What to Read in the First Hours

cool, pleasantly soft gray skies
third day of gentle rains
after long heatwave and sun
not gloomy, rather meditative

I spent my first hour of the day, my quiet getting started sacred reading meditation hour, reading the Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Fascinating, interesting reading. Historical documents, but also insights into thought processes, and poem process. Not everything has to be a finished essay, not everything a finished poem. It inspires me to maybe write a gentle poem or two, in the moment, after many months of no writing. I still refuse to call myself A Poet anymore, though; that contentious vicious neurotic insecurity world is no longer for me.

birdsong at dawn a riot
awakened me to visit bathroom
birdsong midmorning more subdued
a little more thought going into song

•



This morning I reminded myself that I like reading in the morning, during that first hour of waking, when I often do my meditation, day-starting contemplation, reading. That it's more than okay to let the laptop just sit there till after reading for awhile, taking a shower, eating breakfast. Nothing online is so urgent that the world will come to an end if I don't get around to it on the instant of waking. One definition of addictive behavior is you can't stop it even if you wanted to. One reason I love going camping is to be off-the-grid for periods of time. I like hand-writing and drawing in the journal, when the nearest electricity, much less WiFi hookup, is tens of miles away. The refreshment of being disconnected, unhooked, slowed down, listening to the birds, ignoring the buzz drone of meaningless online chat and drama.

Poets on the Peaks

Back here in the flat Midwest, flat relative to the mountains of the West, tucked into the Great Lakes riverine zone that mostly drains towards the Mississippi, and on the edge of the Great Prairie: solidly on the Precambrian craton rock of the central North American Plate, this glacier-scraped and carved northern Midwest that is my native land. Back here for days, not wanting to be here at all, wanting to be back there, back in the mountains, in the high thin air and the silence except for the wind in the trees and sage and grass, and the wildlife passing through.

A book I bought in California, in Berkeley, and brought back here with me, reading it these past few days while sitting here in my porch chair wrapped in blankets against the chill autumn rain, devouring this book as though it were a sacred text to be read every morning before starting my difficult days, with everything that has to be done upon return from a long retreat, most of which I'd rather not have to do, this book reminding of where I so recently was, enjoying the stories from these places I know, tales of events and illuminations that occured 50 years ago in the mountains.


Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades, text and photographs by John Suiter. (Published 2002)

Reading this takes me back to where I was, all in the last five weeks, camping more than once at 8000 feet or above, as well as camping sometimes in the Pacific tsunami hazard zone at less than 30 feet above sea level. The coastal range, the ocean parks, and the silence and solitude of the high mountains. Yes, you do encounter more people up there than you would have 50 years ago, but for the most part the people you encounter walking and hiking, as opposed to driving, are reverent and appreciative of these mountain lands. Even in overrun Yosemite, a group of college boys, jumping off the bridge into the Merced River, took time to chat with me since I had my cameras in hand and was catching the late afternoon light on the peaks on the canyon sides.


photo by John Suiter, from the book

Thinking about hermitage in the desert and the high peaks. One night of sublime hermitage this trip at Wheeler Peak, another day and night of hermitage in the cold sea-fog at a state park on the north California coast. The best times on this past trip for me were stolen moments of solitude and silence, or days driving alone, or hiking with the photo gear up some trail, the first person out in the morning, the last one out at dusk. The best times were when I could stop the truck, get out, hike away a bit, and be alone. Photography is in some ways an excuse to be out here, where I want to be most of the time. People understand better if you have a purpose for being out there, even if really the purpose is just an excuse for being where you want to be. Another trip, perhaps, I'll take just a notebook out with me; but no, I'm not fooling myself, I'll probably always carry at least one camera, even just a light portable one, because I love remembering what I've seen and where I've been, and photographs are memories.

This book by John Suiter is a literary history, but it's also a book every mountain-loving soul could love to read. The prose is evocative of time and place, the descriptions of the fire lookout stations on top of the mountain peaks vivid enough to smell, vivid in the memory especially if you've been there, or to similar places. Everyone at 9000 feet knows what the air smells like up there. It's a smell too recent in my own memory to be lost; I can take a deep breath and be transported, even now. Suiter's photos are incandescent, luminous, and evocative. One wishes for more of them in the book. This isn't really a coffee-table book; that's just a disguise for something far richer and more promising.

It can take six weeks for your body to adapt to altitude, for your marrow to produce enough extra red corpuscles to be able to pick up more than enough oxygen to keep your system in balance. Until then, you pant a lot, and maybe your eyes are funny, and maybe you see visions of angels and demons, and anything else that the open doors in the sky have opened you up to experiencing. After awhile, you breathe easier, the headaches go away, and you begin to enjoy how incredibly clean the air is, how much it fills you with light. Get thee to a mountain peal, and open your soul.

