The coming weirdness. Ceaseless wheel of lives. Ceaseless wheel of lives. Red sandstone gleaming to all all might. Ceaseless wheel of lives. Red sandstone and white to all all might. Driving all night south from Reno

[01:05]

Through cool-porched Bridgeport Past Molo Lake's pale glow Past tongues of obsidian flow stopped chill And the angled granite face Of the East Sierra Front. Ah, here I am arrived in Bishop Owens Valley, called by Yahu Nadu not so long ago. Ranger Station on Main Street. I'm a traveler. I want to know the way to the White Mountains and the Bristlecone Pines. She gives me maps. Here, the trail to the grove at Timberline Where the oldest living beings thrive on rock and air.

[02:16]

Thank you for your help. I go to the pass, turn north. End of day, climbing high. Find an opening where a steep dirt side road halts. A perch in the round, dry hills. Prickly pinyon pine boughs shade. A view to the last chance range. And make a camp. Nearby, a rocky point. Climb it. Passing a tidy scat arrangement on a ledge. Stand on a dark red sandstone strata, outcrop at the edge.

[03:19]

Plane after plane of desert ridges. Darkening eastward into blue-black haze. A voice says, You had a bit of fame once in the city. Four points of mountains. Here it's real. What? Yes, like the lines, walking on walking, underfoot, earth turns. But what do you know of minerals and stone? For a creature to speak of all that scale of time.

[04:27]

What for? Still, I'd like to hear that poem. I answer back, Tonight is the night of the shooting stars. Mirafak, the brilliant star of Perseus, crosses the ridge at midnight. I'll read it then. Who am I talking to, I think? Walk back to camp. Evening breeze up from the flats. From the valleys, salt and death. Venus and the new moon sink in deep blue glow. Behind the palisades to the west. Needle clusters shrink in the wind.

[05:31]

Listen close, the sound gets better. Mountain ranges, violet haze, back fading in the east. Puffs of sailing, dark lit cloud. A big owl's soft, swift whip between the trees. Unroll the bedding. Stretch out blankets on the crunchy, dry pine needles. Some warm, rosinous ground. Formations dip and strike my sleep. Approaching in a dream. Bitter ghosts that kick their own skulls like a ball. Happy ghosts that stick a flower in their old skull's empty eye.

[06:32]

Good and evil, that's another stupid dream. For streams and mountains, clouds and glaciers. Is there ever an escape? Erosion always wearing down. Shearing, thrusting, deep plates crumpling. Still uplifting, ice-carved cirques. Dendritic, endless fractal stream bed rifts on hillsides. Bitter ghosts that kick their own skulls like a ball. What's it all for? A meteor, swift and streaking, like a tossed white pebble, arcing down the sky. The mountain, spirit, stands there. Old woman, white ragged hair. In the glint of algol, alter, denim, solder, Aldenbaran.

[07:33]

Saying, I came to here. I can't say no. So I speak. The mountain, spirit. Walking on walking, underfoot earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same. Walking on walking, underfoot earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same. Into earth, rock dives. As the mountains lift and open, underground out. Dust over seashell, layers of ooze. Display how it plays.

[08:37]

Buttresses fractured, looming, friction only, soon to fall. Each face, a heap of risks. Tale of slaves below. Flakes weathered off the buried block. Tricked off an old pluton, and settled somewhere ever lower down. Gives a glimpse of streaks and strains. Warp and slide, a braided gritty mud wash glide. Where cliffs lean to the raven neckless sky. Calcium spiraling shells, no land plants then when. Sands and stones flush down the barren flanks of magma. Swollen uplands, slurry to the beach. Ranges into rubble, old shores buried by debris. A laughing trough, a lapping trough of tide flats and lagoons. Lime rich wave wash, soothing shales and silts. A thousand miles of chest deep reef. Sea bottom riffled, wave swirled, turned and tilled.

[09:43]

By squiggly slimes, swimmers many armed. Millions of tiny different tracks, crisscrossing through the mud. Trilobite winding salt sludge. Calcite ridges, diatom babies drifting home. Swash of quartzy sand. Three hundred million years be rolling on and then. Ten million years ago an ocean floor. Glides like a snake between beneath the continent. Crunching up old seabed till it's high as Alps. Sandstone layers, script of winding tracks. And limestone shines like snow.

[10:45]

Where ancient beings grow. When the X strokes stop, the silence grows deeper. Peaks like Buddha's at the heights. Send waters streaming down to the deep center of the turning world. And the mountain spirit always wandering. Hillsides fade like walls of cloud. Pebbles smoothed off sloshing in the sea. Old woman mountain hears shifting sand. Tell the wind nothingness is shapeliness.

[11:46]

Mountains will be Buddha's then. When bristlecone needles are green. Scarlet penstemon flowers are red. Mountains feed the people too. Stories from the past of pine nut gathering baskets quickly full. Of help at grinding, carrying, healing. Ghosts of lost landscapes. Herds and flocks. Towns and clans. Great teachers from all lands. Tucked in Wovoka's empty hat. Stored in baby Krishna's mouth. Kneeling for tea in Vimalakirti's one small room. Goose flocks.

[12:48]

Crane flocks. Lake Lahontan. Come again. Walking on walking. Underfoot earth turns. The mountain spirit whispers back. All art and song is sacred to the real. As such. Bristlecone pines live long. On the taste of carbonate, dolomite. Spiraled, standing, coiling dead wood with the living. Four thousand years of mineral glimmer. Spaced out, growing in the icy, scary sky.

