I.M. DEREK BEAN, 1924-2013

Kris Hemensley

*

in in-between world

toes point to the sun

as head is drawn to the sea-bed

off Elwood Beach

I float in a dream

of two families of uncles

inspired by the sight of

three strolling Mediterranean men

in togs without bellies

tanned brown with glinting silver hair

profuse on chest sparse on top

clad in their natures like shimmering fish

another film rewinds then

of English summer-holiday

where ever-the-world's host my father

invites his brothers for a picnic

on the beach and whatever

parents kids nephews uncles play

postponing boredom sadness end-of-holiday

like frisky bachelors

they fetch & carry for my mother

joke swim produce sixpences for ice-creams

smoke cigarettes languorous as the officers

they'd endured all their war years in North Africa

looking back at the shore

the purpose of the world seems first & last

appeasement of the senses

self & world-knowledge

gained by simply gliding body

through water or air enveloped in sunlight

anticipating the trajectories of bathers & walkers

merging with or diverging from them

as if we're all summer's melting marionettes

absolved from guilt excused consequences

but fifty years back

i was sacked for acceding to impulse

an hilarious image ballooned in my mind

demanding an hilarious act to fulfill it

i raced the yards from soft sand

to the puddled ribbed flat

exposed by outgoing tide

where my mother stood girlishly entertaining

my father & uncles

i slapped her blooming blue-costumed behind

so perfectly my right-hand stung and the

whack's echo

startled seagulls and her cry was a pure pain

encapsulating my little devil's jubilation

i ran on & on

and would have cartwheeled if i'd known how

expecting our party to laugh & applaud

instead one uncle chased me down

lectured me like a policeman

marched me back to my tearful mother

& her angry retinue

i prickled red with embarrassment

was made to stew

until awarded the cold blue mercy of banishment

in in-between world

there is no nymph called Thetis

no son Achilles dipped by the heel

into magic waters

there's only ever sea & sea

no other mother's bequest

could so nearly offer immortality

those three manicured Mediterranean men

those look-alikes aliases surrogates

those also-known-as Egyptian uncles

approach the water dainty as penguins

upon the ice-flow

attracted by the laziness of my swim

which tempts their machismo

suddenly one charges & plunges in

calling his partners to join him

then my dream pops into place

and once more real world roars around me

2003
[from DEAR TAKAMURA, 2002-03.
The English uncles are Derek & Dennis Bean; the Egyptian uncles, Gaby & Cesar Tawa. It was the gallant Uncle Derek who ran me down]



oOo

Kris Hemensley

What curious symmetry brings bad news from either side of the family within an hour  of each other? English uncle, Egyptian cousin --though, as my brother elaborates, Pierre was only a couple of years younger than our mother, his aunt, who better related to him as her cousin.

An old man, tanned Mediterranean to oblige this recitation, grey hair, open necked white shirt, brown jacket & trousers, deliberates for half a minute before continuing his shuffle along the pavement. I'm reminded of my cousin but the dawdler's probably a closer resemblance to my Uncle Cesar, thirty years passed.

After my son died, his doppelgangers appeared and for several years following --jumping out of the pages of the music papers, occasionally & startlingly in the flesh. The hesitating Mediterranean is my cousin Pierre's first posthumous herald.

In England, Uncle Derek is apparently dying --the nuance or substance of the epithet 'terminal'. The age he's achieved doesn't diminish one's shock. He's always been a figure of energy & creativity. Walking, climbing, making or teaching music, driving, travelling, socialising --Derek appeared to guarantee the promise of ebullient longevity on our paternal side.

Suing for immortality was Dad's conceit, somehow hobbled by abstraction & timidity; fortunately for Derek it's his character. Perhaps because he never harped upon age, Derek's ageless. The man of wit we've always known --at home with himself --identical with his language --pilgrim's miles in his legs --newspaper beneath arm --tree, shrub or flower in his eye --a piano in his head.


