Video: bell ringing in an empty sky

bell ringing in an empty sky, a meditation video, 2012

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This was made using time-lapse photography, photographed at 1 frame per second, played back at variable frame rates. Shot using a tripod; the pan effects were made by turning the tripod slowly as the camera clicked through frames. The only lightsource was the candles in frame.

Another experiment in using tools to make style. We learn by doing. Sometimes the tools themselves give you a clue towards what the subject matter is, and the tone and style in which to present it. Artists need to listen to their tools, usually more than they do. There's a wisdom in the hands that often supersedes the egocentric directions of the head.

Gates of Sleep

Some late night wondering about where I'm going
and where I've been, tied up in fragments rather than knots,
made into a weaving that at last ties together all the various
threads of a life that seems unraveled and directionless.
And then I can't help but wonder if the men I've loved
had anything to do with it. I carry a photo of Ganesha
in the truck, tucked up in the overhead sunshade. And on
the dashboard I have a small pewter necklace bead of Ganesha,
which I had once tied to the rear view mirror, but which has fallen
loose. Some morning, doing truck chores, I'll get a piece of wire
and reattach the Remover of Obstacles to the view. Meanwhile,
I've put most considerations, worries, and nightmares on hold.
It takes all my energy to like these plans for summer. It keeps me
going, though. Somewhere along the road I lost some necessary
element, some attraction or attractiveness. Now, no matter where
I turn, there isn't anyone to spend the night with, not even in
the desert heat with long distances between stops, roads, and hotels.
Back now from long southwestern roads, back from the heat,
back into the freezing rain, these nights seem lonelier than ever.
Rain on the tin cap over the fireplace is both soothing and desolate.
It's late at night. The world seems to have come to an end,
except for the small circle around this lamp, this flickering early moth.
I invoke sleep under the sign of the wrathful deities.
The many moods of Mahakala, all of them fatal to illusion
and disrepair. I'm more drawn to the wrathful deities, they seem
more real, more connected to life's regular disruptions and rocky trails.
Kicking a stone off the cliff-edge path with steel-toed boots, you know not
to go chasing its fall down that steep abyss. Below you, a million acres
of empty air filling the canyon from rim to rim. One step, and you fall.
The photo of Ganesha in the truck is the elephant-headed deity
in his rare wrathful aspect, black-bodied, golden-eyed, golden-trunked,
a rare Nepalese statue seen in an art museum of the god in flames,
dancing for all the world in a ring of fire like his father, Shiva the Destroyer.
Dancing the world in and out of existence a billion times a second,
the rite of Shiva, blood on the plains, blood on the stones of the canyon.
Wrathful Ganesha serves to wake you up, even if you'd rather stay asleep.
All of the wrathful deities are about slapping you awake. I admit I find
most of the peaceful deities dull, sleep-inducing, their tranquil meditations
soothing but disconnected from my own life. Too much drama for that
dull grace. The slaps on both cheeks from the black-skinned,
tiger-robed, corpse-dancing wakers serves me best. I guess I'm thick.
I suppose I should wake into some higher life, but all I really want to do
right now is find another lover. Prospects are few. Hopes are dim.
Somehow you go on, even when it's pointless. Insomnia.
That's the real weight of living, this going-on that serves no purpose.
Where's the Remover of Obstacles, the Opener of Roads, when you really
need to find someone to sleep with? Not even for sex, just for the warmth
of a body in bed next to yours. I remember Fernando, from Peru,
joyous dark-skinned man with the generous heart and stunning smile.
Nights and weekends we spent together, naked, sleeping, kissing,
making love naked in the hidden back yard hot tub. Nights we slept,
mornings when I woke feeling completely satisfied, completely one
with the person next to me, waking to feel breath on my chest hairs,
hearing his heartbeat through my jaw. Where's my new sleeper?
Sleepers joining hands across the world, distances dissolved by
that elephant-headed guardian of roads, travel, and historians.
Remove the obstacles between me my love. Between me and restful sleep.
Remove the dancing from my legs, my jaw, my itching hide.
I'm going on, anyway, even if I never wanted to go on.
We made love on the rug on the floor. Now we want to meet again.
Make these roads collapse, Lord, into connection.


Shiva, Dance All Night

Shadows on the Wall

Sacred Music

This image means a great deal to me. It's from the 1920s or 30s. (I don't have a full attribution for it.) It's an image of the great three-faced image of Shiva from the caves on the island of Elephanta, in India. Seated at the base of the sculpture is a sarod player, a young master musician, who no doubt went on to have a full career as performer, teacher, musician. I found this image in a book about Elephanta, and when I turned the page and saw this photo, it stopped me cold. It says everything I want to say about music, my relationship to the numinous, the Divine, and how these are essentially One.

I've said it before, but let me say it again, because it's true, and because I really mean it:

Music is sacred to me.

Of all the arts I practice, and there are several, music is the most central to the core of my being. It's the one that means the most. It's the art that is a sacred art, one could even call it a religious art. Although I am in no sense traditionally religious, music is what links me to the religious sensibility, the religious aesthetic. It's in music that I share common ground, along with many other musicians, to the numinous, the liminal.

Bach wrote at the end of each completed score of music, Deo Gratias, "To the glory of God." I understand the impulse to say that, I understand the feeling behind it. It's not language I would use, but it's language I can feel, and support.

Visual art is something I really love doing, but I'm always pushing at it. It doesn't always satisfy me on a deep level. Sometimes it feels disconnected, the imagery too mental, too imaginary. It can be virtual, rather than fully sensual. That's partly because our entire culture is dominated by a bias towards the visual—over the other senses, and also as a learning channel—and so visual art is both accepted and easy. People accept my photography and digital art more readily than any other work I do. We have a visual vocabulary, a very rich and complex one—and it contains things we can't always put into words, symbols that resonate on a deeper level. At its best, for me, my own visual art activates the archetypes, and creates resonances beyond the purely visual. There is a hum of the Divine in its presence, when it takes on its archetypal aspects. The best visual art is shamanic—not necessarily in terms of imagery, but because it seems to open into worlds that are visionary, transcendent, and full of emotional and spiritual resonance.

In my visual art, in those pieces that mean the most to me personally, there is often something mysterious, inexplicable, archetypal to be sure, but not always obviously so in terms of imagery or style. I find myself drawn again and again to certain images that for me are very alive, very powerful, that seem to evoke the Mystery, and the gods. This photograph of Shiva with a musician at his knee is one of these images. I've made more than one photograph I've made of statues of Shiva dancing into an archetypal icon of my own.

In my written arts, in poetry, in essays, in writing in general, I have often admitted that words fail me when it comes to trying to describe the numinous. The closest I can get to evoking—not simply describing or reporting, but evoking—the Divine as I have experienced it is in visionary poetry. I've written more than one poem that is a record of a visionary experience, a waking dream, a moment of gnosis—whatever arbitrary label we want to use, that allows us to box the Mystery into a convenient and unthreatening categorization—and while such poems are records of experiences, the use of poetry as the language of recording seems essential, since poetry itself is heightened language, more than ordinary words or talk-talk. Poetry can raise language to the sublime.

