The most adventurous part of my adventure occurred before I ever got to the monastery, but I think that “bon voyage” must have helped, but the trip very nearly became the Zen Mountain Massacre. Fortunately, I was helped by a couple of bodhisattvas along the way and made it to the monastery in time to begin the retreat despite my GPS unit, usually very reliable, trying to take me down a road with a washed-out bridge. I had driven happily through the Adirondacks and down into the Catskills, avoiding the Northway (I-87), which would have been more direct. Around sundown I found myself in Lexington NY on a road that both the satellites and my new iPhone said would get me where I wanted to go. What neither of these smart devices knew was that floods last spring had washed out a bridge. The road ended in a barrier. As it turns out, Zen is all about barriers, but I’ll come to that later.I notices a car parked at the Lexington Municipal Building and pulled in to ask for directions. An very helpful woman who I think was probably either the mayor or the town clerk pulled out a map and sent me back onto a route that would get me down to Mt. Tremper. Of course I missed the turn in the dark. Time was now running short — I really needed to be at ZMM by 7:00 in order to begin the retreat with everyone else (the liturgy waits for no one) — so I pulled into a diner, where the waitress and a couple of patrons helped me with some local landmarks. I headed back down the road but missed the turn again and came back to the diner. This time the local bodhisattvas were very specific & I found my turn, where, weirdly, the GPS picked up again and started reading out the turns. (Master D?gen says that practicing Buddhas often don’t know they are Buddhas, but I can tell you that there are Buddhas in Lexington NY.) I made it with about fifteen minutes to spare and within half an hour found myself sitting with about a hundred other people — something I had never experienced, having done zazen by myself over the last couple of years.

This is where things get more difficult to describe. Despite being in my street clothes & despite having just driven for seven hours & having been completely lost — an experience that in the not so recent past would have tied me into six-dimensional knots — I was calm. I was even happy. After an hour of zazen (broken in the middle by five minutes of walking meditation) there was a service I understood very little of. In Zen Buddhism one stands for most parts of the service — doing honor to the Buddha & the sangha, yes, but also stretching one’s back. Bowing & doing repeated prostrations is also very good for the back, it turns out. After the service I was given a snack, since I had missed diner, and I went to bed — a dorm type room with four other men. It was 9:30. It took me a long tiome to go to sleep. I wasn’t really wound up, but the strangeness of finding myself in this place after so aggressively secular a life kept me suspended in a kind of amazement.

Around 5:00 the next morning the monk with the bells came around to wake everyone up. The bells are not particularly loud — not a great clanging — but they persist long enough to make sure everyone is awake. The schedule allows just enough time for everyone to cycle through the bathrooms and make it down to the dining hall for a quick cup of tea or coffee before morning zazen. Again, we sat for an hour & then there was morning liturgy. Who knew that Buddhists have hymnbooks? Made the liturgy & chanting much easier to follow. Then we had breakfast & then Caretaking practice, i.e., work. I vacuumed all the cushions in the zendo & dusted the woodwork; later, I would wash dishes and chop vegetables in the kitchen. Then came lunch & some instruction in other areas of practice. Dinner. Sitting. Liturgy. Sleep. Here’s the official schedule. On Sunday people from the local community bring their kids what one can only call Zen Sunday School in the dining hall and some of the parents join in the zazen & liturgy upstairs in the zendo.

And after lunch on Sunday I drove home — by a more direct route. The weather had been perfect on the way down — very lucky for January — and was even more beautiful for the drive home. In fact, it was so beautiful it made me laugh. Heading up into the Adirondacks at sunset, the whole sky to the west lit up in orange-gold-red with dramatic pulsing blue-black shadows and a shaft of yellow sunlight shooting straight up from the center of it all. “Ah, this must be that enlightenment they speak of,” I mused. Really, it was a cheesy New Age Zen movie sort of sky & it wasn’t through with me yet. Descending the Western slope of the mountains down toward the St. Lawrence Valley, I turned a corner and there was a huge — & I do mean really huge — full moon rising directly in front of me. I got home without the cosmos playing any more ironic jokes on me & dove right into getting ready for the semester to begin. I’ve only just now caught up enough to write this description.

