In one of the great court banquets, everyone was seated according to rank, awaiting the entry of the king. In came a plain, shabby man, who took a seat above everyone else. His boldness angered the prime minister, who ordered the newcomer to identify himself. Was he a minister? No. More. Was he the king? No. More. “Are you then God?” asked the prime minister. “I am above that also,” replied the poor man. “There is nothing beyond God,” retorted the prime minister. “That nothing,” came the response, “is me.”
— A Sufi Parable
Ernie certainly didn’t leave the army with the intention of setting up a mystical luncheonette. I was a regular at the place for a long time before I began to see the mysticism in it myself.
For nearly thirty years, the Victory Luncheonette filled a cramped, overlooked space on a block of industrial buildings in Manhattan’s East Village. Its founder, proprietor, and staff were all one person: Ernie. As you might guess from the name of the luncheonette, Ernie was a veteran of the Last Good War, to which cause he had given his right leg.
It was nothing in particular that made me a regular at the Victory. I simply stopped in one morning for coffee and a buttered bagel. There was a crowd two or three deep at the counter, mostly workers from the area’s small loft factories. The air was fat with smells of toasting and frying and the clamor of voices trying to rise above Bob Seger’s “Old Time Rock ’n’ Roll” throbbing from a jukebox in the back.
Gently angling my way toward the counter, I signaled for Ernie’s attention.
Unaware that he was one-legged, I was momentarily caught by Ernie’s odd but graceful movements as he worked the narrow space between grill and counter. Like a Sufi dervish, he was bobbing and sweeping in long, slow circles, cutting a bagel here, popping the toaster there, opening the coffee spigots on two cups at once, buttering a bagel with a single sweep, scrambling an egg in what looked like a dented aluminum helmet, brushing litter from the counter, cutting another bagel, flicking back the coffee spigots at the last possible moment — all the while contributing abbreviated comments to conversations with half a dozen customers. I must have been hypnotized by this performance because I suddenly found him pointing at me.
“Yastrzemski for MVP,” he was saying. For the second time.
The wheels were turning slowly. I blurted back another name: “Mantle.”
“Silvio, you hear that?” He was poking at someone’s shoulder. “The professa says Mantle. Yaz is a bum. What’d I tell ya?”
A small circle had formed. From the way they were looking at me, I was encouraged to think it was a Mantle crowd.
“You want something or you got all day?”
“Umm, coffee and a buttered bagel.”
“Toasted?”
I wanted it untoasted but by the time I could respond he had sliced it, rammed it under the gas flames of the grill, and turned to another customer.
“Yaz can hit. I’ll give you that, Silvio.”
Silvio responded with a dubious shrug and started squeezing a long, yellow worm of mustard onto a reeking mass of fried pastrami.
The cooking equipment of the luncheonette had been so arranged that Ernie could reach every part of it by pivoting on a single foot. Two huge coffee makers were against the wall; the sinks, cutting board, and toaster were tucked under the counter. Although he could get to either end of the counter with a single giant step, he delivered most of the food by spinning it along the counter, dangerously skirting open stacks of jelly donuts and corn muffins.
Between the stained metal tanks of the coffee makers hung a photograph of Ernie from another time and world. Dressed in pajamas and a soldier’s cap, one arm around a nurse and the other awkwardly gripping a crutch, he was glaring at the camera with a young man’s stern resolve to show he didn’t give a good goddamn.
“You want it buttered, your bagel?”
“Right.”
As I walked away with my breakfast in a little white bag, I wondered how he knew I was a professor. I was wearing my Levi jacket and jeans, and hadn’t cut my hair for almost a year. The idea was precisely not to look like a professor. Did I look like a professor trying not to look like one?
There he was, spinning in his grimy apron, no more mysterious than a toasted hard roll. He was certainly the center of everything that happened in the Victory, but it was a strangely unnoticed center.
The reason I didn’t see the mysticism in the Victory is that in the ordinary sense there was nothing to see. The nothing was there, not in what Ernie was doing, but in what he was not doing.
At first it would seem that Ernie was working while everyone else stood around. But as you became familiar with the place, Ernie’s work seemed to disappear. You would just stop noticing he was working. There he was, spinning in his grimy apron, no more mysterious than a toasted hard roll. He was certainly the center of everything that happened in the Victory, but it was a strangely unnoticed center. It should have been obvious that he was actually preparing and serving food, but it wasn’t.
