|
Abbot's Journal Volume 62, February 6, 2008 |
|
By Norman Fischer | 6/02/2008 @ 8:59 am
|
Abbot’s Journal Vol 62
February 6, 2008
Muir Beach
Eighth day with the flu. On Thursday last went down to Redwood City with David Levy to introduce him to Meng and other Googlers and to finally get the armrest in the new car replaced. On the way to the car dealer we got caught in one of those urban traffic disasters that come along once or twice each year, closing off major arteries, creating havoc often for days. In this case it was a tanker sprawled across Highway 101 at rush hour, having spilled gasoline all over the roadway. Along with thousands of other cars we exited the freeway and wandered on multiple-lane city streets jammed with cars backed up behind traffic lights, till we finally found the dealer. Lots of wrong turns false starts and hair-raising reversals. By the time I got home that evening I was ill. Got up next day for seminar and dokusan, figuring (with confidence in my physical stamina and all-around well-being) I’d shake this in a day or two, but was worse on Thursday and Friday, spent the days partly in bed, but not entirely, because there were things I kept needing to get up for, benefits, Dick C.’s funeral, etc. Came home from that on Sunday and was able to be in bed to watch Super Bowl from beginning to end, a treat, this time for once it was a good game, exciting, with upset by New York Giants, a new hero quarterback is born.
Friday night I had to go to Roger Housden’s house. He’d graciously assembled a group of people to have dinner and hear me read from “Sailing Home.” I spoke about something I’d learned that day about Pound: what “periplum” is. A map, but not seen from above – seen rather from the perspective of a ship in motion, how the land looks. This is how Pound felt he was writing history in the Cantos, not seen statically from, as it were, above, but history on the hoof, seen from the ground, for the onrushing quick needs of the present. He felt he was writing a poetry of actual stuff, stuff that happened in detail in real time and space, not of abstraction or sentiment, of the general as abstracted from the particular, but the particular itself. (Last night read in new online mag “Critophoria” - that has an essay by me in it – a piece by Rachel Blau du Plessis on all this: she says that Pound’s theory is fake: that he claims to be humbly removing himself from the equation in favor of the objective recitation of particulars but in reality they are his particulars, that must be viewed as he viewed them. She then uses linguistic theory to show that “pointing out” isn’t hard and fast – it’s relative to who is pointing and what’s pointed to and that the particulars are fluctuational and essentially social – which Pound, Olson, and the rest of the Modernist gang miss. They thrust themselves on us far too much, far more than they were willing to admit or even notice).
... anyway, turns out someone at the party’s a classicist, who knows Homer, knows Pound, and adds that essential to the idea of periplum is parameter – that the map’s drawn as a circle around one in the center looking out. Which the online dictionaries I’d consulted didn’t say.
|
|
Abbot's Journal,Volume 62, January 24, 2008 |
|
By Norman Fischer | 6/02/2008 @ 8:51 am
|
|
Abbot’s Journal Vol 62
January 24, 2008
Muir Beach
Just saw in Cantos, p 384, “;;;...” which impressed me, that Pound would have thought of that. The most impressive thing to me about the Cantos is his use of fractured as-if-spoken language, misspellings, use of “etc” etc. The off-hand short-hand rapid-fire feeling of the text, the slang, the hyphenated, hard-accented words (a sound that Gary picked up on) – along with the lunacy of the obscure sources and the multiple-language quotations. Pound must not have considered Cantos to be an English-language poem.
**
Opening last night of the new Red Ceder Zen Community Dharma Hall in Bellingham. The place newly finished, and they’ve done a great job. Beautiful bamboo floor and the walls painted a lovely tan, with elegant hanging lanterns, everything fresh new and clean. In the ceremony we went to all the altars and at each one a sangha member made a statement before the incense offering; all the statements were all eloquent and heart-felt. I was proud of everyone. Lots of people came (many had worked on the place, many people I’d never seen before, new people) and there was a grateful and energetic spirit in the room. The new place is on a main street, with a large sign out front, so it makes a much larger appearance in the community than the old place did.
|
|
Abbot's Journal Volume 62, January 23, 2008 |
|
By Norman Fischer | 6/02/2008 @ 8:47 am
|
|
Abbot Journal Vol 62
January 23, 2008
Muir Beach
C. told me she had suddenly, for no apparent reason, become aware of “the pain of the world.” How shocking, she told me, to suddenly recognize, viscerally, the extent of it, how deeply disturbing, but that after she had digested this fact it somehow brought her, surprisingly, a sense of calm. I could see she wasn’t kidding about this, or dramatizing. She didn’t say exactly how all this had come about, told me about it very briefly in a break during a meeting. “I knew you’d understand,” she said, which I certainly did. I told her about my experience years ago, of leaving Tassajara for the first time after a training period, and looking at the faces and bodies of people on the street in Monterey – how I could see the suffering right there, in each and every face and gait, without a single exception. How startling this was.