Nonetheless, words often fail. They just can't contain everything we want to contain in them. In the end, words even betray us, by making something ineffable seem ordinary, in the inadequacy of telling about it. Our culture is dominated, in the linguistic domain, by a bias towards linear narrative, towards straightforward storytelling—and against the sideways or nonlinear pull that poetry can bring into consciousness. This is one reason, obviously, why prose narrative is far more popular than most poetry, which even in linear narrative forms tends to be incapable of being fully tamed. Poetry is always a bit wild, even when we try to domesticate it. It keeps seeping out around the edges, keeps flickering in and out of the light and going to hide in the shadows.

My own poetry, at its best, is not at all tamed. I don't want it to be tamed. I want it to remain wild and unpredictable, even to me. Some of my own favorite poems surprised me: I had no idea where they came from, and what they said was so unexpected that it was a new idea, even to me. Far too many readers of poetry, and even poets themselves, try to pretend that poetry is predictable, and manageable; formalist poets in particular carry around the totally-unsubstantiated idea that all poems are planned, intended, intentional, and created at the will of the poet. Wiser poets, based on the reading that I have done in poets' essays and memoirs about their art, seem willing to acknowledge that they don't always know what's going on, that they cannot always manage their poems, as though they were tidy little boxes that could be stacked and sorted in the warehouse of memory.

My own favorite poems that I have written—although, to be blunt, it often feels as if some part of the Self was in charge of the writing that is not the "I" of the ego-personality—or that have emerged from my pen, are those poems that take my out of myself, and into something greater. In ancient Greece, poets and dramatists and other artists spoke of being possessed by their daimon, their dark spirit, or of being possessed by their god, and speaking truly, as an oracle, for that moment of creation. That's an experience I've felt, being taken over by something greater than myself. I marvel at some of the writings that have emerged at white heat, when I've felt taken over, or as though I was merely a little hollow bone for Spirit to blow through. I marvel at those writings in part because they don't seem like they're mine—rather, that "I" cannot claim ownership of them without sounding arrogant and egotistical to myself—and in part because things were said that in some cases were brand new to me, as well. Writing like this is not purely self-expression, nor is it a deliberate attempt at expressing an existing thought or opinion. Some writers have said that they don't know what they themselves are thinking about a topic until they write about it—I can relate to that, although what I'm discussing here goes deeper. I'm trying to avoid collapsing into the usual clichés about writing, while at the same time trying to discuss what is numinous and liminal about the experience of having written something that surprised even yourself. There is indeed something special, something spectacular, about witnessing even your own writing, when it gets to that numinous level. When you're in the flow, in the groove, writing at white heat, feeling inspired—whatever label we want to give the process to try to box it into some unthreatening categorization—it's an amazing feeling. It's beyond rewarding: it's what we live for, as artists.

(Language capable of supporting discussions of the numinous and liminal does exist, but it's more likely to be found in the literature of mythological and anthropological studies, and in the literature of psychology, than it is to be found in the literature of either literary criticism or poetry criticism. The literature of literary criticism has become particularly anemic about discussions of the soul in art. Lit crit has turned largely towards the head, and away from the heart, and lost all sense of enchantment.)

Having said all that, I must return to the essential: For me, whatever numinous experience I might attain from writing, or making visual art, music is even more so. Multiply everything I've said so far about writing, about art-making, and for me, music is even more so.

I'm lucky in one sense about my music: I've made my living from it occasionally, but haven't really had to compromise much to do that. I've made much more of my living doing visual art, doing commercial illustration and design—as a result that's both why I can be egoless about it, when a client asks for a change in an illustration or design, and why I sometimes feel like my visual art isn't as meaningful, is more detached somehow. When I'm doing commercial art or design, I long since got over any pretensions that it was anything more than art made to spec, for clients or art directors, and not fundamentally mine. At the same time I was doing commercial art, I was doing my own fine art, on the side as it were. Occasionally there was overlap, but mostly those domains stayed separated.

I've noticed a tendency among young graduates from design school, who are full of great ideas but don't much real-world experience yet, to believe that what they're doing as commercial artists has a higher Purpose, is in fact Art. But it's not. I read, in the literature that designers write about what they do, many of these same pretensions: that what they're doing has some higher purpose, that great design can change the world. Mostly it doesn't. Mostly it's commercial work for clients. Mostly it doesn't have the opportunity to Change The World. (Occasionally it does, but only rarely.) Designers have the chance, every so often, to create an idea or iconic image or logo that permeates the public consciousness, that is "viral" in the sense that it spreads and self-replicates and keeps popping up in places beyond its original purpose or intent.

But remember that most such viral ideas had a single purpose at their inception: to exercise the imagination in order to get you to buy something. Even Andy Warhol's Campbell's soup cans, as abstracted and iconic as they are, contained an inherent, unavoidable commentary about consumerism—precisely because the image evoked the commercial product. That was deliberate—and subversive, when it was first done. now, post-Warhol, when you see this maneuver done in postmodern art, do you think more about the art, or the product?

I'm lucky in one sense, therefore, that my music has rarely been dominated by commerce. Not that I never got paid for my music—I've sold my share of CDs—but that I wasn't required to modify my music to suit the tastes of the buyer. I've had the artistic luxury, with my music, most of the time, of not having to give a damn what anybody thought about it, and could just do what I wanted to do.

(This may be about to change in the near future. More on that later. And it's why I'm thinking about this today.)

I've heard a dance master, a man who is both accomplished dancer and choreographer, opine that you can't hide in dance. It's too revealing of the self. You can try to act, but in the end, you're always naked. I think the same is true of music. In poetry, and perhaps even more in prose, you can hide: you can present characters who are not you, who are nothing like you at all, yet who are real people to those who encounter them. Dance is done with the self. It leaves you very vulnerable and exposed. Music is the same. When you are on stage, performing music, or performing music you have written, or improvising on the spot, you are incredibly vulnerable, incredibly open, incredibly naked to the world, to the environment, to the feelings of those around you. That is music's (and dance's) great joy: that living connection with others, in the moment, in live performance.

It's also music's great challenge, and great obstacle. Some very private people have been master musicians. In some cases they have talked about how painful it is for them to perform, how they felt too naked on stage, too vulnerable. More than one biography of pianist Glenn Gould has suggested this was one reason he quit performing concerts at the peak of his career. Gould's technique as a pianist, and his radical ideas as a composer and radiobroadcast producer, were stellar, probably even on the level of true genius. But he had many personality quirks and eccentricities; he fought with feelings of isolation, with depression, with disconnection. His musical work was magnificent; I think his radio work for the CBC was equally brilliant with whatever he did at the piano. Nonetheless, he himself said in an interview that playing music onstage was sometimes too painful to endure. He was, I believe, torn between his need to express himself musically, and his strong tendencies towards being an eccentric hermit, a complete isolate.

