The cat starts screaming around two in the morning. Not the cartoon yowl. The real thing — a sound with a body in it, wanting made audible, somewhere down past the citrus trees where the dark is total. Another cat answers. Then there’s the scuffle, the brief violence, and whatever follows violence in their world, which is more want. By first light it’s quiet and the cat is asleep on the stone like nothing happened, like it was never anything but peace out there.
I have sat with my own mind for fifty years trying to get behind a sound like that. To find where it starts. The spring it runs out of, before it becomes a scream in the yard or a thought in the skull. I’ll tell you what I found. There is no spring. You go up the river looking for the clean origin and the water is the same all the way to the source. And the water is the wanting, and the search is the wanting too.
People come to the cushion expecting calm. That’s the retail version, the one on the bookstore display — the serene man at the eye of the storm, untouched. I have never once heard a serious teacher describe it that way. You sit down and you are a swirling mass of crazy inside a swirling mass of crazy, and the practice is not to still it. The practice is to stop pretending there’s a version of you that stands outside it. Thoughts arise and fall. Wanting arises and falls. You watch. And then — this is the part the display copy leaves out — you notice the watching is more swirl. There is no clean witness. The one who came to observe the desire is made of the same stuff as the desire.
So you go back further. Before the thing you want — the woman, the light on the water, the next page, the cat across the yard. Before that, before the object, there’s the one who wants. And before the one who wants? You keep going, expecting at last to reach the still place, the bare ground the whole river pours out of. And at every level it’s already there ahead of you. Already reaching. Before the object, before the self, before the split into the one who sees and the thing seen — wanting, already, all the way down.
Desire is not the thing. It is the thing before the thing. And before that thing. And before that one too. You do not reach the bottom of it because it is the bottom. It is what depth is made of.
The cat is not innocent of this and neither is the lemon tree. We like to imagine the animal lives in some grace we fell out of, some pre-desiring present where it simply is. Listen to it at night. There is nothing graceful down there. The lemon tree is not serenely turning its face to the sun. It is wrenching every cell toward the light because the cells that don’t get there die, and the root is forcing through clay by the same blind logic. That’s not peace. That’s the mechanism, with the dream peeled off it. The cat screaming and the root splitting stone are the same event the scream in your own chest is — want, desire, before the story gets wrapped around it to make it bearable or noble or yours.
And here is the part that took me the longest to stop arguing with. It isn’t mine. It isn’t the cat’s. The wanting doesn’t belong to the organism that happens to be doing it. It runs through. The cat is a place where it happens. The lemon tree is a place where it happens. I am a place where it happens, this hand on this table at this hour is a place it happens. The universe reaching to be here and now. It’s what the universe knows how to do. Ten zillion little openings and the same thing pouring through all of them, wanting to find out what it is, which is wanting.
The human is one more item in that. We make things the cat can’t — the novel, the cathedral, the bomb. Higher bandwidth, finer aperture. But the capacity to create doesn’t lift us out of the universe’s toolbelt. The wanting found out it could make symphonies, so now it makes those too, by the same pressure that drives the root. There’s no promotion in it. The novelist and the lemon tree are doing the identical thing at different resolutions.
I suspect the universe is no more impressed by Manhattan than by a meadow of wildflowers. Both are reefs. Both are something the wanting secreted through whatever organism was standing there — coral laid down by a million human apertures or a million plant ones, and no preference between them, because preference is a tool we keep in the belt and not a frame the thing is using to grade us. The genius of the city is real, and it is real to us, and from any distance at all it is markings on a stone.
Some suggest the world is cold. The indifferent universe, the hard floor under the warm human story. But that’s the same mistake as the other one — the mistake of the people who think it loves them. Cold is a thing you feel about it. The universe has no thermostat. It is not failing to care; care is a word that doesn’t reach where it lives. Not cold, not warm. Prior to the axis that cold and warm are even points on. There’s no floor to call hard because floor is already a position, already a self that needs ground to stand on, and we are upstream of the self here. At the thing before the thing.
You do not transcend this. That’s the last costume, the finest one, the one Zen gets accused of and the one the cushion will sell you if you’re not paying attention — the deft move where you see the wanting and step free of it. But seeing it is wanting to see it. The reach for the ground beyond the reaching is the reaching. The fifty years I spent paddling upstream toward the source were the source, displaying itself, finding out through me what it was. Not wasted. Not redeemed either. Just the universe wanting, in the shape of a man who wanted to know what was under the wanting.
The cat wakes at dusk and the whole thing starts again. It does not start because the cat decided. It starts the way the tide comes in. I sit with it the way I’ve sat with everything, which is the only thing I know how to do and is also, I understand now, one more place where it happens.
There’s no line to end on that closes this. If there were, I’d want it. And that wanting would point me to exactly where I still am.