Notes from Up North

In the past five days and nights Up North—in northernmost Minnesota, in Superior National Forest and Finland State Forest, next to the Boundary Waters, not far from Ontario—having experienced multiple encounters with loons singing day and night, ravens by the roadside, hearing wolves howling not too far away in the deep night, and wandering the land, I awake this morning knowing that the Northwoods has gotten lodged in my heart as one of my home places. It's in me for good. I will always need to spend some time up there.

I'm glad I was able to get away, however briefly, for a short camping vacation Up North, after a summer full of concerts, travel, stress (not all for bad reasons either), and mounting exhaustion. I had a few days on the land where I did nothing but read, play my flutes, chat with friends, and prepare satisfying meals. After five days and nights, I was ready to return home. But the return is also the re-entry to so-called civilization, crowded as it is with people and Things To Do, the re-entry itself can prove impossibly hard. So I find myself with my body back home, and my heart still Up North in the wildwood.

•



On the drive home, a bald eagle resplendent on the median of the highway, just pausing a moment before flying back over the water. Life is all around us, if only we would be open to seeing it. Passing by within feet of the Great Spirit, unafraid and still wild at heart.

Blessing the remains of coyotes and deer killed by traffic, their carcasses on the road shoulders, a common sight Up North, where the wildwoods are not separated from the villages and roads. Always a reminder of mortality, and of spirits moving on. Blessing as we pass seems the least we can do.

•



Since I'm a global nomad, without a real sense of hometown anywhere in the world, having grown up all over the world, having moved so many times when I was still a boy, I am often comfortable wherever I go. But I also have a small collection of places that have become special to me, home places, places where I feel connected to the Earth, where I feel at home, where I go to be reminded of those connections. Up there on Minnesota's North Shore, and inland, in the great Superior National Forest, and Kawashaway, has become one of those home places. This morning, back home in southern Wisconsin, I look at paintings and photos of Up North, images of ravens and the northern lights, and feel like my heart is still back up there. At least part of it always will be. Just as other parts of my heart reside in the Southwest, and elsewhere.

When you're a global nomad, a wanderer, certainly you take you sense of "home" with you wherever you go, as it resides inwardly. Yet it's also good to have actual physical places on this spinning ball of life-covered rock that you can also feel at home in. Good to travel. Good to be home again.

•



It grew into an evening ritual: As the sun was setting over our small beaver-pond lake, which curves around the north of the land and to the west, I stand on an exposed boulder to the west of the cookhouse, and play my shakuhachi for awhile. I play for the pine and cedar trees; for the light on the water; for the day's ending; for the sunlight that haloes all the finest pine needles with white fire.

One afternoon I played for a long time, and felt the silence move in around me. The silence that is deepened by the rustle of wind in the trees, by the pauses between the last note played on the flute and its echo from the low hills across the lake. The silence that deepens because it surrounds the few sounds remaining. The afternoon becomes completely still, and the pauses in between breeze sounds deepens until you can hear the Void behind the least sound.

But the Void no longer induces terror or fear, no longer threatens. It just is. It's just what you sense, that grounded emptiness beneath The Ten Thousand Things, when the illusions of consensus reality have all dropped away. This is the familiar Void, the comforting stillness of Nothing. I set out on this vacation to Do Nothing, and there it was.

After listening to the silence—which is worth at least a month of any other form of therapy—after hearing the Void behind the Silence, linger for awhile, the afternoon late afternoon sunlight bright and hot on bare skin, warming my fingers as they still hold the bamboo of my flute, linger and absorb this peace, this serenity, to bear with you as you re-enter the fray of what most call consensus life. Itself the culture that believes in its own necessity, neglecting to know its own lack of substance. In the silence, the world is vapor, and the walls between worlds so thin that all you have to do is step forward in your heart to meet the Great God Pan, god of panic, the Piper at the Gates of Dawn.

•



I awake in the late deep night, chilly and clear, the waning gibbous moon and the circumpolar stars all bright. I go out to the wall to drink some cold, cold water, and to the outhouse.

In the far distance, six or seven wolves howl. They are answered by a single wolf voice much nearer to me. The pack sounds about two miles away, on the land between two of the smaller lakes to the south and west. The wolves have been heard howling in our camping region for the past two or three summers, and tonight I get to hear them. Long low voices, singing in complex harmony.

These are not coyote howls. I know coyotes well, I've had many encounters with them, some very up close and personal. I know what coyote packs sounds like. These are true northern wolves.

After awhile, the loon resident on our little lake begins singing, motivations unknown.

The sounds blend together under the bright silver moon. Eerie, atavistic, beautiful, transcendent. Cold silver blue moonlight and wolves howling: the perfect night Up North.

I go back to my sleeping place and have intense vivid dreams all night long.

Fort Bragg, CA: Contrasts

images from Ft. Bragg, CA, February 2010



the riverbed full of sea-wrack, flotsam, wreckage,
boats full of memory and dream, littering the Noyo,
detritus, houseboat life, long-term and nomadic,
human refuge, human refuse, human sanctuary and wrack

down the river valley, sun-shadow moves under the crane's wing





whirl of cedar stump overgrown with coastal vine
the choke and dance of living

Returning from Elsewhere: Theories

Well-known and influential literary critic and professor Hugh Kenner wrote in 1998 a small themed book of reminiscence and theory combined. Titled The Elsewhere Community, it discusses the mode of learning new ideas that involves travel. It also contains memories of his encounters with many of the literary Moderns, many of whom created displaced, expatriate communities elsewhere. The book is in five parts, which are talks originally meant for radiobroadcast. So a little necessary repetition occurs between sections, so each can stand on its own.

In talking about the Grand Tour, a common practice a century ago of visiting the central cultural sites of Europe, Kenner defines, if only indirectly, what he means by an Elsewhere Community:

"All humans, by their nature," said Aristotle, "desire to know." A special and unparalleled way to know is to go where you're never been. And the key to this quest for knowledge is "elsewhere." In going there, you join what, in these lectures, we will be calling an "Elsewhere Community." It's a concept that is impossible to define strictly. It can name where you dream of going—where bluebirds fly, perhaps. Or it can describe the people you've met somewhere, memories of whom have helped to change you. Or it's an awareness of your own growth and change, arising from the places you've been: Rome's Sistine Chapel, perhaps, or the Zen Gardens of Kyoto, or the green oasis of Manhattan's Central Park.

