Long after it became clear that the guidebook was of no practical use,
he insisted on bringing it with him. When they stopped before one
monument, he read the description of another, demolished
long ago, which had stood in the same spot, as though he
could not stand to see the city only as it was,
but must double its real sights
with imaginary ones
.
In my early twenties, sick of the city and its constantly shrieking sirens, (we) found ourselves part of an influx of refugees... draftdodgers, self-seekers, the gay, idle escapists, mystical dreamers, astrologers, artists, the rich in rummage, welfare-getters, junkies, hopeless hedonists, the cracked, the numb, dropouts, copouts, hippies and even a handful of native sons visiting Cape Cod's windy brow--recently resigned from a precocious Madison Avenue executive career--I hung out with artists, writers, and Sam Rivers' jazz combo, with whom at all-night parties I played an empty beer can drum, and became a poet.
In Provincetown that summer one of the portrait artists plying the store fronts was Joe Goff, the name he used. Immensely talented and self-destructive, hooked on heroin, sometimes kicked by fasting for weeks on hard liquor and Twinkies, Joe's friends fought over the bequest of sketchbooks, while a storm of young women circled his Dionysian spirit, the mad truth he was.
stoned eyes,
but so much love in his hand-
shake, hours later my hand's
still high.
The confluence of Joe Goff's creative gifts and marginality to society made him my first teacher of the New World that was rising...
in the Haight-Ashbury of San Francisco, at the God's Eye Theater, a young writer performed his play, "Michelangelo's Ice Cream," in which the pope wants to confiscate the great artist's refrigerator in the middle of summer, thus melting the cream of his soul to his final transcendent image of the fusion of the Son and Mother, each consisting of parts carved out of the other, in which even the forces of gravity are degraded, boundaries are obliterated, and the two are timelessly reunited like warm spumoni.
This same playwright, few years later, jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge into a different dimension of himself, seeking that reality from which we are so brilliantly born. What metamorphoses we go through just to survive!
Back in Provincetown: I had bought a wooden recorder, which every day I intended to learn how to play. As Joe admired it, I gave it to him, leaving me more time to write and carouse. Two weeks later, sitting in the crowded Atlantic House, a shade of Jackie Kennedy lurking in a corner, Sam Rivers and his band spotlighted, Joe stood up at our table and began playing the recorder with the band...stares shot at him, the musician's union suddenly threatened, mixed with admiration--
Yes my brother I know,
The rest might not, but I have treasur'd every note...
That summer I didn't wear feet so that we can take off our shoes...so that we don't have to walk on our shoes any more, but on our shoes outside. Yet there are deep footprints, a doorway within our minds that usually remains hidden and secret until the time of death. The Huichol word for it is nieríka...Nieríika is a cosmic portway or interface between so-called ordinary and nonordinary realities. It is a passageway and at the same time a barrier between worlds, struggling out.
Knowledge does not convey information; it cannot be programmed into, or retrieved from, data banks. To know is not to be able to inform. This jolts us back to the Upanishads: "He who knows doesn't say; he who says doesn't know." Thus, how much the ancient masters couldn't say...to this day!
Reading Rimbaud in a small rented room near the ocean, writing long prognostic letters to friends, mingling with weekend tourists, falling in love until bicycling home at dawn, discussing art and philosophy over strong morning brew...at the end of August, having to report for Army induction, I left for New York prone in the plush coffin compartment of a hearse, with a woman I would never meet again--
Met her in Provincetown, Massachusetts,
29 years ago, saltwater taffy concession.
hand-in-hand thousands of miles inland
today, I can't remember her name or face.
Was I only always of her dreaming?
Last night I went to hear Phil Whalen read in a crowded semi-circular room at the university, remembering the time when I cleared a beautiful little place up north of San Francisco. I've often dreamed about that place. On this last trip I found it. Of course, I didn't know the name of the place until I got there, didn't even have any idea where it was a chest of draws in the Bolinas home of John & Margot Doss, where Phil had been living before leaving for Japan. I had inherited his job of supervising the Doss' young sons, along with the poet's comfortable room.
What did Philip leave behind? A pair of huge jockey shorts and holey tabi.
I am still alive, I dance alone in this borrowed room
I sing to myself ...
This evening, Phil, now a Zen monk, read a poem in honor of his old friend Allen Ginsberg's 60th birthday.
On Buddha's Birthday, a circumambulation of Mt. Tamalpais began in a parking lot. From there, it winded up the mountain, with planned stops for chanting, eating, meditation, and adding more stones to the stupas. Upon reaching the peak, after lunch and rest, the celebrants scrambled down fast as possible.
One year Ginsberg and Whalen led the pilgrimage The higher they climbed the more clothes fell away; until, on the summit Phil called out, "Allen, where are you?" Came a clear retort, "I'm naked!" Then clothing fell in ancient Israel (where) the primacy of clothing acquired a metaphysical significance associated with the notion of chabod, which means splendor, glory and honor, and which refers etymologically to that which is weighty, grave, important everywhere.
Installed Woody Vasulka's video exhibition, "Out of Memory," today. Over the phone, I asked him the title, and heard what sounded like "Art of Memory." (I probably had Frances Yates' book in mind.) Later, when I tell him what I had heard him say, he'll reply that "Art of Memory" is a better title. But "Out of Memory" will stand for now. In the next room is an exhibition of Joel-Peter Witkin's photographs, a rare show in Witkin's hometown. Yet, two internationally-known artists, and no catalogue!
Being famous is not the only possibiliy. There are artists who spend their whole life after entering the mountains struggling to create one satisfying piece of work.
Gary Snyder, a charismatic man, who has the discipline to suppress nearly everything not consistent with "Gary Snyder," told me that modern man, for Baudelaire, is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself by age 19 he had planned his whole career. Why did this man influence the direction of my life and work for over a decade? Is it because he consciously fashioned a life larger than himself, a myth?
While I was on my hermitage at Ettawa Springs, CA, Swami Shivananda bought an old resort nearby. Was "the Hollywood Swami" I saw one night (orange robed, long white beard freely flowing, hundreds of disciples singing his entrance song) the same one who was Mircea Eliade's guru in India forty years before? There are many Shivanandas.
O I am happy! Swami Shivananda -- a smile!
High in my cabin, I was seeing miracles occurring everywhere I looked---
"holes in a fish net," "deer neck,"
antiworlds weaving narrow for baskets,
turtlenecked close-knit wizened foldings,
"pine tree'd hills," dogwood, dye-weed plumes.
a baby's flesh brought lightning glits,
invaginating pine nuts, seasoning beargrass,
butterflies, Trinity River People's splashing songs,
making weddings to keep their neighbors moist.
happily latticed baskets, clear-cut skies,
long-leafed green grandmothers reaping whitish girls.
inner sawgrass and woodpeckers used genius, scowee,
baskets unraveling horizons whose life was rooted
in sourberry, boiling the years in baskets.
flumes of willow gifts carried jokes, molecular red
baskets leaving meadowlark's throat with prayers
to catch the world's charms on flesh or bark,
sun's roots revolving yellow feathers,
young alders chewing dyes, weaving laughter,
yellow withes keeping food soaked in light.
kicking within a old door, basket's a cradle
behind stems, in oriole's mouth water giggles,
creek pounds on beads, a swirling topknot walks
like a baby's basket, spirits head for acorns
bartered from red earth designs.
Mother Porcupine and baskets leached,
blue willows dry grey, redbuds cloud the search
for shining stones, hips bend downward
as Harm's dream wanders past coiled eyes,
through shapes falling, working into reddened sedge,
themselves fibrous, yet soft enough to roast
like quail, tufts know, dropping stones in brooks.
The cabin was built on a steep grade on which the roots of an otherwise pine tree were non-hierarchical horizontal multiplicities which cannot be subsumed within a unified structure, whose components form random, unregulated networks in which any element may be connected with any other element being undermined by runoff, and my home was in danger of being crushed. As my chainsaw was too small to the job, I bartered a dead tree on the property for the job to be done.
Native American medicine man, Rolling Thunder, relates the proper ritual before taking the life of a plant. This I performed the day before the tree was to be felled. The next morning I tired around the trunk and walked it out, an absurd gesture, as if I could guide tons of dense life to where I wanted it to go!
