Four Men Shaking Read online

  ALSO BY LAWRENCE SHAINBERG

  NONFICTION

  Ambivalent Zen: One Man’s Adventures on the Dharma Path

  Brain Surgeon: An Intimate View of His World

  FICTION

  Crust

  Memories of Amnesia

  One on One

  Shambhala Publications, Inc.

  4720 Walnut Street

  Boulder, Colorado 80301

  www.shambhala.com

  ©2019 by Lawrence Shainberg

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Cover design by Jim Zaccaria

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Shainberg, Lawrence, 1936– author.

  TITLE: Four men shaking: searching for sanity with Samuel Beckett, Norman Mailer, and my perfect Zen teacher/ Lawrence Shainberg.

  DESCRIPTION: First edition. | Boulder: Shambhala, 2019.

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2018049034 | ISBN 9781611807295 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  eISBN 9780834842250

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: Shainberg, Lawrence, 1936– | Spiritual life—Zen Buddhism.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC BQ986.A42 A3 2019 | DDC 294.3/927092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049034

  v5.4_r1

  a

  FOR VIVIAN

  THE TEARS stream down my cheeks from my unblinking eyes. What makes me weep so? There is nothing saddening here. Perhaps it is liquefied brain.

  —SAMUEL BECKETT, The Unnamable

  CONTENTS

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

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  ONE

  ROSHI DOZES in the front seat. Watching him from the back, my eyes are fixed on his bald head as if concentration alone will ease me out of my confusion. I’m stunned by the shift in my state of mind. Half an hour ago, waiting for him to come out of customs, I enjoyed the equanimity I always felt when about to meet up with him again. After all, he was my teacher. The connection I was about to resume was not just with one irascible Japanese monk but with the faith and confidence I found, almost every time, when I sat on my cushion, straightened my back, followed my breath, and believed—yes, again and again—that I was escaping the tyranny of my brain. What has changed since that moment? Why do I feel I’m collapsing somehow, that any thought I’m about to have will only deepen my confusion? And why does this surprise me? This is Zen, isn’t it? How many times have I realized that there are regions in my brain that resist my escape from it? That these regions seem to be exactly the ones I need when—as now—I sit at my desk and try to believe in the sentences I produce? Confusion? Better to call it neurological dysfunction. Unless I’ve experienced a radical cure for that dysfunction, any moment I’ll resume the state of mind I lost a few minutes ago.

  The head drops quickly. Roshi is fast asleep before we leave the airport. He’s never been good at air travel, and he’s suffered more and more from it as he’s grown older. Now, at eighty, the thirteen-hour trip from Japan is almost debilitating for him. If the past is any guide, he’ll be jet-lagged for the next four or five days, disinclined to answer the phone or make anything more than minimal conversation, avoiding especially his English-speaking students. His already fractured attempts at our language have further deteriorated since he moved back to Japan five years ago to become the abbot of Ryutaku-ji, the monastery where he trained. True, neither the jet lag nor the language gap will bother him. If the past, again, is any guide, this old monk, now ministering what many in the Zen world consider one of our most important monasteries, will be on his cushion in our little zendo in downtown New York by 6:15 tonight in order to ring the bell, at exactly 6:30, that begins the first of our three thirty-minute zazen periods. Tomorrow morning, he’ll be up by 6:00, sit alone for an hour or more and then—ecstatic to resume the sort of chores his monks take care of at the monastery—vacuum and mop the zendo and the four flights of stairs between it and the street-level door to the building.

  This is a payback visit. Six years ago, when invited (some would say ordered) to become abbot of Ryutaku-ji, he endured two days of uncharacteristic vacillation—the only hint of ambivalence I’d ever seen in him—before concluding he had no choice. Much as he loved his students and the zendo, his TV (pro wrestling, especially), and his daily walks in Chinatown or Greenwich Village, his first devotion was to his teacher and his teacher’s teachers and thus to the monastery where he’d lived for thirteen years before agreeing to his teacher’s request that he establish a zendo in Israel (a country he’d never heard of before setting off for it) a few weeks after the Six-Day War in 1967.

  He remained in Israel for fourteen years before heading to New York and then maintained our small zendo in Soho for fifteen years before circling back to his point of origin in Japan. To ease the pain of our separation—the range of emotion experienced by students for whom a teacher like him becomes an amalgam of every spiritual, paternal, or neurotic ideal our minds produce—he promised to return for a month every August, when Ryutaku-ji closes. Today, as for the last five years, he is keeping his promise. Along with two other students—an Israeli, Amnon, who followed him to New York from Israel, and a Japanese woman, Kazuko, who found her way to the zendo when she came to New York to study painting—I’ve come out to meet him in Amnon’s van. Now we crawl in hot summer traffic on the Long Island Expressway while Roshi sleeps in the front seat, and sitting in the back with Kazuko, I consider as if for the first time the confusion Zen generates in my mind, my brain, or the mix of the two that one confronts so vividly in sitting meditation.

