The Contemplative Eye

THE CART IN THE HEART

Seven Analyses by Khenpo Suess

1. Let us consider a cart, a cart,
And see what occurs when you take it apart.
The wheels, a bed, a pole—not much.
Yet somehow there seems to be something to touch.

2. The parts of a cart, when you take them apart,
Are right in your hands, a good place to start.
But where is the cart in its absolute Self
When the parts of the cart are up on a shelf?

3. If we look for the cart apart from its parts
And search high and low to see where it starts,
There’s nothing to find for all our compunction
But the parts of a cart and the fact that they function.

4. Surely the Self of the cart in our heart
Possesses the pieces of which it is part.
Or maybe the facts are the other way round:
The truth of the Self might never be found!

5. If the parts of the cart are held in place
By the Self of the cart in primordial space,
Will the glue of the Lu and the zen of the Nyen
Help us assemble our “cartness” again?

6. Or maybe the parts are smarter than smart
In owning a Self—like love in your heart.
But when we assemble them over the years
Nothing is added—apart from our tears.

7. So having considered a cart, a cart,
And seven ways to take it apart,
Who needs a self in all its pomposity
When we’ve got emptiness-luminosity?

January 2004

["The Cart in the Heart" is a whimsical yet largely accurate retelling, in the style of Dr. Seuss, of five of the traditional Buddhist teachings known as the “Seven Analyses of a Cart.” In the Buddhist view, the central cause of human suffering is the belief in a Self—an ego, soul or other essential “me-ness” that we unconsciously struggle to build up and defend. The teaching looks at an ordinary oxcart in seven different ways to show by simple logic that the things of the world (and by implication humans) have no such essence: No entities exist apart from the parts of which they are made, and there is no lasting, separate or independent existence of any kind. Buddhists use the seven analyses as a meditative contemplation extending over weeks, months and even years to convince themselves—first intellectually, then more profoundly—that there really is no Self. A khenpo is a senior Tibetan Buddhist teacher, roughly equivalent to a double Ph.D. in the West.]

What is “spiritual” art anyway?

Traditional Eastern spiritual arts and practices—scroll painting, flower arranging, Zen archery, meditation, etc.—include artfulness. (Just as ballet dancing includes tying your shoes.)

But they’re not art in the Western sense. Not essentially. When we hang a Tibetan thangka on the wall and say, “How lovely” (or “How meaningful”), we miss the point.

So it’s no wonder art curator Marcia Tucker wrote, “It is increasingly hard to find artists who publicly acknowledge spirituality as a primary impetus for art-making.”

The art world—and the West in general—has forgotten spiritual life as a valid category. We don’t see it anymore. Educated people have collapsed life into two categories: work and play. Even art is play on sale and hence a form of work. But not some other, third thing. Not the third thing it can be.

The result is that spiritual artists lie low—because the art world doesn’t “get” the questions they’re trying to answer. (And I don’t mean “religious” artists—people who make Bible paintings or pot-bellied Buddha statues.)

Buddhism teaches that human beings suffer because they act on a habitual stream of mental chatter and confused beliefs:

• That there is a real, continuing “self” inside of me
• That the rest of the world is split off, outside of me
• And that to survive I have to enforce this split and protect “me”

Long-time meditators, it is said, learn to stabilize the mind, slowly untangling this stream of chatter from their actual perceptions—until they see reality directly. They’re the fish who finally discover water.

My photos are contemplative. (Contemplative art is a subset of spiritual art.) At their best, they offer the viewer a visceral experience of interrupting the stream—“stopping the mind”—so that we find ourselves at peace for a moment, simply experiencing the moment. Experiencing our being.

How do they do this? By drawing attention first to the visual patterns, color arrangements, compositional energy and other concrete, nonconceptual features of the scenes instead of to the things in the scenes themselves. This can give us a moment in which our perceptions hover unidentified, separated from our usual conceptual knowledge of them.

The result, sometimes, is that we glimpse them in their sweet, light-filled nakedness—as radiant being-in-itself rather than mere things-with-names.