I don't suffer from Gould's distaste for the audience. When I'm performing music before an audience, I love the connection that happens on the best occasions, when it feels not as if they were passive receivers of your music, but as if all of us were taking a journey together. Taking a journey—together. I might be driving the train, but no one is left behind who wants to come along. That's a kind of performance "natural high" I enjoy every time it happens. When I've given improvised music concerts, I've been known to explicitly thank the audience for taking the journey with us, the musicians.

When you are immersed in making music, you are very naked.

And that is what makes music a sacred act. It is not merely that you are naked and exposed, in yourself and to yourself, or to a living audience. It is also that you are naked to that Immanence that lives in everything, that in sacred space you can see lurking in the backs of the eyes of everyone you have ever loved. You can see the Divine very close to the surface, then, very close to breaking through all the masks and filters, to make direct contact. That Immanence, or Mystery, which I have no good label for—but for which the word "God" is inadequate and misleading, not least because there is so much cultural baggage around the word that isn't what I'm talking about here—sings back at you, when you are singing. It becomes a duet. I've experienced this numinous duet many times in concert.

(I know plenty of writers who would deny this happens, or is even possible: but most writers don't ever directly engage with an audience. Writing itself is a solitary act, in a way that music never is. Most poetry readings seem structured to avoid performance natural highs, and so rarely approach the level of musical performance. People stay in their heads, mostly. It's interesting what writers try to avoid, ennit?)

Music, because it is made up of organized sounds in time, is an environmental medium. It is not safely removed, it is not easy to keep your distance from it. It can never be only purely mental, because sound itself is an immersive medium. We live within a planetary atmosphere, a dynamic fluid medium through which sound-waves propagate in all directions. A sound produced moves outward spherically. Sound is also non-linear; it reflects back on itself, and affects itself depending on its environment. Acoustical physics must account for sound reflections in the spherical domain of resonance and reflection, not only those sounds that come directly from the source. Music is environmental, and immersive. We experience music in our bodies, not just with our ears. Some sound frequencies are more felt than heard, while others can be heard via transmission of vibration through our physical bodies, not just directly into our ears. We feel sound in our bones, in our blood. Big bass booms from a stack of huge speakers at a rock concert shake the air and liquid in our lungs, in our guts. We feel music, we don't just listen to it.

There are those who try to avoid knowing this, of course. They prefer music that stays in the head, and doesn't affect the lungs, or heart, or bone marrow. Of course, music that shakes the lungs has a profound emotional force—and many are those who are afraid of powerful emotions, of whatever type. Ecstasy, to them, is as suspicious as anger, as grief. There are those—many writers I know fall into this group—who would prefer it if life were not so messy, so chaotic, so immersive, so very visceral. They do their best to keep life at a distance, to keep it from affecting them on any deep emotional levels. They want to stay in control—of themselves, of their feelings, or whatever—and will go out of their way to avoid the personal letting-go that is ecstasy, that is dancing, that is a loud music concert. Apollo wants to avoid Dionysus—although both need each other in order to be whole.

But music, like dance, makes you naked. And music is sacred. Not because I say that music is sacred, but because every culture has always said so, everywhere in the world, since the beginning of human time. The greatest, most sublime sculptures of Shiva, carved from the living rock of a cave on an island in the Indian Ocean, sculptures in which the god smiles serenely in perfect tranquility, perfect equanimity, perfect enlightenment, showing us the way—these same sculptures also show us Shiva as dancing, as being in continuous motion. The musician down in the corner of the photograph is playing for the god, to be sure, but also as the god, as an Immanent aspect and mask of the god he is seated beside, as another face of music, which is sounds dancing in the air. The musician is playing for himself, for us, but also for and as Shiva, as the voice and face of the god. Every time he plays his sarod, he is evoking the god seated next to him, behind him, within him, the god who never ceased dancing, who never ceases playing. Each act of making music is a sacred act, both an evocation and reflection of the Divine.

I have always known this to be true. It's just that in some venues you can't talk about it. People don't want to hear it. Talking about it is always a risk, not only of being misunderstood but of being hated for speaking the truth. But in my own music, I am always aware of it. It's always present: music is a sacred act.

Devotions

and Shiva dancing in the flames,
and Shiva dancing in the flames,
and Shiva telling us through flames,
the world, the world is fire. . . ..

—Shiva on the Plains





Dedication: To my Father, who died three years ago, just before Father's Day

Shiva on the Plains

and Shiva dancing in the flames,
and Shiva dancing in the flames,
and Shiva telling us through flames,
the world, the world is fire.

hot blood on the running plains,
the young flamekeeper master
killed by old, old hatreds,
the young boy cut and bleeding,
his blood running on blood-red stones,
and Shiva dances in the blaze,
creating, destroying,
the red light of heaven in his eyes,
he smiles forever, engulfed in flames,
the room burning, the house,
timbers blazing up between close walls,
the neighborhood ablaze, the city leering
on the hill, orange light rising through the pall,
smoke spilling across the hills, the valley
pounded by sun, the world itself in flames.

the god looks on and dances,
the red light of heaven in his burning eyes,
smiling at the stones;
beneath his feet, the corpses in the sun,
rooted dismembered trees,
trampled and burning, the perfume of death, reborn,
wild grasses and circling carrion birds,
the soil of the sun,
the young boy cut and scattered,
the cables of his life spread
split across the anvil of the sun,
fire burning over all, hot red sun,
the sky itself aflame,
and Shiva dances in the flames,
and Shiva dancing in the flames,
creating, destroying,
crushing the demons of noise,
dancing in the circling blaze,
a fiery diamond in his grasp,
his hands a flicker of blood,
his hands drumming the beating heart,
drumming the rhythm of the mountains singing,
the soil of the sun,
the lights of heaven in the god’s still eyes.

the world is burning, the world is fire,
the watchfires built high, immense upon
the anvil of the sun, air striking blows like fever,
stark and shaking and gigantic,
vultures gathering around the torch of self-immolation,
feeding on the well-cooked dead,
and Shiva dances in the flames,
staring across the shimmering devastation,
the world a wall of fire, hot blood hiding in the stone,
red tongues licking at the sun,
burning every wall on which the shadows flicker,
destroying what the shaper sees
enscribed within the circle
of the known, knowing what the red eyes read,
destroying all that has been made, what will be made,
weak hands sifting through the bloodied ashes
of the sun, the young boy cut and shattered on the stone,
water pouring through him and becoming steam,
and Shiva smiling in the flames.

it is enough, Lord, it is too much,
and Shiva dances in the flames,
and Shiva dances in the flames,
and Shiva dancing in the flames,
and Shiva telling us through flames,
the world,
the world is fire.

India In Me

a Spiral Dance essay

There's no doubt that spending my earliest childhood in southern India was a life-shaping experience. All my earliest memories are of India, the land, the smells, the warm tropical nights, the monsoon. Each time I've returned to the tropics as an adult, these earliest childhood impressions surge up again. When I lived and studied in Java, Indonesia, on a Fulbright grant to study gamelan music as a composer, I had many flashbacks and memories come up. It's fascinating how much memory is tied to smells. The smell of rotting fruit under a tree by the side of the house. The smell of enormous, sensual, sexual tropical flowers in all their glory, and the scents being carried more powerfully when the air is heavy with humidity. Whenever I visit a tropical room in a conservatory here in the Upper Midwest, that rooting-vegetation smell, sometimes like old bananas, sometimes like eucalyptus mixed with fig and freshly-turned humus, takes me back. My friends might turn up their noses, but to me it's a scent of home.