4/4/13
[from DELPHI]



oOo



Kris Hemensley JOURNAL + Notebook
23/24 April, '13

[re Ringwood/Fordingbridge visit]

(…) Big hiccup at Ringwood --I realised too late after alighting from the National Express coach & mooching about in search of Pam, that I wasn't supposed to be meeting her in Ringwood at all but Fordingbridge, a short hop away on another bus. I'd attempted several calls to Bernard but for once he wasn't home --I thought he'd be able to phone Pam & tell her I was still in Ringwood. However once I did realise the mistake I caught next local bus to Fordingbridge! And there she was, at the bus-stop, waiting for me.
We drove fast, first leg to a local store to pick up newspaper for Derek & beer & cheese for lunch, & then on to their home.

Uncle Derek in red checked shirt (or pyjama top?), fawn slacks, blanket around middle down to his feet --blue socks, one of which loosened & after an hour or so Pam pulled it up for him.
Uncle Derek's familiar smile & soft, smooth-skin handshake, more hand hold than grip.
"I bring greetings from [siblings] Bernard & Monique & Robin!" Later on I repeat Monique's best wishes. Derek says, And mine to her.
How are you? I ask --Very well, & yourself?
He alternates attention between the television & The Times crossword. Pam tells him it was my idea to get the paper (""you've got Kris to thank for it"). Derek smiles & keeps working. He's watching Question Time from Parliament. Looks fascinating. I asked him what he thought of the prime minister, David Cameron. He ponders before replying. I think he's doing a pretty good job, he says.
Was the answer contained or encouraged in the question? Pam told me she's learned to conduct just that kind of conversation with him --confusion is not what she wants to foment.
Derek enjoyed (or at least he chuckled) when I referred to Uncle Dennis's appreciation of Ray Monk's biography Wittgenstein. Oh yes, Derek said, Dennis did like Wittgenstein.
Pam had brought out ham for our lunch, the traditional English fare. When I declined she laughed it off. Salad & a chunk of cheese will be fine, I said. I don't know how much a chunk is, she said. Lunch was good, accompanied by several glasses of ale.
Pam showed me WW2 snaps of Derek --Rodger [Derek's son, my cousin] had brought them to show her and in the 45 minutes before he departed for the airport & the flight back to Australia she had them copied. Northern Germany, Hamburg for example. Very interesting was a Forces bulletin advertising a piano recital to be given by Derek Bean --Schubert & Schumann. Signalman Derek Bean.
Pam described Derek watching the broadcast of Mrs Thatcher's state funeral, and how he was impressed by the choir. I sang in St Paul's Cathedral, he said. Hmm. When footage of the Falklands War was shown he remarked he'd fought in that war. You weren't in the Falklands, derek, she laughed. Yes I was, he insisted. So what did you do in the Falklands then? I carried a rifle, he said.
Signalman Derek Bean, holding his rifle, World War 1, World War 2, the Falklands...
Uncle Derek, indomitable, incorrigible…


oOo


"TWO HEARTS UNITED"


Pam Adams :
Email / July 25, '13


Dear Kris,

Preparations for Derek's service on the 31st... I am typing up the order of the service for the printer and have reached an impasse - I am wondering if you can make a beautiful translation of this - am I correct in thinking you know German? - I think I am...
            
Der Abend dammert, das Mondlicht scheint,
              Da sind zwei Herzen in Liebe vereint,
              Und halten sich selig umfangen. 
                                                                          Sternau

This excerpt was included in the score by Brahms to accompany or throw light (mondlicht?) on the second movement of his Sonata in f minor, which Derek loved and played magnificently, and which will be played in his service by Gwenneth Pryor.  Derek loved languages, Derek loved German literature, and I just thought it would be nice to include the excerpt in the order of service, that he would appreciate that, but I would like to add a translation as well.  I can make out the words, but I can't put them beautifully - help?

               Dawn of the evening, the moonlight glistens (?), the moon shines (I'm no good at this!)
               Two hearts united in love (there are two hearts?)
                stand in blessed embrace   HELP!!!  (stand?  stop? stay? Aaaargh!)


