Longing is Light

Ah!

This very longing,

The light of being, transmitted.

There is nothing else.

John Bailes: Kotatsu Roko

In response to Douglas Penick’s poem

15 November 2012

Prospect Hill, Somerville

the scepter that arises from heart which is all good, always.

Tuesday, 13 November 2012

We, The Monmouth Zen Circle, had a great time sitting zazen last Saturday at Blue Moon Yoga in Shrewsbury NJ. Two brothers, twins, Bassem and Sofi joined us in the afternoon just before the dharma talk. Bassem and Sofi are in third grade. They courteously sat through zazen instruction, and then a good ten minutes of zazen. When I asked them if they had any questions, Sofi asked me about right speech. It didn't take long to get from Right Speech to Jedi Knights and the Force and the light and the dark. I showed them the Jedi Scepter Norman Fischer gave to me. We talked about Bodhisattva's, Warriors, the Light, the Good, the Dark and Beyond light and dark and beyond good and bad. We talked about how posture is deeply related to the light and the good. We talked about good posture as the doorway to "All's Good" and the importance of vertical and horizontal and the scepter that arises from heart which is all good, always. Bassem and Sofi understood this directly. They know. We adults know too but somehow what we call life has gotten in the way. That life is really death. It is not even real death. It is more like purgatory or some kind of hell where we are all waiting for something and we are all hiding from something. If it were real death we would be completely alive. The open heart is scepter, a wand, that makes all good. Open heart is beyond life and death.

We all are or have been tortured souls...

We all are or have been “…tortured souls… trying until the very end to express the inexpressible.” Each of us ought to practice complete respect for each human being’s existential dilemma.

I was deeply touched by this anecdote Freeman Dyson tells about Ludwig Wittgenstein from Dyson’s days as an undergraduate at Cambridge University in the UK for two reasons: 1. It brought to mind Norman Fischer’s talk on Tara and women’s place in Zen practice at the recent Everyday Zen sesshin http://www.everydayzen.org/index.php?Itemid=26&task=viewTeaching&sort=title&option=com_teaching&id=1279.) 2. I think most remarkable is Mr. Dyson’s change of view and understanding of Mr. Wittgenstein plight as years passed and even death, the seeming ultimate signpost of the transitory and ephemeral nature of this life, appears to help transform Dyson’s understanding of Wittgenstein’s situation .

“When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty (as an orderly) at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: ‘I get stupider and stupider every day.’

Finally, toward the end of my time at Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, ‘Which newspaper do you represent?’ I told him I was student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance on his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, ‘Wittgenstein.’ To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in white silence. He was no longer a charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.”[1] Freeman Dyson, What Can You really Know? NYRB, 11.08.2012.

---

[1] Freeman Dyson, ‘What Can You Really Know?’, NYRB, 11.08.2012.

On relating with a teacher...difference becomes clear..

From the pine tree

learn of the pine tree,

And from the bamboo

of the bamboo.

                                                  Basho

“The Japanese word for ‘learn’ (narau) carries the sense of ‘taking after’ something, of making an effort to stand essentially in the same mode of being as the thing one wishes to learn about. It is on the field of sunyata that this becomes possible.”

Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness.

The silence of speaking and hearing...

This entire mistake once activated is thus come, even looking someplace else, there is no place else. There is only the expression of the deaf-mute and the silence of speaking and hearing. 

 —Kotatsu Roko as quoted by John High in his new and soon to be published book of poetry: you are everything you are not

Humongous Rhetorical Deluge

Bloc 11

Humongous Rhetorical Deluge
Breezy Ineloquent
Redolent of Schlock!

              The things that make life unbearable:
              No orange poppy seed scones @ Bloc 11 and
              settling for an Almond Croissant
              with my coffee -->
              too sweet!

John Bailes
Kotatsu Roko
Saturday, 1 September 2012
Bloc 11, Somerville

for the person of no rank

Zazen for Ordinary People:

  

The act of concentration by which every being gathers itself within itself

– our very being – stretches across an abyss fading into bottomlessness.

From somewhere deep beneath the ground of all being the Form of things - falling apart and scattering – floats up to the surface.

It matters not how gigantic the mountain, how robust the man, nor how sturdy the personality, the question of nothingness, our own, that of the entire world, this very universe, touches the essential quality of all things.

This nothingness is nothing more than a display of illusory appearance essential to all beings. When all beings return to nothing, we leave not a trace behind.

From ancient times people have spoken of the impermanence of things, the nothing that allows not a trace to be left behind lies at the base of all things from the very start.

This is the meaning of impermanence.

As my dear friend Norman Fischer has said, “Only Love.”

