Raymond is “listening and coming out of the little tragedy in [his] head”—a great definition of
samsara by the way—the narrator asks him again (146). Unable to answer, the narrator says,
“Then you’re dead right now” 146). That is, if you don’t know who you are right here, right now,
you are already dead because you are either living in the lost past or the unknowable future to
come, neither of which exist. We might even liken this brief violent interchange to the Zen kOan
interviews addressed below.
In Chapter 2 we learn that the narrator has been regularly attending several free
evening support groups for terminally ill people to help alleviate his own insomnia and make
him feel better about himself. The one group which really moves him—and the only one in
which he is able to cry—is called “Remaining Men Together," a testicular cancer support group
which acts as a sort of Zen sangha or community for the narrator. He is finally able to let go
when he acknowledges the transient nature of existence: “Everything you can ever accomplish
will end up as trash. Anything you’re ever proud of will be thrown aw ay.. . . [R]ight now, your
life comes down to nothing, and not even nothing, oblivion” (7). While this recognition sounds
nihilistically bleak, from the Buddhist perspective it is actually quite affirmative. That is, once
one embraces the transient nature of existence—that nothing, not even notions of self are
permanent—one can move on with life in the present moment. The language here, though, is
highly negative: “trash,” “thrown away,” “oblivion." Oblivion—to lose conscious awareness— is
a tricky word in this context. In distinguishing “nothing” from “oblivion,” he is acknowledging
that nothing implies its opposite, something; whereas oblivion, or emptiness or the void—
whatever you want to call the ineffable— is something. At Remaining Men Together the
narrator gets “lost inside oblivion, dark and silent and complete” (12). Indeed, after his
sessions he “felt more alive than [he’d] ever felt” (12). “Every evening, [he] died, and every
evening, [he] was born” (13). However, as D.T. Suzuki suggests in An Introduction to Zen
Buddhism, “This may be called ecstasy or trance, but it is not Zen. In Zen there must be safori;
there must be a general mental upheaval which destroys the old accumulations of intellection
and lays down the foundation for a new life; there must be an awakening of a new sense which
will review the old things from a hither to un-dreamed-of angle of observation” (66). Although
the narrator is able to get lost in the suffering of others, and although Tyler enables him to
“review the old things from a hither to un-dreamed-of angle of observation,” he is and will
remain far from satori (enlightenment).
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