This actually happens all the time with good art and at certain life moments. Spiritual teachers draw our attention to it to help students like me, and all of us, enter what Eckhart Tolle called the “portals of the unmanifested.” (The Victorians knew almost nothing about Asian esoteric mind training. Yet they were accurate in reporting their experience of what happens when we confront good art: They called it “a moment of aesthetic arrest.”)

As a meditator, I approach my photo subjects by relaxing in order to help stop my own mind, dropping preconceived ideas, depression, allegiances, anxiety and aversions—as I wander the world aimlessly, “listening for photos.”

I shoot unarranged scenes in natural light, largely outdoors. And I’m always astonished to find that despite our ugly era and attitudes, the world when seen aright is beautiful and ever-fresh—in a profound yet ordinary way that points beyond the conventional opposition of ugliness and beauty.

As Rabbi David Aaron said, “The goal is to be able to see…without labels, without preconceptions. Labels prevent us from directly experiencing reality. They obliterate our vision and prevent us from seeing God.”

Contemplative photography is like Zen archery—lots of history and ritual. But then in the actual moment, you make the shot. Pure and simple. And something happens—or it doesn’t. Such a photo, then, is also (among other things) a portrait of the artist’s mind at the instant the shutter clicked.

I photograph whatever speaks to me, creating large numbers of pictures that defy easy labels and meanings (including plenty that are just plain awful). Whatever I shot, it was simply there. Maybe in the end everything is simply there.

And when I attend to the world with a quiet mind, it turns out that the world is speaking to us—regardless of what convention says it does—because, as the saints and sages of all traditions agree, the doorways to the radiant Present are everywhere, in every dog and dust mote, and are everywhere ajar.

That is why Tolstoy said love at first sight is the only way we ever really fall in love.

[Above: A garden putto at an antiques store in Brunswick, Maine. Below: A meadow in Topsham, Maine. Irises at a retirement home in Portland, Maine. An ancient boat in the woods at Harpswell, Maine. A waterfront mosaic in Portland. A bicycle rack on the Northwestern campus at Evanston, Illinois.]

Saw it with my own eyes, and photographed it, not three weeks ago at a garage in Evanston, Illinois. Yeah, baby!

But it gave me a new way to think about meditation: When we sit on the cushion we park our public self, don’t we?, gently laying it aside for a time, and practice simply being there with—and as—our “real” self. Our undefended, unperforming, unpublic, ugly, beautiful, crazy, sane li’l self. Just…me.

Hi.

A more wakeful person, of course, gradually brings these two selves together, decompartmentalizing things, until the cocoon of habitual views falls away in its entirety, in shreds and tatters. Inside, as Tibetan meditation master Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche used to say, we find not a true, final Self of some kind after all but something even better: Just vast, empty space. Lord, what an unburdening this would be!

We are just a speck of dust in the midst of the universe. At the same time our situation is very spacious, very beautiful and workable. In fact, it is very inviting, inspiring. If you are a grain of sand, the rest of universe, all the space, all the room is yours, because you obstruct nothing, overcrowd nothing, possess nothing. There is tremendous openness. You are the emperor of the universe because you are a grain of sand.

So: Good for Evanston. Maybe it was a sign for a zendo.

Mary and I went to the farmers’ market this morning to buy fresh bread from Barak Olan.

Barak’s a young artisan who bakes during the summer, selling the real thing—bread from a wood-fired brick oven—and an artist who teaches printmaking during the school year at Maine College of Art, in downtown Portland. Mary teaches at MECA herself, in the continuing-education division, and the two of them know each other slightly. He was working on plates in the background in Mary’s bookmaking class last Wednesday night when the school marketing photographer showed up to take catalog pictures of all and sundry.

Want great bread? Track down Barak at Zu Bakery, P.O. Box 84, South Freeport, ME 04078, 207-865-6865 (no website, to my knowledge). He even grinds his own grains.

As we left the market via a side road, we spotted four young mud-spattered pigs on a meadow in an electric-wire pen, capering happily and paying us not the slightest attention. Three were classically pink, one was brown.

One of the pink ones had a black, even underbelly, as if he’d stood in liquid mud, like a bulbous American two-tone coupe in swanky colors from the early ’50s.

The brown one stood in a tub of water and seemed to bathe, removing her mud, then tiptoeing about and staying quite clean.

The others braced their hind legs, thrust their heads deep into the tussocky meadow grass, and heaved out big, football-size clods of matted soil to find and eat the roots underneath.

All in all, they seemed so alert, industrious and playful that we couldn’t help recalling the great intelligence that is imputed to pigs, and it felt suddenly appalling to eat pork, not because pigs are unclean but because they are so manifestly conscious.

And yet, alas, here I sit this very day at lunchtime, eating a slice of Barak’s bread and hand-smoked Canadian bacon from an eccentric little Polish mom-and-pop grocery in Webster, Massachusetts.

[Above: The brown pig at Crystal Springs Farm, Brunswick, Maine, after a postprandial nap (the pig, not me.]

Mary and I drove near the town of Deep River the other day as we roamed the shoreline of Connecticut, and it reminded me of something that happened this past spring back home in Harpswell:

One night about half past midnight, waking from the sleep of the middle-aged, I tottered out of bed to visit the littlest room in the house when I was surprised to see, from the convenience of my window seat, the lights of a police cruiser flashing across the road.

Then I remembered: My car was parked over there, beside a meadow, because I forgot to move it back into the driveway at day’s end. So I pulled on my shorts and flip-flops in the dark, my wife’s tousled head rising slowly from the sheets, and shuffled out to deal with it.

“Good evening, sir,” the officer said, bounding energetically from his cruiser. “I just got word this is your car?”

“Yes,” I said. “We had workers in the driveway today. Is there a problem? I’ve parked here for years, with the owner’s permission.”

“No problem,” he said. “You’re well off the road. Just checking for safety.”

I told him how a dead spruce had begun to teeter during the big northeaster three weeks earlier, its root ball turning in place like a hip joint, until it stopped in mid-storm, miraculously, about four feet from our roof line. It had been swaying there at an eye-popping 70° angle ever since. Tim Vail, the town tree warden, spotted it the next morning and offered to cut it down. But he was so busy helping the countless people whose trees had actually crashed that we never saw him again.

Meanwhile, a young lumberjack named Dave from Skowhegan was tipped off by his mother, in Auburn, that there was money to be made in Harpswell, where trees beyond number were lying (or leaning) uprooted. He knocked on my door on the advice of our mutual friend, scallop fisherman Al Rugar, who knows a bargain when he sees one, and we agreed Dave would take the spruce down for $100. Complications ensued, however, despite Dave’s best efforts, and in the final felling the tree tore a length of vertical power line off the side of the house (without actually cutting the power).

Soon after that, the boys from Wirenuts, the Harpswell electricians, arrived to reckon the true cost of the spruce, our power company having declined to make the repair on the curious grounds that even though they own both the meter on the house and the line running from the house to the phone pole, they do not own the 10 feet of vertical line in between.

The police officer was losing interest by now and interjected, “Sir, I’m sorry I disturbed you. Still, it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

I agreed, adding, “And you didn’t disturb me. I was up anyway. To pee.” (This might have been more information than he wanted.)

Apologizing again and bidding me good night, he leapt back into his cruiser and drove off with the words, “Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.” I believe he was making conversational filler, trying to find a third way to praise safety. But I am a writer, and it made me happy in any event to see a young person speaking in proverbs and quotations (though Aristotle frowns on this), especially in an age when the continued existence of discretion and valor is occasionally to be doubted.

Back in bed again, I untangled the sheets and reflected how fortunate we are—don’t you think?—to live in a world where even at half past midnight valorous people are watching out for our safety. I thought, then, for the first time in decades, of a childhood friend I’ll call Sandy. Sandy and I were fond of each other when she was 12 and I was 14, growing up on the Connecticut coast. She moved away eventually, down the coast to Deep River, and, a dozen years on, was living with a man nobody liked when she suddenly vanished. Her body was never found, and no charges were filed.

And this made me think about safety, as I said, its triumphs and its failures, and how people can be lost to living memory regardless, and then found again, and whether there might not be a kind of safety, or at least a tender presence, in just this.

[Above: Deep River Landing, oil paint on panel, 30" x 6", by Leif Nilsson, 2005.]

Did you know there are still people around who think the only “real” art photography is black-and-white?

Several of my photography friends are top-of-the-line classically trained—at Pratt, for example, and the School of Visual Arts in New York. (Me, I’m just a crumbum who took out a library book. Really.) So I’m surprised when they drop hints—or when I think they’re dropping hints—about Art with a capital A. Isn’t that like saying, “We do it this way because we’ve always done it this way”?—a remark that’d be laughed out of the room at a competent business meeting. (I hope.)

In its first century, of course, photography was limited to black-and-white for technical reasons—and made wonderful use of the limitation, just as early painters made wonderful use of limitations in their palette.

The traditional argument for black-and-white, apart from the necessity of it, was that it emphasized, and worked with, interesting sub-elements of our visual perception—form, texture, tonal value and composition.

In 1976, MOMA photo curator John Szarkowski mounted the first U.S. exhibition of color photos as serious art. He observed that even in black-and-white, “[t]he photographer’s problem is perhaps too complex to be dealt with rationally. This is why photographers prowl with such restless uncertainty about their motif, ignoring many potentially interesting records while they look for something else.”

I agree. I’m an inveterate wanderer-about.

But then he went on to claim that the introduction of color “was an enormous complication of a problem already cruelly difficult. And not merely a complication, for the new medium meant that the syntax the photographer had learned—the pattern of his educated intuitions—was perhaps worse than useless, for it led him toward the discovery of black-and-white photographs.”

Huhn?

To me, this is like saying the introduction of automobiles, circa 1900, meant that the “syntax” buggy-whip makers had learned over the years led them back toward buggy-whip making. Okay. But nobody’s sympathetic to that. Especially because color, after all, wasn’t a loud, bizarre and annoying new addition to life on earth. We’d been living “in color” all along, and other artists routinely made use of this fact.

As for me, always happy to undermine my own argument, I admit I occasionally convert a photo to black-and-white—a one-click effort in Photoshop (plus a little fiddling) that film purists look down on, too—because I can see it’ll look more like Art that way. You decide.

And anyway, John was writing more than 30 years ago. So let’s get with it. Show me what you see!

[Above: Along the waterfront, New Bedford, Massachusetts. Below: The original.]

Every once in a while you spot a painting—not always necessarily a great one—that smacks you up-side the head with happiness, like the opening clarinet glissando in Rhapsody in Blue.

Mary and I dropped by the Lyman Allyn Museum on the Connecticut College campus the other day on a cross-New-England vacation ramble. At the admissions desk the docent, an elegant older women right out of Central Casting for docents, said, “Why, hello. That’d be two senior citizens, right?,” which so startled me—I’m eleven years short of the mark, thank you—that I came, foolishly, within a hair’s-breadth of turning her down, not perceiving that she was giving us a sweet, random $2 break. Fortunately Mary laughed me off the stage.

Inside, we found the painting you see above, Connecticut River: View from Ely’s Ferry Road, by William Chadwick (1879-1962). Chadwick was an American Impressionist who worked in New York City and, during the summer, at the art colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut. (Old Lyme is near the mouth of the Connecticut River.)

This,” I sighed, “is how the world looks to me!“—glowing with golden yellow light, dreamy summer blues, and delicate marshland interwoven with endless skies and seashores—while Mary hunkered down, wheezing good-naturedly, my human tripod as I labored to shoot (with permission) a no-flash photo of the canvas.

In high school, my clarinet teacher was Sal Amato, an old Italian gent with a twinkle in his eye (much needed, given the caliber of his student). He was one of the first professionals, many decades ago, to successfully play the Rhapsody’s famous opening solo and glissando. It was considered impossible when first written.

After that, I played it many times myself. Glowing with happiness.

Mary and I were meandering home to Maine on back roads from an Indian wedding in New Jersey the other day when we stumbled upon Woodstock, Connecticut.