I hope to see you in this floating world.

Kotatsu Roko

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

Somerville

Each of us is the...

Primary Point

This is not a flying away.

This is a coming to be,

a bringing to one point

that which already is,

including flying away.

This is not flying away.

This is allowing to be

one point which is already

including flying away.

Kotatsu Roko

Wednesday, 5 September 2012

Somerville

Along With the Arctic Ice, the Rich World's Smugness Will Melt

Prospero:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd tow'rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

The Tempest Act 4, scene 1, 148–158

following  from George Monbiot's article, Along With the Arctic Ice, the Rich World's Smugness Will Melt  28 August 2012, UK Guardian

You are Everything You Are Not

Upon Glimpsing John High’s Third Act

You are utterly beautiful.

The pain you are now feeling will never go away.

It will only increase in intensity.

The rivets of this life cannot tolerate

the nearness of the Milky Way;

space so dense, the black of black,

so bright, we return.

Kotatsu Roko

Sunday, 19 August 2012

Brooklyn

I open my head.

The Milky Way.

The turquoise river.

No return.

Kotatsu Roko

24 August 2012

Bloc 11

Somerville, MA

Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt...

I’m reading Chris Hedges’ and Joe Sacco’s new book, Days of Devastation, Days of Revolt, and I am engrossed. It is tremendously well done. It doesn’t tell me a thing I don’t know about the “sacrifice zone” and the strip mining of the American citizenry. It does tell it in a clear, concise, direct, human and compassionate way. It is moving to read and not overly emotional or polemic. I agree that the only response is revolt.

Here’s a piece from the book as Julian Martin, a seventy-four year old retired school teacher and son of a coal miner tells his story about his southern West Virginia homeland.

“…They were plenty smart. But the highly talented, creative people have been sucked out of the Appalachians.

“It’s a sacrifice zone,” he says:

It’s so the rest of the country can have electric toothbrushes and leave the lights on all night in parking lots for used cars and banks lit up all night long and shit like that. We have been a national sacrifice zone. Hell, that phrase was created thirty-five, forty years ago. Now it’s terminal. There’s no way to stop it. I haven’t had any hope for a long time. But the only reason I keep goin’ is, why the hell not? I’m goin’ die. Shit might as well hold my head up. I don’t want Bill Raney, the president of the [West Virginia] Coal Association, to be able to tell his lies without somebody saying, “Bill, shit, that’s not true.”

These corporations are goin’ to strip the whole country. If you face this reality you become a guerilla. You blow up the damn thing. I can’t go there, because they will put me in the penitentiary, and I don’t want to go there. I know they would catch me eventually.”  Hedges and Sacco, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, Nation Books

Still, can you hear it?

Consult the Sutra of Innumerable Meanings:


The scope of our various projections
intermingle, overlay, pass through
and never touch...


The beauty of standing here with you
cannot be known.


Still, can you hear it?

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko
Friday, 3 August 2012
Bloc 11
Somerville

Two?

Two flew here,

            Two flew off, --

                      Butterflies.

by Chora

not everything is missing...

Tuesday 17, July 2012

Dear M.

Thinking of you so far away,

Nothing is complete –

Not everything is missing –

Entirely lovely each one.

Love,

John

One Heart, One Word, One Flower, One Moment: One Real Life

A life to Defend

A life to Defend

Imminent rotund responses roil up

Bioluminescence of an enormous ignominious ocean

Bolus of a life spent in specious argument.

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday, 26 June 2012

Prospect Hill, Somerville MA

Vegan Apple Crisp, Great Blue Herons and Restless Native American Spirits

Flight home from Samish Sesshin:

Trusting what we give fully

in this way just one word

fills the entirety of space and time,

permeates all being.

Nothing prepared

everything rises

as the occasion is

one real life.

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko

Saturday, 23 June 2012

United Airlines Flight 594 K

Somewhere over Wyoming

Another take on Completeness and Doubt

We always want to nail it down. We cannot hold on to it. It is us, even in our holding. We are so funny.

From Tom Cleary’s introduction to Timeless Spring: A Soto Anthology

“After Dongshan left Yunyan, he still had some doubt, until one day he happened to see his reflection when he looked into a river as he crossed over and was suddenly greatly enlightened. Then he uttered his famous verse,

‘Just don’t seek from another

Or you’ll be far estranged from self.

I now go on alone

Meeting it everywhere

It now is just what I am

I now am not it.

You must comprehend in this way

To merge with thusness.’

Not seeking anything outside of fundamental completeness, one relizes the self that is self because there is no other, and the self that is no self because there is no other."

Dongshan is the founder of the Caodong School of Zen which is the Soto School in Japan and locally.

Akshobhya Incarnate

A Fly in the Ointment

A Fly in the Ointment

It is all fluttering away always and in different places. I never realized how entropy worked in life. As a young kid I thought it was just physics. It still is. So am I: a concept flying apart.

Driven until compelling ideas run out; extinction, not even a dinosaur.

I want. If we even know anything, then I would say, know well, “I want”. Get very close to I want: I & want, wanting.

Sitting here with the crumbs of my lemon poppy seed muffin, crumbling, crumbled. An entirety, as one hand or one arm; looking back, no, always moving forward: mountains, glaciers, seas; enormous brilliant being walking.

Sidewalks, stone masons, jack hammers, dreams; rhythmic, pulsing heart wanting this; just this; examining itself, just this whale rolling over in a sea of karma. Consciousness or not: compelled.

Man on a suicide mission avoiding source. It takes two but you are not two. What are you? One and three are not the correct answer unless you say so.

Delicious moments rise highly prized fashioning thoughts they appear differentially not necessarily what we thought they’d be or do.

Not unlike mountains or monstrous waves, whole ranges of being not isolate only alive even when plucked from the crannied wall, the one that is always there and no one sees, until we do.

A rainy day in the city: no lupine meadows, no view to a sky; wet and gray through walking umbrellaed and all the above. Precipitous plains of concrete; left over moraine, the ice age of a certain type of mankind.

Brilliant crepe: hermeneutics. These are important gems embedded in seeming background, already a jewel; hands painted on walls. 40,000 years: not very long at all. Did we walk here or take a taxi?

Enormous blonde lemon cakes slowly roll down mountains of chiffon gruesome sugary goo retarding the flow.

  

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko :   Monday, 4 June 2012 :  Mr. Crepe, Davis Square

For Ashley...

For Ashley Almost a Month After Her Birthday

Residual thoughts of you fleeting

glancing, jumping, slipping through,

gone; dancing, floating, glistening

some pleasure of being

alive.

On a good day luminous:

buoyant trombones, pirouettes,

flamboyant hammers, video equipment;

trousers’ ass resting against kitchen cabinets;

some kind of music

smiling.

This though is what is happening now.

Rampant roses nervous proliferate

Nascent dreams resolute rise foremost

Mountains remain intent ferocious

Freedom rides elephants forward

Without anticipation, knowing

What she is this fragrance opens

Minds of all beings leaving                              

No walls.

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko

Sunday, 3 June 2012

Prospect Hill

Not to mention John Travolta's twisted double life.

The Trials of John Edwards

Obsequious frequent ornate tumescence:

Supine plains of propinquity pirouette.

Languorous resilience begins to blossom

at first furtive. 

Pearls hang over the highway;

thighs in opulent concordance.

Flirting alternate jurists wink and

jiggle in piquant effluvial phrases

flavored with flanks of fulminating

economic folly.

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko

Concord Coach 1113

South Station Boston to Bath Maine

Monday, 28 May 2012

On the occasion of Zenshin Buckley’s 70^th birthday.

A Sense of My Feeling for Akshobhya's Blue

For Tensho:

The beauty of your glistening mind,

Dewdrops falling in sunlight,

Skies and ferns meeting,

Climbing out,

The great blue.

Dear Dave,

There is a blue found in the sea but not resident there.  It is really the sky reflected in the clarity of the water.  The white froth of our wake sets off a stunning contrast of color.  The blue of the water is a color you could expand into forever and disperse like a breath.  It is near indigo but no black, no darkness, only blue and the light breathing or one breath opening. The desire for that blue is great, but not like Hart Crane.  You could leap into it forever.

Is this blue, a metaphor, a door to walk through, a being to enter, immersed?  I could devote my life to this blue, that garden of roses at the heart but not black and white. 

John

Some time in 2005...in a letter to David Schneider/Tensho a man of many other high end Tibetan names as well.

John Bailes/Kotatsu Roko
remembered 28 May, 2012
Americans call this: Memorial Day. 

Akshobhya

Akshobhya is believed to transform the human failing of anger into a clear mirror-like wisdom.

Completion

Where is completion?

Is something missing?

Is there something other

than our doubt?

Find our true doubt.

This immovable mountain:

Akshobhya incarnate;

doubt is faith, trust and confidence.

Just this mountain

made of five heaps

or whatever else

you might parse it as.

Entire doubt,

just this doubt,

is no doubt, is trust

and only opens as

Love.

Kotatsu Roko

Thursday, 24 May 2012

Bloc 11, Union Square, Somerville MA

Saturday, 12 May 2012

Xenia Sky

Am I so dear?
Do I run rare?
And you've changed some:
peach, plum, pear.