Going someplace I've never been always makes me feel alive, alert, aware, and undulled. Even on a long day of driving, if I'm on a highway I've never seen before, surrounded by lands, lakes, mountains, fields I've never seen before, I feel particularly alive. It is my goal, in the next few years, to visit all of the US National Parks, and every state in the Union. At some point I want to drive along the Canadian passage to Alaska. I love the north country, and I don't want to just fly over it to get a notch in my belt for visiting Denali, and making photographs there. Photography is the goal, but in a way it's also the excuse. Just going, being able to go, being able to travel, is equally important.

I like to travel slowly, if possible, to take several days to get where I'm going. I enjoy seeing the land along the way. If I could drive to Hawai'i, I would; next best would be to take a boat there. But I'll probably end up flying there, renting a car, and taking off. Who needs hotels when you have fields of pineapple to explore?

Where I differ from Kenner, and from his generation's assumptions that the Grand Tour was to those places that shaped our history and culture, is that my own Grand Tour is about places more than people, geology more than landmarks, geography more than culture. Kenner's artistic generation was drawn, as children of immigrants, to Europe. The Grand Tour was essentially a cultural tour, a tour of the great cities, artists, museums, and history of Europe. Kenner's own form of the Grand Tour, which he describes in his book, was to visit those literary greats of the generation of Moderns that he could encounter who were still alive. He traveled to Europe to see Eliot and others; he traveled in the US to see Pound, Williams, and others. From his encounters with the Moderns he noticed that so many of them had been ex-patriates, displaced, travelers, living overseas; and from this observation was one of the roots of his idea of Elsewhere Communities.

By contrast, I am drawn to tour the National Parks. I want to be there, to feel that wind, that air, that light, that silence, for myself. I am further drawn to visit many state parks around the Union; for state parks often are equally beautiful to the National Parks, but they are relatively unknown. You can almost always find a campsite at a state park, and there are often state parks so near to National Parks that they share their geography and beauty.

For years I've envisioned myself traveling in a small van which I would have converted to sleep in, and have in it a small workspace corner, a small kitchenette. It would allow me to travel and camp at places that are sometimes too hard to set up a tent in, or unsafe to do so because of weather or local wildlife. (Like the time I pulled into an Everglades campground only to read several signs warning about cougar.) I could travel at a slower pace than I do even now, stopping whenever I was tired, or wanting to work. It would be the Zen of Travel: travel when you're alert, sleep when you're tired.



One of the great Chinese poets, one of my favorites, wrote in one his poems the state of being that an aware traveler takes on: Heaven my blanket, earth my pillow. Yang's approach to poetry changed, when he began to travel, from a focus on the poetry of the past, to that inspired by what he saw right in front of him:

Mountain thoughts, river feelings—never betray them.
Rain forms, sky patterns are always beautiful.
"Closing the door and searching for verses" is not the way of poetry.
It is only when you travel that poems will come naturally.
(trans. by Jonathon Chaves)

Yang says, It is only when you travel that poems will come naturally, and this echoes my own attitude, based on my experience. It is a classical Chinese and Japanese poetic attitude, seen in the great Chinese poets, in Basho, and in one who was self-admittedly inspired more by the Moderns' discovery of Asian literature than by their own experiments, Gary Snyder. That's a capsule summation of a central thread of my own literary lineage. I do some of my best thinking when driving on a long roadtrip. I do some of my best writing, my best photographic work, when traveling. It is from encountering the land directly that the poem arises. When I come home and start to work with the materials I've gathered on my most recent travels, I am still Elsewhere even though I am Home. I see my photos, as I sort through them, and they bring up bodily sensations—memory is an experience, not an idea—which give me more poems, art-making, and music. It's a paradox of inspiration and memory and making.

When I think about the van I want to eventually travel in—face it, I'm not 25 anymore, and setting up a tent under some conditions is really hard work—I also think of William Least Heat Moon's travelogues, beginning with Blue Highways, in which he traveled and lived just such a converted van. I also think of the station wagon that Ansel Adams traveled in on many of his journeys, which he sometimes slept in, sometimes traveled with others in, and on the roof of which he had built a platform for his camera. Stories abound of Adams pulling over, quickly setting up, and making a photograph.



I have to say, here, that I had the idea of traveling in a converted van for myself; but I am pleased that other artists have had the same idea. It's a natural idea, seen in many cultures across many times. The word "caravan," from which "van" is derived, is itself a very old word.

In my own instance, rather than a rooftop platform such as Adams used, I would build a small corner behind the driver's seat, with a computer and flat-panel screen built in on shockproof mounts, where I could download and archive the day's digital photos, and begin to work with them, at night, camped, after a day's travel.

I realize that there would have to be a bookshelf in the van, as well, secured somehow against the books scattering onto the bed at every sharp turn in the road, because as I sit here writing, I realize that I am pulling books off the shelves and scattering them on my desk to make these references. I would have to carry at least a few texts with me, there's no way around it. Some for inspiration, some for pleasure—a lazy day when you don't want to go anywhere, just loaf and read all afternoon, is bound to occur on any given trip—some for knowledge.

Hugh Kenner says, a bit later on:

Within The Odyssey we find the story of a second journey. A supernatural being named Circe—a female magician—tells Odysseus that the only way to get around the Sea God and get back home is by traveling to the Far Shore where dwell the Dead. Once there, he must consult the ghost of a sage named Tiresias. And so Odysseus undertakes a journey after knowledge, fueled by his desire to get home. The knowledge he acquires turns out to be his means of finally getting home. For to travel is always, in some sense, to learn. What we don't know yet, is to be found Elsewhere.

I want to continue with that idea: people traveling after what they do not know. Such a pursuit is a way of seeking entrance to the Elsewhere Community.

So we set out after knowledge, to see places and people we've never encountered before. Joni Mitchell once wrote in a song from her "road album," Hejira:

People don't tell you where they've been
They'll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself
You never really know.

Hejira (the word denotes a journey to escape danger or oppression) is an album of music that lives among others in my truck as a permanent fixture, as a central part of my road music listening collection. It's an album I listen to mostly on the road, because it perfectly captures the feeling of long-distance traveling, its dislocations and its joys. In another song, Mitchell writes:

I pulled into the Cactus Tree Motel
To shower off the dust
And I slept on the strange pillows
Of my wanderlust.

One point of traveling with a few creature comforts, like in my theoretical caravan, is to minimize the effects that "strange pillows" have on one. Sometimes you want the pillows to be exotic and strange and unknown. Sometimes you want to carry your own pillows with you, and sleep in your tent, even when the parcel of ground you're on changes every night. And even my own pillows can seem strange, at times, when I've been traveling for a long time.

