In 1986, a Taiwanese Ch’an Buddhist monk, Hsin Tao, was given a gift of a hundred relics by a Tibetan monk at Shwayambu Temple in Kathmandu. The Tibetan explained that the temple’s relics first came from the Buddha, that they had been multiplying over the centuries, and that these were descendents of the originals.  Back in Taiwan, Hsin Tao’s relics too reportedly began mysteriously multiplying, growing, and changing color, and he became well-known partly as a result. 
     Nine years later, in 1995, his Taiwanese supporters were planning to bring him and a group from his large monastery to New York for a kind of cross-cultural spiritual exchange. A friend asked me to come there to help with the project. Although I had never met this teacher I was interested in the cross-cultural aspects of Buddhism, and during the frantic weeks that I was involved with the project I thought it had the chaotic intensity of Chinese opera. At the end of the visit, Master Hsin Tao offered a relic to me. I was puzzled about relics, but I received the icon with warm appreciation.
     Soon after the visit, while I was still in New York, I phoned a longtime practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism to talk about relics in the Tibetan tradition. First of all, he admonished me, they're only phenomena. That said, however, it's true that they are seen as powerful evidence of  mystery and faith. They reportedly materialize in the presence of great faith, and they are taken as signs of great attainment when they do manifest or change. We talked for a while. I commented that he must have had a similar experience when his daughter, now a beautiful 12-year-old, was born. Absolutely, he agreed. Even as a newborn she had her own agenda, her own energy, was both source and manifestation of faith and of love.
     I hung up the phone and went outside. I was staying on Roosevelt Island, and I walked slowly south along the river. As I turned towards the steps of the subway, I looked up into a tree filled with light and it came to me that not just relics, but all forms are manifestations of the unconditioned. The universe of form is composed entirely of signs of emptiness. I stood there a bit staggered, hearing in my mind the familiar words of the Buddhist chant, form is not different from emptiness, emptiness is not different from form.

A few months later, late one night in an old house in Berkeley, I came across a tattered copy of The New Yorker with an intriguing brief review of a novel. It described characters in “accelerating states of spiritual crisis” who treat painting and faith “without embarrassed restraint but with seriousness and tact.” I had never heard of Annunciation or of its author, David Plante, but I found the book and was hooked from the first page.
     The particular space in which Plante positioned his narration, between the characters’ uncomfortably acute awareness of their interior experience and its dissonance from what they are saying and doing ... that gap was revealed, explored, and in some way sanctified in Plante’s novel. He must write from a deeply meditative state, I thought, to evoke so well the space between the consciousness, speech, and action of his characters. 
     I decided to read everything David Plante had written. I tracked down nine of his novels and a number of articles and discovered that he was a French Canadian born in Rhode Island who had lived in London for thirty years, prolific (fourteen books), critically appreciated as an adventurous experimenter with a very special voice, gay, not very well known. All the books of his I read reflected the distinctive voice I had appreciated in Annunciation.
     That winter I went to England to volunteer at a Theravada Buddhist monastery . I took along to study while there Transcending Madness, Chogyam Trungpa’s collected lectures on the Tibetan Buddhist bardo states --  a book that is at once an elaborate explication of psychospiritual states of confusion and a guide to the potential for insight latent in those perplexing "between" states. I had recently read Gretel Ehrlich's memoir Match to the Heart,  which  recounts her experience of being struck by lightning and its aftermath. Ehrlich's book is a reflection on the body as an unfamiliar landscape; the disturbing medical symptoms of the lightning strike and their effect on her psyche are the terrain she explores. Ehrlich was a student of Tibetan Buddhism in the early 1970's and likens her lightning aftermath experiences to the bardo states. I began to think of Plante as exploring similar states in the context of his French Catholic upbringing. I sent him Ehrlich’s book, said I thought his work would be of interest to Buddhists, and asked to meet him.
     A reply arrived within a couple of weeks, with an invitation to tea. I had brought to light, Plante wrote, “what I have kept in the dark, lest the light reveal it to be an intention and not, as I pray, something that occurs in my writing without my intending it.”
