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......................... .....---who's favorite haunt, the Now or Never
Cafe, was the site of many a wise saying and metaphysical bar
fight. |
I
met Roshi Bob when I was young .
The story is, on a cold New Jersey day my car broke down and
I was wandering around looking for a place to call home. With
a bitter wind blowing down from Hackensack I stumbled into a
little bar called the Now or Never. It was in Secaucus,
just off Route 3 along an approach to the Lincoln tunnel where
east-west meets the Jersey Turnpike. The Now or Never,
turned out to be a neighborhood joint a stone's throw from the
Big Apple and within scenting distance of that great, smelly,
smoking, landfill ironically called the "Meadowlands"
and known by some as Our Lady of Perpetual Cosa Nostra
cemetery.
I stepped into the saloon, stamped snow off my boots just inside
the door, and scanned for a phone. There, to my left, at the
end of the bar,  the
person I came to know as Roshi Bob caught my eye. He was seated
under the silver arc of a stuffed marlin eating a pickled egg
wearing a Yankee cap and a wry smile. His backlit head glowed
in the neon of a Piels sign and crumbs of yolk and albumen, in
a halo of golden confetti, ringed a small white plate on the
bar between his hands. In front of him was a bottle of Guiness
next to a half-full glass wearing a spent head of foam. It wasn't
long before we struck up a conversation, and that, as they say,
was That. Then and there our friendship was launched and christened
in beer punctuated with Wild Turkey chasers.
In the years following that first meeting Roshi said many intriguing
and memorable things, most of which I've forgotten. But, luckily,
I did jot some down with a #2 Ticonderoga pencil that Roshi insisted
I use because he usually changed his mind about everything.
In fact, Roshi hated pens. He once warned, "A pen is an
instrument of the devil and dogmaticians. Erasable graphite is
the blessed marker of the Tao.
"The letter killeth in some political contexts," he
went on, "especially when written in ink. But rash remarks
rendered with a #2 Ticonderoga are easy to erase."
To say that Roshi was remarkable is to alliterate...but writers
do that. And to say that Bob was the best is --well, there I
go again.
In order to avoid another relapse, I think I'll just let Roshi
do the talking.
Therefore, I present these sayings as a memorial to that enigmatic
and charismatic character (there I go again --and with a rhyme
thrown in for good measure) who is no longer with us.
What became of him, you ask? It seems that one day, without due
notice, Roshi hopped a west-bound Greyhound and dropped into
the Middle-Western Kingdom somewhere between Cincinatti and Crested
Butte.
Roshi Bob was never heard from again.
Update: Roshi sited in midwest
bus stations
Update: New
analects and more about Baba Bob
T
h e A n a l e c t s
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Analect . ..1 |
Analect ...4 |
Analect ...5 |
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Analect ...6 |
Analect ...75 |
Analect ..100 |
|
Analect ...110 |
Analect ...115 |
Analect ...129 |
|
Analect ...130 |
Analect ..131 |
Analect ..132 |
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Analect
...133 |
Analect
...161 |
Analect
...164 |
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Analect
...165 |
Analect 170 |
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Analect 1
"Being a guru, people often ask me, 'What's
it all about, Roshi?' and I'm nonplussed. I'm thinking, how am
I supposed to know what it's all about for them if they
don't even have a clue themselves? Am I them?
'No,' I answer myself, and go on about my
business hoping they'll eventually get to theirs."
Commentary:
Everybody's looking
for answers from somebody else. This is the wrong tack. If God
wanted everybody to get their answers from somebody else, God
would not have needed to invent so many people. One person, like
one giant media conglomerate, would have been enough.
We can infer from the fact that there are so many people, that
God sought to encourage diversity of thought.
Then along came the first dogmatician with his calipers and sacred
book.
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Analect 4
"Intelligence is a strange phenomena. Some
who have it are brilliant, while others are as dumb as a stump.
In fact, the fruits of intellect are as varied as the whims of
man and should not be counted on to bring bliss.
"Brilliant idiots invented the atomic bomb, and brilliant
idiots are responsible for TV.
"Remember it's usually not Mensa rejects who invent
spectacularly diabolical things. It's geniuses gripped by an
ignorant and arrogant inertia."
Analect 5 / LINK
"Ah, Imagination. The free realm.
"This is where you go when you dump dogma.
"They say that truth is the mother of imagination.
They don't say who the father of imagination is, but he must
have one helluva dark side." How else can you explain 9/11
and global warming?