*

Kris Hemensley :
Email / 26 July, '13

Hi Pam, I sent two urgent messages to 'my people' with German language : poets Cecilia White & Petra White. Cecilia, Sydney based poet, often in Europe, has responded with this 'translation' which she says is also an interpretation. She thinks it might have the musical feel you need.

Evening arrives softly
Moonlight appearing
In love, two hearts united
Holding each other in blessed embrace


I hope this either assists you in yr translation or does the job entirely...
All best, in haste, Kris


*

Pam Adams:
Email/  27 July, '13

Hello Kris,

Thank you so much for throwing yourself into the task at hand!  Urgent!  I like it.  And thank your people!  Amazingly, I needn't have worried, the printer had a translation in her vast store of everything she's ever printed, and apparently that excerpt has come up on many an occasion!  Here's what she printed and I said, okay -

Through evening's shade,
The pale moon gleams
While rapt in love's ecstatic dreams
Two hearts are fondly beating.

Okay.  Somebody took tremendous liberties, but whatever.... gleams and dreams rhyme so okay.

The Order of Service looks good, I'm happy.  Now I have the weekend to do the outer cover.
Found some very interesting things!  A box of pictures - one of you and Derek - do you have a copy of it? from his visit [to Melbourne] at Christmastime 1997, I believe, in your shop.  Will send that if you don't have it.  (There were two copies of most of the pictures in that set, but only one of that photo, so you may already have it.)  Also the sweetest picture - which will go on the inside back cover, along with a couple of pictures of young Derek, soldier - of Derek crouching opposite, and feeding/petting a baby kangaroo.  Sweet.  Also found a letter I had written him while he was in Australia, detailing what he was missing in a particular class at Morley College.  He was class secretary, and in his absence it was quite chaotic - and someone turned to me and asked when Derek would be back.  "Morley doesn't stand if Derek isn't here," he said.  "It's like the ravens in the Tower."

*

Petra White :
Email, July 28, '13

Evening grows dark, the moonlight shines, two hearts are made one in love, holding each other in happiness.


oOo

ISLE OF WIGHT DREAMING

ISLE OF WIGHT DREAMING : Robin Ford's On the Brink (Cinnamon Press, Wales, 2010)


Leaping out of a catalogue description of Robin Ford's new book of poems, On the Brink, from Cinnamon Press, his third, was the reference to the Isle of Wight. I didnt know his name but instantly he was my man! --the open sesame for the Island of which my own dream has always been waiting. (Long gone, I readily confess, my younger shrinking, taught by betters, from any such affiliation. The notion of poets representing this or that geographic region considered an utter joke --as though poetry was separated from the poets' own places or rather, ought to be, for the language's sake. Another of my generation's exciting but specious mutual-exclusivities which provided for the beauty of the autonomous object whilst undermining the truth of description & evocation.)
My brother Bernard, reviving as a small publisher with a renewed interest in the local via his Stingy Artist press in Weymouth, is keen now to foster my Dorset connection, as though I really were a 'Dorset poet'! --after all, I've been visiting Dorset since 1987, a few years after my younger siblings moved there from neighbouring Hampshire, followed by my parents. And Dorset's inner & outer landscapes have certainly inspired me in ways that Hampshire, apart from the New Forest, never did. However, because of what the catalogue had aroused in me, I suddenly rankled at Dorset's definitive claim! At least, I thought, if Dorset then Hampshire & the Isle of Wight too! Southampton & environs is something else : it was where I grew up, my home, the place from where one dreamt the future and opposed the small town tyrannies. But Ryde, Isle of Wight, was my birthplace, where my grandmother lived for decades (at Tangley Lodge, Salisbury Road) and where we holidayed through childhood & teens. The last time as a family was in 1965, the summer before my emigration to Australia, a brief sojourn sandwiched between clerking on British Railways in London, travelling on the Continent, & sailing on the Fairstar (I was a one-voyage mariner, jettisoned just as I was getting the hang of my hold & shop duties, worst luck).
My father, who grew up on the Island, suggested to me that perhaps we'd make a trip there, walk around his childhood haunts (Ryde, Bembridge), but it never happened. Instead I went myself, visiting my uncle Dennis there in 1996, accomplishing the reorientation Dad & I had planned. He, of course, was all ears for my report. In retrospect, lack of sleep & jet-lag from the Melbourne flight was the perfect preparation for the encounter --and my uncle's no show at both Waterloo & Portsmouth just another share of transcontinental displacement. But he was waiting at Ryde, --and all over the place in Ryde as that & succeeding days arranged themselves around his peripateticism & the wild oscillation of his sleeping & waking. Four a.m. kettle-boiling & cups of tea ushering in conversations to last the day about literature & philosophy (he was full of Ray Monk's biography of Bertrand Russell I recall) & music; walking miles around town & into the country; drinking with his young & old cronies at the London-style pub (captured for me now from memory of Graham Greene's novel or the film of Brighton Rock) --where 'London style' implicates all Southern England, transcending rural society's cap-doffing hierarchy --wherever found & whomever has the readies uncoupling ease from class --the comfortable shabbiness of carpet & furniture, and much the same for the patrons whether or not of the spiv & toff, flit & bot segment of Uncle Dennis's society.