Woodstock is a village of 7,200 in the far northeastern corner of the state. It is of no particular interest to me except that my cousin Jimmy said years ago that our common grandfather, George Montfort Simonson, is buried here.

This claim had always puzzled me, because I knew, roughly speaking, that the Simonsons lived in New York City in those days—70 to 100 years ago—summered in remotest rural Cummington, Massachusetts (in an old farmhouse on a hill that is remote even by Cummington’s standards), and wintered in Gainesville, Florida. But Woodstock? (Exactly when they worked, on this schedule, is unclear to me, too.)

The entire Simonson side of my family, in fact, is unclear to me because my dad, George Luther Simonson, an economist and efficiency expert, fell ill in the 1950s and was moved permanently to a V.A. hospital in 1965, when I was 12. And his parents were both said to have died around 1920, when he was three. (I am the fifth George Simonson in a row, and the last.)

So all of a sudden, there was the Woodstock town hall, right by the road, and I pulled in on a whim. “I’ve got your strangest question of the day,” I announced to the assistant town clerk and told her about my grandfather. She led me into a beautiful room lined floor to ceiling with old and new town records, many of them bound in leather. She checked two sources for information about deaths in town around 1915 to 1940—and found nothing. I sighed, having expected as much.

Then she had a brainstorm—and checked a separate binder full of certificates in plastic sleeves for people who’d died elsewhere and later been buried in Woodstock. And there he was—a “George M. Simonson” as plain as day, who’d died in Gainesville and was buried in the town cemetery right here. But the certificate said he’d died in 1938 at age 75, when my father was 21, not three….

And so mysteries are laid to rest, and new ones are born. My grandmother, I think, really did die when my father was about three. My grandfather would’ve been about 57 at the time—quite old for fatherhood. And indeed his four other children, my Simonson aunts, were all far older than my dad. Did the death of my grandmother blow the family apart? Why did my grandfather leave his five children? Why is he buried in Woodstock? (Is his wife there?)

Woodstock was founded in the 1600s. (Like everything in Connecticut, it happened about a century before the same thing happened in Maine.) A hundred years ago it was a summer resort for wealthy New Yorkers. The entire village is on the National Historic Register. Today it is home to, among others, Brian Dennehy, the actor, and Caroll Spinney, a puppeteer who played Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch on Sesame Street.

George Montfort Simonson was, according to family accounts, an editor of the old New York Sun, published in that city from 1833 to 1950, under the motto “It Shines for All.” The Sun was famous for the 1897 editorial known as “Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus” and the oft-quoted “Man Bites Dog” definition of what constitutes news. (It was also famous to me in the fourth grade for the dopey one-liner about the reporter who introduces himself by saying, “Hi, I’m Brown from the Sun.”)

Ah, well.

In those days, when we visited our cousins at the old family farmhouse in Cummington—Jimmy and his three sisters—all of whom were older than we, they teased us for eating watermelon in demure slivers like city kids instead of whistling down whole quarters at a time and spitting out the seeds. The backyard of the farmhouse was beautiful and moody, with a rough-cut lawn that trailed off into a meadow dotted with wildflowers and, in the distance, a shadowy forest. As night fell, it grew dreamy, then spooky, and finally frightening to me in the failing light. I was nine. Another darn George Simonson on the premises….

(Above: A view of Woodstock in Sheep in a Pasture, 1891, by the French-born American painter Frederick Rondel [1826-1892]. Below: Woodstock’s gnarly Roseland Cottage, built by wealthy businessman Henry C. Bowen in 1846. We spotted it alongside the road and winced. Bowen hosted U.S. Presidents here and founded the Republican Party.)

My wild night on the town.

So: There it was—the monthly email from Maine AIGA (the American Institute of Graphic Arts), inviting me to their art directors’ meeting even though I’m a beastly writer.

I made sure to go this time, because it was being held at McCabe Duval, a great little ad agency in Portland where I used to write copy. Good people. (Good food.)

When I reached their big-window penthouse high above the harbor, owner Chris Duval was looming over the hors d’oeuvres spread like a mastiff and wielding a nebuchadnezzar of red wine—and naturally I surged straight through the crowd to help him.

