• chapter three •
Who made who, who made you?
Who made who, ain’t nobody told you
Who made who, who made you?
If you made them and they made you
Who picked up the bill and who made who
Ain’t nobody told you
Who made who
Who made you
Who made who
Who made who
Yeah
Nobody told you
—AC/DC
“Who do you think you are?’ was an old schoolyard taunt—and a surprisingly good question. You awake as a being that is being itself, verb not noun, with no fixed substance, no boundary. “What is Buddha?” someone asks. “Who are you?” is the reply.
“What is this self?” (or even more simply, “Who are you?”) is the fundamental koan, echoed a thousand times through the records of Zen. Mu is another way into the whole territory of Who? but offers “you” no handhold—it has already generously swallowed hands, feet, nose, eyes, mind, mountains, rivers, and the whole great earth.
Or Linji: “Everyone! There is a true person of no rank, coming and going from the faces of each of you. After a while, it never goes away. Who is it? Look, Look!”
That one is too humble even to have a name, or gender, even though it is as present and distinct in detail as our own faces. Names—and even “me” and “you”—make a kind of cut in the flesh of intimacy, in the wholeness of the world. But they also call us into being. Perhaps it is ranking—this is better, that is unsatisfactory—that so fillets the whole moments of life and leaves us stuck with the slivers of better and worse. The true person of no rank can recognize none of the peculiarly human sense of being exceptional or entitled that seems to come all too easily, leaving us so isolated, an exile among the species of the earth.
“It comes and goes from all our faces,” says Linji—sometimes clear to us, sometimes fogged, sometimes brilliant in the flash of an eye or a baby’s smile that knows us, sometimes glinting in the dew on grass or the smell of rain on dust. Then a crow utters a sound over Lake Biwa—and suddenly the true person of no rank looks out steadily through our face.
The Koan of Human Being
“I” is the koan every human being is working on from very early days, the everyday undeclared mystery of “I am.” No one can elude it completely; our consciousness of self, identity, self-conscious awareness—once you turn to look at it—is strange all over the earth. If this consciousness of self is not completely limited to us among the animals, then certainly it is unique in the tremendous life of its own that it assumes in us, consumes in us. A lifetime’s worth! There’s reason to suggest that it not only marks us out among the species, but also threatens to alienate us from the earth and exile us from the community of all beings.
And “You” is the koan that both brings “I” into being and heals it back into relationship—into a communion of subjects, instead of a world contrived by thought into a collection of things. The red thread is what conjoins “you” and “I”—and confirms them to be not two and even less than one.
Children have a beautifully fluid sense of “the other.” A small girl rushes away down across the beach ahead of her mother joyfully singing out, “I am the beach! I am the sand! I am the waves!” What is “other” can be so close to being no other at all that even you can sound too distancing—touching on rude. I once watched two small children playing with a ginger kitten named Sweet Dreams, who frisked repeatedly out of reach and finally skidded under a couch to escape their competing demands and to pat at an interesting-looking drift of dust.
“Sweet Dreams, Sweet Dreams, where are you?” crooned the little girl.
“Don’t call Sweet Dreams You!” her little brother reproved.
Children generate natural koans with ease. I was completing peaceful midmorning laps of a pool one morning when a busload of eleven-year-old boys arrived from a local school and began plowing and churning noisily up and down the lane next to me, setting the lane markers wildly bobbing. A plump boy came puffing heroically to a stop at the end of the lane, ripping at his goggles, saying to his friend who was about to take off, “I can’t see with these goggles!”
“They can see you but,” his friend shot back with a grin.
“You,” the very signifier of relationship, can be the most tender of words. After all, there is no love without the word. When we feel affectionate toward something inanimate, it soon starts to become a you; familiarity breeds a mutual belonging. We’re people—when our heart’s stirred by something that also settles it deeply, you comes to our lips. When, after some time away, I come back over the brow of the hill and can see our green roof down there among the trees, mist twisting and rising from the valley below, it’s not so much I’m back as You, here! In that moment, who is who?
A sense of presence calls up the sense of “you.” Trees, mountains, creeks become presence, everything grows presence when we become present ourselves. There is a mysterious “thou-ness” to the earth, the natural world, and all its intimate detail. Clouds, stars, trees—even that dark, emu-shaped hole at the heart of the Milky Way in Southern Hemisphere skies; relationship forms with whatever calls us up, if you’re human. And is most completely realized when you and I, and the idea “you” and “I,” are experienced as marvelously empty.
