Crows & A Lone Goose
Posted on March 11, 2010
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In winter the crows congregate deep in the woods, doing their philosophy presumably, and we only see them high in the sky, circling in large groups. Now that the snow is melting we see them solo on the tops of white pines and cedars scouting territory for the breeding season. Sometimes one crow will follow us as we walk the dogs, arcing from one treetop to the next along the road. This morning we also saw the first returning Canada Goose. One almost never sees them by themselves, but this guy was flying north and squawking his head off. Having arrived early, he must have been lonely and looking for company. It won’t be long before they have returned in their numbers to our bend of the river, where they nest on the sandbar and get handouts of corn from Betty, who lives across the water from us.
Breaking the Ice
Posted on March 10, 2010
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I don’t think I’ve gone this long without posting something since I started blogging almost nine years ago. It’s been a busy semester — I’ve been serving on a search committee and a planning committee, both of which have had to navigate certain controversial issues. And I’m teaching a survey course — American Lit I — I’ve never taught before and that has meant reading some texts I haven’t looked at seriously in a couple of decades. I’ve also been trying to arrange translation and editing work with a couple of Vietnamese colleagues and do some writing of my own as well. Fact is, I haven’t been working on poems with any serious application for several months. But I’ve also been suffering from fairly severe anxiety for several months, for which I’m now taking medication. It started after I cam back from Vietnam last spring, around the time of my birthday. Beyond noting the fact here, this is not something I’m going to write much about here in a public space, but it’s not something I want to hide either. (I am fortunate to be in a position in which making such an admission will have little or no effect on my ability to make a living, friendships, etc. Not everyone is so lucky.) Such an experience — especially coming out the other side of it and regaining some equanimity — leads one to some fairly intense considerations and reconsiderations of one’s personal history, one’s “self,” if you will. Especially at my age, when I have a fairly long vista to contemplate in the direction of the past and a somewhat shorter vista looking ahead. Or is it all chemicals binding and unbinding to receptors in the brain? More than that, clearly, though I’m not sorry about introducing the chemicals to my brain cells — they seem to be getting along quite well in recent days.
I’ve been doing a couple of things to work out for myself the nature of my recent experience (which is actually a recurrence of a very similar episode a decade ago, also after returning from Vietnam, though I think that is mostly a coincidence, except perhaps for the influence of spending a lot of time by myself in a strange, though loved, place.) I’ve begun gathering thoughts and materials for a course that I want to teach with a medical historian colleague called The Literature of Madness. I’m also in the early stages of drafting an essay with the working title, “The Wilderness of American Mind,” which will be an attempt, along with the class, to investigate the literary implications of certain abnormal states of mind, not limited to, but including my own. I am particularly interested, for the purely personal reasons noted above, in anxiety and the ratcheting and ricocheting state of mind it produces.
I have been circling Buddhism for at least a decade, probably longer, but I was so burned by Christianity as a kid that I have distrusted all forms of religion that I remained suspicious of even a non-theistic religion like Buddhism — of which there are, also, some heavily theistic forms. I survived my early adulthood by becoming a non-believer, though I’ve always had a strange attraction to ritual; mostly, I discovered that I got a lot more comfort and happiness from sentences than from beliefs, though, so I went to work as a writer. And then over the last decade I came to believe less and less in that, or in the kind of writer I had become. There seemed to be no need for such a thing as I was. That has been driving me crazy, figuratively and perhaps literally. But for the last six months or so I have been sitting zazen, reading sutras, trying find a way forward. It seems to be working.
Song: On Hearing That the Obama Administration Intends to Cut the Budget for the National Endowment for the Humanities
Posted on February 12, 2010
Filed Under Personal, Poetry, Politics | 1 Comment
Song
The fuck you say?
Two hundred million
(or whatever it is)
won’t keep the Marines
in bullets for a day.
The fuck you say?
The Pentagon won’t
deign to wipe its ass
with anything less
than a couple billion.
The fuck you say?
An ancient master
noted: All things
are empty, true, but
differences still count.
The fuck you say?
One does not use
the emptiness
of a shit scoop
to ladle out the soup.
Finches
Posted on February 11, 2010
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Saw the year’s first finches at the feeder this morning, so even though it was below zero overnight I know that spring will come. Bright sun and cold air today. This morning, early dawn, the sky in the south was a color I’ve never seen before.
