Guru

8/5/2024 Where are you in the conga line of follow/follower

Alive or dead?

the answer is, no
Con/Jur/d, 8/5/2024

What do you 
want from 
me?

a lament popular among
the teacher’s cohort,
framed as Joshu’s
three-legged dog

who lamely but with 
good grace chased

an unripe plum across
a green Japanese grotto
filled with sounds of

SUMMER LOCUSTS 

and Joshu sitting
beneath the oak
or was it maple?
watched, the air

filled with drilling 
with screaming and yet
he sat smiling, content

a student, mistaking
his teacher’s mood
asked, does your

misshapen dog have
Buddha nature? To which
he infamously replied 

NO

and with that in mind
ask yourself, what do
you want?  Who is it 

who does this wanting 
who does the having, 
who is your dog, who is

still chasing?

THERE WAS A TIME — WE THOUGHT WE KNEW THINGS — AND COULD’NT SEE THE KNOTS

ABOUT 5 YEARS AGO — 50 YEARS AFTER LEARNING TO TIE OUR SHOES ATTENDED A KNOT CLASS AND I REALIZED I HAD BEEN MIS-TYING MY SHOES FOR 50 YEARS

The patterns delineated here have not yet been classified by a Linnaeus of human bondage. They are all, perhaps, strangely, familiar. In these pages I have confined myself to laying out only some of those I actually have seen. Words that come to mind to name them are: knots, tangles, fankles, impasses, disjunctions, whirligogs, binds. I could have remained closer to the 'raw' data in which these patterns appear. I could have distilled them further towards an abstract logico-mathematical calculus. I hope they are not so schematized that one may not refer back to the very specific experiences from which they derive; yet that they are sufficiently independent of 'content', for one to divine the final formal elegance in these webs of maya. April 1969

R.D.L.

COULDN’T BE A GURU IN THE SENSE OF EXPERT

COULD BE A GURU AS ONE WHO REVELS IN THE MYSTERY —

ALTHOUGH WE DO HAVE PROBLEMS DEALING WITH OTHER PEOPLE’S WHIRILGOGS

A GURU FOR AND OF ONE

THE UNREADABILITY IS PART OF ITS MYSTERY

ANOTHER SEVERE THUNDERSTORM IS ROLLING IN — TIME TO BATTEN THE HATCHES AGAINST THE FICKLE ANTHROPOCENE

Much love,

Con/Jur/d, 8/5/2024