Introduction and Alternatives

INTRO:

Hello and thank you for visiting WORD AND WORDLESS.


It seems we are on the verge of not quite imaginable transitions. For a moment, we feel we can almost master the means to realize dreams. Timelessness could unfold within time. Sanity might prevail. Or insanity. We feel the nearness of collapse and void. We shiver on an edge where extremes are inseparable. The world is changing us.

Whatever Trungpa Rinpoche taught, he was never conveying information or promulgating some view. It always felt that he was opening a door right before your eyes to worlds that are almost familiar but somehow far more gorgeous, far more menacing, far more seductive, far more expansive, far more dire.

Towards the end of his life, he said: “I have given you all you need to know to change the world.”


This blog will present/explore moments and possibilities of that.

Contributions and comments are most welcome.


Douglas J. Penick




Alternatives  1.

The reader is feverish, lying on a rough cot, drifting in and out of a sweaty sleep. Then, suddenly he is walking down a narrow murky corridor until he finds himself standing in a doorway. The dim room before him is made of crude log walls and lit by a single candle.

A tall woman wearing an elaborately embroidered red kimono is bent forward, facing away from him. The kimono is pulled down to her mid-back, and the long stream of her black lustrous hair falls down across bright pink skin. She is stooped over a small wooden table, washing her face carefully in a blue and white porcelain bowl besides which a bronze mirror is propped in a crimson lacquer stand. The reader finds the scene subtly erotic in a way made familiar by Japanese woodblock prints.

Very slowly, the woman begins to turn her head towards the reader, as if to look at him over her shoulder. Then he sees that her skin is an absolutely even flamingo pink and it shines in a completely unnatural way. As slowly she turns her head further, he sees that she has only a single, large inquisitive eye in the center of her forehead. Her nose is even and elegant, and when she smiles slightly, he sees that there is only a single sharp-pointed tooth, dazzling white, in the center of her wide mouth.

As she raises her head to the reader, in a delicate gesture poised between seduction and offering she opens the red kimono which rests below her shoulders. In this way, she shows him the single breast in the center of her chest, small and perfect with a tiny rose pink nipple. Her gaze, though almost solicitous, is intent.

The reader feels a certain inner struggle as he stares openly at a kind of being he has perhaps heard of but has never been able to imagine clearly. He knows that if she speaks to him now, she will say:

“You see, this is just how I am.”


ALTERNATIVES 2.

From the Empress:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GINuyXYm6n0&feature=related