This bears repeating: I keep coming back to the idea that all creativity is an act of distortion. I’ve just been reading Harry Mathews’ epistolary novel The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium. One of the story’s protagonists – Tro-tsi Twang Panattapam McCaltex, from the former Italian colony of Pan-Nam in Southeast Asia – writes in her imperfect English a Zen story well-known in her native Pan.
In the po test by whiwhich the 6° arch of zen was chose, there were poems. One say, “Dis-like roil dust. The probes remove the dust.” The “head wing” poems are their. It said, “He ‘s the mind. Where, is dust?” Some lat-er Pan masters: a monk who was stak-ing bats, a young-er monk up to his id in the dust – “Are you a-staking-bats?” “No. Why?”
[…] I’m interested in John Cage but I’m not interested in Zen, so I don’t want to get too tangled up in origins. When reading the Pan Zen parables in The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium I wondered at first if Mathews was using Cage as a source, or if the two of them had each read the same, common book of Zen stories. After the briefest of research, it was obviously the former case. […]