The Red Thread

An exerpt from Bring me the Rhinoceros, by John Tarrant.

Connections That Desire Makes

Friday I tasted life. It was a vast morsel.
A Circu passed the house--still I feel the red
in my mind though the drums are out. The Lawn is full of
south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first
time the river in the tree.
--Emily Dickinson

We must agree on what matters: kissingin public places,
bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion,
literature, generosity, whater a more equitable distribution of
the world's resources, movies, music, freedom of thought,
beatuy, love.
--Salman Rushdie

Desire burns at the core of life, and it's usually complicated. "If you love me then I don't love you," as Carmen sings. One spiritual solution to desire is to flee it. The idea is nonattachment, transcending the body and its feelings--an intellectual form of taking a cold shower. But trying not to think about what you want sets up an inner conflict and is not the same as freedom. Desire might be handled in another way, as a given. What you want is a portion of the world rising out of nothingness to meet you. It has its own purity just by exisitng. It is as real as the Sydney Opera House or a wombat. You can't transcend a wombat. Perhaps desire is necessary for life and fundamental to empathy. You might find freedom by going toward the disturbing force rather than away from it. There is nowhere outside the body you can live, so you might find freedom in the body. One koan about desire consists of a simple question.

The Koan:
Songyuan asked,
"Why can't clear-eyed Bodhisattvas sever the red thread?"

Working With the Koan
The idea here is that a red theme runs though everyone's life. This red thread is passion and sorrow--all the vulnerability and desire that link you to the world. The direction this thread takes in you life is only gradually observable over time. It is the color of blood, of fire, of sex, of intimacy. To connect, to help, to be of use in this world, you have to walk with people. You have to let them act upon you also, and you won't remain unchanged. The interesting thing here is that the person who is attached to desire is the one who is a Bodhisattva, the Buddhist version of a saint who is seeking to help others. Your own desire, your own red thread, might be the source of your empathy for others. Songyuan, who made this koan, was explicit about this. Sometimes he said, "It's the red thread between your legs."

In this koan, there is also a sense that love is the enemy of purity. Mohammad Atta, whose fanaticism led him to pilot one of the airplanes into the World Trade Center, found the presence of woman polluting, and it makes sense that someone who would commit random killings for the sake of an idea wouldn't enjoy life very much. Puritanism takes many forms--counting the worth of people only as numbers, which the corporate and bureaucratic mind loves to do, is puritan because it ignores the necessary uniqueness of each person. Also, when religious parents don't want children to be taught evolutions, there is a puritan fear of being part of the natural world, of losing oneself in nature and desire. During the time of the airplane attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center, John Ashcroft, attourney general of the United States, used to give press conferences in front of a bare-breasted statue of Justice. It evidently embarrassed him to be talking to television audiences with a half-naked woman standing behind him, so he arranged for curtains to cover her when he spoke. Hmmmm. Justice without breasts is a bad sign for mercy.

The red thread is always tangled and resists the simplification of life into formulae. No matter how pure you are, you might change your mind, fall in love, or forget to punish someone. Erotic connections turn life upside down,and when life is too tight, turning things upside down can be a good thing. This koan reists the totalitarian impulse in spiritual paths.

I knew a man whose life had a great deal of the red thread in it, and who was also a Bodhisattva of sorts. There is more than one kind of darkness in his story, and some might think it did not end well, yet for me, it is about the shapes love takes.

Tommy Dorsey was a performing drag queen who discovered an enthusiasm for Zen Buddhism, an enthusiasm that, for some years at least, saved his life. He became a priest, shaved his head, was given the name Issan and wore the formal kimono-like robes that went with the role in Japan. "I still wear a skirt, but I gave up the heels," he said. His dedication surprised many people, and when his teacher made him the abbot of a small Zen center in the Castro District in San Francisco, it was a big event. The Castro was a place for the gay revolution with is arts, its parties, its style and its joie de vive, and Issan was part of these happenings. Then, in the early 1980s, AIDS started to appear and at first no one knew what to make of it. Whatever the disease was, there were very sick young men who were in the streets with nowhere to go.

There was a medieval echo in this plague because it was little understood and because it was often disfiguring. There were people who shunned the sick men--"I'm not letting you eat off my dishes; you'll infect my kids"--and there were hands that reached out to catch the falling bodies and asked for nothing in return. In northern California, lesbians were prominent in the caretaking movement, and there was a sorrowful repetition of the old motif of a woman holding the body of a young man. It was nursing time and funeral time. It was red thread time, when desire and kindness and death were intimately twined together, and the puritans had very little to contribute.

One day, Issan brought home with him a man who had become too sick for his roommate to manage. The man was called JD and seemed to be going down fast. Issan thought that he and his friends at the Zen Center (whom he consulted beforehand, though without really explaining how much everyone's life was about to change) would take care of JD until JD died.

