The Dude and the Zen Master Read online

  But the essence of Camus’s book was that Sisyphus was a hero. Instead of just saying, Oh fuck, what is the use, man, he finds some interest in the job: Oh, look at what happened this time! Funny, I never noticed that little shrub before. The rock sure raised a lot of dust this time when it rolled down, wasn’t that interesting? Oh, here it goes again. Oh, there it goes. Watch it.

  BERNIE: One of the definitions of the Bodhisattva is that it’s the person who climbs up the mountain, gets a spoonful of snow, comes back down, and throws it into a well. Then she goes back up again to get another spoonful. You can ask, what’s the value of working so hard to get a little snow and then throw it into a well? And, certainly, what’s the value of getting it spoonful by spoonful?

  But is one spoonful of snow like another? More poetically, can you see the sun rise for the first time, every time? Can you live this moment like it’s the only moment, as if there’s nothing else? The movie Groundhog Day is a little bit about that.

  JEFF: I also think about Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning, which was about his life in the concentration camps. Some people in that situation became completely selfish and were willing to do anything to survive, but Frankl felt that this was also the place where angels and saints were born. He lived in what most people would say was a hopeless situation, and he decided that within that, he would do his thing. That book had a big impact on me.

  Growth happens out of the most terrible things. It’s sad that sometimes those lessons have to be learned over and over and over again. It’s almost as if we need terrible things to push off of. So out of the Holocaust emerged that promise that we must never let something like that happen again. If we can learn, then there’s goodness there. But God, looking at history, we’re fucking slow learners, man.

  I recently made a movie, R.I.P.D., that had a scene that took place in a meat locker. We were surrounded by cows cut in half, carcasses hung on meat hooks. Frankly, it didn’t bother me that much. I thought, Gee, we’ve been in here all day and it doesn’t smell that bad. But when I got home, I got an e-mail from a guy who wanted me to participate in a documentary called Unity, and it was all about the importance of being a vegan. And he quoted Tolstoy: “As long as there are slaughterhouses, there will be battlefields.” And that rang true for me, because that same disrespect we show animals is what we show people whom we vilify and call the enemy. It’s the same consciousness, or lack of consciousness.

  I dug what the guy was saying, but I felt my participation would be hypocritical because I’ve always eaten meat. I’ve always loved a good steak, you know? I’d like it rare, please, just knock the horns off. It was a piece of meat, nothing else. Every living thing has to eat to survive, but there are different ways of doing it. The Native Americans used to kill and eat buffalo, but in a ritualized way that emphasized their respect and gratitude to the buffalo for giving up its life to feed them. Not like us. When you see what we do and how we treat the animals, it’s inhumane. And the trouble is, we don’t want to look; the denial is amazing. The same kind of thing goes into how we treat people and how we treat each other.

  His e-mail did inspire me to try a vegan diet for three months. I enjoyed it and did not miss meat at all. But then I got sick in the middle of making a movie and ended up missing almost two weeks of work, and I thought that maybe I needed to eat animal protein. This is just an opinion and it’s probably full of shit; my brother Beau has been a vegan for more than nine years, so I’d like to try it out again.

  BERNIE: I’ve met a lot of survivors of the Nazi concentration camps. One man, who died a few years ago, had a particular impact on me. His name was Marian Kolodziej. He was a Catholic Pole who was taken in one of the first transports to Auschwitz, and he survived there until the end. His number was 432, a low, three-digit number that shows how long he was there. He and those first inmates were used to build a lot of the camp.

  Once, they were in line for soup and bread, which was all they got to eat. The guy next to him got his bowl of soup, but one of the guards bumped him and the bowl fell. This guy was Jewish and weak, starved like all the rest of them. So Marian shared some of his soup with him. It’s hard for us to imagine this kind of generosity. They were all on the edge of death from hunger; it was almost crazy to share your watery soup with someone else. People killed each other for just one piece of bread.