Those jock climbers for whom mountaineering is a matter of conquest miss all the sublime magic; most of them summit, but do not linger, eager to notch their ice-axes with another conquest made, and on to the next. I've met a few of them on the trail. I've noted they never stop long enough to let the silence linger, become still, and enter you. Some people don't know how to just stop, and listen. Well, I can't judge them too harshly; I've been guilty, as most eco-tourists have, of trying to cram too many stops into a day, to try to visit so many places in a short trip that you never linger in any of them. I've been guilty of moving too fast across the face of the world, and sometimes not being able to linger even when I wanted to, because of appointments to keep.

Yet I went out on this last sojourn in part to remember how to listen to the silence, feeling like I'd lost the skill under the personal drama of the past few years. I didn't tell anyone here that was my real goal: to recapture what I felt I'd lost. I deliberately had an open itinerary, allowing myself to deviate from a planned route, and spend more time wherever I felt like it. And thus I doubled the length of my foreseen visit to the Snake River, to the Hoback, to my beloved Tetons. This was my return to my own mountains, the places in Wyoming I'd first studied geology in the field, as a young artist studying science, when I was 18, literally only weeks out of high school before finding myself living and studying there. You need to go back to your roots, as an artist, those places that first lit a fire in you; even though you carry them always with you, even if you rarely get back in person.

I went out to the mountains and the ocean in part to be alone, to remember how to listen to the silence. And to bring some of that back here. I did succeed in writing the first non-haiku poems out there that I've written in months. So the inspiration that these three poets on mountain firewatch found for themselves in those mountains is still there to be found; and I renewed myself, just as they did. If you have no better reason to read this well-written and beautifully-photographed book, let it be for inspiration: to get out there yourself, and get up in the mountains, and listen for what words in the wind will come to you.

One of the lessons of this book is how the mountains mark you, as person and artist. Even decades later, these mountains are still in Snyder's poems, and Whalen's, and Kerouac's Desolation Angels is basically his journals and logs of his lookout time, as is the end of Dharma Bums. You want to re-read those, now, having just been there, in those mountains. You want to get out the books that these poets took with them up the trail, and re-read those, too. Some few of them I have on my shelves already, most notably the books Snyder took, as I've always shared many of the same interests, such as D.T. Suzuki's Manual of Zen Buddhism, a compilation of essential Zen texts from a thousand years of writing by the masters. And my own recent trip was a renewal, a return to places that have marked me as deeply as the North Cascades marked three earlier poets, one of whom, Snyder, has been a life-long inspiration and pathfinder to me as to many others. Our inspirations in part give us the excuse to go out and do what we always wanted to do anyway; inspiration as validation of purpose.

I don't want to be back here. But here I am, still yearning for the 9000 silences, remembering them as I sit quietly on my porch and read, letting them follow me home. Here I am, till the next time I'm back out West, in my beloved mountains.

Gary Snyder: Danger on Peaks

This 2004 book of thematically connected poems recently came into my possession, as a hardcover first edition, along with the author's No Nature: New and Selected Poems 1992. Gary Snyder is a poet who I feel strongly connected to, both in terms of shared subject matters, but also in shared worldview, interests, and maybe even approach to writing. I cannot but admit to an influence on my own writing from his.

Speaking as a writer interested in both "nature poetry" and what has come in recent years to be called "creative non-fiction," I set Snyder on a shelf in my library next to Barry Lopez, John McPhee, Annie Dillard, and some few others.

I'm also very interested in the genre of writing lately called the poetic journal, which has strong roots in both Thoreau and in Chinese and japanese precursors. There is a connection to zuihitsu, which is a characteristic Japanese literary form of "random composition," literally, "following the brush." This is an open form of free writing, in which the author makes no intentional order, and topics and styles can leap widely from section to section. What creates continuity is proximity rather than outline. (Famous literary examples of zuihitsu include Sei Shonagon's Pillow Book and Kenko's Essays in Idleness.)

Snyder's book Danger on Peaks carries elements of both poetic journal and zuihitsu. It is not the first example of this work he has given us; it is a common mode for his poetry, and also appears in his essay collections Earth House Hold and The Practice of the Wild. I think the origin of Snyder's style lies in both the influence of American nature writers such as Thoreau, and his well-known Asian studies background. That he practices it so well is a tribute to his own skills as poet and prose-poet, and the balance he has found that allows him to stand on the shoulders of his precursors on multiple continents. I have said, previously, that of all the poets associated with the Beats, Snyder is I think perhaps the most enduring, and for me at least the richest and deepest. His work is a deep well that puts out streams in several directions. Snyder has said, in different ways at different times, that his values and practice are nature-based, as old as the human species; this full book of poems reinforces both values and practice, moving them forward into the new century, at the same time reaffirming their archaic, even Paleolithic origins.

