‘Attachment, Non-Attachment’

by Shunryu Suzuki

32 page MS book, black stick ink on Zerkall paper, gouache illustrations, tan Ingres endpapers, Somerset Toned White card cover, Indian Hemp Beige jacket. Completed in December 2023

I return once again to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki for this essay. During the summer of 2023 I revisited the Klingspor Museum in Offenbach, Germany, and was impressed anew by being able to handle Rudolf Koch’s stupendous Gospels. In this book I attempt something close to the dense black pages achieved by Koch, especially in his Matthew Gospel, although I am a long way from being able to effect his emotional spontaneity. Besides, the script I use is difficult to do as it relies on being able to maintain a flat pen angle throughout the stroke, so the writing is slow with each page taking about 5 hours to complete.

As I wrote, I found some of the things Suzuki says rather odd - for instance, his assertion that daytime and night-time are the same thing, which seems manifestly untrue. But I think the wider point is that ascribing higher value to particular states of being is a kind of attachment that prevents one living in the moment, and being alive to possibility. I find a resonance in the writing process itself, where one strives for ‘perfection’, but at the same time must relax into the accidental. As if to emphasize the point, I made a spelling mistake on the penultimate line of the book and which under other circumstances I would have felt it necessary to correct, but in this case I was able to camouflage the error and consider it a living embodiment of the spirit of the essay.