Imagine, if you will, that you are having lunch with a friend in your favorite diner. It’s a cold winter’s day, and both of you have ordered bowls of chili. Sampling a spoonful, your friend notes that the chili is spicier than usual. That’s fine with him but not so fine with you. It’s far too hot for your palate. But as you gingerly swallow another spoonful, you recall a question one Zen student asked another: “Are you tasting or judging?” And in the present instance, has the latter function superseded the former?*
Perhaps no modern Western poem more succinctly embodies the tension between tasting and judging—and, more broadly, between sensory experience and judgmental thought—than William Carlos Williams’ “This is Just to Say”:
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
–
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
–
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
Williams wrote this haiku-like poem in 1934, when modernism in general and the poetic movement known as Imagism were in full flower. “No ideas but in things,” Williams’s aesthetic creed, became a slogan for that movement. Primarily through its imagery, the present poem establishes its setting, its dramatic conflict, and its confessional tone in its first two stanzas. In the third, however, the narrator’s attention turns to the taste of the plums, which overrides his compunctions. His sensory impressions take precedence over his concern for the fairness of his actions. Tasting, in short, trumps moral judgment.
If that is true in Williams’s poem, it is less often true in our interior lives. Quite the opposite. Unless we have trained ourselves to remain in the moment and to attend to what we are presently experiencing, more likely than not our minds will revert to what neuroscientists call their “default mode,” which is to say, to scattered, reactive thinking, much of it focused on a remembered past or an imagined future. And no small part of that thinking will consist of judgments, whether trivial (“This tea is bitter”) or profound (“I have wasted my life”). Not infrequently, these judgments may be accompanied by a sense of separateness and by feelings of superiority or inferiority in relation to whatever is being judged. And all too often, our judgments will be reactive and dismissive, closing the door to any further inquiry.
To be sure, many situations in everyday life require us to make judgments and to act accordingly, often without sufficient time to consider every relevant factor. Parents, teachers, and administrators, for example, must frequently decide on the spot how to respond fairly and even-handedly to conflicts and crises as they arise. And without question, the quality of judiciousness is both a desirable personal trait and a sign of moral maturity. But to cultivate judiciousness is one thing, and to adopt a judgmental attitude toward every new experience is quite another. That attitude can easily harden into a mental habit, and that habit can itself become an element of character. Just as the cultivation of sensory awareness can foster hyper-sensitivity, the virtue of judiciousness can calcify into the vice of self-righteousness, turning us into pale replicas of Shakespeare’s Polonius, whom T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock aptly describes as “full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse.”
Fortunately, there is a middle ground between those two extremes, namely the faculty of discernment. The word discern derives from a Latin root meaning “to separate,” but in its practical application, to discern means to distinguish one thing from another. Unlike a reflexive, judgmental response, discernment allows us to remain open to our present experience, as we watch, listen, smell, or taste and endeavor to distinguish this from that. As but one example, here is a poem by the late U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov (1921 -1991):
BECAUSE YOU ASKED ABOUT THE LINE BETWEEN PROSE AND POETRY
Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned to pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.
–
There came a moment that you couldn’t tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.
In these lines, a discerning critical intelligence in concert with a fertile poetic imagination observes a natural phenomenon, likening it to a distinction between literary genres. No judgment is expressed. Rather than expatiate on the traits and merits, respectively, of prose and poetry, Nemerov investigates his subject, which becomes the other half of an “I-Thou,” rather than an “I-It,” relationship. And his gentle, memorable poem, composed by a writer who was both a superb poet and a gifted essayist, becomes an act of disinterested, self-forgetful contemplation.
—-
* In her book Ordinary Wonder, the Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck reports overhearing this question while she was having lunch with her students. Charlotte Joko Beck, Ordinary Wonder (Shambhala, 2022), 157.
“Receive a guest,” advised the Zen master Soyen Shaku (1860-1919), “with the same attitude you have when alone. When alone, maintain the same attitude you have in receiving guests.”
One Time, One Meeting 