Coughing and biting, hot steel teeth cut deeper & deeper, until all that remained was a slither of heartwood on which the tree's life balanced....then, creaking, leaning, slowly gathering speed, but not in the direction we planned, the rope burned my hand as it whipped away, the logger yelled and ran, while the tree laid its immense body down by the cabin's side, almost gently, brushing the small porch.
It was as if this extraordinary creation was a constant dialogue between all the life forms on the planet. I watched the birds that were still circling, and I wondered about the prospect of exchanging thoughts with them, teaching me how easily it could have demolished my home, had I not shown proper respect to its "correct presence."
Even a microscope has its
moments
of self-reflection;
and in that moment
we are all giants.
Now in New Mexico, the desert conjures mirages, sacred wells filling potholes from below, freshly-drawn draughts of texts, the pH of paragraphs, sediments of phonemes crushed into stammering strata; fossil evidence not of evolution, but a laputa of subliminal horizons.
I've become a beached sailor scraping barnacles off the bottom of my dreams, constantly sprucing a fading chipping self; a man who spends his days stringing together spongy words, pouring over labyrinthine charts of terra incognita at night.
Right knowledge at the right time.
Gray Jewish patriarchs come breathe,
sayeth Sam, so whirling up hands
lecturing wandering members.same with fiddling esoteric joy,
Sam's initiation into strange
mistress behind breaths.wind curling in back-
country is all Sam's sect.
Joan Baez sang John Lennon's "Imagine" on Boston Pops T.V. show. When she came to the lyric imagining what a better place the world would be if there were no religions, she added, "Except your own." On stage with her at an anti-Vietnam War rally in Berkeley, I began to sit on her guitar---the horror in her eyes, as if she were hearing those distant broken chords.
tumbling still coupled in
waiting in myself holding
lonely wing outward space
still a still pandemonium
Billy the Kid, nee Henry McCarty, et al., who gunned down not a few, in Lincoln County, NM, spent his childhood in Brooklyn, NY. The dark hulk of Kings County Hospital, with wards for the criminally insane, which I could see out my windows, wasn't yet built when Henry was a kid. One day he said:
I see
into the light only; there is only light.
All is lit by what I make
of it. HEATED BY THE VOID
of my senses.
Wrote to Woody Vasulka this morning to tell him that the Trinitron's color guns have been balanced, as he requested. Also used this opportunity to comment that we need a return to artists as alchemists buried in an abyss of thought--surrounded by divers, crucibles and alembics, with skeletons of various animals that garnished his walls. Upon his table lay some ponderous and worm-eaten folios, in confusion--many strange mixtures of metals, placed in acrid fluids--numerous amalgams upon his right and left:--also, the Elixirs, the Salts, and the Sulphurs--the Ammonias, and divers others ingredients of his potential and secret art distilling their soul, even as market interests work to corrupt us.
Decided that, instead of driving to Santa Fe for Thanksgiving, I will have dinner with friends here, in Albuquerque. Presently, most everything important to me is close at hand. Ancient colophon of sunstreaked adobe walls, leaves bronzed with autumn's dying shoal, the glance of an unknown woman's eyes, with clouds driving in from the west.
In Sweetwater's Cafe this morning, a radio banters commercials, while music blasting from the kitchen jolts the petrified omelets. Poetry, too, is privileged, even when its goal is to be "ordinary." As soon as a text is identified as "poetry" it becomes ironically situated within a roughly similar set of concerns and techniques, a general self-conscious positioning of the artists against the dominant aesthetic assumptions of their day. In other words, I reject the impulse to try to establish a direct line of influence, but I do see W.C.Williams' project of "ordinary speech," doomed to failure. "If anything is ordinary, it is that which goes without saying."