I doubt whether Ernie knew the names of more than a few of us. But names didn’t matter here. Identities had a lighter weight. To the degree that we knew each other at all, it was by our orders or our baseball teams, by the jokes we told or by the intimate details about our lives that we revealed with astonishing innocence. Even if Ernie didn’t recognize you, it came to about the same thing: “What’s yours, lady?” “What’re you buying today, pal?”
The Victory was a place where the public and private dramas of life got equal attention. How should the jury vote in the current Mafia trial? Someone’s child has pneumonia. A woman is attacked in her subway station by a twelve-year-old boy. Should the Mets trade Tom Seaver for a whole new infield? Threaded through all this was the ongoing argument about whether subway tokens would ever go as high as a buck. And often events of puzzling metaphysical significance, such as the time Yastrzemski dropped an easy fly ball, causing the Red Sox to lose a crucial game. “Yastrzemski, he just doesn’t drop fly balls.” But the mysticism had nothing to do with these dramas themselves. It was the weightless way they passed in and out of conversation, like moonlight striking water.
Although no one ever had what you could call a conversation with Ernie, he seemed to be in every conversation at once. If he never, or almost never, forgot your usual order, and if he never finished one order before starting another, he would also never forget unfinished conversations. “Yastrzemski,” he would mutter, angling his head sideways at someone who had put money on the Red Sox. “How’s the kid?” he would ask another. In the Victory there was no such thing as The Last Word. Truths, conclusions, absolutes — all had about the same permanence as the steamy smells that circulated in the Victory and drifted out onto the street.
Endings were part of a larger formless tumble that started from who-knows-where, and would go on to who-gives-a-damn. Buddhists have a name for it: samsara, the state of endless change from which nothing and no one ever escapes.
If the Victory was as samsaric as all this, why was it in fact festive? It was because of the way Ernie spooned sugar into a paper cup and slammed change on the counter. Over the years his actions had been reduced to their minimum. Cutting and buttering a roll was a matter of a few effortless moves. There was no one hidden in it, doing it, as it were, from a distance. Tao-like, no one was doing anything and yet nothing remained to be done. The Victory had become what Ernie did without doing it. There was a center to all this activity; it was a still center. It’s no wonder that we overlooked it. We overlooked it because there was nothing to see.
It was the nothing that made it mystical.
Whether Ernie saw it this way is another question. How Ernie saw it at all is a question. He would sometimes look out at the passing traffic and say, loud enough for all of us to hear, “How could I waste thirty years listening to you dumb bastards?” He talked about winning the lottery: he would collect his check, close the door of the Victory behind him forever, and visit “that place in France where the Heinies ruined my future with the Rockettes.” But the words hit like moonlight.
The first time I was alerted to the mysticism of the place was the morning I stopped in for my usual before lecturing on Nietzsche in my 8:30 class on existentialism. I had been reflecting on a remark in The Genealogy of Morals — the book in which the Buddhist influence on Nietzsche is most palpable — that “there is no ‘being’ behind the doing, acting, becoming; the ‘doer’ has simply been added to the deed by the imagination — the doing is everything.”
Just as I reached the counter, Ernie had my bagel in the toaster and was telling someone which horse he should not back in the third at Aqueduct. He cut the bagel right in front of me but I still found myself wondering, Did he do it or didn’t he? There was the slicing and the move to the toaster, and then the other hand back to the coffee spigot. Was this all one movement or was it many? Was he doing something? Was there someone doing it? Was there a being behind the act doing what was done? Or was the doing everything? How could you ever tell? How would you even know that about yourself?
How much of what I do is what I am not doing? It was at this moment that I remembered Growler Grashevski.
At the beginning of the wrestling season in my junior year of high school, Coach Weaver walked me over to the schedule attached to the wall of the wrestling room. He was pressing his fingers into my right bicep as though measuring it. This is an omen, I thought.
Stabbing the schedule with a thick forefinger, he drew my attention to a date seven weeks off. It was our annual match with a high school in south Milwaukee, a wrestling powerhouse. His grip tightened and I could feel the blood gather in my fingertips.
“Growler Grashevski,” he said with an unmistakable note of warning in his voice.
I didn’t need the warning. Growler was already a legend as a football player. He got his name from the animal sounds he made while attacking the opposing team. Rising from all fours as the other team came to the line of scrimmage, he would paw the air with a guttural blast of sound. He was most famous for his diving leaps, which carried all 265 of his tightly muscled pounds over the blockers to seize the runner, whom he would take to the ground with another roar of triumph. Growler’s appearance doubled attendance at high-school sports events, and rumors abounded that the pros already had their eyes on him.
