Preface
[Posts shared/retrieved from Facebook]
(October 4, '15)
DAVID PEPPERELL : Dear George. Thanks for the ad [HOWL reading at Collected Works Bookshop : Saturday, 10th October, '15] and thank you for including me in your Six Gallery Commemoration. I'm looking very forward to being a part of a celebration of the very beginning of the Beat Generation. Just a pedantic point - I'm sure you know that Phil Lamantia did not read his own poetry at the Six Gallery but those of his recently deceased friend John Hoffman. Those poems are in the back of Lamantia's City Lights book "Tau". Wouldn't it be good to read at least one of those as a tribute to a poet lost at 21 to a peyote overdose in Mexico?
GEORGE MOURATIDES : Thanks so much for being part of this, David. Yes, I absolutely agree with you re. Lamantia and Hoffman. I have a copy of that book and have asked Larry Schwartz to do some Hoffman and maybe one or two Lamantia... Really looking forward to meeting you... Peace and blue notes
DAVID PEPPERELL : That's great George and thank you for including me. I am delighted that casual remark of mine to Kris Hemensley a few years ago has borne fruit. Thank you so much for organising it.
oOo
(October 6, '15)
The HOWL Report!!!
Great to hear from Jude Telford : "wowee zowee
HOWL it was my fave .... I used to work in a book and record shop in
Toronto back in the 70`s and I placed HOWL by the cash register ." Now
that's an unintentionally funny juxtaposition! Discuss $$$$$ later...
!
The event on Saturday a/noon at Collected Works coordinated by George
Mouratides (who as people may or may not know, is one of the 4 younger
scholars who worked on Penguin's "SCROLL" edition of On The Road) is
unique as far as i can see looking around the Web...
Our
celebration/commemoration is anchored, as it ought to be, by Ginsberg's
Howl, and includes poems by the other readers at the Six Gallery (7 Oct
1955), namely Lamantia (who read J Hoffman), McClure, Whalen, Rexroth,
Snyder, --read on Saturday a/noon by, as George says, LOCAL poets!
My
own sense of the occasion is held in Doctor Pepper's ascription "the
very beginning of the Beat Generation" , thus Rexroth & Lamantia as
slightly older current still flowing of course and the Beats as catching
the splash.
Expand this thought to say that from the 40s Apocalypse
poets onwards, late translation in part of the cross Channel surrealist
excitements, something else was in the air, abounding naturally in
contradictions but fomenting the condition for Beats & everything
else that follows.
oOo
(October 7 '15)
The HOWL Report, 2nd
Thinking yday about the 'new poetry''s
relationship to Ancient Chinese & Japanese poetry --and yes of
course, Pound & Fenollosa... But along this line : when the East
& Ancient became adjacent, available, it was at the expense of the
exotic... or at least, since i happen to like Mr Binyon, the East &
Ancient as exotic wasnt any longer the only sound or optic in town...
Life as well as letters, so an equivalence, a contemporaneity to the
Chinese Mountain poets, or the Japanese haiku masters... thus the mid
20C translators including Rexroth, Snyder, and so the Beats...
Another
thing : listened yday to Larry Schwartz's CD gift of the Rexroth &
Ferlinghetti reading at the Cellar, 1957... Rexroth's long poem Thou
Shalt Not Kill (i.m. Dylan Thomas) so reminiscent of Ginsberg's Howl...
and Ferlinghetti, reading from Coney Island of the Mind, --europeanly
funny & ironic hitched to the same american drive out of Whitman as
all the others...
oOo
(October 8, '15)
The HOWL Report, 3rd
Stephen Hamilton came by yday in acknowledgement
of the magic moment : 7th October, actual 60th anniversary of the Six
gallery [HOWL] reading. James had copied for him the original
announcement : "6 POETS AT 6 GALLERY". The text, by Kenneth Rexroth i
assume : "Philip Lamantia reading mss. of late John Hoffman-- Mike
McClure, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder & Phil Whalen--all sharp new
straightforward writing-- remarkable collection of angels on one stage
reading their poetry. No charge, small collection for wine and
postcards. Charming event.
Kenneth Rexroth. M.C.
8 PM Friday Night
October 7, 1955
6 Gallery 3119 Fillmore St. San Fran"
Or maybe it's
Ginsberg's text re- "remarkable collection of angels"! Yet "charming
event" has arch edge to it wch is why i thought Rexroth!
oOo
(October 8, '15)
The HOWL Report, the 4th
(Actually the third & a half-th!)
Further to my mention of the tete a tete yesterday with Stephen Hamilton
at the Bookshop (who was on his way to rendezvous with similarly
maniacal Beat enthusiast James Hamilton to raise a glass to the 6
Gallery originals) : Stephen, looking along the American shelf,
mentioned his interest in Jackson MacLow & the relevance of MacLow
to the Beats & co --the segue i guess would be neo-dada/surrealist,
Steinian, Cagean experimentalism --Ah yes, i said, JACKSON MACLOW, met
him at a party once! Oh, really? says Stephen, --wch is fatal temptation
for me to spin one of my stories! Yes, it was at the party in his honour
thrown by Robert Vas Dias in Hampstead in 1975, June or July? --the year
of the inaugural Cambridge Poetry Festival which i turned into a
wonderful three month trip around the England of the British poets of my
acquaint-- Robert Vas Dias the American poet, little mag publisher,
residing in London --I'd set out from long way across town with John
Robinson, editor of Joe di Maggio mag & little books, with whom i
was staying a couple of nights --it was late afternoon, the party wasn't
due to start till six or seven --We came to a pub, and it was OPEN (the
maddening English after-lunch licensing restrictions of that time)! I
persuaded John we should get a drink because it was HOURS until we were
expected. John wasn't so sure but i persuaded him! One pint became
another & another. I told him no one turned up to a party on the
dot, well not in Melbourne anyway! We walked around the treed &
curving streets (is that right? slight ascents too?) & eventually
found Robert Vas Dias's house. And the party was in full flight! Greeted
the host, (we'd met up at the Cambridge Fest, as everyone else had)and
joined in! Packed. We were the last there. Jackson MacLow was seated at a
long table eating dinner --salads, cold serves-- surrounded by friends,
colleagues, fans, all filling their faces. We must have missed dinner
or werent expected! Jackson MacLow, big grey-white beard, long wiry
hair, man of the moment. And i noticed a bit of chicken caught in the
fronds of his whiskers! It must have been there for a while, no one
seemed to notice, respectful conversation was being had, he was talking
seriously, and the chicken (was it a wish bone? or just a bit of skin?)
bobbing as his head did, as he ate & talked... Many people to talk
to --Bob Cobbing? Allen Fisher, Pierre Joris & Paige Mitchell, David
Miller (to play music?), Derek Bailey (ditto), Anthony Barnett? The
Chaloners? Lee Harwood? I cant remember. If i cld find the note-book of
the time it might be there. At some point i'd moved out of the main
room, was by myself having a drink, when an American woman said hello
(now, her name WILL be in that notebook). We clicked. Her opener : what
are you doing at this chicken-shit party?! I pointed out the uninvited
guest in Jackson's fuzz. Extended laughter, joking about English high
society, where we could go for a real party. Exchanged phone numbers.
