Koan is a riddle with no solutionused to provoke reflection on the inadequacy of logical reasoning, and to lead to enlightenment.
Years ago in a dance class at University of Washington - our teacher instructed us to "just walk across the room," in front of the class, which I did—and failed totally—according to her.
Until recently, I always wondered why.
An impossible task for my (or any) conditioned mind, the assignment was a koan of movement. Over the years it became a recurring and unresolved memory. Now however, I recall it with a smile as I read the prose of Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard, who "walks across the room" with his art —effortlessly and unselfconsciously. Unlike my mannered movements that day, Knausgaard's direct, unadorned writing lacks the mask of trying to make "good" art.
He just makes art.
And writes like a Zen master.
There is a saying or a meme that goes "Dance like no one is watching." Well, Knausgaard writes like no one is watching. In fact, he has said, while writing the first two volumes of "My Struggle" he didn't believe anyone would read it. It must have liberated him to find and express his truth. Truth for me, has always been the domain of poetry, music, and visual art because it is oblique, non-verbal. The finger writing about the moon can never be the moon. But Knausgaard gets so close! His work flows with a natural, intuitive structure. As he focuses on the mundane in all its wonder and triviality, boring detail becomes somehow revelatory and universal: moon to Moon.
Believe Knausgaard's and all our—artistic/spiritual energies come from a place of quiet or MU as Zen might call it, free of internal and external judgements. Apparently it was an awareness I lacked when walking across the room that day and in living life. Since then, the freedom of slowly dropping baggage (judging and the inherent violence of grasping) in art/life has been balanced with comical—blips of fretting and trying. Let go and let go and let go...
For the heart, life is simple: it beats as long as it can. Then it stops. Sooner or later this pounding action will cease of it's own accord, and the blood will begin to run towards the body's lowest point where it will collect in a small pool, visible from the outside as a dark soft patch on every whitening skin, as the temperature sinks, the limbs stiffen and the intestines drain.
—Knaaugaard, first sentences of My Struggle Book One
And death, which I have always regarded as the greatest dimension in life, dark, compelling, was no more than a pipe that springs a leak, a branch that cracks in the wind, a jacket that slips off a clothes hanger and falls to the floor.
—Knausgaard, final sentence of My Struggle Book One
You don't know what air is, yet you breathe. You don't know what sleep is, yet you sleep. You don't know what night is, yet you lie in it. You don't know what a heart is, yet your heart beats steadily, day and night, day and night, day and night.
—Knausgaard, first sentence of Spring
Note to Bronwyn: when you were near death, you had a realization that you would be