Commentary:
Imagination in the
right hands will produce a Pieta.
Imagination managed by somebody like Darth Vader turns out Hiltlers
and Holocausts.
Keep your eyes peeled for the Darth Vaders:
those heavy breathers blowing poison vapors.
May the Force be with us, at the very least.
|
Analect 6
/ LINK
"Any head raised on a steady
diet of TV would not stand out in a room full of cabbages."
Commentary:
In modern times,
a person's perception of what's happening in the world is colored
by many things, but the main one is TV. If any nation's grasp
of reality hinges upon TV news coverage spouted by pretty heads
in great clothes, or the bouncing attributes of babes in thongs,
it can say goodbye to its future.
Note: Whenever Roshi Bob meets a cabbage-head
raised on TV you'll hear him mutter,"Go Lumpky". More
often than not,the person referred to thinks this is an esoteric
Polish incantation.
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Analect 7
/ LINK
"If you're not getting your
way by staying, you might as well not get your way by leaving."
Commentary:
Some people believe
that abruptly getting up and leaving in the middle of a losing
argument is an effective way of making their point. Their departure
is often accompanied by curses and oaths. What they want to convey
is contempt for the proceedings, but the only thing actually
conveyed is themselves out of the room, which is a great benefit
and relief to everyone left behind.
If you want to make a point by leaving, just cut to the chase
and don't show up at all. It's a much more efficient way to lose
a debate.
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Analect
75 / LINK
"A lobbiest is someone who
hangs around lobbies trying to drum up business.
"Some lobbiests hang around the lobbies of cheap hotels
in crummy districts, pimping. .Some hang around the lobbies of more
upscale districts, like the District of Columbia doing the same
thing. They're high-stakes specialists and very savvy about the
hot johns in those precincts who troll for lobbiests.
"It's a fishing expedition that works out pretty well for
both the hooker and the hookee."
Commentary:
Even
though this is nominally a democracy, there are people who actually
make their living buying the inallienable rights of others. This
is hard to believe I know, but these people and politicians are
in cahoots ...with large and frequent campaign contributions
things just become more possible.
Said the sage: Ibn Ali McCarthy (a boyhood friend of Roshi Bob),
"There are many nuanced
ways to buy votes. You really don't have to be so obvious as
to set up pay stations at ballot boxes."
Lobbiests understand those subtleties well. In fact, they're
top experts in the fields of sub-rosa vote leases and symbiotic
relationships.
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Analect 100/ LINK.
"God is all. God is nothing.
For hopeless conceptualists such as ourselves this is hard to
believe, but that's the way it was in that golden age before
language and theology.
Of the "nothingness" of God, nothing of course can
be said. So nothing meaningful has ever been said about it, though
many have tried (John
Cage and Lao Tze in particular).
The mind, it seems, compelled to negotiate chaos on stepping
stones of nouns, verbs, and other symbols, has not been geared
to articulate this void. So, cavorting in the mundane we choose
to avoid it (no pun intended), or, out of desperate need to chase
our tail, invent religions. This amounts to the same thing."
Commentary:
Which
just about says it all ...or nothing.
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Analect 110/
LINK
"God, who like nature abhors
a vacuum, one day slid Her hands under her footstool, scooped
the dust bunnies of the earth into her mitts and formed a likeness
of Herself. She breathed life into it and it became full of vim
and vigor and was cool --and inexplicacble. "
Commentary:
This
dust-to-dust thing is just a metaphor. This is a poet using poetic
license. There's a lot of that in the bible ...and in the language
in general for that matter.
Whatever your metaphor, there's more than enough going on around
us to work on and work out.
"Where do you come from? Where do you go?
Sorry that's nothin' you would need to know."
--Bob
Dylan,
Love
& Theft,
Summer
days
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Analect 115/LINK
"A lot of people walk around saying they
know God, or they know what God wants. But think about it. The
only one with a head big enough to know what God wants would
have to be ...you guessed it, God.
"With the small heads we humans stumble around in ...well,
you just couldn't cram what God wants in there. This is self-evident
if you've read any history or kept up on current events.
"Any politician certain he has a close relationship with
the Lord should be suspected of being a demagogue --one with
an especially bad case of hubris. There have been those.
"Only God knows for sure what God wants. The rest of us
are just hoping, guessing, delusional, or whistling past the
graveyard.
"The Son of Sam was delusional. But he wasn't president."