Another story. A woman deep in a Zen retreat took her koan Mu into a walk among redwoods—trees so high the encounter with them is with huge soaring trunks, sough of wind, that piney smell with just a hint of mold, and the gray-green gloom of branches knitted together far out of sight.
Sunlight broke through here and there. Without warning, for no reason, the solid fact of trees shifted into transparent, shimmering energy that surprised but did not startle her. There seemed to be no one there to startle. A bell rang, and this no one made her way back inside. She noticed the delicate scent of urine that always lingered in the cedar of the women’s bathroom—but noticed it now with something like affection; opinions about such things were gone.
Something in her resisted wrangling this nameless experience into words of her own but silently asked the redwoods and slight stink of pee for any words of their choosing. Whatever spoke simply said, “No other.”
“No other” brings us to what the red thread so richly confirms, which is how passing strange are being and emptiness (the and is provisional; it disappears): Your life is also my life, the red thread makes clear; our intimate connection to life and to every other being cannot be cut; no being exists except in relation to every other being; and beingness is legion upon the earth. In the largest and most generous sense, for every one of us, there is no other.
This “only I, alone and holy” leaves no one out, because it radiates out from the joy of “no-self.” Consciousness generally sets about identifying and singling out “things” relative to “me.” Realization heals this divide and finds the clarity of each thing exactly in its no-thingness—its emptiness or seamlessness, its robust wholeness with all that is. In this sense, “you” is the place where “no other” is discovered and resolved.
Language stutters a bit here, no doubt because language itself serves largely to discern and articulate tangible distinctions within what is undivided. Terms enact these perceived or persuaded differences and go on to subtly replace what first inspired the act of naming, as with a river, tree, or pebble. Yet as Leonard Michaels points out, “The magnificent horror of the volcano, and the blinding, silvery beauty of the rain were there long before terms.” Rivers, potatoes, faces, toenails, cesspools, orange blossoms all survive their “termination” in words with perfect ease, and happily exist, just as they are, free of the restraints we let names impose. Who is imposed on at that moment?
Potatoes, for example, offer no objection to being called—well, anything of your choosing. Please, check this for yourself. They remain entirely themselves, continuing with their own quiet, unbroken Zazen (all the while growing eyes and wrinkles and shoots) that has no intention to trouble anyone.
When we approach anything just as it is, minus names or terms, presence can begin to enter awareness—though who is who at once becomes less easy to sort out. Take a plane tree growing in a city street. How commonplace, how simply there they are, until you stop to be with one, its actual presence. The trunk—suddenly you see how huge it is, so smoothly curved and richly patterned, with unfathomable shifts and spots of color in the bark. The twisted knotty root, powering from the pavement, worn and scarred in places from contact with the human world, but indefatigably itself. So present, and yet, when its presence is admitted, its startling thusness admits you to yourself more intimate and nameless, and this mutuality makes clear “There is no other.”
No other, because there is no self, yet this no-self is personal. Emptiness is entangled not just with the red thread of body, sexuality, bleeding, passions, suffering, and mortality, but also with “you,” “me,” and the relationship called “love.”
Love remains blessedly quiet as a word, in Zen, and I am grateful for that fact. Left so rarely sounded, it is freed to speak itself eloquently in the open, unspoken offer of the self that marks maturity in Zen. Realization experiences the full charge and gift of being here, and this is of inestimable value; but realized behavior is what finally counts. I have no trouble calling all of this love, but better than using the word is seeing its action.
When the word love is overused, its currency is debased and slips into self-adornment. Un-debased, love is a word that inspires and also chastens action and seems to know what’s needed faster than thought. We endure a slow destitution when the word is hollowed out by overuse: What can take hold or thrive among hyperinflated expressions of “love” and cloying, stumbling detours of sentimentality? I think of the disturbing proliferation of teddy bears and other cuddly toys in recent times to mark the place where raw adult loss and empathy attempts and somehow fails to be expressed. Possibly fails even to be coherently felt.
