Painting: Digital

Another aspect of painting that I've been exploring is digital painting, using various apps on my iPad. I find this to be very rewarding, in part because I can work quickly or slowly, save and come back later if necessary. There are some paintings I've been working on for awhile, some others made with the quickness of a Zen lightning flash across the mind.

At the high end of software apps I'm using, with amazingly flexible and editable tools, are ArtRage and ProCreate and ArtStudio, all of which allow you to create full art on your tablet. Another couple of favorites, which are a little idiosyncratic and less purely about painting are Flowpaper and ZenBrush. I have several other drawing and painting and sketching apps, but I find myself using this group most often. ArtRage and ProCreate in particular are the ones for painting using my own photographs as reference images. A lot of the images I'm creating are sketches, just five-finger exercises. I don't consider many things here to be finished art. Although a few are, particularly those new paintings I've made from existing photographs.

This style of painting, of painting-over, of making art based on photographs, is something that strongly appeals to me. I make new art from existing images, not by reproducing them but in fact by refusing to reproduce them exactly; rather, by creating a new version that is more abstract, more painterly, as if a plein air painting done on the inspiration of the place and time where I had made the photograph. Many landscape painters have used photographs as references for their paintings. In my case, I am using photos as reference, but also in some cases as source material: painting over the painting itself, sampling the colors, and working the image till it evokes a more abstract mood and style. A fresh painting made in a new mode. I feel that this mode is the best, most actually artistic, of what I'm doing with digital painting for now.


Moonrise, 2012

•

A completely different kind of visual art that I'm doing is combining writing, calligraphy, and drawings of various types. Little visual haiku. Precedents in Japanese haiga, which are paintings with haiku, not really illustrations but a combined artform. Brushwork on painting, on photography. Blending media. Layered imagery and words.



Haiku are a quick form of poem, something that happens spontaneously and with clarity of mind, out of clarity of mind, or not at all. Likewise these little visual haiku.





•

Since the ZenBrush app is specifically designed to emulate Japanese brushwork and writing, I find myself doing that with it. It's good for sketching, but also for writing a haiku, then combining that with artwork in a painting app. ZenBrush has some flexibility in terms of brush size, opacity, ink style, touch sensitivity, and so forth; it also has a wide range of virtual papers on which to write or draw. As usual, I often start a brush session by warming up by drawing enso.



An enso can then be erased, drawn over with new layers with different opacities or types of sumi-e ink.



Another app I use regularly converts visual images into images composed of words and type. This is fun to play with on the brushwork and Zen fronts: adding layers of meaning by adding randomized type-casting to the brushwork image.





Here's an example of a sumi-e style drawing, which I then experimented with in terms of both type and painting. Several different versions of this one idea yield different, even playful variations.


river, carry me home, 2012





A completely different kind of feel can be made with the same process in the same apps. (These were drawn on the smaller screen of the iPhone.)





•

The aesthetic of this kind of calligraphic painting/drawing, even though it's done on the latest type of computer, is ancient in feel. I made that explicit with this morning poem.



These are all examples of the process of painting, calligraphy, and drawing using virtual paint on a tablet. They range from serious fine art paintings, using the high end painting apps, to small morning poems and drawings done quickly and simply. Different aesthetics for different moments and different ends. But they are all digital painting. I'm doing a lot of this work right now. I'm drawn to it, in part because it's something I can do during my morning meditation time. Not all of it, as I said, is anything more than studies or exercises; yet I feel there is a great deal of potential here for creating genuine art, real illustration, and more.

To be continued. We'll see where the road takes us next.

Video: bell ringing in an empty sky

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

•

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.

New Music for Meditation: Flute Recordings

Beginning work on a new recording project. Having had several flutes restored to me recently, I have been planning to do some new recordings towards a new album project. This past winter, recording Darshan, a new album of music for meditation, yoga, healing, and Reiki, has also renewed interest in recording more new music in that mode. I am also continuing to write new lyrics for new songs. I'm not writing many poems right now, but that's normal when I'm working on music.

Tonight I was finally able to set up the microphones and do some recording. (I'm writing this while taking a short rest break.) I've had some computer issues lately, but now things in the studio are working again. I've got the stereo mic pair set up in the living room, and when I'm done tonight I'll leave everything set up so that all I have to do to record some more is throw a few switches and start playing.

I recorded a first piece with the Zen flute, and another with one of the shakuhachi I hadn't played in awhile. Mostly I'm exploring. I'm recording everything, expecting to trim most of it away later, leaving just the best music. I will probably make one piece from this session with a lot of space in it, to make an ambient piece with flute events widely spaced apart.

For tonight's session, I'm just improvising. Getting to know my flutes again. You record everything just in case you come up with something really good. I've made several piano pieces that way, and even more Stick pieces. Tonight's session is a reintroduction to some old friends. Finding our voices together again. I'm not worried about perfection at all for this session.

When I play back a solo flute piece, sometimes I hear Stick or keyboard parts to go with it: they emerge from within the gestures and spaces of the music. What I'm doing for this session is also listening to play back with reverb added, to hear how things sound in a large acoustic space. (I have some of the best software reverb emulators ever now: the software algorithms just keep getting better.)

I feel like working on into the night. If I run out of air, I will keep going with other instruments.

I am making raw tracks here. They will assembled later. This is all raw material. Some of it might turn into finished pieces, some of it may be mixed in elsewhere. It's like a painter taking sketches to later repurpose them into finished paintings. That's a good analogy, actually. Tonight I'm recording sketchbook pieces. Something good may emerge from them later. Meanwhile, it just feels incredibly good to playing my old flutes again. A year ago, I'm not sure I would have even had the breath and stamina for this; so I guess it's true that I'm getting stronger, now, even if still very gradually.

•

I've put in about two hours now tonight. Time to stop and let the ears rest. I find that I can't really go much more than four hours at a stretch without my ears getting tired. Two hours of continuous recording is pretty good, overall.

I recorded some ambient soundscapes, when I was tired of playing flute. Some of these larger bamboo flutes require a lot of air to play, so they're actually tiring to play for a long time. I recorded another take on the Zen flute, and some more shakuhachi.

Then I fooled around for awhile trying out ambient synth patches. One or two ideas that won't escape the sketchbook, probably, but one or two that might be good music beds, once I massage them a little. One in particular might end up being good to blend with one of the flutes, later on. I'll see how that goes.