  Kazuko is dark-haired and stocky, a humorless woman in her midthirties with cold, dark, suspicious eyes. Her voice and face give no hint of her thoughts or mood. Though we have no great fondness for each other, we’ve managed to work together, taking the brunt of zendo chores, valuing above all that we can count on each other to be on our cushions when the bell rings, remaining still through the great range of pain, anxiety, exhilaration, and realization zazen produces, thus finding a kind of respect not far from admiration for each other. She knew nothing of Zen in Japan, but within months of discovering the zendo, she became Roshi’s favorite companion. Alone among his students in the United States, she shares his language. After she took an English-for-foreigners course, she became his frequent, barely competent translator when, as often, his English fails him. Like most Japanese I’ve known, she is guarded about her private life, especially her background in Japan. Though we’ve known each other for more than nine years and practiced together for countless hours, I know nothing about her current life or her life before that, in Japan. Then again, we’ve never been in the backseat of a van together, stuck in traffic on a hot August day. While Roshi sleeps, she eases into a surprising, confessional state of mind, telling me how and why she came to New York, how she began to paint as a teenager and resolved early on to study in America, and finally how she found her way to Zen. None of this, as far as I can see, has caught Roshi’s attention, but when she turns to her family life, describing a difficult childhood, a family so dysfunctional she was forced to leave home at sixteen, the bald head rises and, barely turning in our direction, sends an explosive rush of Japanese in her direction.

  Done with his tirade, the head drops again. Kazuko turns to the window.

  After a moment, I can’t contain my curiosity. “Is he
angry at you?”

  Kazuko nods. “Yes. Very.”

  “Why?”

  “He say I losing all my energy to memory.”

  * * *

  —

  ARRIVING AT THE ZENDO, we help Roshi upstairs with his bags, then go our separate ways. I hurry home because a mountain of chores awaits me. Out of town for two months, I have to unpack bags and boxes, get my office organized, and get back to work on my book, which has taken much too long and seems to be going nowhere. Roshi’s statement about memory doesn’t help. How if not with memory can I expect to produce a memoir?

  My desk is piled with mail, book bags, and packages. Most of the book bags contain books related to mine. I’ve mostly disciplined my book-buying habit, but I can’t resist anything on Beckett, Mailer, Zen, or neuroscience because it may contain the information I need to break through the hopeless dilemmas this book presents to me. These are my subjects; I can’t escape them. My last memoir, Ambivalent Zen, brought me more questions than answers. My Beckett obsession has paralleled my Zen practice; my friendships with him and Mailer, his polar opposite, have forced me to look at the way allegiance to both has thrived in my brain. Six years on this book has not resolved these contradictions, but where if not toward contradiction does Zen direct the mind? It’s this equation that Mailer abhorred and Beckett cherished. How can I be surprised that a memoir about this triangle seems to be paralyzed?

  I cleared shelves for books related exclusively to the memoir, but I ran out of room a few months ago. Stacks on the floor are crowding each other, and my new acquisitions will of course make things worse. In addition to the shelves that contain books, some are devoted to videos—Beckett’s plays, Mailer’s films and interviews, and, for Beckett, the new CD containing all of his work. There’s also a book called Beckett’s Library, which is an obsessive examination of the books found on his shelves after he died—all his underlining and notations plus extensive research on the impulses that led him to buy them and their eventual effects on his work. Though I’ve never read this book, I’ve leafed through it often and almost every time found something that makes me remember the writer who shaped and sometimes paralyzed my work and, by a sort of miracle, became my friend some years ago when I sent him a book I’d written and he responded with appreciation.

  Mailer died just five years ago, but his pile is almost the equal of Beckett’s. Two of his wives and one of his girlfriends have written memoirs, and every year the Mailer society publishes The Mailer Review, which contains essays and memoirs about him. Michael Lennon’s definitive biography came out two years after his death, and Lennon’s 738-page collection of Mailer’s letters was published just a few months ago. In the mail today are four new books on Zen, two on Zen and the brain, and two on the neuroscience of meditation. In the shelves, begging to be reread, are two biographies of Beckett and the first three volumes of his collected letters. The fourth, containing several he wrote to me, is in the mail on my desk. I can’t look at these piles without thinking of information glut and the nightmare it creates for writers of books like mine or, more glaringly, Mailer’s. He’d been a best-selling author for decades, but at one point he told me that when he sat down to work, he felt like he was “making buggy whips.”

  * * *

  —

  I MET MAILER WHEN I asked him to give me a blurb on Ambivalent Zen. As with Beckett, I knew the odds were long against me. Though I’d encountered him two or three times socially, I was pretty sure he’d not remember me. Even if he did, there was no reason to think the book would interest him. For that matter, given the pile my book would surely join on his desk, it was far from likely that he’d notice it, much less take the time to read it.

  What I didn’t know about him was that he was compulsively generous with blurbs. Books had to be very bad to be ignored, and if they were written by Provincetown writers or those who lived nearby, as I did, they had to be close to or completely unreadable.