The Koan “You”
Zen came west in the twentieth century and met with a worldview that, among other ideas foreign to its place of origin, once had strongly at its center a personal God, usually addressed by the personal pronoun him, and a fundamental understanding that this God is loving—indeed, is love itself. If this worldview has suffered the attrition of a steadily desacralizing, secular worldview across several centuries, the idea of unconditioned love persists as an all but sacred residual reference point for what is right, true, transforming, reconciling, and redeeming. In other words, love is still held forth in the West as the closest thing to salvation—though a tin-pot rival has emerged in the avalanche of digital devices and their vaunted connectivity (with which they distance or replace real contact).
The cultural orientation of Asian Zen was carefully distanced from this word love that nevertheless flows as bloodstream through the red thread. Confucian ideals of filial duty, mutual dependency, and subordination of the self to social cohesion blended readily with a Buddhist ideal of equanimity understood as achieved nonattachment, the cooling of the passions to a neutral universal friendliness no longer disturbed by an ungoverned self. Add to this a monastic setting that enacted an ascetic removal from the world, and a formal, diplomatic distance from love becomes complete.
Not that this in any way could have truly stopped in its tracks or ever severed all that the red thread signifies and brings to life! But the vigor of the Western ideal of love—taken to the level of ultimate and redemptive mystery in the term the passion, meaning the loving and sacrificial suffering of Christ, but also valorizing romantic love as personal salvation—presents a very different energy. Two waves coming together at different angles, colliding and unifying in the same moment . . . Zen meets the West, and in that context “you” (and “I”) now has a charge upon it that was far less intense in its Eastern context. “You” becomes a vital matter to resolve in the Red Thread koan.
Self and No-Self
Zazen generously doubts and in doubting heals the sense of a separate self, letting us into the shared, inclusive, undivided emptiness revealed in everything met in a wide and unpresuming attention. This realization of “emptiness” overflows with fullness and vivid detail emptied of the confining view of “separateness.”
Traditionally Buddhism has had little to say about the personal “shape” of this embodied experience of replete emptiness. It’s a remarkable moment: No self in front of anything and yet someone breathing, laughing, crying, or agog in wonder. What may we say about the vestigial yet utterly distinct sense of self that remains, no longer troubling anything at all? A perfect fit. This personal self belongs more completely in the experience of no-self than it could have dreamt. No wonder it’s called “coming home.”
But though we live conscious of that experience, and practice to heighten consciousness of what it means and asks of us, we are imperfect human beings, finding our way home in constantly changing circumstances. Sharp, painful, grievous events are on the menu for all of us. A penetrating response to the red thread comes in the form of the haiku that Issa (1673–1828) wrote upon the sudden death of his beloved two-yearold daughter:
this world of dew
is the world of dew ~
and yet
Even this astonishingly enveloping and convincing self is as impermanent as the dew, and adult acceptance of the fact has little choice but to grow, and yet—people matter infinitely. Their loss tears us open, rips a formless howl from us. Issa’s “and yet” embodies all that is human and struck nearly dumb by loss, right there alongside life as one continual, inevitable letting go.
And yet! Every being we love is irreplaceable and matters terribly. Personhood matters dearly. Character—or the way realization forms us and learns to walk upright in the world, in the most ordinary and understated way—matters, and the particular way clear action radiates out effecting change in ways that can’t and do not need to be tracked or counted, this, too, is inexpressibly dear. We’re not here long; try to notice and remember some details of the ones you love.
Could you ever come to the end of the value of a human being? It’s difficult not to see practice itself as a personal act of love in response to the desire to realize and inhabit this mysterious gift of personhood in the fullest possible way. “You.” “I.”
So the Western tradition, given its social and religious history and its recent near-obsessive fixation on individualism, retains a heartfelt human need to address and belong to the universe in personal terms—to evoke “I” and “you” right here in undividedness. Whether this is completely universal on the earth by now is impossible to say, but a “person-shaped emptiness” seems to be our natural threshold—or final strong-hold?—before an even further dropping away, to where even love is too limiting a word for what opens to us and as us. Where love itself is gone, fallen away into a completeness that can find no edges of any kind.
If this Western sense of “person” diverges from the Asian roots of Zen, there is reconciliation right within that tradition: for the Red Thread koan opens the way to a fully embodied, human, person-shaped embrace of the vast and intimate reality we call emptiness.
