THE PRACTICES (TALKING ABOUT 3 YEAR RETREAT, #1)

Our lives are mostly invisible, and deeply connected, but somehow our lives seem bereft of this knowledge.

So the first year consists of practices (the “ngondros”) to purify this impoverishment: expressing one's commitment and openness to the (invisible, present, surrounding) buddhas through recitation of prayers, visualisation of buddha lands, prostrations, etc. Confession and purification of one’s negative karma accrued since beginningless time. Offering visualised Mandala universes to the buddhas on behalf of all wandering beings. Expression of one’s commitment to become a buddha as the best way to repay the kindness of all mother-like sentient beings throughout all those lives.

Then begins a cycle of practices to stabilise, concentrate and open the mind through more meditative practices (the ngondros themselves are quite meditative and focussing, but they are primarily energising and cleansing). These include practices aimed at transcending one’s deeply ingrained delusional tendency to see oneself and the world as ordinary.

The final year is quite specialised tantric work whose aim is to accelerate the attainment of buddhahood: working on the subtle body, dream yoga, emptiness meditations, techniques to transfer consciousness to a pure land at death, to remain conscious during the dying and post-death state, among other things.
I’ll unpack some of this in greater detail over the coming months. And if there are any specific questions, just ask. I’m happy to talk about it.

AFTER THE FALL: THE CONSERVATION OF TULLIO LOMBARDO'S ADAM

"Burying things in a first glove of words, a second pocket of writing, a third screen of printed matter, a thousand names..."

         -- Michael Serres, 'Biogea' 

A friend sends me URLs that she has 'orphaned' from their seamless one-click digital environment. She writes them by hand: scrawled in semi-legible pencil on the back of a 20 baht note, or neatly penned in gold ink on glass and then photographed. She draws the outline of a Fra Angelico painting and writes one around the angel's halo, or finger-draws them over photos of darkened rooms that come to me via Instagram.

And then, slowly typing these unclickable unpronouncable URLs into the address bar, I am reminded once again of something that our digital culture ís straining to forget: that there are many, many different ways to approach things, and that love and attention have their own unique velocities.

And I find myself watching things like this:

This beautiful short video documenting the reconstruction of a shattered sculpture unintentionally yet effortlessly seeps outside its immediate concerns, leaving me thinking about robotics, slow time, extreme medical intervention, dance, crime scene investigation, and even William Gibson's Bobby Chombo (the 'Spook Country' GPS geek who chalks out a grid of metre-wide squares on his warehouse floor and refuses to sleep in the same space twice...)

And the vimeo one? Well that isnt too difficult to type in yourself, is it...?

HOUSEKEEPING (HULME, 1990)

"We thought to engage in a very old-fashioned gesture, or one so modern as to still be, like music, in its infancy.  We acted according to a new complex mathematics, one dependent upon the tiniest initial tweaks..."

    -- Richard Powers.

“We laughed, but as little as we could, because we knew it was a solemn thing to burn a house down.”

    -- Marilyyne Robinson

In a dream 30 years ago an angel taught me the secret of photography. She said there are two essential rules: be sure to find the correct distance and always stay as close to the ground as possible.

And for a while I lived inside the wider ambience of those instructions. I turned my home into a soft-logic laboratory, an architectural equivalent of what in India is called ‘frugal engineering’. I had no furniture. The floors were covered with small sculptures and the debris of a nomadic intelligence (books and photocopied fragments, beautiful letters from my friends in Japan). I remember how the act of constantly stepping over things slowed me down and changed the rhythm of my thinking, making it more nuanced, attentive. I remember a Korean zen monk talking about the importance of ritual: he said, when you do something every day your manners become pure, your face shines. 

I remember photographing the books lying on the floor, the corners of rooms that had been ‘softened’ by small piles of cotton wool, subtitled tv images, the radiator in my bedroom. I made audio tapes with seventy minutes of silence wrapped around three or four songs. I understood that the object-world was about to start talking, and that we humans were about to stop doing so, out of a sense of balance, or harmony, or relief. I remember reading Marilynne Robinson’s novel “Housekeeping” during those years. And when I re-read it recently I was amazed to see how much it has influenced my subsequent life. 

I remember waking up one morning with a small poem in my head, a tiny thing no bigger than an address on an envelope: "The young Tibetan monk comes west. He will walk through the whole of Western civilization as if it were snow." But isn't that what all poetry aspires to - being an address on an envelope? Anyway, I got the message and I started walking towards the address, towards my future self, beyond the limits of my imagination and rationale.

Suddenly thirty years pass.

But even now I dream of living in similar experimental spaces: a house with wi-fi but no running water, or running water but no internal doors. A three year solitary retreat - with webcam and ambient OS. Those Hulme years, electrified, reincarnated.

BUDDHAFIELD TALK

"Opinions Are Non Contemporary" (37 minutes)

A talk about confession, robots, Je Tsongkapa, walking towards China, and more...

RECEPTION (LETTER-BEINGS AND TIME)

"Literature is without proofs. By which it must be understood that it cannot 

prove, not only what it says, but even that it is worth the trouble of saying it."

 -- Roland Barthes

"As an allegory rather than a utopia, an allusion rather than 

an illusion, desire was for a whole generation a guiding 

star. Today it is merely an observation satellite." 