One day, in the Haight Ashbury's Straight Theater, I wandered into the building on the eve of its first transformation, twenty years ago, at the hands of volunteer hordes who accomplished the alchemic conversion of the former Haight Theater in an apparently leaderless manner, milling around like members of a new kind of hive...I'll never forget the sight of the architect and the astrologer, down on the floor, consulting while Whalen was reading his poetry, Joyce was dictating (Finnegans Wake) to Samuel Beckett, there was a knock at the door. Joyce said, 'Come in,' and Beckett wrote down, 'Come in,' thinking it was part of the book. He immediately realized that Joyce had not intended to dictate it; but when he started to erase it a fire engine's siren came screaming past, appropriated by the poet.
Whether or not (Morhei) Uyeshiba's feats can be scientifically validated, an admirer of Andre Gide once had the opportunity to visit the writer's home in Paris; the fact remains that those who were best acquainted with the Master are convinced that he hoped Gide would discuss literature with him; instead he was operating 'in another dimension,' preoccupied with a set of keys he had misplaced, and all morning, especially in his last years, he could only think about his missing keys.
In a 16 mm film, group of blackbelted Karate students form a tight circle around him, from which the master suddenly disappears...
appearing a few seconds later on a staircase, like a stylite preaching to a clear-cut forest.
Every thing circulates in no-time, between the rapture of its molecules and its timely reality, usually the only thing (elementary particles) need to become 'real' rather than 'virtual' particles is some source of energy on which to feed so quickly we don't realize its gone. There are times, however, when we see something's missing, misplaced....Here I go on with my life, not waiting for what I know will incarnate again. Recycling to where every thing is mere potentiality, is how the universe re-minds itself that it always is, but never was.
The problem is that we are not ordinary enough. More ordinary, the world would be miraculous to us in its common store of revelations, and we would ordinarily speak "poetry." Was it the loss of the ocean, then? Or maybe I began to flow, and could no longer tolerate the slather of the poems I'd been writing, instead of simply displaying phenomena or statements in their vertical or horizontal dimensions. As words gather one must form a transversal or mobile diagonal line along which the archaeologist- archivist must move, filling the page from all angles. But I am not yet happy with the cant.
Old friends, their Collected Poems published; while here I am with an empty title at a third-rate university museum, clutching a flimsy fleece.
A long talk given this afternoon by Chicago media artist Annette Bardier. What do I hope to do with electronic art?
Perhaps in the future, the many pieces of technical apparatus will as inescapably belong to man as the snail's house to the snail or the web to the spider. Even then, however, these machines would be more parts of our human organism than parts of surrounding nature.
God is the leap
we are the synapse It leaps across
When naturalist/writer Loren Eiseley was a small boy, he watched from his aging father's shoulders Halley's Comet blazing across the sky. Now an old man himself, Eiseley remembers while in his study at Mortlake, John Dee was distracted by a brilliant light outside his window and stepped outside to receive from a creature he described as the Angel Gabriel a polished lens of New World obsidian, which he described in his diary thence forward as 'the Shew Stone.' He was able, by meditating on this stone, to induce visions and dialogues with his father saying:
If you live to be an old man you will see it again...I'll be gone, but you will see it. All that time it will traveling in the dark, but somewhere, far out there...it will turn back.
One summer, in upper New York State, I hiked to the summit of a mountain, sweating under a bulky "horseshoe" sleeping bag. That night, as I lay beneath a canopy of bright constellations and meteor showers, the Aurora Borealis, at that latitude thin sheets of white light which catapults the mind out of 'the unfocused fringe' where it 'loses its boundaries and a sense of the oceanic pervades,' as the center, and the site itself spread across the sky.
At a friends home last night, I met a woman who is the image of someone I lived with many years ago, as she looked back then. Is resemblance more ambitious than we realize? Is a face a topography meant to lead us somewhere else?
Attended the MAYA show at Albuquerque Museum, with videographer Bob Willis who was documenting the exhibition. The museum was officially closed, the guards off-duty. Thus I was able to palpate sculptures and steles, receiving the thrill of vibrational contact with their makers over centuries of cultural riffs.
A feathered head of stone:
what seems a mouth is the path
of a word.
Dreamed last night of a woman, tall and slim. I said to her:
You sing in me
like a sad sweet song,
long-boned,
be filled,
and fully fragile,
someday is
beautiful
now.
