Bankei’s Zen Made Easy

  

Numbers in parentheses refer to pages in Peter Haskel’s Bankei Zen: Translations from the Record of Bankei; those in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     The prize of enlightenment is so precious, one might naturally think it must be very difficult to attain.  The history of Zen certainly includes some heroic strivers, among them the Second Patriarch Huìkě who cut off his own hand to offer Bodhidharma as evidence of his earnestness.  The very last advice the Buddha gave his followers was to strive hard [1], and monks of the sangha have virtually always been given a rigorous and demanding regimen of meditation and sutra chanting. 

     Yet Zen, particularly the Rinzai (Linji) tradition that arose from the Southern School has always recognized the possibility of sudden enlightenment.  Their founder Huìnéng, after all, experienced what the Japanese came to call satori when he overheard a passage of the Diamond Sutra.  Though monasteries of all sects continued the demanding spiritual practices they had inherited, none considered diligent effort sufficient to guarantee enlightenment, and many thought spiritual liberation might suddenly arrive at any moment. 

     The seventeenth century Japanese monk Bankei served as abbot of several important monasteries (including that at Ryoanji in Kyoto where the celebrated “dry garden” of raked sand and rocks is found).  He was as well a genuinely popular teacher whose public sessions attracted tens of thousands of listeners.  His approach to Zen, though singular in its simplicity and surprising to many, was approved by such masters as he could locate and his work became sufficiently influential that he is today regarded as one of the greatest exponents of Japanese Buddhism [2].

     Bankei’s central teaching is his exhortation to dwell in the Unborn Buddha Mind, a concept derived from the concept called in Sanskrit anutpāda, which is to say unconceived, or unborn [3].  His sermons hammer away at this one simple counsel to the point of becoming tiresome.  “Straightway abiding in the Unborn Buddha Mind just as it is , and you’re a living  tathagata from  today forever after” (4).  “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn” (13).  ”You’re always a living buddha, and there’s no time when you don’t remain a buddha” (22).  One need do nothing to achieve this status; it is in fact always already present {4].

     Bankei repeatedly recounts his own history of pursuing enlightenment by practicing zazen, reciting sutras, and studying Chinese to read the accounts of earlier masters, only to assure his followers that they need do none of these, though, if they wish, they may (49).  Bankei does not shout or strike meditators, seeking to shock them into enlightenment.  He tells them that, rather than anticipating years of rigorous and perhaps fruitless effort and self-denial, they are fortunate to hear his advice which has the potential to bring them enlightenment the very same day they hear his message.  The question is problematized by Bankei’s claim that “there’s no such thing as enlightenment” (83) and that “talking about wanting to achieve ‘enlightenment’ is certainly useless.” (84). But the aspirant need not worry about his meaning.  Everything, Bankei says, is already perfect.  There are no rules: “Do whatever you like” (58, 155), he says.  A student need do nothing but recognize the fact of a liberation fully present in every moment [5].

     Thus he insists that moral laws and miracles are irrelevant (7), there is no need even to speak of Buddhism or Zen (8), koans are nothing but “old wastepaper” (23) and icons useless (25).  All methods are merely expedients (103) and, if study has any role at all, it would be only to confirm one’s satori (114). 

     One must, however, contend with an adversary perhaps more subtle than memorizing characters on a sparse diet with a harsh teacher: the old bugbear of self-consciousness.  Bankei notes that his listeners are paying attention to his sermon with their conscious minds, yet they are simultaneously aware of other extraneous sounds such as sparrow, crows, or human voices which they hear without intention or effort, thus with the Buddha Mind [5].  While one may intentionally concentrate on a lecture or on achieving a goal, one must sneak up on oneself unawares to avoid paying attention or striving.  Surely this is the reason that most of Bankei’s listeners did not find their lives transformed after once hearing him speak.  Will is powerless, one must fall without thought into the Unborn Mind . 

     By his account Bankei’s own enlightenment came after prolonged arduous effort, when he was ill and had not eaten for a week, “on the verge of death.”  He spit against the wall and, when he “noticed that the sputum had congealed into a jet-black lump like a soapberry,” he suddenly realized “Everything is perfectly managed with the Unborn . . .I’ve just been uselessly knocking myself out!” Presumably his overstressed physical state had taken him out of himself and brought him momentary thoughtlessness which was sufficient to alter his consciousness, leaving his spirit “clear and buoyant” (13).  Yet he insists that his listeners need not follow his path.

     Bankei does not shrink from self-contradiction; indeed, he embraces paradox.  In spite of criticizing the traditional means for pursuing enlightenment, since one need do nothing whatever to find the Unborn Buddha Mind, he also declares that “to practice is hard” (67) and advises students “don ‘t fritter away your time” (89).  In spite of considering koan study “of no particular usefulness,” (23) he uses koans to bring his followers to understand his position. 

     The very koan that elicits Bankei’s dismissal of the device in fact enriches the subtlety of his vision.  An old man asks Hyakujō Oshō whether an enlightened person remains subject to causation.  He says he had told a follower of his own that such a one would no longer be subject to birth and death whereupon the student was condemned to five hundred lives as a fox.  When he was told that an enlightened state “does not ignore causation,” the student was freed from his fate and died in the form of a fully enlightened fox [6].  His error had presumably been to provide too definite an answer.  Bankei thus reminds his listeners of the value of such old stories for some and warns against accepting duality.  Bankei's use of the story, reminds his followers of the teaching while holding it at arm’s length, using it while explicitly rejecting its value. 

     Another central koan for Bankei’s Unborn Buddha Mind is that in which a monk who pursues the Sixth Patriarch, expecting to challenge his succession is startled into a higher consciousness by being told  “Think neither good nor evil. At this very moment, what is the original self of the monk Myo?” [7]  This “original self,” identical with the Unborn, though always and inevitably present, is obscured by delusion and accumulated habitual ignorance.   Hui-neng assures his questioner who inquires whether this is the most profound mystery that “what I have told you is no secret at all.  When you look into your own true self, whatever is deeper is found right there.”  He sounds here very much like Bankei.

     We twenty-first century Americans may feel that our era, even more than seventeenth century Japan is a “degenerate age of Buddhism” (6), sorely in need of a kickstart of insight.  Bankei reminds us that the Unborn Buddha Mind is always present, always perfect, for those who can recover a spontaneous unselfconscious grasp of it.

 

 

 

1.  "Behold now, bhikkhus, I exhort you: All compounded things are subject to vanish. Strive with earnestness!" Maha-parinibbana Sutta: Last Days of the Buddha translated from the Pali by Sister Vajira & Francis Story.

2.  In the century following Bankei, Hakuin rose to prominence.  He was an advocate of very rigorous and unremitting practice and very critical of what to him was “do-nothing” Zen, including that practiced by Bankei’s followers.  Most modern Japanese Zen has roots in Hakuin.

3.  The term is often encountered in the Prajñāpāramitā Sutras and in the Lankavatara Sutra as well as in  Nagarjuna.

4.  Readers may be reminded of the use of the expression “always already” (immer schon) in Heidegger, Althusser, Derrida, and others.

5.  This point appears on pages 5, 27, 28, and 33.  The reader may be reminded on Cage’s celebrated piece 4’33” (1952).  In another image, Bankei notes that one withdraws the hand from hot fire without thought, prior to conscious perception.