I notice that I have stuck pretty exclusively to more or less objective description of the retreat at ZMM; as already noted, I find it very hard to talk about the spiritual side of the experience. Hell, a couple of years ago I would have scoffed at the very notion of the spiritual — the whole concept was so tainted for me by my early experience of fundamentalist Protestantism that I just completely dismissed that whole realm of consciousness, except occasionally when it arose in the secular context of poetry. I have been making notes about my reading & meditation & I am going to try to write something soon in this space that does not betray the very deep qualities of the experience, if I can.

As a poet I find it hard to take seriously any philosophical doctrine presented is clumsy or unconvincing language. (Sartre of course wrote effective fiction elsewhere, as in the novel Nausea, so the story being discussed here is perhaps nothing but an aberration.) Despite the aesthetic failures of this story, I remain of Sartre’s party, mostly because it offers a materialist like me the opportunity to exercise a certain amount of self-making within the overpowering historical and material forces that shape so much of human existence.

2. The vocalizations of cetaceans is often compared to music, or song, and somewhat less often (& less directly), to speech. They have tribal dialects, apparently, which suggests language & since they can both learn & teach what they have learned, it appears that it might be something we would recognize as a real language, not just a highly elaborate system of communication. And here we get back to the issue of self-recognition. Language, too, is a mirror. I’m far from expert, but in addition to their vocal communications, don’t at least some species of cetaceans produce & repeat long “symphonic” vocalizations and then work changes on them? If so, this would suggest a sense of the aesthetic in whales & dolphins, though perhaps it is only an elaborate kind of birdsong. [Need further information.]

3. Living in the country, Carole & I take delight in seeing & naming: birds (many species, including jays, woodpeckers, nuthatches, hawks, vultures, ducks, geese, several kinds of finches, bluebirds, thrushes. . .), turtles (painted, snapping), frogs & toads, beavers, skunks, porcupines, deer, and occasionally coyotes & bears. What is the source of our delight? Merely a privilege of the bourgeois, or something deeper?

4. Portrayals of damaged humans, usually children, in fact & fiction: Kasper Hauser, Victor (the Wild Child from 18 c. France; various accounts by Truffaut, T.C. Boyle, etc.), Malcolm (from Marisa Silver’s novel The God of War), Christopher (from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime). By looking at what these damaged humans possess, as well as what they lack, we highlight the cluster of qualities that allow a person to create & recognize a self. And connected to these accounts, there is the much more abstract set of arguments in Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind that seem to suggest a special place in the universe for human consciousness. Not sure if I can accept the “fine tuning” of physical laws Robinson suggests (but does not assert), but that is not necessary to appreciate her devastating response to “parascientists” like Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and the other reductionists who believe that, because the brain is a physical organ, mind & consciousness are epiphenomena, easily dismissed as ontologically inferior the the various tissues and juices of the brain.

5. Mind as extension in the Cartesian sense. Richard P. Bentall’s Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature argues persuasively that “madness” is not one thing and is not separated by a bright line from other “normal” states of mind; in this vein, he sees mental complaints rather than a discrete set of mental illnesses that can be assigned a particular diagnosis. He also brings forward an impressive amount of evidence that strongly suggests mental illness is a bio-social phenomenon.

Further thoughts a couple of days later: 1. Yesterday evening I was watching Jett, our seven year old Jack Russell as he stood on the deck looking down the road toward the river. There were some kids swimming down there & the other two dogs had been barking in that direction, but Jett was focused, his mouth a little open, his nose moving to sense the air almost as a human would feel a piece of fabric to get the sense of it. The other two dogs were excited, but he was calm, completely self-possessed. I’ve watched all the dogs over the years of course & each has his/her ways of focusing on the world & at the same time being themselves. In fact those two things go together — focusing intently on the world and being an animal self. This goes beyond Santayana’s notion of “animal faith,” which is a kind of confidence that the world will be, perhaps roughly, supportive of our being. For the philosopher, “animal faith” is a common ground for animals & humans, something we humans share with animals but also then surpass in all the usually enumerated ways: reason, language, technology & so on.

