Real Life with Ryuei

Do I have anything to say?

Actually no, I really don't.

I've been reading Henry Miller again lately, I just finished his Rosy Crucifixion trilogy (Sexus, Plexus, and Nexus) and am now onto Tropic of Cancer. Great stuff. Hilarious but they are also filled with wonderful insights and very touching portraits of people and places. They are also filled with a lot of ugliness and raunchiness (esp. Sexus). Henry was very much trying to paint the entire spectrum of human experience as he experienced it with words.

I think that is the key to appreciating Tropic of Cancer because I remember feeling very impatient, confused, and dismayed the first time I read it. It doesn't have even the halfway narrative nature of the Rosy Crucifixion, there is no plot, and the book just meanders from one observation, rant, and diatribe to another. Still, even the first time, I was drawn in by Henry's way of playing with words and images. It's a travelogue, a dreamscape, and a rambling stream of consciousness - maybe not so much a stream as a series of perilous rapids. The first time I read it I was looking for something more structured and for a more coherent record of Henry's life in Paris. But this time I am really appreciating it for what it is - a series of verbal landscape paintings.

Now last night I picked up Brad Warners new book Zen Wrapped in Karma and Dipped in Chocolate, though I am thinking of it as The Continuing Adventures of Brad Warner. I am very much enjoying this one - and it is much more coherent than Henry Miller, insightful in a much more down-to-earth and prosaic way, and is much easier to devour in a couple of sittings. But it is not really ART the way Henry Miller's books are art. Reading Brad's books, for me, is like sitting around shooting the shit with one of the guys.

Reading Henry Miller is like being thrown head first into someone's raw and gushing impressions of life as it is with all its squalid ugliness and all its blazing beauty.

Did I mention that towards the end of his life Henry Miller heard of and then chanted Namu Myoho Renge Kyo? Well, he did.

I've also taken to doing some of my own writing. As I've said elsewhere, I've finally gotten sick to the gills of Buddhist pontificating. I've stored up quite a load of impressions, feelings, opinions, bile, and even amrita myself - and the rather dry abstract way I write about Buddhism (unlike Brad's in your face style) doesn't express any of that. So it just sits neglected and unused, festering. So to vent all that in a creative way I've set up a play be email Dungeons and Dragons game (actually using the Pathfinder rules but with the old Greyhawk campaign world as the basis for the setting). Actually I think of this project as collaborative storytelling because it is not just my writing by also the contributions of the players and the gestalt that is created by everyone's contribution.

Now I readily admit that I am a rank amatuer at this writing business. Firstly I write terribly livid purple prose because I have been too heavily influenced by people like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft and even Harry Harrison, not too mention all the other pulp novels I've taken in over the years. I will even admit that I love purple prose - I think its hilarious the more over the top you can get - even when dealing with serious themes - maybe especially then. And of course when I am not writing purple prose I write dialogue for my characters that if full of pontification and sermonizing - I can't help it. But at least I feel more free to be more blunt or take on different opinions than my own. There is a great sense of freedome in being able to speak my piece and even to express the pieces of others - the way I hear them. And since it's just fiction no one had to take it too seriously or be too grossly offended because afterall they are just characters in a fantasy game world. This is the freedom that I have long since lost as a Buddhist priest who has to be sure not to offend or alienate anyone unceccessarily. The freedom to let the Id and various alter-egos express themselves in a creative, channeled, and safe way.

This does not mean that every character I write about or write dialogue for is just an alter ego or an expression of my own true feelings. Some of what I express through these fictional characters and situations emerges from people I have known who made an impression on me (for better or worse), or from fears I have, or things that annoy me, or things I admire, or pastiches of characters from other books, movies, or graphic novels, or t.v. shows or whatever that really struck me. Or sometimes they are opposites or at least very different types than myself and I want to see what it would be like to be that - for better or worse. I think many people can't understand this - I think many people (even people older than myself) still have only a tenuous graps on who they themselves are. To project themselves into another kind of life is inconceivable to them, even terrifying. So be it.

Related to this - I remember that P.J. Harvey has commented on how silly she thinks it is that people think the songs she writes and sings are somehow secret revelations about her own life, and how people imagine (based on her music) that she lives in a dark cave on the moors or something. P.J. Harvey seems to be able to separate fiction or artistic expression from reality, but apparently there are critics and other listeners who cannot separate fiction from reality.

Personally, I think that I have a more acute sense of the difference between fiction and reality than most people - and I think it is why I more deeply appreciate how fiction and even fantasy and sci-fi fiction can present very accurate reflections of reality while other people are lost in the fantastic.

Anyway, that's enough for today. Once more I have said nothing worth saying, but I wanted to keep my hand in here.

If anyone is looking for some nugget of Buddhist wisdom I will only offer this:

Chant Odaimoku until your jaw drops off.

Of if that puts you off then just sit down and shut up.

Smell the roses, get a cup of coffee, think about the fact that in a 150 years everyone here now will be dead. What did you say your problem was?

Namu Myoho Renge Kyo,
Ryuei

Posted by Ryuei at February 4, 2009 11:12 AM