6.  Case 2 Mumonkan.  The phrases here quoted are from Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and the Blue Cliff Records, translated with commentaries by Katsuki Sekida and edited and introduced by A. V. Grimstone, p. 31. 

7.  This is quoted from the above edition of the Mumonkan, Case 23, p. 81. This story appears as well in the Sung version (the Hui-sin edition) of the Platform Sutra.  The questioner’s Chinese name is Hui-ming.

Holy Gibberish

 

     The business of an artist centers on the construction of meaningful patterns of words, sounds, forms, or movement, yet the creator is often acutely aware that the object produced falls short of the initial vision.  The same gap is unlikely to be experienced by authors of texts meant to convey less subtle information such as warehouse data or scientific research.   For such purposes language seems wholly adequate, while, on the other end of the spectrum, ordinary verbal usages fail the mind that ventures to plumb beyond the horizon.  Words encounter their acid test in Ultimate Reality.  What name can the ineffable bear?

     Various spiritual techniques have sought to transcend the limits of words, some, such as Hatha Yoga, largely non-verbal, others like the koan practice of Rinzai Zen, using language to subvert itself.  Often people seeking illumination have used nonsense syllables, vocables with no conventional meaning, to indicate or to evoke insight beyond the bonds of ordinary speech. 

     The mystical significance of gibberish is usually distinguishable from its artistic use in such manifestations as Dadaist sound poetry, the zaum of the Russian Futurists, or the work of those who produce asemic writing (an abstract form using no familiar characters).  Though many writers entertain spiritual as well as aesthetic pretensions their work is usually classed among their fellow avant-gardists rather than among the practices labelled religious. 

     Likewise excluded here are purely musical uses of nonsense vocables such as the scat singing of jazz vocalists, Celtic “lilting,” Jewish Nigun, Sami joik or luohti, the chanting of tabla bols in Indian music, and the familiar use of nonsense in children’s rhymes, folksong, doo wop, and hip hop.  [1] 

    I find no clearly demarcated borderline, though, between religious and magical gibberish, as both involve supernatural claims.  In each case the individual expects to use a series of unintelligible vocables to derive some benefit from the unseen powers.  What seems to the believer a sublime spiritual activity might strike subscribers to other belief systems as utter superstition, while the skeptical observer would convict all the believers alike of credulity. 

     All such practices have a good deal in common.  Both priest and magician employ what might be called the principle of Mumbo Jumbo [2], the notion that mysteries are likely to be associated with unintelligible speech.  This is evident in the world-wide belief in the efficacy of magico-religious formulae such as spells.  The best known such expression in the Western tradition is probably abracadabra which dates from Roman times when it was used in medical treatments [3] though today it is more common in cartoons and stage shows. Hocus pocus and alakazam, though formed of sounds reminiscent of Latin and Arabic respectively, are both latecomers, lacking the pedigree of having once been used for conjuring. 

     In religion proper, the use of mysterious words to seal a contract with the supernatural is probably as old as language.  Many Roman Catholics felt that the mass lost a good deal of its impact if not its efficacy when vernacular was substituted for Latin, while Jewish and Hindu congregants may well yet hear ceremonies in words they do not understand.  A middle-class American sitting in temple or in a mandir may share more than is immediately apparent with the purchaser of a useful spell from the local magic-worker in the Nigerian bush.  Like the elaborate directions such a shaman might insist must be precisely fulfilled, or like the dials and blinking lights on a quack medical device, the very inscrutability of the sounds seems to their users a guarantee of their value.  Such magic phrases in antiquity sometimes included the deeper mystery of “charaktêres,” signs with no associated sound or significance.

     One group of magical formulae in ancient times was called “Ephesian words,” said by Pausanias to be written on the cult image at the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus.  These phrases were employed for a variety of purposes.  Among the attested uses are to guarantee athletic victory, to bless a marriage, and to avert demons. The fire meant to burn Croesus was drenched after the king, it was said, pronounced an Ephesian spell.  [4]  Other similar charms were called voces magicae by the Romans.   Another label was “barbarous names,” due to untranslated magic formulae being imported from other languages, Egyptian, Persian and Hebrew.  Such terms were widely used by the Neo-Platonists.  Iamblichus explains that such unintelligible foreign terms are preferable in controlling certain divine powers. [5]  These texts and their names were revived by Renaissance practitioners of magic such as the author of the Ars Goetia, compiled in  the mid seventeenth century which was in turn used by later occultists such as Aleister Crowley who notes that such phrases should remain untranslated to retain their purity and power as they “are very sonorous” when pronounced in “a certain magical voice.” [6]

     The Hindu use of mantras such as “Om” depends upon the sound’s lacking any denotation.  [7]  It is thus even more empty of meaning (and thus to some potentially full) than the Zen “Mu” which retains traces of signification, though only of negation.    

     Holy gibberish is generated ever anew in some Native American cultures (Dakota, Blackfoot, and Native American Church peyote songs, among others), but perhaps its most spectacular contemporary expression is among Pentecostalists who practice speaking in tongues.  Though speaking in tongues has sporadically appeared among other sects in the past including fifteenth century Moravians, seventeenth century Camisard Huguenots and Quakers, and nineteenth century Mormons, those most identified with the practice today are fundamentalist Christians such as those in the Assemblies of God, the Church of God, Foursquare churches, Apostolic churches, and Vineyard churches.

     The scriptural warrant for this activity is the day of Pentecost when “there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them.  And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.” In this incident it is clear that the Christians are thought to be miraculously able to proselytize in all languages.  In some Biblical references speaking in tongues seems to be simply a spiritual gift that descends on some believers requiring no interpretation, while in others it refers to the ability to communicate in any earthly tongue, or to prophesy, or to possess esoteric knowledge of a divine language used by god or by angels. [8]

     A number of individuals have in fact composed secret languages.  Though others have invented languages meant for purely practical ends such as Esperanto and Interlingua, some have constructed languages that they supposed would enable communication with god.   Feeling, surely, that neither German nor Latin was quite up to the task of supporting her meditations, Hildegarde of Bingen devised a phonetic alphabet to embody her “lingua ignota,” used, as far as is known, by herself alone.  Anticipating her death, her friend Womarus asked elegiacally, "where, then, the voice of the unheard melody? And the voice of the unheard language?" [9] 

     Apart from Hildegarde, perhaps the most significant language constructor in the European religious tradition was John Dee, the Elizabethan scholar, scientist, and occultist widely thought to be Shakespeare’s model for the character of Prospero, who developed what he called “Angelic” language but which was later labeled “Enochian.”  Dee also called his language “Adamic” because, according to his angels, it was spoken until the confusion of tongues after Babel.  Beginning in 1583 Dee with the aid of a medium recorded first a new alphabet and then a series of seven-by-seven tables as well as poems (for some of which he provided translations) in this angelic speech. His work is celebrated today by the Theosophical Society and other esotericists, though a recent student of his system maintains that much of what he produced was meaningless, mere random syllables. [10] 

     Other constructed languages with spiritual aims include Balaibalan, devised by Sufis in the Ottoman Empire, Damin used by a group of Australian aborigines of the Lardil and Yangkaal groups, and the Medefaidrin invented by an Ibibio congregation in Nigeria during the nineteen-thirties who came into conflict with the government when they sought to use the language for their children’s school.