I imagined Robin Ford's poems delivering me a version of my dream, but I should have known that dreams arent ever on tap to one's bidding! The cover of On the Brink (& that title should have been a warning) is an Isle of Wight view --cliffs, shale, white-tipped incoming seas, the dark-blue depths, the fast clouds in a sun-washed sky. And there in the centre of the book the sequence Wight.
Instantly he's given it to me, for example, At Dimbola in Freshwater (which is all about the famous Julia Margaret Cameron) : "Tennyson of course, a private path and gate for him / from Farringford, all the fashionable and great / who take up Freshwater : Browning, Darwin, Millais, / happy to pose as kings and mythic figures, Dodson's / Alice, staying up the road, whole lot fixed for us / by silver nitrate..." Or, In Clerken Lane : "Fooled by nostalgia I leave the main way, totter / on a muddy tightrope of a track, ridged high, slippery / with autumn, find it now cut short mid-way, mid-air."
There's a lovely thing apparently derived from a 1930s IOW memoir by wonderfully named Fred Mew -- A Glorious Morning 1913 : "I sit by Blackgang Chine / four hundred feet above a sea / that's brilliant, blue, / a thin, white line of foam / kissing at red shingle beach / which stretches from / St. Catherine's Point up to / the dreaded ledge at Atherfield, / graveyard of many fine ships ..." --a precious postcard.
From On Chalk, last verse : "and in an abandoned marlpit / when I brush againt / bramble dock coltsfoot / where it's claggy / thistle spring and anthill tussocked / I turn child again" -- more or less the idyll's caption.
Contrast the 2nd verse of the scene-setting Flotsam : "We walk the low tide shore; a cloudy day, storm passed, / sand dull and flat. Lugworm casts like walnuts, / knot and dunlin feeding at the water's curl. / Above sea's usual reach a mesh of blowsy rubbish: / cans, plastic, oil, tar-clogged garments, rope. / There's been a wreck along the coast, cargo flicked / off decks, tossed from holds and split containers. / Round the bay a line of heavy duty rubber gloves / gagged up by sea, orange as funeral garlands on the Ganges, / fingers splayed as if cold hands, at last gasp reach, lay dead in them: / Albatross, Sirenia, Irex, Clarendon." Of course it's an elegy, governed by essential pathos, but the utterly particular vocabulary is indispensable.
Juxtaposition elsewhere of "in summer sweet, by autumn treacherous" speaks to our Isle of Wight poet's internal & external weathers...