In each of my wrestling matches during those seven weeks, I had only one opponent in mind. Actually, he had taken residence in my daily consciousness. I exercised, drilled, and fought against only one person, no matter who was on the mat. My matches were taking on a dreamy quality that invited a strong response from Coach Weaver.
“Don’t think, Carse!” he would yell at me during practice. “This is wrestling, boy. Thinking is for philosophy.” During the matches his “don’t think” became a mantra he tirelessly chanted at me.
Despite my prayerful wish for a disabling injury or one of those dreadful infections you get from a mat burn, I found myself sitting next to Coach Weaver as he drove us to the match in Milwaukee. It wasn’t a highway I saw stretching out before us but a shining ribbon of fear. Every few miles the coach would knuckle me in the thigh and silently mouth the words, Don’t think.
I wrestled in the heavyweight, or unlimited, class. I weighed scarcely 190 pounds and rarely wrestled anyone less than 250. Mostly they were clownish fat boys with accidental strength and little coordination. The high moment for the audience came when they first took off their warm-ups. As for me, the relative absence of both muscle and bulk made my sudden nakedness an object of hilarity.
But all this was nothing compared to Growler. In the first place, he made his entrance into the gymnasium walking on his hands. When he reached the edge of the mat, he sprang to his feet in a graceful half flip, dropped to one knee, and took a Charles Atlas pose, popping a bicep at a crowd now frantic with joy. I only elevated the din by retreating as quickly as I could to my end of our team bench.
Staring across at this remarkable specimen, I reflected on the genetic unfairness at work here. While my slender Celtic forebears were doing funny dances on their toes, probably drunk, his were pulling oak trees out of the forests of northern Europe with their bare hands, no doubt eating the bark as well. There was no comfort in the fact that our team had won the preceding two matches. As the referee slammed the mat with his hand, indicating the end of the match just before mine, the crowd joined Growler in a cry for revenge. His bout with me would decide the meet.
I stood up, slipped off my jersey, and stepped to the edge of the mat. My joints were made of ice. I took the standard opening stance and looked across at Growler, who was on all fours, pawing the earth and beginning his famous roar.
At the starting whistle, Growler paused for a theatrical moment, then exploded in my direction. None of my imaginary matches with him had included this move. So I quickly backed and turned. With Growler’s fingertips just grazing my shoulder blades, I bolted off the mat and across the gym in the direction of our bench. I found myself looking down at Coach Weaver. His face was expressionless, even as he molded his lips to form two silent words.
We took our places again on either side of the referee. This time, Growler stepped back, crouched, and came at me in a long, soaring arc. My memory of what happened in the next three or four seconds is frozen into a series of photographic stills. Growler is airborne, about six feet above the mat. My hands are on his shoulders. I am falling backward with his momentum but my feet are still square on the mat. His body does not resist the rotating pressure of my hands; it turns like a loose propeller. My feet leave the mat. He is now under me, my chest square on his. I ride him to the earth. When we hit he takes my full weight on his rib cage. There is an inhuman sound as all the air blows out of his lungs. The referee’s face is inches away as he tries to see whether Growler’s back is pressed to the mat. The referee slams down his hand. There is a resounding crack. The match is over. Someone is lifting me by the shoulder.
“Let’s get out of here,” Coach Weaver said as he dropped my warm-ups over me. I looked up. The crowd was motionless and silent.
I turned as we left the gymnasium. Growler was now standing, though still sucking wildly for air, holding his hands up as though begging for an explanation of what had happened.
During the ride home, no one said a word for miles. I finally looked over at the coach and asked, “Well, I did win, didn’t I?”
Without taking his eyes off the road, he said in a tired and solemn voice, “Don’t think, boy. Don’t think win, don’t think lose. Just don’t think. Thinking’s for philosophy.”
For a few moments each day, we could be who we were without having to be anyone. Ernie’s effortlessness seemed to become ours. We were absorbed into the gentle chaos of the Victory, gliding with its rhythms, taking our places in the nonstop conversation.
Mystics often distinguish between the ego and the soul, or the ego and the self. The terms are not so important, but the distinction is. The ego is the dualist in us. It is the habit we have of seeing ourselves over and against someone else. As ego, my inwardness remains inward because it is completely closed off to you by my outwardness. As ego, my wealth, intelligence, moral goodness, social class, and so on, are what they are only in contrast to the person next to me. Whether or not we are believers, we oppose the natural and the supernatural: we are here and worldly; God is there and otherworldly. In fact, belief and unbelief are strictly issues for the ego: you can’t be an unbeliever unless there are some believers against whom you are an unbeliever. All such oppositions are creations of the ego.