The Heart Sutra tells us, “Form is no other than emptiness,” which means such an “I” and such a “you” cannot possibly be limited or separated in that vast and intimate reality. But equally, it continues, “emptiness [is] no other than form.” In other words, “I” and “you” vividly appear, along with kittens called Sweet Dreams and gravestones for two-year-olds. The Heart Sutra brings this right home: “Form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form.” These two are not even “two.” Indeed, they are even less than something that can be called “one”—for that would have an outside to it.
Realization is an opening that feels too edgeless in its reach even to be called love, or still to contain something solidly “me”; and yet an unnameable, objectless sense of love feels like the final jumping-off point—while also marking each step of the way. Bodhicitta.
The emptiness includes this mystery called you, and every other subject—every other “you”—with complete, impartial equality. This is the red thread nature of human awakening. And although every category lies empty, still, when we wake up empty it is also intensely personal; we awaken in person, “Just this person.” And are never more thoroughly ourselves than when we do.
So there is you, and emptiness of you—impossible and simply true. And where does that leave trees, stars, hills, kangaroos, and great elks? Not to mention gut flora, mycelium threads in the soil, earthworms, and splendid blue wrens?
“E”
Someone who easily responds to such a question is the late Bill Neidjie (1920–2002), Aboriginal stockman, road worker, and songman, whose long stream-of-poetry essay titled Story About Feeling tells us about belonging simply by chatting and singing seamlessly with the living world.
Well I’ll tell you about this story,
about story where you feel . . .
Listen carefully this, you can hear me.
I’m telling you because earth just like mother
and father or brother of you. That tree same thing.
Your body, my body I suppose,
I’m same as you . . . anyone.
Tree working when you sleeping and dream.
That star e working there . . . see?
E working, I can see.
Always at night, if you lie down . . .
look careful, e working . . . see?
When you sleep . . . blood e pumping.
So you look . . . e go pink, e come white.
See im work? E work.
In the night you dream, lay down,
that star e working for you.
Tree, grass . . . working for you.
Neidjie doesn’t use he, but e, which is a rendition of his vernacular speech but—by leaving the h silent, achieves something brilliantly inclusive: “E” is genderless, and so close to his key word feel, feeling, that in the flow of words a natural affinity softly forms. Many indigenous Australians use “this fella,” “that fella”—not names—to alert you to significant nodal points in the intricate network of relationships that make up country (a very different word from landscape or environment, for it evokes the entire web or kinship bond of landforms, creatures, trees, bushes, berries, rocks, stars, and people, including their ancestors’ teeth and bones that together delineate and bring country up alive).
This fella and that fella may be male or female yet also genderless; and like Story About Feeling their avoidance of fixed name allows relationship to stand up clear and uppermost; they slip past being objects and step forward as subjects. Is “e” he or she? No one needs to know. We’re gracefully ushered inside the reality of a communion of subjects with fluid boundaries and released from seeing the world as a collection of colliding or competing things.
And like “e,” these subjects (including us) have no rank—where’s the rank to be found between hill, tree, star, “e” . . .? I enjoy how “e” elides all difference also between he and me. (Dongshan’s “He is me” echoes tantalizingly here.) Neidjie’s “e” offers a simple and natural-feeling entry into vast kinship of equal belonging and is comfortable in its person-shaped openness. But simple does not imply “easy.” Bill’s life was one of hard laboring and hard-won comfort of belonging in most simple things through disciplined awareness of the natural world and how it spoke to him and how it needed answering.
Not unlike the conversation the earth will open up with a person grown deeply still and internally quiet, in Zazen.
That vast equality is a healing for human beings; it heals the cut we make between human and everything else, so that being here is the same as coming home. There is no rank in “e.” Just true person.
I Have Already Become like This
Case 41 from Transmission of Light, collected by Zen Master Keizan (1268–1325), is one of the few places in the literature of Zen where a question about self-nature is raised as a question about love. Master Tongan Daopi is approached by a monk who comes quoting an old text: “I do not love what worldly people love.” Flourishing this classic statement of ascetic Buddhist understanding of the perfection of cooled desire, he challenges his teacher by then asking, “I wonder, Your Reverence, what is it that you love?”
Daopi replies, “I have already become like this,” words that awoke his student to what love is, far beyond where questions can be raised.