Her boyfriend and then John joined us. And things began breaking up. I
phoned her up from Southampton but never heard back. That's life in
1975!
oOo
(9th October, '15)
The HOWL Report, the fifth
Brian Hassett is "in Lowell for the JackFest", and sends this message : "So cool and am so happy about your Six Down Under. I was just with Michael M yesterday at his rare East Coast (or anywhere) appearance and I mentioned the Sixtieth of the Six to him and ... he had no idea !!
He said, "Oh, I must drop Gary a line."
But like — the guy's not booked anywhere. (!) (And of course, nor's Gary.)"
I guess that old joke, de Kooning's? about birds not into ornithology (he was talking about art criticism), could apply here!
But this is surely something else. Once again intersections & connections : enthusiasts become historians eliciting palpable, tangible meaning from out of pop celebrity on one hand and the valueless abyss informed by carelessness & forgetfulness on the other.
I coined the term "active archive" thirty-odd years ago to account for the type of magazine i was publishing : a simultaneity of remembering & reflecting and the imperative to (and this'll sound like Ram Dass) be here now!
George Mouratidis programme for tomorrow, the 10th October at Collected Works Bookshop, is prime example : the local poets, never less than individuals of current vigour & personality, channeling, if you like, the Six Gallery originals!
Yeah!
Showing posts with label Whalen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Whalen. Show all posts
Sunday, October 18, 2015
Thursday, January 1, 2009
THE MERRI CREEK #8, 2008/09 : POEMS & PIECES
SAM BYFIELD
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
Sunset, I step outside and catch
the west's last luminous seconds, the sky
evolving through its leafy spectrum,
before stars and the high pitched rhetoric
of crickets. Currawongs call in their alien
tongue, bring to mind the gentle language
of seduction, how it plays itself again
in dreams. Every evening this week
I watched the sun threading away,
into the ranges and desert belly
of this country, and I've imagined it
reaching you, setting into the Indian
Ocean, hoped that you would soon be
watching it, wishing that Winter
would hurry, so that I might return.
*
RETURNING TO LA NINA
A lizard's curiousity in the verandah's arched shade.
The smell of farms, a profusion of living after
the monotony of droughts. The garden overflows
and pulses like rainforest, spiders as big as fists
my mother tells me and I'm glad I wasn't here
to see them. Frangipanis hang like eggs, broken
and suspended. The birds are restless and the leaves
are restless. The wind and the heat. Sun's dapple
fascination. Feather pattern on the horizon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLIVE FAUST
MAXIMS, MINIMS, SQUIBS AND ESSAYETTES
1. I didn't know that Phil Whalen had lived next door to Cid in Kyoto, nor about the regular meetings in San Francisco when young. "... and we used to solve the world's problems together." Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations (in my case, with Ian Watson, say) all these years later; but that's mainly so those two young men could stay free of second thoughts , and continue being young. Besides, part of the correction would be to the hope they had; and I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope.
2. Whenever they concoct a new antibiotic for golden staph, the bacteria evolve into strains resistant to it. The micro-organisms are not stupid.
3. People come in and out of our lives casually and accidentally, as if our train were late, and we had to ask a stranger if he knew whether they'd rescheduled it, or whether this one was still meant to be departing on time.
4. I like the sound of a stamp --and on an ink pad too.
5. And real materialists, like Hume, who deny the supernatural, will usually pull some very unlikely deity out of the hat --like the "invisible hand of the market" he invoked for his friend Adam Smith. A lot of obeisance to that Deity round the bourse cathedrals of the world.
6. Blackberries hidden in prickles.
7. "Everything will be forgotten in the days to come." But only if there are days to come. And if there are no days to come, will everything still be forgotten?
8. In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you.
9. All alone one New Year's Eve, so I recalled friends, and had my Auld Lang Syne with the dead.
10. Losses of people. I don't really know how to cope. Oddly enough, the ordinary consolation that it is inevitable and universal, is more desolation than consolation for me: the idea of so much absence, and the dwindling in meaning of any one particular absence in the light/dark of that thought, of that truth in fact, is pretty much unbearable. I think how little now deaths of a hundred years ago mean, or fifty, or from one's earlier life. And how blase was one's own attitude to the death of grandparents, as being inevitable with such old people? And it was --but ... .
11. What happens after After is in the lap of the Gods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THINGS
1
sharing
the tight lipped
outside the world we love
shines attraction more crushing than
ourselves
packets
of compassion
visualise oasis
demons season and spring whisk soups
real zest
welfare
and thorny styles
imbues testy postures
detailing people gives notice
on pride
concerns
of give and take
are parlous excuses
calm moods texture reverie as
armour
full hopes
immerse on trains
while forks cut unawares
with nearly all things quiet and
trafficked
2
Judas
was double crossed
blamed on my ticklish sleeve
as delusion and faults forfeit
friendship
shiners
and leather shoes
fail to impress folklore
open myths verify jackets
tailored
bonfires
not gaiety
are love variances
heaviness radiates roaming
murmurs
umpires
and exchanges
pitch result for losers
a transplant injury mounts new
heart pumps
counsels
rouse my lament
and indict defences
what's the exposed image of lone
wedge tails?
3
lovers
and lapsed rhythms
sour most ardent courses
single mercies cherish pacing
dance steps
rackets
and landing strips
out of nowhere alight
details inflate my wanting to
crash land
milkshakes
lime and raspberry
salute a boy's penchant
while gritty dynamics secure
favours
reviews
and articles
riddle my excitement
incumbent chargers fiddle gripe
lambaste
the soul
cautiously let
have you been here that long?
Godot might ask, are you looking
at me?
