Bold

Prepare to have your time wasted. Today, he resolved to write this the way he read it should be written from a book on drawing. This recommendation coming as it does from Dr. Elizabeth Edwards, writer of many books on drawing and visual thinking.

But here is a Japanese poet. Who one day sets himself to make a painting of blackbirds in a bamboo grove. What does the Japanese do but to go to the bamboo grove to sit there? He knows the hour when the birds come. They come at certain hours of the day, which times in due time he determines.

He knows he cannot know how the birds feel. He can only make a conjecture less  real than how he himself feels when they come.

He feels a lightheartedness. He knows this comes only from not knowing what he is doing. How does one know, after all, the right way to sit in a bamboo grove among blackbirds? Only the bamboo and blackbirds know for sure. The wise yearn for the stupid.

Sometimes they yearn for it more than anything else.

The Japanese poet is, of course, yearning only for emptiness. And how else can the wise describe it but as stupid? The luxury of being wrong? Or the fact of putting one’s self in a state of no right or wrong that really matters. Only time moving away with the bamboos straining in the wind against gravity. The blackbirds flying here and there not knowing or caring what they are doing.  

They have a way of perching. Their claws grasping thin branches. One leg always higher than the other. They balance themselves in a way as particular as the way they spread their wings in the beginning of flight, first plunging downwards, then arresting this fall as the wind catches the spread of wings.

And then to the next branch. They look around quickly, scanning all about them for food or threat or the next bird. A mate perhaps? They sing. Squawk actually. But as there are hundreds of them doing this same thing at the same time it becomes music filling the air with a mindlessly lovely cacophony, not at all tiresome. The Japanese poet dozes off into a short nap holding onto the dream about how wonderful life is. And how the best thing to do, as always, is to do nothing. One must learn to relish the boredom of the stupid if one seeks to be wise and unafraid.

In his dream, he thinks of time and forever. The thought enters his head that time cannot exist in heaven or nirvana or any conceivable paradise. The boredom would become hell. But if time did not exist then a single second could be taken for eternity, death could be taken for only a nap going into a dream from which, as Shakespeare puts it and he restates, there is no awakening.

He has not died. This is not heaven. But he knows this only because he is walking home in the late afternoon. He goes to the kitchen. Boils himself some water. He prepares a table. Puts  his paper, his inkwell and his brushes on it.

The water has come to boil in its pot. He puts the tea into it, sets it on the table beside his painting things. He pours himself a cup.

Waits. He sips. He waits again. He stares into the empty paper in front of him and studies its emptiness. How wonderful it looks in its pristine state, the color of its fibers. He thinks of the perfection of absence and emptiness. How awful he must be, like a mad serial killer, that he is going to scar this with his stupidity, his imperfection. How in its realest sense that is all beauty can ever be: That state of imperfection one brushstroke before and away from perfection.

Bold.  And yet the poet must be bold. Bold before anything else. Before even being stupid. Art is an accident. It is a visitor that must be waited in the same way the Japanese poet waits for his first stroke after he has spent the day in the bamboo grove among blackbirds. The poet is a warrior unafraid either of defeat or death. The gods determine outcomes. They are unimportant.

The poet wields only the brush. Dips it into the inkwell. He runs the brush over the paper, his body, his arms, his wrists, his fingers going into their predetermined paths the same way the blackbird falls into flight. Without thinking plunging into the fall of flight.