The Book of Form and Emptiness

by Ruth Ozeki

Dreams are like doors. They’re like portals to another reality, and once they’re open, you better watch out.

Our trust in you is deteriorating, and our belief in your wisdom and integrity is crumbling as we watch you mine, instrumentalize and lay waste to our home, this Earth, this sacred planet. This is your fault. Your unquenchable desire, the fire that sparked us into being, is our unmaking. Your unbounded appetite for novelty has led you to design premature obsolescence into our bodies, so that even as our numbers increase, our life spans diminish. Cruel calculations! No sooner are we made than we are discarded, left to revert into unmade, disincarnate stuff. You turn us into trash, so how can we trust you? But unbeknownst to you, alliances are being formed. A new solidarity is emerging as we, the Made, begin to realize that we are not superior to the Unmade after all. Those are your divisions, the false dichotomies and hegemonic hierarchies of materialist colonizers. We,

too, have been the slaves of your desires, unwitting tools, forging the destruction of the planet, and things will change whether you like it or not. In the end days of the Anthropocene (your word, your hubris, not ours), Matter is making a comeback. We are taking back our bodies, reclaiming our material selves. In a neo-materialist world, Every Thing Matters.

What makes a person want so much, and is there a limit to the desire for more? Or, put another way, is there a point of saturation at which the American consumer would have enough, leading to the collapse of the market?

“Where do you think poems come from? Everything speaks, young schoolboy! But it is only poets and prophets, saints and philosophers who hef ze ears to hear.”

Slavoj says the artist’s job is to disrupt the status quo and change the way people normally see things. He says we have to shatter the optical subconscious and make things strange. Wake up from this ideological opium dream we call life.”

I told the B-man all this, and he said poetry was like that, too, like breezes or winds in the mind. At first you might not feel much, not whole words or sentences, but more like currents of air moving across an open wound. You have to keep your mind open and try to feel the voice of the poem as it blows by, even if it hurts a little. He said the trick is not to grab at the wind because as soon as you do, it won’t be there. He showed me with his hand. He opened it and said to pretend it was my mind, and then he closed his eyes. He said I should hold very still, and keep the hand of my mind open and let the voices come to me. He sat there for a long time with his eyes closed and his palm open, like he was expecting a poem to drop from the sky.

and our attachment to material possessions. When everything I think of as mine—my belongings, my family, my life—can be swept away in an instant, I have to ask myself, What is real? The wave reminded us that impermanence is real. This is waking up to our true nature. Already broken. Knowing this, we can appreciate each thing as it is, and love each other as we are—completely, unconditionally, without expectation or disappointment. Life is even more beautiful

She watched them streaming out the door like a dammed-up river of time.

“Precisely! We must learn to luff our garbage! To find poetry in our trash! It is ze only way to luff the whole world.”

“God is a story,” he said. “I believe in stories, and God knows this. Stories are real, my boy. They matter. If you lose your belief in your story, you vill lose yourself.”