Top of Form

• 
  

John Bailes 

To Emily
Marginal turbulences roil lost
Impure flavors residual floats
Impairs operations only
When we do not see entirely
Our own gruesome beauty.

John Bailes Dharma Talk Monmouth Zen Circle, Compassion Ocean Sangha Saturday May 5, 2012

This is a portion of a dharma talk I gave at Monmouth Zen Circle, Compassion Ocean Sangha Saturday May 5, 2012. It covers the first section of Dogen's, Bodhisattva's Four Methods of Guidance: Giving. We're new to recording here and the last portion of the talk and the discussion are missing because I am mostly technologically inept.. It was recorded directly on to my "telephone".

http://soundcloud.com/kotatsu-1/john-bailes-dharma-talk

I hear the lyric voice of this gruesome beauty in your free verse. which is why I love it so.

John High 

2:57 PM (7 hours ago)

to John

Taking off a tattered dress worn by the dead & dancing in mud

the girl glanced over the snows of an empty

field— the horse stood by the edge of a cliff

& the voices circling about their wandering

all of this time she had thought that she

& the boy were following them, that there was

some purpose & destiny in their pilgrimage, & now

she sensed in the night that we were

following her here in night, she & the boy trailed by

monks and ghosts & birds & trees & all of

the others, and in that moment in a perfect silent

pitch—we are here.

John Bailes 

10:53 PM (0 minutes ago)

to John

Destined to be here,
eyes open
or
not...

There's something about 
an American poet 
who loves Russians 
and is a Buddhist.

There are all these boys and girls 
blind and dumb 
running around on the steppes, 
down to creeks 
and 
all that land and sky 
so alive from before time 
and even during; 
butterflies and bugs, 
mosquito swarms, 
clouds, horses, swords and slaughter: 
some kind of 
destiny.

Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, the Czar; 
Akhmatova, Mandelstam and Mayakovsky; 
Stalin, pogroms, and Pushkin; 

Finn's starving north of Leningrad, 

St. Petersburg;
 Solzhenitsyn's archipelagos: 
Not one ever returns 
as in the river, 
Neva. 


Who is paddling now?

I hear the lyric voice 

of this gruesome beauty 

in your free verse 

which is why 

I love it 

so.

Did I send this one to you already?

Almost the end of April

Reading a recent poem at Robyn Ellenbogen's.

http://soundcloud.com/kotatsu-1/michelia-champs-a-1

Almost the end of April

Almost the end of April

I look everywhere

for evidence

          of my being;

everywhere is.

How many times do we

raise the entire universe:

          orange peel

          stop light

          grocery clerk?

Each of us always

not even reflected

in.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Sunday, 22 April 2012

Great River Zendo

West Bath, Maine

Of Gondolas, Frank O'Hara and Bodhisattva Vows

  

Some might call it a gondola

that carries us through

the night.

This gondola moving

on or not

seems.

If you ask someone

they would say

so.

Similar veins recoil

tumescent instruction

resuscitates simply

lucid nights.

Acrid dreams resume

inconvenient discontinuities

reveal terminal

attachment.

Seeming solid planes

yield naught

turn toward

light.

  

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Prospect Hill

Written after speaking with the mother of a marine...

Complicity and Betrayal

Itinerant worshipped fallen standard repugnant fissure leveling water thimbles broadly open tulips fly rampant furnace liniment littoral rosetta firmly fistulating glimmer.

Remorse or sadness: truth romance and deep love found in states of aggression where we are no longer fighting for some other ideal than one another. Really there is no other than this meeting in which we give up all for and it is what we all want need but that many get it through goading others into the act for no other reason than to see something they never can enact themselves.

What a sorry statement it is to know that people feel the only way to fulfill this yearning and enter knowing is through war.

What perversion it is that we put ourselves in this predicament to find too late we stand only for one another and no ideal and certainly not what we were sold on to get us into this predicament whereby we forsake all else save the situation in which we find ourselves. The forsaken meet the forsaken in the open spurred by a predicament of others’ making and if lucky realizing too late this is all which just might allow a total consumption with nothing left.

Only a few are so lucky.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Tuesday 17 April 2012

Prospect Hill

I guess I feel...

                                     I guess I feel

                                                closest to what

                                                          I imagine

                                                                   Philip’s way

                                                                             is.

                                      I take it to be

                                                a dangerous

                                                          & beautiful

                                                                   path à

                                      More and more having

                                                or holding

                                                          or being

                                                                   some way

                                      Means less

                                                and less

                                                          to me.

John Bailes, Kotatsu Roko

Monday, 26 March 2012

San Francisco Airport