Sigh. Look. Outside the window. A bird.
The boss asked if the blood was my blood. The bird flies downwind. I’m writing a
little haiku in my head.
Without just one nest
A bird can call the world home
Life is your career
I’m counting on my fingers: five, seven, five. (54-55)
Alluding to the Heart Sutra, his comment that “[everything is nothing" quite succinctly
encapsulates the gist of Mahayana philosophy. The notion of emptiness is a non-negative
negation, an affirmation of our interrelatedness with all things. “Everything is nothing;" in the
words of the Buddhist sutra: Form is emptiness, emptiness is not different from form.
Emptiness means no-thing when divested from the realm of the perceiving dualist mind; it
connotes a mind unfettered by the attachments of conceptions, distinctions, and delusions. In
the “Look at me” quote above, the narrator uses the first person “I,” “me," and “my” seven
times— hardly the language of one who truly believes that “Everything is nothing."
He also relies on his assumptions of what it means to be enlightened when he is in
stressful situations in this chapter and elsewhere; it is here too that we see him employ haiku
for the first time. He uses them as a centering practice in place of the meditative mind-palace
he was able to create for himself during guided meditation in the support groups preceding
Marla’s arrival. In each instance he is feeling outside stress— being confronted by his
coworkers’ hostile glances (haiku 1), being interrogated by his boss (haiku 2), while impatiently
waiting on Marla (haiku 3), and being asked by Maria if she can stay the night (haiku 4).
Moving from a Marxist-inflected haiku as the chapter opens, to progressively more
philosophically-oriented ones, his verse interestingly becomes more in touch with Zen as
another key incident in the novel is hinted at the end of the chapter: the first real pain felt by
the narrator as Tyler pours lye on his hand. The first haiku quoted above reads too didactically,
and even though it concerns nature (bees), it lacks the requisite seasonal reference and the
time- and place-specificity of traditional haiku. What is interesting about it, though, comes in
retrospect as we move through the novel. While on the surface the content seems illogical—
that the queen is the slave of the workers—we might read it from the standpoint that the
narrator is the metaphorical queen enslaved by both Tyler and his space monkeys, both of