Dear Breyten … a tribute by Antony Osler

Dear Breyten

Do you remember Paris all those years ago, after the Deshimaru morning zendo, when you were told to explain Zen to this wide-eyed young South African? I doubt it. We sat in a coffee bar somewhere in the city watching the steam drift up from our mugs to our nostrils, gossiping about the old Master, about Japanese Zen, South African wine, braaivleis, exile and who knows what else.

But I have been grateful for your rekindled kindness over these last twenty years or so. For your gracious encouragement. And for your abiding passion for the dry open spaces of the Karoo where the long steam trains once joined heaven and earth.

So you’ll be pleased, I think, to know the place still. The moon rising over the koppies into the nightly stillness, the soft call of the eagle owl. Storms still frighten the children here, the donkey boiler still boils, the floorboards still creak. There are still long drops and candles, neighbours still help when the veld catches fire, and I can piss on the grass under a necklace of stars.

The rock engravings are still with us, the kraals, furrows and windmills. We still hear the news on the radio in the kitchen and our hearts still break over distant conflict. A place of unpretentious people speaking your beloved Afrikaans, people who are often derided as simple and unsophisticated but who manifest an intelligence finely tuned to the rhythms of this land.

In so many ways this is a life of distance and solitude. A brilliantly inconvenient old-fashioned existence far from the highway, little altered by changes in fashion, the outcome of elections and the promises of politicians. And over it all the grace of silence.

 

Cover of an exhibition catalogue, Stevenson, Cape Town, 2018

It is deep inside this landscape that we do our Zen practice. A zendo in the veld. The practice of rock and sky, of inside-ness. Honouring our ancestors; Bushman and Boer, springbok, dassie and mongoose. Knowing nothing. Listening. We take off our shoes when the gong is rung and in our rough stone-walled zendo the zabutons still line up meticulously on the planks of the poplar floor. We bow like rivers, chant like blue cranes and sit like mountains. The Buddha in his niche smiles kindly at our foolishness. And sometimes the walls of the citadel tumble into birdsong.

I love, unreservedly, those that come here on retreat, for their pain and their willingness to be touched by the ten thousand things of this world. And there is something about the spacious immensity of the Karoo that allows this to happen – landscape and the zendo together. All we do in our Zen is to re-discover our innate natural connectedness. What more could we ask for?

Of course, however familiar this place, change is everywhere. The post office has gone, and the railway trucks. Gone are the trains that rumbled out of sight on the way from Norval’s Pont to Hugoslaagte. Gone the horse carts, the karretjiesmense, and the party lines for the telephone.

Now you too; gone. We light incense for you in the zendo and say your name. I’m sorry I won’t have a chance to wear my black funeral suit, which is getting quite a bit of wear these days, but my robes will do. Each morning we chant from the Heart Sutra; Gone Gone, Gone Beyond, Beyond Beyond, Here! The Gone-and-yet of all this – down the aisle, dancing in the dark.

As you said only recently, when writing about your late brother and sister, ‘Nothing that is is ever lost – nor you, nor me, nor what we call this life.’ I hear your voice this morning, in the call of the bokmakierie, in the stream running through the poplars, in your asking me once more, ‘How you are you, my brother in silence?’

It is spring here, Breyten, and your beloved swallows have returned to last year’s home in the eaves of our house. You will not be there to greet them when they fly back to the warmth of Catalonia in April but please know that, when they do, they will find again the space you left for them. As you wrote in one of our last letters,

‘The swallows carve the dusk with flight
They have come north from Africa again and
Again. The old nests have become the new and
The birds are one soaring continuity.
Who has seen a swallow fall?
Their journey tilts over the bowl
Of the sky without spilling a single star.’

Thank you, oubobjaan, take care of yourself out there, whatever self means and wherever there is.
With bows of gratitude on behalf of us all,

Antony

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FEATURED IMAGE: Feliz paisaje de dia (Happy Day landscape). Painting by Breyten Breytenbach.