In a final turn of strangeness, when we have danced so hard that we slip sideways into other times and spaces, we come to the most recent, most technological form of the Elsewhere Community: the Internet. Kenner discusses the Internet near the end of his book, describing how it has the potential (not yet fully realized) of becoming a truly global communication tool. It creates virtual relationships that collapse geography, bringing people who share affinities into apparent close proximity and dialogue, disregarding the separations of actual distance. In this, Kenner follows the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, who was one of his first mentors. (McLuhan was traveling with Kenner when they first met Ezra Pound; it was this first meeting with Pound that shaped a great deal of Kenner's future interests and career, and Kenner cites Pound as another of his great mentors. Mentoring writers was, after all, one of Pound's great contributions to modern literature.)

Because the Internet collapses space, traveling to learn is less necessary. Your library desk becomes your office or home desk, where The Library of Babel is available now, mostly, at your fingertips. The Final Encyclopedia or Universal Encyclopedia is starting to manifest itself. It is a scholar's paradise. Both data and interpretation are available directly from sources that in previous times would have been either unknown or unavailable. One can go out and do research, and make relationships, in ways both simpler and more complex than ever before.

The Internet is made by its users. There are portal-tenders and gate-keepers, but the content of the Internet is ultimately made by, contributed to by, invented by, its users. Kenner describes the Internet as not being owned by anyone yet; other writers have also described it as a free zone of thought, a temporary autonomous zone, and the last (or next) wild frontier of free thought and free speech. Its attraction to me lies in those realms, in fact: democratizing connection and removing the gatekeepers of discourse allows me, as well as you, to go out there and say what you need to say, for better or ill.

So I don't need to travel as much as I did, to get knowledge. I can stay at home and find many things out. Still, I do travel to learn, and I travel to go see places I haven't seen before, because I want to let those experiences have an impact on me, and change me. I use the Internet a lot for my pre-roadtrip research: to find out about places I want to visit, to find out about places along the way where I might want to stop, to discover information I might need to know traveling. And there are always surprises on the road, nonetheless. The Internet contains only an illusion of approximate total content; in fact, a great many experiences in life cannot be virtual, and never will be. It's easy to get caught up in the "new is inherently good" cycle, that dream of progressive technological utopia that is a principal legacy of Modernism, without ever conceding either consequences or alternative channels of learning. The Internet is still the new toy on the block, still very shiny, still very narrow-band in what it can actually give us.

The chief danger of virtual community is that it might only be pseudo-community, an apparent community that can fly apart from its own energies at any time. Sometimes we think we know people better than we do, online; virtual reality gives us a sensation of intimacy, especially intellectual intimacy, which can be illusory. (Hence the high drama of betrayal and argument cycling constantly throughout the literary blogosphere.) Relationships can be built across vast geographical distance, yet one perceives is still a representation, a persona, an avatar. It's not a matter of who you trust, or what you believe is real. It's rather a reminder that in some ways, all of experience is maya, illusion, virtual or otherwise, and it is necessary to sort through all kinds of noise to get at the signal.

If the Internet is not a huge Elsewhere Community, it is at least a collection of many Elsewheres. Some merge and overlap, many do not. But discovering which is which is another kind of learning journey, another kind of roadtrip for the mind to discover and gain knowledge from. And be changed by, even as the land and what we build upon it change, albeit at different rates.

Sometimes It Needs Only a Word, Some Things to Take Into Account

Restless, just back home today from another sojourn, this time a musical one with words inadequate to convey it, a road trip for music's sake, unable to sleep tonight, probably, knowing my own habits and tendencies, knowing I'll probably end up curled up on the couch rather than in bed, worn out finally by tiredness, still, too tired to sleep, mind still spinning from two long days of driving home after the music seminar, turning at last to those small books, some taken with me on the travels, to be read in the tent in the morning, or over breakfast, or just to keep in the breast pocket, a talisman, others pulled at random from the shelves once home, restless, late at night, pulled down to read on the couch even as the mind whirls and the eyes begin to fail.

And everything begins to converge. To find some kind of connected meaning, or meanings, gathered together as though intentional, as though planned, as though guided by a hand unseen in any light the eye can see, that inner light of the true human. And it all ties together, and somehow connects. Perhaps it's only that it's late at night and I'm writing this as a way of avoiding going to bed. But perhaps there are indeed connected threads of meaning here.

Man is nourished by the invisible. Man is nourished by that which is beyond the personal. He dies from preferring their opposites.
—Jacques Lusseyran, from Against the Pollution of the I

The great Lusseyran, made blind in an accident at age eight, an organizer of the French Underground during the Nazi Occupation of France, a survivor of Buchenwald, who went on to obtain advanced degrees, and teach many. Lusseyran, who admitted to no limits, and who wrote and spoke often about the inner light that being blinded had allowed him to see. The inner light that both gave him hope, and heart, and the poetry of living, and which was also useful as an absolutely accurate lie detector during the Resistance in Paris. Lussyeran, whose legacy in English translation is only two or three books, but among the most luminous of the 20th Century, as luminous as Pacem In Terris, as Thomas Merton, as others, who all echo through each other's thoughts.

Discovering recently one more unknown Thomas Merton book, Peace in the Post-Christian Era, written in 1962 but published only in 2004. A book censored and stopped by the Abbot-General of his Trappist order, who told Merton to stop writing about peace and war. But the book was printed in mimeo, and distributed by hand, only a few hundred copies, but some made it into the right hands, and the book probably influenced the Second Vatican Council in 1962 through 1965, and probably influenced John the XXIII's encyclical Pacem In Terris, which profoundly influenced Frederick Franck, and gave him a name for his home in upstate New York, which became a place for his iconic artworks and buildings and work in stone and steel, which I visited in May earlier this year and which moved me so deeply, as I anticipated, that I can still barely speak of it, or what I experienced. Sometimes you reach the end of words, sometimes it needs only a word, and there are some things to take into account.

On my travels this past month I took with me a small volume titled The Pocket Thomas Merton, which, along with Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior, has been one of those breast-pocket talismans as I went through the day. Both Merton and Basho rode along with me, these past two days, nestled among the detritus of travel on the passenger seat of my truck, as I drove home.

The real violence exerted by propaganda is this: by means of apparent truth and apparent reason, it induces us to surrender our freedom and self-possession. It pre-determines us to certain conclusions, and does so in such a way that we imagine that we are fully free in reaching them by our own thought. Propaganda makes up our minds for us but in such a way that it leaves us the sense of pride and satisfaction of men who have made up their own minds. And, in the last analysis, propaganda achieves this effect because we want it to.

