words, words, words–fluttering drizzle and snow

last night river and i went to panorama, and when i said i’d spent my afternoon off riding my bike north and reading gary snyder on the black bear porch he said “i don’t know who that is.” i was of course shocked and started writing a book list on a paper napkin, even though i have been slightly irritated in my latest readings with certain tendencies towards what i can only describe as the “bosomy hills aesthetic,” but it’s hard to read or talk to a man with any spiritual or intellectual appreciation for the natural world without encountering something like “he seeks them not only in the wilderness but also among the singsong girls of the pleasure barges, floating with lantern and zither in the night,” or “I think again of rain maidens, and remember the water cycle,” but no one is perfect, not even gary snyder.
“and you call yourself a hippie,” i scolded river, and he said “i just like the music and the drugs. really, i’m just not a reader,” he confessed like it was something he’d been meaning to tell me for years. i said snyder is one of few people i’d consider marrying, despite his already-marriedness and his being at least 80 by now, and i’d appreciate it if river at least knew who he was. because of this, in part:

“For a gathering of poetry yogis and yoginis at Green Gulch Zen Center one spring, I wrote, ‘We have to appreciate the Mind that floats our many selves, gives shelter to our hard-won information and word hoards, and yet remains a sea of surprises. (Whatever made people think Mind isn’t rocks, fences, clouds, or houses? Dõgen’s ingenuous question.) Meditation is the problematic art of deliberately staying open as the myriad things experience themselves. Another one of the ways that phenomena ‘experience themselves’ is in poetry. Poetry steers between nonverbal states of mind and the intricacies of our gift of language (a wild system born with us). When I practice zazen, poetry never occurs to me, I just do zazen. Yet one cannot deny the connection.’
On seeing Ikkyu’s poem (and my comments), my friend Doc wrote me from his fish camp:

Ikkyu says, ‘Humans are endowed with the stupidity of horses and cattle.’
I think Ikkyu is full of shit.
Humans are endowed with a stupidity all their own.
Horses and cattle know what to do.
They do it well.
He is right about poetry as a work out of hell.
We ought to know.
Phenomena experience themselves as themselves.
They don’t need poetry.
We are looking at a mystery here.
How do these things have such an obstinacy
and yet are dependent on my consciousness?
When I practice fishing with two teenagers
poetry never occurs to me.
But later it does.
I can go over the whole day.
Hooray! That’s what being human is all about.
It is just as much a weakness as a strength.
You say language is (a wild system born with us).
I agree.
It is wilder than wild.
If we were just wild we wouldn’t need language.
Maybe we are beyond wild.
That makes me feel better.

Kanaka Creek.
Doc Dachtler

Beyond wild. This can indeed include language. Poetry is how language experiences itself. It’s not that ‘the deepest spiritual insights cannot be expressed in words’ (they can, in fact) but that words cannot be expressed in words.’ So our poems are full of real presences. ‘Save a ghost,’ you might be asked by your teacher, or n owl, ot a rain forest (or a demon). Walking that through and then putting a poem to it are steps on the way toward realization. But the path has many switchbacks, and a spiritual journey is strewn with almost as many land mines as a poet’s path. Let us all be careful (and loose as a goose) together.”
-”A Single Breath,” A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds