"Not the Final Interview with the Buddha," anachronistic fiction by James Joaquin Brewer

 

ME: Mr. Gautama, at the risk of reducing complex ideas to misleading oversimplifications, may I express my current understanding of your essential attitude toward that eternal question “How should one lead one’s life here on Planet Earth?”

HIM: Sure. Why not?

ME: Thank you. I would boil it down to this: “By being born, we enter the experience of suffering; suffering results from frustrated desire; by abolishing desire, one would abolish frustration and thus abolish suffering.” Is that a reasonably acceptable summary of your essential attitude?  Please let me know if I have misrepresented it.

HIM: Close—for a college student who might think he alone understands the notion of “reasonable acceptance.” [sound of low laughing]

ME: Humorous point taken! Of course there is no topic—no “notion”—for which I alone own its understanding. All I meant was that of the common perspectives touted as bulwarks and buttresses of religious or “philosophical” insight, this one impresses me as the most . . . technically . . . rational. However, many people who might wish to explore your . . . teaching . . . who maybe even consider committing themselves to its principles . . . Well, they may wonder if they can resolve a few logically sticky conundrums it raises. May I candidly highlight some such “puzzles” with you?

HIM: Possibly better with me than with your high-school football coach.

ME: Ha! Right again, Mr. Gautama! Thank you! Now, then . . . it seems that the potential . . . perplexities I have in mind are based upon the relationship of two premises, the first of which I accept as axiomatic but the second of which I do not so accept. I do believe that to be born, to be alive on Planet Earth, is to suffer. But I am not as convinced that everyone should attempt to abolish his or her suffering. The “Harvard Six-Foot Shelf of Great Books” would have been reduced to a few measly inches if our great Western writers had abolished their sufferings by abolishing their desires.

HIM: On the other hand—or foot, one of your Harvard students’ available Six—a silver or gold lining in that dark cloud you worry about would be that having only a few inches to study would make it easier for English majors to prepare for final examinations. Probably not a bad thing, yes? [sound of heartier laughing]

ME: Well . . . perhaps so, Your Enlightenedness, but also more . . .  boring. Would we—and I suppose I refer to the majority of Western readers of anthologized poetry—prefer a tradition in which Percy Shelley had disciplined himself to scratch from his rough draft the famous “I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!”?

HIM: Or his succeeding reference to being chained by a “heavy weight of hours”?

ME: Yes, I guess . . . that fits my case almost as well.

HIM: Young man, I suggest, regardless of selective out-of-context quoting, Mr. Shelley need not have bled. He needn’t have fallen on those thorns. Life is already thorns—there is no requirement to fall in order to experience them. But regarding the overall effect of his Ode to the West Wind, I guess you hadda be there . . .

ME: Sometimes I wonder if it’s just that Shelley had such an emotional appetite that one might call him accident-prone to falling upon . . . any . . . near-by . . . thorns of life.

HIM: He could have slimmed-down his emotional appetite and become less susceptible. That’s what my teaching just might be mostly about.

ME: Maybe falling onto thorns was what Shelley was mostly about. If we take away his bleeding, do we take away too much of his identity?

HIM: Could be. But if it is a suffering identity, taking away his tendency to fall and bleed—or to be weighed down by heavy hours—could be a compassionate thing to accomplish. Of course, he would have had to take it away for himself. As he did, at least partly, in other writings. Even here in this complicated ode, he concludes with “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?”—right?

ME: Okay, right, but still . . . Hypothetically, if one’s identity is often a suffering identity, what is one left with if—compassionately or otherwise—that part is totally taken away?

HIM: Ah, that part of an identity is a mask. It can be discarded. Or traded for another type. One with larger eye-holes.

ME: And what lies underneath such a mask?

HIM: Possibly peace.

ME: And poetry?

HIM: Possibly poetry, too—of a healthier kind.

ME: Hmmm. Well . . . I don’t get too excited about the prospect of imagining a happy re-masked Shelley composing detached, healthy, haiku. How disorienting! Perhaps dispiriting! He would never make it into the Norton Anthology that way!