-- Jean Baudrillard

10:17 pm. I receive a  text saying "document arriving in ten minutes #letterbeingsandtime"

She doesn't need to sign her name: our devices do that for us now. And our names are now our addresses. We exist as locations, not as histories. We appear as messages, as quieter and quieter messages, appearing and dísappearing like moments of weather inside the Times Square of our crowded and cool devices. Messages like snow, or the 21st century equivalent of snow, coded for anonymity and distance and endless love.

And then, ten minutes later, these arrive:

Gazing at the images in the darkness I find myself thinking about the notion of 'reception'. There's a passage in "Godel, Escher, Bach" where Hofstadter talks about how messages have to not only contain their message content but also a little bit of meta-message that announces the presence of a message. He talks about Bach records being sent out into space with the hope of some alien civilisation receiving them. Will they be able to recognise the 'envelopes' of satellite craft and metal box and LP record? Will they recognise the grooves as containing 'music'? Will they đeduce 'record player' and 'violin' and 'reverberation' and 'emotion'? And finally, will they get the message?

He also goes on to wonder whether a meteorite crashing into the craft, obliterating it in a moment, may be a way of playing Bach, of 'receiving the message' of Bach...

Sometimes I feel like that meteorite and sometimes I feel like Bach, or a museum of musical instruments, or some kid's first ever record player, or a museum on fire in the night of all nights, or a video of that conflagration found on Kafka's phone and destined for Felice but never sent. Sometimes I feel like the message and sometimes I feel like the envelope.

I picture her texting, standing by the window of her studio (where her phone lives, on the windowledge, safe from the surrounding chaos), and a line from a Richard Powers novel comes back to me: "her face was like someone texting a lover." Its not an infatuation, its just something I'm thinking, something to do with light. Faces and light. The human eye perceives less than one millionth of one percent of the electromagnetic spectrum - yet here we are: texting, visualising, painting, remembering, a communicative array somewhere between golden telepathy and meteorite crash. We're at home in the darkness. Its amazing.

HAND-SET AND GRETEL

"The tree that springs up again, the locusts that devour the crops, 

the cancer that beats others at its own game, the mullahs who dissolve the 

Persian empire, the Zionists who loosen the hold of the mullahs, the concrete 

in the power station that cracks, the acrylic blues that consume other 

pigments, the lion that does not follow the predictions of the oracle..." 

 -- Bruno Latour

"On Mushashi Plain / the voice of a deer / is one inch long."

-- Basho

She's just finished painting for the day. Conversation begins as she cleans brushes and I finish assembling a playlist for her on Youtube. We talk about envelopes and clothes and platforms of anonymity, The vastness of the envelope, the length of a sleeve, the voice of Basho's deer, ghosts without watches or pens, voice recognition software and voice pretend-not-to-recognise software, CVs that fit on the back of a postcard, self-confidence and stillness, smiles that explain everything. We talk about anonymity as ornament: eloquent, disciplined, intentional, restrained. And anonymity as maze, as lost voice and disinheritance.

She asks me ìf there are any book titles I envy, that I wish could've been mine. I mention two: 'Operation Wandering Soul," and an essay by Helene Cixous entitled 'Letter-Beings and Time.'

We talk about languages, all the possible languages. The enchanted ruins of old grammars and etymologies  The prosaic formality of book titles compared to the fractured chaos of DJ playlists. The illusory distances between Jane Austen and Twitter and the literature-to-come, Hansel and Gretel in the age of google maps. Fairy tales told by maths professors. 

(more of his cartoons can be found here)

She tells me about a disappointing date she went on recently. 'We met, but we đidn't meet each other and we đidn't meet the unknown.'

She asks me for an image of passion, something from the world of a buddhist monk. "'Walking through fields of snow I counted the snowflakes.' - that's close to what I mean by passion. I mean a true feeling, poised within íts unrepeatability, yet graceful and modest. Neither limited nor reckless. But most of all freedom from compulsion. Deep sadness - with thanks. That's passion."

"I'm listening, attentive, I'm translating, I'm advancing in the 

scaled-down meaning ... the ascent goes from the hell of noise to 

the smaller and smaller paradise of the said."

 - Michael Serres, "Biogea"

I tell her about John Cage's recollections of D T Suzuki, the Japanese zen teacher at Columbia University in the sixties. He used to teach with the window open in the summer and the classroom looked out over the runways of La Guardia airport. Whenever a plane took off or landed the roar of the engines would drown out hís words. But he never paused or raised his voice. He just continued with his lecture regardless, allowing some of íts content to be erased in this way. One time he mentioned some zen master 'who lived in the 8th or 9th century... or maybe the 10th... or perhaps the 11th, or 12th...'

I tell her about a remark by the American writer Marilynne Robinson that I can't get out of my head at the moment, about humanity's "odd capacity for destitution." She gives me one of her special smiles - a lighthouse beam from the cliff-edge of rash decisions - that says 'I know, I know,...but don't forget your breadcrumb map...'

(THEY NEVER REALLY STOPPED BUT) THERE THEY ARE

"As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go.  We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future -- the night of time.  If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are...  There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said."

- John Ashbery

Watching thís video I know I'll be coming back to this world again and again. I cant believe that such loneliness and speechlessness and cuteness can exist without eternity as one of its ingredients. So I know I'll be back: as silent witness, as over-eager commentator, and as goofball performer,.. I will be there. You try too