[NOTES:
Judas Iscariot (died April, AD 29-33) was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve apostles, and was apparently designated to keep account of the 'money bag' but is traditionally known for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
READING
Academically
She insists
The book is about
Needing to
Observe and extend
Freud's political
Unconscious
When Graffito
Rubs against
the Holy Mary
But he quietly
Counters that
It is merely
And wholly
About Love
Memory paths
Ingrained
The grips of grief
And desires
Thwarted
And so
The Weekend
Begins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Does it help that billions of miles away
planets spin in patterns drawn from spirographs?
Swirls within swirls, fractionally rotating
in invisible patterns, like the way a lily
won't open before your eyes, or how
you might even be that lily, if you don't
concern yourself with the parasite inside;
But that lily I mean, the one you didn't notice,
it's all brown petal now, so make sure you don't step on it,
instead watch your child grow taller, and allow her to lean
away, toward a parallel orbit, accept you are peripheral
and though you might have walked around here for days
and months and years, thinking you must be moving
toward something, each day was simply busy
with its own rewriting of grander patterns,
where you fit, only as a swirl, tracing another
swirl, within another swirl,
that's within another swirl.
*
THREE GOOD THINGS
On any day it might all come down
to three good things, or the way
kindness can return unpredictably
Not everyone believes these things
but today I repeat them as a mantra,
my own song that lifts up and banks
out of the littered street,
the plastic bags whose
contemporary beauty
only serves to remind me
everyone is either buying
or selling, then discarding
These words are too weak,
a breath or two might blow
them out, as a child blows
at candles on a cake.
Three good things
candles, cake, a child.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
SAM BYFIELD, born in 1981, grew up in Newcastle and after stints in Canberra & China now lives in Melbourne. He has published one chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, and his first full-length collection, Borderlands, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney). He has been published in Australia & overseas, most recently in Heat, Famous Reporter, Meridian & The Asia Literary Review.
CLIVE FAUST lives in Bendigo to where he returned in the early '70s after several years in Kyoto. Contributed to The Ear in a Wheatfield in the '70s, featured in the 4th series of Cid Corman's Origin magazine in 1978, included in John Tranter's New Australian Poetry (Makar Press) in 1979, and has published 5 chapbooks (3 with Origin Press) and a selected poems, Cold's Determination (University of Salzburg Press). His review of John Phillips' Language Is appears in Jacket #32 ('07).
ROBERT JORDAN, see note in Poems & Pieces #4
ANNE KIRKER, see note in Poems & Pieces #1
ANN SHENFIELD, see note in Poems & Pieces #2
[Compiled November/December, '08 and typed up this 1st day of January, 2009
Kris Hemensley]
________________________________________________________________
AUTUMN PORTRAIT
Sunset, I step outside and catch
the west's last luminous seconds, the sky
evolving through its leafy spectrum,
before stars and the high pitched rhetoric
of crickets. Currawongs call in their alien
tongue, bring to mind the gentle language
of seduction, how it plays itself again
in dreams. Every evening this week
I watched the sun threading away,
into the ranges and desert belly
of this country, and I've imagined it
reaching you, setting into the Indian
Ocean, hoped that you would soon be
watching it, wishing that Winter
would hurry, so that I might return.
*
RETURNING TO LA NINA
A lizard's curiousity in the verandah's arched shade.
The smell of farms, a profusion of living after
the monotony of droughts. The garden overflows
and pulses like rainforest, spiders as big as fists
my mother tells me and I'm glad I wasn't here
to see them. Frangipanis hang like eggs, broken
and suspended. The birds are restless and the leaves
are restless. The wind and the heat. Sun's dapple
fascination. Feather pattern on the horizon.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CLIVE FAUST
MAXIMS, MINIMS, SQUIBS AND ESSAYETTES
1. I didn't know that Phil Whalen had lived next door to Cid in Kyoto, nor about the regular meetings in San Francisco when young. "... and we used to solve the world's problems together." Yes, I know that scene, and it's very attractive. Wouldn't particularly want to re-hear the conversations (in my case, with Ian Watson, say) all these years later; but that's mainly so those two young men could stay free of second thoughts , and continue being young. Besides, part of the correction would be to the hope they had; and I don't like sniffing out hope --even past hope.
2. Whenever they concoct a new antibiotic for golden staph, the bacteria evolve into strains resistant to it. The micro-organisms are not stupid.
3. People come in and out of our lives casually and accidentally, as if our train were late, and we had to ask a stranger if he knew whether they'd rescheduled it, or whether this one was still meant to be departing on time.
4. I like the sound of a stamp --and on an ink pad too.
5. And real materialists, like Hume, who deny the supernatural, will usually pull some very unlikely deity out of the hat --like the "invisible hand of the market" he invoked for his friend Adam Smith. A lot of obeisance to that Deity round the bourse cathedrals of the world.
6. Blackberries hidden in prickles.
7. "Everything will be forgotten in the days to come." But only if there are days to come. And if there are no days to come, will everything still be forgotten?
8. In age you are treated as a walking ghost well before you die. And you see the world like one too, with its distant affairs of not much interest to you.
9. All alone one New Year's Eve, so I recalled friends, and had my Auld Lang Syne with the dead.
10. Losses of people. I don't really know how to cope. Oddly enough, the ordinary consolation that it is inevitable and universal, is more desolation than consolation for me: the idea of so much absence, and the dwindling in meaning of any one particular absence in the light/dark of that thought, of that truth in fact, is pretty much unbearable. I think how little now deaths of a hundred years ago mean, or fifty, or from one's earlier life. And how blase was one's own attitude to the death of grandparents, as being inevitable with such old people? And it was --but ... .
11. What happens after After is in the lap of the Gods.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ROBERT JORDAN
PHILOSOPHICAL THINGS
1
sharing
the tight lipped
outside the world we love
shines attraction more crushing than
ourselves
packets
of compassion
visualise oasis
demons season and spring whisk soups
real zest
welfare
and thorny styles
imbues testy postures
detailing people gives notice
on pride
concerns
of give and take
are parlous excuses
calm moods texture reverie as
armour
full hopes
immerse on trains
while forks cut unawares
with nearly all things quiet and
trafficked
2
Judas
was double crossed
blamed on my ticklish sleeve
as delusion and faults forfeit
friendship
shiners
and leather shoes
fail to impress folklore
open myths verify jackets
tailored
bonfires
not gaiety
are love variances
heaviness radiates roaming
murmurs
umpires
and exchanges
pitch result for losers
a transplant injury mounts new
heart pumps
counsels
rouse my lament
and indict defences
what's the exposed image of lone
wedge tails?