  Some time later, Marian was caught making maps of the camp to be smuggled out to the Polish resistance. He was sentenced to be taken out and shot at the Execution Wall. The Nazis, however, were known for their bureaucratic efficiency; the paperwork had to be properly signed and stamped before sentences were carried out. It turned out that the Jewish inmate with whom Marian had shared his soup worked as a filing clerk in that office, and when he saw the paper authorizing Marian’s death sentence awaiting signature, he simply slid it under the stack. He kept on doing that again and again, until he finally found the death certificate of someone who’d died, and he arranged the paperwork in such a way that Marian got the dead man’s name and escaped being shot. Marian Kolodziej was that person’s name, and that’s the name Marian kept even after his release from Auschwitz. Later he said that he himself had died there, and that only Marian Kolodziej survived the camp.

  After the war he became one of Poland’s leading theater set designers, and for fifty years he didn’t tell anybody that he had been in Auschwitz. And then, in his early seventies, he had a major stroke and almost died. As he began to slowly recover, he asked his wife to help him down on the floor of the hospital room and give him a sheet of white paper. She held the pencil in his fingers as he began to draw, and what he drew were his memories and impressions of his time at Auschwitz. When he fully recovered, he went back to the camp and stayed on the grounds for six months, bearing witness.

  JEFF: He never told his wife that he was there?

  BERNIE: Never. He began with small sketches, his wife helping him hold the pencil when he was too weak to hold it himself. Then he put those sketches together into murals. These murals are gigantic and now cover the immense cellar walls of a large Franciscan monastery just outside Oswiecim, the site of the camps. They make the cellar look like a barrack. Some of the murals show hundreds of inmates, skeletons with large heads and eyes, along with terrifying images of death heads and monsters with fangs and claws. The entire exhibit, which is huge, is called The Labyrinth. When you walk through it, it feels like you’re walking through old camp barracks inhabited by camp inmates, surrounded by terror and suffering.

  We’ve been taking people to see them at all our Auschwitz retreats. Marian was old and lived far away in Gdansk, but he’d come and join our retreats each year and talk with us. We always sat at the old Selection Site by the train tracks, a long walk from the main gate, and he would make his way slowly on his cane, assisted by his wife. Our bearing witness there was so important to him, and hundreds of participants from different countries, young and old, felt deeply connected to him over the years.

  What never failed to touch me was that he had no anger. Imagine this cellar that looks like a barrack, surrounded by terrifying murals, the rest of the retreat people stunned into silence—and he had no anger at anybody.

  But he did have some sense of shame. Eve asked him about that once, and he told her, “Whenever somebody tried to escape, the Nazis would make all the inmates suffer. Once, someone escaped and they told us to run along a large, circular track without stopping until they caught him. By the time they finally caught him several hours later, more than three hundred people had been killed, trampled to death by those of us who’d run right over them. So how shouldn’t I feel shame?” He was part of a humanity that was doing these things to itself. But there was no anger in him; he was full of love.

  JEFF: Why do you think that was?

  BERNIE: Because he bore witness to the whole thing, including to the Nazi parts in him. He acknowledged that all of that was him, the murderous guards, the sadistic kapos—they were all parts o
f him and of all of us. At some point you have to decide whether you will love humanity or hate it, and he chose to love humanity.

  Marian went through a whole transformation because he went from a period of fifty years, when he wouldn’t talk about Auschwitz to anyone, to fully bearing witness. In some of his drawings you see the young Marian holding up and helping the old Marian to keep on drawing. Many people say it’s great art, but Marian called it his testimony.

  He died about a month before our annual Auschwitz retreat, which takes place in November. Before that, he told his beautiful wife, Halina, that he wanted his ashes to be scattered at Birkenau during our retreat. She came with the ashes, accompanied by a few elderly survivors of the camp, and as she stood there overlooking one of the crematorium sites, she said that Marian’s dying words to her were, “Where there’s love, there’s no death.”

