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Note on Zen

The Arthurian dramatis personae are not the usual bunch at which to throw the sorcery of Zen, but what the heck, they were a quasi-religious crew, and Celtic magicians would say they invented their own Zen anyway, which seems roughly the business, to whatever degree of satisfaction a seeker requires, of reconciling the opposites, contradictions, absurdities and paradoxes of life. The stories about King Arthur’s magician Merlin, his Queen Guinevere and her lover Lancelot are of little relevance here beyond the types they represent and their medieval flavour.

I mention the Many-One question in the notes on Peasant Moon. Guinevere is a pluralist and believes the world is, deep down, what it seems on the surface anyway, manifold. Pluralism comes in two flavours. You can say there are many substances. These (like earth, fire, water) are nouns. Or you can say there are many kinds—many attributes, I believe. These (like red, anorexic, condescending) are adjectives. It’s my guess that Nature is made of differing things, and that even a discrete substance-mix, e.g. the brain, can be variously described (hence ‘mind’).

Merlin is a monist; he believes everything is ultimately One. This is not simply to say that ultimately only one type of fundamental particle (or string, or membrane) exists. I think a monist must also assume that there is only one ultimate mathematical equation, and that this equation, or expression, contains only one symbol. This is surreality of a Jorge Luis Borges proportion, and I find Merlin’s philosophy baffling.

It worries Lancelot, though. He brings all he knows into his mind and then tries to erase it, annul it, in a yogic trance. This works a little. Satori is a Japanese Zen Buddhist state of sudden enlightenment, of being able to encompass, understand, experience—if these words mean anything here, and I have my doubts—these opposites, pluralism and monism. There’s a serious account of what such a yogic exercise might be like in Rudy Rucker’s Infinity and the Mind (Penguin 1982), p.214.

Those interested in prosody and tone will note the 9-syllable line again, and the mostly consonantal assonance. I think this form takes the strain of the stately tone rather well. This voice is abetted by inconsistent mid-line breaks (caesuras); line-end run-overs (enjambments); artificialities of vocabulary like ‘cupreous’, ‘tryst’, ‘avail’; tight syntax; and a shifting metrical feel like hooves hovering in a not quite perfect dressage. I like a Guinevere with copper braids, most Pre-Raphaelitic! I have to remind myself that greaves are pieces of leg armour for the shins only. Lancelot would not have found the Holy Grail in Carbonek Castle. That was where he slept with the second Elaine and conceived Galahad.

Alan Marshfield

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