This is one of the few real pleasures in life left to modern man: this illusion that he is thinking for himself when, in fact, someone else is doing his thinking for him. And this someone else is not a personal authority, the great mind of a genial thinker, it is the mass-mind, the general "they," the anonymous whole. One is left, therefore, not only with the sense that one has thought things out for himself, but that he has also reached the correct answer without difficulty—the answer which is shown to be correct because it is the answer of everybody. Since it is at once my answer and the answer of everybody, how should I resist it?
—Thomas Merton, from Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

Merton would be pleased that his writings still mean so much to the current world. His would be equally dismayed that his words were still so relevant to our social conditions that have in some cases changed not at all, in other instances have worsened. He would be appalled at how necessary we find his writings now more than ever. He would be both horrified by and resigned to our contemporary tyrannies we inflict upon ourselves and each other.

When I read Jacques Lusseyran, or another survivor of a WW II concentration camp, Viktor Frankl, I read words written by minds that were made truly free by the circumstances of confronting the end of existence very often, very personally. I encounter minds truly free, in every way, from the conventions of social politeness. Minds truly free because they have actually thought things through for themselves, by themselves, and not settled on everyone else's answer. Merton was another freed mind, freed by early encounters with death and dislocation, a mind who had to write in order to know what he himself thought, and who created meaning as he went along. Frankl wrote often about how we create meaning out of the search for meaning itself.

Here's a truth that few will tell you: Our much-honored legal system doesn't prevent anyone from doing anything. That it does is a lie. We are all free to do anything we want to do, at any time. It's a matter of choice. All the legal system does is remind us that their are consequences to our actions, some more than others. The laws of conduct that we impose upon ourselves are a set of expectations about social interaction and relationship, encoded in the language of both civil rights and of authoritarianism alike.

Sometimes all it takes is a word to remind you that you are truly free, that you have always been free, that you will always be free. And that every choice has meaning, even if only the meaning we choose to give to that choice. And that every action has consequences, that nothing happens in a disconnected vacuum. Our modern, and post-modern, sense of alienation is as much as cultural ideology invented by our times as all those ideologies from previous eras in our culture that we, in our post-modern hipness and irony, mock. In fact, contemporary hipness and irony, especially in literature and the arts, is as stale an ideology as anything it itself condemns. Once, it was meant to break us out of complacency: now it has become a newer complacency. It only takes one idealist at a time to remind us how far off-course we have let ourselves stray. Such voices are rarely without controversy.

This is what prophets do: warn, remind, cajole, threaten us with the truth. Prophets don't prevent anyone from doing anything. But they do remind us that there are consequences to what we do, what we choose to do, consciously or otherwise. We are free to act, to create meaning. But we had better know what the price will be.

Things Acquired Along the Way

I had a banner week at the Goodwill retail thrift stores in the region this past week. In two visits I found a whole stack of books of interest. When I was moving, last year, I divested myself of lots of books, knowing that I needed to weed out. I got rid of a lot of things that I didn't need to keep around anymore, that I wasn't going to re-read. But there are always new things a-coming down the pike, new adventures and bits of knowledge as yet unknown and untrammeled.

Sometimes I find a few things on a thrift store visit, sometimes nothing. It's always a treasure hunt, but not always one that brings in something substantial. This week I got lucky though, and hit real paydirt. Forthwith:

Lillian Feder. Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry. (1971) This heavy tome looks at how ancient Greek and Roman myths function in Modern English and American poetry, in the poetry of Auden, Yeats, Eliot, Pound and their followers. It looks to be dense going, but it interests me because I have been reading articles lately that ask a relevant question: The High Modernist poets were so well-read, so allusive in their poetry to ancient myth, so allusive also to their vast knowledge of literature, that they included so much in their poetry, that one must wonder if they went too far. Is one reason that Modern poetry started the trend of poets writing for each other instead of a general audience, which has led to a powerful contemporary disconnect between artist and audience, because they were so insular in their allusions that the audience couldn't keep up with their references? In the case of Pound's Cantos, I've often thought so: those are such twisted and processed references in the Cantos that it's no wonder that one of Pound's influences on later poets was the movement towards the disconnection between sound and sense. I look forward to reading through this from the direction of myth studies, too, in the sense that myths are the stories a culture tells itself about itself; and myths are always living stories in a culture, even though they will change as the culture changes.

James Dickey. Poems 1957-1967. Essentially a Selected & New Poems, this collects his best known early work with a few new poems; including probably his best work, the poems in Buckdancer's Choice. Why would I pick up a poem collection by a poet I don't particularly like? And I don't like Dickey, for the most part; occasionally a brilliant novelist, started out with some excellent poetry, which got worse with time. When Dickey's imagination is engaged, his writing rises from the bestial to the angelic, and transforms the mundane into something archetypal, if not always pretty; but when his imagination seems perfunctory, Dickey's poetry is morbid, flat, and his characters and events are stereotyped. Death is everywhere; it's a major theme throughout the first few poetry books; the poet's voice often speaks of how the dead are more real than the living. It seems to me, and some critics confirm this impression, that as Dickey proceeded, his poems became focused on power and brutality. Almost sadistic at times, jingoistic at others. So why would I want this book in my collection? Because I collect Collected Poems, even of poets I don't like very much; it's for my library, so I have it available if I need to read it or look something up. Call it a reference book purchase. And for a buck at a thrift store, no problem.

Peter Matthiessen. The Snow Leopard. (1978) Actually, I have more than one copy of this excellent book. I've read it several times, over the years; not too long ago, I found a hardcover first edition at another thrift store, and was giddy. This is a spare copy to give away. I do that: buy extra copies of certain favorite books, to give away, to inspire a friend, for the wisdom offered, and the lessons to be learned. I've given away at least 4 or 5 copies of this classic already. Good to have a backup.

P.W. Atkins. Periodic Kingdom: A journey into the land of the chemical elements. (1995) A book on taxonomy and classification, also a bit on the history of the discovery of the chemical elements—which is a fascinating detective adventure in the history of science. I like history of science books, and books on the history of technology; I'm fascinated by the interactions between technology, culture, and how we conceive of reality.

Vincent Mosco. The Digital Sublime: Myth, power, and cyberspace. (2004) Speaking of how we conceive of reality, this speculates on the transformations of culture currently underway in our times. Myths are, again, the stories that lift us out of the mundane and into the sublime, the archetypal. (Sounds like poetry!) There's a bit of history in here, about cyberspace and the Dot.Com collapse, but what interests me is the premise "that if we take what we know about cyberspace and situate it within what we know about culture—specifically the central post-Cold War myths of the end of history, geography, and politics—we will add to our knowledge of the digital world." So there's some history of technology to be studied here, even as it is happening: the creation and change of the myths we live by, even as they are forming and dissolving.

