Random

Yesterday morning on my way to Zen practice, I stopped to photograph Modica Way, the alley in Central Square, Cambridge, that has been taken over by street artists.

The most democratic of genres, graffiti is an extremely random art form: anyone with a spray can, paint brush, or inedible marker can add their scrawl. Not only is Modica a collaborative work incorporating the efforts of several different artists, the wall reflects various media of street art, with stencil work, free-hand tags, and all sorts of stickers covering the bricks, exposed ductwork, and other building surfaces.

Even at its most random, the Modica mural shows some semblance of order, with different sections being dominated by different artists, including Bren Bataclan, the Boston artist who painted my Christmas present. When I first visited (and photographed) Modica Way over a month ago, I wasn’t sure where the “real art” of the wall’s sanctioned artists ended and the popular editorializing of random punks began. On a wiki-like wall where everyone can write and revise, which version is the truest? After staring a while, I realized the point of pastiche is the ultimate randomness of it all. When your parchment is a palimpsest, every painting is pentimento: every iteration is a literal do-over, today’s version writing over yesterday’s.

I’ve had randomness on my mind all weekend as I’ve been spending a surprising amount of time staring at the gift I gave J for Valentine’s day: a digital frame for him to display his photographs. I figured a digital photo frame was a perfect gift for a photographer who has everything; what I didn’t foresee was the way I’d enjoy revisiting a couple hundred of J’s favorite images from the last year. Now that there’s a frame on J’s kitchen counter cycling in random rotation his various photos of me, our pets, and the places the two of us have explored together over the past year, I find myself stopping to watch these scenes from our shared life, marveling at how many memories two people can cobble together without really trying.

At Zen practice yesterday, I gave consulting interviews, and one practitioner asked about the difference between good thoughts and bad. How can you encourage the former and get rid of the latter?

“There is no difference between good thoughts and bad thoughts,” I explained. “The mind is a sense organ that perceives an endless series of thoughts, just as the eyes perceive an endless supply of visual stimuli, the nose perceives an endless series of olfactory signals, and the ears perceive an endless stream of sound.” Just as we don’t blame our nose for bad smells or gouge out our eyes when they see something ugly, we can’t blame or give credit to our minds for their thoughts. Thinking is what minds do, so it makes no sense to judge our thoughts or to cling to presumably good thoughts while pushing presumably bad ones away. Instead, thoughts will be thoughts, and our minds will be minds: like a digital frame set to “random,” our minds endlessly loop the thoughts and images they’ve taken and stored whether we like them or not.

And so the answer I’d give in response to Annette‘s request that I describe my life in six words or less would be the following Zen-inspired definition of consciousness: an endless series of random stimuli. Some folks wait until their dying breath to see their life flash before their eyes, but I say watching your life is as easy as walking down a graffiti-covered alley or flipping through the virtual pages of an electronic photo album, the accident of your life appearing in all its random glory.

Click here for a photo-set of images from Modica Way, taken yesterday and in January. Enjoy!