25
He would not join
the contest
for the most humble
and so, won.
He immediately
hid his face in shame.
26
Seeing without illusion
is too often
another illusion.
27
The full moon effects the tides
in our brains.
28
We are each a group of
vibrations/electrons
that have become ego protrusions
in the great vibrate.
29
Humans as ego protrusions
are anchor points in the chaos of the
levels of vibration in
all dimensions.
30
Only situated, contingent reality
can be meaningful
to languagized, culturized, linear thinkers.
Bits, pieces, parts, fragments, aphorisms, and hiaku
16
Zen is not Buddhism!!
There; I have killed the Buddha.
17
I see/perceive out of an object that is a
Perceiver of objects;
Out of a subject which is part of all
objects: a contraption of meat in which
the subject-made-object by locating it is
located.
18
We are only accountable to whatever
brought us here to this tavern at this
carnivorous carnival; but remember
that it brought everything else AND
we are only single ego histories of each
of our bodies.
19
Some think magic must pop and splutter
and amazingly stick out in reality, but
reality is the magic.
20
The mind with language
freezes the world;
and the mind, keeping it,
steals the moment
from reality.
21
Be careful that the accouterments
of religion do not mask
the vastness of
spirituality.
22
Six AM, I don’t want to get up, but my mind
is full of metaphorical ideas which don’t seem
to distort reality.
23
Keep your higher, observing self, as a
constant companion.
24
Trimmers trim the sails to eventually
move in the direction they want;
Some others don’t understand that the in-betweeness
is not vacillation.
From: Aphorisms, fragments, bits, parts, and haiku
2
Thoughts which my mind
thinks are worthy
keep me awake in the night
3
About the possibility of dropping
grief and trauma:
Empty holes are hard to drop.
4
The “I” is merely a naked
point of memory
of the biological
entity in which
it resides.
5
We must be for
spirituality as
against religion
just as we should be for
humanity and freedom but
against the idea of
nationalism.
6
Religion exists only
to make humans constantly
and consistently refer to their
higher self.
7
Thinking takes intention away from the senses;
the senses take intention from thinking;
one dies when the other enters.
8
Linear, contingent, languagized
thought cannot contain
spirituality or reality; and yet
we are the lyres of the
physical world by use
of this gift.
9
Hanging on to
your freedom
shackles you
10
Are we all idiot savants
who obviously know how to live
but don’t understand?
Logic is useless.
11
We distribute our egos along
the flowing shore of time and beach-comb
things-phenomenon perceived
and reified
again and again.
12
The local Zendo opens at
5:30 AM (read: O-dark-thirty).
Well, I used to get up then to go fishing.
As then, I don’t expect what I catch to be fish
13
Fishing:
Might as well talk in Etruscan.
I came to this for
all the wrong reasons;
directions are always relative to
the map.
14
Words cut the world into parts;
Who would want real enlightenment?
To succeed you must fail.
To know you must not know.
And you must stop running
with words like scissors
toward reality.
15
Every morning on awakening, the self, the
history of this entity is brought back together
from notes in the mind,
and the text of the matter; the vibrations
around are continued.
Religion is the crutch that many people seem to need to enable them to treat each other the way they should. It's too bad that it seems to require belief in things for which there is no evidence. It need not be so. We could all lead an ethically proper and moral life without ever professing belief in things for which there is no evidence. We could start by living the golden rule. Just remember, in all your dealings with any person, to treat them just the way you would want them to treat you. It's so simple. All you need to do is think before you speak or act. Think first THEN speak or act! Things will happen at a slower pace but you will be much happier with the results.
THE FLOW OF SIGNIFICANCE
To name, to signify, is to help the memory. Naming makes significance, and significant events must be named. These two are recursive, are also real and in time, and build the history, the intermingled egos. They are words calling back places and events to the present as it moves on, evoking more evocations; naming and calling back; naming and calling back. We must be careful with names and not drop them into a sweet spring of ideas, stirring mud into the natural clarity of the linear movement of moments of naming.
I remember the yellow-green shine of the sun on Twelve Pole Creek, named for the twelve poles that George Washington measured it with, or so my mother told me. She knew many such things: the names of plants and stones, and the histories of places and objects. I recall the creek mainly because Dad took me and my two older brothers fishing, one at a time (we were 8 to 14 years old then). He wore waterproof waders but we wore blue jeans and old tennis shoes. And I recollect wading, the cold brown-green water flowing around and into my tennis shoes and soaking my jeans up to the rope, worn for a belt to avoid ruining my good leather one. I felt my way on the bottom of the creek, careful not to step in a deep hole. This I remember, but I think many of these memories come to me from color slides and movies that my parents made. That yellow shine may be the sun on the lens of the camera. But some things are not in the pictures and are snagged in my memory like leaves caught on a gnarled tree branch hanging in the stream. The wading was like this, and it is like remembering, feeling for the bottom, the significance of the long-past experience.