3
lovers
and lapsed rhythms
sour most ardent courses
single mercies cherish pacing
dance steps
rackets
and landing strips
out of nowhere alight
details inflate my wanting to
crash land
milkshakes
lime and raspberry
salute a boy's penchant
while gritty dynamics secure
favours
reviews
and articles
riddle my excitement
incumbent chargers fiddle gripe
lambaste
the soul
cautiously let
have you been here that long?
Godot might ask, are you looking
at me?
[NOTES:
Judas Iscariot (died April, AD 29-33) was, according to the New Testament, one of the twelve apostles, and was apparently designated to keep account of the 'money bag' but is traditionally known for his betrayal of Jesus Christ.
Waiting for Godot is a play by Samuel Beckett, in which the characters wait for a man (Godot) who never arrives.]
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANNE KIRKER
READING
Academically
She insists
The book is about
Needing to
Observe and extend
Freud's political
Unconscious
When Graffito
Rubs against
the Holy Mary
But he quietly
Counters that
It is merely
And wholly
About Love
Memory paths
Ingrained
The grips of grief
And desires
Thwarted
And so
The Weekend
Begins
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ANN SHENFIELD
LIKE SPIROGRAPH
Does it help that billions of miles away
planets spin in patterns drawn from spirographs?
Swirls within swirls, fractionally rotating
in invisible patterns, like the way a lily
won't open before your eyes, or how
you might even be that lily, if you don't
concern yourself with the parasite inside;
But that lily I mean, the one you didn't notice,
it's all brown petal now, so make sure you don't step on it,
instead watch your child grow taller, and allow her to lean
away, toward a parallel orbit, accept you are peripheral
and though you might have walked around here for days
and months and years, thinking you must be moving
toward something, each day was simply busy
with its own rewriting of grander patterns,
where you fit, only as a swirl, tracing another
swirl, within another swirl,
that's within another swirl.
*
THREE GOOD THINGS
On any day it might all come down
to three good things, or the way
kindness can return unpredictably
Not everyone believes these things
but today I repeat them as a mantra,
my own song that lifts up and banks
out of the littered street,
the plastic bags whose
contemporary beauty
only serves to remind me
everyone is either buying
or selling, then discarding
These words are too weak,
a breath or two might blow
them out, as a child blows
at candles on a cake.
Three good things
candles, cake, a child.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTRIBUTORS' NOTES
SAM BYFIELD, born in 1981, grew up in Newcastle and after stints in Canberra & China now lives in Melbourne. He has published one chapbook, From the Middle Kingdom, and his first full-length collection, Borderlands, is forthcoming from Puncher & Wattmann (Sydney). He has been published in Australia & overseas, most recently in Heat, Famous Reporter, Meridian & The Asia Literary Review.
CLIVE FAUST lives in Bendigo to where he returned in the early '70s after several years in Kyoto. Contributed to The Ear in a Wheatfield in the '70s, featured in the 4th series of Cid Corman's Origin magazine in 1978, included in John Tranter's New Australian Poetry (Makar Press) in 1979, and has published 5 chapbooks (3 with Origin Press) and a selected poems, Cold's Determination (University of Salzburg Press). His review of John Phillips' Language Is appears in Jacket #32 ('07).
ROBERT JORDAN, see note in Poems & Pieces #4
ANNE KIRKER, see note in Poems & Pieces #1
ANN SHENFIELD, see note in Poems & Pieces #2
[Compiled November/December, '08 and typed up this 1st day of January, 2009
Kris Hemensley]
________________________________________________________________
Sunday, June 17, 2007
ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS, #7
Melbourne, May 9-12,'07
Dear Bernard, My month came & went --April "with his schowres sweete" etc., "Thanne longen folk to gon on pilgrimages" as Chaucer says --but Taurus, my constellation, has a little way to go yet. English Spring, or how it used to be pre-Climate Change, and Melbourne Autumn have some similarities. The sunshine in the backgarden, where I sat for an hour before the breeze sent me back indoors, is blissful after the burn of Summer, just like sunshine in England after Winter cold.
I'm rereading that part of TDB before Ray's stint with the Fire service --when the trio have returned from their first trip. Japhy & Smith have been joined by Alvah (Ginsberg) & Coughlin (Philip Whalen) for talk & wine. Coughlin urges his fellow devotee recite the Buddhist stories. They're drinking and Japhy, inspired, lays down his vision, the vision, his social programme if you like. And it truly is the vision of our time, you & me in the middle of it.
'"Give me another slug of that jug. How! Ho! Hoo!' Japhy leaping up : 'I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refridgerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deoderants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...'" (pp76-77)
The argument, of course, is between those who do & do not "subscribe to the general demand". If there were millions of "rucksack revolutionaries" (and maybe there were, from the Sixties to the present?) would the general condition have been transformed? Japhy's wish for "a floating zendo, where an old Bodhisattva can wander from place to place and always be sure to find a spot to sleep in among friends and cook up mush" (p77) is closer to the reality I suspect. Thus the Counter Culture : alternative societies within the general subscription society. So Japhy's the social revolutionary and Smith sympathizes but contributes the compassion (as the good conservative should) : "Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye : they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of the One Eye. But neither was Japhy..." (p82)
Smith's narrative swings harmoniously between Zen Lunatics on their dharma bum and the world as it is (as it always was and will be). Recall the start of chapter (actually, more like rave or riff) 24, p125 : "If the Dharma Bums ever get lay brothers in America who live normal lives with wives and children and homes, they will be like Sean Monahan [Locke McCorkle in real life](...) a young carpenter who lived in an old wooden house far up a country road from the huddled cottages of Corte Madera(...)[living] the joyous life in America without much money(...)" (Kerouac's sexism reflects that time's conventional paradigm; women were part of the equation then but generally lacked their narrators. Impossible not to think of men & women now since the upheaval of the Sixties & the Feminism of the Seventies. "Lay brothers & sisters" everywhere...) Who would have believed, though, that in the West, in our time, Buddhism, for one example of an alternative perspective, would become mainstream?
The closing paragraph of the book has Ray offering a prayer to his fire-watching mountain-shack before he "turned and went on down the trail back to this world." Where we are --having our cake and eating it too! --in this world.