          Each of these uses of holy gibberish begins from the assumption that ordinary language is inadequate, that the words used in daily discourse cannot bear the weight, the infinite significance of the divine.  Yet unintelligible utterances can do no more than gesture in the direction of the numinous godhead.  Intimating something beyond and confessing that what one has seen one cannot tell.   Strained to the breaking point, words fracture and fail, yet in this broken state, they preserve the passionate desire of the individual to establish contact with the macrocosm.  If, in the via negativa, god is that which we do not know, perhaps his most eloquent liturgy must be likewise incomprehensible.

 

  

1.  Among modern musical ensembles that have used constructed languages of their own invention are Magma in France and Sigur Rós in Iceland. 

2.  The term, which came to mean incomprehensible language, as I here use it, originally signified a divine being, his sculptural representation, or his impersonation by a person in masquerade.  Mungo Parks introduced the term to English in Travels in the Interior of Africa (1795).

3.   In the Liber Medicinalis of Serenus Sammonicus where it is presented in a “reduction pattern” with one less letter per line, forming a triangle suitable for inscribing in amulets.  The phrase is clearly based on the opening letters of the alphabet.

4.  See Chester C. McCown, “The Ephesia Grammata in Popular Belief,” TAPA 54 (1923).

5.  See Iamblichus Theurgia, or the Egyptian Mysteries I, 7.  The concept of barbarous names appears as well in the Chaldean Oracles.

6.  Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice, Ch. IX.

7.  The syllable also occurs in Buddhist, Jain, and Sikh texts. 

Reading John Ashbery (On “For John Clare”)

  

“For John Clare” follows the essay. 

 

     No one, I have been told, before the twentieth century complained that poetry was incomprehensible [1], yet, in spite of the miniature renaissance in America of community-based readings and the laureateship of Bob Dylan, the art is commonly dismissed as obscure and for most not worth the trouble, even among otherwise educated individuals.  Poetry’s prestige, once immense and universally acknowledged, has diminished not through attacks, but through neglect.

     In ancient times, of course (and among unlettered people yet) poetry was consumed by everyone and, if well done, found to be digestible by all.  Song lyrics remain beloved by mass audiences everywhere, and advertising copy is filled with the devices of poetry.  Yet since the Romantics, poets and artists have been associated with eccentricity, political radicalism, and counter-cultural values and have increasingly eschewed a mass audience.  In the twenty-first century poetry has been abandoned largely to the university mandarins and a tiny handful of lay aficionados.    

     Many common readers think of poetry as a sort of puzzle.  The considerable overvaluation of theme, especially in pedagogical situations, is in part to blame.  “What,” a teacher will ask, “is the poet trying to say?”  In a good many poems, I would consider theme, the implications of a text about the reader’s lived experience, to be among the less interesting of the avenues of approach.  A poem’s center is as likely to be in its sound or the formal play of its images as in its “meaning.”  If a paraphrase will adequately embody its significance, the poem itself is then superfluous. 

     Yet still, readers persist in objecting to the unintelligibility of modern poetry, and the foremost example for many is John Ashbery.  Whether in praise or blame, such comments have become a commonplace, almost a required, initial observation of his work since Ashbery’s career was launched by his selection for the Yale Younger Poets Series in 1956.  The judge, W. H.  Auden, had initially failed to find a worthy manuscript among those short-listed and specifically requested Ashbery’s manuscript which had been previously rejected by the in-house editors. [2]  Having crowned Ashbery with laurel, Auden in his introduction seemed oddly ambivalent about his own choice, lamenting the loss of a shared culture and the substitution of idiosyncratic individual vision like that of his selection.  Today the Yale Press’s own publicity cheerfully notes that soon after the book appeared “selecting judge W. H. Auden famously confessed that he didn’t understand a word of it.”   

     The characterization of Ashbery’s work as obscurantist, echoed by Donald Hall and other early reviewers, has become a cliché.  Even Richard Kostelanetz, whose own works have elicited some puzzled reactions, declared, “John Ashbery's poetry is extremely difficult, if not often impenetrable.” [3]  While theme is often subordinated in Ashbery’s work to other elements, just as in the case of Ashbery’s  influence, Wallace Stevens, the texts quite often make perfectly good sense in spite of all the critics. [4]  My intention here is simple, to follow Ashbery through a single poem, taking him at his word, though indirections may fall on every side.  That bare paraphrase may seem flat-footed is no disadvantage since the whole point is to show a poem’s thought process as coherent when read as direct utterance.

     An explication of “To John Clare” is particularly useful as that prose poem defines Ashbery’s poetic process almost explicitly.  Though it lacks the sensual pleasure of the density of palpable images with which he commonly strews his lines, the thematic point is all the more effective for its abstractness.

     The dedication to John Clare marks the piece as a poem about poetry, specifically recalling the earlier poet’s concrete detail illuminated with a visionary glow.  Ashbery imitates not specific phrases of the “Northamptonshire Peasant Poet” but rather his angle of approach.  For each a carefully delineated refraction of reality, a very particular slant, can make any sight an entry point to sublimity.  In addition, Ashbery reminds the reader with this dedication that he, though identified as a “New York poet,” has a distinctly pastoral strain running through the body of his work. [5]  Toward the end of his life, Ashbery affirmed Clare’s significance for him, writing that “the effect of Clare’s poetry, on me at least, is always the same—that of re-inserting me in my present, of re-establishing ‘now’.” [6]

     What it means exactly to speak of re-establishing “now” is the subject of “For John Clare.”   The poem is a narrative of consciousness, the story how of a thought, any thought, arises from the data of perception.  For Ashbery the information delivered by the senses must be linked, though the mediation might tortuous and elusive, with the phenomenal world.  The entire poem might be considered a response to the provocative hyper-skeptical propositions of Gorgias, who argued that nothing can be shown to exist; second, that if anything did exist, it could not be known by people; and third, that if anything were known to a person, it could not be communicated to anyone else.  Ashbery struggles through artful dancing and weaving to escape this nihilistic pit. 

     What do we see when we gaze upon the world?  The first verse paragraph opens with the paradoxically qualified adjective “kind of empty” but immediately clarifies that the description is of appearances and not essences: “in the way it sees everything.”  Yet there is no subject or rather the entire event occurs in the subjective, enacted only within the imagination of the persona and thus on the page, and then reflected in the reader’s mind.  For the persona, and thus for the poem, it is the earth itself, the entire planet that is seeing things (as it had already got to its feet and saluted the sky).  The lines are dizzying, even outlandish, perhaps, some might say surreal, but susceptible nonetheless to understanding.

     To say “the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky” suggests some grand synthesis, the sense of a cosmic order not always discernable, a resolution of high and low, of all dualities, marked by the esprit of a salute.  Such insights are not always accessible; thus, with slightly awkward syntax recalling Gertrude Stein, insight is modest: “more of a success at it this time than most others it is.” 

     The speaker is caught inside subjectivity; in fact, the sky is always only “in the back of someone's mind.”  And it differs in each, so “there is no telling how many there are.”  Yet these various visions, these multiple versions of reality, can be so pleasing, they “grace” everything sufficiently to distract the individual from the routine life pleasures, “to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling.”  “Like a smooth switch back” the mind returns to earlier glimpses of the coherence of things, “to what was aired in their previous conniption fit.”  It seems a thoroughly post-Modern decentered experience, presented not as an alarming chaos but as something one might enjoy like a carnival ride the ticket-holder does not expect to go anywhere in the end.  