Analect
129/
LINK
"I'm convinced God grades on a curve. Having
created a sliding scale of intellectual and emotional ability,
would it be fair to allofasudden become absolute?
"If that's God, we're sunk."
Commentary:
To an absolutist
it seems that God is absolute. What's the big surprise?
To relativists? Well, their god is a little less remote, much
more merciful, and sometimes available for periodic, sit-down
re-evaluations over a beer or latte --depending upon class.
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Analect 130
/ LINK
"There are many different
kinds of lies and politicians know them all; complete with addendums,
appendixes, and footnotes."
Commentary:
Politics is, first,
the art of the verbal manipulation of reality. It's part an actor's
game, part linquistic prestidigitation. Skirting the truth with
a straight face while seeming to make some looming contradiction
disappear, and all the while not breaking into a sweat are tools
of the trade.
Not being able to fool all of the people all of the time, is
not as crucial as being able to fool some of the people some
of the time.
You only need some of the people to get elected.
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Analect
131 /
LINK
"The mind is, among other things, malleable.
This is why America is in such deep trouble ...simplistic malleability.
It's as if a cabal of fascist sculptors with marxist leanings
operating out of tv news studios took lumps o' proletariat and,
removing the areas of reason, honesty, and self respect fashioned
hideous busts of themselves.
They're going to mount them on pikes along the boulevard of broken
dreams."
Analect 132 / LINK
"Who are the master baiters
of the world but power-anglers who throw out a hook, line, and
sinker to snag constituent fish with the sole intention of satisfying
themselves?"
Analect
133 / LINK
"Certainty is a funny thing
...or not.
"The most certain are the most dangerous.
"In light of the constant flux of the universe, to be certain
is to run counter to life. Things running counter to life are
dangerous... this is absolutely certain."
Commentary:
Who doesn't desire
certainty? This is a widespread delusional impulse from the lazy
side.
God demands more work than that.
If theTao didn't expect us to embrace change, why would
it have stuck us with so much of it?
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Analect
161 / LINK
"For purposes of population control marriage
would be an effective tool, but only if the psychological condition
typically found in couples married for 15 years or better could
be mentally grafted onto the freshly married.
"A great sage once said, 'Headaches are more effective than
condoms in the war against overpopulation and sexually transmitted
diseases.' "
Analect
164 / LINK
"He who beds-down with lies
wakes up lousy with them."
Commentary:
In a given instance,
any man or woman having found the truth an insurmountable hurdle
--or just very uncomfortable-- will often resort to a convenient
lie. This is just human nature.
But the only difference between "l-i-e" and "l-i-c-e"
is a single letter, which (as can be plainly seen) is not much
of a buffer --spelling bees have been blown on as little.
Therefore, to avoid conceptual contamination due to single-letter
typos, one should never become comfortable with lies, even those
as tiny as lice. Otherwise, "He who beds down with lies
wakes up lousy with them."
Note: In political contexts
this analect should be squared. Pertaining to business-political
relationships it should at the very least be cubed.
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Analect 165 / LINK
"Reporters talk about Unified Theory as
if it were something new. The Unified theory hoped for by physicists
can be illustrated simply by a circle. Circles are not exactly
new.
In unified theory everything is resolved to exist neatly inside
this circle --you can count on it, they'll have the math all
figured out, and have edited all the scriptures.
But even this resolve itself is as old as the hills.
Unified Theory reminds me of this line: "Come in, she said,
I'll give you, shelter from the storm."
"Ok, this is all very cosmic," says an exasperated
Roshi Bob, "except there's still that freaking circle!"
Commentary:
Pushing the boundary is
just forever advancing the point at which we realize there really
is something we can't know --namely, whatever lies beyond the
boundary of the annoying and ever-expanding bubble of only-the-things-we-can-know,
which is as inscrutable as an event horizon.
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Analect 170 / LINK
"The answer blowing in the wind may not
be the scent of security, but a whiff of a dangerous narcotic.
Those with noses to smell, let them smell."
Commentary:
In
the 60s we burned a lot of incense --sandalwood, lavender,
patchouli. This was often done just to pleasure the nose
and to be cool. But many times it was also done to cover the
smell of marijuana and stay out of jail.
Governments burn incense too, and they have their special scents
--liberty, democracy, war-on-terror. Sometimes these are
used to cover the smell of totalitarianism.
If you're not going to bother smelling with your nose, you might
as well just cut it off to spite your face and donate it to somebody
who'll use it.
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