*
A NOTE ON THE HAN SHAN ANALOGY
(14/3/07) The Governor's sketch of Han Shan & Shih-te, laughing loudly, Ho! & Ha-ha! (in Snyder's preface to Cold Mountain Poems) is the template for Kerouac's TDB. All there in the ancient Chinese pair's fleeing society the moment freedom was felt to be threatened --hiding in the mountains, disappearing into the cave of the remotest world as well as the world at large) --exactly how Japhy & Ray Smith are meant to be in the novel. Hoo! shouts Japhy. Ray adopts the exclamation. "Hoo" announces & punctuates --the glee of being in the world. The scholarship, the wandering, the drinking & partying , the confrontation with ultimate questions in the silence of the mountains --Japhy as Han Shan, Smith as Shih-te. Plain as plain can be!
Yet although Smith/Kerouac could imagine himself the senior partner, especially as Americana Catholicism brushes off that old Dharma --echo of Alvah earlier in the book, dismissing what real-life Ginsberg will clasp full-on in years to come --it's a conceit. More likely the older amigo's life-experience inflecting whatever can be said of Mahayanna versus Zen for example. Undoubtedly, in terms of Buddhist story rather than natural mysticism, Japhy appears to be Smith's master in the book.
*
A NOTE ON ARTHUR WALEY
(19/3/07) Pound's superiority as translator according to Hugh Kenner, introducing the Collected Translations, is the ability to transpose his own voice upon the ancient text : "Pound after twenty-four centuries lends Confucius his voice." Indeed --and that is the signature of our time. Yet what emerges as a danger after only a few decades of the Poundian influence is the flattening of topical langauge (that is, of expression specific to its time) in favour of what is recognizably "our own". No historical personality, simply our own reflection. The example Kenner offers to advantage Pound over Waley sems to me defficient if only for one crucial word, namely the "way". Referring to the way, Pound reports : "He said : The way out is via the door, how is it that no one will use this method." Method? What happened to The Way, one of the world's most poetic cosmologies? Method? The word reeks of the mechanical, the systematic, the utilitarian. Who couldnt prefer Waley then : "The Master said, who expects to be able to go out of a house except by the door? How is it then no one follows this Way of ours?"
Kenner's put-down requires him to caricature : "Arthur Waley sensed a sage embroidered on tapestry expounding the Way." After reading John Walter de Gruchy's Orienting Arthur Waley : Japanism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English (Hawaii,'03), I think I sense the Modernist reflex against the aestheticism of the late 19thCentury & Bloomsbury in Kenner's representation. And I naturally hope it isnt also bullish sneer at whatever's less than red-blooded vernacular --queer & Jewish, look out!
De Gruchy's contrast of Waley's criticism of Japan, informed by superior scholarship & linguistic acumen, with the Japonism of so many Western literati between the World Wars, is salutary. How blinded one can be by partisan enthusiasm in poetry as in politics, and be led past the pretty flowers sure enough but ultimately right up the garden path!
This isnt a belated denigration of Modernism --our times' great adventure after all --but merely a questioning of some of its idiom & its disguised prejudices. Thanks to de Gruchy, Waley's back on my desk, squarely, as are (wait for it!) Laurence Binyon & other earlier translators so temptingly cited!
*
(8/5/07) Re- the revised/expanded edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon, 2000), I enjoyed the confirmation contained in Bill Porter (Red Pine)'s introduction : "If China's literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country's greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain [Han Shan] would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China's temples and shrines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well."
John Blofeld's description, in his introduction, of the Taoist feeling for & about life is surely written with a wide grin --it tickles my heart as I read. The relational people most of us are, living in the pragmatic world as we do, arent entirely lost when we're charmed by truths & tropes of the absolute! "You are going to give me a 32-course (plus side-dishes) Chinese banquet? Thanks, I'll enjoy that. We have only a bowl or two of inferior-quality boiled rice for dinner? That will go down very nicely. We have nothing on which to dine? Splendid, we shall have more time to sit outside and enjoy the moonlight, with music provided by the wind in the pines."
(9/5/07) I'm rereading, after many years, David Young's Five T'ang Poets (Oberlin/Field, 1990), especially his little introductions to each poet (Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-Yin) which describe their lives and discusses the rationale of the translation within the context of the history of each poet's translation. His courtesy is gratifying. Distinguishing "accuracy and scholarship" from poetry in his criticism of another anthology and promising to "rescue my four poets [five in the 2nd edition] from the often wooden & dogged versions of the scholars", Young hopes he might "take my place with other poets -- Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, in particular, along with Arthur Waley, the scholar who translated like a poet -- who have worked in Chinese translation."
A nonsense to talk of rehabilitation with respect to Waley but necessary --and I'm regailing myself as much as anyone else --to maintain the whole field of reference against the distractions of fashion.
*
(15/5/07) Regarding your closing remark, "But the spirit is there". I'm sure that it is. When mobility has been restricted, as it actually has for you, then spirit is almost everything. It would be trivialising for me to say that "everyone's restricted" in the face of your circumscription. But you are the Abbot of Goldy, you have your library of literature, poetry, philosophy not to mention your music collection. You have the run of the kitchen and you must know your Radipole & Chafey's walks like their official warden (or poet)! Thing is to sow the seed, grow the dream, keep your spirits up!
Love, Kris
*
Weymouth / England
May 2007
Dear Kris, I'm anticipating a letter from you soon. Your last got to me in four days. That's some speedy snail! I still prefer this form. No PC, e-mail, etc, for me thus far. I've said it before --I'm not convinced -- which irked you. But maybe I'll go electronic sometime. Anyway, there's no substitute for the books you consistently send. Keep 'em coming.
Talking of which, Zaza [Monique, sister] visited and brought me a couple of presents today (13th May) -- a jar of amazake (made from millet, which I prefer to the brown rice variety) and a book from Waterstone's bookshop in Dorchester. She said she just had to buy it for me. Whilst looking for something else she saw Poems of Thomas Hardy (selected and introduced by Claire Tomalin, Hardy's biographer). I was very pleased to receive it. Do you know it's the first book of his poems that I've ever had in my possession? I've been meaning to get into Hardy since I moved to Dorset twenty-two years ago. Maybe now I'll make a start. But he's not thus far moved me the way the Powyses have. And he's not moved me the way Kerouac and TDB etc has. But he is someone with whom I'd like to feel more at home. By the way, printed on the bag in which the Hardy book came was a quote from Hemingway -- "There is no friend as loyal as a book!" And books sure are amongst my best friends.