Zen: Stop when you're tired. Eat when you're hungry. Chop wood, carry water. Sleep wherever you fall. Live in the moment. Play.

the Fire Sermon

the Fire Sermon

the Buddha addresses his followers in the Quiet Grove,
a stand of old white trees overlooking the Summer Sea.



the birds flash in the fever of living,
dark forms chattering around the boughs
of the summer tree, the first bird speaking in its crown,
sunlight and shade dappling the green into many greens,
a cool blue haze under the canopy,
leaves whispering in the ocean breeze;
they burn with the inner word,
flames of the inmost seeker
that touch the tongue and burn
into articulate speech, the first word,
the genesis tongue. the sun
flames whitely at zenith, standing guard
above distant mountains and the sea;
in the drowsy heat we forget ourselves,
our words, we sleep; birds flicker around us,
their calls breaking the air,
turning and whispering in wild unknowing.
they pattern the air, eclipsing themselves
in restless hunger,
consuming small insect fires, chattering
their words like flames.
the world is fire.

from dark hills broken by rivers
down to rocks breaking the sand,
the eye sees not stones but frozen music,
the dance burning so fast and slow
that to our short-seeing eyes it seems motionless,
more solid to the touch than the hand itself.
but the stones are dancing
in Shiva’s fire; they vibrate in place
like shivering lakes dancing in rain,
humming to themselves of roaring fires,
each atom remembering the forge of exploding suns,
the refuge light of the sky’s red underglow;
the eye sees vibrating chalices of light
and believes it sees silent stone,
but the stone burns.
the world is fire.



in the blue canopy of trees
sulfur butterflies hum, wings rhythmically beating,
pulsing so fast that face-on, edge-on, face-on,
they seem to blink in and out of being,
a flicker in blue air;
the butterfly swims in the hot sea of unknowing,
the forever thirst that sends it flickering
and blinking from flower to leaf to flower,
drinking passionate wine, never replete, never filled;
sulfur and black, mute and restive,
feel the burning, feel what makes them quickly breathe
until they breathlessly fall, mouthparts and mandibles
never still, never motionlessly poised and waiting
like the silent hunter mantis, always flowering
and flickering from point to point
on the burning matrix of day.
they dance, unknowing, breaking themselves
on the sun, the hard white edges of the air.
the world is fire.

the patient mantis well knows the fire
and remains poised, still,
waiting, knowing that the fireflow
will bring the prayer close by,
when it will strike with speed that beats the eye.
the mantis sees the fireflow itself through infinite eyes,
all things as they truly are,
knots of fire flowing in the fields of fire,
bright lines in matrices of shivering flame,
tossed here and there by the field’s hard dancing;
though all believe they give themselves direction, they do not.
the mantis without motion is the observer of all that moves
in Shiva’s dancing, light, the play of flames,
the god’s burning gaze; the mantis is most reverent audience.
this is what it knows; this is why it prays.
the mantis without eyes sees deeper than the eyes of fire.
this is why we fear the mantis: it knows
the world is fire.



as we move beneath the trees, as the breeze stirs its branches,
the sun dapples through sheltering leaves
shatter in our eyes, blinding us with spatters of light;
the greater glare beyond, reflected light blazing on still water,
blazes white in the eye, burning vision black;
the moon is lit by the sun, and lights the sunless plains;
the finger points to the moon, and foolishly
we imagine there is a connection
between the moon and the pointing finger; looking away,
red and green afterimages spin in our gaze,
the field of vision darkens, bluely, dizzily,
like the sky during an eclipse, smothering death of light.
an eclipse of fire is the sun floating in fire,
moon floating between, a knotted light,
darkening, and we imagine it opaque.
light into shadow into light.
lightning spills over into visibility
and we are blinded and deaf, we do not look
upon the god with wonder.
but the trees have not moved, except as they always move,
we have moved through the light beneath them.
is it the wind that trembles their leaves,
or the leaves that make the wind? it is the mind’s moving
that shapes the air, that the leaves turn within.
our eyes drown in their light; our feet
burn on the fiery sands.
the world is fire.

on the beach, rocks break from white sand
like dolphins arcing into sky,
the sun crashes on stones,
sands white and fierce as snow,
snow blind and white like the disused eyes of a beggar child,
like the mute glow of the cave salamander that has never seen,
that would die in the light;
mountain snow softening and melted
by its own trapped heat and the sun’s hammer,
raging white, turning to clear crystal rivers
dancing with searing points of reflected sun,
flowing cold enough to burn the skin
where you bathe in the headwaters by the ice,
river breaking on the stones, flowing closer
till it spills into the summer sea,
warm now with long light, the body’s own endless fever.
light breaks water into vapor,
hot sun feeds the trees that hold the riverbank,
filling the air with cool sweet exhalation;
now, beneath the sun, ocean steams,
and there will come soft rains out of the burning clouds,
falling everywhere and always, washing away like tears.
the world is fire.



like prayers spoken in the wind,
the whale sings, the fish thrum,
songs hot in the ocean’s cold ground;
waters cannot cool them, though they freeze.
they dance in the blazing waters
and are blind.
cold salt wind burns the lungs, is bracing on the skin,
to hold ice burns the hand;
in the shores of ice, shoals of krill
reef and blow in cold currents,
endlessly swimming like seabirds diving through the air,
glowing with inner harvest light, engulfed by the feeding whale;
whale sighs as it sings, breathes deep,
rolls and dives, crying, mourning those who dance
to Shiva’s drum and do not know they dance,
whirling in the heartbeat light till sweat bursts out, skin burns
with fever, they glow to the fiery heat of the dance,
and collapsing wonder why the world spins about them;
the whale knows how they fall off the crest of the wave
and believe the world has gone awry, gone out beneath them,
because they feel it moving now
and do not ride with it; in that moment,
the falling, the fainting, they see,
see truly, just a flash, one terrible moment,
see what the mantis sees.
the whale hears, and sings it; the song will always ring,
even when the whale has gone. even from the edge of the fire desert,
the god hears; the god drums it, eyes glowing red and hot.
the world is fire.



we too, we too, we also.
we also rise and turn and look about in flames,
stone coals in the earthlight;
we feel it through the veil of flames,
perhaps only one forever awful moment,
when we sit beneath the canopies of trees
by the oceanside, where cold salt winds
drift in to mute the hot, heavy sunlight
and the searing blue sky, young birds crying,
butterflies in the blossoms overhead,
when we sit and see whales breaching in the bay,
in the silent blue distance across the wind-cut water,
and do not hear them in the silence of sun and breeze and surf,
though they hear us, hearing instead the deeper roar
of the world’s slow unwinding, down to deeper silence
and dark cold, mountains slowly ringing,
crumbling in the light, when we begin to look through the cracks
in the wall of the world, that wall the eye built
to have something to see—look through the cracks
and find a door, a window, a changing of the light,
a view into what the falling have seen
as they fall, see what the mantis sees;
the fire burns us and we shiver with inner cold.

one said that we must learn to put the fire out.
another said it is the refiner’s fire,
the hot forging that would harden and reshape us.
i do not know; some days the flames are cooling,
some days incandescent. i have burned my feet
upon the icy plain of wind-shaped stones
and must now sit quietly.
but Shiva never stops dancing, never stops smiling,
the drum and bell pulse in the blood forever,
and the god’s eyes glow fiery as he gazes out on us,
the flames dancing in his hand.
it is not cruelty, or anger, or passionate love.
it is not pain, not joy, not weeping, not peace or war.
it is what stands behind all these,
the fire of living, the power under life.
it is the fire.
the world is fire.

Songs, Eros, Demons, Angels

Three books have come into my possession during the course of this roadtrip that make up a kind of trilogy of considerations of creativity. Each is self-contained, written for the author's own purpose; perhaps all that links them is synchronicity, and the connections they evoke in me. Nonetheless, they bring to the foreground what has very much been in my mind while traveling.

