…in his Museum without Walls
So this is the thing. I love to write, with fountain pen or keyboard. I keep dozens of notebooks as journals: to record the banal details of my day and often night too. I agree with Meades that everywhere is interesting. I’m never bored of walking the same streets and paths through High Wycombe, whether for practical reasons, or simply the exercise. After my spinal op for Cauda Equina, I can walk miles to strengthen my muscles, and it’s a joy to have received free from the NHS a special walker, which I call my Roadrunner, as it’s so quick and manoeuvrable.
Anyway, here’s something I wrote in bed this morning, before Karleen brought up tea for us both and biscuits for me—I eat small and often, at interval in the day and night, it’s feature of the spinal thing to have compressed my stomach.
“I think it will suit me to live a life of austerity, one that feels natural to my age and health. Or as they used to say in the Boy Scouts “clean in thought, word and deed.” But the definition of clean is according to my own definition, that whatever I do is done consciously and deliberately and not something I’d want to renounce or distance myself from later. This way I grow in “spiritual strength”. In quotes because in my youth I was into Zen, particularly this book.
I got my original copy in Paris, 1962, heavily dog-eared, but the pages never fell out—they have proper bindings, not glued. I thought that Buddhism was the thing, particularly Zen was the thing. I remember a triumphant phrase from somewhere:
J’ai écrasé la caverne des fantômes
which I translate as
I’ve blown the ghosts out of my skull
However there’s nothing like it on Google, which we all assume knows everything*
posted by Ian V M
*but this was written before the mighty AI which tells me this:
or, via Google translate:
“Crushing the cave of ghosts” (or destroying the nest of ghosts) is a traditional Zen Buddhist expression that signifies breaking one’s attachment to emptiness, inaction, or a false sense of mental tranquillity.
In Zen practice, this term refers to a critical stage—and the pitfalls that accompany it:
• The trap of the “cave”: This is a state in which a meditator settles into a flat, stagnant calm—a passive inwardness or a conceptual void. This is known as the “den of demons” or the “cave of ghosts” (in Japanese: *gankutsu*), because the mind remains frozen and sterile within it, cut off from dynamic reality and active engagement.
• The act of “crushing”: Destroying this cave means transcending such false enlightenment—which is, in truth, merely an attachment to stillness—in order to return to the concrete world. This constitutes genuine awakening: an state that neither fears movement nor illusions, but rather moves right through them.