“I lost a lot of weight,” he announced. “So did I!” said I, between mouthfuls.

(By the way, I don’t mind pointing out that I’m one of the few people who can spell “hors d’oeuvres” and “nebuchadnezzar” on the first try. Actually, it was probably a jeroboam, which is only four times the size of a 750 ml bottle, not 20. Still, it was pretty huge, and fun to spell, too.)

I love art directors, although it’s naturally my duty to make fun of them: People who fail to see “visual culture” as the decline of the West. And who dress in black, decade after decade. (Actually, the black thing seems to have run its course for now. But the young men all had two-day-old chin stubble.)

Writers are bozos, too, of course. Me, I dress like Jim Rockford. And we, collectively, are under the delusion that people still read. (Research shows that the only people who read ads are the ones who’re about to buy. This gives writers one last toehold on dignity and employment.)

Chris’s consigliere, production director Ron Recchio, was there, too. Ron is a beautiful former art director from Boston who talks in whole sentences and enjoys fine cheese. Ron was so outrageously talented as a young fellow that he put himself through college by painting huge abstract canvases on the side and selling them to corporations. Today he lives on an island and mostly thinks about his vegetable garden.

Steve Darnley of Tugboat Creative let me bend his ear on the advantages of working with me, and didn’t run away or cry. (Or laugh.)

My friends Jessica Simmons and Erica Hebold, talented art directors, were on hand, too, and were as articulate (at least until the chardonnay hit) and decorative as always. I also met a young graphic-arts student from Simmons who likes typography even more than I do; running-book writer Scott Douglas; his wife, photographer Tracy Cramp; and a dozen more.

Two red wines, two beers and two hours later, I told Chris I had to leave, saying, “We’re driving to an Indian wedding in New Jersey.” He said, “Don’t gain all the weight back in one day.”

I shoved off in a rain storm to collect my wife from a book-makers’ gathering and found the seven of them as pixilated as I was, wielding real scalpels in vain attempts to make a slot-and-tab paper book! Yikes.

No blood splatters in evidence anywhere that night.

I give up.

I went to Staples this morning when our laserjet printer died and bought a new one—even though I continue to be scandalized that no one fixes things anymore. Curses, it’s just plain cheaper to buy new….

So next door at Starbucks, I was standing in line with two ladies my age, laughing about the day’s trivia question—”Who was Captain Kangaroo’s sidekick?”—because we knew it was a real puzzler to the kids working there.

I said that I’d noticed people are forgetting who W.C. Fields was, too, and that I’d been shocked almost 30 years ago, in my first job in Manhattan, by our young receptionist, a sweet bridge-and-tunnel girl from New Jersey. I walked in one morning in a brisk little Eisenhower jacket I fancied. (I liked to pretend to be a tough guy and wear it all winter long instead of something heavier; this was before my dreaded Brooks Brothers suit phase—power ties, wingtips.) When the receptionist complimented me on it, I said, “Thanks. It’s an Eisenhower jacket.” And she, naturally, said, “Who’s Eisenhower?”

(To me, Eisenhower was President for so long that when Kennedy came along, when I was seven, I was startled to learn that “presidenteisenhower” was actually two words.)

This made us wonder how many things we’d never known as young people that our elders knew like the back of their hand and which are now lost. When it was my turn in line, I said, “Mr. Green Jeans” and took home a venti dark roast for my wife with a free shot of espresso.

The receptionist’s other enduring gift was her word for a staple remover—a “kapunka-negator.” She reasoned (rightly) that staplers go “kapunka” when you use them and that staple removers negate this.

In Fields’ Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (1941; his last starring film), there’s a cockamamie scene on an airplane with an open balcony that seared itself on my memory decades ago. Even today, when I close our barn’s high back door at dusk, I swing out in midair with one hand on the jamb and, without touching the ground, push away the two-by-four that props it open, pretending I’m on…an open balcony in a DC-3.

After that, it’s back to my desk, scribbling for clients. Kapunka.

(Above: W.C. Fields in a scene from The Bank Dick [1940].)