Danger on Peaks does what the best poetic journal writing does: it moves easily between prose section and enjambed verse. The tone of voice is consistent, regardless of whether the style seems more prose-like or poetry-like, and it's a tribute to both style and execution that the moves between more prose-like objects and more poetry-like objects on the page are seamless.

The poems take place in the mountains, or in the frame of mind of, having returned to the lowlands, one's heart and mind being still in the mountains. Sometimes this is explicit; other times, merely the context of the poem's actions. The title of the book echoes throughout, as each poem in each section gradually accumulates to fill alll the spaces in the book. This is genuinely a book-length poem made up of additive elements that create a synergistic whole.

The book's seven sections being with "Mount St. Helens," an autobiographical poetic journal beginning withe first time Snyder climbed the snowpeaks of the Cascades, at age 13, and continuing through other memories to when the mountain blew in 1980, and the aftermath. The fourth poem in "Mount St. Helens" is Atomic Dawn:

The day I first climbed Mt. St. Helens was August 13, 1945.

Soirit Lake was far from the cities of the valley and news came slow. Though the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima August 6 and the second dropped on Nagasaki August 9, photographs didn't appear in the Portland Oregonian until August 12. Those papers must have been driven in to Spirit Lake on the 13th. Early in the morning of the 14th I walked over to the lodge to check the bulletin board. There were whole pages of the paper pinned up: photos of a blasted city from the air, the estimate of 150,000 dead in Hiroshima alone, the American scientist quoted saying "nothing will grow there again for seventy years." The morning sun on my shoulders, the fir forest smell and the big tree shadows; feet in thin mocassins feeling the ground, and my heart still one with the snowpeak mountain at my back. Horrified, blaming scientists and politicians and the governments of the world, I swore a vow to myself, something like, "By the purity and the beauty and permanence of Mt. St. Helens, I will fight against this cruel destructive power and those who would seek to use it, for all my life."

If consistency is a measure of inner grace, and commitment a measure of inner power, then Snyder's grace and power have never diminished.

The fifth section of the book, "Dust in the Wind," is a sequence of expanded haibun; not formally precise, but exploded, the intent and cohesion of the form still there. Haibun, my own favorite poetic form to write in, can be defined as densely poetic prose with interspersed haiku. Here, Snyder doesn't stick to strict haiku in form; still, each poem begins with a prose paragraph followed by a short poem. Snyder follows the aesthetic of the haibun form, in that each short poem following a prose paragraph looks at the same moment from a different angle: a new take on the topic, unified in essence but never merely repeating the prose. It's always an oblique viewpoint, but the haiku also completes the haibun. This is the classic way the haibun has been practiced by the haiku masters, most famously by Basho himself, in his masterpiece Oku no hosomichi, or "Narrow Road to the Interior."

Spilling the Wind

The faraway line of the freeway faint murmur of motors, the slow steady semis and darting little cars; two thin steel towers with faint lights high up blinking; and we turn on a raised dirt road between two flooded fallow ricefields—wind brings more roar of cars

hundreds of white-fronted geese
from nowhere
spull the wind from their wings
wobbling and sideslipping down

The seventh section of the book, "After Bamiyan," is full of lament and anger. It is political poetry, but not protest poetry: it is engaged with the world, and events, but the poet responds as a human, not as a political flack. The section begins with the destruction by the Taliban in early 2001 of the ancient, gigantic Buddhas sculpted into the rocks of the high cliffs at Bamiyan. I remember studying these Buddhas, in college art history classes, as a culmination of historical Buddhist art and architecture along the Silk Road; I had always wanted to see them in person, which is now and forever impossible.

My favorite poem in this final, lamenting section is one of the poems Snyder wrote after the destruction of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. The most indelible images in my mind, from that day I sat watching the events as they happened, live on television, were the dots of people fallign from the sky: those who had chosen to leap to their deaths rather than be burned alive, or crushed in the fall of the twin towers. I knew, as soon as the planes hit the buildings, that the buildings were coming down: jet fuel is an arsonist's dream accelerant, burning hot enough to soften concrete and steel. The images of the people who chose their own deaths, by leaping free of the towers, is still what I remember most viscerally. Snyder wrote about it as follows, and in this his writing says all that I have never been able to:

Falling from a Height, Holding Hands

What was that?
storms of flying glass
& billowing flames

a clear day to the far sky—

better than bruning,
hold hands.

