THE BEACH REPORT, February 4th, '17

High temperature returns and the little beach becomes the most popular strip on the Bay --well, not the most, that being St Kilda & all along the watch-tower, Port Melbourne, South Melbourne, Albert Park, Middle Park & further, oh yes, further --Brighton, Sandringham, Black Rock --one end's big by dint of punter volume, the other by head of wealth, --but Elwood resembles these bigger brothers on such a day as this. Find a space to drop sandals, bag, towel, then straight into the clear sea, shallow for yards tho' discover raised shelf suddenly runs out & midriff's depth leaps to armpits. Hot sun, cool water & clearest sea yet yours truly's blind to a submerged slab of rock, --like the ditched trunk of one fallen on the proverbial hard times, everything he could hock done so including --if this were my story, say Melbourne in Winter,'66 --the wristwatch given me by my Aunt, the charcoal-grey John Collier suit, souvenir of my work voyage on the Fairstar, good now I thought for white-collar job-interviews in Oz, & the best black shoes to match --inevitably tripped & stumbled in avoidance of the barnacled rock and concerned not to fall, trying to maintain balance, smashed my heels into the end of it --heftier bash to left heel than right. Hauled grazes & bruises up the sand --hardly an accident compared to the cut feet & knees swimming "off the rocks" years ago, the beginning times, remembered but borne by hardly changing shoreline --is that true?-- the land-fill further submerged below the hardly new Marina, through which one'd walk, --strange landscape, spongy, compost-warm, broken down waste, broken up building materials. If nothing else the walking-path & the Marina have reconfigured the landscape, but the context, the sight & sound of it, the feel of it, is eternal --each intersection, each trajectory, eternal too. 

I sound like Kerouac or how Kerouac might sound to the uninitiated, as tho' Little Golden Book religiosity or --only talking about it on the bus this day, Loretta's Aunty Laurie, on our wedding day for Heaven's sake, April '68, describing new book she'd been reading, The Dharma Bums! --much she could endorse, she said, funny word? reveals quite another attitude, but said she was disappointed by the characters' apoliticism --well of course, Loretta says (--is Laurie short for Loretta? & Loretta named after her aunt? --hasnt this come up before? --growing up within the figure of the aunt & not the mother? --not on account of the name but the apparent personality or character, --as i wondered then although a stranger to the family, but encouraged too by the girlfriend's declarations about her relatives --phew!) --politics, the correct politics, the Party's line, "politics" was everything! --in the understanding of which, i interpolate, everything else is missed! Whatever K said later or in contradistinction to Gary Snyder/Japhy Ryder's "ruck-sack revolution", the prophecy of thousands, millions, of said 'revolutionaries', the young --young men in Kerouac's mind --but of course young women, understood though not yet written (--Of the Beautiful Young, poem i'm writing in 1971, "neither Men nor Women", "who cannot tell yachts from tears", "my beautiful young cannot sail or cry / they are magnificent in their captivity / they drown tearlessly almost i think fearlessly / whilst we walk dry bottom / full of the knowing / of yachts & tears / the years of the beautiful young") --within the enormous suggestivity of the conflation, and i guess ambiguity could retrospectively be claimed, that is author distinguishing between self & character even though the genre being conjured overrides the conventional literary theorem, -- Kerouac's being acclaimed by my time's envoy, Ed Sanders, on telly, on Mr Buckley's show, on behalf of our Hippy generation, "we come to praise you Mr K…", which Jack brushes off peremptorily, no time for hippies since even the shine of his beats had long dissolved, --but hey! the damage was done! --i mean, the history a done deal, all around & everywhere to be seen, --but fancy Aunty Laurie reading The Dharma Bums, evidently containing sufficient pieces of her own life's jig-saw, not least the encounter with nature, ancient Taoist/Buddhist accented appreciation of trails & peaks, eternal corollary ancient or modern, --Laurie at the helm, as she believed, of the modern, Communism's fail-safe schema, to which every particle of existing & potential being was subservient… I wrote about this in 1968, still going on about it! --but the times repeat, similar dynamic excite similar psychologies, and who remembers anything anyway (Santayana)?

*

Back on the sand, towel around shoulders looking like a Bedouin, surveying the beach & the tribe thereon, sunbathers & tanners of the cliche one thought surpassed, --casually return to the water's edge, the shells there glinting like coins, ingots, treasures from the deep, & the seaweed, the green & brown, the stars & urchins, -- not a prospector now but Doc Ricketts found to have migrated from Canary Row & Sweet Thursday to his own book, The Log from the Sea of Cortez, --brother Bernard's book, recall his Steinbeck collection of paperbacks, read or not i don't know --I'd handled & sampled & taken away with me in my imagination to Australia in '66 --recognised on every beach in every rock-pool thereafter…

*

OF STEINBECK'S DOC

It begins with Ed Ricketts' death --Steinbeck's straightforward prose protects the event from sentimentality; it owns no greater tragedy than its matter-of-course, its dailiness. The writer celebrates his friend, brings him back to the world, --the world in memorium for every lived, loved & gone day; each lived, loved & gone person & place. For sure, the Doc doesn't die every day, but every day any one of us might. And not going out into the world is the kind of death one's loathe to contemplate. Such is the adventure of  each day set against the everyday's incremental dulling. The Doc's surely not a dull man but a daily one, given over to the day's exigencies, as defined by these as by his eccentricities & prejudices which his friend details without the judgements informing them. Steinbeck's Doc is an unruffled man about a small town, except when he isn't. And he & his is the form i now adopt looking into a rock pool, hat on pate, looking & seeing despite, whatismore, his own understanding of the world, especially in its immediacy, as much further & deeper than the 'particular segment' in view --thus ecology, myth, genetics, poetry & philosophy, Ancient & Modern of East & West. Now he is bending to his work, poking through the water, lifting shell or seaweed. He is poking & peering as in the painting of him on the cover of the Corgi paperback, collecting bucket in hand, backpack of implements over his shoulder. First sun or last, sun up or sun down, unambiguously there, as we are here, eternal antidote to the drear & the fear. Clear.

[4-8/2/17]

  

MYTHS & TEXTS

MYTHS & TEXTS


Ive signed & inscribed it "from Retta, Myer's sale, Feb. 68" --amazement & glee when she presented Gary Snyder's little book, Myths & Texts, to me. Avant-garde hunter gatherers in them thar days. The shining lights of the New Writing ever in our sights. Golden season of Franklin's bookshop in Russell Street throughout '66, first year of my emigration, when every visit turned up something --a paperback Kerouac, Holmes or Brossard, Broyard, Cassil, Mandel (a hardback), Salinger, Mailer et al… And continued after I met Loretta, --through '67, '68, all & any of the many Melbourne bookshops --Gaston Renard, the Russian Bookshop, Cheshires, the Anchorage, --but Franklin's by far the best 2nd hander…

In February '68 I'm in the lap of luxury having been let go by the Education Department (Technical Division), advised before end of term, December '67, that I wouldn't be re-employed at Williamstown Tech after the summer holiday, yet fully paid for the entire period! Friends told me to go to the Teachers Union and fight it. The Union said it was a strange case since a sacking before end of school year normally meant no holiday wages at all. Unless I seriously wanted a teaching career they advised me to take the money & run!  I'd known from the moment I set foot at Williamstown Tech that the Principal couldn't handle my looks or my books --long hair in a pony tail, poetry anthologies & anarchist tracts --and the Teachers Union anti-conscription petition I pinned up on the staff notice-board the last straw --unless it was the cricket match I unilaterally abandoned (defacto sports master & umpire in addition to my English & Social Studies brief) when one team's Anglo-Australian boys and the Greeks & others of the opposition attacked each other with bats & stumps --'race riot' as I declared it, occasioned by the Greeks belting the Aussies around the park, wielding cricket bats as though baseball clubs, not guarding their wicket, no technique, solely eye & instinct… Next day at the staff meeting, a more liberal minded teacher than most, a literary man, Tennessee Williams enthusiast, interceded in my castigation. If Mr H agreed, he said, he'd gladly cane the perpetrators, beat some respect into them! Culture & race had nothing to do with it, discipline was the key, he said!

Another teacher I occasionally spoke to, Mrs Brass, sympathised with me about the incident. Over the years I've thought her husband was the journalist Douglas Brass because of their shared name and memory of her reading & discussing articles in The Australian for which he was a columnist, but it isn't so.  Additionally Ive found her on the Web described as teaching at Williamstown High, so perhaps she was only temporarily at the Tech school. Like me she wasn't trained but hired on interview in that uncredentialed era. Ruth Brass was from Germany and if we spoke in the staff-room I'm sure my friendship with Inge Timm & visiting her in Soest, Westphalia in '65 would have cropped up. She was connected with the Goethe Institute in Melbourne and the thought begins to percolate that late '70s, when Walter Billeter introduced me to its splendid library, I may have talked to her there and perhaps brought up our earlier Williamstown connection!

Peter Norman was my head of humanities, an athlete, to whom I told the story of visiting the great Percy Cerutty at his famous Portsea training camp, under the wing of my friend Kelvin Bowers, British middle-distance junior champion, whom I'd met on the migrant boat in '66, & who'd been invited to train there. I remember Peter as often around the corridor in track suit as in shirt & tie. I probably thought he was quicker on his feet than tongue. I'd picked up he was Christian and though he generally agreed with my anti-war politics, didn't sign the anti-conscription petition. I was appalled. Only a year later imagine the surprise when I saw my regular-guy colleague in the Black Power protest on the hundred metres medal podium at the Mexico City Olympics?  A la Spike Milligan, had I played a part in the Aussie sprinter's radicalisation? Nah!  That was the era and zeitgeist impossible to buck, or what?

