I met this guy - and he looked like he might have been a hat-check clerk at an ice rink.
Which, in fact, he turned out to be. And I said: Oh boy. Right again.
Let X=X. You know, it could be you. It's a sky-blue sky. Satellites are out tonight. Let X=X.
You know, I could write a book. And this book would be thick enough to stun an ox. 'Cause I can see the future, and it's a place about seventy miles east of here, where it's lighter. Linger on over here. Got the time? Let X=X.
I got this postcard, and it read, it said:
Dear amigo, dear partner. Listen, uh - I just want to say thanks. So thanks. Thanks for all the presents. Thanks for introducing me to the chief. Thanks for putting on the feedbag. Thanks for going all out. Thanks for showing me your swiss army knife. Oh and uh - thanks for letting me autograph your cast.
Love and kisses XXXXOOOO.
Oh yeah, P.S. - I feel like I am in a burning building - and I gotta go.
As Buddhists, one of the things we’re constantly aiming for – or, more precisely, trying not to try to achieve – is to let X=X, to let the object of consciousness or attention be itself and not something constructed through a lens of conceptual thinking. But the phraseology of ‘let X=X’ captures something else; the fact that, when dealing with X, X itself is an abstraction (the sky is 'sky-blue'). X is an abstraction not only in the sense that there are ultimately no separate ‘things,’ but also in the sense that all experience is available only through consciousness, through mind. This is something which, it seems from my perspective, often gets lost in claims that conceptual thinking is the problem, that without it we can experience reality completely unmediated, or ‘things as they (really) are.’
In Zen, at least, this view ties in both with a common, and, to my mind, regrettable anti-intellectual strain (which in itself seems aversive rather than accepting, inasmuch as it chops off a part of experience as ‘intellectual’ and rejecting it); and with a strong emphasis on attaining ‘enlightened’ states as altered states of mind.
Let X=X begins with a playful example in which how things seem to be to the individual, are exactly how they ‘really’ are. In a nicely paradoxical way, though this image on the one hand perturbs the fundamental Buddhist concept that a commonsense understanding of reality is not what’s really going on, on the other speaks to the argument that there can be no ‘objective’ or ‘unmediated access to reality,’ but rather that the nature of ‘how things really are’ is that they are always viewed from the standpoint of mind. The idea of ‘objective’ access to reality says something about the way in which this conception of 'the enlightened mind' idealises objectification. Even though ‘mind,’ far from being fundamentally real, is as empty as any other noun, it is the inescapable medium through which experience comes to be known.
Conceptual thought can then be seen not as an enemy or something to be stopped – aversion is, after all, a form of attachment – but rather as a tool, where the problem is not its existence and usage, but the fact that it is mistaken for something more existentially important (to whit, the totality, the essence of individualhood, or a self). To make a comparison (despite my suspicion of metaphors given that every thing and event is ultimately unique), my hand is a useful tool that I use constantly, but if I decided that my hand was ‘me’ I’d be in trouble – I’d spend every moment watching for wrinkles, protecting it from minor cuts and bruises and agonising over scars. But the best solution to such a problem would not be to cut off my hand, but to understand what my hand is and what part it plays in my experience of subjectivity.
All this is contained in Let X=X. I’m always excited when I come across Buddhist themes in Western artwork, particularly give that it’s so hard to translate religious themes into vocal music in a lyrically-original way, and that doing so in terms of Buddhism has such a new history in the West. I wonder whether Anderson’s 'book thick enough to stun an ox' might be compared to the classic taming of the bull – ‘the whip and the rope are necessary' (though the problematics of the oft-used image of the subjugation of or violence toward an animal for the training of the mind is one for another day, the words of another Buddhist come to mind - namely Leonard Cohen, in his 'Ballad of the Absent Mare'– no need for the whip ... no need for the rein' ). I also very much appreciate Anderson’s melding of that which is usually considered ‘natural’ with the ‘unnatural.’ So often in modern Zen rhetoric there’s a tendency to praise ‘nature’ in a way which overlooks the fact that concrete is as natural and as beautiful (or as ugly) as flowers, the car horn as natural as birdsong – or, in this case, satellites as stars. As many have noted, everything that is, is natural. And this is where we who are city-dwellers live – we can only hurt ourselves by rejecting it or idealising some imagined other category of things.
One of the troublesome issues about artwork and the intellect, though, is that sometimes the anti-intellectual parameters, previously discussed, which are so familiar as artistic tropes – that explanation is not only insufficient, but pernicious, and should be set up in opposition to intuition and emotion – can also come through in music. I listen often to Akron/Family’s track ‘Gone Beyond’ from Meek Warrior, a gentle guitar song in which the lyrics consist of a ‘translation’ of the Prajnaparamita Mantra found in the Heart Sutra: ‘Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone completely beyond’ (according to Wikipedia, Akron/Family’s Ryan Vanderhoof left the band in 2007 ‘to live in a Buddhist Dharma center in the Midwest.’) But when I came to the song ‘Suchness,’ from their first album, I was troubled, from a philosophical perspective, by the lyrics: ‘I want to see the thing in itself, I don’t want to think no more.’
Anderson, herself a Buddhist, has said that 'in Buddhist thought, there's the thing and there's the name for the thing and that's one thing too many.' But I’m not sure that I see that reflected in her work. How can there be one thing too many? If anything, every ‘thing’ is one ‘thing’ too many – though at the same time, in a spirit of nondualism the conventional reality where ‘ten thousand things’ exist is not ‘cancelled out’ by the ‘one suchness’ of ultimate reality. This is where I also appreciate Let X=X’s manifestation of everyday language – and the skilful representation of everyday language in the artistic and musical context is something I love about Anderson’s work – not to mention the giving of thanks, which is both to the self (in the context of the narrative of the song) and must be directed away from the self (in the context of its performance). But at the same time as giving thanks wholeheartedly, it’s equally important to realise that that for which we are thankful, inasmuch as we are thankful for it, is that to which we are attached, and constitutes part of the burning building in which we are living:
ignorant children … are not afraid nor know the purport of the word "burning" … while incessantly whirling in that mass of evils they are sporting, playing, diverting themselves; they do not fear, nor dread, nor are they seized with terror; they do not know, nor mind; they are not startled, do not try to escape, but are enjoying themselves in that triple world which is like unto a burning house, and run hither and thither. Though overwhelmed by that mass of evil, they do not conceive the idea that they must beware of it.
While an interpretation of this Lotus Sutra parable is the superiority of the One Vehicle or Teaching over the Three, of Mahayana over Hinayana, and even of the Lotus Sutra itself, to my mind, despite the materialism of the parable itself, the strongest teaching is the least sectarian: not only that skilful means are in fact vital liberatory devices, or that the reward for self-liberation is greater than what we’re capable of envisaging in our unliberated state – but is found in the most simple aspect of the parable, the fact that the great, spacious house in which we live is in fact internally rotten, subject to destruction through fire at any moment, and in fact passionately blazing even as we speak, and it’s only ignorance which keeps us unaware of this – so, once we know it, we’ve gotta go.
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