*
Re- Dogen / Shobogenzo
"People have sometimes regarded 'Uji' as his unique discourse on the theory of time. Theory of time, my foot! It is his trying to explain reality in a way that people could understand. As Koho Zenji said to me, Dogen was no more interested in time, as such, than the next man. He was trying to point out that everything which is present is part of a flow, and everything which is in the future is part of a flow. And, he was telling us not to get caught up in periods of time, not to get caught up in appearances, not to get caught up in anything -- just be one with the flow that comprises all of existence."
This is what Jiyu Kennett says in Roar of the Tigress, vol 2. She goes on to say that unless you discover this for yourself you'll have a hard time understanding what Dogen is going on about. It was a great relief for me to read this as I was teetering on the brink of giving Dogen a wide berth, giving up on him. But I'm restored.
*
I bought a beaut of a book recently on handbuilt shelters called Home Work, by Lloyd Kahn. It's published by his own press, Shelter Publications, out of Bolinas, California. And I was most pleased to see in it the house of one of his neighbours -- you'll be delighted as well -- Joanne Kyger. Them Dharma Bums and their friends and neighbours get everywhere dont they? Kahn writes -- "Joanne Kyger is my neighbour, a poet, and an elegant lady. Her house, an old cottage she bought in 1970, reflects her travels to various parts of the world and has a wonderful feeling inside. Everywhere you look are things of beauty : a Tibetan tanka, a Balinese painted calendar, lots of paintings, dozens of baskets, healthy green plants, Japanese vases and laquered plates. There's a mirror from Guatemala, the smell of incense, and a book-shelf with hundreds of books. The old water-stained shingles on the roof show through in the living room, and there's a woodstove for heat."
Is that a bit like your cottage in Melbourne? Poet's hideaway? Tin roof. Bookshelves and paintings. Taoist/Zen Lunatic's retreat? We need such places.
Home Work contains "100 photos and over 300 drawings, all illustrating buildings assembled with human hands -- a Japanese-style stilt house accessible only by going on a cable 500 feet across a river; tree houses, bottle houses, bamboo, yurts etc." Fantastic. A book to get me thinking and dreaming. As I said -- books are amongst my best friends! And these places are what you mention in your last letter (20th May) -- Japhy's "floating zendo".
Pleased that your letter came eventually and at the same time as the Five T'ang Poets which you sent separately. Two packets on the same day. It beats anything by contemporary poets I might read. This is what does it for me. Thanks so very much. I enjoyed Clive Faust's poems you photocopied for me, one for Cid Corman and one for Philip Whalen. Exemplary construction. And of course I appreciated the cutting from The Age on Bill Mollison.
I don't have the new edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, but I do have three copies of the original first edition (1983). I will get the new one, complete with photos. I must mention David Budbill whom Copper Canyon publishes -- an American modern-day equivalent of our favourite T'ang poets. The New York Times Book Review said, "When Budbill's on his mountain, he longs for the city, and vice versa. Fame, wealth, and sex are false gods, he insists, but he hastens to add that he still, at times, craves all three. These are not new ideas -- a list of references in the book shows how strongly he's influenced by the classical Chinese poets -- but they find fresh expression here, thanks to Budbill's good humour and gusto. " (Copper Canyon 2006-07, Fall/Winter catalogue.)
*
(25th May) I have just two books bedside at present -- Five T'ang Poets and The way of a Pilgrim. I've taken to reading them aloud to mama. Poor thing, she's not at all well and rests and sleeps a lot. But I try to keep her interest alive by reading to her. Kerouac would've loved the latter (as well as the T'ang poets of course). He did have his Bible which he read -- "I took out the Bible and read a little Saint Paul by the warm stove and the light of the tree. 'Let him become a fool, that he may become wise,' and I thought of dear Japhy and wished he was enjoying the Christmas eve with me. 'Already are ye filled,' says Saint Paul, 'already are ye become rich. The saints shall judge the world.'" (TDB, p99.) Yup, Ray Smith would've loved The Way of a Pilgrim -- the Pilgrim is a sort of Dharma Bum.
Christian? Buddhist? Buddhist and Christian? Ray has doubts but ultimately transcends everything. "Then suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried 'I'm gonna die!' because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my dead father and dead brother and dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an etherial flower, and ye live. I knew that I also knew that I was the worst bum in the world. The diamond light was in my eyes." (TDB, p100.)
*
Thich Nhat Hanh is very keen on practicing with both traditions, Christian and Buddhist -- "(...) parents should encourage their children to have two roots and to have both the Buddha and Jesus within their life. Why not? (...) It is just like cooking. If you love French cooking, it does not mean that you are forbidden to love Chinese cooking (...) You love the apple, yes, you are authorised to love the apple, but no one prevents you from also loving the mango." (Going Home : Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, Riverhead,1999; p202.)
Me? I've got plenty of time for all of it. Everything. Multitrack. Not single track!
Love, Bernard
I'm rereading that part of TDB before Ray's stint with the Fire service --when the trio have returned from their first trip. Japhy & Smith have been joined by Alvah (Ginsberg) & Coughlin (Philip Whalen) for talk & wine. Coughlin urges his fellow devotee recite the Buddhist stories. They're drinking and Japhy, inspired, lays down his vision, the vision, his social programme if you like. And it truly is the vision of our time, you & me in the middle of it.
'"Give me another slug of that jug. How! Ho! Hoo!' Japhy leaping up : 'I've been reading Whitman, know what he says, Cheer up slaves, and horrify foreign despots, he means that's the attitude for the Bard, the Zen lunacy bard of old desert paths, see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn't really want anyway such as refridgerators, tv sets, cars, at least new fancy cars, certain hair oils and deoderants and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of 'em zen lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures...'" (pp76-77)
The argument, of course, is between those who do & do not "subscribe to the general demand". If there were millions of "rucksack revolutionaries" (and maybe there were, from the Sixties to the present?) would the general condition have been transformed? Japhy's wish for "a floating zendo, where an old Bodhisattva can wander from place to place and always be sure to find a spot to sleep in among friends and cook up mush" (p77) is closer to the reality I suspect. Thus the Counter Culture : alternative societies within the general subscription society. So Japhy's the social revolutionary and Smith sympathizes but contributes the compassion (as the good conservative should) : "Only one thing I'll say for the people watching television, the millions and millions of the One Eye : they're not hurting anyone while they're sitting in front of the One Eye. But neither was Japhy..." (p82)
Smith's narrative swings harmoniously between Zen Lunatics on their dharma bum and the world as it is (as it always was and will be). Recall the start of chapter (actually, more like rave or riff) 24, p125 : "If the Dharma Bums ever get lay brothers in America who live normal lives with wives and children and homes, they will be like Sean Monahan [Locke McCorkle in real life](...) a young carpenter who lived in an old wooden house far up a country road from the huddled cottages of Corte Madera(...)[living] the joyous life in America without much money(...)" (Kerouac's sexism reflects that time's conventional paradigm; women were part of the equation then but generally lacked their narrators. Impossible not to think of men & women now since the upheaval of the Sixties & the Feminism of the Seventies. "Lay brothers & sisters" everywhere...) Who would have believed, though, that in the West, in our time, Buddhism, for one example of an alternative perspective, would become mainstream?