     The remainder of this first section of the poem details how elusive reality is, how it vanishes off into several obscure directions.  To begin with, no one can take it all in: “there is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it.”  The immensity of detail is overwhelming and defies analysis: “it never feels new, never any different.”  What impressions the observer may form will decay in time: “certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember?”  Then there is the complication of the relation of one’s own perception with all those other consciousnesses such as “that couple is stopping to look in that window over there.”  Any mental construct, any individual take on the scene, even a photograph, is misleading.  The inadequacy of words closes this section with a confession of language’s shortcoming: “very little gets said.”

     The second verse paragraph asks with poignant awkwardness for a more stable connection between the ego and the things perceived, one with “room for more things,” and a broader application, a “spreading out, like.”  The speaker reveals the inadequacy of his present partial vision, yearning for spontaneous revelation, if only things “came to you at once,” or at least with some reciprocal desire, “then meeting them halfway would be so much easier.”  Lacking a universalizing vision, the separate concrete details of existence are either unnoticed (“we perceive them if at all”) or irrelevant (“meant to be put aside”).  Thus the clues they offer are ignored (“you can do nothing with them”) no matter your own eagerness (“not even offer to pay”). 

     The dialectic between vision and blindness, knowing and not-knowing, continues with the third section.  Having stated the epistemological problem of what to make of the apparent spectacle of the world and having fully detailed both the problems inherent in any answer and the promise of the rewards of an enlightened mind, Ashbery succeeds in providing, if no resolution, at least a means of keeping the potential of such a vision alive.  Perhaps, he suggests, we are wiser than we think: “It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction.”  The yearning persists for “the whole scene,” “the music all present,” producing a kind of synaesthetic transport, “as though you could see each note as well as hear it.” 

     But this is unrealized at present.  Its harbinger is nothing more than “an uneasiness in things just now.”  This impression, however, is strong: “it's keen, it makes you fall over.”  All the dramatic action of changing weather and rushing seasons without apparent meaning inspires a further pathetic fallacy: “After all it's their time too -- nothing says they aren't to make something of it.”  He lapses again into the vernacular that in this poem signifies excitement in Jenny Wren’s frustrated attempts at communication. [7]  The small bird with its senseless twittering parodies attempts toward articulation and suggests that meaningful discourse may indeed be impossible.  Though the bird strives fruitlessly to be understood, “others” do not even try, since even an attempt would surely prove “the first step of the terrible journey,” ending in “utter confusion and hopelessness,” “east of the sun and west of the moon.” [8]

     The phrase points to another of the poem’s ambiguities.  In the Norwegian fairy tale of this title the wicked stepmother’s castle is located “east of the Sun and west of the Moon.”  There the prince is confined, having been enchanted in the form of a beast, a fitting analogue for the person confined in inexpressible subjectivity.  The folk story’s happy ending in which the prince is rescued by his beloved surely signifies the possibility of gaining that blissful wholeness that remains just out of grasp throughout Ashbery’s poem, but for the poet and reader liberation is rarely as complete as for the prince.  The individual must be satisfied to gain purchase on at least one small corner of the truth allowing a fingerhold on the grand holistic spectacle (“the whole history of probabilities”) that signifies nothing less than everything at once.    

     The concluding image lovely: “the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.”  By evoking a shapely and slender canvas gently bellying out with breeze, Ashbery suggests again the enigmatic grace of things as they are and the sense that one’s life experience is revelatory and beautiful, though always a matter of “probabilities” and manifested only on the constantly mutating cinema screen of time. 

     If “For John Clare” implies that truth is inaccessible, that language is inadequate, and that communication is foredoomed, the poem maintains that making a poem nonetheless, writer and reader alike may glimpse sparks of the scintillating, almost numinous, light cast by the will-of-the-wisp of the possibility of seeing everything at once.  More cool and oblique even than Wallace Stevens, Ashbery was still pursuing the “supreme fiction” that Stevens had sought in song.  If his poem seems to resist its readers, it is because the poem enacts with the fragmented and idiosyncratic imagery of the twentieth century a story in many ways similar to that of the Ox-Herding pictures of Zen in which the bull of reality, while elusive, may be captured, though he vanishes ultimately for the enlightened mind. [8]  Readers frustrated by Ashbery’s poems would be likely to have little patience for koans as well.

     Many of the poet’s works might be clarified when viewed as attempts to burst beyond the limits of the individual consciousness.  Others seem like the roisterer’s caroling or the Jenny Wren’s song, a melody to pass the time in the anteroom of vision, playing the game of perception as an entertainment.  Were the final enlightenment to arrive, a blank page would suffice.  Short of such a thought-ending revelation, what remains is the record of the incomplete struggle to know, pushing always against the mind’s limits, unbowed, feeling the way in all-but-complete darkness.   

         

  

1.  This is a considerable exaggeration.  Self-consciously hermetic styles had been cultivated by the practitioners of trobar clus and by Gongora and his followers as well as by the Symbolists, Italian Hermeticists, and a variety of other Modernist and post-Modernist schools.  Some writers such as Ted Kooser and Billy Collins have found great success bucking the trend.

 

2.  Ashbery had written his senior thesis at Harvard on Auden.  According to Jesse Zuba, Yale’s in-house editors reacted with “confusion” and “outrage.”  See "’Everything Has a Schedule’: John Ashbery's ‘Some Trees’ and the Notion of Career,” Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 59, No. 2 (summer 2013), pp. 260-282.

 

3.  Richard Kostelanetz, “How to Be a Difficult Poet,” New York Times, May 23, 1976.

 

4.  Ashbery's commented that his poems are "accessible if anybody cares to access them." 2005 NPR interview https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4542617.  On another site a critic maintains with statistical evidence that Ashbery’s poems are, in fact, syntactically “simpler” than Ted Kooser’s!  See http://mikechasar.blogspot.com/2010/10/this-just-in-john-ashbery-more.html. 

 

5.  Apart from his youth on a farm (at least when he was not away at prep school), Ashbery’s pastoral interest is evident in titles such as “Eclogue” and “A Pastoral” in Some Trees and “Farm I” and “Farm II” in Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.  Of course, Classical and Renaissance pastoralism were always urban phenomena. 

 

6.  Ashbery, Other Traditions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).

 

7.  Some readers find a reference here to the character in Our Mutual Friend.  The well-known energetic song and rapid movement of the small bird seem to me sufficient basis for the figure.  A bird is, of course, one of the most common metaphors for a poet. 

 

8.  First recorded in the Mahā Gopālaka Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 33) dating from perhaps two thousand years ago.  Perhaps best-known is the twelfth century Chinese version by Kuòān Shīyuǎn.

 

 

 

   

 

For John Clare

 

     Kind of empty in the way it sees everything, the earth gets to its feet and salutes the sky. More of a success at it this time than most others it is. The feeling that the sky might be in the back of someone's

mind. Then here is no telling how many there are. They grace everything--bush and tree--to take the roisterer's mind off his caroling--so it's like a smooth switch back. To what was aired in their previous conniption fit. There is so much to be seen everywhere that it's like not getting used to it, only there is so much it never feels new, never any different. You are standing looking at that building and you cannot take it all in, certain details are already hazy and the mind boggles. What will it all be like in five years' time when you try to remember? Will there have been boards in between the grass part and the edge of the street? As long as that couple is stopping to look in that window over there we cannot go. We feel like they have to tell us we can, but they never look our way and they are already gone, gone far into the future--the night of time. If we could look at a photograph of it and say there they are, they never really stopped but there they are. There is so much to be said, and on the surface of it very little gets said.

