The smell of rotting flesh

On political disagreements today

While I write this, a “corpse flower”—so nicknamed because of the stench of rotting flesh it emits when in bloom—is beginning to blossom at the New York Botanical Garden, the first time the garden has had a corpse flower in bloom since 1939. The enormous, stinking flower can grow up to 10 feet tall and reveals its purple blossom just once or twice a decade, give or take. Each bloom, lasting only a day or two at a time, is a brief, disgusting effort to entice flies and beetles with the smell of putrid meat, during which visit the bugs will pollinate the plant, which will then recede into hibernation only to reemerge in a few years to undertake the whole hideous display all over again.

As a metaphor for anything both majestic and revolting, the occasion of a corpse flower blooming in the United States at this particular moment, straddled by the Democratic and Republican national conventions amid one of the ugliest and strangest elections seasons in our history, is almost too perfect. The fickle flower appeared as Donald Trump emerged as the official GOP nominee, and its scientific name is Amorphophallus titanum, which translates roughly to “gigantic formless penis.” (Never let anyone tell you nature doesn’t have a sense of humor.) The plant also reeked while the Democrats kicked off their own convention amid revelations that officers of the Democratic National Committee conspired to corrupt the nominating process by actively working against Senator Bernie Sanders, whose supporters have long sensed something was fishy at the DNC.

In every election season passions run high and the uglier sides of our humanity come growling out from under the yoke of civility, but somehow this one feels particularly gross. The two major party candidates, perhaps the most unpopular pair in American history, have been accepted with held noses by many in their own parties—and they’re absolutely reviled by people on the other side. Donald Trump riles his supporters with visions of looming apocalypse. Hillary Clinton riles her supporters with visions of Donald Trump. Mass shootings, cop killings, killer cops, and foreign terrorist attacks make this moment feel all too real, adding a sense of urgency and danger to the crisis.

Under these circumstances, maintaining decency toward people on the other side, who you believe are not just wrong but are putting your life, the lives of your loved ones, and of the country itself in mortal danger can seem not only difficult or irresponsible, but immoral. The situation is made all the more desperate because inevitably some of those people are your friends, your coworkers, your family. 

Kindness is never wasted, but with stakes this high it’s natural that people should feel anger, even hatred, toward the dangerous idiots on the other side. You can be forgiven for wondering if being good to people who are so wrong might actually be bad. It’s confusing. 

I want to suggest we all turn east for a moment to take a lesson from Zen Buddhism, which has a unique philosophical take on conflict resolution. 

In Zen, a great deal of emphasis is given to the concept of nothingness, typically rendered—at least as this non-Japanese-speaking Okie understands it—as the Japanese word mu. Mu is not yes, but it is also not no; it isn’t one, but it also isn’t zero. Nothingness isn’t something, but neither is it nothingness. It is no thing. The idea of mu is to break the lens of duality through which we typically experience the world.

“This word mu can be neither measured nor grasped,” writes 13th
century Zen master Dogen, “for there is nothing to grab hold of.”

One of the most helpful explanations of mu comes from a book that is only kind of about Zen, the American classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” Robert Pirsig uses the example of a computer circuit, which can only exhibit two states—one or zero. 

“Try to find a voltage representing one or zero when the power is off!” Pirsig writes. “The circuits are in a mu state.” As Pirsig puts it, mu means not to answer yes, or no, or to refuse to answer but to “un-ask the question.” 

When confronted with a friend you thought a decent person until he turned out to be a fill-in-the-blank supporter, try putting yourself into a mu state. You may wonder, “What in the hell is wrong with this person? How am I supposed to be friendly toward someone with beliefs so abhorrent?” You don’t have to answer. You don’t even have to not answer. Just un-ask the question and watch as time continues to pass while our little rock spins onward through space into oblivion. 

And if all this sounds to you like so much mumbo jumbo, fair enough. We may just have to hold our noses and bear it until November. Fortunately, this stinking flower only blossoms every few years.

For more from Denver, read his article on getting the creeps from Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau.