it is possible to remain untainted and to
continue in obscurity …
Quotation in bulk would be tiresome. The object of this note, impertinent enough in itself, is not to provide a hunting ground for the contentious scholar; rather I have suggested an exciting game which would interest those for whom the Book of the Simple Way is still confused, still a little obscure. By striking at the ethic wherever it appears in the text, one is suddenly faced with a genuine clearance of all the ‘confusions’. The book is empty of dead wood, the tree itself stands out, free and glowing, as it must have been originally.
Empty the document of these bewildering volte-faces and the circle finds itself harmoniously closed once more; we enter the centrum again. The ‘confusions’ have gone.
* * *
Have the ‘confusions’ really gone? What a preposterous last sentence, for while I continue to write, their continued existence must be supposed. A long way from the enigmatic smile of Kasyapa I am still at work taking bearings and keeping my humble Ship’s Log up to date. Poetry creates these clear imperatives — not thinking so loud, letting the heartbeats break the codes embedded in the vowels. And then, in daily life, others created out of the tensions of events; to be the equal of reality you must learn how to ignore it without danger!
So the search must go on, poem by poem, until one strikes the obvious disengagement strategy so as to enter the stream of the Heraclitean time at last. Great truths, one discovers, are not necessarily Facts — Facts are dreams.
NOTES
1
Chang, Jolan,
The Tao of Love and Sex,
Wildwood House, London, 1977.
2
Needham, Joseph,
Science and Civilization in China,
Cambridge University Press, 6 vols.
3
Yes, absurd, for had I strayed into a Tantric temple and seen wall-decorations involving jovial acts of cannibalism, ghosts drinking blood from skulls, and tearing human bodies limb from limb to eat them, I might easily have had a shock in the opposite sense.
4
The full address of the Chateau De Plaige is: Kagu-Ling, College Monastique, Chateau de Plaige, France 71320.