When my family returned to the USA, when I was almost seven years old, returning to the Upper Midwest, to the Great Lakes state, Michigan, where I was born if not familiar to me in any memory yet, it was a shock to the system. I was beyond disoriented. It spun me into a shock so profound that I felt both numb and frozen. For one thing, it was cold here all the time, even in late summer. My body still prefers langorous tropical warmth to winter's bitter cold, and luxuriates whenever I can have a sauna or spend sunbathe shirtless or nude on beach sand or granite boulders on a hot late-summer afternoon. I spent my remaining childhood and young adult years, living in Ann Arbor, on the northeast edge of town, going wild each summer, riding my bicycle everywhere, wearing as little clothing as one could get away with, almost always shirtless, tanning each year by summer's end to penny-brown. We're a family of redheads, but I was a strawberry-blond thanks to my mother's Norski side of the family, and I could tan while my sister never could, but just burned. I gloried in the summer heat. People who don't live here often don't realize that, while the Upper Midwest can get terrifyingly cold in midwinter, it can also get very hot in summer. In northernmost Minnesota, some years there can be a 140 degree temperature swing between that week every July or August when the thermometer climbs to the triple digits, and every January when it can sink to 40 below. I've always felt most alive in the heat, most comfortable in my skin. My bad knees stop clicking when I climb stairs. The sweat rolls down your ribs and thighs like baptism.

When we returned to the USA, it was a return to a country, a land I didn't remember. My parents told me we were going "home," but it was to a home of which I had neither memory nor knowledge. A place I felt no connection to. I often still feel like a visitor rather than a native. In fact I've spent more of my life overseas than the average American, much more. That shapes both perspective and attitude.

How do you separate out what's innate and what's environmental? Was I already a shy boy when I was first thrust into the American public school system, finding it hard to make friends, wanting only to be liked but too self-conscious to be self-confident and secure? Or did I become shy because I felt so alien? Nature or nurture? What makes you that way? I know that I was already socialized to converse with adults by that age, as I had no nearby friends my own age in India; we saw each other only rarely. I remember that I was always more comfortable talking to adults than to my age-mates, a feeling that endured into my twenties. Was I already an introvert? Probably. Making friends was doubly hard because I was dropped suddenly into this alien and unknown context, and had to figure out how to adapt on my own. What I loved about school was learning new things on a daily basis; I was a knowledge sponge, absorbing everything as fast as I could. What I hated about school was the people I had to interact with, many of whom I couldn't figure out how to trust.

Imagine, if you will: You're approaching seven years old. You've never in your life seen a television set before, much less watched TV. You've never heard pop songs on commercial radio before. Your parents are both musical, your mother professionally trained in classical music, your father a gifted amateur who's an opera buff; so you've heard mostly classical music and opera on the antique wind-up Victrola record player, usually during and after dinner. Pop music? What's that? You've also been to both Hindu and Muslim weddings, and heard the music associated with those. Otherwise, it was the wheezy pump organ in the church, or the occasional piano. You have nothing in common with your so-called peers in your age category. Not even your language, since you grew up in a relic of the British Empire, surrounded mostly by Canadians and Brits and Indians; you vocabulary is Anglo-Indian, and you drink tea. Soft drinks were a marvel, a world of nose-tickling fizz never before explored. You played tennis on the neighborhood courts in India, when the family was in the hill country, but you've never seen a baseball or basketball before. You love to swim, and love to be in water, but you're otherwise not much interested in sports. It's not that you're not athletic, but that there isn't much common ground. How can you take seriously a game like football where the ball doesn't even bounce properly? Boxing still seems too vulgar to call sport. You're pretty good at volleyball, though. Still. What do you do? How do you cope? Who do you make friends with? Who can you talk to who can understand you, really? Shared experience in relationship is the root of empathy. How do you learn to empathize with aliens who have no idea what you're talking about? Add to all this the teachers quickly singling you out as being one of the brightest kids in their classrooms. No wonder you got beat up and bullied for so many years. Being the teacher's pet was only part of it. School was a glorious trauma for years. The bullying didn't really cease until high school, when for reasons unknown the captains of the high school football team decided that they liked me and suddenly I was under their full protection. I even got invited to the popular crowd's parties a few times, for the first time ever.

Just to be clear, earlier in life this became a spiritual wound, something that forced me to go deeper inside and explore my own experience and inner landscape to find touchstones, when none were provided in the outer world. It was a deep wound, and long an inarticulate one. I still don't really believe that most of my friends can really understand this aspect of myself, so I don't talk about it often. It was a wound. It's not so much of a wound anymore, though. A great deal of it has been healed. And that healing came via self-understanding, by that soulful spelunking that was also necessary refuge. There's always more to discover, of course. Only a fool thinks he knows himself completely. Just to be clear, it's a wound that no longer dominates, that marked me but which I learned from, and which I learned to overcome. There's a scar there, not a seeping sore. I do still sometimes get stuck in acceptance: in wanting to be loved, even in situations in which that desire is foolish. I catch myself at it far sooner than I used to, and do it differently now, after catching myself; that is most of what I can say.

So I've never really felt like a born and bred American. I've always felt a little alien and disconnected to the social structures of the USA. Some of them I like and have grown to align myself with. Others I can only approach as if they were alien microbes viewed under a microscope. I often feel like an immigrant rather than a native. Often I feel a lot of empathy for immigrants, for refugees, for displaced persons, many of whom have survived far harsher circumstances than you or I could ever comprehend. I feel like an outsider in my own land; as I once formulated it for an academic paper on ethnomusicology, an insider/outsider, one with a foot in either perspective, always walking that borderline without ever feeling completely in either camp.

The land of North America itself, though, I immediately connected to. The land itself is what keeps me here, connected and rooted to its beauty and power. The land keeps me alive, and nourishes me in ways other powers rarely do. The land of the Great Lakes region speaks to me as if indeed it were my home. Those times I can best listen, I feel at home here. Just as the mountains of Wyoming and the Southwest also speak of a certain kind of home to me; as does the Pacific Ocean, whenever I am near it. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean are not separate, and I can stand on the shores of California and feel my way across the long water to those beaches near Madras, and north, where I played as a child. I have photos of myself surfing in quiet shallow waters on the east coast of the Indian peninsula; had we stayed near an ocean, rather than the Great Lakes, when I was a child, I might have continued surfing. When the tsunami struck Madras in 2004, it was doubly wrenching for my family because that was our part of India, the part we knew well; some of those beaches were ones we had explored.



And I carry India in me still. My experience of India, which is not a native Indian's, but that of a long-term visitor. Still, children arrive with no preconceptions. They have to be taught their prejudices. Hatred is not innate, no matter what else is, even fear. So children can feel at home even where they know they're not, and where their parents are clear foreigners. How much can a child go native? I don't know; but I suspect more than most adults imagine.