Let's suppose one hadnt gone instantly to the Wight section; instead read first the Asyla & Faustus poems. Then one would have begun with terror ("that haunted wing, my mind") & been riveted by the collection's major poem, Audrey at Whitecroft (--"the former county lunatic asylum on the Isle of Wight" , Ford notes, "later the psychiatric hospital until it closed in the 1980s" --where, indeed, he was too (Whitecroft Revisited 30 Years On), "The old wards named for poets: Shakespeare, Browning, T.S. Eliot. / Gascoyne had his time here. "). This memorable dramatic monologue features a female persona ("They called me Screamer. I do not think I screamed / but it was better not to question them. "), whose testimonial, ameliorative of what in other hands would be diatribe, reminds me just a little of James Dickey's May Day Sermon to the Women of Gilmer County, Georgia, by a Woman Preacher Leaving the Baptist Church --it is transported, heightened, & similarly transgressive god-talk.
"My world seemed right for me alone, when I felt sad or down / and violence came my way, I could enter it to blessed peace, // a meadow filled with ox-eye daisies, quaking grass and sorrel / with fairies fine as dragon flies. I quickly learned it was unwise to tell / the doctors of this special place because, in envy (their own hell), / they turned the taps on me, brought out syringes, wet towels, // said I was away with birds and so I was and that is how I wished to stay / but even birdsong turned to screams which seemed inside of me; then I / was sent into the cells for days, where peepholes watched me, demon's eyes. / I wrestled myself quiet, ate filth they pushed at me through long, bad days // of stinking rain, carbolic soap and loneliness..."
A lifetime of institutional degradation passes followed by the advent of mental health's 'Community' solution. And then, one late day, "a nurse, a good one, best of seven, / taught me embroidery. My world lit up. I saw my brilliant heaven / through her, for God has many means to show Himself to us, the open eyed. // Suddenly I found my voice. // (....) Silks, wools, cottons, they worked with me as if the linen wed the thread. / I grew well, though old. One day they said, You have your own home now. /Shocked I left the ward in fear, bid farewell to every flower, / walked down the drive. Then God said, Audrey, come. And I was glad."

Audrey cant help but be a kind of surrogate, genuine creation though she also is --it's more to the point that Robin Ford's own experience of illness ("my storm of sickness"; "How to still a mind that pours / unstoppable as water over weir") & institution --that is, the ability to absorb & transform what any life throws at one --conflates exquisitely with the fiction : if not the character's doings then the atmospheres inhabited & projected.
Treacherous to take any work of art literally, as though it were an affidavit, yet feeling (pitch, ambit, tone) always attracts narrative. Why, for example, in The Oxus, the Indus and the Aral Sea, doubt this poet's confidence :

When I am well again I will lie on a chalk hillside,
breathe calmly, turn my head to see sunset fall

on sedge, burnet, harebells, float on scent of thyme
and marjoram; spring will warm my bones and over me

crossbow swifts will wheel and tumble. My eyes
will rejoice with hawkbit, speedwell, scabious,

bloodspot orchids will be the only stain the world knows,
my mind will be a new hatched butterfly

testing unexpected wings(...)

In my book it's the chalk hillside, the herbs, flowers, grasses, the birds of any season that constitutes the restorative. Indubitably, no dream, even of the Isle of Wight, without shadows, but Dream & dreaming nonetheless.


---------------------------------------------------------
Kris Hemensley
September 2nd-October 8th, 2010

ON THE DHARMA BUM(S) WITH THE HEMENSLEY BROTHERS (3)