Issan didn't think of anything he did as noble or good--being good in conventional ways wasn't his strong suit anyway--and this more or less involuntary act of kindness seems to me deeper than a thought-out choice might be. He knew a lot about desire and love, and this decision came over him the way desire would. It was a red-thead moment and also a moment of simple fellow feeling. Issan's thought was that JD would get a good, dignified death in a few weeks, and, after he was gone, Issan intended to haul someone else home.

But JD had other ideas. He became delirious and paranoid, manifested many terrifying symptoms, and then revived. He wrangled himself a motorized wheelchair in which he hot-rodded around the Castro. He took this chariot by BART, which is the Bay Area's Rapid Transit system, to Oakland and came back with an iguana. He demanded martinis. He eventually traveled to Florida to say goodbye to his family. JD smuggled his pet onto the plane and somehow lost him there, after which he locked himself in the bathroom at thirty thousand feet. And in Florida, eventually, he died. This is another thing about the red thread: if you help people, they will be unpredictable and do inconvenient and, possibly, dangerous things. When you take in a person with AIDS, dementia might be a factor on top of tuberculosis and shingles, and other, stranger diseases, yet even so, beauty might be linking everyone concerned.

Issans's fate was interlaced with others like JD. Being Issan meant being tangled up with the consolations and transgressions of desire--he carried that power and that blessing. He had a lover whom Phil Whalen called Sweet Baby James, but not to Issan's face. Issan had known James for years and considered him one of his trancendental experiences. James was a street kid who could indeed be charming and then again could go crazy and roller-skate around the zendo and threaten people. Issan thought he must have caught AIDS during a weekend involving "James, a cheap motel, a pottle of cheap gin--no, no, it was a bottle of good gin, actually. I can't stand the cheap stuff." This was the sort of adventure that had something dark and unconscious about it and that nevertheless was also threaded through with what was exciting and sympathetic about Issan.

It is not necessary for desire to kill you. Issan was killed by circumstances and luck, not desire. He was like someone who is in a market, picking up a bottle of wine, when it is bombed. You could say that the desire for wine killed that person, but if she had been out buying bread, would you say that she was killed by her desire for bread? You need courage to find out what you really want in life, and what you want might be dangerous. But life is dangerous anyway, and there is a beauty in becoming more and more fully who you are, in paying attention to, as well as being pulled along by, your red thread. For me, the story of Issan's life is not just about sex. The red-thread quality lay in his being emphatically who he was, and how he brought that sexy drag-queen quality of his to looking after people. The red thread was most visible in the moment of picking people up off the street and finding a home for those who had none.

Issan seemed to contemplate his own demise very little; it was just present and looming. This did not seem to be denial. He would complain: "Oh it hurts! It's too cold. They never get the pleats right. The garlic is very strong, don't you think?" and there was something dramatic and endearing about it. He complained about real things, yet not about his fate. Issan proved an exception to Montaigne's rule that no one is a hero to his servants: those close to him found him happy and loving, though inclined to turn their lives upside down.

My favorite story of his dying is this: Toward the end, Issan needed assistance walking and a friend was helping him back from the bathroom. They paused on the first-floor landing. The friend, a person himself so fiercely nonconformist that he was nicknamed "the feral monk," was overwhelmed by feeling, a perviously unheard-of event. He took a deep breath and said, "I'll miss you Issan." Issan turned his large, liquid, seductive eyes on his friend and said, "I'll miss you too. Where are you going?"

Kindness and wildness is a poignant combination. It is without premeditation and does not ask for our good opinion or seek payment for good deeds. Maitri, the AIDS hospice Issan founded, became an institution, which grew and helped many. There are people who think Issan was a saint, and even people who think that after his death he interceded for them in heaven and cured them of AIDS by his blessing. I think he would have enjoyed that, the way he might have enjoyed someone finding the face of Lana Turner on a tortilla. The more interesting point for me is the one about the red thread--that everyone has some sainthood possible, and that the unfolding of their goodness might sometimes be through their transgressions, through what is wild and imperfect in them. Issan seems never for an instant to have thought of his life or his death as a tragedy. The point of this koan might be found in truly living your life rather than living it perfectly or even respectably.

Eventually Issan died in his temple. He died before JD, the patient he had first brought in. I sat with his body one night after his death. He was laid out in a white kimono--white for death. The windows were open to cool the rooms and the white curtains flapped and sighed. Every now and then I would think he spoke and begin to ask, "Say again, Issan?" and then realize that, no, it was just very quiet. He and I were both very quiet. Then friends came in and embraced him and stroked his cold cheek and wept and spoke to him as if he were alive. Someone had told him that they thought AIDS terribly unfair.

"You get what you deserve," he replied, "whether you deserve it or not."