After Noble Silence
Vipassana
No talking, not even “Please pass the salt,”
or, “Good morning.”
Nine days of Noble Silence, cold turkey.
Listen and look inward.
Still the transmitter; tune in the receiver.
Washed in wisdom, I don’t even towel off.
Buddha’s words shoot straight.
Our words do not deflect them.
Ancient arrows pierce our armor.
Breath is focused.
Monkey minds are calmed. Self is seen in new ways.
Visions arrive, desires dim, pain is blunted.
Too soon sweet weight of Noble Silence lifts.
When, on the tenth day, we may talk again, I am reluctant
to do so. I do not repair my armor.
I leave the arrows imbedded where they are.
Breathing in and out.
Anti Tank Team
It takes a special kind of cojones
to stand up to a tank;
a special kind of “what the hell”
and the ability to penetrate thick armor
with your thought –
to see the driver’s flesh and blood
to feel the gunner’s pulse beating in his helmet.
Try hard and you can smell their breath
and tell what they ate for lunch.
Set aside the terrifying size and
mighty bulk of the tank.
Don’t get hypnotized by its
horrible noise and how it
gobbles up landscape.
Focus on the driver and the gunner.
If you use what you have,
and use it well, they won’t eat lunch again.
Ever.
Monster
I hadn’t seen Carlo for more than a year. When he
stopped answering my letters I resolved to travel to his village – my village
formerly – to visit, thinking I had offended him or that something dark
might have happened.
I found him sitting in the sun drinking wine the
color of ox blood and smoking a cigarette. My heart sank when I saw the
bandage. I knew what had happened.
He had blinded himself and could neither see nor
cry. “Abacinare.” the villagers had known that word for generations.
A word dropped from most current languages. To blind with heat, “Use
a pruning hook, white hot, held just in front of the eyes.” The villargers
nodded knowingly. “It takes a few moments. Then – pfffftt - finished.”
Responding to my voice Carlo smiled and rose to
shake my hand and embrace me.
“Don’t be sad, Justin. I am avoiding temptation
almost entirely.” Without asking I knew the “temptation” was Dorothea,
his cousin. We sat and sipped wine in the cool afternoon, speaking obliquely
about her but, curiously, never mentioning her name.
The whole village knew Dorothea as a monster. She
had been one since the age of six. Not a “monster” as the word is currently
used - not ugly or evil. But a “monster” in the earlier sense of “being
held up for view,” as with a piece of ritual altarware – the monstrance,
containing the wafer – the body of Christ. The village kept the older meaning.
Dorothea was a monster not of ugliness but of beauty,
breathtaking, intoxicating, numbing beauty. There had been such monsters
in the old days in our village – so beautiful that the villagers became
quietly insane, wondering at the great beauty that slowly, day by day,
turned their ordinariness into great ugliness. Other places and people
know monsters – so ugly or fearsome or beautiful they could not be looked
upon. Medusa could not be looked at directly for fear of turning into stone.
God himself is said to be too beautiful, to brilliant, too awesome to look
upon. Lot’s wife turned to salt.
Monsters, ugly or beautiful, overturn the social
order even if they have no desire to do so. Monsters make us miserable.
We must prepare ourselves to deal with them. Carlo understood that and
the villagers understood that too.