       

     There ought to be room for more things, for a spreading out, like.  Being immersed in the details of rock and field and slope --letting them come to you for once, and then meeting them halfway would be so much easier--if they took an ingenuous pride in being in one's blood.  Alas, we perceive them if at all as those things that were meant to be put aside-- costumes of the supporting actors or voice trilling at the end of a narrow enclosed street. You can do nothing with them. Not even offer to pay.

        

    It is possible that finally, like coming to the end of a long, barely perceptible rise, there is mutual cohesion and interaction.  The whole scene is fixed in your mind, the music all present, as though you

 could see each note as well as hear it. I say this because there is an uneasiness in things just now. Waiting for something to be over before wind--and yet it's keen, it makes you fall over. Clabbered sky.

Seasons that pass with a rush. After all it's their time too--nothing says they aren't to make something of it.  As for Jenny Wren, she cares, hopping about on her little twig like she was tryin' to tell us somethin', but that's just it, she couldn't even if she wanted to--dumb bird. But the others--and they in some way

must know too--it would never occur to them to want to, even if they could take the first step of the terrible journey toward feeling somebody should act, that ends in utter confusion and hopelessness, east of the sun and west of the moon. So their comment is: "No comment."  Meanwhile the whole history of probabilities is coming to life, starting in the upper left-hand corner, like a sail.

Skipping over the Surface of Things

 

     Years ago I noticed the tendency among certain of the young to watch television in a new way, turning from one channel to the next without lingering long on any.  To me even a second-rate show seemed preferable to wandering always, hoping that the next option might offer that appeal so elusive that it never quite arrives.  The phenomenon was recorded in Springsteen’s "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)," though the fifty-seven channels soon became hundreds on cable and satellite, and then, through online devices, all but unlimited.  Originally such skimming over the surface of myriad possibilities was confined to the time one sat down in front of the screen seeking entertainment, but, with the introduction of smartphones – the term was first used in 1995 but such devices did not become commonplace until Apple’s iPhone in 2007 – people could scan one thing after another anywhere and at any time.  And they do, even while shopping or sitting with friends or in a toilet stall.   In a New York subway car, almost every eye gazes into a small hand-held device.  In a crowded elevator, instead of the conventional prim stance (facing the door, looking slightly down, hands clasped in front) many are now roving mentally around the virtual universe held in the palm of the hand. 

     This has surely amounted to an alteration of consciousness.  On the watch for food sources and for possible danger, animals, predators and prey alike, must be constantly attentive and observant.  In prehistoric times, people, like other animals, walked the woods always alert to their surroundings in the interest of survival.  Everyone in the community contributed to hunting and gathering and mutual defense.  Over time with the division of labor, people learned to focus on specific tasks which for a very few high-status individuals were accomplished entirely in the head: speculation, reading, philosophy, and science resulted, with the consequence that the sharp generalized vigilance that had served so well for millennia eroded.  Working from home in the pandemic has made dramatically clear what we already knew: that today a good many workers, and many of the most highly paid among them, do nothing productive in the old sense, but simply manipulate symbols on computer screens.  Instead of seeking significant information in the world immediately surrounding them, people now perform as small cogs in an immense cooperative machinery, contributing to production in a way that is meaningless in isolation.

     Whereas our ancestors walked daily absorbed in their immediate surroundings, reading the immediate data of earth and sky and smells and sounds, people may prosper today without ever knowing the phase of the moon or a single edible plant.  The specialization of work roles diminished the range of human consciousness in many ways, but it also enabled its fabulous expansion in others. When, millennia ago, aristocrats and intellectuals were freed from the necessity of vigilance that had been inescapable in the prehistoric era.  Technology, science, and art developed prodigiously to the extent that, many have ample free time to contemplate what they will.  On billions of Smartphones people choose to occupy their minds and emotions with the rich variety of possibilities of the tiny screen.  While that is all very well and understandable, entertainment being a latter of taste, it remains to inquire about users who are not listening to music or writing letters or performing other specific tasks with their devices, but merely flipping.

     The phenomenon suggests that it not the content that keeps people spellbound, but rather the medium.  I once read, in Scientific American I believe, a study tracing the appeal of the television screen which even to infants draws human attention, to the instinct to focus on any element of the environment which is moving or changing.  Unlike the obvious value of such awareness for early humans, the attractiveness of the scintillating screen is desirable only for advertisers seeking to increase sales. 

     This skipping attention is quite unlike the purposeful cognitive activity involved in problem-solving or the experience of art; it is the very opposite of the solid and steady concentration of meditation.  To me this shallow skipping consciousness is similar to addiction.  Seeking the distinctly human pleasure of playing with the mind, the individual never quite finds it, but is sufficiently motivated only to continue the endless and always unsatisfied quest.  The same derangement of behavior is evident in drug users and the sexually obsessed, not to mention those with a compulsive greed for food or money or power.  In each of these cases the soul  like a hungry ghost grabs after satisfaction but finds only deeper frustration.

    Yet might one find as well in this digital wandering something like the non-attachment in which the Buddha glimpsed the possibility of freedom?  There is no reason that one might not similarly skip across the surface of life, watching each moment with mild but sustained interest as if from a slow river steamer proceeding up the Amazon.  Would the Sixth Patriarch find any reason to favor more functional cognitive churning?   Perhaps the very deepest and most finely pointed concentration, the sort one hears is available to skilled meditators, is identical to the shallowest, and the drifting consciousness is an example of the flow of the Dao.    

Planetary Motions

This post is a draft of the introductory essay to Planetary Motions, a collection of new poems whose publication (from Giant Steps) is scheduled for June.



The planets were so-called because the name signified in Greek “wanderers,” and Mars and Venus, unlike the fixed stars, seemed to ramble about aimless in the heavens. From a later heliocentric perspective, however, the movements of these heavenly bodies appear elegant and predictable. I can conceive a day that scientists might announce that Venus and the rest were vagabonding after all and the regularities the astronomers had reported were simply mirror images reflecting their own minds in their more rational, if operatically grand, moments.

My own course pretends to little design. The chaos theorists have shown, however, that systems lurk even in what is apparently arbitrary, and, of course, all patterns break up when viewed from a different angle or a slightly altered consciousness. How do I happen to dwell in this town? I simply find myself here. Why do I believe as I do? Because of everything that has come before. Course of study, course of life make little difference in the great tidal movements of mind which are likely in the end to resemble the slow unfolding of a tree’s shape over decades, the distribution of stars in the sky, or the histories of slugs and snails told in silvery mucus.

The boldest claim I would make for the driftings of the consciousness I know best is similar to that made by Marcus Aurelius for what he saw before him on the table: “some splits appear in the crust of baking bread, and these have nothing to do with the baker’s plan, yet these have always a certain rightness.” A rightness like that of the shore-marks of the sea’s waves, or the undulations wrought in the Sahara’s sands by wind, or the swirls and stripes on my tabby’s back.

These things, though, are untouched by intention, so a work of art represents always its object, not only transformed by the conventions of human senses and brains, but then further shaped by desire, fear, and vision. Poetic events, like those observed on the quantum level, come into existence only when observed.