25/6-28/6/06 , rewritten August, 2006
Weymouth & Melbourne

Dear Bernard, Regarding your day of Kerouac synchronicity & scores has me thinking of the way Kerouac entered my life. The first Kerouac I ever saw & purchased was Big Sur, a Mayflower-Dell pb, found right under my nose amongst the general literature, thrillers, romances, in the tiny kiosque I was required to work in, on the tourist deck of the then Sitmar Line's flagship, Fairstar, late September, 1965. Just as I'd been disbelieving of the hoo-hah around the Albert Hall poetry reading earlier that year --one of those "almost" experiences because I was working on the railways in London and could have attended-- so was I suspicious of Big Sur's lurid blurb, "the story of the crack-up of the King of the Beats"! However, I enjoyed it and the clincher was the fantastic sound poem at the end of the book, Kerouac's transcription of the ocean at Big Sur... Back home from the voyage (Southampton to Australia via Suez, Aden returning via Singapore, Colombo, Aden & Naples) I researched the Beats at our beloved Reference Library at the Civic Centre and began hunting for Kerouac & Co. around the new & secondhand bookshops in town.
I found On The Road on a stall in Kingsland Square Market; The Dharma Bums somewhere in St Mary's Street; new editions of Lonesome Traveller, Visions of Gerard, & Burroughs' Dead Fingers Talk at the Paperback Parade, bottom of East Street & adjacent to the Tech & the Art College in the Docks area.
In 1964 I made the momentous discovery of Whitman's Leaves of Grass in an 1896 hardback pocket edition on the pavement table outside Gilbert's! When I read Ginsberg later on I immediately sensed Whitman as his progenitor. Whitman was my daily companion when I sailed for Melbourne on the migrant ship Fairsky in 1966.
On the family summer-holiday on the Isle of Wight in 1965, prior to my voyage on the Fairstar, Uncle Dennis (Bean), Dad's step-brother, gave me a copy of the first issue (Autumn, 1952) of Perspectives , which I thought a wonderful American literary mag (and in retrospect I've realized it had to be since it was probably doing its cultural-political bit in those first years of the Cold War), containing poems & prose by William Carlos Williams. The poems astonished me (they included Proletarian Portrait, Poem /"so much depends", This Is Just To Say /"I have eaten the plums")! I hardly believed they were "poems" at all coming as I was from an enthusiastically consumed diet of DH Lawrence & the school syllabus of Chaucer, Shakespeare,R. Browning et al! I remember discussing the poems with you --it seemed like the simplest sentences had been rearranged vertically and called poems! We were shocked, amused, delighted by the simplicity. I tried my own hand at the style --wrote 20 or 30 in a day-- they werent any good but at least the cat was out of the bag...
In Southampton I looked for WCW at the Civic Centre Library but could only find Charles Williams. Had I not been exposed to WCW, Charles wouldnt have seemed a dud, and it wasnt until the late 1980s that I read him again (in the context of the Arthurian mythos & the Inklings I was happilly researching for myself & to stock at the Shop). But you came home one night from work with WCW's Kora, Or a Season in Hell, snaffled at Gilbert's, the best bookshop (new & secondhand) in town. Later you brought home Paterson , in the Macgibbon & Kee edition, which you must have ordered specially. Paterson, of course, carried dedications & material for Allen Ginsberg whom we'd read in the Penguin Modern Poets series, in the volume with Corso & Ferlinghetti. In retrospect, what a marvellous period of literary discovery, characterized by the displacement by the new Americans of the British & European (mostly French) writing we'd thrived on previously. Important to state here that the Beats were slotting into the place made by the following American writers (I quote from the lists I have from 1965-66) : Faulkner, Saroyan (read as early as 1963),Baldwin, Steinbeck, Caldwell, Hemingway... That time's crucial academic critics for me were Ihab Hassan & Leslie Fiedler, and foremost of the new commentators was Norman Mailer following on from the great trailblazer Henry Miller...
The hunt for Kerouac & the Beats resumed in Melbourne after emigration in 1966. My Alladin's cave was Franklin's, the secondhander in Russell Street on the edge of Chinatown. Maggie Cassidy , The Subterraneans, Protest (the anthology juxtaposing the Beats & the Angry Young Men, to the former's obvious advantage one must say), The Village Voice Reader, all came my way in quick succession. The fuller context included Randall Jarrell, Bellow, JD Salinger... I bought Desolation Angels from the South Yarra bookshop in Toorak Road, around the corner from where I was living in Park Street (Lorin Ford's dad's boarding house as fate would have it --and that's a whole other story). There it was, the Andre Deutsch, British first-edition, in its silver dust-jacket, in the bookshop window, waiting for me! The baby of a girl-friend wet on it one day, soaking the front-cover & ruining the end-papers. Although aghast I had to accept it as a Beat annointment!

