Zen Snooker Player

You will find one in any corner bar. A cloth, usually green, covers its entire surface; six pockets are distributed symmetrically around its rectangular frame. Snooker table? No, nothing of the sort. It’s a portal. A portal capable of teleporting whomever it may be inside themselves. All around it, everyone is drinking, clinking glasses, singing, dancing, commenting on wars or love affairs. But not the self-immersed player: he is no longer there. All he sees are the signs laid out across the green cloth: a kind of tacit enigma awaiting its solution. The ball to be eliminated has already been selected; the pocket into which it will disappear, also; and there exists between each a perfectly straight line, though accessible only to the imagination: the self-immersed player tries to envision it flawlessly. In order for the object ball to follow this fatal trajectory, it is necessary to strike it at a very specific point: the so-called “ponto de morte,” or kill spot. The self-immersed player, however, cannot strike it directly; instead, he must use the tip of his cue to strike another ball – the white cue ball – sending this one in search of the object ball, meeting it at exactly its ponto de morte: not a millimetre to the left, not a millimetre to the right. In other words, the cue ball will travel in a straight line until it meets the object ball; yet, as it will not strike head-on, but rather glancingly, it will end up propelling it on a different path, and this new path must lead it unerringly to its death, in the chosen pocket. And when the self-immersed player is successful, this means that, at the precise instant of the cue-strike, he was no longer himself: he was the cue, he was the white cue ball, he was the object ball, he was the pocket, he was the green cloth. Paradoxical, I know. But what truth isn’t paradoxical? It is precisely this: becoming self-immersed to the extreme, he escaped himself and became all things in this world.

Translation: Victor Meadowcroft