This was at Cabwaylingo State Park in West Virginia. The name includes the four closest counties. C-a-b is for Cabell County, w-a-y is for Wayne County, named for Mad Anthony Wayne, the l-i-n-go is a combination for Lincoln County and Mingo County. Our parents took us there for a week's vacation for several years during the late 1940s and early 1950s. The cabins were made of creosote-soaked logs. That odor still evokes thoughts of the vacations there. I can't bring back to mind our everyday life in those cabins, what we ate and when, but I vaguely remember trying to sleep in that strange environment of insect sounds and water flowing. Odors were thick in the air: dust, mildew, the creosote, war surplus banana-oil insect repellent, smoke from coal oil lamps, and citronella. The things I do remember, as I feel for the experience again, by definition must be the events and perceptions that are significant after fifty years.
Besides the wading and fishing I have other definite memories: baby eels pouring with the water from the mouth of a smaller creek into Twelve Pole Creek; pipsissewa, which my mother pointed out to us; a pet groundhog at the local store where we bought food and cases of Nesbitts Soda Pop; a tiny turtle, which I kept for a several years; and hikes in the flourishing green hollows and up Tick Ridge to an old deserted farm.
What we called baby eels were about two inches long and all black. One end, as I remember, was all mouth and I seem to recall one tooth. They would latch onto and suck on our skin. The cold, clear water swept hundreds of them over the rocky bottom at the mouth of the little creek. We filled paper cups with the slick black little worms, and had contests for who had the most. We soon tired of this and emptied the cups, letting them loose into the ever-moving stream.
We learned about plants like the reclusive evergreen laurel relative, pipsissewa. In Cree this means "to break it up," referring to its use as a diuretic and in the breaking up of bladder stones. I have often, as I grew older, confused its fascinating name with the fascinating form of Indian pipes, which are saprophytes that live on dead leaves, mulch, and formerly live things, and grow under dead wood or low cliff edges. They live on old residue like a memory that takes what it can from the past and uses it to make reality and flourish. They grow as a single stem, bent over to form the flower at the top, giving the appearance of a smoking pipe. The flower is made of the same waxy material as the stem, all white or all pink. My mother showed us these and many other plants and named them; others were lady slippers and jack-in-the-pulpit, but the name pipsissewa and the form of the Indian pipes invoke these moments the most.
We drove out from the state park to a local store for food and drinks. The store was in a frame building, backed against a sandstone cliff, its white paint peeled off in flaps showing weathered wood underneath. Chewing tobacco and soda-pop advertisements filled the window. A general store, it sold junk food and modern "gee-gaws" for vacationers, and staples and produce for the locals.
A groundhog hung around the front door and would take offered food from the customers. I extract a picture from my memory, or from the movie camera with the yellow shine, of a fat complacent grey-brown sort of beaver-like animal, but without the flat tail, sitting in a gravel parking-lot eating crackers. As in many of my recollections, I am sure there is some idealization.
I don't long for the past to return to it, but what I remember seems better than my experience now; either my tastes have changed dramatically or the Nesbitts Soda Pop we bought there was better than anything that we can buy today.
On a hike up one of the lush hollows where the pipsissewa grew, as I rested from hiking on a large moss-covered rock overlooking the creek, a movement near my right leg startled me. At first, thoughts of snakes and insects flooded my mind, but within a few moments I was holding a turtle about two inches across. It was a pond slider or red-eared turtle, a type they used to sell in the pet shops. I'm sure it was against the law, even then, to take anything from a state park but I smuggled it home and kept it for several years. Eventually it escaped and I never found it again. I gave it a name but it must not have been significant; I can't remember it.
Memory is like the sandstone rock cliffs in the eastern forests; rough, weathered and usually hidden by foliage. We would come upon them suddenly, and from several yards they looked like old stone ruins. I learned they were sedimentary rocks, grit of long ago dropped to the bottom of a body of water where the current slowed. Fossil memories of older times were deposited and a stable stream bed, firm enough to find footing on, solidified. I know now this strata is designated by the time period in which it is laid and the area in which it was first named, Pennsylvanian, Pottsville; and the dark black fragments of formerly living things in it are called Matewan or War Eagle coal strata. Again, I know this from my mother. Before she died in 1996 she sent me a book on the geology of West Virginia. Odd, that she would once more, through a rivulet of time, help me signify an ancient silt. That older stream, though dried, still has significance in the larger, longer stream of time. My imagination coupled with a natural affinity for large stone formations gave the hikes in the hollows there a special excitement.