Everything is a matter of aesthetics in the end. Ethics requires defining what sort of a person one would find it becoming to be. Viciousness is quite simply ugly. My ideologies resemble my home’s interior decoration though the former are more easily portable. Each person constructs a nest of what seems right and judges others for their taste rather than their ratiocination, and this procedure is quite in order for we know what we like and must settle for that as a human sort of Truth. Poems and other forms of art are naked about this. As Sidney said, the “Poet, he nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth.” A few hundred years later, Keats called a similar willingness to suspend “any irritable reaching after fact and reason” Negative Capability. A millennium and a half earlier another writer with medical training, Sextus Empiricus, had recommended ἐποχή, withholding judgement on all issues, as the likeliest path to serenity.

Lacking a destination might seem to some to entail lacking a purpose, yet, though miles behind, I would like to think that I follow the footsteps of Fa Yen who, when he declared that he was on a pilgrimage without a destination, wandering without goal, was assured by master Kuei Ch'in that such undirected movement was exactly right whereupon Fa Yen attained enlightenment. I can promise no such reward, only a few snapshots of consciousness reflecting glints of shattered truth which I wave in the dark like a blessedly naïve child with a sparkler the bright lights of which provide a sort of promise in spite of their evanescence. Looking then down, a crystal ball is surely available in the reflections and refractions of every puddle in the gutter!






This story I paraphrase is case 20 of the Cóngróng lù, or Book of Equanimity by Wansong Xingxiu, in Japanese called the Shōyōroku.

Tristan Tzara, Poet of Manifestos

Numbers in parentheses refer to Tzara’s manifestos listed just following the essay. I used Seven Dada Manifestos and Lampisteries translated by Barbara Wright from Riverrun Press, New York to avoid quoting in French and including translations. The originals are readily available.
Numbers in brackets indicate endnotes.


Tristan Tzara pioneered the development of the manifesto as a literary form, [1] a movement across movements that persisted throughout the twentieth century and, in a quieter form, into the present. To me his poetry and drama generally work best in performance. While on the printed page the appeal of much of his work is less apparent, his manifestos retain their lively and likable energy.

The invention of this new genre, as well as the reinvention of performance poetry, was, perhaps, natural given Dada’s profound and polemical skepticism. For Tzara, Arp, and others a fiercely radical questioning approaches nihilism like an asymptote, yet their political, aesthetic, and spiritual idealism remains always a flicker, peyrceptible to the discerning reader. In the realms of conceptual art, chance, and the privileged valuation of the ephemeral, Tzara’s early twentieth century pronouncements are groundbreaking.

To be sure, Tzara could not have been clearer about his manifestos being anti-manifestos. In his seminal “Dada Manifesto” he notes the paradox and readily admits his self-contradiction: “I am writing a manifesto and there is nothing I want, and yet I’m saying certain things, and in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles.” He later writes under the guise of Monsieur AA, the Antiphilosopher. Dada, he says, “doubts everything.” “Everything we look at,” he insists, “is false.” “We don’t accept any theories.” Dada is “a word that throws up ideas so they can be shot down.” (2)

Playing up the destructive potential of his position in dramatic form, he proclaims ”there is great negative, destructive work to be done.” Dada is “like a raging wind that rips up the clothes of clouds and prayers, we are preparing for the great spectacle of disaster, conflagration, and decomposition.” (2) Anticipating Jimi Hendrix, he calls for musicians to smash their instruments on stage. (3)[2] “Every act,” according to him, “is a cerebral revolver shot.” (6)

If nothing whatever can be known, making everyone an "idiot,” as Tzara calls himself and his readers alike (5), what then? If the poet is a mere “fart in a steam engine,” (7) what more can be said? Avoiding as Gorgias had done millennia before, the desolate and boring aporia that might result from a conviction that Truth is altogether inaccessible, Tzara turns to his own subjectivity. This is essential because, “a work of art is never beautiful, by decree, objectively, for everyone.” (3) Since every consciousness is unique, the individual must shed “the pursuit of I worship you.” (4) Authority, including Tzara’s authority, is illusory. Thus the manifesto reader must not be “led astray by Aaism,” (4) that is to say, by the very document he is reading. Tzara rejects the very possibility of discursive thought. Some explain, he says, while others learn, but both deceive themselves. Abolish both the teacher and the learner and you have dada. (7) He calls, in fact, for “NO MORE WORDS,” though he cannot avoid using words as he does so. (5)

Only by entering into his own mind can the poet make progress: “With the words I put down on paper I enter, solemnly, into myself” (6) Tzara refers to this inward turning as “selfkleptomania.” (7) To him he is simply making explicit what is inevitable in any case. As he says, one may try to write a manifesto, but “it’s your autobiography that you’re hatching under the belly of the flowering cerebellum.” (7)

The dominant result of this introspection is an extraordinary ebullience, irrational exuberance and high spirits arising from some unquestioned, unquestionable base in a pyrotechnic display of excited language. Delightful little verbal displays pop off here and there. He maintains, for example that art is to be identified not only with Dada, but equally with plesiosaurus or handkerchief. (3) He renews the reader’s subscription to “the celluloid love that creaks/ like metal gates” (4) The phrase “for the saxophone wears like a rose the assassination of the visceral car driver” occurs in the middle of a passage as scintillating and fast-moving as the world of subatomic particles. That passage ends “thus drummed the maize, the alarm and pellagra where the matches grow.” (6) At times, Tzara’s manifestos are so rich in this pure poetry that one feels as though one is eating bonbons. “Dada is a dog – a compass –the lining of the stomach – neither new nor a nude Japanese girl – a gasometer of jangled feelings.” (7) And so it goes, infused with wild unpredictable imagination and passionate enthusiasm.

In the end, “Dada is our intensity.” Spectacle rules: “We are circus ringmasters.” “It’s still shit, but from now on we want to shit in different colors” (6) the cosmos then becomes a marvel, “the spermatozoon ballet” (4), at which one can only look on in wonder.

Yet, Tzara sounds a word of warning. Significance is lurking in the shadows. “While we put on a show of being facile, we are actually seeking for the secret essence of things.” (1) Tzara’s pseudonym on top of a pseudonym for several of his manifestos is M. Antipyrine, a name suggesting a healing nostrum. The psycho-aesthetic-spiritual solution suggested by Tzara (and other Dada artists) has much in common with Zen Buddhism. [3]

Tzara’s pseudonym with its associations with the French word triste draws attention to the universal suffering that motivates the Buddhist search for enlightenment. [4] He repeats the line “You’re all going to die,” (7) as if this fact poses the essential problem of life. The solution to this problem is in both cases experiential rather than logical. Tzara insists that “logic is always false,” (2) a contention that, were it not so baldly stated, could be a portion of a Zen sutra. He speaks nearly explicitly about enlightenment: “We really know what we are talking about, because we have experienced the trembling and the awakening.” (7) Dada arises not from intellection but from living: Dada, Tzara says, is “the roar of contorted pains, the interweaving of contraries and of all contradictions, freaks, and irrelevancies: LIFE.”(3) The twentieth century artist recalls Nagarjuna and Advaitist Vedanta when he proclaims that dualities are a fraud, specifying “order=disorder; ego=non-ego; affirmation=negation.” (2) [5]

Finally, and most dramatically, Tzara agrees with the sages that we are really liberated all along, though unconscious of the fact. Nothing really changes with sublime knowledge. One returns at last to the point one had occupied all along. The “three laws” of God are “eating, making love, and shitting.” (6) The story is told of Baizhang Huaihai among others that, when asked how he pursued enlightenment, replied “When hungry, I eat; when tired, sleep.” Yet somehow, in both cases, everything is transfigured.