“I have already become like this” is a properly strange and oblique-looking kind of reply. Is he avoiding the question or freely revealing himself in a complete response to it? A quick glance might see one kind of boast (I aim to live in the place free of all attachments) being met with another, even more grandiose (don’t worry, I dealt with all that long ago). But no, Daopi is meeting and directly responding to a very good question: “What is it that you love?” Ask it sincerely of yourself and you will know why it is that you practice at all. Sometimes it can be hard to say why we practice, but if we check it with that question, it becomes plain.
When you ask such a teacher a question like this, you can find you have asked yourself a whole cluster of inextricably linked great questions: What is this self? What might self-relinquishment look like? What’s the place of love in all this? The action of love—what might that look like?
This monk became Daopi’s successor when he heard and realized Daopi’s luminous response, “I have already become like this.” Clearly, it met and dissolved every one of these implicit questions thoroughly. And to be so open to the response, this man obviously came not with arrogance but genuine wonder. Daopi must have seen the force of these questions latent in in the monk and the query that he framed: “I wonder, Your Reverence, what is it that you love?’
“I already have become like this” has no grandiosity in it. The response is graceful and skillful because humbly true. It’s a bit like conceding—I am that stone halfway across the paddock. That shadow of a bird crossing the open ground. The grief of that neighbor across the way still brokenhearted by the loss of his closest friend. The woman bent over planting rice whose row veers off toward her crying baby. I share my nature freely with that and with the trees on the hillside, he is saying. And with that run of notes just now from the currawong, and the quietest gurgle of water still audible in the creek, and . . .
In the thorough conceding of self you can feel in “I have already become,” love as a thing apart has vanished together with Daopi as a thing apart—only to turn up embodied in every bright or solemn detail. He’s asked about love but doesn’t name anything he loves! Does he sidestep love this way? Or reveal its nature and natural movement in a way that lives unrestricted even by that word? He leaves it entirely to us to uncover in our own being what “becoming like this” might be, whenever resistance to being here lies low or mercifully is gone.
The first time ever I heard Daopi’s reply I thought of those deep green stones you see at the bottom of a steadily flowing creek, rounded and edgeless, rolled over and over by water flow until all resistance has been taken away. Water and stone come into complete agreement: stone with the character of water, water revealing itself in the shape of stone. Becoming more and more like this.
You Are Welcome Here
A practical way to invite yourself into this mystery of how “you” belongs in emptiness is to offer the welcome and so become it. “You are welcome here”—or shortened just to “Welcome”—is a practice that looks gentle enough, but then so does unceasing water flow: Just ask a river stone! Welcoming this breath, this feeling (pleasant or not), this edge of thought, this sigh of the wind, this next breath is the practice of noticing in the very act of not resisting but making welcome. But can you really say who makes whom welcome?
The longer form, “You are welcome here,” quickly reveals a mysterious twist. You are not only taking the part of the host, which places you fundamentally at home, welcoming each thing intimately, as “you.” You find each thing that arrives in open awareness says equally roundly to you, “You are welcome here.”
There is no way in the end to tell the you who offers the welcome from the you who is welcomed. Whether you accept each “arising” (feeling, sound, sight, taste, touch, smell, or thought) reluctantly, tentatively, willingly, curiously, or lovingly has no bearing on the matter. Still each one is not anything but you—in person. And of course the underlying question constantly in play is, Who is that? Who is who? What if not knowing was the greatest intimacy?
This is a gently comprehensive but also fierce way of continuing to wake to the constantly changing ten thousand faces of being; it more and more deeply inhabits the discovery that everything moves together, nothing is fixed, and every subject/object distinction grows more and more difficult to sustain when you open and widen in Zazen. “You” is the name, almost, of intimacy itself.
Dongshan’s own face reflected in creek water let him see he had the likeness of all that is, in every detail . . . His question to his teacher, “Do I have your likeness?” now broke clear. Yunyan could well already have died, yet Dongshan truthfully can say, “He is now exactly me.” Which now no longer possibly can contradict, “But I am not now him.”
Don’t mistake this for the way we carry loved people in our heart and bones and even look at the world through their eyes from time to time. It is a deeper point of realization. The timeless and the karmic are not two, despite the warning word but that kindly stops us in our tracks to ensure there is no spurious claim of oneness here. Not one. Not two. Realization is not divided and divides nothing at all. The remarkable thing here is how human is this intimacy that is so vast. Yogi Berra’s accidental Zen teaching offers itself here: “When you come to a fork in the road—take it!” It’s you that swallows every divided possibility, swallows the universe whole.
