oh that devilish linguistic conundrum..."say 'He' and you wallow in mud and flounder in puddles. say 'She' and your whole face is as red as a beetroot with shame and humiliation." (from Hekiganroku and apologies for my paraphrase)
IT is She, She is He, They are One, He is Three. Oh the glorious power of the english language to reduce the sublime to the lowest common denominator; to join, to separate, to re-join, to re-separate,----this sexual, centripetal, centrifugality is the essence of life. Ho, ho, ho, he, he, he oops, she, she, she. A word is real because it is not a word, because it is a thing, a thing which is a real thing only when it is not a thing, when it is a word. The charm of language, that charm without which, as Emerson says, nothing can conquer me, consists precisely in its separate-inseparate character. In certain Zen sects words are publically denounced as being, like men themselves, "decievers ever". As an old senryu goes, "the cough is used in many, many ways. So the question becomes, what do we seek-- gender equality or enlightenment, peaceful mediocrity or salvation? Nanpoku reminds us that
"Quite apart from our religion,
There are plum blossoms,
There are cherry blossoms."
Nah, there never is a last word so a bit more...what is wrong with "Our Father which art in Heaven" is not the anthropomorphic "Father" but the separateness of "Which art in Heaven". Even if we say "Which is in earth, in me, in the stone, in the tree," we still have "in". Evil is separation, an "in" is separation, even "is" is separation, "equals" is separation, all affirmation of identity is separation, all denial of difference is separation. In asking He, She or It we are like Christ's disciples; insincere. They were not, that is, willing to pay any price to see him. Christ answers, "You see what you want to see, and almost no man really wants to see God, though he may cut himself with knives and throw himself into the fire in his pretending. The title of one of Gurdjief's books is "Life is Real, only then, when, I Am" a wonderful line that nullifies our question when true. We are the blind leading the confused into visual silence or to borrow Tennyson's auditory analogy,
"It is the rift within the lute,
That by and by will make the music mute,
And ever widening slowly silence all."
Croc, no I, for one, don't have a suggestion
g(thanks R.H. Blyth)hunk |
