Muir Beach

… So many events, presentations, retreats, comings and goings in the last week or so really I can hardly remember them. I’d need to check the calendar to determine where I’ve been, what I’ve been talking about, to whom.

This question of remembering: it does seem I forget a lot. I like to think of this as an aspect of my practice, that I emphasize, and put all my energy into, completely where I am at the time, so that I have less of a sense of historical or sequential time, but this may not be the case. I may just have a bad memory, anyway, I do little to exercise or enhance my memory. At my age one should worry about this but I don’t. I am happy to forget most things so as not to have my mind too cluttered up with this and that. I am sure I will remember what I need to remember when I need to remember it. Or that someone will remind me before there is disaster.

**

“And then I took a breath and the guy took a breath. It was contagious.”

“Oh, ok, ok. I don’t know anybody else, that’s a resource, a resource that I have.”

“Now I need a chair.”

“It’s huge right now.”

“It is intangible.”

Muir Beach

… emptiness teachings of Ashta hard for people to appreciate. It’s pleasant to think of emptiness (sunyatta) as interconnection. Then emptiness means we belong to everything, which is a comfort. But emptiness as void, as illusion, as nothing’srealinthewaywethinkitis is less comforting – or so it seems. Why not take delight in disappearing? “Gone” is only a disaster in terms of our being here – as we believe. So there is no “gone.” Just as there is no “emptiness.” Emptiness and goneness are just projections of our fear. And to really and truly disappear may be quite delightful.

I’m thinking of this in relation to Gil’s (Smolin) funeral last week (or whenever it was) walking up the hill to the burial site, with Julie, Gil’s wife, and talking about the Mahayana (and Zen) teaching of “no coming no going.” In a sense, I told her, Gil, the actual Gil, was never really here: which you suddenly appreciate when he’s “gone,” that is, when you recognize how uncanny “gone” is. He’d been gone every day – to work, to the store, to the next room. And what’s the difference now? Before he wasn’t gone because he was always there, in mind. And now? Just as much in mind as before, possibly more. This is hard to appreciate, but Julie said she did understand it (and I could see, in the look of her, that she did, that she was liberated by the knowing), couldn’t explain or conceptualize it, but understood. And of course would quickly forget, would lose, just as you fleetingly understand and lose track of the emptiness teachings.

Kaz wants to translate emptiness as “boundlessness” which may be ok for the Chinese, which renders sunyatta as “ku,” or “sky,” which connotes an empty boundlessness. But in Sanskrit sunyatta does mean emptiness (like a gourd, which is hollow inside) and “boundless” is a word that is synonymous.

Beautiful sunny day, dry, golden Marin hills, putting Gil’s pine box in the ground, saying a prayer. Funny, Gil was a Brooklyn Jewish boy, quick, intelligent, witty, shifty. Julie and her family are Minnesota Norwegians, without a hint of irony, stoic and upright. They’re the ones left now. Eulogies in the ceremony were very good. I didn’t know Gil had been so active in eye care in India for leprosy-sufferers. And that he’d seen from that experience that poverty-stricken Indian villagers, even when ill, are happier than wealthy educated San Franciscans. That was when he’d begun his spiritual practice. At the reception someone told me that whenever people went to visit Gil, close to the end, when the ALS had pretty much taken everything away, including the power of speech, Gil would always mutter something as the person left. It was impossible to tell what he was saying but the person told me that finally she had figured out what it was: that Gil was saying, to each and every person who’d come, “I love you.”

Muir Beach

… Saturday, Company Time retreat all day (subject: “focus”) then benefit for Hartford Street Zen Center that night. With David Schneider. Hadn’t seen him in maybe twenty-five years. He looks almost the same, lean and lithe in his neat suit, one hardly notices the thinning hair and the gray. We sat up on stage reminiscing about Issan and Phil (Whalen). I’d come prepared to read stuff by and about Phil, figuring I had little else to say (couldn’t remember any amusing anecdotes) but then, in the event, I did remember. Seeing Del’s “Tassajara Bread Book” drawings on the wall at Hartford Street, I remembered once driving Del and Issan up from Tassajara and we’d stopped at Del’s place in Palo Alto for dinner. Del and Issan drinking gin and gossiping about the old days in the San Francisco gay community, long before it was safe to come out: all the suffering, all the outrageous, if secret, behavior. I sat listening with shock and delight. It was as if an historical period long gone and long submerged were springing to life before my eyes. That reminded me of an essential element of Issan’s character (and, now I think of it, of Del’s too): a fearlessness, a total inviolability. Having made peace with his own sense of being an utterly debased person (what being gay in the 1950’s meant: you either embraced this, celebrated it, or you felt ashamed and horrified about yourself; surely gay people now are privileged to be fully included in the general fear and loathing that everyone feels), nothing further could happen to him, there was no violence. no humiliation he need stay clear of, so he didn’t care, had nothing to protect, and this was the source of his legendary charm. It was why he had no sense of fear and dread about AIDS, could pick people up on the street and bring them home with him, without any care in the world about when or if they’d leave or what they’d do when they were there. Whatever it was, Issan could handle it. For as long as it lasted. In the end though it was that very cavalier attitude in the face of danger that did him in.