I'd've been home in my tiny rented terrace cottage in Canning Street, Carlton, next to the all-night thumping of the bakery and its permanent bread-dough aroma, almost suffocating in mid-summer, the bread smells trapped in the airless heat. I'm typing poems or letters, being paid by the Education Department essentially to sit on my arse, read, study, be a poet, when Loretta came in with her prize! Perhaps I'm psyching myself up to fulfil the curtain-raiser for Michael Hudson's production of Peter Schumann's Bread & Puppet Theatre at the La Mama cafe-theatre around the corner in Faraday Street, Betty Burstall's good idea to justify the night's billing of such a short play, and redeemed she was when our poetry began pulling an audience in its own right. It  grew another leg when Bill Beard joined me, so that Mike's Bread & Puppet appeared to be supporting us!  But here it is, my God, Gary Snyder's Myths & Texts, published by Corinth Books, "in conjunction with Totem Press/Le Roi Jones" --wow-ee! What on earth was it doing, engulfed by bad popular fiction, romance, thrillers, on a sale table in the book department of Melbourne's flagship department store? The only copy, the only poetry book! What were the odds that Retta should find it? Incredible!

[22/26-5-14]


oOo


On misty, damp, after-rain morning, writing as I stand in doorway section of smooth-running stop-all-stations train from the 'Garth & Creek's quasi rurality into the Big Smoke, surrounded by pleasant hum of commuter small-talk --like I'm Walt & not Gary Snyder, subject of the memorandum I'm heading to, --Walt & not Gary, definitively, because in Gary's poetry the daily milieu is foil or natural context but its candour never so grown & substantially remarked as in Walt's inexhaustible ledger, small glint of which is mine here --and plainly isn't the point of it, isn't his ideology,  like Walt's Song of this and Song of that, determined to include everyone & everything within the call's special ring, like an auctioneer in Kentucky or, nodding back through the years to my sister Monique who sent me its postcard, the Appleby Horse Fair, long long ways as these may be from Camden, New Jersey --hoo! Gary, hoo!


*

And chatting with Chris Wallace-Crabbe one morning in the Shop, on his way over the river to the William Blake exhibition at the NGV, --bright as a button, dapper as Barry Humphries --in response to his polite question about reading &/or writing, --Snyder I said, and searched for the right word to describe him --irony? no, --separateness? exclusivity?  --And though we're all carried by Walt's democratic ebullience, this civic ecstasy not expected in Snyder contrary to an image perhaps preceding him? --because Snyder is found in singleness, singularity, singing also but to distinguish not occlude --each natural jewel of rain sun forest (--this is some conversation! ) --I just happen to be supervising a student in Snyder at the moment he says --laugh : let's tutor him/her together, I say! -- What I like, I say, is the simultaneity of American & Japanese --Chinese, Californian, Chris adds laughing --

But stay with the double outline, the casual slippage of ancient & modern, registered as here & now --no more arcane than acorns are --seamless  collage --logger, Marxist, Wobbly, hitch-hiker. folklorist, Native-American, Chinese, Japanese, Buddhist, lover, shaman --

"Bodhidharma sailing the Yangtze on a reed
Lenin in a sealed train through Germany
Hsuan Tsang, crossing the Pamires
Joseph, Crazy Horse, living the last free
starving high-country winter of their tribes.
Surrender into freedom, revolt into slavery--
Confucius no better--
(with Lao-tzu to keep him in check)
"Walking about the countryside
all one fall
To a heart's content beating on stumps." [from part 6, Burning; Myths & Texts, 1952-56]---

Snyder, --like at Collingwood Farm I told Chris, drawing the cabbage with two pencils in my hand, the blurs outlining instant contradiction, adding dimension, so is our subject all-over, all-around, always, expressed as the simultaneity of alternating here & now -- 


*

1968 reading Myths & Texts same age as when Snyder began writing it. What accomplishment, teens & twenties! --especially as the post WW2 generations become younger, suspended by personal prosperity/social welfare in new norm cotton wool adolescence. Reading Snyder, there's no discount for youth -- realise Snyder is as Snyder does, was ever who he is --which is how one appreciates all notable & memorable writing in the retrospect one never thought twice about at the start of it. Not that '60s reading was at the beginning of anything other than that season of English & Australian youth's education. But if only for Myths & Texts, Snyder could uncontroversially have qualified for Robert Duncan's class-roll, The Lasting Contribution of Ezra Pound (Agenda vol 4, no 2, 1965), wonderful to read in Melbourne in '68 --describing the importance in the late '40s, early '50s, of Pound & Williams in opening "the way for a group of younger writers --Charles Olson, Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, Larry Eigner, Paul Blackburn, Gael Turnbull, Theodore Enslin, Cid Corman and myself --who were concerned with immediacy and process in the development of their poetics." Pound & Williams are unambiguously sounded by Snyder --and the only magpie would be seen & heard along what's become his very own way, killing the Buddha at every bend.


*

Walking/working backwards from his influence --on Franco Beltrametti's Nadamas for instance --I cant put my hand on the chapter he published (his own & Judith Danciger's translation) in the Grosseteste Review, '72, so refer to the section I published in Earth Ship #10/11 (Southampton, August, '72, just prior to returning to Melbourne), summed up in this sentence : "Here we are again in the  swing of the events following each other always more rapidly so that you don't have to be interested if they overlap or ride over one another." As Beltrametti so Snyder --the absolute presence of the narrative, no progression only what's current, and time passing's subsumed within the concurrence or simultaneity. Beltrametti's 'additional handwritten poem' in the signed edition of Face to Face (Grosseteste Review Books, 1973) makes the same call :

"reckonings don't come even
roughly on the same latitude as
Seville / Richmond / Wichita / Nigata /
Seoul / Askhabad
magpies
from one carob tree
to the next"
[10/7/70]


*

And though Snyder's Myths & Texts does 'contain history' after Pound, Williams' grafting (for example the young feller Ginsberg's correspondence included in  Paterson, which serves to bless the incidental with the historical) is a propos --real bits of world, documents, quotation, letters as they come, as world comes, observed, overheard, perceived. (No reason to be peeved, if he really was, when his own stuff landed up in Kerouac's Dharma Bums. Material is material and the private subordinate to a larger literary good?) All of which suggests the fluidity or openness of the poem as the measure of experience yet the Snyder poem is also composed --much more of a made poem, confirmed by standard capitalisation & lineation, than the rangy field-work of the first poems of Mountains & Rivers Without End which chronologically follow Myths & Texts.


*

What to say of his Jewish joke not quite lost in the anti-Christian jibe :

"Them Xtians out to save souls and grab land
'They'd steal Christ off the cross
if he wasn't nailed on'
The last decent carpentry
Ever done by Jews." [from Logging, section 10, Myths & Texts]?

Sure, Snyder's target is both bible-bashing colonialism and the theologically guaranteed human dominion over nature, the bete noire of the ecological philosophy & politics he champions. An example of casual anti-semitism maybe, and only funny within it.  Sure, hearsay, quoted speech, but seamless in Snyder's drawl-scrawl, his droll-scroll…


*

P. S. : Rip Rap


Permit mind blown in the fatal collision of wilderness & industrial civilisation --"I cannot remember things I once read / A few friends, but they are in cities." Consider the few days between worlds, and all gone that other one --and what another one "Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup / Looking down for miles / Through high still air."  --what room for anything else when this other imposes such permanence that the very notion of contrast shrivels, no register except "caught on a snow peak / between heaven and earth" --except the lad is a scientist, can unsentimentally state "in ten thousand years the Sierras / will be dry and dead, home of the scorpion." And the Milton he's pulled out of his ruck-sack's (as last of August light extended by camp-fire's) "Too dark to read". Hah! --pun into blackguard Milton aka Western dramaturgy, --but as though autobiography, Cold Mountain's just the place to slough off "Damn me a fool last night in port drunk on the floor & damn / this cheap trash we read. Hawaiian workers shared us / beer in the long wood dredgemen's steel-men's girl-less / night drunk and gambling hall, called us strange sea- / men blala and clasped our arms and sang real Hawaiian songs " ---Ah, right royal navvy's days & nights…

*

In Rip Rap's 50th Anniversary edition there's long footnote apology for a phrase in the poem, For A Far-Out Friend. He confesses it's earned him flack over the years but now it's time to clarify. "Because once I beat you up / Drunk, stung with weeks of torment / And saw you no more", was an untruth right from the start he explains. She was the violent one, not he. "She started beating on me in some anger and I let her whack me (protesting) till I got her into the car. (….) I thought that saying I'd hit her was the more manly, or even gentlemanly, thing to say, an idea that comes from chivalry, perhaps. I never laid an ungentle hand on her. My critics, especially my colleague Sandra Gilbert, have said that there is no excuse for treating violence against women casually, and they are absolutely right. This note seems the best way to deal with the problem rather eliminate the poem or change the line in silence." Hmmm. Didn't want to change the original poem he says but bows now to feminist pressure and seeks to 'explain'…There you go. But surely, what's good for the goose is good for the gander? Snyder evidently doesn't blush for the "kulak" reference describing farmers & landowners in one of his much admired Han Shan translations, Cold Mountain poem # 16.

"Cold Mountain is a house / Without beams or walls. / The six doors left and right are open / The hall is blue sky. / The rooms are all vacant and vague / The east wall beats on the west wall / At the centre nothing. // Borrowers don't bother me / In the cold I build a little fire / When I'm hungry I boil up some greens. / I've got not use for the kulak / With his big barn and pasture - / He just sets up a prison for himself. / Once in he cant get out. / Think it over -- / You know it might happen to you."

'Kulak's traditional meaning is "a tight-fisted person"; "a peasant wealthy enough to own farm and hire labour" (Concise Oxford). But it's inextricable from the vicious Soviet connotation. This term from the Stalinist lexicon refers to as wicked a pogrom as any in the USSR, its horror & madness if anything magnified when the attitude was inherited by Maoist China. What did Snyder intend? "You know it might  happen to you" a little more sinister than a comment on personal salvation? Simplest & kindest to say that in the '50s, as a young man of the left, revolting against the American way, he's amenable & acquiescent to leftist gloat and a say-what-I-like macho glib… Fiftieth anniversary or not, time's ripe, methinks, for more clarification of such hot & cold war attitudes & language… The Right is unfailingly called to proper account for its reflections of Fascism & Naziism, but the Left hardly at all for its toeing the line of iron fist Communism, Stalinism, Maoism and whatever flows on through contemporary Socialist reflexes & assumptions…

The older & younger survivors of the ideological storms are we, especially as the poets we're able to be… Time to be poets & not suckers & saps… hoo! hoo! hoo!