**
Finding today that I have a bad attitude toward Phil’s work – and this may extend to poetry in general. He often referred to (as I do also in relation to myself) his “writing habit” as a pernicious weakness which one also, despite one’s self, affirms. But you see the downside of it, and recognize the real foolishness of a lot of what passes for (and may actually be) great art. Pound for instance, a willful maniacal Fascist. Stein, a self-indulgent arrogant rich lady. Yet they advance the art, are “great.” Then this makes you wonder about art altogether. And you understand the impulse of the Stalins of the world to suppress art, not only for overt political purposes, but maybe also for a deeper sense (as Plato had it) that artists are in the end necessarily immature, their works a distraction from a reasonable social life. Religion is so much better at nurturing people and keeping them usefully engaged – that is, until it gets boring or repressive (the two possibly being one and the same) and people need to break out. Anyway, reading Phil lately I see only his doodling, his useless erudition (without much useful understanding), all his poetic weaknesses, matching his personal shortcomings. This doesn’t make me love him less (and love was, in the end, what he was after) – or love his work less – but reduces any pompous references to him as “great poet.” I believe he himself felt pretty much the same way about it. Wanted to be a great poet, saw himself as such, and at the same time thought the whole thing – and he himself – was nonsense.
**
After the All Day Sit K. and I watched Schindler’s List. The movie was very sad and good. How did Spielberg manage those scenes of 10,000 incinerated bodies, of hundreds of emaciated naked men and women? Where did those people come from? Long time’s past now since all that (release of the movie, I think late 1990’s, marked a signal moment in our collective digestion of the Holocaust) and I could watch the movie without as much raw emotion and shock and when I first saw it. Still, there were a few times when tears welled up. From the documentary footage, in which people from the list spoke about what had actually happened, I learned that virtually everything in the movie, every small detail, was factual.
|
|
Abbot's Journal Volume 62, January 15, 2008 |
|
By Norman Fischer | 6/02/2008 @ 8:38 am
|
Abbot Journal Vol 62
January 15, 2008
Muir Beach
As I write, January 15, 2008, late afternoon at Charlotte’s Way, I’m looking at pale blue sky outside window over deeply etched precise and sharp hills. Sat this morning in the dark, then dawn slowly comes, very lovely to feel the light rising not only visually but in the whole body. Dawn dawns in me. Lately I feel not so much that I am meditating, doing zazen, or zen in any way, but that I am simply slowly entering silence. Entering the light.
On Saturday we heard from Emila that Michael’s now “dying.” That is, the doctors say his condition has gotten sufficiently bad that his life expectancy is very short, that he’ll be gone before the year is out. K. and I went over there and Gary and Trish were there and the six of us sat quietly, with our sorrow. Then yesterday at our priests’ meeting Michael decided he wanted to tell the group about it. “Something to tell you, this group,” he whispered. We all waited long minutes while he worked his way up to saying, with tremendous passion and drama, “I’m dying, I’m dying, I’m dying.” (This was precipitated by my speaking of Dave Tapper, who’s been suffering from a blood illness, and who, at the Elat Chayyim retreat, practiced Cheshbon Ha Nefesh, Reb Nachman’s “taking stock of the soul.” Walking outdoors in the snow, speaking spontaneously out loud to God he was surprised to find himself saying “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die.”)
After Michael’s declaration an amazing performance. He was feeling so much, but you could see the feeling was all jammed up inside him because of his defective neurology, so that not only could he not say what he was feeling, he, seemingly, could not even feel it, yet knew it was there to be felt, felt the need to feel, the pressure of the pre-feeling, but couldn’t push forward into the feeling, only feeling the jamming of the feeling painfully, as one would feel an intestinal knot when one needed to push out a stool. He began to breathe heavily, clutching Rick and Iva’s hands, who flanked him to either side. He looked intensely at all of us in turn and his body began slowly moving, then heaving, swaying from side to side like an autistic person, his face reddened and screwed up, his eyes narrowed, it was as if every conceivable human emotion – fear, anger, grief, sorrow, despair, confusion, panic – were passing through him in jumbled succession. Finally he began to growl, then to roar like a lion, something he’s been doing lately to cope with the frustration of being unable to speak. We all joined him in this lion’s roar, and then he was able to say a few words before he more or less collapsed into a heap on his little scooter, his head in his lap. He seemed cheerful and amused after that. Our conversation went on.
During some of the long pauses in all this the clear, dear, delicate peeping of a sparrow could be heard.
|
|
