2023 brought me anything positive, it has been my reconnection with Zen Buddhism. I first became enamored with Buddhism in my youth, and I carried it with me intellectually and philosophically my entire life. However, I always lacked the discipline to engage in a meaningful meditation practice for a prolonged period. Now, years later middle age hasn’t brought me wisdom, but it has at least gifted me with the patience to slow down, sit down and meditate. If
I’ve been voraciously reading a great deal of Zen literature as well, and I have devoured many Buddhist texts in the last year. One particularly engaging book was by John Daido Loori and titled Sitting With Koans, a fascinating book with essays and studies from some of the finest scholars in the world of Zen koans. The book started with a historical perspective of the ancient practice which was very educational. However, what makes this book an absolute gem and must read are the actual koans and koans studies. I have always been interested in koans in a literary sense, and along with haiku, have been very much influential on me as a writer for both their paradoxical nature and their sparseness and economy of words. Koans are integral to a spiritual journey, and I find myself turning to them more frequently…. Yet there is another layer to them, and the experimentalist in me finds them to have similarity to something else that has been integral to my journey as a person and as an artist, the cut-up.
I came to cut-ups in my youth with a literary curiosity. I employed them in my own writing as a stylistic tool where I could use words like a painter uses paint. Eventually though, I would realize they are much more than that, that the cut-ups indeed challenged rational mind and word lock, allowing my subconscious to bleed through… which was therapeutic to say the least, groundbreaking more so.
Like the cut-up, I also enjoyed Koans from a literary point of view long before I studied them or understood what they were intended for. The point of these paradoxical stories and parables being to exhaust the rational mind and feel the meaning of it in your being rather than with your intellect.
So the Koan and the Cut-up, while different in content and style and separated by centuries, are not at all dissimilar in their intended effect… to challenge the rational mind. One is a tool for enlightenment, the other a tool for de-conditioning. Is the deconditioned mind not an enlightened mind?
So now the questions that beg to be asked: What would be the effect of meditating on cut-ups? What if we cut-up Koans? What would a post-modernist Koan look like?
Broken Zen 