Into the Mystic (Allen)

 

Toward the end of his life, in the little cottage behind his Lafayette, California house, Bob Birnbaum breathed heavily in his black leather easy chair, his tired eyes closed, as I counted the ways that he had appeared to me during our Wednesday at 4 p.m. blast-offs: Therapist, teacher, surrogate dad, mentor, spiritual master, fellow traveler, bodhisattva, friend, wise leader, beloved, will-bender, pilot. Those are the ones I remember. It was a long list. He shook his head violently at “teacher.” In fact, he scorned all but two – “friend” and “fellow traveler.” When I finished he repeated out loud and nodded vigorously, “That one. Fellow traveler.”

Bob (whom I never knew as Swami Prem Amitabh) was raised in the Bronx tenements and projects of the 30s and 40s, so as a Jewish red diaper baby he was applauding the subversive Communist-inspired etymology tucked into the term “fellow traveler.”  We were in on the same spiritual secret cabal, Bob and I! Seven years together, and then he was gone.

Why would “fellow traveler” improve on “teacher?” I know what a math teacher is, but what’s a teacher of wisdom?

The Buddha of the Early Discourses and Lotus Sutra, Nagarjuna, Vimalakirti, and the Sixth Patriarch have teaching in common. They know something I can know and they find vocal approximations that lead me to a new understanding. They are adept at the project, bouncing from metaphor to encouragement to metaphysics to examples and exemplars, using every pedagogic trick in the book. Evangelists, they are surefooted and direct.

Dogen is something else.

Maybe he remembers what came before “getting it.” Does he recollect that for all the time he was being told what to do, what changed his mind was something else: being thoroughly confused?

Mostly I forget that my earliest childhood learning didn’t emerge out of trial and error. It erupted out of confusion. Before I knew the rules, there was no error. I didn’t know how to learn the rules. I got directed into the rules later, by adults, for what reason I didn’t at first know, and got a frown when I didn’t stay directed. Eventually I forgot my confusion and it all made sense.

My original face was happy in its confusion. It didn’t learn through rules, but through relatively unguided exploration. What’s that? That red protuberance? What does it taste like? Much later it’s called a rubber ball. From then on confusion wears a bad reputation.

Can you call a catalyst for confusion a teacher? Can you call him a fellow traveler?