I remembered other things: his walk: with back trouble he felt he needed to take special care of his posture, so he always moved with a straight spine, his head and neck extended, his shoulders squared and swaying from side to side, in a dignified and saucy manner, a gay, but not exactly a gay, walk. He wore white jubons (which are underwear) as if they were smoking jackets, and black tabi (Japanese socks) as if they were footwear of the emperor. No matter where he lived the place was always elegant and neat, though simple, with everything always exactly in place (later Laura Burgess said that Issan had developed this habit of neatness and precision when, as a female impersonator, he had to make swift costume changes backstage). Also remembered (but I think did not mention on stage) how regal he looked on his deathbed, so elegantly laid out. (A poem about it in “Success,” which means he died in 1990).

Lots of stories and memories too about Phil. Feeding him at Laguna Honda – just like feeding our turtles: he’d sit up, stretch out his neck, slowly open his mouth, then “glump!” bite down decisively; then slowly and deliberately withdraw. Rick Levine told me that once in the steam room at Tassajara he’d screwed up his courage (because Phil could be a scary guy) and asked Phil what he thought of Williams’ “no ideas but in things.” Phil grunted and groaned and finally said testily “How do I know what he meant? He didn’t mean anything – he liked to sleep with his patients, that’s what he meant!” Then, a few years later, Phil knocks on Rick’s door and hands him a volume of complete Blake. “Here: I want you to have this.” Wouldn’t come in for tea. In the volume every reference to “minute particulars” had been underlined.

I regret that I (with David’s cooperation) framed the evening around the conceit that the wicked old days were so much fun, and now things are so clean and rational they’re boring (that is, the Zen movement is boring). K. and some of the other women were recalling that to many Phil was scary and mean, and that he and Issan were in many ways quite sexist. When someone in the audience asked “Why aren’t people like that anymore in Zen?” David said, “lawsuits!” and he’s not wrong. There was a lot of sheer irresponsibility and blindness and all that quirkiness and crabbyness (words I’d used to describe Phil and Issan) had its price. Inevitably it would have had to change and certainly the change is for the better.

Muir Beach

Event with Novo Nordisk executives, the first day of their “Lighthouse Program.” In which they take thirty top executives from around the world (including the CEO, Lars) on a secret leadership development program. They are told what to bring, and are given some gear appropriate to the occasion, in this case outdoor jackets and Northface backpacks, but not told where they will be going or what they will be doing. I spent the day with them out at the Noetic Sciences site near Petaluma teaching them zazen and walking meditation and talking to them about the relationship of classical Buddhist mindfulness practice to leadership. I used more or less the same thoughts I’d presented to the Metta Institute students, who are concerned with being better caregivers for the dying – because the issue is the same in the end, how to cultivate a deeper sense of presence with yourself and with others.

With mindfulness there are three points: First the difference between mindfulness and self-consciousness. Mindfulness is exactly not self-consciousness, it’s establishing a wide field of awareness (wider than “self” would allow) in which inner experiences and outer experiences (and there is no important difference between these) can both be contextualized into a larger sphere. When we can do this, through careful, subtle training in zazen and extending that to the whole of life, we can be quite aware of what goes on within us – more aware, with fewer constraints – without being limited by it; and we can connect more warmly with others through the recognition that our feelings are simply human feelings, what everyone feels, that they don’t belong exclusively to us.

Second, that Dogen’s meditation instruction “think not thinking” is a kind of thinking. An open, creative, intuitive sort of thinking, without goal or purpose, and therefore more likely to get us outside the pattern of our usual thought, more likely to be creative. (CEO Lars saw this point immediately – he said that he always got his best ideas and best solutions to problems when he was jogging or bicycling or trimming the hedges).

Third, that with mindfulness comes eventually connection to life’s deepest suffering, and deepest truths, and therefore profound sympathy with others, and compassion.