We will be
two peregrines diving

all the way down

The book ends with a final poem-blessing: We have spoken again the unknown words of the spell / that purifies the world.... Then one turns the page, and just before the brief Notes, there is a beautiful photo of Mt. St. Helens that Snyder took in August 1945, returning us back to the first poems in this collection, about his first climbs of the snowpeaks.

As poetic journal, as haibun or zuihitsu, as a continuation of a genuinely American poet's work—a Pacific Rim American poet's work, one who looks both West and East—this is a compelling book. It both summarizes, memorializes, reminisces, and moves us forward into the future. Snyder's poetic prose and more formal poetry alike weave together into a unified whole, parts capable of standing alone, but the whole greater than the sum of the parts, as well.

Any poets who are interested in what can be done with these journal forms and prose/poem styles need to read and re-read this book; for inspiration, for solace, for possibility. For me, this is one of hte most inspiring books of poetry, and poetic prose, that I have read in years. I expect to return to it numerous times, and to carry it with me, next time I venture into the Cascades.

Post-humanism

Humanism, in the literary arts, is the idea that "man is the measure of all things." This is a viewpoint that has been in the philosophical ascendant for centuries now, to the point where most people simply take it for granted as natural law. In fact, it's an illusion, a solipsistic illusion, and a particularly self-absorbed, culturally-egotistic one. The arrogance comes in primarily when human writing is framed as natural writing: the only natural text worth discussing.

This is worth examining in detail. Gary Snyder writes about humanism and posthumanism is his long essay Tawny Grammar, collected in his book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, published by North Point Press. Snyder is worth quoting from at length:

One of the formal criteria of humanist scholarship is that it be concerned with the scrutiny of texts. A text is information stored through time. The stratigraphy of rocks, layers of pollen in swamps, the outward expanding circles in the truck of a tree, can be seen as texts. The calligraphy of rivers winding back and forth over the land, leaving layer upon layer of traces of previous riverbeds is text. The layers of history in language become a text of language itself. . . .

Euro-American humanism has been a story of writers and scholars who were deeply moved and transformed by their immersion in earlier histories and literatures. Their writings have provided useful cultural—rather than theological or biological—perspectives on the human situation. The Periclean Greeks digested the Homeric lore, which went back to the Bronze Age and before. The Romans enlarged themselves by their study of Greece. Renaissance seekers nourished themselves on Greece and Rome. Today a new breed of posthumanists is investigating and experiencing the diverse little nations of the planet, coming to appreciate the "primitive," and finding prehistory to be an ever-expanding field of richness. We get a glimmering of the depth of our ultimately single human root. Wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture. The "post" in the term posthumanism is on account of the word human. The dialogue to open next would be among all beings, toward a rhetoric of ecological relationships. This is not to put down the human: the "proper study of mankind" is what it means to be human. It's enough to be shown in school that we're kin to all the rest: we have to feel it all the way through. Then we can also be uniquely "human" with no sense of special privilege. . . .

When humans know themselves, the rest of nature is right there. (pp. 66–68)

I find this to be remarkably similar to what Robinson Jeffers said about his ideas of Inhumanism. The parallels are striking, although the language is very different. Jeffers wrote, in his preface to The Double Axe (1948):

The first part of The Double Axe was written during the war and finished a year before the war ended, and it bears the scars; but the poem is not primarily concerned with that grim folly. Its burden, as of some previous work of mine, is to present a certain philosophical attitude, which might be called Inhumanism, a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to not-man; the rejection of human solipsism and recognition of the transhuman magnificence. It seems time that our race began to think as an adult does, rather than like an egocentric baby or insane person. This manner of thought and feeling is neither misanthropic nor pessimist, though two or three people have said so and may again. It involves no falsehoods, and is a means of maintaining sanity in slippery times; it has objective truth and human value. It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy. It neutralizes fanaticism and wild hopes; but it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.

Snyder speaks in a gentle, Buddhist-inflected voice, while Jeffers speaks more harshly, more directly, in his Calvinist-raised voice. Yet I believe they are essentially saying the same thing; and they are statements that I agree with strongly, both as a poet and as a human. Having visited or lived among many of the landscapes that Jeffers and Snyder have inhabited and written about, I find myself caring deeply about preserving the natural beauty of those places.

In retrospect, it is ironic that Jeffers was often misunderstood to be misanthropic or bitterly anti-human. In fact, both Snyder and Jeffers explicitly state that their philosophies are not anti-human, misanthropic, or pessimistic. That they have been perceived to be just that, is an indictment of the self-same human-centered solipsism that they are presenting an alternative to, to bring humanism into balance with those natural forces that are part of us, and also much larger than us.