     The theme of light and dark pervades all of Plante’s work, but I was struck by his use of the word intention. Observing intention and its consequences in daily life had been central to my Buddhist practice. Keeping a schedule on retreat was an opportunity to investigate what happens when an intention – the intention to move while sitting, for example – arises within the larger intention of remaining still. Sitting quietly through the restless movements of the mind can nurture patience, compassion and insight.
     David Plante lives in a row house a few blocks from Marlyebone Station, near Baker Street and the Theosophical Society on Gloucester Street. The house faces a long narrow rectangle of tall trees enclosed by a wrought iron fence, the private park of the residents on its boundaries. The brick houses are painted white on Plante’s side of the street; a brass marker on one announces that Anthony Trollope once lived here. 
     David answered the door. He was not as tall as I'd imagined from pictures on the flyleaves of twenty years of novels, and he was also infinitely warmer than I'd expected. He led the way up a broad, cinnamon-walled stairway – a warren of plants in the tall window at the landing – and into the tiny white foyer of his own flat. Coats piled on hooks at my back pushed me almost onto the pale wood staircase, where an elegant Abyssinian cat sat quietly on a step at eye level. 
     Up the stairs, the flat opens spaciously. It's a bright, happy house, full of colorful art, light walls and woods. I stood in the kitchen while David prepared a tray, then followed him up yet more stairs to his study -- a darker room, one long wall floor-to-ceiling books, a laptop on a wide writing table between tall windows at the front, a sofa and chair and a coffee table at the other end. We sat there for tea, a Hopi Indian brew, with Greek cookies.
      We met twice. This first time, a bit starstruck, I almost missed seeing how willing David was to meet me as another human being, how unpretentious and open he was. He seemed to be as fascinated with my appearance in his life, coming there from a Buddhist monastery, as I was with meeting him. We talked about writing, about his experience of critical acclaim and failure, about the characters in his life and books, and about his discouraging sense that the novel as a self-contained universe – as opposed to the "issues" novel – is no longer viable to publishers. Being a writer, he said, is “like standing naked in a field, where anyone can walk by and throw stones at you. You’re completely vulnerable.”  I winced at this. I’d identified characters from his descriptions in our conversation; I realized how much he reveals in his writing and wondered at what cost. 
     He said he didn’t know much about Buddhism, and after we’d talked about meditation for a bit he said, “Concentration and detachment are the essentials of writing fiction, the way to make it true. It fails if it expresses specific concepts, because they always refer back to the writer. One strives for something objective. Universality... kills the fiction.” It’s the intention to express universality that kills the fiction, I thought; universality can’t be imposed. He lets images arise, as opposed to thinking them up. He refrains from drawing conclusions and lets his images speak for themselves, just as when a meditator hesitates at that edge of seizing an object in the mind, space reveals itself. 
     I told him I’d had a hard time finding some of his books, and he offered me two I hadn’t bought yet, inscribing each with an image. In Slides, published in 1971, (cover design by David Hockney) he wrote, "He saw heaps of stones, and large beams, and shadowy, exposed rooms,"  and in The Accident, published in 1991, "...smiled, as to express his gratitude more expansively." While I was looking at the books David left the room and returned with a dark brown manuscript box. “This,” he said, “will never be published.” Inside were six hundred mostly white pages, only a line or two – a single image – at the top of each. It was a box of images. 
     Along with his reply to my letter, Plante had sent a copy of Suzi Gablik’s interview with him for her book Conversations Before the End of Time. He’d begun Annunciation, he told Gablik, by wondering what it would take to bring a secular woman to her knees. I’d pored over the interview, and one bit struck me in particular: Plante was fascinated with the image of a pregnant virgin and remarked that he would "give all my writing to be able to come up with the image of the Annunciation." After our first meeting, that comment continued to stick in my mind. We agreed to meet again when he returned from Lucca, Italy, where he would spend a month writing in his flat in a fourteenth century building while he sorted out paying for his share of reroofing the place. Meanwhile, I sent him a couple of articles I'd written about Buddhism in Thailand.
     In our second meeting, I mentioned that I’d been reading philosopher Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. "Irony is the “mass understanding of getting beyond the didactic,"  Plante said. “But I am not capable of irony. I wish I were. There is a certain flatness to not being ironical; one wants dimension. Irony allows exposure of self-consciousness.” He paused, and then added, “Although it’s also a way of avoiding things, avoiding the ultimate flatness...” He broke off there, and I thought “the ultimate flatness,” what a good description of dukkha, suffering, the Buddhist First Noble Truth. Irony can be both a very effective way of revealing unconscious belief structures, and a very sophisticated defense against the pain of deeper awareness.
     I brought up the subject of intention, and David picked up immediately. “Intention is central to my work. Is it ironical that one brings a very high degree of intention to one’s work so something will occur which is beyond one’s intention? This is a very different kind of irony. All intention is to detach myself from my work. Of course I use myself, my life. I detach through images. I try to create images which have references beyond my own intention.”  His  poignant remark about the image of the Annunciation came to mind, and I told him the story of the Buddhist relic I’d received the previous spring, which I’d brought along to show him.
     Plante took the relic to the window for a better look. We stood together in the fading winter light, gazing at this porous little white sphere the size of a peppercorn on its bed of saffron in a cellophane packet. (I had opened the silver case, with Manjushri and his sword of discriminating wisdom in bas relief on the cover, in which the relic had been presented to me.) David looked at me and said, "Maybe you don't need to write. Maybe what writing is for, you’ve already found. 
     “Writing's an obsession,” he declared, and took me on a quick tour of built-in cupboards in the hallways and bedrooms of his house, throwing open doors on to boxes and stacks of notebooks. "I love it, but it's an obsession." As I followed him I thought: I don’t have the commitment for the hard work of writing. Whatever insight I’ve glimpsed through Buddhist practice isn’t mature enough.” Then, as we sat for a few moments before I left, I recited a short poem I'd written a few months earlier. David’s response was, "That has tension." I knew in my body the difference between the experience, however concentrated, of writing the articles on Buddhism I’d sent him and the experience of scribbling, at three am, out of deep sleep, images from my own life which had then juxtaposed themselves into a poem. “Where does the truth come out from, in the body?” I mused aloud.
     “That’s a good question,” David replied. He paused and then continued softly, “Grief is always a good place to start. Grief is a source of grace. Start with grief.”

“Grief is a source of grace” became, for me, a sort of koan. David and I stayed in touch. I sent him some poems; he sent me some quotes he was collecting, and a postcard, with a picture of an elderly couple on a bench in the sand, facing the sea and sky. The photograph is covered by a numbered grid, and the man is saying, “Sometimes it feels like I am in C-10, but mostly it feels like I am in I-2. What Margaret feels, I have no idea.” The grid he refers to first is filled with sky; the second contains a trash bin. 
     Since reading Annunciation I’d recognized in myself a state of stoic forbearance not unlike the spiritual crisis of the characters in the book. I was oscillating between a vibrant sense of presence and a queasy feeling of being unmoored. I felt there was a sort of spiritual development through Plante’s books, and I was eagerly awaiting his next one, which I expected to resolve something in his work and – I  hoped without quite admitting – in myself. The bardo, after all, is not supposed to be a permanent state, but a transition, a breakthrough to insight. 
       But when Plante was invited to teach at Columbia and I visited him in New York, he gave me a diskette containing the manuscript of what would be his next book with a warning, "It's very dark." A friend, the novelist Mary Gordon, had called him weeping bitterly, he said, after she'd finished it. 
     The Age of Terror is set in Russia in the early 1990’s. The main character, Joe, a young American history teacher, is bent on suicide, and in the process of his helpless decline he brings others down with him. Joe is suicidal because he despairs of being original and is sick of the banal violence his imagination conjures. He has the helpless passivity of some sensitive American men, but is this enough to explain the devastation he wreaks? The character Gerald, whose vicious intentional malice is a foil for Joe’s ineptness and confusion, is horrifyingly bright. He knows how he got the way he is. 
     Forewarned of its darkness and captivated as always by Plante’s imagery, I saw The Age of Terror as a powerful indictment of abuse, an exploration of the consequences of malice, intentional and unintentional. I had so expected an epiphany that at first I thought Plante had left the ending uncertain, that Joe’s final trip into the snow segues ambiguously from his delirious visions. The story does flower and fade within an ellipsis: the image of a fieldstone house, covered in honeysuckle. But I had read into the ending more hope than was there. (Caleb Crain, reviewing the book in The New York Times Book Review when it was published a year later, would conclude, “Plante leads his readers into some deep, dark woods, though they may have to find their way out on their own.” ) 
     I phoned David to say I’d been afraid to read the book, and now that I had it was forcing me to face the implications of my own dark moods and impulses. “I don’t know what the book means,” he replied. “It was written in deep despair.” He wished Joe hadn’t had to betray others as he did, but the novel seemed to require it. He added that he isn’t stopping there, but is continuing his work on a book “about God.”