1. Monsieur Antipyrine’s Manifesto 1916
2. Dada Manifesto 1918
3. Unpretentious Proclamation 1919
4. Manifesto of Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher
5. Tristan Tzara
6. Monsieur AA the Antiphilosopher Sends Us this Manifesto
7. Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love


Endnotes

1. The word manifesto had earlier been used for many political declarations such as Bolivar’s “Cartagena Manifesto,” Peel’s “Tamworth Manifesto,” and, most notably, Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century several anarchist manifestos appeared. Very likely the move from the social realm to the aesthetic was facilitated by the military analogy suggested by the term avant-garde.

2. Hendrix did this at Monterey in 1967, but he had been preceded by Jerry Lee Lewis destroying pianos in the 1950s as wel l as by Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck and others. In the realm of avant-garde art, Nam June Paik smashed a violin in 1962 as part of his "One for Violin Solo" and the gesture had become enough of a convention that a Destruction in Art Symposium was held in London in 1966 which involved a number of “destruction events.” Two years later a similar event was held in New York City. Oddly, Townshend had studied with Gustav Metzger who was the central figure in the London symposium.

3. I am hardly the first to note the similarities. See, for instance, Won Ko’s Buddhist Elements in Dada: A Comparison of Tristan Tzara, Takahashi Shinkichi and Their Fellow Poets.

4. In fact the name Tristan is Celtic meaning noise, and is not derived from the Latin tristis, though the association is prominent in Tristan and Iseult as well as with Tzara, who, according to Paul Cernat’s Avangarda românească și complexul periferiei: primul val, said that it was meant to recall the French phrase “triste âne tzara” ("sad donkey Tzara"). According to Serge Fauchereau's report (also recorded in Cernat), Colomba Voronca recalled Tzara’s explaining it as a play on the Romanian phrase trist în țară, meaning "sad in the country." In 1925 he legally changed his name from Samy Rosenstock to Tristan Tzara.

5. Tzara reinforces the point while incidentally anticipating Derridean deconstruction in section IV of 7.

Biking as a Spiritual Discipline

     I am still biking twenty-five miles a day, taking me about ninety minutes, not counting time spent applying sun screen, and I continue to hope the routine may ward off the Reaper for a while, and allow me along the way to eat rich dinners without assuming an altogether unseemly form. It is rather a lavish expenditure of hours and energy, though, and consumes, I figure, little short of ten per cent of my waking life, an alarming cost for one with little taste for athletics. Wishing to justify the practice on other than physical grounds, I have lately been contemplating the mental and spiritual rewards of this exercise. I like to think that without this more ethereal reinforcement, I may not have been able to keep riding so long.
     Many thoughtful people have found running, jogging, or riding to be a useful time to contemplate concepts, or the order of words in either prose or verse. Scientists and engineers as well as poets find that inspiration may arise in such paradoxical moments when the mind is in one way totally engaged and yet in another altogether unharnessed. The mind can benefit from its removal from the concerns of everyday life. This benefit is functional and incidental and resembles the opportunity afforded by long distance driving, knitting, and similar occupations.
     Yet it is true as well that any such repetitive physical action is, as the Zen abbots knew, a form of meditation and may assist the mind in its approach toward enlightenment. The mandala is of less importance than the focus itself in Tibetan sand painting. Surely the monks could be making images of Donald Duck.
     Even without intention routine tends to empty the mind. I recall when I would be driving my old commute and would suddenly return to immediate conscious awareness after a space of mental wandering without ever losing total prudential driving alertness in one part of my cranium.
     The liberating effect is purely dependent on repetition. There is good reason that devotees repeat formulae and the Sioux chanted their divine scat songs for hours. Surely the field work songs of the old South sustained cotton pickers through long days, and for all one knows, the minds of the home weavers of ore-industrial days may have soared in the most imaginative flights of fancy. The brilliant work and field songs of the old South formed the rich subsoil in which the blues grew. I have always thought the worst job would be on a production line, yet perhaps those laborers, too, could relax into an all-too-familiar routine and feel their minds float free. All conscious recourses to icons, mandalas, St. Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises and all the rest are refinements of the technology of managing human consciousness which, however varied the imagery and assumptions, depend on a fundamentally similar method.
     Those who achieve high levels of athletic performance must certainly be practicing a form of meditation, at the very least a single-minded focus on the task at hand which paradoxically may be experienced as an escape from the physical which under these circumstances continues without conscious attention. Concentration on the physical can vault consciousness beyond muscles and rushing blood. The push of ego can lead to ego’s disappearance.

Notes on Recent Reading 17 (McCarthy, Chang, Snorri)

Venice Observed (McCarthy)

     Mary McCarthy’s book on Venice is clever, erudite, poetic, and alive with aesthetic judgments. Every reader must pay her attention when she begins her book with a series of pans of la Serenissima: Venice left Stendhal “cold,” to Herbert Spencer St. Mark’s was “barbaric” and the Doge’s Palace “dumpy” and “meaningless,” while D. H. Lawrence wrote of the “abhorrent green, slippery city.” Her treatment of painters is lively and entertaining – full of curious details such as the description of a grand life-size banquet scene designed by Sansovino and constructed by a druggist for the amusement of the French Henry III, this in the middle of a treatment of Veronese. Such grand artificiality is her theme, and she does the best job I know of the exploring the strange conundrum of the visitor who seeks a city’s essence in its “old town” which has no current use but to beguile the visitor’s gaze and to make of its populace touts and waiters if not worse.


Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism (Chang Chung-Yuan)

     I am not familiar with any other translation of Shi Daoyuan’s Jǐngdé Chuandenglu (Transmission of the Lamp), a thousand year old record of Zen masters, one of the most important documents of the tradition. The early chapters in which speculative philosophy of the Tiantai and Sanlun schools arising from the work of Nagarjuna seeks ever subtler ways of engaging Ultimate Reality will give any thinker a salutary workout. With this foundation, he is better prepared for the confounding narratives of Mazu Daoyi who valued direct experiential insight and sudden enlightenment over systematic meditative practices, and established a new and distinctly Chinese Buddhism, influential to the present day.
     The book is almost too rich. Who can absorb koan after koan, page after page, each seeking to crack the great nut of the true nature of things? A monk in traditional practice would ponder a single one for weeks. The seeker after Zen on the printed page can do no better than to read and reread and reread again.