From the perspective of soul, however, we see each opposing either/or as a conjoined both/and. We can be here only because we are not there; in this way the “here” and “there” belong together. “That comes from this, and this comes from that — which means that that and this give birth to one another. Life rises from death and death from life” (Chuang-tsu). If God exists beyond all the heavens, then God must be hidden in what is closest and most familiar to us. “When there is no more separation between this and that, it is called the still-point of Tao. At the still-point in the center of the circle, one can see the infinite in all things.” I can be separate from you only because at a deeper level we are joined in something inseparable. I cannot be alone alone.
The still center, the soul, does not oppose anything. Not opposing anything, it does nothing. As soul, we do not act; we are. As ego, we cope with the world, change it, arrange it, try to improve it. We cope with ourselves, too, becoming our own projects, struggling to be who and where we are not. When we become aware of the still-point in a person, of a deed that has no doer, we are aware of soul; we are in the presence of presence.
My question to Coach Weaver was the ego’s question: I did win, didn’t I? It had a dualism in it. It was the ego that rode to Milwaukee on a ribbon of fear. The ego’s question on the return trip is telling. I’d been on the mat with Growler a mere nine seconds and my memory of that sequence of events was nearly perfect, but still I didn’t know whether I had won or lost. The reason is obvious: I didn’t do anything. These things just happened. My feet were on the mat. My hands were on Growler’s shoulders. Growler turned like a loose propeller. There was no doer in these deeds.
What happened to the ego? Maybe it froze or died or just gave up, not caring what would happen. For some reason, it got out of the way. Whether the coach’s “don’t think” had an effect, I can’t say. Perhaps it was the long months of disciplined practice, the endless, mind-numbing repetition of basic moves, that took over and did what it did no matter what I might have been thinking. I remember what happened, but I don’t remember doing it. I was not watching myself, not thinking about acting, not being something outside of the act.
Coach Weaver’s reaction afterward was dismaying. I had expected praise, celebration, a gleeful hug, but there was not a word, never a single reference to that match. At the time I found his disinterest startling. Now, however, I am much more startled by my own lack of awareness of what I was doing in the final few seconds of that match.
When the ego steps out of the way, the soul neither wins nor loses. The soul triumphs over nothing and cannot be defeated. Nor does it comfort us in our losses. These are all matters of ego and therefore matters of indifference to the soul.
I don’t know what Ernie was thinking when he talked about winning the lottery, but I do know he might have lived his life quite differently. If he had chosen to “make something of himself,” he would have acted as ego, dualistically, taking the measure of himself by what opposed him. He might then have decided that these thirty years were really a waste of time and that if he had been more adroit in a worldly way, he would now be collecting rent on this building, rather than paying it to someone he had never met. Who knows, he could have had a whole chain of Victory Luncheonettes and driven a Cadillac to work. But then, if he had harbored such regrets, he would only have worked against himself — each roll, each cup of coffee a reminder of failure, of time forever lost. He would have been absent from the Victory — and so would his customers. Even as we stood there, we would have been somewhere else.
In spite of the sepia photograph of a brave young soldier on the wall and the nostalgia in the name of the luncheonette, Ernie wasn’t trying to keep the past from passing away. The war had profoundly affected his history, but he was not at war with that history. The Germans got his leg, but he was not fighting its loss by trying somehow to compensate for it, proving he could act like a normal, two-legged person. Had he done so, he would have still been on that battlefield, carrying that huge past with him. He was no Rockette, but no Rockette could have been more balletic, less weighted with the superfluous. He was no Rockefeller either, but no millionaire could have been more oblivious to the quantity of his wealth.
Ernie did not stand over against his history, his customers, his bagels, his nameless landlord. Because they were not opposing objects that had to be struggled with, there was an effortlessness about him. This is why he never appeared to be working. This is also why, when we walked into the place, our own struggles seemed to belong somewhere else. It was infectious. For a few moments each day, we could be who we were without having to be anyone. Ernie’s effortlessness seemed to become ours. We were absorbed into the gentle chaos of the Victory, gliding with its rhythms, taking our places in the nonstop conversation. There were no boundaries between its impermanence and our own, and our lives became what they were anyway — samsaric, passing away.
