joyce, zen, brain
Zen koans calm the mind (and arguably the brain) not by emptying it (impossible) but by occupying its seach-and-understand impulse with an unsovable riddle. Likewise, Joyce calms our mind/brain's craving for hero-plot-resolution with gnomonic (incomplete) characters, events, and endings.
posted by Robert Frumkin at 6:39 AM
1 Comments:
However, Joyce elicits in some of us the desire to reach out into the critical apparatus and into the works cited to somehow gain clarity--as many Zen students spend varying amounts of time in the vast corpus of Zen literature, to gain a fuller understanding--even when counseled to just sit and respond immediately to the koan posed by the teacher.
I don't think we necessarily crave hero/plot resolution, but we do crave information. I imagine the text riddled with hyperlinks. Sometimes it's necessary to just attend to and enjoy the text (follow the breath) and not follow the thoughts the enter the mind which might be resolved by the Annotation or other critical work.
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