•

I haven't been conventionally happy on this trip across the Southwest and West. I have had moments of joy, and moments of real connection, real work. There have been some ecstasies. But overall my mood has been neutral to dark. Some of this is because of the reawakening in me—experienced again as insomnia gets me out of bed to write, as I spend a cold night in Jackson, WY—of emotions of violation, fear, agony, and despair: all remnants of the illness and surgery and recovery narrative of the past year. I lay awake in my bed tonight unable to stop thinking that my narrative of surgery is only half over: I am nowhere near done with this story, I am instead in the limbo between major surgeries, each them life-risking, dangerous, and powerful invasions of my corpus. My physical self finds it impossible to be cheerful just now. The rational mind, which of course, despite its delusions of grandeur, is the least aspect of the self involved in this process, finds a lot to be positive about. Indeed, many friends have been remarking how positive and life-affirming I seem to be, lately, when I talk about how I have more physical strength than I've had in literally decades. But to me that all seems like a lie: more accurately, a mask, a partial truth, a performance of partial completion. People want me to be positive, they want me to be well, and they want to avoid contamination by the angel of death still hovering over me, hovering closer than it's ever been. People want me to be cheerful, and happy, and feel good about life. The truth is: I don't. I feel neutral a lot of the time: not dark, not bad, but not jumping up and down with giddy happiness, either.

The truth is, I feel like I'm presenting a false face, like I'm lying. I'm not upset about this feeling, and I'm not feeling like there's anything wrong with talking to friends mostly about what's going well, rather than about my lingering fears and doubts. But there is a cognitive dissonance between the mask and what I feel inside, a strong disconnect between what I feel and what others want me to be feeling.

I'm still feeling distant and disconnected about art, about life. I still have no idea if anything I'm doing is any good. That doesn't mean I don't like what I'm doing: one or two photos I've made on this roadtrip will stand, I think, among my best work ever. One or two moments of inspiration, when I felt fully present, fully alive, while making art, writing, making photos: these stand out as ecstatic moments, the perfect moments that I seek out, as an artist, a musician, a writer. They stand out in high relief, more than ever, in contrast to the daily grind of mundane survival and ongoing medical narratives. (This is one thing I can't seem to get any of my medical team to understand. But then, perhaps it's so far outside their gamut that I'm speaking Martian to them. Certainly I feel like a stranger in a strange land.) So I can't really tell if anything I'm making now is any good. I just keep on doing it. That has to be enough. I can figure it out later. (The rational mind likes to think it leads, but truly it follows.)

The rational self really doesn't understand what this is about. Am I numb? Am I in some kind of ongoing PTSD-type emotional shock? Is it exhaustion? Perhaps. Certainly the blows have kept coming and coming without cease for months beyond counting. Am I just worn out by the real drama of life? I don't really know. I feel detached and disconnected even from caring too much about knowing the why of it all. I'm a little thoughtful about it, but by definition I'm not having any extreme drama about it. (At least not this week. There have been a couple of real meltdowns on this roadtrip, earlier, when basic self finally rose up and said What the frak has happened to me?!)

So I plan to just keep going. I have no answers. Other artists will let me know what they think of the art I'm producing. (Or not. Sometimes I feel a genuine vacuum of attention, and want more than I get. Then I remind myself to detach from that wanting.) Meanwhile, I just keep going. Tomorrow I will take the cameras and notebooks out into the wilds, and drive to the end of the road, and spend the day out there.

Part of me wonders if this detachment isn't part of my spiritual program, my existential post-surgery healing and life-story reassessment. I am, after all, suspended in the limbo between two major surgeries. (Again, those basic-self emotions have been coming up a few times along the road, now that I have leisure to face them: violation, shock, horror, mortality.) I wonder idly if this detachment I feel is not numbness but genuine detachment, an arrival at a Zen state, an actual detached state. It's true I have become very impatient with things that don't matter, the little unnecessary and pointless dramas of life—spiritual impatience, if you will. I get only hints of response to this question. I'm feeling unambitious about it—a lack of spiritual ambition—but rather humble.

As I've written before, the events of the past year and more have me seeing everything in my life from a new perspective. Everything has changed, and all the old maps are gone, while the new maps contain many obscure regions, many mysteries. That's probably the way it's supposed to be: Mystery and humility lie at the core of this distance I feel from life and art: this unknowing. In some ways my "I" has been taken away—that personality-ego upon which the rational mind is built—or greatly diminished. Certainly I know my own limits, my own mortality, as never before. Which is neither complaint nor praise, merely observation.

•

So the Universe provides me with reflections on life and art, and adds resonance to my unknowing in encounters with three books on creativity that resonate deeply with my process at the moment. I feel deep responses in myself to each of these three books, different as they are in subject, constant as they are in wonder. Each of these are books I want to engage with more thoroughly, individually; I group them here because of the synchronicity of their arrival in my life at this time (a crisis time in my creative life? or a post-crisis time?), and here I can give at most a taste of why they each are worth responding to individually.

Daniel J. Levitin: The World In Six Songs: How the musical brain created human nature. (Dutton, 2008)

I am increasingly skeptical of claims made by neuroscientists about anything, as there has been a growing tendency in neuroscience and brain studies to want to explain every aspect of human life through the lens of biochemistry. (While simultaneously explaining away the mysteries that remain.) The resurgence of militant "new atheism" has gone hand in hand with this. The problem is, neuroscience typically assumes a biological explanation for every facet of human experience, of human existence, and is unable to comprehend the synergy of body-mind: in other words, that the brain doesn't determine what we experience, it reflects and records it. It's not an operating system on a hard drive, it's a holographic storage device. In other words, in the language of Tron, we are users, not programs.

So I approached The World In Six Songs with this skeptical attitude in mind. I have to say, I was entirely won over by Levitin's approach, which is not to explain away life, but to embrace it. This is an artist's book as much as a scientist's. Levitin is himself a jazz musician, and brings that viewpoint to his brain studies. He extensively discusses creativity with many musicians from many walks of life: songwriters, composers, singers, jazz players, dancers, and more. The six "songs" the book is divided into are huge themes: friendship; joy; comfort; knowledge; religion; love. This is overall a very positive and life-affirming (and arts-affirming) book, not at all reductionistic, and not at all afraid to admit that there are mysteries we don't comprehend. Music (as I am quick to agree) has a power for us quite beyond the conceptual: music and dance are intimately linked, and go back to the origins of civilization, the founding of our species as self-aware. Religion grows out of our desire to make sense of the world: the dance and music we use as part of our religious practices are ways of organizing, of shaping our understanding: religious ritual is nothing if not performance of foundational myth, nothing if not reenactment of core faith. (Contemporary organized religion is often hollow precisely because it has become detached from the body, from the experience of contemporary life, and the enactment of myth rather than its mere recitation.) One other aspect of this book that deserves mention is its appealing use of pop songwriting lyrics to make its points about our biology; this is not only quirky fun, but quite convincing. And there are extensive interviews with great contemporary songwriters, including some profoundly relevant quotes from Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, and Sting, among others. I find myself agreeing with Levitin's responses to pop music a lot; for example, he shares my respect for Bob Dylan as a songwriter while also sharing my distrust of the slavish devotion of many fans.

William Everson (edited by Albert Gelpi): Dark God of Eros: A William Everson Reader. (Santa Clara University Press, 2003)

Everson was one of the great California Coastal poets, and writers about poetry. He was the self-proclaimed "lone acolyte" of Robinson Jeffers for many years, championing Jeffers even when his popularity was at low ebb. (Disclaimer: I am a member of the Robinson Jeffers Association, and have been deeply affected by Jeffers' writings myself. So I bristle slightly at the "lone disciple" attitude, even when it was merited.) Everson lived a dramatic, charged life, went through the equivalent of three religious conversions, and wrote darkly-muscled, often violent poetry that is nonetheless powerful, beautiful, and resonant.

This volume is an excellent, thorough introduction to Everson's work and life. In addition to a generous selection of his poetry, it also contains long prose sections of Everson's writings about poetry, about Jeffers, about hand-press printing—he was a master printer of fine editions of poetry, and founded several small presses during his lifetime—and about his personal cosmology regarding erotic mysticism: the truth that mysticism is rooted in the body more than in the mind. There is also a generous sampling of other poets writing about Everson, a posthumous selections of responses and appreciations. (Robert Hass gives one of the most revealing here.) I've been exploring Everson's writings about Jeffers for a little while, as part of my expanding research into Jeffers—my responses to the poet are mostly artistic, not scholarly in an academic sense, nonetheless I appreciate reading literary criticism about his work—and this is not my first delving into Everson's own work, although this is a deeper delving than prior visits.

Everson was a strong personality. As strong as his poetic master's, in many ways. As independent and uncaring about critical reception. Everson alienated a lot of poets and readers, though, with his often violent rhetoric, his dramatic changes of direction—all of them, in the end, religious responses to erotic embodiment as a spiritual path; which is one reason I find him so intriguing, as the mystical/erotic path is one I feel myself following as well. Everson remains in some ways as controversial as Jeffers. (These endless comparisons are brought in part through his own fault of identifying himself as Jeffers's disciple.) I find myself responding to his prose writings about mysticism and poetry, and their connection, as I do to the poems themselves. I have two or three other books just of his poems; I find this sampler gives me a way into the other books of poems which had sometimes been daunting.

Basically, what Everson left us with is a life-long passionate encounter with poetry, which engages you even where you disagree with him in some details. (As a gay man who has long felt sex and spirit to be one, I celebrate Everson's erotic mysticism and explicit depiction of sex in his poetry, even where I find his worship of the archetype of Woman, his imago dei, sometimes a bit difficult to appreciate.) In all phases of his life and work, Everson was fierce, passionate, and questing. I feel very much the same: I feel as Everson did that one thing contemporary poetry is severely lacking is enthusiasm, passion, and commitment. A lot of "cool" and cerebral poetry, a lot of ironic mannerism, still dominates the scene. Everson's writings are a tonic, a reminder that a genuine, sincere, non-ironic, unsentimental, and fiercely engaged poetry is not only possible, but necessary.

Edward Hirsch: The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the source of artistic inspiration. (Harcourt, 2002)

Unlike most art critics, poet/critic Hirsch does not begin and end with the artistic product, he is interested in how the artist creates, in what the sources of artistic inspiration are. He does not question whether inspiration exists—which is a somewhat unpopular critical stance in these Mannerist days of replication, sampling, and ironic distance from inspiration. I have every reason to recommend this book, as it goes a long way towards synthesizing everything I have ever talked about in terms of my own sources of creativity.

Hirsch begins with Federico Garcia Lorca's engagement with the duende, the "dark self" that Lorca saw as the source of artistic power and inspiration. (A translation of one of Lorca's seminal writings on the duende can be read here.) The duende is the demon, or more properly daimon, the ancient Greek term, of the book's title. Then angel is RIlke's terrifying angel of The Duino Elegies. Many artists and writers from ancient days through to Modernism have talked about feeling "taken over" by inspiration, almost having their work dictated to them—an experience I have had myself numerous times. I've written before how sometimes my most surprising, best, and most challenging work is written at white heat. There's a feeling of inevitability to what emerges, as though some greater part of the self was in charge, completely bypassing the everyday consciousness we normally work from.

The Demon and the Angel is a book of critical synthesis, a book of many short chapters in which different aspects of the duende and the daimon and the angel are considered in detail. In addition to a thoughtful, thorough response to Lorca, Hirsch discusses how the duende appears in all the arts. He discusses Yeats' daimon; Martha Graham's expressive solo choreographies; Rilke's angels; the American angels of Walt Whitman William Carlos Williams; Robert Bly's engagement with the duende in his essay Leaping Poetry; and much more. What I find exciting about this book is to read many of the same sources being discussed that have opened up the same questions in my own thinking, over the years. I almost feel as though Hirsch and I have been on parallel tracks. (Being a known poet and critic, he gets to publish his thoughts in book form; I on other hand just get to ramble on about them here.)

For me, one of the most telling of chapters here is where Hirsch discusses the late, black paintings of Mark Rothko. I've had numerous arguments with poets and artists about Rothko, about how to approach his work, and how not to dismiss it out of hand, as it so often is. This chapter on Rothko is ammunition in my future arsenal for conveying Rothko's essentially spiritual goals as reflected in his paintings. Hirsch discusses several of the other Abstract Expressionists, as well, as they are prime Modernist examples of artists who sought both abstraction and emotional content in their work. One of Robert Motherwell's famous "Black and White" paintings graces the book's cover.

On the main points about the duende that recurs again and again in Hirsch's book is how a sense of elation, of heightened liveliness, of ecstatic leaping, occurs in art whenever death enters into the room. I relate to this from my own sense of mortality and urgency to get more done, following recent brushes with death, surgery, etc. Perhaps the duende does come down to the truth of eros and thanatos, love and death, in the end. Lorca believed strongly that the duende was present when poetry or song fiercely chose to face and defy Death. In my own case, a literal encounter with dying and being reborn has led to many changes in the way I do my art, and the ways I perceive it. I was always attuned to the duende, though; it's just become more foregrounded now.

Hirsch points out that Lorca correctly identified the danger to art from the overly-rational intellect—the reason so much cerebral poetry is in fashion nowadays—but Hirsch also points out how evoking unreason risks evoking the deep strain of anti-intellectualism present especially in American culture. What I find contradictory about much American poetry nowadays is how it flirts with unreason, but uses rational control of its tools to strictly control it at the same time, often ending up with a dry, intellectually-rooted poetry that claims to be populist and anti-intellectual. Perhaps one reason that non-poet audiences feel unable to engage with poetry nowadays is that on some level they sense they're being lied to, that a game is being played at their expense.

The Demon and the Angel is a very rich book. I feel I could on about it at length. (Which I will do at another time.) It speaks to me on a very deep level, partly because Hirsch has gone exploring for the sources of creativity in many of the same place that I have myself. Perhaps this book will resonate more with artists and poets than it will with the general reader, nonetheless I would recommend it to anyone. It touches on so many necessary bits of knowledge about the creative process that I wouldn't hesitate to loan it to a non-artist friend who wanted to know more how what they discover in my own art got there.

I have said more than once that there are mysteries in the artistic product: things in there that I didn't know where there, that some audience member discovered and told me about—which is something I like. I like the fact that some smarter part of me put that in there, that my rational mind didn't know about. This book is a big help to all involved, towards a deeper understanding of how that actually works, how it happens. I will need to spend some serious time with this book, myself, as it has already clarified my own thinking.

watch the skies 2: the making of a photograph series

The photographs of a Wisconsin sunset and evening and of a full moon were made sequentially, on the same day. These photos were all made within a span of two or three hours, on a very productive day for my photography.