2.Over the years I’ve had many encounters with animals that have gone beyond mere observation into something more profound and, I believe, reciprocal, though I don’t want to sentimentalize the notion of reciprocity– I understand that the heron I saw 25 years ago on an estuary near the Pacific “understood” our encounter in the same way I understood it, but the bird did look back at me and allowed me to come quite close & was clearly conscious of me. Wild animals are one thing & domesticated animals another. I freely admit to sentimentalizing our dogs, but I also spend a good deal of time just watching them, trying to understand something about the way they understand the world. Their sensory organs filter the world for them in a way different from mine, of course, but there is enough overlap — we’re all mammals – that we can make sense of each others’ sensory worlds. Also, we share a social world of complex personal interactions that allow us to communicate our sense of the world. And of course we observe each other in action and draw conclusions, seeing the world, in imaginative reconstruction, “through each others’ eyes.”

3.So what kind of cross-species identification does it take to get on a jet ski in the Antarctic Ocean to attack a Japanese whaling vessel & through acid at its crew?

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

From the standpoint of its will to shape expression, the literary image is a physical reality which has its own relief. More precisely, it is the psychic relief, the multi-leveled psyche. It furrows or it raises; it finds a depth or suggests an elevation; it rises or falls between heaven and earth. It is poly phonic because it is polysemantic. If meanings become too profuse, it can fall into word play. If it restricts itself to a single meaning, it can fall into didacticism. The true poet avoids both dangers. He plays and he teaches. In him, the word reflects and reflows; in him time begins to wait. The true poem awakens an unconquerable desire to be reread. (28) [Empahsis in original; original source: L'Air et les songes, 286.]

So sometimes the merest chance brings you something you need. (My mother used to half-believe this about the Bible, but felt it was a little too “superstitious” to be morally reliable.) I am less cautious about such things than my mother and I needed to be reminded about this middle path for poetry, which of course does not necessarily mean “mainstream.” I think I was drawn to the passage, too, because of the word will in that first sentence. I’ve been reading William James, whose philosophy is in some ways an exploration of the idea of the power of will to create meaning. Here, Bachelard attributes will to the “poetic image” and only by extension to the poet who “creates” the image, or discovers it. This conforms with my own experience writing poems, in which language wills itself into meaning as a kind of collaborator with the one holding the pencil or sitting at the keyboard.

During my poetic lifetime — the last thirty years or so — it seems as if the reactionaries have had a steady presence that continues the orientation of the New Critics but without the New Critics’ skills; and the theoreticians of language and power have had an opposing presence that claims at least sometimes to descend from Pound and Williams, but also from the Objectivists and Olson. (I’ve never got Olson and in fact published a poem against him in APR several years ago.) I’ve long felt bereft in this landscape. I trace my own descent from Pound and Williams, but I also acknowledge Eliot (despite Dr. Williams’ disapprobation). I also honor my teacher Donald Justice, though I write nothing like him and resemble him only in my failure to be prolific and perhaps in my general pessimism. Also in my poetic makeup are some voices I have tried to disown over the years: from early adolescence Kipling and Edna St. Vincent Milay.  I still have my mother’s volumes of these poets on my bookshelves and while they are no longer central, I learned traditional metrical practice from them, for which I am grateful. And from my later adolescence comes my continuing attachment to the so-called Confessional School of Berryman, Plath, Lowell, Sexton, and Snodgrass. A very unfashionable group these days, but also a group, I’d argue, that practiced a middle-path poetics, with a concern for both matter and meter, subject and language.

Bachelard’s definition of poetry, if that’s what it is, also insists upon a reader, but a reader who has the gumption to reread, who is open to the poem’s insistence on being reread. It seems to me that contemporary schools of poetry have either over-emphasized or under-emphasized the reader, either pandering or pushing away, didacticism or word play. I think the division reflects a  fundamental dualism we have been unable to get beyond in Western poetics (with some notable exceptions); we feel driven to be one thing or the other, completely; we are made uncomfortable by mixed states.

[Cross-posted to The Plumbline School.]

I’ve just been reading Ellen Bryant Voigt’s delightful little book, The Art of Syntax – another in Graywolf’s really excellent The Art of series* — in which she makes explicit the patterns and variations in several poems serving as exempla.After all these years of writing poetry, Voigt’s little book excites me about what originally excited me — making shapes with words. With James Longenbach’s The Art of the Poetic Line, Voigt’s book would serve the intermediate student of poetry as a fine introduction to the art.

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*Charles Baxter’s The Art of Subtext, another entry in this series, is a rich source of insight about the textures of literary fiction.