Afterward -- I lay for three years eating sausage, thinking about
God, death, unity, problem solving, teaching, the lack of
anything worth teaching.
Since I could learn nothing,
what was I to teach, how could I believe in any lesson? I
could experience, have illuminations, change over
time. But the mechanism of change eluded my memorizing mind,
my writing hand. Each new discipline, ardently pursued,
worked for awhile,
then died at the first
intermission. New tricks were needed to rouse my exhausted, disbelieving mind, 'til it seemed no further tricks were
to be
found. I wrote three hundred poems, I walked three
thousand miles. I lived in seclusion, I spoke only with my
family: narrow-minded, salt of the earth, with
little lives, no aspirations, who enjoyed the rain, food,
occasionally rubbing bodies, did not know there was a
question of God, a larger
world, temptation, abstinence, knowledge to pursue, or scorn,
hierarchies, the elect, the damned. They ate and smiled, they lived and found need of nothing more.
When I
eat I eat, when I sleep I sleep, chop wood chop wood, but without
consciousness, I was bored to death. I could not be so
simple, so sweet, so mild.
I questioned that there was
the elect, the damned. I, like a bodhisattva, wanted to believe in the godhead of all sentient beings, but most
were
so boring, so trying, so petty, pettily involved
in jobs, cars, cares, insurance, taxes, feuds, gluttony, greed, that it seemed if there had been a
higher
plan, God had abandoned it, despairing, in mid-twentieth century,
a minority of one, deeply out of fashion and unable
to see the emperor's new clothes A change of mind was
evident, bowing to headstrong human folly, "Let them dance,"
God said, "and make their bombs. Perhaps
afterward
I'll try the dinosaurs again, or perhaps, onward with the birds,
I'll try consciousness in the sky, enlightenment among
wind swept clouds."
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