Fw: Salinger and Buddhism as promised
Curtis Maxwell Perrin (cmperrin@fas.harvard.edu)
Mon, 29 Jun 1998 15:08:05 -0400
-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Kozusko <mkozusko@parallel.park.uga.edu>
To: bananafish@lists.nyu.edu <bananafish@lists.nyu.edu>
Date: Monday, June 29, 1998 2:11 PM
Subject: Re: Salinger and Buddhism as promised
>
>> I'm not so sure that one needs to write "sdrawkcab" in order to play with
>> language. Indeed, writing backwards and using other *tricks* might
almost
>> be called violations of the rules of the language game, because, properly
>> speaking, such tricks are outside language.
>
>They aren't, really--they can't be. In a sense, nothing can be outside
>language, because the moment we identify something as "outside of
>language," we've cast it relative to language; we've made that something
>part of the phenomenological mass we differentiate with language. You
>can't get outside of structure, because once you do, you've simply
>stepped into a larger, ur-structure that governs both the space you
>inhabited initially, and the space you stepped into.
>
Aha! Very funny. I think this is the point where the Zen master is
supposed to hit me with a stick or something because I've been enlightened
by your broad concept of language. I can see that. I tend to use the word
in a more restrictive, commonsense,
strictly-language-as-we-define-it-in-third-grade sense. Your point is well
taken. It makes conversations hard though when we're always pulling on the
absolute (even if it is right)!
.
>Somewhere, we lost track of who was arguing which point.
Because as you noted in your definition of language, everything contains its
own contradiction! Very funny again! But if lanugage-played-by-the-rules
(common sense definition of language here) contains its own contradiction
why resort to *tricks* (which the rabbit noted long ago are "for kids"). It
is far more difficult and subtle to work *within* those structures rather
than childishly tearing them down. Neither alternative is more right or
more wrong; they both probably reach the same end. But also, the way of
getting there can be by degrees more or less delightful depending on how you
walk it.
>The most difficult means of
>> producing "differance" is not through breaking every rule, but by
submitting
>> to every rule while simultaneously conveying a sense of high
>> self-consciousness in the act of submission. I think Salinger's writing
>> does call attention to itself in this way, and in so doing it heightens
>> one's awareness that it is a "construction."
>
>I'd never actually considered what applied differance would look like in
>a story. I only ever saw it as a little game in which Derrida tries to
>present a concept while insisting it's not a concept--eating his cake
>*and* having it, while denying the existence of flour and water. But
>Derrida really isn't my thing. Care to expand on your point?
>
The Zen state is one of "living fully," releasing oneself to the moment
without asserting one's Self against it; the mind is to mirror the world
because they are one and the same. This means *not* looking for the meaning
of things, because the more we look for it the more we assert it is
something outside ourselves, and the more we look for it the quicker it
flees. However, just accepting things as they are is not merely to accept a
lawlessness; rather we are to accept things by getting into them (realising
we and they are identities). Realising that Self and World are the same
also includes realisation that Freedom and Law are also the same; each and
every thing contains its opposite. R. H. Blyth wrote, "Freedom in Zen means
absolute freedom, not just the freedom to be asymmetrical, but the freedom
to be symmetrical if we want to, not just the freedom to be immoral, but the
freedom to be moral if we want to . . . There is no more a unity than there
is duality; relative and absolute are names of the nameless" But these "two
things" are paradoxically only "one thing" when we realise they are also
"two things"!!
The Zen state is one of accepting that reality--not merely intellectually
grasping it, but making it *real* in oneself. It is not a release from the
physical world for an idea, but a making real of both the idea and the world
in oneself. So Blyth: "The absolute is not any more truth than the
relative: both are truth. . . . Zen aims to reach that undifferentiated
state where the subject is a self-conscious object." [Blyth is tragically
under-read. Anyone who can access his hard-to-find books should definitely
take a look at them.]
Now, whether it does in the absolute sense or not, in the *relative* sense,
writing "swakdrab" does call attention to a divide between sense and
meaning. It is too "differentiated." It would be far more difficult and
potentially the cause of a far greater enlightenment to come at that same
realisation not through blatant dichotomies but through plainly BEing
(undifferentiation). Not calling attention to oneself (or one's writing)
through language tricks, but by letting the "being-ness" of the language
just "Be". *Tricks* prompt the intellect to think of them in *relation* to
"normal" language; whereas the "equal mind" wants to get beyond relativity
to see things in identity with themselves. I think Salinger's writing does
just that: it shows things, characters, states of mind, all *in terms of
themselves.* Zen is not just being; nor is it the criticism of being; but
it IS the living of life, which is the explaining (criticism) of life--it is
not something we create (through language *tricks*) but something we
discover in the process of living.
But really we are arguing the same point!
Curtis Perrin
cmperrin@fas.harvard.edu