I have an affinity for the Hindu gods of southern India. I feel at times closer to Shiva or Ganesh than I do to any of the Christian saints or symbols. I'd have to call myself a post-Christian: raised in a Protestant faith, a rather intellectual one to be honest, but not attached to either the institution or how it shapes the liturgy. I feel closer to the bhakti poets with their songs to the Lord of the Meeting Waters than I do to gospel music; while I view "contemporary Christian" pop/rock as a chasm of contradictions. (A heavy metal handbanger song about Jesus as your personal savior? It makes one's head spin.) I'm more drawn to individualistic spiritual explorers than to mass worship of any kind; more drawn to monks and mystics than mega-churches. I carry an image of Ganesh in my truck, in his role as Lord of the Crossroads and Remover of Obstacles. The truck feels naked without Ganesha's soothing presence on board. I have a personal altar in my living room, which has both Russian icons of the Sacred Heart, meditating Buddhas, and a large statue of Shiva Nataraj, the Lord of the Dance.

What's the thread that ties all this together? I'm being too revealing in even mentioning any of this, but I've come to believe that it's part of India in me: an eclecticism and open-armed approach to faith that is experiential rather than dogmatic. If you consult the historians and anthropologists you come away with the impression that India is a muddle of thousands of local gods, each expressing something larger behind their local face-masks. Hinduism is decentralized and both regional and local. There is no One Abiding Creed, one set of ultimate truths that everyone can agree to. It's a collection of accumulated local faiths that grew and merged, and overlapped somewhat while still remaining local and personal, both small and large at the same time. Some theologians would no doubt argue with this impression, but in practice it holds a great deal of truth. Different versions of the same gods, arising in infinitely varied manifestations, scatter the landscape.

In the continental USA, I feel many local gods in many places. Some places have a strong spirit to them. A mountain seems to look back at you, when you contemplate it. The bluffs above a glacial lake seem charged with electricity. Viewing the sunset from a natural stone bench above the ocean, trying to catch the green flash, is charged with portent and meaning. How is this different than the Japanese Shinto sense of the kami, the gods and spirits that inhabit specific sacred locations? How is this different from the Native American sense of gods in the landscape, a common thread to several tribal nations no matter what else they might differ on?

This feeling, this universal human instinct to perceive and protect what is sacred in one's own backyard, is a thread that runs through every faith, even the big organized institutional religions; the local spirits might be frowned upon, or they might be acknowledged by being re-labeled as saints or angels. The action of spirit is always personal and local, specific and universal simultaneously. God is a verb. In "religions" which are more sets of gathered myths and traditions than anything formalized and dogmatic and centrally-controlled, this awareness is simply more overt and obvious. It's at the surface of faith, rather than concealed behind a mask of conformity. The individualism of Native American spiritual traditions has become rather well-known; choice and vision are closer to the surface of social awareness. This kind of spiritual practice, local and personal, is why I often joke that I prefer dis-organized religions to those well-organized. Many of the re-invented, or re-discovered, neo-pagan faiths such as Wicca show this style as well. Although one does note that many Catholics converted to Wicca still tend to prefer high-church organized, formal and dramatized rituals over spontaneous kitchen-witch private magick. Perhaps it's all what one grows up with, that sets those preferences. If you're a kitchen-witch in spiritual preference, are you also one in the kitchen, and in your creative work? You see how all this might tie together, more products of personality and early experience than we often care to realize?

Is my worldview more inclined to see the local spirits this way, because of my childhood in India? It seems possible. I do believe it's true that my experience opened up in me the awareness of its possibility. And travel does broaden one's perspective, a cliché that is true at its core. Most people I've met who've traveled extensively do have a different perspective on life than those who never leave their local gods behind. I don't claim to have been specially enlightened by my travels—and yet, there is a difference. Perhaps it's an simple as having more images under one's belt with which to make synergies and comparisons.

And India was where I had my first visionary experiences. I can remember several numinous and liminal experiences that starting ringing through my life as a child. I was probably five when they started to happen; but perhaps they had always happened, and I wasn't sentient enough, as young children are not, till age five to be able to remember them now. I sometimes tell people now that I was five when I first started seeing angels, because it gives them a word whose context and frame of reference they can comprehend; but in fact I don't think of it as seeing angels, or seeing dead people, or whatever, but of having encounters with the local spirits and local gods.

"Vision" is a misleading word because a visionary experience is full-sensory, somatic, spine-tingling, often incredibly sensual, and involves your whole body, your whole spirit, your whole being. It's not an intellectual "Aha!" nor some safely-distanced sight-experience like watching a movie on a big screen twenty feet away from your nose. You're inside it, not looking at it from a safe distance. Rilke wrote Every angel is terrifying and he was absolutely accurate; he also wrote Beauty is but the beginning of terror, and this too is also accurate; although it is often misunderstood as fear of personal (ego) annihilation, although in fact what one most fears is one's inability to share one's experience with others without being completely misunderstood. There's a reason many mystics can't talk about what they've experienced: this is one arena in which words fail utterly. Poets' biases about the power of language aside, even the old Celtic bards knew that there were things they had no adequate word-horde to convey. After beating your head against the stubborn wall of incomprehension for awhile, some decide to stop; and they simply go silent. Not me, though, in my willful and arrogant desire to share; I can't seem to shut up, struggle as I constantly do with the inadequacy of saying anything at all. Why? Because I've seen the look in the eyes of the silent ones, that look haunted with light rather than shadow, that you'd miss unless you've shared the numinous experience of being immolated by the Light. Someone needs to talk about it, for those who can't or won't.

I was trained early in science. I tend to take an experimental and experiential approach to spiritual belief. I base what I know on what I've experienced. I don't accept a lot of received wisdom, and what I do accept I test first against my own cosmology and experience. It's a mystic's way, a shaman's way, a practical way. A way in which spiritual technology lives side by side with Mystery, in which Mystery is accepted rather than denied or attacked. Any faith that gives you all the answers, or tries to, should be looked upon with distrust. Everything is always provisional, and Mystery will always envelop the rest of life.

I was a boy in India when I first started having visions. My first connections to the natural world; hearing the rocks thinking; seeing presences that no one else could see. In India, the world started to open up around in me in ways beyond understanding, expanding and enveloping my small life in something very large and powerful.

I remember one afternoon, when I was supposed to be napping in my room, I snuck out of the house and went over to the laundry area—cement basins and tubs and wash areas, where the servants for all the houses in the compound washed clothes and linens. It was a hot, humid Indian afternoon in the dry season. I snuck into the tubs, there was still a little water dampening the stones, and I took off all my clothes, just to feel the heat of the day on my skin. It was sensual, hot in the air, the stone cooler under my backside. I was blasted with light. I gradually felt overcome with and enveloped by bright white Light. Time seemed to stop. All the sounds around me seemed to recede into the far distance. The Light became everything. I felt tingles of energy all through my body, and I felt everything on my skin, the air, the sunlight, the cool damp stone under me. And in the growing silence, which seemed to last a very long time, I felt something like a smile standing behind the Light. It lingered a long time, then everything faded away back to normal. I sat there flushed, feeling very tired and still. Eventually I put my clothes back on and snuck back into the house, went back and laid on my bed and eventually had a genuine nap. Very little clock time had passed. This happened when I was about five years old.