[7/10-10-14 (4-11-14)]


*


P-P. S


The issue of what is or isn't 'politically correct' is prickly enough in the present day. And there's a greater problem with the retrospective judgement of previous generations, earlier societies & epochs, according to contemporary attitude & belief, and not least because the legitimation of such attribution implies a standard set, unchanging through time. This installs the progressivist depiction of human affairs as the only one, coacervate, indeed, with history itself. On the other hand, reform & repudiation of atrocious acts is generally laudable & necessary. I guess expression, whether or not literary or artistic, being what is held, spoken, depicted, is rightly personal --eccentrically formed, not legislative whatever its aspiration. So the  question I ask of Gary Snyder is as reader-writer of a colleague poet, though he be exemplary, & one who hasn't confined his work to the literary domain. If you like, when reader-writer addresses another it's poetry & literature of which the question is asked, asked whatismore within & behalf of poetry & literature.

[5/9-11-14]

THE GUINNESS REPORT

THE GUINNESS REPORT


'In the midst of' though not quite, for instance walk to Clifton Hill station to catch train to the City, quick smart through waiting-room, past groups of Cats supporters, bedecked in blue & white scarves & bonnets, onto train to sit a few seats behind black & yellow swathed Tigers fans, and reminded instantly of growing up in England, die hard follower of the Saints in football & speedway, qualified thus as a local, at last graduating from a kind of emigre family's uninvolvement, yet no more connected than that… All the fans alight at Jolimont-MCG for their big game. Saw the huge flood-lights from a station or two before the famous destination, as ever outside looking in…

Similarly in England, first years of home visits after the Exile which twelve continuous years in Oz created… Vicarious for want of belonging, the experience defined as "Ghost" --an invisible man in the middle of jumpin' seaside town. Tried on Dorset accent once as I intersected transaction between gypsy posy vendor & holiday-maker, yet remained unremarked as though unheard, unseen… But it's the writing which delivers me from the nebulous arrangement. In Melbourne I become poet of the Delphi cafe or the Elwood Beach kiosk, in Weymouth poet of the Old Harbour or Radipole Lake --poet of the place the writing makes. Become person --feet on solid ground, head rocking through a very particular air --why wouldn't it riffle reeds, bobble viscous water, prick hot cheeks emerging from The Boot's close atmosphere --loaded with one or another of Ringwood Brewery's traditional beers, primarily Old Thumper but nothing wrong with Fortyniner, even the Best Bitter or, for a complete change of taste, the Guinness…

[4th May,'14 (July, '14)]


oOo


Take your chances in Young & Jackson's main bar since this time the side bar's too cramped & Twilight Zone-ish, if you know what I mean, like the one arm bandits bar at the Clocks on Princes Bridge, last section of which overlooks the river, not only society's flotsam & jetsam but Time's. In the main bar, plenty of room by the taps to order & peaceably wait. It's Guinness so that's hardly loose talk. Young Gurkha who serves me is yet to acclimatise. It won't be long he says. But at Y & J' s you pays your money & happily wait.

NRL on the big screen, Rugby League's halftime rap, which then reverts to Aussie Rules, Gold Coast Suns vs Sydney Swans. The camera only has eyes for Ablett, class act of the competition, picked out for merely breathing, gold dusted, shimmering in the winter sunshine, like the woman suddenly alongside me, not drinking but studying the screen, in her own space, and truth is I'd noticed her when I bought my Guinness, sitting high on a stool she was, at the long table at the top of the bar, distinctive blond hair escaping brown cowboy hat. Then I'm aware of brown coat long to her ankle boots & her unflinching self-containedness. And at last the Guinness has risen, the beautiful long drop, full bodied, cream on top.

In a way this fraction of a session is compensation for not finding either Michael Hartnett's or Peter Fallon's poems on the Irish shelves at the Shop, urged on me by Libby Hart one Thursday afternoon which was confirmation of the feeling growing in me for Irish writing but also Scottish, anything not English, which comes upon me from time to time, the marvellous resource it is, like Guinness. I'd come in, extra-mural, for the Gary Snyder I'd forgotten there & needed at home to work with. Found the Snyder at once but wandered over to the Irish section like a kid in a  candy store, alone among the books. No individual collection, as I say, but some Hartnett translation of Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill, yet enough of an eyeful to boost the image of the impending drink at Y & J's! Hurried down the stairs of the Nicholas building, onto the chocka Swanston Street, through the blue sky chill which may as well be the same cut piercing t-shirt & jumper as accosts you in the England I remember or the Ireland Libby had talked about.

Entered the bar with the Hartnett translations from the Gaelic in my shoulder bag and straight into the pint thought of all the way into town. And suddenly popping into my head the actual comment I wanted to make to the man requesting the new Gerald Murnane back in the Shop recently, instead of the small talk, though accurate, around a flicked upon upon sentence which grew into several pages, a section I could have followed forever, with which I entertained the both of us. And now I realise it was the first paragraph of the promotional sheet accompanying A Million Windows, "Gerald Murnane, from a letter to Teju Cole, April 2013", as follows : "I hardly needed to remind you that I think of mind as space. I long ago rejected the popular theories of the mind advanced in the Twentieth century. For me, mind is extent and, quite possibly, endless, that is to say, infinite. This would entail, I suppose, the belief that all minds are one or even that everything is mind, but that sort of speculation is not for me. I have enough to do during my lifetime with uncovering the patterns of imagery in my corner of mind without seeking further." All of which is to say that whatever's in mind, or what's in place or in train, in or as mind, enjoys coalescence, seamless adhesion, of time & space, known as the incidents & objects thereof.

All of that, all of this, the public bar's voluminous etcetera --and why not stand on ceremony --of Melbourne itself, ancestor felons, free or freed settlers (though no one like me can talk credibly of 'ancestors' --our account's dribbled out in & as generations on no parchment but the black ink entries of births, deaths & marriages in cased municipal Domesday registers)-- I am johnny-come-lately in what pundits of every complexion call the end of time. And all of this the only Australia I stand up in, leaning on an Ireland, so it seems, compacted in poetry & stout, for as long as fate's deemed I'm removed from fatherland, compromised as that may be for the both of us, Dad & I, our mothers protractored either pole of the immense & pink blushed continent of Africa…


[8-19/6/14 (October, '14)]

THE DORSET JOURNEY, 2011 : A CONVERSATION WITH THE STINGY ARTIST

KRIS & BERNARD HEMENSLEY

[20 April, 2011]

K.H. : So what is the 'Abbey' part of 'Goldy Abbey'?

B.H. : It's gone... it's the 'Hermitage' now.

K.H. : 'Goldy' of course is self-explanatory...

B.H. : From 'Goldcroft Road', plus 'gold' is a nice metaphor.

K.H. : What is the hermitage?

B.H. : It's just my place... people always equated my place with wherever I was working...

K.H. : Is this where the hermit lives?

B.H. : it's where a hermit lives, where he would like to live, he's still on the path –maybe he's an Anchorite! --I've always thought of that –I don't think it'll ever happen now : a self-limiting definition which suited the agoraphobic I was –just practice & meditate & see where that led...

K.H. : I always liked the conceit of the 'Abbot of Goldy'... I was interested in the possibilities of a certain kind of fantasy... like, to take on a role or image which did express a sense of who one was or would like to be?

B.H. : Yes, of course. You & Robin [Hemensley] dubbed me the Abbot because of my meditation practice –at one time it was three hours a day –on & off since 1970. You grow into who you're meant to be, both by the way people see you & how you see yourself. And now I feel I've got the life I always wanted & dreamt about. I'm 'busy' for up to 20 hours every day.

K.H. : So, what is this house?

B.H. : One concept derived from Robin's description of 'art houses' in Belgium, when he lived there in recent years : people would visit a house, the whole of which was an exhibition. My idea was that anything & everything in the house was for sale, including the house! Apart from that it's a place for quietness & contemplation, no longer following any one tradition but with its roots in Buddhism & Zen.

K.H. : The whole house is a living gallery –no dedicated exhibition or shop space?

B.H. : Yes, the whole house as home & studio...

K.H. : Regarding the Buddhism & et cetera : from the look of it –the vast library of contemporary & mostly American & Japanese literature –the tradition you refer to must also be based in the themes & practice of the poets, I suppose the West Coast poets?

B.H. : Not totally –I'm still interested in the New Englanders : Ted Enslin, William Bronk, Cid Corman, Larry Eigner, Wendell Berry. Otherwise it was West Coast, Japanese. The first book to get me going was Paul Reps' Zen Flesh, Zen Bones –my copy is the 1961 Anchor Books p/b edition –bought in the mid to late '60s. The reason for getting it was probably the influence of Dad's collection of of Yoga & esoteric books –also the Master Theiron magazines!

K.H. : Yes, and that's a whole other story!

B.H. : Yes, still very interesting. Dad was ahead of his time –auras, colours, diet –all of the New Age interests predated by Master Theiron!

K.H. : What would you like to happen in this house?

B.H. : I'd like it to bring into focus my interests, in the company of other people.

K.H. : So, is it a kind of b & b for esoterics?

B.H. : Only in a very private way –not open slather. It's not business! By invitation only --via family or my own connections...

K.H. : The obvious connections between literature –or let's say poetry --& Buddhism, say, appear to me, as I look around the house, to be Gary Snyder, the Beats –which aint exactly what you'd expect in an English country garden?!

B.H. : It's not what any other local expects either. My nearest English 'collaborator' is Owen Davis, who lives in Bournemouth, 30 miles away, who's into Bukowski, Kerouac, Patchen, Snyder, jazz... He seems to be following another direction now though these are still references in his head.

