Nathalie Sorensen

Eihei Dogen: Dreams with Plum Blossoms

The little boy watches incense smoke. Curling and wafting, it disappears into high dark vaults. The Lady Ishi Matsudono of the Fujiwaras lies in her coffin. She is his only parent he, her only child. Nothing, nothing, he sees now, stays. Nothing.

As a young man, he joins a holy order, travels far, works with diligence, but cannot find his teacher in Japan. He sails to China, and for two long years journeys from monastery to monastery, searching.

At Wan-nien, the abbot shows him a rarity a scroll of succession. Patriarchs are named, ancestor after ancestor, descending through centuries. I have had a dream, the Abbot says, an old man appears, hands me a branch of plum blossoms, tells me, “If you should meet a true man who came by boat seeking the Way give him this branch.”

The names of the ancestors are written on plum silk embroidered with blossoms.

The young monk travels on from mountain to mountain. Years pass. Exhausted, ready to give up he, too, dreams. An ancestor of the Way comes to him offering a branch of plum blossoms in full bloom.

Soon afterwards, his teacher appears, welcomes him as a father his son, says, Sit intensely, for days, for months, from early morning to late at night. You must drop body and mind.

He sits.

When at last the young monk achieves the Great Matter, he goes to his master’s room. The body and mind have been dropped, confirms his teacher. You have attained the Way.

As the young man bows, a fresh breeze blows petals of plum in the lucid air.

John Tyndall

The Second Time Alice Munro Asked Me a Question

In the library queue of babbling inquisitors she reappeared to ask me a second quiet question this time for her husband who desired to know whether Jorge Luis Borges’ A Universal History of Infamy comprised actual bibliographic entries or secret fabrications to confound his readers

Off to the lower system of rectangular rooms I took her to seek answers in The N.U.C. The National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints, where looking up each author we discovered entries so near yet so far from truth we both felt we were looking for meaning in impenetrable dreams

She gave me her phone number in case any further information turned up so later I ascended the stairs to the seemingly limitless shelves of books retrieved Borges’ original Historia universal de la infamia and, repeating my quest in The N.U.C., found again only fantasies

When she returned my phone message she said she and her husband laughed when I revealed that he was not alone that graduate students of many languages had posted digital laments on various internet sites about Borges’ intentions their voices crying in the wilderness