Prose Edda (Snorri Sturluson)

     In spite of Wagner’s operas and creditable translation work by William Morris and Auden, and Ursula Dronke’s magisterial though incomplete edition of the Poetic Edda, the Germanic pantheon has suffered from Greco-Roman cultural privilege. The great legacies of the Northland are the sagas written in Iceland that so effectively blend magic and history, hyperbole and understatement, high courage and rank selfishness and the fragments of an encyclopedic mythological system in the Eddas.
     The Prose Edda, which I read in the unambitious Penguin rendering by Jesse Byock, resembles many other primary mythological texts in that it presents little systematic narration. As in Greek and Sanskrit myth, Odin and Thor, Loki and Balder, frost giants and black elves appear in discontinuous incidents or glancing references as often as in connected narratives. The awesome gap between human and divine familiar to followers of Abrahamic religions is absent here. Not only are various orders of being described – Loki, for instance, is neither divine nor human, Baldr is killed, Odin tricked, but, in addition, the whole house of the Aesir face Ragnarok, though the text tells us that beautiful places will remain after the cataclysm. Here is an apocalypse that could coexist with modern physics.
     Those who have attended open poetry readings will find likely the story in which poetry is transmitted with mead made with the body of Kvasir, consumed by Odin, and spit into vats for the use of humanity. Some, however, he happened to expel from his rear: “We call this the bad poets’ portion.”

Notes on Recent Reading 12 [Huxley, Norris, Dōgen]

Crome Yellow [Huxley]

     I should confess at the outset a weakness, for Saki’s Clovis and even -- dare I confess it? -- for Ronald Firbank. In Huxley’s novel, the same aestheticism verging into camp appears in somewhat diluted, digested, and intellectualized form. This roman-à-clef of the scene at Lady Ottiline Morrill’s might be a grandchild of Thomas Love Peacock and a child (on the other side perhaps) of Oscar Wilde.
     The fashions of the advanced thinkers of the time are naturally for the most part altogether absurd, though Mr. Barbecue-Smith’s salable profundities would probably rank as high today on the best-seller list as they did in his own. With becoming self-mockery, the author himself is represented by the ineffectual poet Denis Stone.
     Modern readers are likely to be particularly interested in the utopian schemes of Mr. Scogan. Surely the most quoted passage in the novel is Scogan’s description of a future generation spawned in state incubators, initiating a time when “Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world.”


The Pit [Norris]

     Norris’ novel of the futures markets in Chicago, one of his three part wheat series, is very much au courant in its depiction of the addictive psychology of speculation. The ego-foolery of high finance is reminiscent of Wolfe’s “Masters of the Universe” in Bonfire of the Vanities.
     Apart from the unusual interest in economic forces, though, the novel is quite conventional. Though Laura is, at first, rather flippant and self-absorbed, a bit of a rebel, she ends up as traditional a good wife as one could imagine. And a male with aesthetic interests like Sheldon Corthell can never hope to gain such a love.
  Every now and then Norris deploys a rhetorical flurry on “the pit,” implying people’s helplessness in the face of fate or some such “naturalist” lesson from our “American Zola,” and Curtis Jadwin would like to think his addiction something quite beyond his control, but these notions seem adventitious. The true characters here are motivated just as in the age’s popular stories
     McTeague and The Octopus seemed more absorbing as stories, though The Pit was popular enough when new to have been serialized in the Saturday Evening Post.


Shobogenzo [Dōgen]

     Neither a Japanese scholar nor a practitioner of zazen, I nonetheless fancy that I read Buddhist texts both to ameliorate my Eurocentric education and to pursue enlightenment. If Dōgen is correct that anything less than total commitment is fruitless, my remarks may only, I suppose, mislead, but I stubbornly offer them regardless.
     Dōgen, the thirteenth century Zen master, founded the Soto school, sometimes insulted as “farmer Zen” by Rinzai adherents because of its popularity. Though Shunryu Suzuki taught Soto at the San Francisco Zen Center and reached many more through his Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, many Americans with a literary connection to Buddhism will be attracted to the more dramatic style of Rinzai.
     How to Raise an Ox is a partial translation of Dōgen’s Shobogenzo with a substantial introduction by Francis Dojun Cook. These editorial materials and the selections from Dōgen stress practice, while keeping a clarified eye on the most basic facts: the paramount importance of meditation, the illusory conundrum of ego (here magically solved by the bodhisattva’s pledge to await the enlightenment of all sentient beings before accepting his own).
     Prof. Cook is an academic as well as a Zen adept, so one can only appreciate it if he sounds a bit preachy in his introductory remarks. He does, after all, want to bring us all to nirvana. It is not surprising and a sign of the best intentions if the strain shows just a bit.

Taking Off

My hat’s in the heavens,
my ears start to flap.
Get set for ascent, boys,
I’m not going back.


     Having traveled here and there by air lately, I have a renewed sense of the pleasure of taking off. For some the reassuring return to the ground may be preferable, but I confess that for me simple safety cannot compare to the frisson of that first moment aloft. Much of the romance of aviation has, I fear, faded. The technically gifted have passed on to the more obscure challenges of microcircuitry, and airports, which in my childhood were among the more exciting of destinations, now seek only to emulate shopping malls. The traveler endures the myriad small annoyances of traffic and parking; removing one’s shoes in the security clearance one feels like a displaced person entering a refugee camp, likely at any moment to be sprayed for lice. Airplane food, which could never compete with the linens, the heavy crockery and silver of the old railroad dining cars, ceased any attempt at palatability years ago and has now, for the most part, vanished altogether. Though the quite marvelous ascent of metal monsters is obscured by routine, the liftoff retains for me its magic.
     The whole body is caught up in the sheer physicality of the experience. Like the juvenile erotic sensations of the swing (or their intensified preadolescent amusement park roller coaster versions), like the enervation of exhaustion or the total-body involvement of the athlete, the dancer, the opera singer whose very body vibrates with the tune, the passenger takes flight.
     One need not be a poet to submit to the charm of a metaphor intruding in this phenomenal world. A spring morning can be midwife to new beginnings in realms other than the vegetative, and the blues are all the bluer under overcast skies. Taking off brings one to extraordinary heights and sets one down in a new spot. That very elevation of language which has come to signify artificiality once indicated the ambition, at any rate, to soar.
     This may be associated with the Holy Spirit, the soul’s ascent, the shaman’s astral wandering. According to a recent study the animals painted on palaeolithic cave walls are all airborne. Parmenides, my favorite among the pre-Socratics for riding his thought to its end unafraid, regardless of his neighbors’ notions, imagined himself in a celestial chariot. That divine craftsman Horace declares that, as a poet transformed into a swan complete with “wrinkled legs,” he will soar with “no paltry or commonplace wings.” Ovid and holy Augustine and many others besides figured their inspired perspective in terms of ascent.
     The pseudo-Longinus who in the first Christian century wrote a work of criticism marked more by poetic illumination than pedantic system, called his text “On high things.” Han Shan asks “who can leap the world’s ties/ And sit with me among the white clouds?” And Pegasus flew until recently on the cover of every Poetry magazine from Chicago. Has the sensitive passenger on flight 574 from Atlanta to Newark failed to earn even some small share of participation in this mystery?
Taking off signifies catching the spoor of inspiration, as in the second of the cow-herding pictures of the Zen master Kuoan Shiyuan, “discovering the footprints” of the Truth: “these traces can no more be hidden than one’s nose, pointing skyward.”
     The moment when the fog resolves ahead into the first rough outline of an idea, uncertain and shifting at first, is familiar to each at home in the life of their mind. Surely the most delicious stage of writing for most of us is that initial stage of invention, the rest being craftwork and polishing and all too often drudgework. The mind persists through memory of that moment when the spirit was borne over the waters long after it has returned to rest in the familiar wetlands of quotidian consciousness.
     And that return is inevitable. As with a ball tossed into the air, or the intoxication of opium, as with sleep, sex, life, or a novel by Dickens the end of the flight must come, the essay must close, the last breath exhaled.