K.H. : Yes, I remember interviewing Owen in 1987, at Cemetery Lodge just down the road when you lived there. I had an old tape-recorder & a kind of commission from John Tranter, then with the ABC, to record some interviews with English poets to offer a picture of the contemporary situation in the UK. Pretty eccentric though : Owen Davis, Paul Buck, F.T. Prince! Nothing came of it! Actually, I'm a bit confused about the date, because I also interviewed Nicholas Johnson. Perhaps it was Owen & Paul in '87, and Frank & Nicholas in 1990? We sold a copy of Owen's Che Hamzah's Monkey, which you published (Stingy Artist, '88), at Collected Works recently-- nice poems –

B.H. : Yes, Catherine [O'Brien] thought so too –she bought some copies for I : Cat Gallery (in Vientiane). Also Cralan Kelder, on the phone recently from Amsterdam, said he was very taken by those poems...

K.H. : Ah yes, Cralan Kelder [his collection Give Some Word, from Shearsman, UK, 2010] –he'd contacted me via email having found the Poetry & Ideas blog –he's interested in Franco Beltrametti and read references to Franco in my article on Cornelis Vleeskens. And I put him in touch with you as immense stockist of Black Sparrow / Bukowski titles & everything else. And so you were able to send him the two publications of Franco you've produced...

B.H. : Yes –Three for Nado (Stingy Artist / Last Straw Press, UK, 1992) & Two Letters to Nado (Stingy Artist Editions, 2010). Nado was my nickname and in Japanese means “et cetera, et cetera” (as described in one of the Franco letters.

K.H. : It doesnt refer at all, then, to Franco's character Nadamas, in his novel of that name, a section of which I published in my mag, Earth Ship, back in '71 or '72?

B.H. : I didnt think of that --I dont know...

[Break for lunch : bottle of Old Thumper, Bernard's home baked bread, spring onions, cheddar cheese, hommous.

Bread : organic almost 100% wholemeal flours consisting of kamut, wheat, barley, molasses, barley malt, sunflower seeds, fennel seeds, salt, dried yeast, warm water, olive-oil, oat flakes decoration.

Beer : Ringwood Brewery's Old Thumper --”A Beast of a beer” --wonderful picture of boar on label, full frontal & tusked. Alc., 5.6% vol.

“Hampshire's New Forest was historically the hunting ground of legendary fierce wild boar, the prize kill of many an English king. Ringwood Brewery celebrated this heritage with a real beast of a beer in 'Old Thumper'. It delivers a deep brown strong ale with a spicy fruity hop aroma and a warming nutty finish. The distinctive taste has made it a champion Beer of Britain, popular at home and abroad.”]

oOo

[via telephone & email, 1^st of May, 2011]

B.H. : Coming from a background of residential social care-work, I naturally tend towards providing a nurturing environment at Goldy. How necessary do you think that might be for writers & artists?

K.H. : I'd like to pull your question into a slightly different discussion, namely the kind of therapeutic occasion such a residence might enhance and whether the making of art, the writing of poetry, benefits from nurture! The thing is, you are making an environment at Goldy, which includes its whole house library of poetry & related literature, and, importantly, or important to you, the food you provide & its informing philosophy. You are simply but thoroughly the host. The environment itself is what will or wont nurture your guest or guests. Being a host to such visitors is not social work in the way your professional background understood it. As you say, the house is where you'll “bring into focus [my] interests, in the company of other people.”

B.H. : It's a resource for writers & artists containing an extensive Zen & Buddhist library. And I'd like to offer a healthy, mainly plant based diet. I have also imagined a Zen sitting group. And do you think a structured environment is necessary?

K.H. : Your artist & writer guests (I'm sure you include readers in that swag) might not of course be Zennists or Buddhists, but they'd be accepting of such as the accent of the place. Fundamentally for visitors it'll be a rather special pied a terre. I wonder if you ever came across the term “eco-monastery”? It was used by John Martin & others in the early '80s here, to describe places which tried to live up to (Deep) ecological principals and to be a combination of retreat & sanctuary. The structure youre wondering about is surely more a general environment or ambiance than a workshop with curriculum!

I actually feel there's a connection between your place in Weymouth, Catherine [O'Brien]'s I : Cat Gallery in Vientiane, Laos, and our Collected Works Bookshop in Melbourne. Cathy told me today that she's been congratulated on her gallery's “independence”. I think that means she just gets on with it : providing a space for poetry, art, film events, and a guest-room, for which she takes the responsibility. She's not waiting on other people or organizations' say-so. I:Cat is becoming known in Vientiane but not at the cost of her personal freedom. This her life, her contribution to the creative life where she lives & works. As you say for Goldy, it's not a business! The same at Collected Works : we are a bookshop in the marketplace, but our economics are about surviving & maintaining a particular kind of creative, literary space, not being a commercial success per se.

B.H. : Based on what youve seen of Goldy on your visit, do you think rapprochement between local & international is possible?

K.H. : Well, without being cute, the existence of your house in Weymouth is that rapprochement in practice! And the contradiction of terms, local & international, is only formal; that is to say, it's not mutually exclusive, nor ever was (as if, as said elsewhere, the Ecole du Paris wasnt local)! If you mean, how will you connect with the local when what you've experienced of the local (Weymouth, Dorset, England et al) doesnt connect with you? --then you have to expand your physical/social ambit as well as your definition, otherwise wither on the vine of mutual exclusivity!

When I've asked the question, most recently in context of our Dharma Bum correspondence (elsewhere in this blog), I only ever thought in terms of connections. At the same time, Weymouth isnt Melbourne, Vientiane, California or Japan in its external forms & expressions, but must be connected as yet another place in the world with the potential for authentic encounter & practice!

[Stop, for walking in one hemisphere, sleeping in the other.]

oOo

(edited Kris Hemensley, Melbourne)

PLACING PETRA WHITE

In the eternal conversation in my head, I continue to worry at the theme of --and here I'm struggling to find the words-- 'person & place', 'representation', 'the traditional address'-- all or any of these as they fold in on one another, even as I try to clarify my thoughts! --and in particular, the value of such tropes within the ramification of postmodernism. So, in this foray, augmenting the crumbs I've already salvaged from memory of my brief exchange about poetry & place with Andrew Zawacki & others during a reading at Collected Works, ca '99 or so [see Vive la Connections, September blog, poetry & ideas], is the stimulation of Petra White's article in the Victorian Writer of June, '08, entitled Placing poetry (in which, according to the sub-heading, she "considers the role of 'place' in poetry").
The theme of that issue of the Victorian Writers Centre magazine is A sense of place, and besides PW's piece there are contributions from Alex Miller, Betty Pike/Charles Balnaves, & Julie Gittus, about political & spiritual identity, & what might be called the authenticating relation of literary character to place.
Often agreeing with her I still find myself raising objections, and vice-versa! For example, and right at the start of her article, no reason at all why she shouldnt declare she's "not altogether sure what is meant by 'a sense of place' in poetry", but to follow with, "for me, what makes a poem viable - gives it a reality - is its language", suggesting the opposition of 'sense of place' & 'language', has me jumping!
Referring to poems in her collection, The Incoming Tide (John Leonard Press, 2007), she explains that "place is not the focus of these poems so much as the site for them..." I wonder how 'focus' really differs from 'site'? Ultimately it's an individual taste & purpose that distinguishes the poem in which place is an effect from that in which it is the crux, and no bigger deal than the poem makes for itself...
Her key paragraph might be the following : "Writing about place for its own sake is quite difficult: the danger, particularly from a travel perspective, is of producing something like the doddery jottings of a detached, interested [is this a typo? 'disinterested' intended?] observer; a dreary parade of random otherness. How do you make the otherness part of you, so that it matters? Can we write about the effect a place has on us, avoiding Baedecker poetry?"
This is the quizzical point of her piece, though what an example of that error might be is left to one's own prejudice (assuming it's shared with her). When I think of what I've always called 'topographical writing' , which I realize has become a major part of my own project through the years, the concept 'spirit of place' comes to mind as its herald. Now, how adjacent is that to White's 'Baedecker poetry'?
It occurs to me that a fear of the obvious may underscore her objection, but even the baldest inventory differs according to poet & poem. Perhaps it's an attitude that's being impugned here --a suspicion of what I'm sure is variously decried as literal, naive, transparent and whatever else is jettisoned from the postmodernist bag. Not that Petra White is necessarily a subscriber but there's no doubting that the mood of this time, informed as it is by a supposedly new science of life, encourages a range of pseudo-sophistication of which the pejorative 'Baedecker poetry' might be one!
Assuming one's not referring to doggerel & deliberately light verse, like Dorothea McKeller's My Country perhaps, which are the Baedecker poems? William Blake's London? Wordsworth? Whitman? Brooke's Grantchester? Lowell's sumptuous family catalogue? Betjeman I suppose, but isnt he indelibly true to period & place, isnt the persona(lity) point perfect? Who else? The New Yorkers I guess, O'Hara, Denby, Schuyler, Berrigan et al.
At the same time, PW's appreciation of Wallace Stevens is commendable, as she writes, "Consider Wallace Stevens' famous poem, The Idea of Order at Key West, which has nothing to say about Key West, but is entirely concerned with the mystery of a woman singing to an audience. Key West remains in the reader's awareness throughout the poem as the site, and possible source, of an opening into imagination, and a place to return to." And what she discerns is probably typical of the behaviour of poets & poems vis a vis place most of the time.
Alternatively, from the ancient Chinese & Japanese (& that magnificent influence in their contemporary poetry) to the city & bush Beats (--though that tradition's created back to front in actual fact; the moderns' embrace of the concrete & colloquially concise against the loftily metaphorical, leading to what the holos-bolus translation of Eastern poetry & philosophy has made contemporary), there is an attempt to be so grounded in 'place' as for it to resound without interlocutor, or at least for poet to be the 'jotter' Petra White maligns. Of our era, consider the Objectivists (with Pound & Williams in the wings), Rakosi & Niedecker for example, and then Ginsberg & Snyder et al, and in our neck of the woods Ken Taylor, John Anderson, Robert Gray, or from another & somewhat dissimilar angle, Laurie Duggan, Pam Brown, Ken Bolton... I have to say I dont mind the jotters at all! 'Random', she says, 'dreary' --but too much in the eye or ear of the beholder for any general rule.
With reference to one of her own poems, she closes thus, "If there is a sense of vividness in Munich, it is not the result of description alone, but of finding the purpose of the poem and the significance of the places [Munich, Adelaide, Stoke-on-Trent], and charging them with the lightning thread of the movement of mind through language and the world."
It occurs to me that there may well be a gender aspect to the discussion : masculine outwardness, feminine interiority. Discussed by many, including Elizabeth Janeway whom I recall quoting in my book discussion services notes for On The Road (Council of Adult Education, c 1981). She described women writers who "seem to be putting themselves at risk purposively, in order to penetrate to the heart of the mystery of being(...)It is possible to see this kind of journey interior, as a counterpoint to the masculine drive to physical journeying, to 'the road' of Kerouac and the Beats." (Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, 1979.) The point here being that recording, transcribing, notating & even jotting down the world's particulars, as given, without author's 'charging', might reflect gender as much as stylistic difference or preference.
My other objection in this instance revolves around PW's term 'description alone', for the question is surely begged as to whether 'description' is ever alone, that is without authorial distinction ('voice' at its most basic). It also invites discussion of the contrast between pictorial & conceptual (the limitations of the former, the limits to the latter), representational & abstract and even the true poem versus the strategic...