Alistair Cooke. Six Men. (1995) This is just pure pleasure. Cooke's prose is always erudite, clear, full of connections and insights, and no more so than here in these short portraits of sex famous figures that Cooke personally knew, interviewed, or was friends with. My favorite essay is the one on Humphrey Bogart; Cooke met Bogart and his wife Bacall when they were all traveling on the Adlai Stevenson campaign train, and became close friends. This portrait begins with several sublime paragraphs on what's it like to be a reporter assigned to the campaign trail, that is a brilliant set-piece in its own right. Delightful reading, the world in these pages.

William Faulkner. The Sound and the Fury. This is the second Norton Critical Edition, ed. by David Minter. (1994) I've never been a big Faulkner fan. Maybe there's something to the regionalist argument, after all; I'm a Great Lakes native, not a Southerner, or a New Englander, and it's true that I feel more of a connection to Hemingway than I ever did to Faulkner, or F. Scott Fitzgerald (or, at least, the writings that emerged from his milieu). But Norton Critical Editions are always valuable, and can get you involved in understanding and appreciating a work you might otherwise not get into. I always like the critical essays and responses in these editions. Now I look forward to giving this novel another try, with a little help from some (virtual) friends.

Hugh Kenner. The Elsewhere Community. (1998) The theme of this book, actually the scripts for five radio lectures, is travel, its value to the imaginations of Modernist writers, and the excitement it added to their texts. Kenner is no doubt one the foremost critics of Modernist literature, and it shows. He writes of his own visits to Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams; he writes of literary meetings such as Eliot's visit to Pound; and he writes of cyberspace, with its new visitation possibilities free of physical limitations, with a created parallel geography. A wonderful series of integrative talks from a very learned voice. I'm also interested in this book because of its connection to my ongoing interest in nomadics, books about travel and being on the road, literary and otherwise.

Library of Nomadics 2

When you travel, there is usually a dearth of books in the places you visit as a traveler. Travelers are meant to be happily distracted by suckling at the teat of ubiquitous blaring televisions in every airport, bus station, bar and restaurant, information wayside stand, and commercial-zoned street corner. Hotels don't think of habitual readers; they think of the need for people to be entertained and distracted. That's a comment on our society in general: entertainment über alles. The cultural assumption is that readers are in the minority, especially among travelers. Not that there is any shortage of media demands on your attention; travel can rapidly get very overstimulating.

I've been in many hotels, and few have ever boasted a library, though every room has a TV and probably a Bible placed by the Gideons in a nightstand drawer. (Someday I am tempted to replace the Gideon Bibles I encounter with copies of the Tao Te Ching; a small bit of poetic terrorism for a future road trip.) Actually, the TV is useful in the morning, to check the Weather Channel; I like to look at the raw data and do my own interpretation, so I leave the sound off, and just watch the radar and cloud maps displayed while I tie my shoes.

There is a personal morning ritual I've practiced for many years, that helps my day go better if I start it out this way. (I notice the difference when circumstances force me to miss a day.) It's my habit in the mornings to read and write, first thing, and to meditate, before breakfast. (Which can become brunch, some days.) I usually spend about an hour every morning in quiet contemplation, reading books that inspire and open my mind and heart for the day, and in writing. (As I'm doing this moment.) The books I need to read in the morning are spiritual books; books of spirit-infused poetry, anything from haiku to Rilke; books on Taoism or Zen; Thomas Merton, for example The Wisdom of the Desert; etc. I also often do some self-healing energy work.

When I'm on the road, there's no need to break this habit. If anything, it's even more important. When I am camping, I often wake with the sun, which is earlier than usual for me, being a natural night person. If it's a warm day, I will go visit the campground bathrooms, then sit in the sun to read and meditate, and soak up the morning warmth and air. Later, when I eat breakfast and break camp, the quiet mood of contemplation can sustain itself for some hours, especially on road trips when I'm not in a real hurry to get anywhere.

I like to travel to and camp in the quieter places of the earth: in the deserts; near the oceans; in the mountains. Places where a national, state, or county park system offers simple, low-rent tentsites. For me, the more primitive the better. I have friends whose idea of roughing it means no room service; my idea of roughing it means cooking a gourmet meal over a woodfire with no radios or TVs blaring from neighboring RVs. I like the dearth of human-made noise, so I can listen to the noises of nature. The sounds of a wood fire under pine trees swaying in a light wind, night birds, and rustlings of squirrels or other critters in the undergrowth: heaven to my ears.

These are places where you can actually hear yourself think. I know many people are afraid of this, and will fill up all empty spaces with distractions so they don't have to listen to their own inner voices. But I like the aspect of travel that gets me away from the usual noise and distraction. I do some of my best thinking when I'm driving, when I'm on a road trip.

When I'm traveling, there is every reason to bring along a few books to read, both in general, and specifically for my morning ritual. Fortunately, there are backpack-size and pocket-size editions such Shambhala Pocket Classics and Penguin Classics, which publish a great deal of the books I like to read in the morning. So, I always have a few books stuffed into my overnight bag, along with the clothes, shampoo, hairbrush, pills, and band-aids.

One book I always carry with me is the Shambhala Pocket Classic edition of Sam Hamill's translation of Matsuo Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior. It's a book I never tire of re-reading, especially when I'm on the road.

Another book I always seem to take along is Matthew Fox's Original Blessing, The first time I read this book, it was a revelation, a map of my own inner cosmology: something I already knew, but had not put into words as clearly as this.

Other titles in lightweight editions that I like to carry along, on a rotating basis, might include: Thomas Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert; Emily Dickinson, Poems; compilations of haiku, or Zen poems, or other poetry; Rilke's Duino Elegies and Letters to a Young Poet; etc. Another favorite that I often seem to carry along, especially if I'm going to be camping someplace for awhile: Four Huts: Asian writings on the simple life, trans. by Burton Watson.

I always have at least two or more audiobooks in the truck with me when traveling, that I listen to on day-long drives. Many of these sustain my morning ritual reading in tone and content. A lot of the audiobooks I like to listen to are released by Sounds True. My top two authors to listen to are Dr. Caroline Myss, and Pema Chödrön. Even on repeated listens, I get something new. While I have all of Caroline Myss' books—another author whose descriptions of the cosmology of inner space validate my own—I especially like her seminar and book CDs, in which she teaches the same information that's in the books but without merely reading the book; they're often done with a live audience, and they're often very funny. I like her no-nonsense Chicago-blunt style of teaching.)