The closing paragraph of the book has Ray offering a prayer to his fire-watching mountain-shack before he "turned and went on down the trail back to this world." Where we are --having our cake and eating it too! --in this world.
*
A NOTE ON THE HAN SHAN ANALOGY
(14/3/07) The Governor's sketch of Han Shan & Shih-te, laughing loudly, Ho! & Ha-ha! (in Snyder's preface to Cold Mountain Poems) is the template for Kerouac's TDB. All there in the ancient Chinese pair's fleeing society the moment freedom was felt to be threatened --hiding in the mountains, disappearing into the cave of the remotest world as well as the world at large) --exactly how Japhy & Ray Smith are meant to be in the novel. Hoo! shouts Japhy. Ray adopts the exclamation. "Hoo" announces & punctuates --the glee of being in the world. The scholarship, the wandering, the drinking & partying , the confrontation with ultimate questions in the silence of the mountains --Japhy as Han Shan, Smith as Shih-te. Plain as plain can be!
Yet although Smith/Kerouac could imagine himself the senior partner, especially as Americana Catholicism brushes off that old Dharma --echo of Alvah earlier in the book, dismissing what real-life Ginsberg will clasp full-on in years to come --it's a conceit. More likely the older amigo's life-experience inflecting whatever can be said of Mahayanna versus Zen for example. Undoubtedly, in terms of Buddhist story rather than natural mysticism, Japhy appears to be Smith's master in the book.
*
A NOTE ON ARTHUR WALEY
(19/3/07) Pound's superiority as translator according to Hugh Kenner, introducing the Collected Translations, is the ability to transpose his own voice upon the ancient text : "Pound after twenty-four centuries lends Confucius his voice." Indeed --and that is the signature of our time. Yet what emerges as a danger after only a few decades of the Poundian influence is the flattening of topical langauge (that is, of expression specific to its time) in favour of what is recognizably "our own". No historical personality, simply our own reflection. The example Kenner offers to advantage Pound over Waley sems to me defficient if only for one crucial word, namely the "way". Referring to the way, Pound reports : "He said : The way out is via the door, how is it that no one will use this method." Method? What happened to The Way, one of the world's most poetic cosmologies? Method? The word reeks of the mechanical, the systematic, the utilitarian. Who couldnt prefer Waley then : "The Master said, who expects to be able to go out of a house except by the door? How is it then no one follows this Way of ours?"
Kenner's put-down requires him to caricature : "Arthur Waley sensed a sage embroidered on tapestry expounding the Way." After reading John Walter de Gruchy's Orienting Arthur Waley : Japanism, Orientalism, and the Creation of Japanese Literature in English (Hawaii,'03), I think I sense the Modernist reflex against the aestheticism of the late 19thCentury & Bloomsbury in Kenner's representation. And I naturally hope it isnt also bullish sneer at whatever's less than red-blooded vernacular --queer & Jewish, look out!
De Gruchy's contrast of Waley's criticism of Japan, informed by superior scholarship & linguistic acumen, with the Japonism of so many Western literati between the World Wars, is salutary. How blinded one can be by partisan enthusiasm in poetry as in politics, and be led past the pretty flowers sure enough but ultimately right up the garden path!
This isnt a belated denigration of Modernism --our times' great adventure after all --but merely a questioning of some of its idiom & its disguised prejudices. Thanks to de Gruchy, Waley's back on my desk, squarely, as are (wait for it!) Laurence Binyon & other earlier translators so temptingly cited!
*
(8/5/07) Re- the revised/expanded edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain (Copper Canyon, 2000), I enjoyed the confirmation contained in Bill Porter (Red Pine)'s introduction : "If China's literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country's greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain [Han Shan] would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China's temples and shrines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well."
John Blofeld's description, in his introduction, of the Taoist feeling for & about life is surely written with a wide grin --it tickles my heart as I read. The relational people most of us are, living in the pragmatic world as we do, arent entirely lost when we're charmed by truths & tropes of the absolute! "You are going to give me a 32-course (plus side-dishes) Chinese banquet? Thanks, I'll enjoy that. We have only a bowl or two of inferior-quality boiled rice for dinner? That will go down very nicely. We have nothing on which to dine? Splendid, we shall have more time to sit outside and enjoy the moonlight, with music provided by the wind in the pines."
(9/5/07) I'm rereading, after many years, David Young's Five T'ang Poets (Oberlin/Field, 1990), especially his little introductions to each poet (Wang Wei, Li Po, Tu Fu, Li Ho, Li Shang-Yin) which describe their lives and discusses the rationale of the translation within the context of the history of each poet's translation. His courtesy is gratifying. Distinguishing "accuracy and scholarship" from poetry in his criticism of another anthology and promising to "rescue my four poets [five in the 2nd edition] from the often wooden & dogged versions of the scholars", Young hopes he might "take my place with other poets -- Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth and Gary Snyder, in particular, along with Arthur Waley, the scholar who translated like a poet -- who have worked in Chinese translation."
A nonsense to talk of rehabilitation with respect to Waley but necessary --and I'm regailing myself as much as anyone else --to maintain the whole field of reference against the distractions of fashion.
*
(15/5/07) Regarding your closing remark, "But the spirit is there". I'm sure that it is. When mobility has been restricted, as it actually has for you, then spirit is almost everything. It would be trivialising for me to say that "everyone's restricted" in the face of your circumscription. But you are the Abbot of Goldy, you have your library of literature, poetry, philosophy not to mention your music collection. You have the run of the kitchen and you must know your Radipole & Chafey's walks like their official warden (or poet)! Thing is to sow the seed, grow the dream, keep your spirits up!
Love, Kris
*
Weymouth / England
May 2007
Dear Kris, I'm anticipating a letter from you soon. Your last got to me in four days. That's some speedy snail! I still prefer this form. No PC, e-mail, etc, for me thus far. I've said it before --I'm not convinced -- which irked you. But maybe I'll go electronic sometime. Anyway, there's no substitute for the books you consistently send. Keep 'em coming.
