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MyBody.exe

© Lewis laCook

Back when I was a lonely geek teenager fluttering around the very margins of society, I wanted to be Allen Ginsberg. He was a role model unlike any I'd encountered previously in my young life: he had the authority of tremendous scholarship behind him (he was reeking with what the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan termed "The Voice of the Father"), but it was an authoritative scholarship unsanctioned by "square" society; he was gay, sought spiritual illumination through exotic vehicles (like peyote, ayahuasca and Buddhism); and he seemed to be the most tolerant man in the world, at least to the eyes of a misanthropic sixteen-year-old. So I tried to be like Ginsberg as much as possible. I began to write poetry. I began to seek out spiritual illumination through exotic vehicles. And I began to meditate, devouring text after text of practical methodology on the subject.

I soon encountered a problem, however. Whenever I sat down to get my lotus on and stare into the intimate yet cosmic blankness of my original face, no matter how hard I tried to remain focused on the nothingness at the heart of all things, I got bored stiff. Literally--you try sitting in the lotus position for hours at a time.

So I wrote Allen, trying to figure out what I should do about this. I told him about my spiritual dilemma. How could I truly appreciate the wonder of existence without clinging to phenomena? How could I tear through the glittering layers of maya--illusion--that surrounded the mystery of life, when all that happened was I got bored? Was I just some over-stimulated American booby so jaded with his own culture that he had to plunder other traditions in order to give his empty life some semblance of meaning?

Allen wrote back, and what he wrote was such a succulent little caveat of brilliance that it's stuck with me all these years, and has remained a sort of ethical guidepost by which I've marked each successive stage of my life. It's colored everything--from how I go about my day-to-day business to my approach to art and literature.

Allen wrote: "Examine the texture of the boredom--get inside the boredom--you might find in the end that it's not boredom at all..."

I bring this up to highlight one of the more striking offerings in the second

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