I was out driving through the farmland countryside, mostly empty of people, and after the harvest. Most of the fields had been cleared for winter, and the leaves had finished falling from the trees. I had been noticing the dramatic clouds after a rain storm had swept through the region, so I grabbed my camera, got in the truck, and started driving.



The clouds were low and bold, steel-blue-gray in color, when the sun emerged briefly in a gap between cloud layers, just before sunset. I was on a county road between open farm fields, with the occasional home and barn dotting the landscape. There is a quality or tranquility in the juxtaposition between the human-made buildings and the eternal landscape and changing sky.



The same clouds then were painted from behind with bright sunset colors as the evening continued. I placed the line of the horizon low in the frame, with bare trees and some distant buildings, as a way of giving scale to the magnificent show of color in the sky.



As the sun sank further, and the sky darkened, I noticed an abandoned barn that made an interesting silhouette against the sky and the band of clouds. I like the contrast of the bold edges of the building against the softer forms of the clouds.



The full moon rose, sometimes in a clear patch of sky, sometimes covered by fast-moving veils of cloud.

I chose to switch from making color to B&W photographs when the light had faded enough that little color remained in the dusk light. Also, the barn and late dusk clouds were more interesting as a strong composition in B&W, and any color in the photo would have been distracting rather than interesting. I continued with B&W for the moon photos, because what was interesting was the moon being played against the pine tree's silhouette—an inspiration from japanese art, in terms of the composition I chose—and against the clouds. The clouds partially covered the moon at times, but their edges also transmitted and reflected the moonlight in dramatic, moody shapes. I made the moon images as square compositions partly to emphasize the composition of forms.

The poems accompanying these photographs were written spontaneously, as I sorted through the images, preparing them for printing (and posting). I have made a practice over the past few years of combining poems and photographs, and have in mind at some time to publish them as an illustrated book of poems. The poems were directly inspired by the photographs, and they ought to be presented together.

•

People sometimes ask me how I make photos like these. What they really want to know, sometimes, is how to do it themselves.

There's no special secret to it. It's really very simple:

1. Always have a camera with you.

2. Always pay attention to your surroundings. Always be seeing what's around you, the sky and the land, the light changing continuously throughout the day.

3. Be willing to drop everything, when the conditions are just right, be willing to stop whatever else you're doing, get out the camera on the instant, and make the photograph.

4. It's all about the light.

You can take this to a deeper level, too:

1. Always have a good camera with you, one that you're familiar with, that you have practiced using. If you know your camera well, you don't have to fiddle with it, getting it set up and ready to go. You don't have to fight your tools before using them, you just use them. Sometimes the light changes so fast that if you're spending too much time getting ready to make the photograph, you lose the moment. Modern digital cameras do make set-up times faster, which is an advantage. The disadvantage is that sometimes they're so easy to use that you shoot a million pictures without having actually stopped to see what you're shooting first.

2. The difference between "taking pictures" and "making a photograph" is all about the time you take to see before releasing the trigger. The difference between "taking" and "making" is subtle, but it's important.

"Taking" is about the borderlands of greed, and can be a violent act: for example, paparazzi taking photographs of celebrities they have pursued is about greed, about intruding your desire to acquire an image onto someone else's private time. You get a great shot (and isn't "shooting" a word about violence, too?), you get paid by some tabloid. It's not about friendship, it's not really about love. It can be about mania, or obsession.

People on vacation take lots of pictures, most of them not very interesting, continuously snapping their cameras, shooting (shooting again) everything in sight. People make videos of themselves and post them on online social networks. The difference between the authoritarian culture of surveillance and the personal culture of narcissism has become deeply blurred.

"Making" is about taking time to first see what you want to photograph. It can involve walking around the subject, contemplating it for awhile. It means preparation: prepared at all times to make an image—sometimes very quickly, as the butterfly alights on the coneflower—by having set up the camera a long time ago to wait for the perfect moment to arrive.

At all times pay attention to your surroundings. See what is there. This can be taken beyond the level of ordinary awareness, into a kind of Zen awareness, a Warrior's awareness, where you always know what's going on around you. With practice, you can make a camera walk into a kind of meditation. My Ki Aikido sensei used to tell me that he doesn't do sitting Zen meditation as much as he used to, because after thirty of daily of practice of meditation, he's pretty much meditating all the time. That's more than most photographers aspire to, or are even aware could be possible, but it can make a big difference in the kind of photographs you make. It even applies to fast-paced photography like sports photography. be paying attention—and all meditation really is, is Pay Attention, Pay Attention, Pay Attention—you can often feel something is about to happen, and be ready for it when it does. There's nothing magical about this: it's merely about paying close attention to your subject, and merging with what you're doing. Photographers can be "in the zone" in the same way athletes are.

3. Be willing to stop everything to make the photograph. Don't hesitate to stop whatever you're doing, in order to make a photograph, when the moment's right.

If you're driving, pull over and stop and get out of the vehicle when you see that perfect photographic moment about to happen. If you're out jogging, stop and make your photograph, then resume jogging. If you're out taking a walk with your camera, you can stop and stare for as long as you want, make your image, then walk on.

Don't hesitate to look foolish. Don't worry about what people think, if you break off for a moment to make a photo. If you're too self-conscious about how and where you make your art, you're probably not going to continue making your art. At the very least, you'll have to find to cope with your self-consciousness, if you want to progress with your art.

4. It's all about the light.

Photography is about light. Light is what makes the photograph. Light, whether it's visible light, or infrared, or x-rays, consists of photons traveling at the speed of light, at whatever frequency and amplitude. You can't make an image when no photons are reaching your lens.

I noticed some years ago, after it had been pointed out to me by some perceptive viewers of my photographs, that a lot of my landscape photographs are really about the sky. The sky dominates the photograph, no matter what the photo's subject is ostensibly about. I generalized that awareness to a realization that when I am making photographs, I'm really looking at the light.

That means that some kinds of light, certain times of day, certain places, are more attractive to my photographer's eye. I am drawn to dramatic landscape, to saturated colors, or to contrast and brightness in B&W compositions. Some of my favorite photographs are all about the light, the sky, and the landscape.

But this isn't limited to time or place. This morning I awoke to another cloudy day of flat and featureless gray skies, gloomy in mood, dark in tone, with no contrast in the shadows, and no interest in the sky. Even on a gloomy, cloudy day with featureless skies and flat light, making a photograph is still all about the light. I can find something to make a photograph of even on a day of featureless gray clouds. I just have to go looking for it. When you go looking, and you start to Pay Attention, you realize that the light is still beautiful, albeit subtle rather than saturated, gentle rather than dramatic. You can change the way you perceive the day, the sky, the light, and still find a photographic subject worthy of your attention.

That's how learning to Pay Attention, and always having your camera with you, can serve you well, even on days you might otherwise find aesthetically challenging. What's changed from the morning when you woke up thinking the light was flat and uninteresting? You've changed. Your viewpoint and attitude have shifted. You've paid attention to what's there, and you've slowed down and stopped what you were doing to see what's actually there.

watch the skies

watch the skies

corn-shaved fields
open to night
sunfall to west
opposite full moonrise

wind's noise, distant traffic
sinks like black round riverstone
into depthless well
of inner silence

knock on the sky
listen to the sound

Japanese Garden: Fresh Visions

Gateway

I am currently getting heavily involved in infrared digital photography. I've been wanting to get into IR photography for several years, but during the era of film it was so technically challenging and difficult that it was beyond me. Now, in the digital photography era, it has become much simpler and easier to do. I purchased an IR filter for my digital camera(s) at the beginning of September, and have been exploring ever since. It's a whole new way to see the world: the world revealed as the eye never sees it.