Talking of which, Zaza [Monique, sister] visited and brought me a couple of presents today (13th May) -- a jar of amazake (made from millet, which I prefer to the brown rice variety) and a book from Waterstone's bookshop in Dorchester. She said she just had to buy it for me. Whilst looking for something else she saw Poems of Thomas Hardy (selected and introduced by Claire Tomalin, Hardy's biographer). I was very pleased to receive it. Do you know it's the first book of his poems that I've ever had in my possession? I've been meaning to get into Hardy since I moved to Dorset twenty-two years ago. Maybe now I'll make a start. But he's not thus far moved me the way the Powyses have. And he's not moved me the way Kerouac and TDB etc has. But he is someone with whom I'd like to feel more at home. By the way, printed on the bag in which the Hardy book came was a quote from Hemingway -- "There is no friend as loyal as a book!" And books sure are amongst my best friends.
*
Re- Dogen / Shobogenzo
"People have sometimes regarded 'Uji' as his unique discourse on the theory of time. Theory of time, my foot! It is his trying to explain reality in a way that people could understand. As Koho Zenji said to me, Dogen was no more interested in time, as such, than the next man. He was trying to point out that everything which is present is part of a flow, and everything which is in the future is part of a flow. And, he was telling us not to get caught up in periods of time, not to get caught up in appearances, not to get caught up in anything -- just be one with the flow that comprises all of existence."
This is what Jiyu Kennett says in Roar of the Tigress, vol 2. She goes on to say that unless you discover this for yourself you'll have a hard time understanding what Dogen is going on about. It was a great relief for me to read this as I was teetering on the brink of giving Dogen a wide berth, giving up on him. But I'm restored.
*
I bought a beaut of a book recently on handbuilt shelters called Home Work, by Lloyd Kahn. It's published by his own press, Shelter Publications, out of Bolinas, California. And I was most pleased to see in it the house of one of his neighbours -- you'll be delighted as well -- Joanne Kyger. Them Dharma Bums and their friends and neighbours get everywhere dont they? Kahn writes -- "Joanne Kyger is my neighbour, a poet, and an elegant lady. Her house, an old cottage she bought in 1970, reflects her travels to various parts of the world and has a wonderful feeling inside. Everywhere you look are things of beauty : a Tibetan tanka, a Balinese painted calendar, lots of paintings, dozens of baskets, healthy green plants, Japanese vases and laquered plates. There's a mirror from Guatemala, the smell of incense, and a book-shelf with hundreds of books. The old water-stained shingles on the roof show through in the living room, and there's a woodstove for heat."
Is that a bit like your cottage in Melbourne? Poet's hideaway? Tin roof. Bookshelves and paintings. Taoist/Zen Lunatic's retreat? We need such places.
Home Work contains "100 photos and over 300 drawings, all illustrating buildings assembled with human hands -- a Japanese-style stilt house accessible only by going on a cable 500 feet across a river; tree houses, bottle houses, bamboo, yurts etc." Fantastic. A book to get me thinking and dreaming. As I said -- books are amongst my best friends! And these places are what you mention in your last letter (20th May) -- Japhy's "floating zendo".
Pleased that your letter came eventually and at the same time as the Five T'ang Poets which you sent separately. Two packets on the same day. It beats anything by contemporary poets I might read. This is what does it for me. Thanks so very much. I enjoyed Clive Faust's poems you photocopied for me, one for Cid Corman and one for Philip Whalen. Exemplary construction. And of course I appreciated the cutting from The Age on Bill Mollison.
I don't have the new edition of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain, but I do have three copies of the original first edition (1983). I will get the new one, complete with photos. I must mention David Budbill whom Copper Canyon publishes -- an American modern-day equivalent of our favourite T'ang poets. The New York Times Book Review said, "When Budbill's on his mountain, he longs for the city, and vice versa. Fame, wealth, and sex are false gods, he insists, but he hastens to add that he still, at times, craves all three. These are not new ideas -- a list of references in the book shows how strongly he's influenced by the classical Chinese poets -- but they find fresh expression here, thanks to Budbill's good humour and gusto. " (Copper Canyon 2006-07, Fall/Winter catalogue.)
*
(25th May) I have just two books bedside at present -- Five T'ang Poets and The way of a Pilgrim. I've taken to reading them aloud to mama. Poor thing, she's not at all well and rests and sleeps a lot. But I try to keep her interest alive by reading to her. Kerouac would've loved the latter (as well as the T'ang poets of course). He did have his Bible which he read -- "I took out the Bible and read a little Saint Paul by the warm stove and the light of the tree. 'Let him become a fool, that he may become wise,' and I thought of dear Japhy and wished he was enjoying the Christmas eve with me. 'Already are ye filled,' says Saint Paul, 'already are ye become rich. The saints shall judge the world.'" (TDB, p99.) Yup, Ray Smith would've loved The Way of a Pilgrim -- the Pilgrim is a sort of Dharma Bum.
Christian? Buddhist? Buddhist and Christian? Ray has doubts but ultimately transcends everything. "Then suddenly one night after supper as I was pacing in the cold windy darkness of the yard I felt tremendously depressed and threw myself right on the ground and cried 'I'm gonna die!' because there was nothing else to do in the cold loneliness of this harsh inhospitable earth, and instantly the tender bliss of enlightenment was like milk in my eyelids and I was warm. And I realized that this was the truth Rosie knew now, and all the dead, my dead father and dead brother and dead uncles and cousins and aunts, the truth that is realizable in a dead man's bones and is beyond the Tree of Buddha as well as the Cross of Jesus. Believe that the world is an etherial flower, and ye live. I knew that I also knew that I was the worst bum in the world. The diamond light was in my eyes." (TDB, p100.)
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Thich Nhat Hanh is very keen on practicing with both traditions, Christian and Buddhist -- "(...) parents should encourage their children to have two roots and to have both the Buddha and Jesus within their life. Why not? (...) It is just like cooking. If you love French cooking, it does not mean that you are forbidden to love Chinese cooking (...) You love the apple, yes, you are authorised to love the apple, but no one prevents you from also loving the mango." (Going Home : Jesus and Buddha as Brothers, Riverhead,1999; p202.)
Me? I've got plenty of time for all of it. Everything. Multitrack. Not single track!
Love, Bernard
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