WORKS ON DIGITAL PAPER

Waltz With Bashir : The Litotious Ok Oh Review

My wife came home in no small way undrunk last night.  I should say that she was more waywardly tipsy in deference to the reaction she will have when confronted by the revelation that her recent inebriation, however mild, has been advertised in such a public way.  Actually, in deference, I wouldn't say anything at all, but this would not make for a scintillating departure point,  the fact stubbornly remaining that her peculiar taste for exactly two glasses of champagne has an obligatory outcome in certain body types shared, with aplomb, by my wife.  She arrived at the very climactic moment in the movie playing on our ragged laptop at which the due process of sobering up might assumed to be forcibly applied.  The movie itself, recently re-unwrapped from the sendbacktoNetflix envelope it had taken refuge in, off and on, for the last two or three months, sitting on our counter, waiting to be returned unwatched, had in fact traveled with me to my office twice with that purpose in mind.  A movie Big Dan had proclaimed a number of months ago, perhaps when we first received the movie, as unwatchably boring, a verdict I had been, since, eagerly anticipating to contest.  This very well may be the reason I now hold an esteemed view of the picture, that is, the desire to like the film had flowered in deeply contrarian soil potted longer ago by an undue interest in the subject matter of the film itself.  This esteem might also be logically perceived to be bolstered by the passage I had just read from the Zen Buddhist collection Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki on my way home from work yesterday, on the train:
Even before we practice it, enlightenment is there.  But usually we understand the practice of zazen and enlightenment as two different things: here is practice, like a pair of glasses, and when we use the practice, like putting the glasses on, we see enlightenment.  This is the wrong understanding. The glasses themselves are enlightenment, and to put them on is also enlightenment.  So whatever you do, or even though you do not do anything, enlightenment is there, always.

This hit me very sideways, and very straight-on.  It made me remember that I am who I am wherever I am, and such is the world itself.  The currently age-old conundrum of placement, west coast/east coast, family/work, will not bring anything new.  This is to say that no matter where I live and no matter what I am doing, I am simply, totally me, and not at all me of course, as the opposite is always true at the same time.  Life would be no different were I here or there unless I endeavor to be different.  Or, when in fact that is the obvious case of events, chose to perceive difference.  Both scenarios, one and the same scenario, completely contingent upon my own contingency, a thing that would be the constant in any possible situation I am in.  Thinking of this passage, I opened the downstairs door to my apartment building earlier in the evening with the plan in mind to see my wife off to dine with her friend, put my son to bed and watch the movie I had been waiting and apparently not waiting to watch.  Four hours later and my wife walks through the door one and a half sheets to some wind and plops down next to me at nearly the exact moment when the full terror chronicled in the film comes to fruition.  We both cried.  I for having watched the film through and not fully expecting the final scenes, she for simply witnessing the final scenes in their raw power.  To say the film fit in to a mental landscape asking for such a monument would be understatement as you can plainly see.   And I suppose regardless of finding yourself in the same mindset, I encourage you to rent Waltz With Bashir.