In Western thought, we seem to need to continually be reminded of these ideas; they keep getting lost in recurrent waves of theoretical navel-gazing. But it is instructive to remember how many great Western thinkers have written attempts to redress the imbalance. Man's proper place in nature, as part of nature, was what Henry David Thoreau wrote about in much of his work, notably in Walden. I also am reminded of part of W.H. Auden's argument in his essay book on poetics, The Enchaféd Flood, wherein Auden reminds us that we are part of nature: nature is all around us, and in us, and the division between "City" and "Wilderness," as represented by desert and ocean, is a purely mental division, not an actual one. As Snyder writes, Wild nature is inextricably in the weave of self and culture. I read an article recently about how wild species have made comfortable homes for themselves within our major cities: peregrine falcons nest on our skyscrapers; bald eagles fly along the Mississippi River through downtown Minneapolis; there are thriving packs of coyotes living in Chicago and Boston and Denver.

Recently, I have been noting a new rise of environmentalist rhetoric, this time emerging from within the Biblical fundamentalist community (not a group I've ever considered very rigorous or logical in their theology, which often has little to do with actual Biblical scholarship). It's amazing to find allies about environmental issues coming forward from many surprising directions; regardless of any other differences, it is a hopeful sign, since the Christian evangelical community has traditionally been hostile to environmental issues.

All of these writers and poets, and their ideas about our proper place in the natural world, are converging on a point that the "primitive" (pre-Euro-American climax civilization) cultures knew quite well: we are not the lords of creation, we are part of the created. We seem to be living at last, now, in a posthumanist era, where we are being continually brought up against reminders that we're not separate from nature, or from each other, and also that we are not "in dominion over nature," one of the most grievous interpretations of Biblical theology, but rather that we must exist in partnership with nature, or die.

So, in our poetry, it is perhaps time to seek out a posthumanist poetry: a genuine antidote to the current dominance of the navel-gazing confessional lyric, and furthermore an antidote to the solipsistic self-referential hermeticism of the New York School and Language Poetry. A posthumanist poetry that does not exclude humanity, but also does not put humanity into high relief in opposition to nature, but in balanced, reverential, embodied partnership with nature.

Depth Charges

In his Fourth Letter to the young poet Kappus, Rainer Maria Rilke writes, in the Letters to a Young Poet:

Don't be confused by surfaces; in the depths everything becomes law. And those who live the mystery falsely and badly (and they are very many) lose it only for themselves and nevertheless pass it on like a sealed letter, without knowing it.

Sam Hamill, writes in his essay A Poet's Place, from his essay collection A Poet's Work (Broken Moon Press, 1990):

When Marx declares "the bourgeoisie has turned the doctor, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, and the man of science into paid servants," he is wrong only in regard to the true poet. Even in Marx's lifetime, the patronization of poetry on any significant level was nonexistent. Even then, poets existed outside the comfortable drawing rooms of the bourgeoisie. By the Age of Marx, the poet has become a religious heretic, one who believes in divine inspiration and its revelatory powers, one who believes, indeed, that all religions are one, and that the revelations that serve as the roots of religion are in fact expressions of the poetic experience. Or, as [Octavio] Paz says, that “religion is the poetry of mankind.”

In the twentieth century, we see such poets as Rilke, Yeats, Eliot and H.D. becoming immersed in hermetic studies, in explorations of comparative religions; we find Rexroth schooling himself deeply in all the world’s major religions, and especially in Buddhism and Gnosticism; we find Robert Duncan’s explorations of the Talmudic tradition and Gary Snyder’s search for the continuous thread that leads from primitive shamanism up through the ages into materialist culture.

This search for origins, for ancestry, is the search for a sense of place in a culture which has no means for justification of the spiritual exercise of divine revelation. The poet returns to tribal culture and gathers a few initiates into the spiritual community, into the secret society of poetry.

I identify with Snyder’s search for “the continuous thread.” I have undertaken a similar search myself, beginning at a very young age:

It is 7th Grade at Tappan Junior High School in Ann Arbor, MI; I am 13 years old. In my Civics class that year, I discovered for the first time how the Christian holiday festivities I had taken for granted my whole life were borrowed or stolen from existing pre-Christian holidays, such as the Roman festival of Saturnalia, and the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic Yule or Tannenbaum trees. This was revelatory: I realized at that age that all religious practices have a timeline of historical development. Later on, in graduate school, reading David Lowenthal's book The Past is a Foreign Country (Cambridge University Press, 1985), I came to realize that every tradition is an invented tradition. In fact, I realized that in this 7th Grade Civics class, in our weeks-long unit on comparative religion; but I was unable to articulate it clearly until I had read Lowenthal, years later.