---------------------------------------------------------------

Kris Hemensley
25th September/12th October, '08

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #10

Melbourne, Oz
January-March,2008

Dear Bernard, Your winter birthday approaches (--do you think in terms of particular months, seasons, constellations?) as here in Melbourne summer's hottest days (& nights) seem to be passing. Impossible sometimes for me to concentrate on reading & writing --mind you, I dont make it easy for myself in my non-aircon, tin-roofed, weatherboard! Even so, the journey continues... Richer --e.g., the fascinating 'Bob Dylan' movie, I'm Not There, seen recently --and poorer --e.g., Norman Mailer's death late last year. (And no sooner said than one of I'm Not There's stars, Heath Ledger, has reportedly died in L.A. --tragically young, 29. My sadness at that news undoubtedly fueled by the parallels with our Timmy's death five years ago... Ledger's art & young-man's emotions irrevocably entwined (--a once-in-a-generation talent, like James Dean, according to Travolta)... Found dying, if not already dead, in his L. A. apartment --'accidental death' almost worse than intentional or expected. What a waste --and waste there is & always has been among our 'best & brightest' --war, illness, drugs --whatever, & forever... Of course, "he leaves a legacy"... Dont they all? Do we need reminding of Kerouac, 47, robbed of his three score & ten...)

(February.) You've been with Dylan from the beginning... 1965 when you bought the first vinyl? I thoroughly recommend I'm Not there, though is it showing outside the art-house circuit? If nothing else you'll enjoy the sound-track (there's also a covers' CD). Dylan's a fascinating subject for a bio-flick, as this film is misleadingly described --actually, it's a series of interwoven fictions at the centre of each of which is a surrogate or pseudo Dylan. The film's thesis, & possibly Dylan's, is that authenticity or the real is gained & maintained by an aware subject's mercuriality, and the evasion of stable bureaucratic identity is how it's achieved. The film's fictions are projections of Dylan's media persona, illustrations of themes from his songs, & biographical snippets. Consummate artist that he's been, Art & Life equally represent him. It's the fate of celebrity --Kerouac, unsurprisingly also mentioned in the film, a casualty of the phenomenon (too literal a believer perhaps).
Cate Blanchett's Dylan, aka Jude Quinn, is superlative mimicry --cheeky & also poignantly instructive. She perfectly reproduces the Dylan from David Pennebaker's historical footage of the early 1960s British tour --her acting is almost like channeling! From the signature Dylan hairstyle & chainsmoking to speed-king foot-tapping & pot-head sniggering, she has the character down pat. The portrait careers through naturalism, farce & satire in its astonishing facsimile. For my money, Cate Blanchett's Jude Quinn is the drawstring of the entire ensemble --for the fictions to work, the facsimile was essential. Her casting is a canny director(Todd Haynes)'s coup de grace! And just as fellow Aussie Heath Ledger's film-star character Robbie Clark, hated, as it happens, by the folk-singer he plays on screen, slides calamitously between relationships, so does I'm Not There slip between fiction & history, fulfilling that experience of the Real required of 'the Dylan film' by those who feel they 'understand' him!
Now here's the neatest connection to Norman Mailer : given that Mailer was in my mind & often popping into conversation during this period, it felt like a synchronicity when, in the middle of I'm Not There, Robbie Clarke, at the big Hollywood party, identifies him through the throng, across the room. There's Mailer, he says. For the life of me I thought the constantly thwarted wife was about to seek him out --maybe she was, but the camera finds husband & girlfriend first and Mailer is lost in the Hollywood night.

*

Speed-reading Advertisements for Myself (my first & probably most influential Mailer --five shillings Corgi paperback bought 42 years from the great little Paperback Parade in Southampton), I'm impressed all over again. Part of the reason for that is his intention & ability to impress --one feels his fire and his texts are firing : those 1940s pieces, the war-stories, & the 1951 Man Who Studied Yoga... what am I trying to say here? --something about energy, creating an equation for egotism where egotism is the energised individual's antenna to the world, which characterised poets & novelists of that period, including the Beats --and Mailer's delightfully pugilistic yet confidential & charming Evaluations - Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room (p339) is a register of that...
For example, of Jack Jones; "Like Styron, like myself, like Kerouac, he has been running for President as well as sticking at his work, and it was near tragic to watch the process as he imprisoned anger, and dwindled without it."
Of Capote; "He is tart as a grand aunt, but in his way he is a ballsy little guy, and he is the most perfect writer of my generation, he writes the best sentences word for word, rhythm for rhythm."
And of our man; "Kerouac lacks discipline, intelligence, honesty and a sense of the novel. His rhythms are erratic, his sense of character is nil, and he is a pretentious as a rich whore, as sentimental as a lollypop. Yet I think he has a large talent. His literary energy is enormous, and he had enough of a wild eye to go along with his instincts and so become the first figure for a new generation. (...) For a while I worried about him as a force from the political right which could lead Hip into a hole, but I liked him when I met him, more than I would have thought, and felt he was tired, as indeed why should he not be for he has travelled in a world where the adrenalin devours the blood."
And so on; Mailer's perspicacity arraigning Bellow, Algren, Salinger, Bowles, Bourjaily, Brossard, Vidal, Broyard, Willingham, Ellison, Baldwin. Scandalously, no women in his text but Mccarthy, Stafford & McCullers in the footnote along with Burroughs, then unknown, wagered by Mailer to "rank as one of the most important novelists in America and may prove comparable in his impact to Jean Genet."

*
(March.) I think Advertisements for Myself is where I first read the names of Brossard, Broyard & co., before I scored the Protest anthology... The book is also the home of his White Negro piece, his Reflections on Hip & the famous The Hip & the Square (a forefunner of Susan Sontag's Notes on Camp?) --the fifty page section, Hipsters, should always have been part of the unfolding Beat story : psychologically acute, sociologically & politically resourceful.
I was ten-thousand miles from Home but with my Kerouacs & Advertisements for Myself, deep into the freedom of the poet-artist-Beat-adventurer's world. Melbourne was my 1966-67 Beat heaven!
What is it now, do you ask? It's where I am & able to catch my breath (my life) in retrospect -- to see those seasons again; survey the writings, the diaries, the books in the way I've been promising myself for years.

One of several references I discovered I shared with Retta, when I met her in 1967, was The Village Voice Reader : A Mixed Bag from the Greenwich Village Newspaper (Grove Press, 1963). We both had copies bought in Melbourne the preceding year. Daniel Wolf was its editor & Mailer partly financed & wrote for it. Did you know it? I didnt see a copy of the actual newspaper until Betty Burstall placed copies on the tables of her Cafe La Mama in Carlton, Melbourne, 1967/68.
The Reader puts me right into the middle of a world, vibrations of which were everywhere by the mid Sixties; it's still hilarious, and its history haunts. Though I would be leftism's first fellow-traveller for years to come, the particular clarification of that anthology (for example, Mailer's "Hip is an American existentialism, profoundly different from French existentialism because Hip is based on a mysticism of the flesh", pp49/50) was in terms of its alternative to communism's alternative, producing a phoenix out of the post-war angst & alienation. Even today I think it's an alternative to Corporate man & woman as zenith of success!
Kenneth Tynan hoped, in a brilliant contribution, ostensibly reviewing Advertisements for Myself, that some day Mailer would resume his socialist faith (p124) --fat chance if "community" now declares for middle-class respectability & prissyness instead of embracing the dangers the collective of true individuals will always present to the political status-quo!
Tynan's quote from Mailer actually doesnt reflect what socialism would be for an English intellectual, then or now --it's excitingly contradictory or enigmatic : "As socialists, we want a Socialist world not because we have the conceit that men would therefore be more happy... but because we feel the moral imperative in life itself to raise the human condition, even if this should ultimately mean no more than that man's suffering has been lifted to a higher level." Hmm --suck on that, corporatists of left & right!)