I remember walking down an aisle of stone statues carved from huge blocks of living rock, a sacred aisle behind the temple of Mahabalipuram in Tamil Nadu, in southern India. Many of the statues were carved from boulders and cliffs already there. Life-size statues of elephants strolled down the aisle, in between miniature temples, palm trees, and more. It was dusk. I ran ahead of my parents and our Indian guide, ran down the aisle to tis end then turned to look back and waved. For a moment the light seemed dark and dense, and I couldn't see or hear anyone else; as if they had all gone down another path, and I seemed to be alone. In the purple light of dusk, just after sunset, the elephants seemed to come to life, and walk forward. The carvings were so life-like already, this wasn't much of a leap. Nonetheless they seemed to stride towards me. Then I blinked and the vision was gone, my parents were there again in the aisle, several yards away, and sounds returned, and the light of dusk returned to blue rather than purple. I was probably about 6 years old when this happened.

In India, as a boy, I began having visions. They followed me, and stayed with me. I soon began to realize I was experiencing things other people weren't. They weren't dangerous, and no harm was ever done. It was always full-sensory, often sensual, somatic, kinesthetic, smells, tastes, and hearing—never just sight. Things altered to something else, then returned to normative. There were other events. The common thread that has run through them all, throughout my life, is the experience of overpowering, actinic Light. And silence, in some form or another.

When my family came back to the US, all of this came with me. I was put in public school, and I learned how to learn, always teaching myself more than the classroom alone intended. I learned to discover and research on my own. If something interested me, I pursued it as far as I could. In middle school, I began to read about comparative religion, looking to understand the visions, to find some context for them. To try to understand what was happening, who I might be. That course of study eventually lead me towards panentheism, towards the earth-based spiritualities and faiths, towards shamanism, towards affirmation rather than rationalization. And I begin to think, now, that this is India in me: a cluster of local gods, both immanent and transcendent, both particular and universal, local yet omnipresent. Principles rather than persons. Presences and powers and principalities, very much engaged and alive and active, not distant and removed. No wind-up universes set in motion by some absconded clockmaker. In India, I remember seeing temple festivals and ceremonies in which people were fully engaged, fully participant. Neither abstract nor discorporate, but somatic, direct, personal, touching. Moving, as Spirit moves in all things.

Mysticism has been defined as direct experience of the Divine, without mediation or the frames of received dogma. Mysticism has been described as the core experience of all great religions; the institutional structures are what are local and specific and culturally-bound, while the experience itself is a universal human birthright. Its tropes and patterns and concepts appear everywhere, over and over again. Did India make me a mystic, or would I have had visions at that young age no matter where I was? Nature or nurture? What I do believe is that my childhood in India opened that door to awareness earlier in my life than might have happened elsewhere. It provided a context and framework that intellectual Protestant faiths do not. It may have made me more open, more aware, more available to that Light. In India, a Light breaking through was likely to happen anywhere, anytime. The very land is infused with millennia of sacred action, sacred music and dance, temple worship. The air and ground are so alive.

So, nature or nurture? I'm not sure it matters. Still I carry India in me, an open and inviting door. I carry those many local gods around in me, as Masks of God, presences felt and familiar. The memories last beyond time and place, and connect as one this land I live on with that land I once lived on. I see the same forces everywhere I go, the same patterns and powers. What is universal is very particular, and what is very specific to this place partakes of what empowers that other place. It's the oneness that is made up of the many. The many emanations that arise from the One.

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(Previous Spiral Dance essays can be found here.)

How Did You End Up Here?

The tendency to make lists is an attempt to impose order on chaos. I was reading Jim Harrison's memoir of being a lifelong writer, Off to the Side, in which he makes many memorable and pithy comments, but few lists. Last night I read the section about his early career as an academic, to which he was entirely unsuited. As almost an aside he commented how writing memoir is a way of imposing narrative order on chaos; that in fact life is very accidental, even good luck and bad luck are accidental. As we go through life, flailing about to find some security which we never fully achieve, everything seems incredibly chaotic. The only narrative order we can create comes later on, in retrospect or hindsight. The steps in life you took to get where you are today may seem incredibly clear, even fated, when you look back on them from today. But the illusion of narrative comes from having walked the roads, in the order in which you walked them, to get where you are now, on this road, today. It's very much an illusion. There was no prior determinant, in most cases, no guiding hand apparent beforehand, so that twenty years ago you could have predicted where you are now. Many people I know have expressed amazement, later in life, that things went the way they did: I never imagined I'd end up here! Any self-aware writer should know better than to believe life is anything more than a chaotic mass of accidents, synchronicities, and miniature set-pieces.

Nonetheless, one can examine the set-pieces and events that did happen. Memory, for the most part, is reliable when dealing with one's emotional and intellectual histories, and while most memoirs could never completely stand the interrogation of the rules of evidence of our legal system, there's truth even in the lies we tell ourselves. Often fantasy and fiction can tell more of the truth than the pure facts ever could.

So while it's interesting to me to read other writers' lists of influences—those books and/or writers who turned them on when they were young, who excited them and inspired them to try writing, too—it's a sort of list-making that I prefer to regard as entertainment rather than essential. If there is a necessary aspect to making a list of one's own influences, it is powered by the Socratic dictum to Know Thyself!, which I heartily approve of. Self-reflection and self-knowledge are important to anyone, perhaps especially to artists and writers. We mine our lives for our material, including our pasts. It is essential to know who you are, and how you got to be that way. Without that essential knowledge, change and growth are never choices but have all the appearance of outside forces of nature.

Carl Jung wrote: When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate. The truth of that is doubly important to the artist. Paradoxically, the illusion of narrative that is made of accidents and synchronicities is also determined for us by our own inner selves; what seems to be our fate to fail at one thing only to succeed at another. Jung also wrote: The more one sees of human fate and the more one examines its secret springs of action, the more one is impressed by the strength of unconscious motives and by the limitations of free choice. We call the unconscious nothing, and yet it is a reality in potentia. The thought we shall think, the deed we shall do, even fate we shall lament tomorrow, all lie unconscious in us today. The work we do on ourselves, the work we do as artists, cannot be compartmentalized. This doesn't mean that all art-making is therapy (even when it is in fact therapeutic), but rather that all that we do is one work, one body of work. Making a life for oneself is a work of art, haphazard and hapless as it might often seem. Which is stronger, our intentions and willfulness for we want, or our deeper selves that actually have more a clue about what's going on? Jung comments: Consciousness succumbs all too easily to unconscious influences, and these are often truer and wiser than our conscious thinking. Also, it frequently happens that unconscious motives overrule our conscious decisions, especially in matters of vital importance. Indeed, the fate of the individual is largely dependent on unconscious factors. Becoming conscious, learning to live consciously, becoming aware of one's own driving forces, mastering impulses, innate tendencies—that's the road to actual will, genuine choices made out of awareness rather than by accident. One last, very relevant, comment from Jung: The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purpose through him... it is sometimes so heavy a burden that he is fated to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being. It is a fundamental error to try to subject our own fate at call costs to our will. Our will is a function regulated by reflection; hence it is dependent on the quality of that reflection. The right way to wholeness is made up of fateful detours and wrong turnings.

