What words, what notes can net what one feels in those too-brief blissful moments? Grasshopper transcendence, [William Carlos] Williams called it, as he caught their translucent wings whirring up into the light before the roar of those milling crowds forced their entry like some thief.
– Paul Mariani, “Snow Moon over Singer Island”
I once ran into David Carradine in a gas station in Southern California. This was in the early 1970s, long before his role in Kill Bill, when he was still best known for his role in the television series, Kung Fu, in which he was called Caine, or Grasshopper.
But this doesn’t have anything to do with that Grasshopper. Nor with the cocktail supposedly invented by Philip Guichet, owner of Tujague’s, in 1918. If that’s what you’re looking for, you can stop reading now.
Many people when they come to Zen practice or any sort of so-called “spiritual” practice are looking for transcendence. As in Transcendental Meditation, or even the Transcendentalism of the early American Romantics, who first imported the “wisdom of the East,” in which the small self approaches some sort of communion with the Great Self or Atman. But we don’t offer that either.
I have told this story before, but back in 2002 or so, when I was answering correspondence for Robert, someone asked, “Have you ever experienced an alternate state during zazen?” Robert answered, “Our everyday state is our alternate state; in zazen we experience our natural state.”
And yet there is a kind of quickening that we experience in zazen sometimes. Sometimes it’s called satori, awakening. Or as Kodo Sawaki called satori: “a thief entering an empty house.”
I always liked the anecdote about the young monk going up the mountain to a retreat when he met another monk coming down the mountain from the same retreat. He asked the monk coming down if he had experienced satori and if so what was it like? The one coming down simply dropped his bag. “What will you do now with your experience?” asked the young monk. The other picked up his bag and continued down the mountain.
This is Zen transcendence.
In the last few days I came across a phrase in Paul Mariani’s biography of Wallace Stevens in which he compares the big transcendence that Stevens longed for in his poetry with the “slight transcendence” that William Carlos Williams achieved in his poetry. (Stevens meanwhile traded the bravado of his aesthetic dandyism for a secret deathbed conversion to Catholicism.) Mariani calls Williams’s version a “grasshopper transcendence.” Up into the air to catch the light, then back down to earth again. One monk goes up the mountain; another comes down. But they are the same monk.
This is a nice phrase, grasshopper transcendence, and I’m going to steal it because it reminds me of Caine, fresh from his training at Shaolin Mountain, where Bodhidharma himself sat with the mystery, before coming to the American West. Little Grasshopper, that quickening leap that we sometimes feel with satori.
But we always come back down to earth. This is what we experience over and over again in zazen. We can call it a leap of faith, or an epiphany, or simply a glimpse into our natural state when we feel alive, alive to our life, to nature, to our environment, to our situation, to our own imagination even. But alive.
And now I’m going to think about going to Tujague’s in the French Quarter for a cold, refreshing Grasshopper.
Kyosaku!
— Richard Collins
The Grasshopper. Invented by Philip Guichet at Tujague's, New Orleans, 1918.