?  How it makes it impossible to see what’s hidden by what we see? I wonder for a moment if there are any “Ists” in the world whose identification as such isn’t a form of denial.  I hear the offense taken even as I type, but I’ve lost the will to care.  Doesn’t the very assertion of one’s “Ism” obviate any remaining questions, and doesn’t this pretty much always result in a name in place of a thing?  I wonder, on the whole, what is the percentage of Ists living in the world whose self-seriousness isn’t predicated on how unseriously they feel they’re taken by the world?  Whose Ism isn’t an escape or domination strategy?    There is no question about others I don’t also ask myself.  That’s why I get the sick feeling that whatever I call Taoism is just something I made up one day.  A name in place of a thing.  Reading about the ancient Taoists, you’d have to conclude that the Ist part was something foisted upon someone at some point, some expedient kind of hole-plugging at work.  I can’t see those old rascals agreeing to anything at all that anyone might have called them.    Look at Master Daehan up there in front of us, me and these wonderful electric old ladies.  Look at him  goofing off while the cheesy-ass music plays from his Bluetooth speaker.  And just as soon as I type “cheesy-ass” I hear Paulo Coelho’s voice, who most certainly is a Master of Secret Knowledge, responding to an NPR interviewer in his lovely Brazilian accent, “What ees thees cheeeeezzzy?”  He doesn’t recognize the category because it only exists as such for self-conscious neurotics like NPR and me.  And neither, evidently, has Master Daehan of Rio Rancho ever heard the word cheesy, slapping his armpit, shouting at us, “Repeat! I love my armpit!” IV. About a month before the Tai Chi class, I’m lying on the crackling paper covering the bed in the same Roswell hospital where our daughter was born five years ago.  This is the very room into which we brought her, at four months old, for dehydration.  We’d had her lip- and tongue-ties removed and it caused our infant daughter so much pain that she would only scream and refuse to nurse.   I’m shirtless and covered in sweat and grime. First comes the morphine drip and soon the fentanyl.  Maja leans over me from the little chair they gave her, looking tired and helpless and frightened.  I’m stretching my arms out over my head to get whatever comfort I can while some baby alien tries to rip itself out from under my guts so that it might be born at last.  In reality, it’s not an alien but a bacteria.  Who can say where that came from?   I’m wondering what life would be like in a perfect world.  And then I’m wondering how I know this isn’t one. Morphine starts in your head and snakes its way down.  Fentanyl is a simple on-switch.  The body just smiles.  I practice a breath while I push on my gut and wonder if our daughter is sleeping or awake back at the residency apartment right now where our assistant is staying with her.  I think it must be about 3am.  Maja crawls onto the narrow bed with me and I mumble how sorry I am again and again, for everything I am and am not, until we both fall asleep.  She is with me.  She is with me.  Thank-fucking-Something-or-Other I’m loved by someone wonderful within the confines of this eternal shit show. V. Pema Chödrön calls the shit show a “Koan of Inconvenience.”  This is what she writes: “It’s so inconvenient…that you have a headache.  It’s inconvenient to get sick, so inconvenient to lose your great radiating presence and be just a normal schmuck.  It’s so inconvenient to have people not regard you as wonderful…to find yourself embarrassed…not measuring up.” All of these inconveniences, she’s saying, are really koans, in other words questions without rational solutions.  Riddles with no way out.  There is no chance of fixing your shit by trying to fix your shit.  There is no way out of the prison you’ve made for yourself. Unless. Unless you learn to see the weird fucked-up little movements of your mind within its prison, and to accept reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.  The only antidote to all your precious, imprisoning little isms is to accept you’re a person who makes up isms because you hurt so fucking much.  Did you think there was a world in which not hurting was a possibility? VI. The squirrel who lost its nut in the shadow of a Nietzschian question.  Wasn’t that clever?  I’ve read some Nietzsche.  Not a ton.  Enough maybe.  Enough, perhaps, that my presumed authority on the matter will make me more acceptable to that all-judging culture out there, way out there in the farthest reaches of my glitchy, hyperlexic imagination.  I am trying to end this dream, which is sort of a nightmare if I’m honest, trying to wrap it up.  It’s making me tired.  But I’m not the least bit able to answer for myself why I’m even writing it.  I should have worked in Cormac McCarthy’s play The Stonemason by now.  You should know I’m a McCarthy complet-ist.  I’ve read every work of fiction he’s ever published.  Do you know what a shame it would be if I couldn’t work it in?  What a Koan of Inconvenience this would be for me?  Look how lost I am in my own dumb maze. VII. BEN  I don’t know any other way to do it. MAVEN  How soon are you leaving? BEN  Just a few minutes. _She kisses him again._ MAVEN  Bye. BEN  I’ll see you tonight. MAVEN  Look after him, Ben. BEN  You know I look after him. MAVEN  I know.  Look after him anyway.