Zazen - By Vanessa Veselka Page 0,2

his clothes. His arms were raised and flailing. I thought of Buddhists who can sit, quiet as wellwater, and burn like candles, like in that famous photo where the Zen monk is sitting cross-legged on fire in the middle of an intersection while cars drive past and people watch. Everything near him is blurry, the cars, the people, because they’re moving. But he’s not. He is absolutely sharp because he is absolutely still. Every detail of his robe, his eyelids and the oil from the smoke is absolutely clear. I first saw that picture in high school. I remember telling Credence about it.

“On fire?”

“On fire,” I said.

“You’d have to move.”

“They don’t move.”

“Della,”—like I was doing it on purpose—“Della, their bodies would make them move. They’d have to.”

His voice thinned and climbed.

“It’s biological,” he squealed. “They wouldn’t have any control over it.”

In 1969 in Prague it took Jan Palach three days to die because he wasn’t trained to just sit there. It was more like what Credence said. He had to move. It was biological.

After I found the photo of the blazing man with the flailing arms, I began to look for eyewitness accounts of people setting themselves on fire. Hell, I figured, if you can’t trust some hand-me-down, unverifiable, anonymous hearsay, what can you trust? There were more of them than I thought. There was one yesterday. He set himself on fire to protest a recommendation from a sub-committee to legislate a three percent quota in alternate grain production.

There were Americans, dancing around like sparklers on the fourth of July. There were Basque nationalists, German priests and Taiwanese publishers. One entry in Wikipedia said, “Kathy Change self-immolated to protest ‘the present government and economic system and the cynicism and passivity of the people.’” And underneath, the afterthought, “MIT student Elizabeth Shin may have committed suicide in this manner.”

One self-immolator was described as disgruntled. Following other names were comments like “supposedly for the same reason.”

I started putting them up on the walls too. I bought a bag of fortune cookies and raided the fortunes. On the back of each I wrote, underneath their lucky numbers in red, the name of the burned.

Jan Palach

Your warmth encourages honesty at home:

718253741.10

Thich Quang Duc

Magic will be created when an unconventional friend comes to visit:

816223141.24

Elizabeth Shin

Your future is as boundless as the lofty heaven:

811283645.15

Norman Morrison

You will be reunited with old friends:

615213840.12

Kathy Change

Your nature is intense, magnetic and passionate:

712293644.27

I taped the fortunes to pins like flags and stuck them in the maps. Each city that inspires immolation gets a tiny white flag to flutter. Tiny little surrender. Tiny little surrenders. Supposedly, the heart of the Vietnamese monk from ’63 never burned but shriveled to a tiny liver. It is held hostage (kept safe as a national treasure) by the Reserve Bank of Vietnam. Tiny liver hearts. I pinned them to the walls. Katydids flutter all around.

Credence came in one day, looked at the wall and suggested I sign up for yoga classes. He offered to pay. I knew that Credence offering to pay for yoga classes was a sign of the box-mall apocalypse. Hey everyone, how about some yoga classes for Della and blackberry smoothies all around. Today, I’m feeling it. I’m feeling the Rapture! Credence waves magnanimously. A seal breaks and fire pours out.

Credence agreed it might be good for me to work in a more positive environment. I don’t know why he thinks watching Wal-Mart crush impoverished communities isn’t a positive experience. Listening to the snap of infrastructure? Cheering when something essential resists failure more slowly—strain…strain…(screaming fans)…strain…SNAP! The architecture of a new revolution now a palace of Popsicle sticks blasted to matted straw, each stick a darling to its mother who can now buy a full set of patio furniture for less than the cost of a box of tampons.

Once I burned an ant with a magnifying glass. It moved when it caught fire because it wasn’t trained to sit there. The straw it crawled on, its very own Popsicle stick palace, blackened and burned. You have to sit there or it doesn’t count. But it moved. That’s how I knew it was alive; that’s how I knew what I did was wrong. Little ant? Little ant? And me crying all night long with ash on my hands. Popsicle sticks. Matted straw. Grassroots. Hallelujah.

2 Pregnant Rats

It was decided that it would be good for me to restrict my job search.

“Maybe just to restaurants,” Annette said.

“Or even just vegetarian restaurants,” said Credence. “Nothing too fast-paced. Maybe