So Dongshan’s “he,” Bill Neidjie’s “e,” every human being’s “you/me”—all of us—can stand free and empty of any ancient dream of separation. Like Dongshan, we must walk our path, entirely personal, but still we meet intimacy (“him,” “e,” “you”) everywhere, we are enfolded in it—all of us, making our own way home.
“You are welcome here” turns no suffering or joy away; it leaves us less immune to the groans and sorrows and injustices, revealing “He is now me.” This lies right at the heart of the matter of intimacy and the red thread that cannot be cut. Expect to find it painful. Expect to find it joyous.
Who Is Who?
In Tomas Transtromer’s poem “Baltics” he writes about a harbor channel suddenly becoming eccentric with out-of-season jellyfish—genus Aurelia. He describes them pumping themselves along “with calm consideration,” or drifting like flowers after a sea burial. And yet they are untranslatable, he says, and must stay in their element, water:
If you lift them out of the water
all of their shape disappears
As when an indescribable truth is lifted out
of the silence
And formulated into a lifeless mass yes
They are untranslatable
Our element is human, and so we call the untranslatable water we swim in “love,” a passionately human word brought into being by a genus that began as a very small and tenuous mammal indeed—radically undefended except by its wits, when dinosaurs still thundered and twittered on the earth. We branch from a very small tree-shrew ancestor, standing shivering in its small bones, only so high, clinging to refuges in bushes and grasses. And down through that little character’s descendants in an immensity of time the word love came into the world.
When I was a child I made pilgrimage with my brother and sister to the natural history museum almost every Saturday morning when we first moved to Sydney from a small Queensland town, which had a small but remarkable museum that was completely outclassed by its big-city equivalent. The first thing I’d marvel at was the blue whale skeleton that hung the entire length of the reception hall ceiling, but the secret sacred site that drew me every time was a tiny, dusty, stuffed tree shrew, eyes huge, clinging to a branch in a dark glass case, above a small handwritten notice that announced, OUR EARLIEST PRIMATE ANCESTOR.
It’s not so difficult to dream your way out of the bone-bowl confines of this skull and begin to see through the wide awake eyes of the other. It’s our human schtick, and infinitely worthy of keeping up.
We discover ourselves in ten thousand other forms that life inhabits. You is the word that embraces recognition, and recognition initiates love. The net of Indra, the extraordinary recognition of everything existing only in the light of everything else—is this startling x-ray of the nature of reality also a revelation of the peculiarly human gift we have of discovering ourselves in the other? The first glimpse of “me,” and every one that follows, is caught in the mirror of “you”—in other human beings, and in beings at large.
Robert Hass speaks about newborns when they first come home from the hospital, their wide staring eyes, wet mouths, fat uncontrollable tongues. “I thought they responded when I bent over their cribs because they were beginning to recognize me. Now I think it was because they were coming to recognize themselves,” he says.
The startling thought me dawns in such moments as the sight of the strangely waving feet in front of your face, which turn out to be catchable at times by someone who is fast turning out to be “me.” But “me” gets easily lost at first and is best checked up on by checking up on “you.” R. D. Laing surmised that small children don’t get up at night to see if you are there; when they wander in asking, “Mummy?” they are actually looking to see if they are there.
A baby in a passing pram can flash you an inexplicable smile that, like Mu, knows you better than you know yourself. When we practice Zazen, these little shocks of being recognized arrive all over the place. They find us—but not as who we thought we were. What gets caught red-handed when something cuts through is the true person of no rank, slipping in and out of our faces (but never going away).
These are moments when something hardened starts softening and breaking up, when some long-foregone conclusion that has shaped or left your life misshapen starts to crack up. It usually starts with “I . . . ,” or “This is . . . (wrong, hurtful, disrespectful, etc.),” but the true person of no rank does not begin with “I” nor proceeds to rank things right or wrong.
So, it is love that pulls us out of separateness into the eloquent immensity of a silence that embraces the whole of it. It seems too big for any human attempt to contain or limit it. Love may be our most unlimited word but it goes beyond love. It finally has no name, no address, no birth or death in karma. Even while it is you.
“Like this” may be the best anyone can do, when we can no longer say who’s who, let alone who made who. It cannot be pure, it cannot be stained, and there is nowhere and nothing in it in which we cannot see and recognize ourselves more truly.