She hadn’t aged. Curious, because I’d seen pictures of her wasted by fasting and lack of repose. Anyway, she was supposed to introduce us to the notion of intimacy, how that experience, I guess that’s the term, could be used in artistic (probably political too, and a number of other fields) expression.
Intimacy according to her was about … understanding, living, of course, in Zen Buddhism I don’t know if verbs of thought are allowed, living, then, let’s say that, not oppositions, but relationship. Then you must be in a place you can efficiently relate to others from, and I had been thinking about this lately.
Whatever happens, you must be true to yourself, your feelings now, last month, in your infancy … the whole span of your feelings; same with your thoughts, same with your ideas about yourself and the world. This way you’ll be safe, no one will be able to cheat you, maybe you’ll even manage to express your views accurately.
The teacher, after briefly referring to our materials, started a 30 minutes pause. Her seminar was about intimacy and art, all kinds of art, I’ve said that. I had been thinking about how her ideas could be applied to writing. She hadn’t been quite clear, but I supposed those 30 minutes were intended for us to sketch some piece of artwork and so I wrote this to be read as a prose poem in the line of Bukowski drafts, or maybe a note in a diary, there’s been a lot of fuss about diaries as pieces of artistic writing in this place lately, or maybe an entry in my blog.
I don’t know if I’m using “intimacy” in the right Zen way. That’s how I always intend to act, anyway.
I love blogging because in blogs there’s space for everything and you’re not forced into the straight-jacket of unity.
What I wrote (this) was/is most like a blog entry. And I intended to post it in the evening, before methylphenidate wore off. In a sense I regretted it, because it would interrupt my thread about Shakespeare’s sonnets. But that was/is not important, blogs contain everything and I said you had to be true.
I read this aloud and it seems that I got unacceptably something at the end. She said that the connection had had many fails and I didn’t get hers nor anyone’s opinion. Let’s see what’s the next session about. I love whores, and trickery. And teachers, after all. A lot of years ago, her man had recommended me “total nakedness,” a piece of advice I had done my best to follow and the way she had urged me to “perfect stillness” in the zendo at the beginning of a meditation period had broken my head for years.