It's fair to say that Janine Pommy Vega, to whom you referred in your last letter, is Old Guard by the above standard! Her beat-wandering seems eventually to have led to the anti-American world-view (minus the USSR, pro-what one wonders? : the Hugo Chavez-Mahmoud Ahmadinejad world-view?) if her contribution to a particular on-line web-site means anything, keeping company with 9/11 conspiratorialism & the rabid rest of it. Summarising her trip in an essay, Revelations of Companionate Love (published in Johnson & Grace's Girls Who wore Black, Rutgers, 2000), Mary Damon notes, "Since her return to the US (punctuated by long periods of travel in the interest of mountain climbing and spiritual pilgrimage/tourism), Pommy Vega has lived in rural upstate New york. She has continued her devotional practice by teaching writing workshops in the prison system. While her work and life no longer manifest a belief in the redemptive possibilities of romantically loving one man [her essay focusses upon Poems to Fernando (City Lights, 1968) in which SPV addressed the grievous loss of her husband, the Peruvian painter Fernando] but rather in being of service to incarcerated people generally (...) she practices a "poetics of service" through a continued contact with the abject, the outcast, and the poetic(...)"
Damon finds parallels between this Beat Generation woman and certain medieval mystics. Any critique of modern times would probably describe the increasing popular interest in every alternative to spiritually deficient & creatively shackled materialism, including, of course, the medieval ascetics & mystics whose example may well be reanimating contemporary monasticism & asceticism in all faiths. After all, our own delight in Buddhism & Taoism & contemporary alternative lifestyles has rather a lot to do with the dancing figures of the Han Shans, Issas, Bashos et al --thus Kerouac, Snyder, Ginsberg, Whalen, Kyger & all!

I'll leave it there for now.
Love as ever,
Kris


*



Weymouth, UK
2008

Dear Kris, Good to get your latest. You're in fine form, as usual. I must tell you I've never read Norman Mailer. Is that a big omission? I'm sure there are many others. Where you went in your reading, I usually followed --Emile Zola, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, W.C. Williams etc... I think when you were reading Mailer I was veering towards Europe --nouveau roman... I've never read anything when i should have done! And now, living in the desert that is Weymouth, I'm right out of things.
Talking of being out of things : today I find myself thinking I'm turning into Dad --I've been gardening. First I was pruning the hydrangea in the front garden, cutting out last year's dead blooms --now there's no chance of frost burning the stems. I did it in the morning sun. Then, in the afternoon, I followed the sun around to the back and mowed the lawn. I know it's too soon to say but I think I've got the gardening bug and found the merit of work! I'm getting to know why Dad enjoyed it so much. The only mystery being that for someone who spent so much time in the garden why it wasn't a more wonderful place & space? Anyway, I've found that I'm able to garden. Never thought I would. I've passed through a barrier. To spur me on I have a few new books on gardening. Stanley Kunitz says in The Wild Braid (Norton, 2005), when asked what was happening in his garden at the end of March, "All is stirring. Hope is stirring." (p113) Kunitz who, at a hundred, has forty years on me, gives me hope! Wonderful.
I've been reading Wendy Johnson on gardening in Tricycle magazine for a number of years. Buddhists make wonderful commentators, and now I have her book, touted as forthcoming for ages --Gardening at the Dragon's Gate (Bantam, 2008). I would've liked more about Suzuki and Buddhism interspersed, as Ed Brown did in his Tomato Blessings and Radish Teachings (Riverhead Books, 1997), but it's still a great book. I was hoping Wendy Johnson would do an Ed Brown in my imagination. Both are students of Sunryu Suzuki, one a cook, one a gardener.

*

Funny how some dreams stick and others don't. Lately I can remember a dream of the Dalai Lama --we were playing fruit-machines together! I also dreamed of Gary Snyder --he was hanging out with Joanne Kyger. Just glimpses. The most memorable, tho', was a dream in which I was living at a Zen monastery type of place. I had my own rooms there. All my books were there, shelves and shelves of them, of which the other monks were jealous. So, one night, to bring them down a peg or two, I urinated over their collection of books and paintings. In the morning, as you can imagine, they were pissed off and wanted to punish and harm me in some way. But some Theravada monks arrived just then to save me. I seemed to recognize one of them, but back when I knew him he was a Korean Zen monk. "You've joined the Theravada monks now, have you?" I said to him. He just smiled and nodded, eyes knowing and twinkling. I felt saved. On waking, and for the next day, I felt well-disposed toward the Theravada. But soon after I was pleased to still be in the fold of Soto Zen!
Reading To Meet the Real Dragon by Gudo Wafu Nishijima (Windbell Publications, '92) and Dogen Zen (Kyoto Soto Zen Center, 1988), particularly the essay Dogen Zen as Religion by Uchiyama Roshi, have helped me keep on track. I've also been watching a DVD, Zen Meditation, from Throssel Hole Buddhist Monastery --very helpful.
Recently received a stash of DVD's from Wisdom Books, the pick of which was Zen Buddhism : In Search of Self. Filmed at a Zen temple in Korea, following a 90 day retreat by two dozen nuns. Love their grey robes! I know that's shallow but I've always loved that grey colour. And their socks! Korean Zen is softer, or should I say not as harsh as Japanese Zen. But the Soto Zen of Throssel Hole and Roshi Jiyu Kennett seems especially right and sane to me. So much for my current direction. Don't think I have time for other stuff, Christianity, Bede Griffiths. yoga etc. Life is short. Need to get a grip and be more focussed. I know you always say 'one doesnt preclude the other', but....... I know also that Kerouac went from one to the other and had a strong feeling for both. But I aint he. I'll be on the train to Hexham. And maybe stretch the Buddhism to include the Taoist trail...

Bernard

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #9

Melbourne
October 16th-30th, '07

Dear Bernard,
Back in the Shop, at the counter (my "desk") --journal, note-book, papers, your letter before me --I'm jet-lagged & more or less content.
I'm pleased you've committed some of your Stingy Artist Press history to paper, especially your relationship, as a book-maker/poetry publisher, to Salt Works & other American fine presses. I took the opportunity, while visiting you in Weymouth recently, to handle some of the lovely things stored in your shed (and what a pity they're not on display & available for purchase) --for example Cid Corman's tiny books, from Elizabeth Press & his own Origin press, with one or two word titles, haiku sequences, and one of Michael Tarachow's, an oblong-shaped book with a medieval manuscript feel to it... That's the craft, isnt it? One probably spends more time admiring the cover, the pages, the type, the sewing, the design than one does the text! One of your Stingy Artist editions is within reach of me as I write this : Franco Beltrametti's Three for Nado (1992), number 3 of a numbered edition of 175. It's one of your most elegant & tiny books : eight pages, endpapers, three of Franco's Trip Trap-like poems --constructions, throwaways, what you will --and your nick-name, Nado, which I've always spelt Naado, in the book's title (and didnt you tell me Franco liked the pun on nado / nothing?)...
Poor Franco, a Dharma Bum if ever there was, already dead 12 years. Searching for Dale Pendell a few months ago (following up on his Burning Man book, which I'd also sent to you), I reread Franco's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology (published by our great amigos, Tim Longville & John Riley, as a Grosseteste Review book, back in 1975), and then the Sperlonga Manhattan Express anthology (Scorribanda Productions, 1980), which got me thinking of Franco Beltrametti as a key European friend of the Beat idea if not also the Beats themselves. I found the website dedicated to him and read his autobiographical account there --as peripatetic an inventory as could be (enviably?) imagined! Poet, artist, traveller, --and I can hear you say "back-woodsman" in the 60s, 70s sense of do-it-yrself, build your own, well out of the work-consume-die rat-race.
Since returning to Melbourne from my 20 days with you & Mum in our dear old England (--the England I perpetually reinvent, not living there as you do, though how you do interests me given our migrant family upbringing in England following infancy in Egypt, thus English-half English childhood & beyond, until the time we must have decided to identify as English rather than exotic half this, half that), I've nibbled at Franco's legend some more. The other day the web took me to the blog of Pierre Joris --he'd posted that bonny photo of hirsute Franco with the comment that this August, Franco would have celebrated his 70th birthday. Doesnt that get you thinking? "Forever young" maybe but not Spring chickens either, any of us!
I sent an e-mail to Pierre then, greeting him after what might be thirty years (the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival, '75, in the company of Paige Mitchell, Allen Fisher?). I thanked him for remembering Franco and told him we'd been talking & thinking of Franco too, not that we'd ever met outside of correspondence & small-press publishing. I directed him to our correspondence on this blog --he replied the following day. While we're writing about Japhy & Co, he's "been teaching Japhy Ryder, his poetry & essays, & Kerouac's novel in my Ecopoetics course this Fall, also talking about Franco to my students --the crisscrossing is endless." Dont you love these synchronicities!
I was elated you didnt already own the Issa translations by Nanao Sakaki I brought to you. I'd ordered what was available of Issa in my wholesaler catalogue --Sam Hamill's Spring of My life, Lucian Stryk's The Dumpling Field, & the Sakaki of which I'd been ignorant. (I must interpolate here that since my return I've dug out some of your poetry including the beautifully made book, Cemetery Lodge Poems (Stingy Artist,1996), and was charmed by the 5th poem of the sequence : "the crying / of crickets / according to Issa / is like the / chirping of men - / easy to imagine / autumn's last song / in this place". I wonder which Issa translation you had read?)
I thought the cover drawing of the snail was also by Sakaki but it's John Brandi's. Like Sakaki's snail translation which you quote, the drawing crystalizes for me the Buddhist attitude (I'd say Zen but Issa is Pure Land I see) --it's humble & hilarious! We're invited into the snail's perspective --its relation to mountain, clouds, sky, universe --ludicrously incongruous yet no truer way of describing all living creatures', including the human, condition.
In his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, Sakaki is asked about another snail poem ''just as he is / he goes to bed and gets up / the snail" --
Brandi : Did the snail show Issa how simple life can be in the middle of all our complications & things we need?
Sakaki : I guess so. That's a great understanding. He feels jealousy, ah yeah (laughs) "I must think about money & human relations, but the snail doesn't care, just goes to sleep, just walk around, eat . . . uh-oh, But not me, why? Why?" That is his point. Why is important, why is snail that way, why I'm this way. . . strange! why? Why are we, why is the sky so shiny, why trees so green?
Bryan : It's all beautiful, why am I so uptight?
Sakaki : Yeah, the surprisement, that is haiku.
Bryan : We laugh, but at the same time we get something.
Sakaki : Yes, something comes suddenly - wisdom! (laughs)

It's a beautiful little book; designed by Jeff Bryan, Sakaki's calligraphy --the Japanese characters & English haiku translation -- and the printed line of phoneticised Japanese adds another dimension. Sakaki talks like a medium, an inheritor & promulgator : "Many beings come to me, from me, many rivers going down, running down, -- sure."
The book brings us Issa & Sakaki and makes me hungry for a large volume of the latter. If still alive he's 83 (75 at the time of Inch By Inch's publication). I hope he is --forever young!

