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  • Quietism Now?
  • An Anonymous Envoi (bio)

I left my locked mouth    hanging        on the wall            With the brushwood                door shut tight                    I delight in my own freedom

-Muso Soseki, "No Word Hut"1

In Muso's quietist poem, the speaker has retired to his hut. A Zen master would never need to retire; he would have already retired to the void in his heart. But the speaker here is still on his way; he hangs his locked mouth on the wall. What would his face look like without its mouth? Some kind of mask? A mask, perhaps, of the Buddha face, with an ineffable smile beneath its smile, the expression of emptiness without form, form that is emptiness, as the Heart Sutra says? That may be too much to ask nowadays. So why not John Cage's silent laugh-I have seen it many times-a Zen fool's laugh, the open mouth swallowing the whole [End Page 276] face? Muso goes on to speak of the freedom of silence behind the brushwood door, tacitly invoking poverty, simplicity, solitude:

Inside        my secret talk resounds            like thunder                        Even the bare                            posts and the lamps            can't pretend they don't hear it 2

This silence, then, is not complete. Within the poem the posts hear it, and the poem itself speaks it to our hearing. It is a singular silence; the word traditionally used is spiritual. Can we, in a time of semiosis unending, emulate the silence or even simulate it? One wonders what Martha Nussbaum could mean by "hip quietism" or by her statement that it (whatever it is) "collaborates with evil."3

Zen has a long tradition of not-saying, not-doing, not-knowing, which has never condoned or conspired with evil. But I have never been able, for myself, to resolve the tension of caring and not-caring, of moving and sitting-still. I have never been able to formulate the tension except as a paradox. As I worked on my last essay collection, I found my language gravid with words like self-emptying, self-dispossession, self-renunciation, self-heedlessness, self-forgetfulness, self-abandon, self-disregard, self-relinquishment, self-surrender, and self-bracketing. Why the kenotic vocabulary? There is no reason one could not be altruistic without being self-forgetful; and many of us, with no self-abandonment, reject narcissism. But I am not alone in sensing there is layer upon layer of dross, phantasmagoria, and rust to strip away from both the culture and the self. (Robert Motherwell says that stripping it away is what the abstract artist does to close the gap between self and world.)

A kenotic vocabulary guarantees no sense, let alone salvation. Still, in quest of nothing, I kept meeting versions of it: the nothing that is the "denial of denials" (Meister Eckhart); the nothing of fana and the "star with no name" ( Jelaluddin Rumi); the nothing of the "fifth element," after "ground, water, fire, and wind" (Miyamoto Musashi); Asian "emptiness" (in the translations of "Red Pine"); the nothing that "will come of nothing" (King Lear); the nothing of zero, omicron, sunya, and sifr, through which you "will see the world" (Robert Kaplan). But there was also and above all on my quest, the nothing that my own limits imposed. So I began looking nearer to hand-at the nothing that "renovates the World" (Emily Dickinson), at the nothing that "is not there, and the nothing that is" (Wallace Stevens), and at the kinds of poise that nothing brings in Rilke, Kafka, and Beckett. [End Page 277]

I

Did modern quietism grow out of Romantic alienation? is my first question. Romantic pride and defiance, more than selfless quietism, inspire the following passage and indeed The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge as a whole:

Young man anywhere, in whom something stirs that makes you shiver, profit by the fact that no one knows you. . . . Ask no one to speak of you, not even contemptuously. . . . Most lonely one, holding aloof, how they have caught up with you by reason of your fame.4

Though brushed by Sturm und Drang, the premise of quietism rests here, awaiting refinement in Rilke's later poetry. In the Sonnets...

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