So, how did we end up here, anyway? What got us here, to be the artists we currently are? There's an exercise I've seen around lately in which poets try to list the books and/or authors that inspired them to become poets. It's an interesting exercise, in that it provides an opportunity for looking within. It's wise to keep in mind, however, that such lists are historical fictions—as we said before, narratives imposed upon lives which are always chaotic. It's also wise to remember that such lists might change; if you do the practice of making your lists of influences every ten years, it might change. The one exercise among all these lists—and the urge to make compile lists seems to be an innate function of ordering and categorizing one's life—that seems least likely to change every ten years is the list of books that got you going, that first turned you on. Just keep in mind that you might not like some of those books anymore, now; and that that's okay.

The best way to teach yourself how to write poetry remains, and always will, the act of reading lots of poetry. Read, read, read, absorb, read, write a little, read some more, read, read, maybe write a little, but never stop reading, reading, reading. Your best teachers are those mentors who you may never come to know personally but whose writings have awoken in you a physical response, a shortness of breath, a pounding heart, an emotional surge, a spine tingling hair raising response. Your best mentors are those other writers who have gone before you who somehow seem to speak directly, across any distance of time or place, to your innermost self. What is universally human is what connects us all to each other; the arts are one way we connect and speak to each other, across all barriers.

I sometimes think poets whose success comes too young—and by "success" we might simply mean getting published at all rather than some level of financial support—get stuck more easily. The temptation becomes to repeat oneself in order to repeat one's successes. If you look at many of the winners of the Yale Younger Poet award, many never evolved or grew in their art past a certain point. While it is good to encourage younger artists with recognition, there's also an inherent shadow of failure implicit in artists who get too much recognition too quickly. One lesson many of these never seem to learn, that early success does not teach, is how to pick oneself up again after an inevitable failure. No artist ever creates at the top of their game 100 percent of the time; every career has slack points and failures. Early success can lead to early failure, and artists who have had little life-experience as yet can be fragile. They fall apart. They get stuck. The shadow side of early success is that it can lead to a short career: more like a shooting star than the moon's constant glow.

Far better, perhaps, for an artist to be "discovered" later in life. Most "overnight successes" that extend into a durable artistic career happen to artists who have already spent years, even decades, doing their art, doing their work. For one thing, they've learned how to survive failures, they don't success seriously as a goal in itself (although it's certainly worthy of being enjoyed!), and they're more detached, more steady in their gaze at the whirlwind of fame and fortune. If success suddenly vanished, many would shrug and keep on doing what they did all along, making their art. The whirlwind of fashion is no safe ground upon which to stand.

Where am I going with this ramble? How did I end up here? This meditation on list-making as memoir was triggered by seeing a lot of lists going around lately, specifically, poets making up lists of those books that inspired them to try writing their own poetry. Again, it's an interesting exercise, and I intend to get to it.

And I want to be clear that the list of books that inspired me to write poetry, the list of favorite books, and the list of life-changing books I've read, are not the same list. There is overlap, but each is a unique list. Each list provides a slightly different set of insights into one's own wellsprings and sources.

Each list is also provisional, always to be revised. The vagaries of memory, like the vagaries of memoir, as such that one almost always remembers something later, when doing the dishes for example, that one should have added to the list. One must revise. One remonstrates oneself with a slap to the forehead, virtual or actual, and a cry of How could I have possibly forgotten that book! So the process of making such lists is both open-ended and an occasional source of low comedy.

The provisional nature of such lists should also make it clear that these lists are personal and idiosyncratic. They are not lists of recommended reading, they are lists that mattered to you or me, but not necessarily to anyone else. People usually tell you what they think you should do, rather than what they've done. Lists are often used as proscriptions, as advice, rather than as maps for territory already discovered. Or, This is what worked for me; I'll share it with you, because it might work for you, too; but I don't assume it will. Find out for yourself. That's the attitude I prefer.

People will tell you where they've gone
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
—Joni Mitchell, Amelia

I'm stalling. It's hard to compile a list of books that inspired to try to write poetry. Some of those books are still favorites, of course, but others are harder to remember because they've fallen to the wayside, have not been re-read in years. One moves on. Here's that fictional narrative again: I'm trying to reconstruct that time in life, when those fires were lit. But in the fog of memory it can seem as though those fires were always lit, always burning, and just looking for an outlet. It's hard to find precise moments to label as beginning-points for things that seem eternal, even predestined—fated, in hindsight—and might even go back before this one lifetime into something much older than one's personal self or recollections.

In the case of one book in particular, I can definitely say that the book gave me permission to bank my fires in the direction I wanted to go; it gave me permission to write the kind of poetry I wanted to write, in the kind of style and voice that seemed most natural to me at the time. It gave me permission to write the way I wanted to write, rather than have to follow someone else's idea of poetry "should" look like. In later years, I wrote a letter to the poet about her book, telling her all this, and received a very nice note of appreciation in response. The book in question is Jean Valentine's Ordinary Things. It remains a touchstone for me, as a poet; a rooted placed to return to, if I feel I have strayed too far out, and lost my way.

One last detour before I force myself to reluctantly execute my actual list. It's important to say that poets should read a lot more than just poetry. It's always been interesting to me that many physicists of high stature have often been interested in literature and the arts, while the reverse has not often been true. Far too many writers think they can get away with reading only within their own domain. They don't read outside the kind of writing that themselves want to do. Well, poets definitely ought to read lots of poetry; but they ought to read a lot more than just poetry. A lot of bad poetry is obviously insular and blinkered in its sources. And a lot of bad poetry also comes out of not really having lived life to the hilt. If you look at the resumés of most poets these days, you don't see the long lists of part-time jobs used to see; nowadays you mostly see their academic credentials, especially their MFAs in poetry. I still think the best writers are those who've lived enough real life to have something to say—all the poetic craft in the world means nothing if you don't really have anything to say.

So on my list of books that inspired me to try to write poetry you'll find books that aren't poetry. You'll find books that aren't even considered literature by the Literary Mainstream. But they each and every one lit or banked those fires. They got me going, and inspired me to try my hand, to get busy, to jump off the cliff and see if I could fly. It's important to remember that poetic writing can occur in prose, in essay, in fiction, in ways that can inspire a poetic response, as a poem. Categories like "prose" and "poetry" often seem to break down, in my mind, when the writing is at white heat, ecstatic, exalted, no matter what literary form it takes.