  JEFF: You run across people who went through that experience who are very angry?

  BERNIE: Of course.

  JEFF: So are there two paths that humans take when they go through something as terrible as that, one of anger and one of no-anger?

  BERNIE: There are lots of other feelings as well, especially guilt. Remember the AIDS epidemic when so many people lost their partners? Remember how depressed they got and full of guilt that their partner died instead of them? We did a lot of work with people with AIDS in Yonkers, New York, and saw that very often.

  JEFF: My mom and dad had a baby before me, called Gary, who died of sudden infant death syndrome. I was born a year later. I think my mother had tremendous courage to get back up in the saddle and have another child. Many people think about children as their immortality. She said that they’re really closer to your mortality. When you have a child, you have another pair of eyes, another heart that you love more than your own, but you have no control over them. So it took a lot of courage for her to invest that much love once again in someone who could die, as Gary did.

  She kept a diary since the age of eighteen and wrote there every day of her life. When each of her children turned twenty-one, on our birthday, she wrote out what was in her journal about each of us, in her own hand, and gave it to us. So we each have our own history as seen through our mother’s eyes from before our conception.

  When she was eighty years old, she assembled the family: “I want to say something to you. I’ve written you poems every birthday, but I never wrote a birthday poem for Gary. I never gave him anything.” At the age of eighty, she was finally sharing the pain and guilt she’d felt all those years. “You’ll notice on the mantel, we have Beau’s portrait as a child, Jeff’s, and Cindy’s. And here is a portrait that I had painted of Gary to hang next to his brothers’ and his sister’s.”

  So late in her life she was still growing. When she was around ninety she decided to take up Buddhism. My friend Dawa became her teacher. I remember taking her to one of his talks. After he finished speaking, he asked for questions. My mother raised her hand, Dawa called on her, and she shouted at the top of her lungs, “Words, words, words!” And Dawa said, “Yes, exactly, Dorothy.”

  BERNIE: My mother died when I was seven, from cancer. We were poor; she was an immigrant from Poland, who didn’t want to go to doctors, my older sisters told me. By the time she saw a doctor, it was too late. When she finally went to the hospital, I wasn’t allowed by the hospital to visit her. My sister would take me there to stand on the sidewalk, and my mother would wave from a window four stories up. She died about three months later at home, and they didn’t let me go to the funeral; once again, they said I was too young. So I didn’t have the chance to grieve.

  My first real grieving was when my wife died many years later. Then I grieved for a full year.

  JEFF: Were you grieving for your mom, too, like hitching a ride?

  BERNIE: Yes. It was a little strange, to live to the age of fifty-nine and not go through grieving for my mother, who’d died over fifty years earlier. I had already done a lot by then. My wife, too, was now a teacher—we had cofounded the Zen Peacemakers Order—and I had decided that I was going to stop teaching, that it was her time now. I thought I’d finished my work and that maybe I was going to die soon. Instead, it was she who died, just short of the age of fifty-seven.

  JEFF: When my father died, I had a lot of grief, but in some way it felt complete. We’d often tell each other how much we loved each other. I can remember a day when we talked about the handing of the baton at a relay race. That’s what our relationship was like. We really sensed it, like I’m going for us; I’m carrying our spirit. When he died, I cried and mourned him. At the same time, I felt quite clean with him. But as I talk about it now, I wonder if that’s entirely true. There may be a level of feeling there through which I’m not ready to go.

  I felt something much sharper when my mother left. Was it guilt? I missed her death by about a half hour. I remember her brother walking out of the house and saying, She’s gone, just as I was coming in to see her. Beau and Cindy were there weeping at her bedside, holding her hands, loving her. But it was hard for me to open right then. The depth of that loss and emotion felt a bit like when I’d done the Joy of Singing workshop and couldn’t sing my song to Sue because I was so overwhelmed.