Something else: because our struggle in life is inherently a struggle against samsara, and because for that brief time we did not resist the passing away, we existed in a state that Islamic mystics know as fana al-fana, the passing away of the passing away. Some mystics call it ecstasy. Buddhists describe it with the starkest possible declaration: Nirvana is samsara. Nirvana, the highest goal of the spiritual life, is identical with the impermanence of everyday life. “That which is the limit of nirvana is also the limit of samsara; there is not the slightest difference between the two” (Nagarjuna).
If we are looking for the mystical, we need go no further than the Victory, no further than the most ordinary of our ordinary experiences.
Just as the sea is never without an obscuring surface, the ego never really ceases to exist. It may well be that Ernie thought most of us were dumb bastards and that if he had our legs he would sure as hell be somewhere else in life. But the thought was foam; he did not remain over against us or himself. There was, no doubt, something that Ernie wanted to be, but there was a nothing in him that was higher than that something.
The mysticism of the Victory Luncheonette was hidden in its ordinariness — which is to say that it was revealed in its ordinariness. Mystical vision is seeing how extraordinary the ordinary is.
I saw but I didn’t see that I saw. My seeing was strictly in the mode of ego. From the perspective of ego, doing by way of not doing makes no sense. It makes no sense because it has no opposing impact on the world. It has no visible effect; it changes nothing. Ernie’s egoless slicing and pouring will have no place in the history of the East Village. The mystical is thoroughly worldly — nirvana is samsara, after all — but its inherent indifference to the world seems to leave the world exactly as it is.
It is true that there was something infectious in the fact that no secret doer was hiding behind Ernie’s slicing, buttering, and pouring. The presence of this absence allowed each of us to enter an egolessness of our own. That is an effect of a kind. But it is hard to trace its results. Each time I walked away from the Victory, I registered, however slightly, the return of a need to be something above the ordinary. I resumed the seriousness about my own special way of doing things that I had dropped for the few minutes of my daily toasted, buttered bagel and coffee. It was as though at the exit I had revived a mute yearning for fresh matches with the Growler Grashevskis of the world. One leg was enough for Ernie; two legs were not enough for me. Sure, I wanted nirvana as much as the next guy, but I wanted it as a passage out of my samsara, not into it.
I am a teacher. When I enter the classroom in the usual, nonmystical way, I want something extraordinary to occur there and believe it will happen if I make it happen. I do it by attempting to interrupt the familiar paths of my students’ thoughts with well-defined but provocative ideas, whether I am teaching existentialism or the philosophy of religion or even mysticism. If I do it correctly, they cannot avoid making their own thoughtful way through these ideas. I am a classroom atheist. I advocate none of these ideas; or, perhaps, I advocate them all equally. What students choose to do with them I want them to do as freely as possible. And if you ask me whether I think my teaching makes a difference to my students, I will tell you honestly that I hope so and often believe so. In fact, I wouldn’t teach if I didn’t believe so.
The classroom looks very different when I take a mystical view of it. If there is anything truly extraordinary in my teaching it is found in its ordinariness. Moreover, just as the still center of the Victory is not something Ernie did, I cannot guarantee by anything I do that there will be a still center in my teaching. As with Growler, it would have to be something that happens without my doing it, without my even noticing it.
One day I made my ritual stop at the Victory while on my way to lecture on Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling. Speaking of the way Abraham was greater than all our ordinary heroes, Kierkegaard said, “One became great by expecting the possible, another by expecting the eternal; but he who expected the impossible became the greatest of all.”
As soon as I stepped in the door it was clear that something was different. Ernie’s back was to the counter; he was laboring over the grill in a way that made it look like work. The place was filled with the regular customers but the usual samsaric flow had been fractured; there was a dark weight in it. Before I asked, someone explained that the building had been sold and Ernie would have to vacate. Ernie pushed my breakfast onto the counter without a comment. I paid for it and left, saying nothing. I never saw Ernie again.
A week or so later, on my way to the same class, I noticed that a dumpster had been rammed against the curb just a few steps from the door of the Victory. I stopped to watch as two men pulled the splintered remains of the counter out onto the sidewalk. By the time I returned a couple of hours later, the luncheonette was empty and walls were being knocked down, filthy with years of grease and smoke. On one wall I could see a bright rectangle of unstained paint where a photograph had long been attached.
“Breakfast at the Victory” is excerpted from James P. Carse’s Breakfast at the Victory: The Mysticism of Ordinary Experience. Carse, the director of religious studies at New York University, draws on Sufi, Hindu, Zen, Taoist, and Western spiritual traditions to demonstrate the mystical meaning of life’s everyday events. © 1994 by James P. Carse. Reprinted by arrangement with HarperSanFrancisco, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.
— Andrew Snee