I'll have more to say about all this soon, both technically and philosophically. Meanwhile, I'm going to hit the road for a few days, take in a concert, do some fall color photography and videography up north, and I'm taking along the IR rig.

Meanwhile, here are some IR photos made at the nearby Japanese garden—one of my favorite settings for making photographs. I find the stillness and peacefulness in this images to be what my spirit needs right now, to become settled, calm, and refreshed. I hope they do as well for you.











•

Infrared photography, because it makes use of the longer wavelengths both near and far from the red spectrum that we can see, requires longer exposures. The IR filters themselves function to block out the visible spectrum while letting through the longer wavelengths. All of this means time exposures on the tripod. Even on a sunny afternoon, exposures can take between 1 and 4 seconds to achieve proper exposure and contrast.


(time exposure with zoom in IR)


(time exposure using natural light and color)

Bowls of Zen

Ignore Art HIstory and Just Make Art

(Hat tip to Robert Archambeau for finding some source materials here.)

I have two artist friends, one of whom just finished art school a couple of years ago, and one who was so traumatized by her post-art school career some decades ago that she effectively stopped making art until her recent artistic renaissance. Both of these are incredibly talented artists; both of them have made pieces of art unlike what you've seen before. Both of them have come under attack, in art school and later in gallery showings, for being out of step with their times and the artistic fashions. Both of them make sincere, unironic art, art that has meaning and beauty, art that speaks to the audience (if not to the critic), and has spiritual content. (Not overt religious symbolism, which I know is what you first thought of when I said "spiritual content," rather archetypal, deeply psycho-spiritual imagery.)

In an interview with poetry editor Micah Robbins, Daniel Nester makes a point or two that I find brilliant:

Nester: I’d like to run it up the pole here for you and see what you think, and I am sure I am wrong, because I usually am and I’m, like old now—is that we have reached a period of late style, where the already bankrupt aesthetic battles of yore—lyric versus narrative, Ron Silliman’s Post-Avant versus School of Quietude, subjective versus written-for-the-ages—have all been decided on. We’re all to be lyric, subjective, post-avant poets now, and that’s that. Baudelaire used the term “Rococo Romanticism,” and I think American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase.

Robbins: I find this both depressing and hilarious! And I don’t disagree with your assessment. I’m imagining Charles Bernstein, Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Ron Silliman in leopard print spandex and frilly boas dancing around to “Rock You Like A Hurricane”! Ahhhhh. No! Someone make them stop!

OK. So what do we do about it?

I can’t pretend to have a simple answer, but I can say that I don’t think US poetry ever enters any stage without the calculated and concerted efforts of various individuals with very specific interests in mind. The 21st century scene seems to be dictated from above by a rather small group of poets with institutional (i.e., financial) connections that are constantly protected by a weirdly bureaucratic fiat (i.e., MFA dogma). The result is that contemporary US poetry has become, perhaps more than ever, part of the ideological state apparatus. It’s really no surprise that the gross capitulation to those approaches that you identify as having been ‘decided on’ has quite literally sucked the vitality out of contemporary poetry. It has also contributed to a proliferation of journals that fall neatly in line with the status quo. And this—the disturbing obedience of editors to what’s been ‘decided on’—is not only bland, but it’s frightening in its conservatism.

On one level I think the phrase "American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase" is one of the funniest assessments of PoetryWorld that I've encountered in a long time. Also one of the most accurate. One a more serious level, Nester's description serves as a scathing attack on the current state of affairs; and Robbins' reply explains why some poets have become disenchanted with the MFA writing programs that have proliferated all across the land (even as they participate).

I've been writing for over a year now on how mannerist art has become, while noting also that some of the same problems exist in contemporary music. This has been occupying my thinking about postmodernism and the arts for some time now.

That it's been "decided on" by the artistic mandarins that we are all supposed to be lyric, subjective, ironic, post-avant-garde poets and/or artists now makes me think of my two artist friends. That they were rejected by the artistic taste-makers and establishment mandarins seems to me exactly parallel to the state of affairs described by Nester and Robbins. Both of them ran afoul of critiques by other artists—I repeat, because this is important, critiques by other artists—precisely because their artworks were epic rather than lyric, archetypal rather than subjective, sincere rather than ironic, and influenced by art-historical iconography without being shallowly postmodern about their sources. My younger friend constantly felt attacked during critique sessions while in art school, because he was making art unlike anyone else, and he wasn't afraid of expressing darker emotions. My older friend, after her art school experience two decades ago, while she was starting to make a career of her art after art school, ran afoul of very similar critiques, and rejection after rejection from shows and galleries.

I've been through that rejection, too. For myself, I am quite aware that the art I make, and the music, and poetry, is the opposite of lyric, ironic, post-avant. It can be subjective art, but mostly in the sense that I approach the universal through the personal. My goal as an artist is not the "self-expression" of ego-display or the cult of celebrity, my goal is transcendence, getting past my "little self" to find the archetypal Self, which is mythic, shamanic, universal. A lot of my art actively scares people, or causes approach/avoidance behaviors, not because the art is shocking (intentionally or otherwise) or depicts brutality, but because it strips away shiny self-reflective filters of denial to deal with the big issues of life and death.

Over the past few years, as I've dealt with a chronic illness, had a few near-death experiences, and undergone life-changing surgery, my art has become even more focused on the big issues of life and death. In other words, as my life has been pared down to its essentials, its core questions, stripping away all unnecessary artifice and detail, so too has my art. I find that I don't care anymore if my art scares people, because I just don't have time or energy to waste on worrying about what people think of me. I've faced my own mortality, and I know my time here is limited, and I know too that I still have a lot I want to get done.

The younger of my two artist friends said to me, when he was still in art school, "You might as well admit it, the art you make is shamanic." He stopped me in my tracks, then, because I had been flailing for a way to market my art that was avoiding sincere words like "shamanic" or "visionary" or "archetypal," for fear of continuing to drive away the public and the critics alike. I had been using "visionary" as the most neutral possible term—but after my young artist friend called me on it, I made a new business card that openly said "Shamanic Artwork" on one side, with this image on the reverse:



It has in fact been a very popular business card. It might not be ironic or reserved enough for the mandarins of late-stage mannerist art, but the general public seems to love it.

So, where does this leave us?

In talking with both of my artist friends, the older trying to restart a career now that she's gotten past a lot of trauma she'd gone through back then, the younger having just survived the rigors of art school, I've found myself saying to both of them: Let all that stuff go. Let go of all the judgments and theories and -isms that were thrown at you, let go of all the career expectations they wanted to prepare you for, expectations which skew the critical judgments made in school and after. Just empty you mind and make art.

Ignore your history, ignore art history, ignore the mandarins and just make art.