In the morning we did groups on “What have you learned about human life through your work as a leader – and what have you learned about yourself?” In the afternoon I went through the mindfulness sutra impressionistically, stressing the counter-intuitive importance of the body as a basis for awareness of vedana (as gut reactions, gut, usually unconscious, emotional conditioning), of states of mind, and ultimately, of human truths. Then I discussed compassion and taught them tonglen (I’d been told they’d be the next day working in a homeless shelter, and had been asked to stress compassion; after the homeless shelter they were to go off to the Cascades, where they would meet with Al Gore and talk about climate change). In groups we worked with “What’s your experience of compassion?”

I was impressed with these people. Easy-going, funny, informal, modest, easy together. It seems the Danes are a civilized bunch! Not like our own countrymen, cowboys, zealots, and maniacs. Lars seemed completely comfortable with the others, they seemed not to treat him with too much deference. Had I not known he was the CEO, everyone’s boss, I might not have guessed. Lisa, the corporate head of H.R., had been a student of religion in university, and took very much to what I was saying. Her opening remarks included a quotation from some business guru who’d worked with Novo Nordisk and said “leadership is simply being who you are only with more skill.” Something like that. Afterward, with K. away, I accepted their invitation to dinner at Benziger winery. In the underground wine cellar that the Benziger people had hollowed out of a mountainside. Long narrow table elegantly set with about half the table’s square footage devoted to wine goblets (four or five for each person): you looked down the table’s center and saw a forest of crystal. Steak for dinner. I ate and drank too much.

Muir Beach

Finished Hank’s “Lyric & Spirit.” Interesting discussions of Jabes, Arakawa and Gins, Creeley, Rae, and a very long section in one of the essays on my work as one of the major instances of what Hank calls “spirit” in contemporary innovative poetry. Unfortunately the essay was written before either Slowly But Dearly or I Was Blown Back had come out – and these I think advance my work quite a lot, new directions and more depth. (Anyway, I hope so). Still, I was pleased to read the essay (I think I had not seen it – is it possible he’d not sent it to me before?) The Jabes stuff come in an essay on Rosemary Waldrop’s book on Jabes, “A Lavish Absence.” Many clarifying quotations from informal conversations with Jabes.

“Faced with an indecipherable world we set out to create a language, a place where human discourse can arise, and we come to exist as human beings; where, at the same time, we can maintain a relation to what transcends us, the indecipherable, the ultimate otherness, and speak it under the name of God.”
(Hank MS p 271)

“The name of God is the juxtaposition of all the words in the language,” Edmond Jabes reminds Marcel Cohen. “Each word is but a detached fragment of that name.”
(p 275)

“According to Kabbalistic tradition this pure spiritual light of the first day was, but did not remain. Where did it go? In the Torah. That is, into the word.”
(p 275)

“The Jew has been persecuted for being ‘other.’ But ‘otherness’ is the condition of individuation, the condition of being set apart from the rest of creation in the glorious – and murderous – species of humankind, and, in addition, set apart from our fellow humans as individuals, always as ‘other.’

“Judaism: a paradoxically collective experience of individuation. Exemplary of the human condition.”
(p 276)

“I (Rosemary) asked Edmond Jabes: “You say you are an atheist. How can you constantly write of God?”

“It’s a word my culture has given me.”

Then he expands:
“It is a metaphor for nothingness, the infinite, for silence, death, for all that calls us into question. It is the ultimate otherness.” Or, as he puts it later, in the conversation with Marcel Cohen: “For me the words Jew and God are, it is true, metaphors. ‘God’ is the metaphor for emptiness. ‘Jew’ stands for the torment of God, of emptiness.”
(p 276)

Hank: “I find Jabes’ writing – and Derrida’s too – to be the most important religious writing of our time. Yet I find myself wondering how that comes to be: how a non-believing Jew, an atheist, writes a poetry (or, truly, a generically unclassifiable writing) that has such a powerful capacity to engage and instruct. Perhaps Jabes writing demonstrates to us – in book after book – how inadequate and crude such terms as ‘belief’ and ‘non-belief’ are and that while Jabes may be classified as a ‘non-believing’ Jew and an ‘atheist,’ the opposing qualities of belief are, throughout his writing, of equal intensity. Perhaps what matters then is the intensity (and credibility and nuanced nature) of Jabes relationship to the fundamental portals of ‘Jew’ and ‘God’ and in this regard his writing is unsurpassed. I sometimes suspect (or entertain the thought) that for Jabes (and for Derrida as well) a direct or simple profession of belief, particularly a profession that assumed a static or definite quality, would not only be a betrayal of the fundamentals of their thinking and writing and of their profound sense of thinking as always being in motion, but also a violation of an orthodox interpretation of the commandment prohibiting one to have or worship any false images of the divine. For such a fixity of belief carries with it the hazard of actually standing between one and one’s relationship to the divine by becoming a sign or site of formulation that one mistakenly substitutes for that engagement.”
(p 276-77)