HIM: It’s too long as it is. You can never cover it all. Even in two semesters. Your professors—especially the non-tenured ones—often end up cutting Joyce or Faulkner or Virginia Woolf. Or someone just as troubling. William Blake, maybe. They have be careful before finalizing that darned syllabus. [more chuckling] But enough about irrelevant anthologies. Mr. Rooks, may I outline my apprehension of your implied attitude and then ask you to correct any of my distortions?

ME: Turnabout is fair play.

HIM: Your previous premise seems to be that the greatest good in Western Culture is the literature springing from souls of people in conflict. I do not use Percy Shelley as an especially representative example—oh, he’s good for your limited point of view, I suppose—but there are others: how about Melville and his whale harpoons, Hemingway and his big-game guns, even Sylvia Plath and her daddy? If their lives had been characterized by more peace and fewer frustrated desires—of one kind or another—you imply that they would likely have left unwritten the notable works for which they are known, depriving you, the cultural consumer, of an evening’s reading pleasure.

ME: Depending on the connotations of “pleasure,” of course.

HIM: Of course. But is it not possible that these admittedly great writers, had they chosen to focus more on peace and less on conflict, would yet have provided readers such as you with eminently satisfying works?

ME: Possible? Yes. In some cases, perhaps likely.

HIM: In any event, surely you don’t believe that given a hypothetical choice between a life of personal unhappiness that produces great works of art and a life of personal happiness that produces no—or merely “adequate”—works of art, a man or woman writer would choose the first? Why would one choose devoting one’s most-frequent thoughts to suffering instead of to peace?

ME: Excuse me, Mr. Gautama, but aren’t you presenting our hypothetical artists with a false dilemma?

HIM: Certainly—one suggested by your comments about Mr. Shelley. To go further, weren’t you implying that Shelley’s achievement of personal peace would have conflicted with your personal pleasures? It’s a short step from there to claiming that one person’s happiness depends upon another person’s unhappiness.

ME: Okay . . . I am definitely not entirely comfortable with that premise. It represents some version of exploitation. I should not be happy at an “innocent” other’s expense.

HIM: And let’s not debate what makes an “other” “innocent.”

ME: Agreed. Perhaps there are artists who can fulfill their natures—and thus find happiness—only at the expense of their own peace. For some, peace and suffering may be complementary.

HIM: Or just supplementary?

ME: Uh . . . maybe . . . nuance taken . . . but more to my point: maybe Shelley was destined to frequently articulate desire, to often embody emotional excess, so that others could gain a . . . useful . . . perspective.

HIM: Oh, so, you would truly exploit him? You would deny him his own valid peace so that you could look for yours? Wouldn’t it be more compassionate to wish him contentment—even at the expense of his art? How can we promote more suffering, whether our own or another’s?

ME: Hmm . . . it’s just that the literature of happiness has always seemed less interesting than that of recurring conflict.

HIM: Is the purpose of life the creation of “interesting” literature? Would the actually intelligent artist prefer the illusion of fulfillment that a “successful” public career can bring over the reality of fulfillment that a peaceful personal life can bring?

ME: Do you believe, then, that the two are always opposed?

HIM: No. You, however, seem to think that most of the time they are.

ME: I wish they weren’t. I hope they are aren’t. But I’m now left with the challenge of disentangling the knotted threads of my attitudes toward the act of creation: perhaps the really peaceful person has no need to create works of art.

HIM: Why can’t he or she create peaceful works of art?

ME: Because contentment is not as interesting as perplexity, at least as far as enduring literature appears to tell us.

HIM: That appears to be true because you, the enduring reader, remain perplexed and, thus, find perplexing writing interesting. Must we be limit our interests only to what reminds us of ourselves?

ME: Mr. Gautama, perhaps too much peace becomes boring.

HIM: Too much? Ah, Danny, the world has never witnessed that much . . .