  In a way, I’m not sure they’ve really gone. I feel my parents so strongly here, in myself and in my children. But there’s some incompletion there, something not quite hatched. Maybe it never will be hatched, or maybe it is and this is it, this is what the bird looks like.

  My mom and I got to read this poem together one night, “The Lanyard,” by Billy Collins, who was poet laureate of the United States. The essence of the poem is: You gave me life, you gave me everything I needed for living, and I went to camp and made you a lanyard. It’s like, how can I possibly repay what you gave me? And I made you a lanyard, which you took and said, oh, how beautiful.

  12.

  SORRY, I WASN’T LISTENING

  JEFF: I fell in love with Montana while making Thunderbolt and Lightfoot in 1974, Michael Cimino’s first movie. Two years later I did a movie up there with Sam Waterston called Rancho Deluxe. We were shooting at a place called Chico Hot Springs. While we were shooting a scene in the hot tub with Sam, Richard Bright, Harry Dean Stanton, and me, I saw this girl. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. Not only was she gorgeous but she had two black eyes and a recently broken nose. Something about her beauty and disfigurement kept me riveted. Every time I snuck a peek, she would catch me. After work I got up the courage to ask her: Would you like to go out with me? She said no. I asked her again, she said no, it’s a small town, maybe we’ll run into each other later. Those words proved to be prophetic and one night in town we danced, and I fell in love.

  The next day I had a meeting scheduled with Duane Lindeman, a realtor who was going to show me some property I was interested in, and I invited Sue to come along. That was our official first date. We went to look at a ranch house for sale on the river. It was fallen down, and mosquitoes were all over the place, but it had some kind of charm.

  So I’m looking at this place with Sue, and as we’re walking around there’s this voice in my head: You are now looking at this house with your future wife. I thought, What the fuck? What are you talking about? And the voice goes on, This is your wife. And I’m thinking, Oh, no, let me outta here.

  But Sue and I got together. In the beginning it was tough. Earlier I talked about autonomy and freedom. I resisted marrying Sue for a long time because I didn’t want to lose either. I felt cornered, not by Sue but by myself. I couldn’t bear to let the love of my life slip through my fingers, but at the same time I was afraid of declaring: This is the one!

  I was crazy in love with her, but I thought, God, is she gonna be the mother of my kids? I came from such a great mom and didn’t know if either Sue or I had that in us. But mostly the issue was losing my freedom, you know, choosing one woman and that’s it, you can’t screw around, pollinating all the flowers, no more of that. Sue was very clear, and compassionate. She s
aid, “Jeff, I understand your decision, but I’m going back to Montana. We’ve been together three years now, and if this isn’t what you want, I’ve got to move on.” To make a long story short, I finally got up the courage to ask Sue to marry me, with the secret caveat that I could always get a divorce.

  Now we cut to the Seven Sacred Pools in Maui, where we went for our honeymoon. We’re looking at these gorgeous falls that finally end up in the Pacific Ocean, and as I’m looking at this beautiful scene I’m consumed by the smell of rotten mangoes, thinking: Oh God, this is terrible. What have I done? And Sue immediately picks up on my vibe and says, “I can tell you don’t want this marriage, let’s annul this, this is ridiculous.” And I say, “No, no.”

  I was this pouting asshole for the first three years of our marriage. Thank God I finally got with the program. You close one door, the door to all other women, but you open a door that leads to a long hallway lined with doors. Incredible doors like children, grandchildren, deeper intimacy with the woman you love, and so many other things that would not be available to you without marriage, without the water under the bridge. Marriage to Sue was frightening for me, but there was also the sense of opening my heart. And thank God I went for it.

  I’ve learned so much from Sue. Authenticity comes to mind; she is the real thing, there’s nothing contrived. I’m glad she was patient and didn’t kick me out for pouting, thinking I’d been cornered into marriage, or whatever my trip was. She points out to me ways that I defeat myself and I do the same for her.