Non-Buddhism

Durdhara Bodhicitta, Part 1

By Tom Pepper

[Originally published 2-5-16 at Lines of Flight]

I’m posting the first section of a draft of a novel I’m working on. Or, have just about finished and am trying to revise. Or something. I had asked if anyone wanted to critique my creative work in the way I try to interrogate that of others, but there were no eager volunteers. Maybe reading it first will raise some questions?

My hope is to offer an example of something that just might do what I have repeatedly asked for examples of. That is, a kind of creative work that tries to engage the world critically, and to encourage its readers to do so. I have doubts that this is possible. Even more doubts that this particular example can succeed. But any intelligent critical response is welcome. (Stupid or useless response will be ignored–I’m just to tired of that game.)

The pdf below, then, contains the first two sections of a novel that is about 115k words. It changes narrators, and mixes genres, and tries any strategy I could think of to be motivating rather than comforting–but to still be fun. After all, the revolution should be a joyful event!

Anyone interested in reading this in some other format can email me at wtompepper@att.net. I can send a Kindle (mobi) or Nook (ePub) version, if you’d like.

Feel free to “pepper spray”…but I will only respond to intelligent criticism.

Durdhara Bodhicitta PDF

EXCERPT
The Event: Gabe 1
Thursday’s I would meet Sam at the Golden Monkey and we would drink tea and talk about her delusions. No, not that kind of delusions, not the psychotic kind. I mean it in the Buddhist way. Sam had almost no delusions left, which is a scary way to be; much worse than having lots of them; almost as bad as having none at all.

I’ll start with that last Thursday meeting, the one that led to all the trouble. I want to tell you the story of how Sam’s last few delusions caused her so much trouble; but more than that, I want to tell you about how Sam’s debacle showed me, finally, what to do. Because I had no delusions left, and I had been stuck there for an endless time. Delusion free, or so I thought, and waiting for an event to set me in motion. Now, I want to tell this in a kind of novelistic discourse, because I don’t know how else to make this kind of point.

So here we go, with some of the obligatory descriptive stuff, setting and tone, developing characters so you can identify with them and be subtly but powerfully interpellated into their ideological parallax, swept into the voice-as-gaze and gently, pleasantly cozened, allowing the narrative to think for you. Or something like that. The Golden Monkey is in the college part of our big town that calls itself a city. We have four colleges (one you’d know the name of) and seven abandoned factories that once made things like glass and guns and pipe-fittings and carpet. Now, we are a town nobody would come to except for the really famous university and the two smaller, second-tier colleges, and the one very small fifth-rate public college that used to be an agricultural school and is now like a four-year repeat of the eleventh grade. Seventeen and a half square miles in the American northeast, a population of just over forty thousand, and nothing beyond the town line for miles but dairy farms and state forest.

Okay, there’s my establishing shot, right? It only remains to insist that I’m fictionalizing the town beyond all recognition, and to give it a fake name. I’ll call it Capua. And now we move in toward the coffee shop, located walking distance from two campuses, open late and early, in what was once a factory that made expensive pocket watches, but is now a collection of offices and shops. The owner of this coffee shop owns three others in town, all with “monkey” in the name. This is the biggest money maker; I’m the manager of the least profitable of the four, The Monkey’s Paw, which sells much more beer than coffee, and doesn’t get many students. But, not to get diverted into backstory, let’s return to the description: the place appears to be a chaotic scatter of club chairs and small sofas, little wooden tables with mismatched chairs, but this chaos is only apparent. Verna and her daughter devote enormous time to keeping the shabby-chic look from falling too far into shabby. The artwork on the wall changes regularly, with amazingly good MFA students from the second-most prestigious college in town clamoring to get their newest stuff shown. In the courtyard in the middle of the rectangle formed by the old factory buildings there sits a four-foot high golden monkey, of no species anyone has ever been able to identify, sitting like a simian buddha, his hands in the teaching pose. The only permanent artwork inside is a series of ten ox-herding pictures done in ink on parchment, and not in the correct order.

Sam has long blond hair in a single tight braid, the way she’s worn it since she was a little girl, and it looks unsettlingly juvenile now that she’s in her forties. She’s thin, tall, strong, very athletic, and you might think she was half her age if you caught her smiling, but her age shows in the weary dolor of her habitual expression. Plus, she wears these thick blocky wool sweaters and corduroy pants that give her a frumpy look when she’s still, although moving, she still has that coltish appeal that overcomes her attempted
self-presentation. She works as a research assistant at the big university, the famous one, and is sexually harassed by every principle investigator she works for; in seventeen years, she has never complained, and so she keeps working.

Download Durdhara Bodhicitta PDF

6 responses to “Durdhara Bodhicitta, Part 1”

Glenn Wallis

February 6, 2016

Reblogged this on Speculative Non-Buddhism and commented:
In a new post at Lines of Flight, Tom Pepper shares a creative work “that tries to engage the world critically, and to encourage its readers to do so.” It should be clear to most readers of this blog that such an attempt resonates in several regards to the non-buddhism project. Just recall certain ideas that have circulated here: discourses with consequences; the event; the faithful subject; radical immanence; thinking from the One; the stranger subject; the site of struggle; the void of exclusion. See for yourself. And please offer Tom your feedback.

From the opening of the novel:

The Event: Gabe 1
Thursday’s I would meet Sam at the Golden Monkey and we would drink tea and talk about her delusions. No, not that kind of delusions, not the psychotic kind. I mean it in the Buddhist way. Sam had almost no delusions left, which is a scary way to be; much worse than having lots of them; almost as bad as having none at all. I’ll start with that last Thursday meeting, the one that led to all the trouble.

[With Pepper and tea-drinking, you know trouble’s ahead!]

And toward the end:

You will assume that anyone calling himself a Buddhist is just a kind of new-age dim-bulb at best, a crazy nihilist at worst, and of little interest to you. Most of the time, you’d be right. But I hope you’ll read on…I hope you’ll have fun reading on. I hope you’ll have more fun in life for having read on.
Bruce

February 7, 2016

Good stuff!

All kicked off for me in the prologue (lol)!

Love the idea of stuffing essays snippets into a novel.

Can I pick your brains Tom? Have your read much Bataille? Specifically, how would you relate Lacan’s Real with Bataille’s “non-knowledge”?
wtpepper

February 8, 2016

Bruce: I haven’t read much Bataille. In fact, I’ve read very little, and it was over twenty years ago, so everything I know about Bataille is from what others say about him in passing–I’ve never even read any work specifically devoted to explicating his thought. My third-hand impression has been that Bataiile’s idea of nonknowledge suggest that there is something like primary and somehow more authentic experience of the world that is distorted by systems of knowledge, but to which we should try to return. This is the opposite of the Lacanian approach, which suggests that we have no experience outside symbolic/imaginary systems, and so cannot and should not try to escape to a more authentic kind of non-systematic personal knowledge–that would be pure illusion and a waste of time. The Real is the limit of our symbolic system, what it cannot “think,’ what is excluded from (and by) a system’s intentional structure. It doesnt’ precede the symbolic knowledge system, but is a product of it–and we cannot escape into a pure experience of the real, because it is only a product of the particular symbolic system. We encounter the real only because of the aporia and contradictions of a given social symbolic structure, not because it is some more authentic true experience. Anyway, this is all much too vague and abstract–bu perhaps you can say something more about Bataiile’s actual thought? I’ve never pursued it, because every time I’ve heard it mentioned it seems to be saying something that sound a lot like the errors of Romanticism to me.

One thing I’m trying to do in this story is to offer characters who collide with the limits of thier particular symbolic/imaginary system–and so encounter the Real. For instance, in Sam’s devotion to the idea of scientific objectivity and her reluctant realization that scientific activity is fundamentally carried out for social and intentional reasons–leading to contradiction, falsehood, deceptions, etc. exactly because of its pretense to objectivity. Ultimately, Gabe’s belief that he can get outside the symbolic and alter it strategically will also run up against the limit of the Real.
Bruce

February 8, 2016

Writing this on a phone so forgive the typos!

Lovely description of the real. Thank you. I guess bataille is interested in slightly different things. Perhaps the closest I can get to bringing his thought into dialogue with lacan is by putting him close to zizek. In the sense that for zizek the real can never be subsumed.

For bataille, the Hegelian idea of the sage at the end of history with absolute knowledge is bogus on the grounds that this clarity disappears when one gets drunk, laughs or other such things.

From this point, bataille looks for a more sincere form of communication based on this dissolution into non knowledge ( ie laughter ) whereas I guess zizek is more interested in revolution.

Bataille seems to highlight and love the useless part of communication such as laughter, eroticism, intoxication wherein the subject abandons itself and plunges into a darkness away from the light of truth.
Artashata

February 8, 2016

Printed off a copy… Let’s see what Tom’s got.
yzandy

March 10, 2016

Thanks. Eager to read more.