Some insights sink into the bone, even before you have words to express them: and that is what poetry is for. Some things are best expressed in poetry, and song.

That same year, in that religious studies unit of that same Civics class, I read for the first time Huston Smith's classic of comparative religious studies, The Religions of Man. I had spent the first half of my childhood in southern India: I was the only person in my Civics class who had seen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam being practiced at first hand, in my presence. I had a feel for comparative religion that my classmates didn't share; I think my teacher recognized it, though, because in retrospect I believe she encouraged me to go further with my studies than most of my classmates did.

I also at that time began to read a classic anthology of spiritual literature: The Choice Is Always Ours, ed. by Dorothy Phillips, Elizabeth Howes and Lucille Nixon (originally published in the middle of the 20th Century; there is in print a 1989 unabridged reprint from HarperCollins). This tremendous anthology contains large excerpts, organized thematically, of spiritual, religious, and psychological literature. Looking back, I am sure that this book was my first introduction to the writings and sayings of Rainer Maria Rilke, Carl Gustav Jung, Meister Eckhart, Sheila Moon, and many other writers I now view as central to my education: my mentors. I had already read Moon’s young-adult novel, Knee Deep In Thunder, which is based on the Navajo creation myths—which Moon had also written a nonfiction study of, from a poet’s and Jungian’s perspective—and I had already started reading and studying all I could find about the Navajo (Dineh) people. The Choice Is Always Ours became for me both a guide and index for who I needed to go search and read in more depth, and a kind of a substitute bible. Since bible essentially means a collection of books, I began at that time to collect together my own books, into my own personal ur-bible. I still keep a collection of books, only it is very much larger now; but there is a small subset of books I keep on hand to read, and reread, and a few of which I always take with me when I travel.

All this information about religion was revelatory to me. It began my life-long tendency to Question Authority. It was the beginning of my understanding that life is always more rich and complex than you believe it to be. It began a life-long study of the history of ideas. It was also the beginning of the end of my unthinking devotion to the faith of my parents, who were rationalistic Lutherans. (Lutherans tend to be pragmatic; they largely don't believe in mysticism. They are devoted to improving the quality of life of this world, in fact the reason I grew up in India was because my father was a doctor who spent ten years doing medicine, and teaching it, in India, sponsored by the Lutheran Church in America.) This was the time of my life I began to realize that I was a mystic, although, again, I did not have the language to describe it at that time. I had already been seeing visions of other levels of reality, which were largely ignored or dismissed by the rationalist branch of Lutheranism that was the norm of the church my parents attended. (The pastor at our church in Ann Arbor was personally very supportive of me, but he didn’t pretend to understand me.) We had a lot of college people, professors and staff, at that church. We had a terrific church choir, because the choir director was also a choir director at the University of Michigan. I sang in that choir out of the pleasure of singing, for several years after I had lost all faith in Christianity. This time, when I was age 13, was when I began to lose that childhood faith. By the time I finished confirmation studies, at age 15, and was confirmed, I no longer considered myself any species of ordinary Christian. Everyday Christianity could no longer fulfill my needs, and no longer spoke to me rationally or theologically.

What I did understand, at age 13, and what I was able to articulate to myself, even then, was that all the existing religions had forerunners: None of them had sprung out of whole cloth, in the fixed forms in which they now existed. None had sprung forth fully formed, by divine fiat. They had all evolved. All of them had accrued cultural habits of practice that may or may not have been true to their original revelations. (Go look up why Catholics eat fish on Friday: the reason for that is nowhere in the Bible.) I began a quest of study for myself, at age 13, to search for what I then formulated as “the original religion.” I formulated this, even at that time, as the spiritual revelations, experiences, and sacred technologies that underlie all the world’s existing religious institutions. I set about to study religions almost as an anthropologist would, and within 3 or 4 years of reading, felt I had found something of an answer to my quest. Others had made the same search before me, and written about it:

My search for the original religions led me, eventually, to shamanism, what Mircea Eliade in his groundbreaking academic study of shamanism termed archaic techniques of ecstasy. Shamanism, I discovered, was ecumenical: it exists, or existed, in every cultural stream, in every civilization or tradition, in every culture, worldwide. Shamanism is a spiritual technology, not a religion. You can be a practicing member of any of the dominant organized religions, and still be a shaman. Shaman deal with the divine, or its helper spirits, directly, on many levels. Shaman tend to be pantheistic, or panentheistic. As a Tungus shaman once told an anthropologist: Everything that is, is alive. This is what I discovered, in my religious studies, as the best candidate for ‘the oldest religion”—even though, technically, it’s not a religion, but a set of near-universal ecstatic practices, trance states, ecopoetry, and pharmacology. Shamanism is everywhere, even if it has been subsumed by later ritual practices, or condemned by later orthodoxies. Shamanism is universal, and heterodox. And shamanism, as are all spiritual technologies, is a form of pragmatic or practical mysticism. This is the worldview I have come to subscribe to, more deeply than any other.

