a train koan
Grok the empty space
between town and the tall peak,
where freight traffic flows.
a train koan (2021; iron, hand-stretched traffic cones, bailing wire) is a sound meditation device.
This permanent installation – perched atop an earthen dyke in Bombay Beach, California – collects sound waves from an open expanse of the Sonoran Desert and concentrates them at the listener’s ear.
Roughly two miles distant, across the flats, freight trains traverse the koan’s auditory field on the heavily-trafficked Union Pacific Railroad line between Los Angeles, Mexicali and Yuma.
Without the aid of the koan, those trains silently skirt the edge of the evaporating Salton Sea, like the moon’s mirrored disc crossing the surface of a still lake. Existent, evident, ephemeral, they leave no trace.
But with an ear pressed to the koan’s narrow end, it’s possible to hear their whistles at distant crossings, the screech of manganese wheels on hot-rolled steel, and the rumble of freighted cars crossing low-slung bridges over desert washes.
Trains are passing away, 24/7.
Hear for your non-self.
Listens are free.
Enlightenment: 25¢
The koan is a ‘finger pointing at the moon’ in the Zen tradition, an enigmatic instruction that trains attention on the unbidden, indivisible and inherently empty nature of existence.
Phenomena continually arise and pass away within an open and vast field of awareness, like so many trains, carrying the contents of consciousness and the weighted freight of our inner life.
In Zen Buddhism, teachers give koan riddles to students seeking to advance on the path toward right view.
What is self-conscious and ulterior is far from the truth. What is mindless is near.
These koans can occasion flashes of insight in the mind the listener. They act as pointers toward the transient nature of all phenomena.
With its rusted coin slot, a train koan offers willful truth-seekers an express route to the ineffable. But any quarter deposited in pursuit of enlightenment, falls silently, lost to the desert dust.
The superstructure of a train koan consists of 26 hand-stretched traffic cones appropriated from points roughly along Highway 395 corridor between Nevada’s Black Rock Desert and Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles.
The cones were stitched together with bailing wire and lashed to the koan’s iron substructure in the expansive midday heat of the Salton Sea basin, where winds regularly gust beyond 80 miles per hour and summer temperatures can soar above 125 degrees.
During construction, when the koan cooled at night, the lashed cones shrank and congealed, cementing the sound-funneling effect.