*

A NOTE ON SAKAKI et al
(22nd September,'07, en route Hong Kong from Melbourne)

Reading Nanao Sakaki's Inch By Inch : 45 Haiku by Issa (La Almeda Press, New Mexico, 1992), confirms one's long held idea of him as the "real thing" (--and I confess, vis a vis Gary Snyder whose name preceded him like sun & shower a rainbow --and having "missed" Ginsberg & Ferlinghetti on their 1970 Australian tour, being back in England at that time, I was more than ready for my appointment with the holy poets of the reading & imagining of my late youth --"Japhy Ryder" of course, after Kerouac, Ginsberg, Ferlinghett, Corso --one of the elect --and I'm suddenly remembering that flash of recognition, Japhy Ryder = Gary Snyder, very early 1966, and the poem I wrote to him, sitting with the College of Technology mates at the Red Lion pub in downtown Southampton --I'll have to retrieve it from the back pages of the particular exercise-book ["16.2.66 / I read my first Gary Snyder & Phil / Whalen & Michael McClure / its a night of history / historic night / man! wait til i tell colin t symes / about it / that ive read them / bhikku / means / buddhist monk / snyder who is in kerouacs / books im sure (japhy ryder?) / and michael mcclure & whalen / tho i dont know where exactly / its funny they talk & refer to so many / of their mates & acquaintances in their / poetry : which makes it beat / which makes the established schools / have acid indigestion / because just as whitman was buried / for writing I IN BIG broad / letters / so are these bringing back I & the / experience / of I as the centre & basis of poetry / the world now seems to be accepting / them / THEM / BEAT / its a pity! society licking their arses / bloody society - / but dont we know society DOESNT / WANT U?"] --O exercise-book of the era of exercise-books, hardly realizing outside of the school issue lined pages & blue covers how blessed one was, & how blessed was that time! (--and doesnt that sound like Aunty Lydia? --as though she knew much more than the platitude, the closest to that demon, Time, of all our relatives) --: Gary Snyder & Nanao Sakaki at Montsalvat, December,'81 --and for the hell of it (no, the full reference of it, being a fool for that sort of thing) I'll quote later from the report I published in my magazine, H/EAR, of that memorable Montsalvat Poetry Festival event, one glorious evening photo of which, by Bernie O'Regan, captures their souls for me and so it will be for the rest of my time! --: So, Sakaki, Sakaki's Issa : is it quirkily simplified or is it Issa's simplicity?
Sakaki's comparison of Issa & Basho begs the question, again, of the literary or learned as positive or negative influence upon poetry --Sakaki's certainty that the peasant is a better poet bespeaks a definition of poetry that would valorize testament, doubt the literary. Who has nothing & knows nothing (take note Mr Podhoretz!) is closer to the earth and can, therefore, sing the song of its elements & creatures, Sakaki implies.
If the poems arent tonic enough, there is his conversation with John Brandi & Jeff Bryan, jumping with mischief, witty & self-abnegating. He appears to relish denying his would-be explicators' Buddhist understandings, insisting naturalness against the esoteric (--no, he says, Pure Land explains nothing of Issa's poetics...). The repudiations are Zen-like. Appreciating the man, his New Mexican hosts accept his "no" for the answer every time.

*

(Hong Kong to London, 23/09/07) Is it the difference (Snyder in himself, Sakaki contrasted with Snyder) between the man when he's in the field, literally doing it, and the pundit who might not even realize a particular shot is ethically cheap?
Critics bemoan the Beats' allegedly suspended adolescence --they may well have a point but part of the debate would be the imperative of maintaining the capacity for adventure & the resulting joy in the encounter with the world --"in & out of the cities" as well as the "mountains & rivers without end"! --and how does that translate in English terms? --which is the jolliest question of all for us --pivotal --since we werent turned-on by the English things of those years of our coming out (--I called it "breakthru" after Ken Geering's mimeod mag of that name, which might even have published me? --I'd left Southampton for Oz just as I submitted poems to him --but a great concept despite oodles of poets probably & appropriately still-born) --and tho Wendy Mulford called me on that in 1970 [she wrote, "How do you mean, people here are afraid to speak? I think they speak like bells (...) When I speak of a syntax of survival , it's a personal metaphor. I have this conscious sense of being english inescapably (...) I want the energy you speak of alright, but for me it thrills as well through Blake or Cowper, Browning or Clare or Byron or Christina Rossetti or or or for example..."], even that advocacy was on the coat-tails of the make-it-new biff and all of that coming-through Sixties modernity --must have been, surely? --Ginsberg's Blake, Olson, Zukofsky, Duncan's Metaphysicals not to mention his Shakespeare, Purcell, and why is O'Hara in my head with the "Elizabethan Rose"? --all variations and not the pretence, however virtuous, of seamless tradition --

*

(29-10-07) Allow me to quote from my piece,Festivals of the Oppressed : An Account of the 1981 Montsalvat Poetry Festival, & the Foundation Meeting of People for Nuclear Disarmourment (both October, 1981), published in The Merri Creek, Or Nero #7, tHEAtRe issue, Winter, 1983.
"(....)Snyder's first reading, in the festival's first evening session, was distinguished by the theme of planetary being, aided by Thoreau-ian accounting & Pound/Olson historicising. He shared top-billing with the Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki. Snyder's was the scholar-adept's response to Sakai's "natural" earthliness. Snyder was truly Sakaki's sidekick in terms of langauge/being. They're exemplary comrades. Sakaki stole the show. There was more "meaning" in a single warble of Sakaki's rendition of a traditional Japanese boatman's song, for example, than in the entire festival's parade of buskers. Perhaps Ania Walwicz's riffs went some of the way with his non-sense, with his marvellous sound. Sakaki's awareness of the nuance of occasion (literary, linguistic & social) was admirable. In contrast, so many of the "performers" that followed were just there to do their bit... From Snyder to the least performance-poet, there was struck a consensus : that language was more or less the generalizing rather than the individualizing stamp of the poet; that this generalizing langauge afforded an externalization bereft of the slightest problematic; that the language was to deliver its predetermined load then & there. This attitude dominated the 1981 festival.
.
Snyder would dearly love to have been born one of those, to quote him, who are blessed with "looser, easier walk & gaze...They are Tibetans, American-Indians, Polynesians, 'Real People'..." I wonder why this should be? As white, American, Buddhist, he's heir to a New Age cosmopolitanism that relates him closer than most to most of the world. I wonder about this reverse racism : I sense the myth of perfect genes behind the transcultural sentimentality (....)
.
Snyder's second reading, on the afternoon of the second day, tended towards recollection of the Beat ethos. His brilliant reading of the long Route 99 hiking poem is comparable to the text of Kerouac's On The Road, albeit condensed & intensified. At both of his readings Snyder referred to Lew Welch. The thought struck me that Snyder is haunted by the ultimate asceticism of the other poet --that Welch's suicide (or, at the very least, his disappearance) pointed him out, accusing him of fellow-travelling, show-biz. Welch's Turkey Buzzard poem, one of the last he wrote before his end, in 1971, contains a Will & Testament, to wit, "on a marked rock, following his orders, / place my meat(...) With proper ceremony disembowel what I / no longer need, that it might more quickly / rot & tempt // my new form" --: a 10th anniversary siren's song for such a sailor as Gary Snyder."

*

A NOTE ON DALE PENDELL'S INSPIRED MADNESS : The Gifts of Burning Man (Frog Ltd., 2006)

(30.7.07-11.8.07) The rep shows me his list --a grab-bag of smaller Australasian & overseas presses including Bob Adamson's Paper Bark (prestigious Australian poets like Adamson himself, Kevin Hart, Jennifer Maiden, Martin Harrison), New Falcon (Crowlie, Regardie, Leary? et al), & North Atlantic --ring a bell? Remember Richard Grossinger's press? The wunderkind of our own time, born in that confluence of New American Poetry & the Counter Culture, with (reputedly) hotel-chain dollars at his disposal to support the wonderful Io magazine --not as literary as Stony Brook (I remember your copies, Bernard) but how exciting! Ecology, homeopathy, astrology, sci-fi, dream, baseball & poetry!
Every now & then something jumps out of the title-sheets, e.g., Tom Clarke's gripping biography of Ed Dorn (particularly for the English years in which Clarke also partook). I'm writing this as introduction to Dale Pendell's book published by Frog Ltd. / North Atlantic --there it was in the rep's checklist --Dale Pendell whom I instantly remembered as poet associated with Gary Snyder, possibly published in Eshleman's Caterpiller magazine?
As we've both since ascertained, Pendell isnt there (maybe Sulpher?) though he is in Jim Koller's Coyote Review & in Franco Beltrametti's Alleghenny Star Route Anthology, alongside Will Staple, Steve Stansfield, Peter Coyote & co. And Peter Coyote & Snyder claim him in blurbs for this book.
It's a rollicking story (no, this isnt Belloc's Four Men! --though quest it is however constituted) --an update on The Dharma Bums offering one outcome of Japhy's rucksack revolution : the Burning Man festival in the Nevada Desert --celebratory, sensory, sensual, ecstatic, never mind-dulling, nothing to do with getting on, some of the best of the 60s, 70s "alternative" scene...
Can one be nostalgic for a life one only peripherally experienced or be inspired by description of events & activities one'll not necessarily emulate? Same questions as posed by our enthusiasm for the subjects of our correspondence I think...
Dale Pendell's major reference is to Norman O. Brown, the mere mention of whom recalls our 1960s, full feathers & bells! And while not dreaming its reinstatement, Pendell is obliged by its revelation. Personal experience doesnt imply social process, indeed the chimerical is where eccentric reality might be happily held, suspended from time & social consequence. The historical faces-off the chimerical in Pendell's field-report of the Burning Man Festival. I'm sure he doesnt conceive an every day of the year/ every year of one's life festival a la Burning Man, but I do think he endorses its periodic eruption as crucial political & psychological benefice. Programmatic revolution & its totalitarian wellspring far less providential than democracy & the free market for, yes it's true, rock'n'roll does save your immortal soul!
Pendell, p78, "Living with some risk makes me feel more alive. I'm not saying that I'm against safety, or even security, or that I want more risk. There is already plenty of risk. But the attempt to eliminate all risk usually destroys what it was you were trying to protect in the first place."
p79, " In Brown's system, risk is Dionysus. Dionysian energy has its own violence --it's transgressive by nature --and Brown was against the attempt of many to sanitize Dionysian energy. But he was steadfast that the suppression of the Dionysian influence is far more tragic than the wreckage characteristic of the passage of the young god himself. For the rites of Dionysius, waste, fire, licentiousness, risk and drug-induced madness, are seemly. Burning Man is an experiment in healing, and it should be considered one of our current national treasures."
p.90, "Brown recognizes that in the era of HCE ("Here Comes Everybody"), the outcome depends on whether or not the masses settle for vicarious enetertainment,
Blake's "spectral enjoyment." Spectator. Here, watch the gladiator shed blood, right on your television. "The Grand Inquisitor is betting that circuses will satisfy. The Dionysian bets the Grand Inquisitor is wrong." (Brown,1996). Brown follows Blake, that the violence of Dionysius is preferable to the violence of Mars. That, following Euripides, the suppression of Dionysius leads to the sacrifice of children. And that, following the most ancient threads of religious and magical belief, the rites of Dionysius are prophylactic. Blake wrote : "I will not cease from Mental Fight."
For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the
Court, and the University : who would, if
they could, forever depress Mental and
prolong Corporeal War.
Blake, "Milton".

Naturally, the body of the book describes, indeed it witnesses, the Burning Man festival. The point of it, though, is cultural-political critique, so no matter how out-of-it the experience Pendell describes, it's always significant --the reporter always mindfully out of his mind!
p99, "Hope. It gives me hope. That tolerance and self-reliance have a chance in a world that seems headed in the opposite direction. Hope against idolatry, in all of its forms. Hope against bigotry, against all the false consciousness that says it can't be done, against all the false gods of modesty, taste, moderation and morality. That there can still be, in the twenty-first century, a Feast of Fools, a backwards day of love and heresy, a day for the god named...no, lets just call him the god of the potlatch. His alternative worship is war."
Wonderful red flag of a declaration, one that speaks for large parts of my formative years, teens & twenties, thirties, but whose implications now pin me to what feels like a fundamental contradiction. In a nutshell, how can one support a war, military action, this or that country's or people's sovereignty, this or that set of conventions, be it Law or Tradition, while simultaneously subscribing to the libertarian agenda? At this very time I often feel I'm America's only friend in the poetry world! --the only poet who doesnt froth at the mouth when, for example, personalities or policies of the Australian federal government are mentioned or, more seriously, Israel discussed.
You told me years ago, after the first two or three of my second era of regular visits to England, that Dad had commented, "Kris has mellowed!" Well, we certainly discovered that we agreed about the propriety of the Gulf War --the first contemporary aggression I'd supported, believing there'd be a repeat of the Czeckoslovakian appeasement of 1938, and Israel in the firing-line not to mention Arab opponents of Saddam, were we not to defend Kuwait. We welcomed the end of the Cold War, happy that Britain & Europe in particular, the rest of the world in general, were delivered from the nuclear-war nightmare, and sure that the collapse of the Soviet Union & the anti-communist revolutions in the Baltics & Eastern & Central Europe proved, once & for all, that Communism was the Russian Empire's vicious counterfeit. Dad's anti-communist instinct was correct, my communist utopianism utter crap! Dad was probably surprised by the comprehensivity of my concession. And then came Yugoslavia, 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq...
Our greatest agreement revolved about the despicable nature of terrorism, and the moral & political bankruptcy of its use to justify struggle for ethnic, religious or national freedom. For me this repugnance extended to the plethora of anti-globalist militancy around the world which seemed to me an echo of Cold War anti-westernism and whose language indulged a degree of self-righteousness which effectively released it from history & above humanity whilst purportedly acting in its name...
Ah well, Dale Pendell may or may not be "anti-globalist" & all that entails. But his approving quotation from (Situationist) Rene Riesel tickles me, especially this : "Radicalism means, literally, 'grasping things by their roots,' not rejuvinating a peremptory anti-capitalism adorned by cliches from Bourdieu." I'd punch the air & yell Right On were it not for thinking for many years now that whilst politics might be most people's best means of understanding & influencing the world, it isnt the only one.
Finding political agreement with Dad in the 1990s didnt mean I'd junked all my 1960s opinions & actions. Some of course; for example I'd now assumed a Churchillian view of the Second World War having realised the folly informing a statement like "Hitler was wrong but the Allies werent correct either". That was a comment I'd read by '60s poet Dan Georgakis somewhere --Margaret Randall's El Corno Emplumado or in something George Dowden had sent me? Have cake & eat it too --typical all across the radical board. What Dad called "antiism" though he neither understood or accepted our generation's sense of suppression & grasping for "freedom"... I'd also outgrown, by the late 1980s, the idea that the State owed me, as poet/artist, a living... Grants & the like are best thought of as a lottery; one should avoid becoming a creature of the State, a voluntary or involuntary dependent.
On which note I'll close,
Love, Kris


*


Weymouth
Mid-November, 2007

Dear Kris,
Oh wow! What a monster letter from you! A surfeit of candy -- spoiled for choice! Like my reaction to long poems (" a poem can't be short enough" -- predilection for haiku etc), I'll have to adjust my thinking!
The Michael Tarachow/Pentagram Press book you mention must've been Potterwoman by Barbara Moraff. I wrote to her years ago, sending her one of Simon Drew's cards -- a picture of the Dalai Lama with horns, entitled 'The Origins of Phrases' -- it read, "To be caught on the horns of a Dalai Lama." --there's a fish caught on his horns. I hope her Tibetan Buddhist sensibilities weren't offended! She never answered my letter!
As I said, too much candy... I haven't read the Dale Pendell book yet -- Inspired Madness. I know of the Burning Man festival through one of my 'girlfriends' -- Justine Shapiro (she's great) on Lonely Planet documentary.
The alternative scene, as with you, always beckoned -- but I passed, unlike you and the other sibs.
Not attending too closely to poetry at the moment because of my obsession with health & nutrition -- macrobiotics-McDougall meets Vegan-raw food diet. My favourite books right now areThe Great Life Diet, Danny Waxman (Pegasus Books, 2007); My Beautiful Life, Mina Dobic (Square One, 2007); The Miso Book, John & Jan Bellame (Square One, 2004); Japanese Foods That Heal (Tuttle, 2007). And I'm eating plenty of raw garlic. It helps with reducing cholesterol, blood pressure and blood viscosity.
But I do have Mad Dogs of Trieste : New & Selected Poems by Janine Pommy Vega (Black Sparrow, 2000) beside me as well. And a whole pile of other things including Thomas Merton...I've been meaning to have a good read of the Vega for a long time, and it's come to hand whilst sorting my books...
Janine Pommy Vega is definitely a traveller and seeker. I get the sense Beat but not Buddhist. Would she be a Dharma Bum? Seeker of the truth, no matter what tradition. Travelled through Israel & Europe in the early '60s, then South America in early '70s. All documented in her book, Tracking the Serpent (City Lights, 1997). At high school she "had been reading Jack Kerouac's On The Road. All the characters seemed to move with an intensity that was missing in my life. A magazine article about the Beats mentioned the Cedar Bar in New York City. We decided to check it out." (Tracking the Serpent, p2)
She met with Gregory Corso, Peter Orlovsky, Allen Ginsberg, Herbert Huncke, Jack Kerouac and other writers... "All that winter and into the spring I read. Emily Dickinson, Christopher Smart, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, Charles Dickens, William Blake, Catullus, John Weiners : anything anyone else was reading. This was my education."
Our friend Bob Arnold pops up in the dedication to that book : "for Bob, Susan & Carson Arnold and all fellow travellers." As I said, traveller -- from Glastonbury to Nepal. I'll have to read it again. Get some clues, maybe, for the journey. For my journey,

*

"Once delusion is extinguished your wisdom naturally arises and you don't differentiate suffering and joy. Actually, this joy and suffering -- they are the same." So starts the film I have on DVD. "Amongst White Clouds", film-maker, Edward A. Burger. Went to China on the strength of Bill Porter's book, Road to Heaven (Rider, 1994) -- decided to make a film on Chinese hermits. Not extinguished by Mao. Amazing that they're still there. He found a master with whom he's been studying for more than five years now. That would be something : to go to China.
But I've found a couple of gems. Firstly, an acupuncturist & healer called Sue Branch, here in Weymouth. And a Zen teacher in the Order of Buddhist Contemplatives living in Aberwystwyth, Wales. As you always reproach me -- you don't have to go anywhere exotic. It's all around you wherever you are. Circumnambulate Radipole Lake. Everywhere/everything is sacred.
Rev. Master Myoho Harris has been very kindly in her(?) letters from Aberwystwyth in regard to my questions about practice. Very encouraging. "Just wanting to meditate is training. It will lead you forward. Help flows to meet us in many ways. Keep offering yourself to the boundless heart of the Buddha and, most importantly of all, listening deeply to what your own body and mind tells you." (Letter, 13th August, '07)
And Sue Branch has been offering Bu Qi -- acupuncture healing without needles as i had bad reaction to needles. Too sensitive. I'm looking forward to some tai chi training too.
Anyway, all for now. Too many Xmas letters to write.
Love,
Bernard