‘Zen Of Tripping Zeroes’ by Sudeep Adhikari: A Review

Review

By

Wayne F Burke

Sudeep Adhikari, a past contributor to Tuck Magazine, is engineer and Buddhist; may be philosopher, scientist, meta-physician, and Taoist also, but first, foremost, he is a poet. Poet with a wry, hip, sometimes brash, always engaging voice, with great rhythmic sensibility: “…Nothing aches more/than the lonely moon, an amethyst pearl/a silver-shape of trance and transience/of absence and abyss, of dance and denial…” (“ghost of roses”)…”The repressed night swells to drown the city/in its sea of neon nudes. Pain shimmers/and paints your despair with/alien molecules of radio-active air” (“speed of dark”).

Zen Of Tripping Zeroes is a trip; interesting, entertaining, and even exciting in the great depth of the poetry, its intellectual and emotional weight; the book a kind of deep-diving exploration into thought and being in “a shangri-la of sonic entanglements” (the world); “a Dionysian feast” (but only “when you don’t see it”–“but be it”) (existence); a “rational manifold/of mind and matter” (the cosmos); and “an awakened lack” (life).

The work crosses between Eastern and Western religious traditions. Sudeep’s Buddhist orientation toward consubstantiality–that one is identical to immanent being, the ground of all things, maya. “A single super-soul we are. A unitary life-force/a seamless continuum of dreamer and dream” (“dream is a hyper-space”). “There is no ‘me,’ there is no ‘you’/only a field of relations” (“love song of a pagan priest”). Western notions of separateness are delusory. What purpose, Sudeep asks, in seeking god when god is within? Why seek truth when “we ourselves are truth”? Eastern orientation coupled with a look West. At Sudeep’s “gig in a ghetto,” an “existential ambush” (Akron, Ohio, USA). Rock & Roll, van Gogh, Tom Waits, Pollock, and others, refracted as if through a prism–the multiplicity of Sudeep’s vision. The poetry asks such deep questions as, is thought the “original sin”? Was the Big Bang the “first solitary thought” of “universal mind”? Was RNA conceived through “some auto-catalyic dance…of inorganic sloths”? Did I mention that the book is fun?

Sudeep calls himself a “pagan priest,” but his spirituality is grounded in the here-and-now. Pragmatist and idealist meet and occasionally duke it out. Zen Of Tripping Zeroes is not, in any case, theology, but poetry, and as such succeeds admirably. This is great stuff. A trip-and-a-half.

‘Zen Of Tripping Zeroes’ by Sudeep Adhikari is published by Alien Buddha Press and can be purchased here

Sudeep Adhikari

Sudeep Adhikari from Kathmandu (Nepal) is professionally a PhD in Structural Engineering. He lives in Kathmandu with his family and works as an Engineering-Consultant/Part-time Lecturer. He is a keen observer of inter-disciplinary dynamics between science, philosophy, religion, literature, music, mathematics and psychology, and its implications on the epistemological foundation of human ideas. His poetry has also found its place in more than 40 literary journals/magazines (online, print) across the world. The author can be reached at [email protected].

Wayne F Burke

Wayne F. Burke’s poetry has appeared in a variety of publications (including Tuck Magazine). His three published poetry collections, all from Bareback Press, are WORDS THAT BURN, DICKHEAD, and KNUCKLE SANDWICHES. His chapbook PADDY WAGON is published by Epic Rites Press. He lives in the state of Vermont (USA).