'I am going with the flow. My flow with that book has totally stopped. I don't feel like pumping it up again.'
`Nnnn.'
I became aware that I was grinding a die into the green velvet. I tried to relax.
`By the way, Tim, I had my first interview with that boy you had sent to QSH for me. I found him-'
`I don't care about your patient at QSH, Luke, unless it's going to get into print.'
He still didn't look at me, and the abruptness of the remark stunned me.
`If you're not writing, you're not thinking,' he went on, `and if you're not thinking you're dead.'
I used to feel that way.'
`Yes you did. Then you discovered Zen.'
`Yes I did.'
`And now you find writing a bore.'
`Yes.'
`And thinking?'
`And thinking too,' I said.
`Maybe there's something wrong with Zen,' he said.
`Maybe there's something wrong with thinking.'
`It's been fashionable among thinkers lately to say so, but saying, "I strongly think that thinking is nonsense," that
stems rather absurd to me.'
`It is absurd; so is psychoanalysis.'
He looked over at me; the crinkles around his left eye twitched.
`Psychoanalysis has led to more new knowledge of the human soul than all the previous two million years of thinking
put together. Zen has been around a long time and I haven't noticed any great body of knowledge flowing from it.' Without apparent irritability he let out another vigorous mushroom cloud toward the ceiling. I was fingering one of the dice, nervously pressing my fingers into the little dots; I still looked at him, he at Freud.
`Tim, I'm not going to argue the merits and demerits of Zen again with you. I've told you that whatever I've gained from Zen is not something I've been able to articulate.'
'What you've gained from Zen is intellectual anemia.'
`Maybe I've gained sense. You know that eighty percent of the stuff in the psychoanalytic journals is crap. Useless
crap. Including mine.'
I paused. `Including . . . yours.'
He hesitated, and then bubbled up a chuckle.
`You know the first principle of medicine: you can't cure the patient without a sample of his crap,' he said.
`Who needs to be cured?'
He turned his eyes lazily into mine and said: `You do.'
`You analyzed me. What's the matter?' I shot back stare for stare. .
`Nothing the matter that a little reminder of what life is all about won't cure.'
`Oh, piss,' I said.
`You don't like to push yourself, and along comes Zen and till you to "go with the flow".'
He paused and, still looking at me, dropped his pipe in an ashtray on the small table bide him.
`Your flow is naturally stagnant.'
`Makes a good breeding ground,' I said and tried to short laugh.
`For Christ's sake, Luke, don't laugh,' he said loudly. `You're wasting your life these days, throwing it away.'
`Aren't we all?'
`No, we're not. Jake isn't. I'm not. Good men in every profession aren't. You weren't, until a year ago.'
`When I was a child, I spoke like a child -'
`Luke, Luke, listen to me.'
He was an agitated old man.
`Well -?'
`Come back to analysis with me.'
I rubbed the die against the back of my hand and, thinking nothing clearly, answered `No.'
`What's the matter with you?' he said sharply. `Why have you lost faith in the significance of your work? Will you
please try to explain?'