So, my somewhat precocious search for the roots of religion led me eventually to mysticism—which, in its depths, is the same as poetry. Poetry for me remains a taproot to the divine. I am a poetic heretic in this rational, language-based day and age, and I proudly admit it: for me, poetry at its best is never about just the mind or intellect, never about playing word games, never about intellectual puzzlery, never about academic theorizing. Poetry at its best, for me, is revelatory, divine, deep, resonant, spiritual, evocative, concretely imagistic, and, yes, inspired. I find most modern poetry, with its focus on self-conscious self-revelation—the celebration of the self—to be shallow. Even poems I admire, but poets I admire, in this modern age, lack spiritual depth. I agree with Gary Snyder when he says, As a poet, I hold the most archaic values on earth. I agree with this sentence; my artistic inspirations are paleolithic as often as they are modern, and they intermingle with each other, with complex, fractal edges. As a poet, I am of this paleolithic, ancient tradition, as well.

So: All my life, poetry has been my mysticism, and mysticism has been my religion. I subscribe to no creed favored by established, organized religions. (I prefer what you might call disorganized religions.) Yet I do find wisdom and truth in the creeds of all the world’s great religions. I find great poetry in their wisdom traditions. I have felt it to be true, since I was a boy, that at their hearts, in their depths, at their roots, all the world’s great religions have an essentially similar mystical experience, of Union with the Divine. The differences between the religions, I feel, grow out of their local languages, customs, and beliefs—those local systems of mythology that color perception of the Undescribable. At their cores, all of the religions speak of similar things; and it is most remarkable how the mystical teachings and writings, of all these diverse religions, all depict some very similar, even identical, wisdom teachings.

And, just as it was for many of those poets, artists, and musicians, who I deeply admire and emulate, and who I view as my mentors, creativity is my spiritual practice. And Frederick Franck has said, Art is a Way.

Notes towards an egoless poetry 6: Showing versus telling

I was scanning Ron Silliman's blog some weeks ago, as I occasionally do, and he had a review of a movie by Bhutanese monk and filmmaker Khyentse Norbu, Travellers and Magicians. (To read Mr. Silliman's review, click here and scroll down to the August 11, 2006, entry.) There's a comment that Mr. Silliman makes, down the page, that I think is pertinent to each and every poet, at one time or another:

Balancing the two narrative lines [of the film under review] is difficult enough, but the real challenge for Khyentse Norbu is how to create a film that is deeply & openly spiritual without, by that fact alone, becoming preachy. It’s a distinction that Rachel Blau DuPlessis makes in the title essay of her new book, Blue Studios, between poems that tell you what to think (or that model it, “thinking hard for all of us”) & poems that are themselves demonstrations of thinking as an active, ongoing, indeterminate process (DuPlessis herself is a great example of the latter, as are, say, Bob Perelman, Lyn Hejinian & Barrett Watten).

The key phrase here that I want to discuss, in the context of these notes towards an egoless poetry, is this: the distinction between poems that tell you what to think (or that model it . . .) & poems that are themselves demonstrations of thinking as an active, ongoing, indeterminate process. Poems that think for you, and poems that model what thinking is actually like (by demonstration), and thus encourage you to think for yourself, and also teach you how to do it. Poems that hand you their conclusions on a sliver platter, and poems that encourage you to make your own conclusions, as a reader. Poems that preach at you, and poems that pull you in by resonating with your own experience. Poems wherein the poet tells you what ot think, and poems that are open-minded and indeterminate of interpretation.

This is not limited to purely surface poetic details, experiences from daily life that readers might be expected to share with the poet. If we assume that that is all that poetry can convey, then all we have left is confessional poetry, journal-poetry. All we can write about is our cats, our children, and our sex lives. (Thank you, Robert Lowell and the other "confessional poets," for opening wide this door, that may ultimately leads us to collections of journal-based pseudo-poems such as Hal Sirowitz' My Therapist Said.)

If on the other hand poetic resonance goes beyond the superficial and mundane, which I think it does, it can also include poems that embody deep spiritual, philosophical, and even religious truths (as opposed to truisms), such as what might be the key phrase of dialogue in Khyentse Norbu's film: "the Buddha says hope causes suffering." The film demonstrates this truth not by baldly stating it as a truism, but by demonstrating it again and again through narrative events, fable, and thoughtful character moments. One of my all-time favorite films, which achieves this level of demonstration, is Ron Fricke's Baraka. (Fricke was also the cinematographer for Godfrey Reggio's trilogy of films beginning with Koyaanisqatsi.)

