Wu Noir: Forget to Remember, as in, Reincarnation [Part 2 - Interlude]

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Huìnéng said to Hui Ming, "Without thinking of good or evil, show me your original face before your mother and father were born."  
At these words, Hui Ming was enlightened...

          -Fragment of Case #23 of The Gateless Gate (Wu-wen kuan)

Immaculate, unconceived of, ever conceiving. Violet hum glowing rests on eyes, multiplied hundreds of times into conglomerate blur, whining, buzzing, another passes my aggregated gaze nearly unknown, but sporting that certain signature, that certain noble hint of pheromone attraction, attachment...

Zzttsssss!! (The bug zapper I flew straight into single-mindedly with many of my own kind, guided gracefully with compound eyes and without fear, what is death?)

 A clear gaze suddenly attained, everything as it is perfectly, utter deployment of fly faculties shredded asunder, completion, a dim memory of distant self, a few glimpses through sharper eyes, visual field better defined, but still obscure, unable to differentiate, very still, wide open and free from interpretation, green waterfalled over brown bars (a distant vision of simian grace, eons later perhaps, who can tell?), respiration heavy, vast gusts like turbulent storms drawn from deep within, embracing it and eternally giving it up again, to intermingle with the uncountable molecules of air, interred in caverns of familiar flesh, familiar phrases... return to the tongue, fluid air venturing through the grimy passage of the vocal cords, stuttering together to chop-up and order the vibrations of air, I remember the vibrancy of feeling, an incredible palate of expression at a moment's notice, unperturbed being everywhere at once... but yes, the air humming past, distilling emotion into something simpler, devoid of the original really, but still teeming with the intent, encoded with it and decoded... passably well, enough to taste the gist of it on your mind like a drop of lemon in a gargling spring, an oasis, an echo of another time, the camels all together looking on impassively at the drifting dunes, impermanent, palm trees beside lifting their glittering leaves up to worship the sun, Ra to some, a burning disk to others who did not have the assistance of abstract thought, of true superstition, of belief, that foul stream of thought which carves itself ever more painfully into the consciousness of man, entombing itself within a ravine of mind which grows to a gorge and finally into a canyon deeper and more persistent than anything else on the horizon, unable to close back up ever again to permanently scar the spirit, its contortions the amplification of what were once the tiniest deviations, wayward trickles turned to ponderous oxbows leading the flow slowly astray, seeming Omegas that sum up not a single one of the ten-thousand things.

I was superstitious then, in an unorthodox way, hair all curled up within a twirl of coarsely woven cloth after a strange but particular fashion. I remember my saddle, just a simple cushion nearly unadorned, but yet an impossibly complex phenomenon of matter, existing nowhere else in the universe but by this small oasis of originality articulating itself stubbornly through the noise, contained and blooming into the intricate patterns of life, the camels looking on impassively, meditating on their cud, slowly chewed and appreciated to ensure the proper amount of mastication, so that it is properly digested again, interred within the caverns of flesh, to rise up to become the mountain of nourishment coagulating upon its immense cellular landscape: the sovereign dromedary hump, upon which we had ridden, or rather, in the valley between it and neck as a glacier of transmuting flesh; we ride upon them as their kings, our control rising among the continuous geographical landscape, a churning vortex of luxurious complexity compelling movement beneath, reigns in calloused hands, my own hands! Now they are remembered in my mind as they once were: drenched in grit and sand. We waited beside the spring which effervesced with chlorophyll about it, that elixir of unthinking fractal construction turning light to life. We let cool water glaze our hands and bodies aching with an indeterminable distance of plodding camel steps which in turn tuned our vertebrae swaying on their backs in a tall stack shuffled with cartilage. I had watched ahead for an omen of a rumored oasis, the single real one among the mirages of shimmering pools and mist enveloped mountains glimmering with waterfalls, yet being nothing but tricks of the air rising with the heat, bending light to confuse and enjoin with our minds into illusion, false thought. After much detective work I finally chose the real one and confirmed its reality with my companion, our hands cupped to its waters, drinking deeply, feeling life returning to our bodies.

I spoke, geysering air, telling him something simple like, "We shall stay here until we have rested," and he assented with a motion of his head. I steaded my gaze at the spring in silence, I know not how long, and then, sprouting up from within me with heavenly accord, I sang joy. I communicated it to my partner, and to myself, and to the pool, and to the trees and vines strung within them, their tendrils weaving the tapestry of the forest from canopy to mid-story to floor within the loom of physical space, and to the camels spitting and simmering in the sun imperturbably after drinking their fill. I sing so long I become in the vibration, vibrating myself, noticing it for the first time, my body's choice resonance, its specific hum, lost in it and the sonic pattern of my voice together, so nearly the same. The beat emerges clearly like a flat instrument sounding against a tuning fork. These offset sine waves I close slowly as one, my body is gone and when it returns I am a small boy crying, wind blowing a bit of dust in my eye, painful, torture that won't stop. I yell the only words my still developing mouth can make, again and again, suddenly I relent in instant silence, quiet, distracted from pain, forgetting and remembering, reminded of my camels, their flesh and bone long since returned to the sand of the immutable flux of the dunes.  

Mother finally comes, face drenched in warmth, in concern, and I smile at her and from that point, awakened, I attend to the familiar lore of life, things learned, ideas explained and digested thoroughly, of rules enforced without reason as all rules are enforced, but I remain as I always have been, imperturbable like the camel, which now graces my cigarette pack in profile, like the stuffed one sitting on my old dresser at home, embedded with a microchip and sensors that replay a recording of its sound, those deep knowing shrill-thin calls. Placed there by my Mom lovingly remembering me by my favorite toy, a relic of my childhood and an alter to my former self, and unknowingly to the former self long before that one, vaguely remembered in its solemn hump, in its unwavering, imperturbable buddha-gaze.

I am 20, sitting in my apartment reading Dōgen, sitting and contemplating in lotus position with eyes half open, meditating in the epiphany of a kōan finally understood in un-understanding with wordless attention, it finally comes back, the light and the void, form and unformed all together in that instant I remember it all clearer than yesterday (a yesterday which I, in fact, can't remember). Marsh, one of my names, and that other being who betrayed his true self to me in his betrayal of me, my yang, my consistent oppositional force, my completion, my opponent eternal, the confluence of our loveandhate, sometimes servant and sometimes master, Winston, his name most lately remembered, his karma to be debited finally, balanced out after a long inequity. When the dharma is so close to being regained, revenge is mandated from the shade of nirvana sometimes, and as I like to play this eternal game we play to bemuse our everlasting and mirthful beings, I decide upon it in certainty. I am disengaged from the wheels of deathandlife but watch them spin nonetheless, Winston, who are you now, what disenchanting form do you inhabit, rent by your own cruelness, burgeoning with ignored pain, it is time for you to dissipate back within the static of reality for a time to remember and forget, until you are blank and new and ready to return to take your turn at this game again. Winston, I feel your ripples of attachment and fear because they are obvious within my stillness, I'll take no joy in purifying your original face from the flesh and self and attachment and fear, well maybe just a little I think as I sip on the scotch suddenly materializing in my hand, why not enjoy it, if it's got to be done? Why not do it real tasty, lay the irony on super thick and poetic? Let 'im simmer in it just a bit. Why not try that well-worn ego back on over my original face like an old suit scrounged up from a second-hand store, wrinkled, musty, impractical, but popping with panache, with that ol' time religun je ne sais quois. I'll snap back on a Marsh kick, and revel in that hackneyed braggadocio just to see Winst squirm, dig?