Four years from now, in an interview with Joel-Peter Witkin, he will talk about certain animals that mark their territory by pissing on it, in order to make it their own, many men mark and dirty, in a kind of defecation, the objects that belong to them in order to keep them, or other object in order to make them their own. This stercoraceous or excremental origin of the right of ownership seems to me a central source of the "day of encountering, at the tender age of 6, the scene of an auto crash, seeing the severed head of a little girl roll out of a smashed car and how, when he began to photograph at 17, he felt that in some metaphoric sense the camera in his hands was this dead child's head, as if she had somehow become his guide."
Around the same time, also in Brooklyn, I was playing outside, wearing a jacket similar to one worn by a boy who was hit by a car. When I came upstairs, Mother was standing by a window looking down on the scene, crying, a neighbor trying to calm her.
We are all always involved in each other's tragedies, each shock felt round a world, spinning empathically.
Every time I think a sentence is set, it swerves! In this universe, there is no point of resolution. Reality's borders continuously scumble into existential bewilderment in the new postmodern space to make a final diagnosis of the loss of our ability to position ourselves within this space and cognitively map it. This is then projected back on the emergence of a global multinational culture which is decentered and cannot be visualized, a culture in which one cannot position oneself; what seems to be not out there, yet has taken up residence in here.
I am in a competition with two other persons, a man and a woman.
There is a fourth person who is the judge. He has a large art book, which he opens at random. He says, You must say something interesting about this picture. It is a portrait of a man, looking either Turkish or Iranian. The male contestant goes first, reciting a brilliant anecdote.
Then a woman beyond me recites, while at the same time, I'm trying to recall some pertinent information on Islam.
At this point, I awoke thinking:
My father is a pious man. He says his prayers every day and does his absolutions. While I dabble with paint. I draw everything and everyone I see. But I must hide my work, as it's against the Law.
In a constellation of singularities, l'm engaged in becoming what? The postmodern is made of scrapes that belong to the Goddess (Hekate) who makes sacred the waste of life, so that it all is strewn with garbotic signs, lives lived on the threshold.
Another long day in the hospital library. Diarrhea tonight. Here falls the debate between the biodegradable and recyclable.
While the recyclable spins on its own axis, one might think that this very artificial word (biodegradable), this pluri-etymological, techno-scientific, and synthetic composite is more decomposable then some other word. It would be called on to disappear or let itself be replaced at the first opportunity, the Wheel of Life, going nowhere, yet not disappearing, loses at least not its essence, its hub. Recyclable material casts off a soul; that is, it has transubstantial value, while the biodegradable has already vanished, existing outside of time like shit stuck to the Wheel for a few gravid turns.
Letter from David Rosen. He'll be arriving at Texas A&M December 18th, to begin what he feels will be a long tenure there.
Wish I could resolve Place! This placelessness. This bottomless crypt at the extreme (where) there would be no privileged 'place' which the self could return to as a structuring center. What would ordinarily have been thought of as psychic peripheries appear no longer to be referring to fixed centers; there are only provisional, constantly shifting centers for a self which would seem to be floating among random images collected from anywhere in the convoluting space of my mind.
As I get older, I feel more & more uncomfortable wherever I am. Are we here to see through "here"?
(I) no longer depart from familiar shores for strange lands, but make the familiar suddenly swerve toward the strange. -M. Leiris
Found a copy of Paul Wienpaul's Zen Diary yesterday. His The Matter of Zen was one of the first books in English that had practical guidance in Zen meditation. D.T. Suzuki's books, popular as they are, have only philosophy and teaching stories.
Suzuki makes "sudden enlightenment" seem as if the practitioners hadn't been doing hard training for many years before their insights. Very misleading, especially in Christianized countries, where believers expect instant salvation.
Those who ask are more dear to the Divine than
those who know.
Asking rebuts the sin of questioning dogma. And questioning, inquiring into, is the crux of zazen. Like many older Japanese Zen Masters, Suzuki thought Westerners don't have the stamina to do zazen. Was this racist on Suzuki's part? Unlike Westerners, most of the Chinese and Japanese monks were "country bumpkins," used to extreme conditions of weather and work.
Wrote to Stephen Mitchell yesterday. Stephen was at a student at Zen Master Seung Sahn's Cambridge Zen Center when I lived there.
