Nothing is Hidden, part one (reposted here for your convenience!)

or What I learned from Ronald McDonald and Mr. Checkers

Advisory: this post contains “adult language,” one “adult situation,” and partially unbuttoned fast-food uniforms.

At San Francisco Zen Center, in the practice periods, intensive periods of study, each Thursday morning, the regular schedule of zazen and service is abbreviated so a student can give what is called a “way-seeking mind talk.” In these talks, a student tells her story–as she understands and can name it on that morning–of how she came to be sitting in a room of people whose eyes are held at a 45-degree angle at 6:30 a.m. telling them how she got there.

These talks chronicle an arc of awareness, a sense of a mind getting to know itself. They often single out specific traumatic events as turning points, recounting new permutations of what other human beings and circumstance can levy onto the self —an emergency tracheotomy on a premature infant, as recounted half a century later through that blessed, resealed trachea; an off-hand reference to a parent in prison, suicide attempts, –one after another, tales of extremity and their attendant moments of clarity, of determined recommitment to life.

These accounts are registered in the assembly with extremely subtle facial responses, the kind Paul Ekman studies, the kind long-time meditators are said to be better at detecting than the average population. Faint variations that say, I’m here with you, or That was funny; or That was tragic, or That’s just like my life. An upturned corner of the mouth, delicate nostril flare, lift of the chin, sometimes there’s outright laughter, relief at the prevailing nervous suspension, and of course, much sniffling.

There is a feeling of temporal dilation in the room, but still there’s a clear boundary: 7:20, by which time, if the talk hasn’t tapered off into, “well, I think that’s about it,” or “does anyone else have a question?” a bell might ring to indicate the time. This audience was woken up by a different bell at 4:55 a.m, and they haven’t yet eaten breakfast.

When I gave my talk last year, I focused on a cascade of revelations and intentions brought about by a string of very thorny breakups, so-called losses, and strokes of fortune. Yes, they are indistinguishable. And now, whenever I mention a new fact about my life to my friend Stephen, his face takes on a wide-eyed genuine disappointment, confusion and shock: I can’t believe you left that out of your way-seeking mind talk! For him, the way-seeking mind talk is the primary point of reference, the hegemonic text for knowing anyone, as if you are supposed to include every important incident, overshot gesture and course correction, relationship, and part-time job in your life.

Though I only briefly managed to mention at the very end, working with Stanley Kunitz, a profound influence in my life, Stephen remembers my talk as being very heavy on Stanley, and yet considers grave the following omissions: 1. my brother is a magician 2. my first job was as a hostess at McDonalds* **

I thought I might reconsider my talk, now, through inquiring into just these items, including some sub-items: *item #2 included attending training at a place called Hamburger University. ** item # 2 also included my first blow-job, though Stephen says it was right not to include that “blue material.” It wouldn’t play well in the Poughkeepsie that is the Buddha Hall.

What can be learned from my life by examining these biographical points, or as it is commonly phrased in these halls, these conditions of my karmic life?

Okay, let me consider first having an older brother who is a magician. Let me turn that over and over in my hand a while. Some lessons in form. What this does is to give you an opportunity to see someone sewing a cape out of black and white checked gingham and adopting a persona based on the motif of checkers. An identity that then embraces anything articulated in a checkered pattern. A whole identity can be built on fabric design.

When my brother was 18, Mr. Checkers was born. Perhaps it helped him through the transition to adulthood, becoming a holder for the imagination one feels pressure to yield at that transition. It is an identity he still inhabits today. What I want to believe is that the remnant of cloth was on hand already, maybe left over from an altar draping my mother was making, that my brother made his identity from what was “on hand.”

I prefer this, project it onto this memory because this is a cornerstone in my aesthetic. Resourcefulness. Responding to the environment. Finding function in what is in your immediate surroundings. I don’t want to think that he just came up with the name, Mr. Checkers and then went out and bought the fabric. If you can’t make magic from the material in your immediate surroundings, it’s no magic I’m interested in.

Having a brother with an alter ego makes gift buying easy, as unlike the full-fledged complex individual ego who may or may not still respond positively the licorice all-sorts so eagerly received last year, an alter ego is usually based on just a few prominent features with a high predictive value—you find a stuffed dog that happens to be wearing a checkered vest and you need look no further for your brother’s Christmas gift.

Watching him receive these gifts was a lesson in the constriction of identity. He had to like these iterations of his chosen self. If he didn’t like them, he himself had to change. So he accumulated caps, socks, an umbrella, all with different grades of checkers.

I watched him tape baggies into newspapers, which then became makeshift ovens in which he’d bake a cookie by passing a hand over the folded paper. I watched him fold playing cards into apples, prepping them for when he’d find them at the birthday party.

I studied the mirrors, the cut away doors, the knives with rubber blades. This meant I had training as a cynic. As he was lying to the audience, I pictured the baggie in the newpaper. I resented his smug denials of trickery and wanted him to let me explore how the trick was done. I wasn’t interested in the illusion; I was interested in how it was done, the actual details of the physical world, the way the baggie hung on the newspaper, how he measured out the flour, cracked the egg.

I felt betrayed – and ultimately bored — that he couldn’t see that I was a magician too and let me in on these secrets. He invoked a creed. But it just felt like he wanted to keep them for himself. Magicians’ catalogs arrived in the mail. Since I got home from school before he did, this gave me a chance to read them first, to see that there were whole stores devoted to these wands, capes and disappearing chambers. These were items I thought you had to receive by some secret transmission in midnight ceremonies, or have them custom-fabricated by fairies, or you had to be born into them. Our mail carrier handed them to me at the screen door.

It remains true today though that things like those screwdrivers that contain several different sizes of screwdrivers in their handles intrigue me more than these items designed to be good just for one trick. It still shocks me that you can walk into a hardware store and buy these marsupial screwdrivers. I thought my life had already assembled around these items not having been handed down to me.

Knowing I can just have one of these screwdrivers, just as now, as an adult, I can have a whole avocado to myself, makes me have to rethink all the things I thought were hidden, like whether _________ really is _________.

But nothing is hidden, says the 13th century zen teacher, Dogen.

My brother tried to hide his tricks from me, but this strategy only made me less interested, rather than stoke his mystique, I just got annoyed with his secrecy and announced what I had been able to gather to the group assembled at and left the birthday party

So what did McDonald’s teach me?

to be continued…