If we’re lucky, and that goes for most of us, human experience includes moments of realization–moments where one apprehends the nature of existence, Zen poet, Shinkichi Takahashi, writes:
Nothing exists, yet fascinating The ants scurrying in the moonlight.
It is the eye deceives: The ants–they are but moonlight.
The idea of being’s impossible: There’s neither moon nor ants.
Like many Zen poems, this one whittles down what we think we perceive, what we think we understand, until the ‘idea of being’ itself becomes ‘impossible’. Ultimately, the poem gives us no place to stand–no ground to support even our consideration of the possible nature of reality. Existence, and the mirror of our considerations (a famous Buddhist parallel), are both illusory. We constantly live in their midst only because our perceptions typically suggest to us that there is nowhere and nothing else.
When we rap our fist on the solid oak table top, we know that this is ‘real’. We can feel it. Yet, when we step back from it, the nature of reality becomes a changeable construct. Our table is actually made of atoms, tiny particles comprised of much more space than solid. Our hand and the whole of what we see around us is constructed the same way–relatively vast (albeit on a tiny scale) spaces that are pinioned by particles so small that it becomes difficult for us, even with advanced instruments, to observe or measure them. The whole of the table seems to be really a kind of fable–a loose congregation of tiny atomic solar systems, each a minuscule web of space cobbled together by only the occasional minute bits of solid and concretized by our own awareness of the thing. When seen in the Zen poet’s moonlight, the table’s solidity, the table itself, and even our own singular presence there to see it, all vanish, as if they had never been. Were they? Or are these but tables of the mind? False creations proceeding from the heat oppressed brain?
Naturally, Macbeth’s perception has an added dimension, and his famous dagger speech marks a vision already weighted down by a future of which the character only, as yet, conceives. Macbeth’s perception of events conceives of a dagger looking forward. Macbeth’s awareness of the world is skewed and his own mind adds a spin to the ball of existence that is already in play. As he considers abusing the sacred trust of his own hospitality towards his king by murdering Duncan, that consideration becomes part and parcel of his reality. He cannot quite touch the dagger yet, be he can see it.
All of this has long been well covered in Shakespearean criticism, and we only brush against the banks of the stream here. The oak table may be solid and real, or it may not, but this possibility/impossibility fits so well with the confusion of human experience where our daily lives remain a constant/inconstant sea of transformation–of becoming and of falling away.
Shakespeare often writes of great transformations. In The Tempest, a spirit called Ariel sings:
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
Ding-dong.
Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.
Ferdinand, having been through a frightening shipwreck, believes his father has drowned. Ariel here plays on that belief. Yet, Ferdinand’s idea about the nature of reality is mistaken at this point. His father, the king, is alive and well on another part of the island. Yet, in a sense, his father is also undergoing a sea change, a profound transformation from his old self into something else. That the nature of his father’s sea change is not quite what Ferdinand believes it to be at the time that Ariel sings the song, does not belie its depth or scope. For King Alonso also believes his son to be drowned, and his great grief finds its resolution in the resolution of the play.
A strange duality appears here–a nexus of the fleeting with eternity–and this too springs from our perception. Incorporating the assumed, the perceived, or the projected into experience can roll it forward in perpetuity. Ferdinand’s father seems dead to him, as Alonso also assumes his son to be “mudded in that oozy bed”, drowned at the bottom of the sea. Death seems to be a permanence. “Life is a narrow vale between the cold and barren peaks of two eternities”, as Robert Ingersoll said while standing at his brother Ebon’s grave in 1879.
Yet, that vale is flux. It is a compilation of change, an ever shifting bridge made up of birds or stars. We live in the sea change, and while we lean back, and our hands and feet seek the supports of solid existence, we ultimately find nothing there to bolster us in our continued pilgrimage. Love may be the most famous example–both constant and ever changing. Birds and stars jostling for position against the deep clear blue of the sky.
Any solidity may be produced only by ourselves. Like oysters, we secrete our own pearls in vague attempts to insulate ourselves from the shifting sands of change. Sometimes, these pearls grow into plays or paintings or relationships, ‘enterprises of great pitch and moment’ that might soften the cries and crises of continuation. Sometimes, these ephemeral beauties will briefly hold our gaze or our consideration. Sometimes, they lend a meaning to the day, the field, the falling stars.
In the end, however, these too fade. Pearls wear away to luminescent dust. Stars go out. Even The Nine Billion Names of God will all be named, uttered, and dissolve. In the end, life and love are so much parallel that we cannot always tell one from another. Lysander’s words apprehend it well:
[M]omentary as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion. (AMND 1.1.145-51)
We have to wonder if anything really is transformed, or the sea change is merely the nature of things, of being, of ourselves and our experience. Because we began with Zen thinker, it seems only fitting that we end with one. One of the ‘greatest’ (and I sense that he would laugh at that) teachers of Zen Buddhism founded the Sōtō school in the 13th century. Dogen often composed his thoughts in a poetic form that predates haiku, known as waka. His description of reality?
To what shall
I liken the world?
Moonlight, reflected
In dewdrops,
Shaken from a crane’s bill.
Here, poetic description encompasses more than ponderous prose might have done. Being in it, and not an independent observer, Dogen can only ‘liken’ the world, and each dewdrop, even as they may fly apart in all directions from the crane’s bill, contains a complete reflection of the moon. Still, we are in motion, shaken off into space and falling, to land we know not where. Whole and fragmented, complete and fragmented, participating in unknown trajectories. Sounds like a sea change to me.