  Six days later, he called to invite my wife and me to dinner. I joined ten others at a long table in the dining room of the redbrick bayside house he shared with his wife, Norris, and, whenever they came to visit, one or more of his nine children and ten grandchildren. Two of his daughters, with their husbands, were with us that night, along with a couple of local friends and a BBC journalist who’d arrived that afternoon to do a radio interview. Mailer introduced us as if we were regulars at the table.

  He was so comfortable in the roles of husband, father, and host that it was easy to forget what he was for me. Except for Beckett, no other writer had meant as much, but since he and Beckett were so utterly different, no one could represent better the dilemma I brought to my work. Like him, though with much less success, of course, I’d been a journalist and a fiction writer. A question I sometimes asked myself—why I persisted in the latter when I was so much better at the former—was a question some had asked about Mailer. More important was a related question, one they certainly did not ask about him: Why did my work remain so subjective and self-conscious when journalism offered the chance to escape from oneself entirely into the concrete world?

  Ambivalent Zen wasn’t mentioned during dinner, but as we were finishing dessert he pointed a finger at me. “This guy wrote a pretty good book. It’s called Ambivalent Zen. You know why I like it? It shows me why I’ve always hated Zen.”

  Amid the laughter that followed, I didn’t get a chance to question him, but later, when we said good night at the door, I said, “What have you got against Zen?”

  “I’ll tell you when we talk,” he said. “How about dinner next week?”

  * * *

  —

  AS EXPECTED, I find Roshi on his cushion that evening when I enter the zendo. What I do not expect, since I assume he needs sleep, is that, instead of dismissing us after the third sitting, he decides to give a talk.

  “This morning, I return, I visit New York. Amnon-san and Kazuko-san and Larry-san—they pick me up at airport, thank you very much.”

  Twelve students sit in two parallel rows in front of him. None of us who know him well are surprised that after twelve years in New York, where almost any well-known Buddhist teacher attracts standing-room-only crowds, his congregation remains so small. It isn’t just that tact is a skill he’s never learned. He does not care how many people show up, and, among those who do, he is very quick to discern and alienate those he believes to be insincere or insufficiently passionate.

  “Every day world is changing. But you practice zazen, I hope, I wish, you discover…nothing change! Always phenomenal world change, change, change. Never stop! So-called phenomenal world. But you doing zazen, you discover your truth, and truth never change. Never! Understand?”

  The forty-five-minute talk that follows is typical of him, a mix of spontaneity and discontinuity that, even though I’ve been listening to him for nearly twenty years, is not easy to follow or, for that matter, tolerate. Ecstatic, at times, depressed at others, my state of mind is unstable and distracted, but I endure it. If I try too hard to focus, I lose him altogether. I am alternately fascinated and impatient with the wild exuberant freedom (or madness?) of his associations, angry at him and myself for being there, then angry at myself for my irreverence. Again and again, however, I sit back and let his words wash over me, and my brain seems to disengage. No thought arises. I am hardly aware of being there. Then I feel exhilarated, powerful, confident until, angry and a little frightened, I withdraw from him again.

  Even though these talks (thanks to one of our sangha members, who worked out the technology) are recorded and passed along to us by email, thus available whenever we like to revisit them on our various electronic devices, he does not like them circulated at all. He wants them here and now and nothing else. These days, I disobey him often, listen to him at my desk or in the car or on a treadmill at the gym. Sometimes it’s possible, listening like this, to feel him here and now again. I always feel a lit
tle like I’m betraying him, maybe betraying Zen itself, to subject him to the demons of technology and electronics, but his voice alone can free me of this concern, remind me that I am more than my state of mind, and that Zen is a whole lot more than my ideas about it.

  “I hope everyone appreciate this life! I was born human being, thank you very much. My parents, thank you very much. Must appreciate parents. Without them, you never born human being! Must gratitude your life! You sincere, whole world helping your life. But first must believe yourself. If you can’t believe yourself, you can’t believe Buddha. Can’t believe God. Pain come, thank you very much! Maybe you think I’m talking joke. No, I only talk my own experience. I expect pain because pain become good zazen…You think pain not good. I think pain is good for me. I have friend paralyze, how you call it, stroke, cannot walk straight, half his body dead, cannot walk straight. But you—you still have both legs! You happy! Healthy! If you become everything is good, you enjoy your life. Endless! Permanent! Even under cemetery, some worm bite your bone, you have great, endless, your life become happy. Please don’t waste your wonderful life…Understand? OK? Good night!”

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS JUST a few months after I discovered zazen, in the fall of 1973, that I took my first step toward institutional Zen. “Nonmembers night” at the New York Zendo on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The building I entered was a testimony to the work of D. T. Suzuki, who, with his books, classes, lectures, and conferences, had done more than anyone else to introduce Zen to the Western world. This building, meant to nourish the curiosity he’d awakened, had also taken his teachings a great leap further than he had himself—introducing the structured “sitting” practice called zazen, which aimed to concretize the teachings he wrote about. Despite the fact that he himself had trained in a monastery and throughout his life maintained a daily zazen practice, Suzuki rarely mentioned meditation in his books because, as he’d more than once confessed, he wasn’t sure that Westerners were ready for it.