The hike up Tick Ridge was a long one and I remember very little of the trip except that we complained of it being tiring and too hot, and Mom had to keep encouraging us to continue. There are no home movies or slides of this, but as before I remember the light; on a day with no clouds it seemed special, bright, but filtered and striated as through moving water.
At the top of the ridge we found a deserted farm which had been a large self-sustaining enterprise. A machine to make wooden roofing shingles stood under a tree. It seemed an odd bit of the past and my father, who was raised on a hill top near New Haven, West Virginia with eight brothers and sisters, had to tell us what it was. Except for the weathering of the wood and the rust on the metal it could have been used only the day before. Some buildings were still standing, others reduced to foundations, but all were being slowly washed away by long duration: a stone cellar, some wooden out buildings, a fenced in rock overhang, and a sort of chimney rock with a ladder to the top. I was not able, or maybe not allowed to climb the ladder to the top and was left at the bottom with my little brother in some blackberry bushes in the hot sun.
When we were running on the trail back to the farm from the rocks we almost stepped on a copperhead. I have a striking memory of a sleek coppery length, like a self-contained bit of fluid, moving swiftly away through the profuse jungle of the eastern forest.
A muddy forest trail led off of Tick Ridge in another direction. We followed it back down to the blacktop county road. Along the way were several old foundations of houses lost and worn like a memory in the flow of time; one is particularly unforgettable because of the rose bushes growing around it and the large shade tree in what was formerly the yard. I wondered who remembered those places as home.
Since the 50s I have been back to Cabwaylingo sporadically. I taught high school and elementary school music and English in the area and ended up there several times on outings. It never appears again as dramatic as it seemed in my childhood or as I see it in the pictures from those vacations. One of the last times there, I slept all night on Tick Ridge in a tent. A large group of old friends and relatives sang and ate around a campfire near the fire observation tower that sits on the ridge. The high tower above the memoried eastern forest allowed a far view across great green space, with clouds scudding as though caught in a tide of blue water. The next day we hiked to a deserted farm on up the ridge where the grandfather of one of my friends had lived. It evoked memories, but it had been a long time and I wasn't sure whether it was the same farm I hiked to as a child. There were only foundations, nothing left standing, and it was very overgrown, very worn, like my memories from thirty years before.
That I think I remember is meaningful; details from so long ago are hard to recall. I've come this far into the creek fishing for significance; wading, with my nostrils full of the odor of sweat, branch-water, dark loam, and moss; finding memory coalesced as in a still pool on the far inner side of a curve in the creek. I'm not sure the significance is there, anymore than value and relevance is anywhere in our long story of remembrance, our ego history, the story of this entity on this planet during this century. The question of significance is really, "who am I, wading in this water now, and from where does the light shine?" The only answer is that I am the past, the light is remembered, whether from a picture or from an actual memory (if there is ever actual memory). I am the one who played with little wriggling black snake-like creatures at the mouth of a fresh clean stream on a steamy day sometime in the mid-twentieth century, sometime in eternity. I am the one who was then, and the one who now thinks he remembers all of that and yellow light. We can only define ourselves or anything with descriptions from the past, and we can only feel for those memories, as for footing and stability while wading in this stream that is all around us, flowing.
Not the word wrought
world.
Through your senses the surroundings
scream at you,
always pouring in.
NOW.
Intense influx of data. Always
you have learned to make
sense of it
(as a baby)
practiced hard to divide it and
separate it into parts,
keep most of it out,
screening.
If
you let it in,
it is a magnetic flux
of everything into
your senses.
At first without thought
(so it is now)
out-reaching like radar or sonar
blossoms
invisible flower of
connections to all,
to live here a moment in the present only
Now add memory and thought with the division of discrimination and the present is replaced by the past and possible future. The moment is lost and the screening restarts.
It-us is "is"
One can say that we perceive the things themselves, that we are the world that thinks itself—or that the world is at the heart of our flesh. In any case, once a body-world relationship is recognized, there is a ramification of my body and a ramification of the world and a correspondence between its inside and my outside, between my inside and its outside. – Maurice Merleau-Ponty
There exists an existence
throughout reality, or
"is,"
who
is
"is."