I have an ambition, not yet realized, to re-read Herman Meville's Moby Dick. I first read this American masterpiece years ago. I started re-reading it a couple of years ago, but life has gotten in the way of getting very far along. There is an unabridged edition on 18 or 19 CDs that I covet, which would be good listening for a forthcoming road trip.

I have no grand conclusions or summations here, other than to observe that my reading rituals are the same, whether traveling or at home. I am always reading something. The continuity of my morning spiritual habits is a key element to sustaining the continuity of my daily practice, my daily life, no matter where I am today. Tomorrow, who knows?

Library of Nomadics

I reserve one shelf of my library, which I am packing up to move, for books on nomadics: the study of rootlessness, of travel, of being on the road, or pilgrimage and journey.

I first became conscious of the importance of this area of study to my life when I read Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines for the first time. In that book, there are sections titled "From the Notebooks," which are compilations and collections of various notes, thoughts, and reminiscences on the idea of being a nomad. The other Chatwin book that lives on this shelf is Anatomy of Restlessness: Selected Writings 1969-1989. This volume collects various neglected and previously unpublished pieces; reading through them, you can see that his abiding themes—which are my own, as reflected in the volumes on this shelf of my library—of roots and rootlessness, exile, the exotic, possession and renunciation. Bruce Chatwin's writings and collected thoughts on nomadics set the tone for this area of study; some of his writings directly reflect my own experiences and attitudes. I am not sure if the books shaped me, or if I discovered Chatwin's writings after I had already started down my own roads. I can find anecdotal evidence from my life that could argue the point either way.

My own lifetime of being a global nomad, comfortable almost everywhere I've been, comes from my childhood living abroad, when "coming home" did not to me at that age mean returning to the country where I was born. That early sense of dislocation has left me without that sense of home-place that most of my friends have: they know where they were born, and where they grew up was where they were born, and they have memories of a childhood spent in a home-town. I know where I was born, but I don't have a home-town; I never have, except for those I've temporarily made for myself. I wonder if buying a house, and becoming a homeowner for the first time in my life, will change my perspective on this. One of my new home's purposes will be, after all, a home-base from which I will continue to travel, and spend long periods of time on the road.

Other titles on this shelf of books about nomadics—not all of these writers would see these titles as related in the same way I do, i suspect—include:

Jim Harrison: The Raw and the Cooked: Adventures of a roving gourmand

William Least Heat Moon: Blue HIghways and his other books

Larry McMurtry: Roads

Alan Booth: The Roads to Sata: A 2000-mile walk through Japan

Darrell Yates Rist: Heartlands: A gay man's odyssey across America

Rebecca Solnit: Wanderlust: A history of walking

Juliette de Bairacli Levy: Traveler's Joy: A personal guide to the wonders and pleasures of gypsy and nomad living

Charless Nicholl, editor: Journeys: An anthology

Paul Therous: Fresh-Air Fiend

Marc Robinson, editor: Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on exile

John Julius Norwich, editor: A Taste for Travel: An anthology

Robert W. Harris: Gypsying After 40: A guide to adventure and self-discovery

Gary Paulsen: Zero to Sixty: The motorcycle journey of a lifetime

Of course, that also brings up Robert Pirsig's classic Zen in the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which is peripherally connected to all this. As a friend of mine once pointed out, I do some of my best thinking when I'm on the road.

I should note that most of my walking (Colin Fletcher) and camping guides are on the Outdoors/Nature Writing shelf in my library, which is next to the Nomadics shelf, and has some overlap with it. But the emphasis is different in each case.

Paradoxically, writing about travel is writing about place: writing about journeying is writing about a search for home. This creates some of the dramatic tension that great travel writing carries. The theme or rootlessness is best served by reflecting on its opposite.

So this library shelf also includes:

Mary N. MacDonald, editor: Experiences of Place

Least Heat Moon's PrairyEarth

Linda Hasselstrom, Gaydell Collier, Nancy Curtis, editors: Leaning Into the Wind: Women write from the heart of the West

Gretel Erlich: The Solace of Open Spaces and her other books about places

Sven Lindquist: Desert Divers

Another related genre that creeps on and off this particular shelf is the Japanese genre of zuihitsu and travel-diary. Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior is a classic of this genre. And there are English-language descendants, including some poetic journals. The classic book of this type, though, is Lady Sarashina's Heian-period diary:

As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams: Recollections of a woman in eleventh-century Japan (trans. by ivan Morris)

A Place to Roam

When I first moved West in 2004, living first in New Mexico, then in California, I left the Midwest because I'd hit a dead end. I needed to shake up my life. I needed to start over. I left the ruins of one life behind, in order to begin another.


Taos Plateau, west of Taos, NM

That has become something of a habit.

It was the beginning of a period of semi-nomadism that continues. Although now I find myself re-seating my roots in the Upper Midwest: born in Michigan, gone to school in Michigan, spent time in Wisconsin and Minnesota before going West, now putting new roots down in Wisconsin. I find myself building my home base here, now, for many reasons. One, I can afford it. Two, I have many friends in that corridor between Chicago and the Twin Cities. Three, if you're going to be driving to all parts of the Lower 48 for your photography work, which I am, it makes sense to build your home base in the middle of the country, rather than on one of its extremes. This is my place from which to roam, and to which to return.

I'll be in Florida this summer, and later in New Mexico, Nevada, and the West Coast. I've driven the length of coastal Highway One all the way from Los Angeles to Portland three or four times now.


Little Sur, CA

I feel like I know that winding, windy stretch around Big Sur pretty well by now. The first time I drove it was in the middle of the night, terrified of the precipices hidden in the dark, driving too slow, taking forever to get to Paso Robles, and long and tense and exhausting drive. Now, several trips later, the road feels familiar enough to tell me its first name.


Julia Pfeiffer Burns State Park, CA

Next time I travel West, though, I will have the cameras and recorders and no agenda this time. I won't be rushed to get back home. My last trip out West, I was hurried, and had to return here as soon as I was able, to resume taking care of my ailing parents. Now that they're both gone, I am free to spend as much time on the road as I can. That is, after all, my mission and job now. It's what I do now, what I have dreamed of doing, and what I intend to keep doing. It really is my job: to go out and take photos and video, bring them back home, turn them into DVD movies, add music to them, and make them available to the world. I will camp as often as possible, or stay with friends along the route. I will spend as much time as I can alone in the truck, listening to audiobooks on CD during day-long drives. And I will come home, now that here is home, again.



I will make pilgrimage, for that is what travel is. And I will return to my cave to nest and recover, to build strength and joy. And then do it all again.

