Zanshin — Remaining mind
University of Minnesota neurosurgery residents work to repair a patient’s faulty brain.
Friday, May 1, 2020. I am on furlough from work at my job as a newspaper editor, but my life’s work goes on. So today I am diving into my well.
Sometime when I was a young boy, I closed my eyes tight, sealing out the light, I thought. But then I saw a light within. An afterimage of my iris, perhaps? I am sure there’s a scientific explanation. But to the young boy it was just light, and when I opened my eyes it rose slowly before fading away. Raised Catholic, I was convinced I had seen a manifestation of Christ, ascending into heaven. And who can say otherwise? It was my own experience. No one else was there. It cannot be put to any test. It’s whatever I wanted to make of it. For me, it was a religious experience.
I thought about becoming a priest. A shocking experience at a Boy Scouts Jamboree, held at a seminary, drove me away from both scouting and the Church. But my interest in all things spiritual persisted. I picked up a book by Kahlil Gibran and found something I was looking for. Then came Herman Hesse’s book Siddhartha, about the boy who would become the Buddha. I found that light I was seeking, and chased it down the path through Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Jung, Alan Watts, Carlos Castaneda, D.T. Suzuki, Saint Augustine, and so many others. I realized at some point that I was chasing an afterimage. Noumena. I wanted the source. I thought I had found it in a physical activity — phenomena — called Danzan Ryu jujutsu. (A note to readers: It’s not like Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, which is so popular today. Danzan Ryu is an modern iteration of an ancient form, koryu jujutsu, that defines its purpose as perfection of character.) I told one of my professors, an instructor of a senior seminar on zen Buddhism, that I did not want to study about satori (enlightenment); I sought satori itself. I dove deeper into Danzan Ryu and it would captivate me for the rest of my life. It animates everything I do today, including my photography. I am still chasing that light.
Zanshin, remaining mind/spirit, is a way of talking about it. Light, the raw material of photography, travels infinitely in a straight line. When it strikes an object it illuminates it and then bounces off at a predicatble angle. We photographers cite a law of physics known as the Law of Reflection: The angle of reflection is equal to the angle of incidence. Knowing this, we can stay with the light (zanshin) and use it to express an image from the world around us. But it is not the world in itself. It is a reflection of our interaction with the external world. So we take another picture, and another, chasing the light. Pausing to reflect, we lose sight of it. Yet we have sight of the reflection: the image itself.
Many years ago, I lived in the Mission Beach area of San Diego. I surfed every day, whether there was a suitable swell or not. I drew on that experience to write a poem about a surfer who gets “tubed..” Inside the the hollow of a wave, the walls are steep and trecherous. The surfer must keep the inside edge of the board angled just so to keep from slipping sideways into the cascading wave. If you can stay tucked into the tube long enough, the wave will eventually spit you out. My poem was about this experience, and how the circling water resembles being inside an egg; the eruption at the end is like a chick breaking out into the world. Afterward, paddling out to friends awaiting the next swell, the surfer in the poem is overcome with a desire to talk about the experience. The poem ends there with the line, Again, happiness runs aground. Had the surfer stayed with the moment — zanshin — he might have experienced the paddling itself. In short, he lost touch with reality and merely reflected it. I turned this into a short story with a different ending. The surfer gets tubed, but the wave crashes around him in a violent turbelence, white water everywhere. When it subsides, he’s inside a white globe. After resting, he chips his way through, finding himself among a group of seagulls, the reincarnated forms of long lost friends and relatives. They said they had been waiting for him.
Today I will do some grocery shopping, then clean my basement and assess whether it can be converted to a photography studio, though the low ceilings may make that difficult. Later, I will shoot some photographs using found objects from around the house as light modifiers. It’s part of a challenge from the photographer/educator Daniel Norton. Then tonight I will gather with my jujutsu ohana (family) via Zoom, and present my thoughts on Fudochi Shinmyo Roku, the Divine Record of Immovable Wisdom. You can think of this as zanshin.
Be well. - Dan
