No Object #1

     What you see is what you get. Examine that and it opens again and again, like a joke. It never says what you see is what is, although "the moons are as they are" (Dogen, again). What you get is what you will see, mountain/snow for instance. First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is a song by Donovan, then there is a great jam version by The Allman Brothers, and the Dead incorporated it too. You can only get what you've actually seen, and the way words become part of that is where money comes in. And as long as money's coming in, the music gets heard. And that's basically all you can get out of the Sixties' system unless the words bang into themselves while crowding towards their object, as in the "Mountains and Waters Sutra" of Dogen. This piece was collected in what the English-speaking world calls the Treasury of the True Dharma Eye, but the French call it La Réserve visuelle des événements dans leur justesse. "There are mountains hidden in treasures," asserts the final section of this "visual reserve of events in their justice." As we try to see what we can get from this, it occurs to me that in such a dialectical "Hegelianism without reserves" (as Reb Derrida called it), incommensurability might just be just.