Notes towards an egoless poetry 3: the hermit hut

There are attractions to the monastic lifestyle: silence, solitude, simplicity. The opportunity to go within oneself. The quiet life. It's often enough that it might seem attractive, to a poet, to drop everything, take only writing implements and a few things to read, and check out for awhile. There are numerous retreat centers that offer hermitage experiences: isolated desert and mountain locations, quiet retreats overlooking lake or sea. It's a long tradition that goes back millenia, in both Western and Eastern cultures. There is a grand literary tradition of writing about one's stay in such places. From Po Chu-i to Basho, from the Desert Fathers to Thomas Merton, from the Mahabharata to May Sarton, the urge to take hermitage has always been there, and has been considered, contemplated, and written about.

There is an apparently universal human instinct towards hermitage, retreat, seclusion, monasticism, meditation, and contemplation, that turns up in various versions in most cultures. In shamanic cultures such as the Plains Indians, there is the sweat-lodge and vision-quest. In African tribal cultures, there are similar tropes. In Australian Aboriginal tribes, there is the tradition of the Walkabout. I think the thing that ties it all together is solitude in a natural setting, whether it's a hut or a pilgrimage. There is always danger involved, often both psychological and physical. There is always risk. The non-risking, mall-going, socially-conforming, mundane, ordinary life of urban snivellization offers little support for pilgrimage or hermitage, if it even acknnowledges their existence. Thus, undertaking such a path can be a radical disruption, a breaking away, and a major change, depending on who you are and where you start from. It can also be An Awfully Big Adventure, and tons of fun.

I sometimes wonder if the Beats didn't stumble on to this idea simply because they were looking for an escape, a rebellion, any escape, any rebellion, and found what would serve in the literary traditions of East Asia and Zen Buddhism. I also sometimes think that Gary Snyder was the one who opened that door for the rest of the Beats, as he was already a scholarly grad student in these topics when the rest of the Beats met him. Asian poetry, the hermit hut literary tradition was one avenue of rebellion and exploration; the Baudelaire-Rimbaud-Artaud tradition of the derangement of the senses (drugs and synaesthesia) was the Beats' other principal route of escape and exploration. As such, the Beats obviously influenced and prefigured a lot of what happened in the Sixties, and in many ways they were the pioneers, along with some others such as Leary, et al.

The romantic notion of a hermitage is that one is going to retreat from the world, get away from the hustle and bustle, withdraw into silence. But what dabblers (and this could include many of the Beats) don't know, because they haven't experienced it, is the tough reality rather than the romantic ideal: you bring all of that with you, to your hermit hut. The world does not just drop away: it has to be actively let go of.

The same goes for your sense of self, for your personality-ego. Lots of people don't get very far into the hermitage experience, because they get fidgety or restless when deprived of the usual cultural stimulations. With only limited social interactions, with no one to chat with, with no one to project one's self onto, the inner noise gets suddenly louder, and some are not up to the challenge of waiting for it to fall away.

So, if you are expecting a hermitage retreat experience to help you get away from your own ego, your own self, and your own shadows within—the opposite is true. Be warned: The monastic life is the hardest life you will ever live: you will experience, first hand, your own darker nature, and be unable to run away from it. You will be confronted with every mistake you've ever made, every horrible thing you've ever done to yourself, or to others. Your life will be in jeopardy.

Because the monastic life is a pressure-cooker: it brings you face to face with yourself. If you are a successful monastic, you will go through a lot of hell to get to heaven. If at some point you don't have a profound faith crisis in the monastic setting, I would worry about your progress. It's like Meister Eckhart said: I pray God to rid me of God. Every illusion, every assumption, every easy ritual, even all the ones you have valued to date, will drop away—so that you can encounter, directly, the Face of God. (We'll use the word "God" here out of convenience, not in any conventional religious sense, but simply as a ready label for Mysteries that are unnameable.) After awhile, the darkness does all fall away: as the world falls away. But it's not an easy process. It's a kind of death. Sometimes all you are left with is endurance. Sometimes you come face to face with the void, the abyss, the death of all meaning, even the death of the faith you once had held so firmly. If you are not strong in seeking, and cannot endure this separation from God, you can get lost for real, and be damaged. The separation from God is itself an illusion, in the end, but while you are in that part of the process, it is very very real, indeed. If you come past it, you come to realize that you are not, nor have you ever been, separate from the Divine. And that is the mystics' knowledge in a nutshell: as Eckhart says, God remains present. It is we who have gone out for a walk.

Total seclusion means that every interaction you have ever had with another person comes to you in memory, and you cannot escape. This takes courage. You will review your life, and it is necessary to do so. After a point, you realize that interaction with other people is a precious experience, and at the same time you can survive without it. You don't have to go looking for characters; they will all come to you, any of them you are ever supposed to meet; they will all appear to you. If you haven't seen any person, for even a week, the first person you encounter will be so intensely memorable, so eccentric, so much a character, so much fully themselves, that it will be almost overwhelming, and you might want to flee back to your retreat rather than to have to spend a lot of time with people again. Your perceptual sensitivity will be heightened beyond measure.

If any of this speaks to you or you own experience, you may be a hermit already, in spirit, whether you live in a cabin in the woods or an apartment in the city. Not all people who carry the hermit archetype live traditional monastic lives; many seem quite ordinary on the surface.

Living out of a truck cab may count as hermitage, albeit a rolling one. There is time for contemplation and inner work in such circumstances, certainly, which are part of the hermit's lot. A hermitage is not always a permanent residence, but sometimes a waystation; a place you spend some time alone, to get your head together, and get your heart woken up. It's not a life that suits everyone, and yet it also seems to have universal benefit to those who try the life out, even if only for short periods of time. Being a hermit has nothing to do with religious monasticism, necessarily; it's a way of looking at the world, and can be practiced even in the midt of a crowded city. The best introductory book I have read on the topic is Marsha Sinetar's Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics.

Another book that is essential reading for hermits is Thomas Merton's Day of a Stranger. In poetic prose and photos, he describes his typical day in his hermitage near Gethsemane Monastery in central Kentucky, in the 1960s. Japanese Buddhist poets Ryokan and Ikkyu both are good reading on this front, too.

When I abandoned the settled life in 2004, and became semi-nomadic, Four Huts: Asian Writing on the Simple Life, translated by Burton Watson, was one of the few books I took with me, as my truck pulled the little Scamp trailer westwards. Merton's Day of a Stranger and Basho's Narrow Road to the Interior were two other books I viewed, and still view, as essential hermitage reading, and brought with me. I lived in the New Mexico desert near Taos all that fall, and into winter, when it became apparent I could no longer survive in the trailer. And then the trailer was taken away from me, leaving me with just the truck and what remained of my belongings. I was reduced to near-nothing again.