If cinema can do this, then so can poetry.

Perhaps we can develop a style of what we might call cinematic poetry, which presents imagery without (surface) explanation, in sequential presentation out of which meaning arises organically. This is in fact something I've been working at for some years now, with occasionally successful individual poems, although my attempts towards this type of poetry have often been dismissed a priori as experimental.

Even though it has become a cliche in poetry-critique circles, this distinction between "showing" and "telling" does get at the very root of a common problem with many contemporary poems, in that many poets tell you what's going on, rather than showing you. The distinction is also expressed as abstract/philosophical vs. concrete/imagistic. (Haiku poets take note.) The problem is that telling the reader what's going on is perilously close to telling the reader what to think, and what to conclude (the chief reason why most political poetry becomes preachy rather than engaging).

Without making any value judgments about which route is superior as a style of "pure poetry"—if there is such a thing, which I question—I will nevertheless make a personal (philosophical? moral? ethical?) judgment about which is more fun for me to read, and about which I strive to write: namely, the showing rather than the telling poem.

I prefer poetry that engages not only the mind but also the body: the gut emotions, the somatic sense of kinesthetic prioperception, poems that pull the reader inside the experience of the poem (rather than simply describing that experience to you, or telling you what it was). Poems that are experiential rather than reportorial.  Poems of the manifest world, rather than poems that exist only in the mind, or only on the page. Poems that can be simply a presentation of images and events, out of which meaning arises on its own, without pedantic aide. Poems that make you feel them from the inside, rather than leaving you as a detached, outside, bodyless observer. From the cinematic perspective, the point-of-view-without-a-body that is the camera lens is capable of evoking a visceral response in the viewer—emotional, somatic, kinesthetic—on a level that written text, by itself, is not.

In terms of cinema itself, I'm often drawn towards shorter, imagistic, low-dialogue, non-narrative films. Cinema is narrative and non-narrative, of course, sometimes simultaneously. I think poetry can be, too. This does verge on that terrain where words fail, and other, non-verbal artforms, really may have an edge over poetry. I'd hardly call dance more abstract than poetry, because dance is kinesthetic, whereas poetry can be (literally) all in the mind. I'm using the word "abstract" to refer to disembodiment, I realize that, but that's intentional, because that's the usage of "abstract" as it arises from historical Western philosophy, religious thought including theology, and, therfore, its parallel usage in Western art criticism. If that wasn't explicit before, let it be so now.

If it seems as though I keep returning to this topic in various essays (embodiment rather than disembodiment) it's because I think it's so very very important, and because it's no very very inevident in much of contemporary poetry. I see very little showing, and very much more raw telling, in contemporary poetry, especially in poetry that attempts to divorce thought from soma. (I think it might be a problem on the level of getting fish to see that they're breathing water: overlooked because inherent; unseen because taken for normal.)

I admit to being drawn to haiku and its related forms, in part, because the classical Japanese tradition emphasizes concreteness and imagery over overt philosophical statement: letting the meaning arise from the images and the described moment, rather than telling the reader what the meaning is, explicitly and directly. There is a certain obliqueness to this approach, relative to much other poetic literature, that I appreciate: even while the poem itself is direct, concrete, and physical, it contains layers and depths of resonant meaning. (In haiku much of that is generated by allusion rather than metaphor, which is possible within a shared literary tradition, if most readers have read the same sets of classic texts: the advantage of a shared tradition.)

It's possible, I believe, although I'm not always sure what it would look like, to have a poetry of embodiment out of which also arises engagement, empathy, and shared experience, and even spritual and philosophical truth (again, demonstrated by example, rather than simply restating a truism). I suspect this was the original appeal of much Zen-inspired Beat poetry, no matter how quickly the original impulse devolved into mannerism and imitated trope (which is very much how I view many post-Beat poets of lesser gifts, not excluding McClure). Of that group, I tend to view Gary Snyder as having had the longest string of successful examples of embodied philosophy in his poems. I confess to a possible bias, there, as my own concerns and experience and interests are closer to Snyder's than many others of that group. (Though, as a gay poet/artist myself, I have always found fellow-feeling in much of Ginsberg's explicitly homoerotic poems, even though many of them may be of overall lesser artistic merit.)

So, it's nice to encounter artistic products, be they film or poem, that seem to move in this direction, of embodied philosophy, enacted truth, demonstrated-by-example thinking, rather than telling and preaching and pedantry. Examples of what is artistically possible, along these lines, are always welcome.