Once I met a group of Japanese Buddhists in Ohio (only one of them was Japanese, all were artists of some kind, one was an artist and a pastry chef, most were gay) who believed in the power of chanting. Being the kind of person I was--partly because it felt strange to me to read out aloud in medieval Japanese, which I obviously didn't know, a text written in Chinese characters--but mostly because of the kind of person I was, I decided to read a passage from A Portrait of Artist as a Young Man instead. Not in the group, of course. There is something to be said about chanting. Especially when you do this at the top of your lung. It makes you a little foolish, but it scares away the invisible gremlins that fill the air, or at least lifts the dust of silence that begins to fall on your shoulders. You feel the soot on your inner walls fall away as language passes like a sonic power chimney sweeper.
p.s. By the way, I just noticed that this is my 666th post. I have to mention that I'm reading 2666 and it is a wonderful novel. In honor of RB and Pi and the devilish number I have arrived at, I'm thinking of stopping right here, making this my last post, even though, being Chinese, this number does not mean anything evil to me. In fact, it's considered a lucky number, though I don't believe in lucky numbers either. But everything that begins has an end. I've been feeling its coming for some time. I don't know if this has anything to do with RB's novel.
So, for once, here's to the luxury of coincidence....And as far as coincidence is concerned, it's never a question of believing in it or not. The whole world is a coincidence. I had a friend who told me I was wrong to think that way. My friend said that the world isn't a coincidence for someone traveling by rail, even if the train should cross foreign lands, places the traveler will never see again in his life. And it isn't a coincidence for the person who gets up at six in the morning, exhausted, to go to work; for the person who has no choice but to get up and pile more suffering on the suffering he's already accumulated. Suffering is accumulated, said my friend, that's a fact, and the greater the suffering, the smaller the coincidence." "As if coincidence were a luxury?" asked Morini.
