#I Did Not See That Man

Someone described a man to me. He had, they said, a fine body, and around him moved lovers kept like ornaments. The textures near him were the kind only the patient, persistent maturity of skilled hands could produce. A chef of great culinary skill arranged his meals as one arranges a mandala, and figures danced without clothing while he ate. When his body was done with food, a servant was near to clean him. He never ever knew a poor night's sleep. Each breath was drawn from lightly perfumed air. His only labor was to take a breath.

I was told all of this with some care, as though the telling would place the man before me. The other told me about this man with a fondness that even his most lavish details paled in what he saw yet could not describe. I could listen to him because he was an acute observer of those around him. I do not know what he would describe about me.

All I know is that I could not see that man he so loved to describe.

It was not a refusal by me to ignore him or to deny an effort to see him, because a refusal must face the thing refused. I had no position from which to orient and so there was no turning away, because there was no turning toward. He was described into a field I could not occupy. Yet for both of us the only labor was in taking each breath.

Whatever passed between the man and the one who watched him long enough to describe him, it passed in a channel I am not tuned to receive. I heard the words. But that man would not recognize my arrival nor acknowledge my departure. How can there be recognition when I am not skilled in an art he desires or too unskilled at a service he requires.

My shit stick has a sea-sponge at its end, dipped in vinegar, and it works. When the body is done with food I attend to it myself, and the attending is complete. There is nothing partial in it that a second pair of hands would finish. The finest craftsman and the plainest tool end in the same place: a body clean, a moment closed, the next moment already open and asking nothing of the last.

The sun does not stop shining on me. I have not arranged this, and I could not arrange its ending. It is not a possession, because a thing possessed can be measured against its absence, and there is no ledger on which the sun is entered. It falls where I walk and where I rest, and it falls on the field beside me with no preference I can detect. This is the thing: nothing has yet been singled out. The unarisen is not empty in the way a purse is empty. It is full and unarisen, luminous before any excitation lifts out of it and calls itself a thing worth having. It is stainless and unsupported. To rest is not to have stopped short. The phantasmagorical is not the destination. There is only the noise that stacks above the quiet and mistakes its own volume for elevation.

I walk and I rest. The field is thick with beauty and also with the old that is going under and the new that is coming up through it, the one that eats and the one that is eaten. I do not correct this. I have no instrument fine enough to lift one of these out of the weave and set it above another, and I have looked for such an instrument and found that the looking was the only thing it ever produced. Dependent arising does not hand you a place to stand outside it from which to grade it. The predator and the field it crosses are one motion. The decay and the shoot are one surface. Nothing in it is missing. Nothing in it is calling to be relocated.

When he described that man to me, he described what was never to be reached but only what was possible to watch. This is the thing I keep returning to. The opulence in the account was not a property of the man; it was a property of the attention that had settled on him and would not lift. The more they told me he had, the more clearly I heard the shape of the one telling — the reaching in it, the measuring, the long orientation toward a point that had to be held as fuller than the place the watcher stood. The man himself may hold none of this. He may look out from his cushions and see a settled order rendering him what it renders, and feel no reaching at all. He is not on the far end of the watcher's line. He is decoupled. The line goes out and finds no vertex. What returns to the watcher is the watcher's own emission, read back as the man's fullness.

So there is nothing to turn around. To turn the account around, to point it back the other way, would be to pick up the very instrument whose only product is the reaching, and to aim it again, and to call the aiming by a softer name. The instrument does not change character when its direction reverses. A magic mirror on the wall validates the observer as the one being observed. A localized excitation propagating one way is the same kind of thing propagating the other way. What is conserved under the reversal is the excitation itself. The mirror relabeled as spyglass. He would have remained very busy, anxious to not miss the detail. And I was busy too under the moon that set, it never carried me along it just returned and shared its phases.

Tonight the moon is full. It was not partial yesterday and completed by any effort of mine. It asks for no confirmation and would not be more itself if I gathered witnesses to agree that it shines. It is showing its face — everywhere and at no particular point, present without being had. The eye that scans an account for what one figure holds against another cannot lift to it, not because it is small but because it faces the wrong way and is full of its object. An eye that reaches cannot see what does not have to be reached for.

I could not remember anything about that man.

The sun rose and the field turned bright. The light did shadow dances across the long grass, and the moon over all of it again. It shone brightly over the man I did not meet and the watcher who could not stop watching and the walker resting at the edge of the field with a vinegar sponge, and no direction in which anything is missing.

The whole of it is there. The moon is full.

Colophon

The work is personal. The material here is original arising directly from my sitting contemplation. It is protected under Any Note Press. It’s publication here permits no commercial use. All rights are reserved. It is offered for the benefit of one’s practice and nothing else.