Short gray robes, 108 full Buddhist bows before dawn, hours of sitting and walking meditation before breakfast, the verdurous feet of skeletons haunted the temple. Meat and dairy prohibited inside, my insight was that as Leopards break into the temple and drink the sacrificial chalices dry; this occurs repeatedly, again and again; finally it can be reckoned on beforehand and, whereas Korean monasteries couldn't afford meat, vegetarianism was made the staple.
The genius of Buddhism is to readily adopt a host country's culture, without losing the Dharmakaya, the Eye of the Law, as spiritual insight is only one facet of living in a complex world. In this spirit, I asked Seung Sahn why he allowed us to eat meat outside but not inside. "What's the difference between inside and outside?" "More meditation!" was his reply.
There was an earlier trip to Cambridge, a slow, head-pounding train ride from up from New York, a week of humid overcast days.
Alcibiades, alabaster,
anemones, and sticking plaster...
This is my charm
against harm,
rune-tune,
in time of disaster.
I was there to visit Elizabeth Benton, a friend from San Francisco. Her present to me was a trip to Walden Pond. But the cabin was gone, and slashes and curves evolved into pictures, which then became symbols that formed hieroglyphs, the precursors to written languages and alphabets, cuneiform styles and letter scripts. But to understand better how alphabets emerged, it is wise to remember it was the cabin, not the pond, that I was eager to see.
A mad high laugh issued from me, one that was almost human, chilling my friends, whom I reassured by telling them that the new ways are the oldest ways imaginable.
Is the myth still here? Or has it been retorted into a quiddity of ink? I walked around the pond munching on a dry tuna sandwich, aimlessly kicking a few leaves, beneath which I dowsed this water as a tributary of a vast chthonic network that riddles the earth, charted by what he calls 'abnormal water' by reference to what he considers to be universal features of human religion: the veneration of water, the tendency of the human mind to dichotomize, and the association of caves with the human womb, with birth or maturity, with the underworld, and ultimately, with shamans in whose visions we must believe.
The floor of my apartment is made of smooth grey stone slabs. I find a small cockroach there, but have no urge to kill it. Before I can get to toss it out the door, however, it disappears down a hole in the floor I had not noticed before. Then tiny eggs appear around the hole. I get the yellow sponge from the kitchen to wipe them up, then rinse and squeeze the sponge, washing them down the drain.
Am I offering to the future the best of myself? We are always looking to our sacred sites (that) have cosmic relevance not because they were chosen by superbeings with more than human intelligence and understanding, but because they provide something bigger than we seem to be; then, with every thought, we falter again.
Awoke this morning with book of Van Gogh's letters by my side. Who could know the artist's terrors but one has no conception, looking at the finished work, of madness and risk and nerve, of being on the edge of the abyss, which it seems to oneself when one is actually the one whose heart is pounding? Even his letters reveal no more than a cat playing with a ball of string. The ball is the universe. The string is the theory. And the cat is neither dead nor alive.
she don't paw at
what we'd kill for,
leaps our mess instead.
Kevin Campbell told me that the independence the various arts currently enjoy will soon disappear into a constellation of techniques, "image processing." All the mediums will be hybrid. Well, yes. So I borrowed Kevin's old Commodore floppy disk drive and keyboard, using my TV screen as monitor, for my first digital adventure.
What sneaks past
as she strides by?
what's calmed, repressed,
laid to rest?should I reach out & say
"It's you!"
she'd look away,
while whispering "Stay"
I welcome a future in which there are no closures, only hypotheses. Here security will be found in the flow of events. The image is of a furabo, a homeless monk sitting in midst of initial conditions.
It was in my cabin at Ettawa Springs that one night over the radio, whose signal faded in & out as it bounced from one mountain to another, I heard Pablo Picasso had died. Something had ended I thought had ended decades before.
We set out to climb the mountain as others had done before us, in fiction, I, in work boots, tired quickly, the boots weighing me down.
We continued to climb, walking up marble steps, the mountain's spine, to a huge circular room crowded with tourists.
We had reached the border, and would rest before crossing.