At other times, in previous years, I have camped under the stars in northern Minnesota, in Wisconsin, and other parts of the Midwest, in all seasons, for weeks at a time. Nothing is as healing as the silence of the night sky in the far north, under the Northern Lights and so many stars you have to work to pick out the familiar constellations; the sound of coyotes or wolves in the distance only adds to the silence. I have spent time in a single-room cabin with a wood-burning stove to cook on. (Food always tastes better cooked over a wood fire. Always.) I have slept in the truck on long drives. I have tent-camped in all seasons, from the Midwest to the central south, Kentucky and Tennessee, and in all but two of the Lower 48 states that lie west of the Mississippi. All times of the year, all season, all conditions. I'm in my late 40s now, and still more comfortable alone in a tent in the woods than I am in most large social situations. I have always been an introvert, and suited to a semi-monastic life. The best place I ever lived was in an apartment that was the upper-half of a house in a small town 20 miles from the larger city where I worked. I had the best of all worlds, and the commute was across two-lane state and county roads, not freeway driving, so it was only occasionally tense. I like people, and I like interacting with them. and I need large amounts of time alone, in silence, in solitude. The time spent alone also wakes you up to the world, when you go back to the towns; you observe people more closely at the truckstops, you notice more details, you see what people do that's unique, and strange, and perfectly them. "Normal" is a town in Illinois, and has nothing whatsoever to do with a state of consciousness or a pattern of socialized behavior. England relishes its eccentrics and characters; in post-Puritanical America, we lock them up or shun them.

I have mostly lived alone. I can live with other people, and I can compromise and communicate and work things out. The usual problem is that most of the people I've lived with can't reciprocate. I get tired of other peoples' drama, when my only contribution to it seems to be my mere presence. So, sometimes it's just easier to live alone.

As a species, humans tend to be species-centric. Like other primates, we are statistically a social species, even though we have a wide range of tolerance within those basic statistics. I've heard more than one writer say: writers depend primarily on their interactions with other people to feed their inspirations. I strongly disagree. While it can be argued that all writing is about relationship, not all writing is about human relationship(s).

While I agree that anything can be done to excess, I would argue that many great writers have been introverts who brought whole worlds into being through imagination. To discount the role of daydreaming, and inner journeying, to the life of solitary writing, is to do it a huge disservice. (It is also a typically left-brained Western-rationalist idea, to place higher value on "empirical experience" than on inner experience.) In fact, many great writers do "make it all up in their heads." They have indeed spent years observing and absorbing what people do; a writer will call on memory going back as far as they can remember, to bring forth characters, situations, and inspirations. A lifetime's worth of fuel for this fire has already been gathered; all you have to do is sit down, get quiet, and tap into it.

Even primarily solitary writers have human contact. Rilke practiced an extensive correspondence. Here was a man who lived in solitude and isolation, and went within for his inspiration, and found worlds upon worlds within—thereby disproving the theory that inspiration must come from sources outside oneself—and at the same time wrote thousands of letters to his many correspondents. Letters to a Young Poet contains ten letters that he wrote that go deeply into his method of solitude as a source for inspiration; but these ten letters are only famous as a collection now because their recipient, the young poet Kappus, gathered them together as a group; they are in no way atypical of the rest of his correspondence, but rather quite of a whole. Reading Rilke's Selected Letters is a good guidebook for living the solitary writer's life, and thus for being a hermit in the modern world. Similarly, Thomas Merton's extensive correspondence contains many of the same tropes, clues, and guidances.

I think that more writers are introverts than extraverts, overall. It's a job that pushes one in that direction, anyway. Writing is a mostly solitary activity. The real balance, as Jung said, is when one works to integrate all aspects oneself into a whole being, and finds a balance that way, in oneself. One becomes a compensated introvert, then, perhaps fundamentally shy but able to handle group situations; or a compensated extravert, fundamentally boisterous but now capable of self-reflection.

It has also been said that introverted writers will "lack the wisdom balance of having observed and lived life fully." Again, I strongly disagree. In order to be that unbalanced, you would have to have never lived, never gone to school, never had a family that you grew up with; you woulkd have to have been raised in isolation, in a box. There's no other way to avoid input; the world always rushes in. Even some autistic people have been writers and artists. While I agree that anything can be taken to an extreme, there's no way to be that introverted short of having grown up alone in a fairy castle, taught to read by the winds, seeing the world only through distant, high windows. It might work in a fairy tale, but it won't happen in real life.

•

Towards a reading list on the hermit life:

Marsha Sinetar: Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics

Jane English: Fingers Pointing to the Moon: Words and Images of Paradox-Common Sense-Whimsy-Transcendence

Thomas Merton: Day of a Stranger; also, Woods, Shore, Desert; The Wisdom of the Desert

Sherry Ruth Anderson & Patricia Hopkins: The Feminine Face of God: The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women

Jack Kerouac: The Dharma Bums. The character of Japhy Ryder was based on Gary Snyder. A version of a piece of the novel appeared in the Summer 1958 edition of the Chicago Review under the title “Meditation in the Woods” along with essays by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki, poems by Philip Whalen, and a piece on sesshin by Gary Snyder.

Mountain Home: The Wilderness Poetry of Ancient China, translated by David Hinton (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002).

Alan J. Berkowitz, Patterns of Disengagement: The Practice and Portrayal of Reclusion in Early Medieval China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).

Four Huts: Asian Writing on the Simple Life, translated by Burton Watson (Boston: Shambhala, 2002).

John Suiter, Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002).

Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, translated by Maria Jolas (New York: Orion Press, 1964), 31.

C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

A haibun on nomadics

Homeless. My hermitage the road itself, and the box one travels in. That shelter of air and refined metals, that bubble of silent consciousness in which you can feel the road but the air whistling by is not loud enough to deafen. Unless you let it in. This cell on wheels. I bargain for lightning, whenever I stop at a waystation. It's too cheap to buy, you have to give something up for it. Feathers on the wind, perhaps, or a root buried in the sun. I go within, where there are echoes lingering from the last wave of memory that washed in here last decade and has been rippling ever since. Waves don't die, they just degrade into brown noise. After all, you mount up and ride off, and the road moves under you, but it's the earth spinning, not you moving; you stay still. Inside, that inner stillness, you stay still in there, while the world vibrates past you, untouched.

roses at the window
my lonely companions—
dreams of travel