Happiness
Posted on February 9, 2010
Filed Under Buddhism | 1 Comment
The old Buddhist masters I’ve been reading — Dogen and Foyan in particular — must have been crusty old bastards. They certainly did some hard traveling in the Woody Guthrie way, traveling back and forth from Japan to China, which is where the greatest Zen teachers lived. (Maybe that should be Way.) When a junior monk, accompanied by a couple of his seniors, asked Foyan a stupid question, the sage said, “If it wasn’t for you two old guys, I’d have punched that little bed-wetter out.” Still, what they meant by enlightenment is just straightforward happiness — managing to get through the day without freaking out. At the same time, of course, this is the toughest thing in the world and takes a lifetime to attain — this is seeing into the heart of things.
Winter Birds
Posted on February 1, 2010
Filed Under Birds | 3 Comments
There are at least four wild turkeys hanging out on our property this winter — when I went out with one of the terriers this morning they clattered up through the spruce trees by the creek. We see their huge tracks in the snow and they dig around under the bird feeders to pick up what has gone deeper than the other ground-feeders can get to. I also saw a grouse under the feeders the other evening — surprising because they are generally so shy that you only see them as a blur when you accidentally flush one while walking in the woods. We also have our usual nuthatches and woodpeckers and chickadees. I always appreciate the birds more in winter when they are the most lively thing in the landscape.
The Poet as Buddhist Computer Geek
Posted on January 31, 2010
Filed Under Personal, River Notes | 1 Comment
Meditation Note
Posted on January 31, 2010
Filed Under Buddhism, Personal | 3 Comments
My head is a house
With a hundred billion hipsters
Snapping their fingers
To bad jazz
Teaching as Seeing
Posted on January 24, 2010
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I’m teaching a five-week Saturday morning class for local high school students on “creativity and imagination.” I’ve got a great group of thirteen teenagers who have self-selected or been encouraged by a guidance counselor to take this class in “creativity and imagination” and they seem engaged and happy to take part, though many are shy and all have been trained by their high schools to be obedient. Yesterday we were talking about ways to put pressure on language in order to see what happens; then we wrote six word short stories and haiku. While the students were working I wrote the following poem(s). I don’t think it’s great work, but it captures a certain insight and it does have the spirit of haiku, I think.
Two Hakiu in a Classroom
Gray metal tables
Arranged end to end in rows
The students also
A square of sunlight
Paints one row illuminating
One student’s face
Vietnam Seems Far Away
Posted on January 24, 2010
Filed Under Personal, Reading, River Notes, Teaching | Comments Off
Vietnam seems very far away at the moment. It’s below zero here and I’ve been running for ten days to catch up from . . . being in Vietnam. In a few days’ time I’ve gone from the leisurely life of a poet in a tropical clime to being a professor of literature living beside a frozen river and teaching, in addition to a class about Vietnam, an American Literature course. The distance, both physical and psychic, is considerable. Perhaps surprisingly, I have felt on top of things in the classroom despite my preparation being a little on the thin side — my students have filled in any gaps I’ve left, bless them. Also, I came home from Vietnam filled with enthusiasm for various projects that I’ll get too as soon as things settle down a bit over on the teaching side of life.
I’m teaching the first half of the American Lit survey, which in twenty years at Clarkson I’ve never done before, and while I can’t work up much enthusiasm for the likes of John Winthrop and Jonathan Edwards, we’re quickly moving on to Emerson next week and I’m rereading some of the central essays with real pleasure and greater understanding than previously.(I’ve found Emerson something of a pious pill in the past, I confess.) Emerson sometimes seems tantalizingly like an American Buddhist, but then he starts talking about superior and inferior intellects in a way that seems contrary to the spirit of enlightenment,i.e., that while there may be quick and slow people that all are capable of enlightenment; the slow require “indirect” teaching (rituals and chanting, etc.) while the quick can grasp the truth sometimes from a single sentence or the way light glances off a bowl. Emerson, on the other hand, seems to condemn “the mob” to live their unenlightened lives as best they can — and women as well, though he never comes right out and says this, perhaps because he had lively daughters. Still, it’s hard to escape the feeling that the audience for “Self-Reliance” consists of young men of a certain class.* In getting ready to teach thias essay, I find myself wavering between asking students to defend themselves against Emerson’s charges of conformity and questioning Emerson’s assumptions about the “nature” of the individual. Of course, I’ll do both.
____________________
There is an provocative complication to this observation in “Self-Reliance.” When Emerson compares the “Vermont or New Hampshire” country boy to the effete city boy he seems to be making room for a broader distribution of “genius,” but this strikes me as more of a rhetorical flourish than a heartfelt sentiment; that is, Emerson seems to be using the figure of the farmboy to beat up the city boy a little bit.