That's my best advice to any artist, writer, or composer. I do my best to practice what I preach. I find it liberating to encounter the blank page with no expectations or history, beginning as if for the first time every time. In Zen, they call this practice "beginner's mind," which is fluid and open and playful, as opposed to expert's mind, which has become inflexible because it thinks it already knows all the answers. The state of affairs that Nester describes, the late stage of poetry, where the ossified are in charge of teaching, to paraphrase Robbins, is very much an example of expert's mind.

In expert's mind, what poetry is has been already "decided on." There are things you do, and that is Poetry, and things you don't do, and that is not-Poetry. I've run afoul of that myself, in a telling moment when a neo-formalist poet objected to a poem of mine on essentially moral grounds. Mind you, not on literary grounds, but on ideological ones. This is another example of expert's mind in operation, but also reflects on the aspect of postmodern Mannerism that focuses on means rather than ends.

So, again, I say that the answer is very simple and plain: Just make art. No matter what, make art. Don't stop. Make art. Don't get tied up in knots by expectations. Ignore the worst baggage of history. Just make art.

•

Poetry is not a healing lotion, an emotional massage, a kind of linguistic aromatherapy. Neither is it a blueprint, nor an instruction manual, nor a billboard. There is no universal Poetry, anyway, only poetries and poetics, and the streaming, intertwining histories to which they belong. There is room, indeed necessity, for both Neruda and César Valléjo, for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Alfonsina Storni, for both Ezra Pound and Nelly Sachs. Poetries are no more pure and simple than human histories are pure and simple. And there are colonised poetics and resilient poetics, transmissions across frontiers not easily traced.
—Adrienne Rich

Poetry is just something you have to do, all the time. It's a wide and varied artform, and like many other wide and varied artforms it can accomodate a wide range of tastes and audiences. Don't limit it. Just do it.

Haiku is not a lyric poetry form

A haiku is not a lyric poem, although many Western poets, who often misunderstand the nature of haiku, persist on treating it that way. That is an ongoing confusion, I believe.

You encounter these misconceptions and misunderstandings almost any time you read an essay by a Western writer, poet or non-poet, about haiku. Almost equally often, you run into it in essays by non-poets trying to understand and explain poetry. Few really understand. I do not in any way advocate "poetry for poets," or any other kind of cliquish insularity about poetry—although I do find it humorous when contemporary poets who write fairly obscure and difficult poetry complain about the lack of audience for their poems. Such poets often seem blind to how they've become their own worst enemies, when it comes to having any audience outside other poets.

Most writers naturally bring to their interpretations their own cultural biases, having not traveled or studied foreign cultures enough to have expanded their perspective on life or art. Which of course is a general issue of translation, not only a problem with Westerners and haiku. A lot of superficial translation only brings over the words, without recreating the context. Most Western poets, when they explore or adapt poetic forms and styles from other cultures, end up using them as just new forms for lyric poetry. Lyric poetry has a compelling grip on the Western soul, Western history, and Western poetics. It isn't really surprising that Western poets mistakenly view so much poetry from other cultures, such as haiku, as lyric poetry, because the lyric is so embedded in the Western literary tradition mindset that it goes unremarked and unquestioned, it is assumed to be the natural state of affairs. I've tried to point this out to certain poets before, and found myself in a situation parallel to telling a fish that in fact it's breathing water.

One of the very great benefits of immersive travel, of living in other cultures, of studying other languages and cultures, is that it puts your tribal assumptions about the nature of life and art into context as one mindset among many; you come to realize that every piece of wisdom you were raised to believe was universal and natural is in fact local and arbitrary.

So, it's natural that most Western writers, encountering haiku, would adapt the form to their own lyrical poetry needs in their native language. But this often misses the original spirit of haiku, while copying the form's model and scope. Lots of Western haiku are merely 17 syllable poems. Many of these are technically senryu rather than strictly haiku. A senryu is a poem in haiku style that is about human nature, is often humorous, and often topical; in other words, the subject matter and tone of the poem are what make it a senryu rather than a classical haiku. Again, I see most Western poets don't make this distinction, or even know it's there to be made.

A haiku can have great evocative emotional and/or spiritual power, because it evokes some powerful completion in the reader. The nature of the classical haiku aesthetic is that the haiku is intended to be open-ended, allowing the reader to "complete" the poem out of his or her own experience. The reader brings their own life to the poem, thus completing it in ways unique to that person. The poem itself maintains a certain detachment from outcomes, a certain openness and ambiguity, that allows for multiple interpretations, even in such a short poetic form.

There is rarely ever one specific meaning to a great haiku, as though it were a puzzle to be solved—a tendency among Western writers and readers is to treat literary criticism as analytical puzzle-solving, which can often overwhelm savoring a poem in simple appreciation—or as though it had a definitive, singular interpretation. This is one of the key points of misunderstanding haiku: this openendedness in interpretation, this diffuse sense of meaning, which the reader must complete for themselves.

Haiku often seem mysterious and exotic to inexperienced Western poets precisely because the Western mental habit is to look for definite, tangible meaning, imagery, and interpretation. We always look for the story, and we tend to impose a narrative where there isn't any, simply because we're used to thinking that way. We even tend to impose narrative onto non-linear poetry because the dominant literary form in our culture has become the narrative prose fiction form, so we make a habit of thinking in terms of linear narrative.

We are a culture dominated by left-brain Apollonian consciousness; we are a culture where we are taught in school that to understand a poem means to analyze it, unpack its meaning, paraphrase it, bring the poet's biography to the interpretation, and so forth. To find out what the poem means. (This way of teaching poetry during school often puts a lot of readers off poetry from an early age.) We are trained to unpack a poem's meaning, to believe that there must be a meaning in there, somewhere, even if it's hidden. One of the reasons there has been a rebellion against overt meaning in contemporary literary circles is that in part it's an unconscious reaction against the way we've all been taught poetry (or literature in general) in school, to analyze it for meaning. Regardless of reaction or rebellion, the habit of thinking, the mindset, remains in place for most Western writers; so that when they encounter a form like haiku, which has become a popular international form for writing poetry, they still to try to unpack and analyze meaning.

Lyric poetry always had a meaning, a story, or a message, even if it was a simple "I love you" from poet to beloved. Western lyric poetry began, historically, as Medieval love poetry. Its roots lie in the Provençal troubadour and trouvére poetries, and similar upwellings of secular poetry begun throughout Europe in the late Middle Ages. This was not the first invention of lyric poetry, of course, since the ancient Greeks and Romans had also practiced such styles; but it was the origin of the modern ascendancy of the lyric, after it had been disused for some time.

Most of this doesn't actually matter to the classical haiku poet. It's not that the haiku poet avoids including moments from his or her life—in fact, that's part of the aesthetic, the keen observation of nature, of daily life, of human response to nature. But the personal, the humanistic, is often de-emphasized. Haiku is not to be misunderstood as a form of nature poetry, though, because in the same way that the reader must complete the poem out of their own experience, human consciousness is the unavoidable lens through which we encounter nature. And humans are an integral part of nature—the mind/body split, the division into a human vs. nature dichotomy is, again, a Western attitude that is not native to the haiku aesthetic—humans are the conscious part of the natural world, the part that contemplates and reflects upon itself.