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Here then, in no particular order, is my idiosyncratic and probably atypical list of circa twenty books that inspired me to try to write poems myself:

Jean Valentine: Ordinary Things

John Cage: Silence and A Year from Monday

Oxford Anthology of English Poetry, ed. by Howard Foster Lowry and Willard Thorp (1935 edition)
Either my parents had had this book for awhile, or I bought it used as a boy. I don't remember which. There is an inscription on the flyleaf that shows the book was once owned by a family friend, who was also a well-known Ann Arbor businessman with an eponymous store, John Leidy. So I don't know anymore how the book came to me, and I can't remember a time when it wasn't on my shelves.

Allen Ginsberg: Mind Breaths and Howl
Apparently I'm unique in that Howl wasn't actually the first Ginsberg I read, or the first poem of his that really excited me. When a book is so famous that everyone claims to have read it even when they haven't, I get a little wary. I often wait till later, despite scores of recommendations, till when the pressure's off and I can read it with an open mind and no prior expectations. This is also probably why I didn't get into Whitman and Dickinson very passionately until much later; although I read them, and knew who they were, they didn't directly inspire me to write poems at that time. Indirectly they did of course, via Ginsberg, who also indirectly gave me a William Blake influence.

Conrad Aiken: The Jig of Forslin

Ursula K. LeGuin: Wild Angels (Capra Chapbook Series edition, 1975)

George Mackay Brown: Fishermen With Ploughs
Truly, I discovered GMB through musical settings of his poems by his close friend and frequent collaborator, Peter Maxwell Davies. My first introduction to GMB was in hearing Davies' piece for mezzosoprano and guitar, Dark Angels, which just knocked my socks off.

Federico Garcia Lorca: Gypsy Ballads and Poet In New York
Again, a musical introduction. I first encountered Lorca's words via their settings in pieces by George Crumb such as Ancient Voices of Children. It was an immediate sense of magic in the world that I was compelled to seek out and learn. More than once in my latter teens, when I was already a composer mostly interested in avant-garde contemporary music, did I discover a poet through a musical setting.

Jerome Rothenberg, editor and commentator of two seminal anthologies of world poetry: Shaking the Pumpkin and Technicians of the Sacred

Miguel Serrano: The Ultimate Flower and The Serpent of Paradise: The story of an Indian pilgrimage

Nikos Kazantzakis: Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises

Carl Jung: Mandala Symbolilsm and Answer to Job

Rainer Maria Rilke: The Book of Images and New Poems (1907, 1908)
Actually it was my encounters with individual poems, and with the Letters to a Young Poet that inspired me. I heard a vast cathedral of silence and natural light open up inside me when I read Evening or The Panther or Archaic Torso of Apollo. The individual poems, anthologized here and there, were what inspired me, and also led me to go much deeper into studying Rilke. The one book that probably had the most responsibility for setting this off was Robert Bly's Selected Poems of Rainer Maria Rilke.

Yang Wan-Li (trans. by Jonathon Chaves): Heaven My Blanket, Earth My Pillow
This Song-Dynasty poet was so important to me, his voice so distinctive and as I felt then personally speaking directly to my own life, that I read this book several times in a row, when I first got it in the late 1970s.

A. K. Ramanujan, trans.: Speaking of Siva
This is an anthology of free-verse lyrics by four major saint-poets of the 10th century bhakti protest movement in south India, the place I grew up. The lyrics were considered radical because they broke away from traditional poetic forms while at the same time philosophically rejecting tradition and ritual. The poets of this movement concentrated on the subject rather than the object of worship, writing passionately and personally of their relationship to Shiva, which was direct and unmediated. These are poems of mystical union with the divine beloved, and bhakti was a word that means direct worship and direct contact with the Divine. The implication is a personal relationship rather than one mediated by the priestly caste with their formal rituals and ossified traditions. Very radical poems in their context. To me they symbolized breaking free of formalism and tradition, and like Jean Valentine's book, mentioned above, gave me permission to write informally and directly.

You may have noticed that a few of these books have a strong Indian connection; I was in my late teens and early twenties trying to reconcile my Indian childhood with my American young adulthood, and working towards integrating those very different aspects of my experience and my self. This is what led me to discover Miguel Serrano, mentioned above, and later, Octavio Paz.

The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, trans. by Ivan Morris

C.A. Patrides, ed.: The English Poems of George Herbert
Again, a poet of direct, sometimes violent, personal confrontation with the mystical and the Divine. I related much more to Herbert's violence and restlessness than to most of the other so-called Metaphysical Poets, who (except for Donne) all seemed rather too cerebral and dispassionate for my taste.

Are you seeing a trend yet? I certainly am: I was trying to understand my own visionary experiences, figure out who I was and how to deal with them. Poetry was for me a better road towards understanding than any scripture from any established religious tradition. This also led me to discover Rumi at this time—but I was not inspired by Rumi to write poetry by any of the translations I could find at that time; that came later, when Coleman Barks began publishing his luminous versions of Rumi.

Samuel R. Delany: Babel-17
A brilliant science fiction novel about language, poetry, love/sex, telepathy and consciousness. That's a bad synopsis of a novel too complex to easily describe. The main character was a poet, lover, and adventurer, who I came to identify with. Delany's prose has always inspired me towards poetry. It stands as a landmark example of "poetic prose."

Robert Bly, ed. News of the Universe: Poems of Twofold Consciousness
A poetry anthology as seminal to me as Rothenberg's, and another early encounter with Rilke, Lorca, Rexroth, Jeffers, and Neruda, among others, who I later sought out and studied more deeply.

Lucien Stryk, Takashi Ikemoto, Taigan Takayama, eds. and trans.: The Crane's Bill: Zen poems of China and Japan

Sheila Moon: Knee Deep in Thunder
A young adult novel, the first in a trilogy, based on Navajo cosmology. I found it in the grade school library when I was ten or eleven, and it knocked my socks off. It's partially what got me interested in Navajo myth, language, and cosmology. Moon was a Jungian analyst and poet, who wrote both scholarly studies and personal essays as well as poems.

Dorothy Berkley Phillips, Elizabeth Boyden Howes, Lucille M. Nixon, eds.: The Choice Is Always Ours: An anthology on the religious way.
I first read this anthology when I was 16, at the same time I was reading Huston Smith's classic The Religions of Man. What makes this anthology unique and accessible is that's about one-third poetry. It was another early encounter with Rilke, as well as my first encounter with Meister Eckhart, almost my first encounter with Jung, Thomas Merton, and Paul Tillich. It's a book you dip into rather than read linearly; you can let it fall open to almost any page and find some kind of insight or solace. Much of the prose by the more mystical writers is again very poetic prose.

That's enough for now. No doubt I could list more, if I spent more time looking back in memory or over my bookshelves. I'll let this stand as testament, though. What I learn from doing it, at the moment, is that some themes in one's life and one's writing seem to have always been there, coming into fruition and deepening with time, more reading, and more experience—but they sustain themselves throughout one's life as long echoes and durable interests. Some early interests and fascinations—a lot of this was autodidactic reading, too, not directly prescribed by school studies—are in fact life-long interests. Some themes seem bone-deep and eternal.