This existence has set up
terminals of awareness to experience
itself as reality, that is, as "is;" all the
small things
it might miss
being all
being (a sunset here or on a far planet, or
watching itself be this ripple
in this stream or that one).
Those terminals of the universe-
Aware-of-
itself
are the sentient individuals, us,
or it-us.
It-us is here-there/now-then
to explore "is"
in it/our
life/death, this
millisecond/infinite
orgasm
of time/space
which is
here-now/then-there.
And so, just
now-then/there-here, when
vertebrates
evolved and the space
phone rang in the
rubbed worn enamel
sky, right
here-now/there-then
Where the glass
Drink-bottles glisten and
lie with plastic
Chemical bottles and metal cans
and petrified wood and trilobites
and pieces of cloth and plastic
sheeting and condoms
hang in the brush
near the creek (where it/i look at
the ripples for it/us),
here-
there-
now-
then-
the eternal order of
clowns was/is formed;
being began,
we knew
we knew and
laughed.
Communion commenced.
It/we became, began,
begot/are becoming, are constantly beginning, and
are always begetting
it/us.
It/we is/are constantly taking
communion with it/us and it's/our
unimaginable
God/Goddess, while it/we hums
to itself/our-self
a hymn of
it-us which is
it-us in this, it's/our chosen
trap for it-us,
“is”
BashoNate's Western Philosophical, Mechanical Zen Tao Te Ching
Verse I
Pre-objective reality is non-sense and so
cannot be differentiated by our language, which named the sensings.
Languagizing the senses defines things; breaks up this reality
with our cultural templates and sifts reality, like nets to catch qulia and these are made into concepts (which are also social constructs).
Some reality always falls through the net holes.
Names as definitions (the cultural templates) limit non-sense/pre-objective reality.
This non-sense and undifferentiated reality is Reality,
in unity. Naming/logos divides it into the un-endable possible particulars.
It is what we can know.
The Song of the Mortars
The squad was well rehearsed.
Four of them sang in a bar, nights.
The forward observer had targets that seemed to look like troops. (Whatever you do don’t call the bleeders people.)
The fire direction control had aiming stakes
set to align from this placement to
some distance, anywhere in this quadrant.
The squad sang, “A Love you don’t find everyday ay ay,
doo doo-doo doo-doo doo, doo”
They moved with the rhythm of the music and sang as they carried the shells
and fixed the charges,
"You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'."
"SHORT THREE! RIGHT TWO!" Bracketing the target.. Closing in on the meaning.
"ADD ONE! RIGHT ONE!" Finding the pinpoint in the distance,
though blind to it.
They carried the shells in rhythm to the song.
Calibrated sights on aiming stakes,
took off fewer charges to adjust for distance,
carried the shells to the mortar pit,
"FIRE FIVE HIGH-EXPLOSIVE FOR EFFECT,
WHEN READY!"
The shell drops into the tube and explodes up and out with
a loud "whoosh." If you lie down beside the tube and look
up, you can see the projectile go up and arc over into time
and otherness.
"You've lost that lovin' feelin' now its gone, gone, gone, oo oo oo ooo."
For Bill Lee
What is there to write about, Bill?
Sitting in this Oregon rain thirty-five years later.
How the seasons, still fenced by the finite moment are
overflowed by time, as you and I wrote one Thanksgiving Day?
How we met at a “free university” class on
poetry writing and discussed your mimeographed poems: “½ Price Special,” “In Observation,” “Wah-me-doe (of Inchon Harbor),” “Try Again Apollo,” and “After the Rain” which reads:
“catch me quick from not being here long
and don’t be shy
dream colors aren’t that dumbfounding” ?
Or how you quit your job as a bank clerk to write poetry,
work on an English degree, and work for
Si Galperin in the West Virginia legislature on “open committee meetings,
stopping the Vietnam War,
and halting strip-mining” ?
Maybe about your introduction to me of
sweet onion, sharp cheddar, and a rough musty red wine
laid out in my mind’s painting on a twilit shadowy table in
stark reality at the house you and Patti called Little Pink?
How you watched death in a bunker during a mortar attack,
received a Bronze Star for “saving your own ass,”
and became a veteran against the Vietnam war?
Or, your only letter to me about how writing bends time,
the writer being in the future of the reader
when writing and the reader being in the past of the writer
when reading; and about the child who later died
before being born?
Or the last time I saw you
and you held and divided an orange which we shared and you spoke of it as special,
like the jar in Tennessee,
or bread and wine?
Or maybe about your VW beetle you called Gregor,
A Kafka metaphor in which
you died?
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