     The Age of Terror was a heartstopping confrontation for me on two levels. Buddhism teaches that suicide is to be avoided because it takes away none of the problems and leaves the psyche without even a body to deal with them, but now I saw that I had clung to this teaching as a belief to cover my fear of suicidal thoughts. I wasn’t facing the fear in a spirit of inquiry. Furthermore, I realized that my dark moods could have dangerous unintended effects on others. I could, like Joe, betray other people while in the narrow tunnel of despair. I was shaken for more than a year by what I had seen about myself, which I couldn’t express. My fear made me dangerous, and the danger made me ever more afraid.
     Then one day I wandered into a bookstore and happened on The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot’s 1955 investigation of the death an artist must subject himself to (his examples are all men: Rilke, Kafka, Mallarmé, Hölderlin . . .) in order to let the work come through. He speaks of the artist as “linked to the work in the same strange way in which the man who takes death for a goal is linked to death.”  A life-and-death struggle is involved in expressing something too big to approach reasonably, or intentionally. It overcomes you, yet you must tussle it into  shape. Wanting to die can be both a wish to avoid the hard work of creation and a longing to give oneself completely, to die into one’s effort so that something more than what is intended can come forth. 
     In Blanchot’s light, I saw The Age of Terror as at once Plante’s allegory of the struggle of the artist and the inseparable manifestation of that struggle. Content and meaning merged in his novel in a way that had forced me to examine the space between the characters’ inner and outer experiences – in those spaces within myself. It would be hard to overstate Blanchot’s influence in my understanding the effect of Plante’s work in my life. I finally recognized my suicidal thoughts as evidence of a longing to give expression to something. 

Recently a writer friend came for a visit and read a draft of this piece. Later that morning, smoking on the back porch, he smiled and asked, “What effect do you think your meeting had on the next book Plante wrote?” 
     "Me? Nothing.  I didn't have any effect," I said, puzzled.
     "But he said you'd brought to light something he'd kept in the dark, lest the light reveal it to be an intention and not something that occurs without his intending it.  In a way, you exposed him. Then his next book exposed you."
     I recalled Plante's image of the writer's life as "standing naked in a field, where anyone can walk by and throw stones at you."
    Reading The Age of Terror did expose me, to myself. My attraction to suicide, I had to admit, was a kind of indolence. Like Joe, I despair of being original. My own experience and training – the raw material I have to derive work from – seem so paltry. But originality itself is derived, is contingent. Creativity is simply the willingness to engage with whatever presents itself to the imagination -- a balance of intention and surrender.
     Perhaps grief leads to grace through a stumped sense that things really couldn’t be different, that there is no strain or thread one could isolate and change and feel confident thereby of a better outcome. It may not be far from that point to the kind of giving up which makes real effort possible. David Plante has written that he imagines a plane that lies beneath his writing “like a pane of glass, and what shows up on that plane is not light but darkness... I am [writing] entirely for that darkness. [The] spiritual truth for which I write... is all in that darkness, so clear in its depth that there is, like God in eternity, no seeing to the end of it.”  Images reveal what cannot be described. Facing despair and apparent meaninglessness, Plante produces devastating work. His unflinching look at the “between” states in human experience rouses his reader to her own bardos, and thus to her own opportunities for insight. 

I hadn’t checked on Master Hsin Tao’s relic for a long time. When I opened the tarnished silver case the other day, the relic was smaller than I’d remembered, more the size of a mustard seed than a peppercorn. It seems to be shrinking. One day, rather than multiplying, it might disappear altogether. I’m reminded of the Zen koan, “What was your original face, before you were born?”  with its paradox of the “original mind,” both primordial and spontaneously fresh, ancient and new. Grace may come to me more in giving up than in acquiring, more in disappearing than in emerging. Still, to recognize the grace in vanishing, I had to write this piece.