*

Thinking about Morley on the trio's mountain climb... Initially I accepted that the none too subtle foil he plays to his Zen-lunatic pals was all that he was, in every way the straight man. But,in retrospect, Morely actually survives the figure of irritating buffoon drawn by Kerouac, perceived by Ray. It took courage, after all, to climb the mountain by himself (a kind of punishment for his dereliction with the crank-shaft and the earlier problem with the sleeping-bag) --he accomplishes it with a humour that's somehow older & zanier than either Ray or Japhy. He isnt anxious about not climbing the summit, happy to lie on his back at the penultimate stage, content within himself. there's a nobility about him...
I wonder what you make of theBuddhism in TDB? Can you remember your impression years ago and how does it strike you now?

Love, Kris



26th August,2006
Weymouth

Dear Kris, Absolutely ages since I've written. I don't want that to be my constant plaint tho'. Or that I've been diverted --but I have-- Dad's illness having galloped on somewhat. He has leukaemia now and I don't think he knows. He told me his MDS had transformed to anaemia, the consultant informed him. But I think he misheard due to his deafness, and what the consultant actually said was leukaemia. Well, this is the Great Matter, Life & Death, that we are all involved in, which leads one to Zen --"trying to do something about 'me'!" Zen is the step one takes after psychiatry & psychology have failed according to Roshi Jiyu Kennett.
Dogen : "The most important question for all Buddhists is how to understand birth and death completely for then, should you be able to find the Buddha within birth and death, they both vanish."
Buddhism and Zen is what drew me to Kerouac. I don't think it was as early as you. First of all I bought and read Zen Flesh, Zen Bones --the Paul Reps compilation. I would quote 'stories' to everyone from it, circa 1970 --I don't have your memory for events and don't have voluminous diaries either. But about this time I was aware that something different was afoot. Different to our Western, Christian society (helped along by Jung and Hesse). My first reading of TDB would be after that. As to whether I was aware of Kerouac in the late Sixties --I don't think so. I was 20 in 1968, when I left home, and I'm sure I didn't know Kerouac then. I missed an opportunity, in 1969, to run the poetry section in a bookshop near Winchester Cathedral. Maybe if I had I'd've run into him. It seems to me that when I went to Buddhist Summer School in 1971 for a few days with my friend John, on the invitation of Patti Ellwood, his mother, I think I was aware of Kerouac. It was here I bought one of the volumes of R.H. Blythe's Haiku. I wish I'd bought the set.
I don't know what sort of meditation I was doing at the Buddhist Summer School. I just sat on cushion. Most people sat on chairs. And I don't remember the incident you've retold me of how I was still sitting on my cushion when everyone else had gone and the monk told me I could "go now"... I do remember the bell resounding, on and on, for an eternity. Then nothing. Blissed out maybe.
I follow Soto school of Zen now. That was my inclination since the mid-70s. Shikantaza = just sitting. I don't know what Japhy was doing when he sat and meditated with his eyes open, which was a revelation to Smith -- "and Japhy sat down in full lotus posture cross-legged on a rock and took out his wooden juju prayerbeads and prayed.' That is, he simply held the beads in his hands, the hands upsidedown with thumbs touching, and stared straight ahead and didn't move a bone. I sat down as best I could on another rock and we both said nothing and meditated. Only I meditated with my eyes closed." (TDB, p53.)
Hey, it's just gone five p.m. --time for my meditation/zazen. I've resumed my practice. Things are always changing. Nothing stays the same. I sit on chair now. Years on my little black cushion have ruined my left hip. But I'm just so pleased to be sitting again. Important thing is to be upright. Sitting on zafu is such a lovely feeling tho'! Not that "lovely feelings" are the point of course. Japhy obviously a young yogi to be able to manage full-lotus. I used to sit Burmese posture -- simply sitting with one leg in front of other, which I feel is no small feat in itself for me. Maybe if I can overcome hip problem through yoga I'll sit on cushion again one day. But who cares? Sitting up, lying down --do the best you can.

Love, Bernard
---------------------------------------------------
[posted 11 April '06] to be continued