The closest we have come in Western philosophy to this viewpoint is Teilhard de Chardin's concept of the noosphere, and later on the Gaia hypothesis, in which human consciousness is seen as the planet's neo-cortex, the part of the overall gaian system that has awakened to self-awareness and self-knowledge. But this is still a minority viewpoint in Western culture, even considered heretical in some quarters.

For a lyrical love poem, although haiku of love and longing have always been written even in Japanese (albeit most often in the modern period, a period influenced by Western culture), a more appropriate form is the tanka. The tanka has a much longer history of being an actual lyrical poetic form, so using tanka to write love poems or lyrical poems in English is entirely appropriate.

Another important aspect of the haiku aesthetic that is counterintuitive to many Western writers is the removal of the personal self from the poem. The essence of lyrical poetry is the persona, whether or not it's the poet's own persona, the "I" and "you" of the poem. A lyrical poem usually exists within a specific psychological space—not a limited or unvaried one, but a specific one nonetheless—which is that of persona meeting world, persona meeting other persona, persona engaged with inner self. In other words, there is always the "I" present, even when fictionalized. There is always the personality-ego present, the mental mind, the self-aware consciousness of personhood. There is always an assumption in lyrical poetry that a persona is present, is part of the writing, part of the poem.

The authentic haiku aesthetic carries the self-aware "I" much more lightly. Persona is frankly irrelevant. The strong Zen Buddhist influence on the origin of haiku is at the root of this aspect of the aesthetic: transcendence of the "I" and a kind of egolessness in observing the world are core elements of the genuine haiku aesthetic. It's not even about the poet's response to the natural world, via observation and engagement, so much as it is about the poet becoming the means by which the natural speaks directly, via image and action, to the reader, even as the reader completes the poem out of his or her own experience and sensibility.

Senryu, by contrast, are heavily laden with the persona, both the poet's persona when the poem makes ironic and humorous commentary on human foibles and human nature—which, let's face it, is a form of judgmentalism, and judgmentalism is exactly what Zen works to transcend—and also the personae in the poems themselves, when character interacts with character under the puppet-mastery of the writer's control. Lots of writers are very conscious about directing their characters and plot. Haiku by contrast is not invested in the writer being in control of things, but rather works to let go of all that.

This is not to say that there is no art and craft to haiku. It is, after all, a poetic form, with a normative aesthetic. Human consciousness is used whenever poetic craft is employed. We shape the world with our words, to the best of our ability. That's what writers do. We shape as much as respond. Haiku aesthetic is as much a sensibility as is lyrical poetry. And like lyrical poetry, lesser haiku fail in part because you can see the scaffolding. At their best, all poems dissolve into direct internally-recreated experience within the reader: the scaffolding of craft and form dissolve, the words become what they signify, the magic of poetry is that it becomes very real.

This is where poetry and music do meet—often misunderstood, again, by those who see only the surface aspects of either art—this point where the elements of craft and sound dissolve into direct experience. This is how we are deeply moved by all great art, this direct connection. Facile comparisons are often made about the similarities between poetry and music, but most of these comparisons go only skin-deep, focusing on the elements not on the totality. And that's really the problem: the lack of deep awareness that many even poets lack about their own art. One can tolerate ignorance only when it's innocent.

What craft and art there is to writing haiku is in the service of making the poem a direct experience, an immediate perception, an "aha!" moment—often called by commentators the "haiku moment"—the synergistic experience that is a poem coming to life. Craft serves the haiku moment. It's essential to the poem, but it's in the service of what the poems leads to.

And that's what I'm really trying to get at here: my impatience with skin-deep facile criticism. My impatience keeps getting retriggered by encounters with articles and books that continuously recycle the same mistaken assumptions about haiku in particular, and poetry in general. In this instance, I am prompted by yet another round of misunderstandings about haiku. I might get back to that later.

So now we've gone a long way towards defining what haiku is not. I've defined before what haiku is, as have many others, many better haiku writers than myself. My main point here has been to remark upon the most common error Westerners make when encountering haiku, which is to collapse the new form back into the familiar tropes of lyric poetry. Not everything fits under that tent, even though the lyric style has come to dominate poetry at this time. The solution is to study haiku more in its native context, and absorb the classical haiku aesthetic for what it can offer us, as an alternative to the dominant tropes of contemporary Western poetry. To the extent that one can absorb something more authentic about haiku, one may find one's entire poetry-writing endeavour refreshed and reinvigorated.

crescent of light
brushes spruce out my window:
summer moonset

Zen Calligraphy and Healing

The last several days have been very difficult. The at-home nurses tell me, out of their extensive experience, that there is a trial-and-error period for new ileostomy patients like myself, while the stoma is still healing, changing size and shape, that involves finding the right appliances to use for the long term. Well, it has indeed been a trial full of many errors. In the past several days, the ostomy bags have come loose many times, leaked many times, needed to be replaced often, and I've lost sleep over it. This morning I really hit the exhaustion wall. I was so exhausted I couldn't even cry out my frustration anymore. Now, tonight, having rested all day long, I do feel better, and I'm hoping that I can get better sleep tonight, better than the past three days.



A few days into this trial, I pulled out the brushes and ink and brush pens, and sat down at my table on the porch to make some enso, to try and center and settle my mind. You can always tell how grounded and centered you are by drawing enso. Enso are circle cosmograms, that represent the circle of all things.



If you are grounded and centered, you will be able to draw a nearly perfect circle with a single stroke of the ink-filled brush. If your mind is not at ease, not empty, not in the state of no-mind, your enso circles will be imperfect, not circles, maybe not even round. I pulled out a stack of my good calligraphy cardstock paper, and made several enso. I started out poorly, and then gradually slowed down, took some breaths, and did some better enso. A kind of brush meditation.



Then it occurred to me that I also needed to do slogan practice. Slogan practice, used in both Japanese Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, is meditation on wisdom sayings. Slogans can be almost stereotypical, but contemplation of them can take you very deep, past the words, past the thought, into the being. So I took some of the enso that I had just made, changed brushes, and began filling them in with slogans and other sayings, and even a few drawings.







I realized that I needed to make art. But not just art to make art. When this healing process has setbacks like the drama I've been having around the ostomy bags failing for so many days and nights—setbacks that really frustrate, and more than once brought me to helpless tears—I thought I might take some of these enso and slogans and make them into a poster for myself.



I will put one or two of them up on the walls, where I can see them often, to remind me to find my center and return to my ground of being, when I fall off. Zen sayings as art posters to remind myself to return to center. To calm the mind. To let go of the suffering and just be in the moment.



Sometimes the frustration edges over into despair, and you feel like these trials will never be over. The nurses and doctors tell me they will, but not all of me believes that yet. I'm in the middle of this mess, it's my body, no one else's, and this has been really hard. My artist friend Alex, who has his own experience with bodily trials, reminds me that me feelings in this difficult time are legitimate and well-earned. He helped me today by validating what I was feeling, rather than trying to "fix" it.





So I will put up a couple of the most resonant of this Zen calligraphy enso drawings on my walls, where they will remind me to slow down, be patient, and go with the flow. Get through the process, don't fight it. Wisdom I very much need to hear right now.





I also remind myself that life will go on, even if right now it's not of very good quality. I will endure. I will not fade away. I will somehow make it through. How, and when, at this moment I cannot envision. All I really want right now is to catch up on the rest and recuperation that has eluded me these past few days.