[13:53]

White bones under summer stars. The mountain spirit and me. Like ripples of the Cangrian Sea. Dance the pine tree. Old arms, old limbs, twisting, twining. Scatter cones across the ground. Stamp the root foot down. And then she's gone. Ceaseless wheel of lives. Red sandstone and white dolomite. A few more shooting stars. Back to the bed roll. Sleep till dawn. Okay, I'm going to finish with one more poem.

[14:57]

Thank you. [...] Thank you very much. You know, you guys are getting off easy tonight. You know, I learned how to read poetry in India. In North India. And, you know, four or five hours is what I consider normal. This last poem is the most recent poem I've written. I guess it's the most recent. I haven't read this one in public except to a few friends up in the mountains. In fact, when I wrote it, I thought, this is not a poem I'll ever read to anybody else. Except people, you know, the locals. But what the heck. It's called The Summer of 97. We built an addition onto our house this summer. At the same time that my wife, Carol, who is wrestling with a very rare and complicated kind of cancer,

[16:05]

had to go into a very drastic surgery in Washington, D.C. And she was gone for a good part of the summer. And then came back just when this thing was finished, or almost finished. And so she comes into the story, too. So this is called The Summer of 97. It's written in a form that I call dog and roll. You'll see what I mean. West of the square old house, on the rise that was made when the pond was dug, where we used to sleep out, where the trampoline used to sit, earth spirit, please don't mind if cement trucks grind, and plant spirits, wait a while, please come back and smile. Ditches, lines and drains, forms and pores and hidden doors. The house begins. Sun for power, cedar for sighting,

[17:07]

fresh-skinned poles for framing, gravel for crunching and Bollingen for bucks. Daniel peeling, moth for singing, Matt for pounding, Bruce for pondering, Chuck for plumbering, David drywalling, staining, crawling, Stu for drain rock, Kurt for hot wire, Gary for cold beer, Carol for brave laugh, till she leaves, Crew grieves, Gen for painting each window frame, Gen read again, Garden cucumbers for lunch, fresh tomatoes crunch, Tor for indoor paints and grins, Ted for roof tiles, tar paper curls, sawdust swirls, trucks for hauling, barrels for burning, old bedrooms disappearing, wild turkeys watching, deer disdainful, bullfrogs croaking, David parmenter for bringing

[18:09]

flooring oak at night, though his mill burned down, he's still coming round. Cindra, tracing manzanita on the tile wall shower, smooth new floors, old house, a big hall now, big as a stable, to bang the meat stein on the table, Robin got a room to write a poem, and no more nights out walking to the john, got indoor plumbing two years before the end of the 20th century, Carol, finally coming home, peeking at her many rooms, oak and pine trees looking on, old kit-kit dizzy house now, has another wing, so we'll pour a glass and sing, this has been fun as heaven, summer of 97. Thank you. Thank you.

[19:33]

Thank you very much, folks. Oh, wait a minute. I said I was going to answer questions. That's right. I said I would answer questions for a few minutes. Back to work. I won't keep you long, but if anybody would like to raise a point or two, we'll do it. Some of that stuff about the 50th millennium. That's why some of my friends and I call this year that you guys call 1998, we call it 49,998. Now, two more years to the 50th millennium. Well, shoot. I'll let you go home. Oh, okay. That what? I don't know what I expected.

[20:41]

Yeah, I guess so. Yeah. What's the biggest surprise? Well, I hate to say it, but the biggest surprise, and I shouldn't have been surprised, is how a certain number, a certain corner, certain territories of American, that is to say, white American Buddhists sort of end up sounding like Protestants. I shouldn't be surprised, though. We will work through that, too. We've got a lot of time ahead of us. Anybody else? Yeah. Wait, wait, wait. I can't understand

[21:43]

what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it wasn't the same as the novel. It was not the same as the novel. So, we've got two different histories going there. Okay. But, you know, what can I say when somebody says, what was it like? It was like life. It was like what you did then. Yeah. Now, Jack's novel, The Dharma Bums, does reflect some real-life events and situations and a certain tone and feeling. Some of it is purely fiction. So, it is a novel. You know, it's not a biography or something. People have a hard time remembering that, including some university professors who should know better. Yeah. Hi, you lot. Yeah, sure.

[22:44]

Okay. Hmm? Oh, yeah. You know, he's going so fast there sometimes with those lines of poetry. Boy, I figure he's just making it up. Okay. One more. Oh, I'll leave that to the scholars of the future to figure out. It has its points of intersection and also it's very different. It could be, you know, in somebody's sort of no-drama hands. It could be made virtually into a no-drama, but that's really not my intention. No, my intention is

[23:46]

to push it out someplace else, but to borrow some of the conventions and some of the dramatic strategies of no-drama, which I admire as one of the most perfect dramatic forms in the world. And it is a poetic dramatic form. That is to say, most of the text is poetry in no. So, it's a wonderful form. I just love watching it. Over there? Yeah. How do you feel about growing old? How do you feel about growing old? How do I feel about growing old? Well, I do notice it sometimes. Although I didn't notice it until about four or five years ago, and then I started getting aches in my shoulders. And, you know, what is it? Arthritis when you get older? There's little things that come along. You know, you have, you learn that, you figure out you've got to adapt once in a while. But then when you learn to adapt, you just do other things. You know, like I figure, I'm saving Europe for my old age. As long as I can

[24:48]

keep going out, you know, in Alaska or out, you know, sea kayaking or moving out in the mountains, I'll keep going out in the mountains. And then I'll be ready for culture when I'm in a wheelchair and they can wheel me around art museums. Yeah, way back there. The point of what? What was the last phrase? The point of mindfulness is that you pay attention. I don't know. That's the answer to your question. The whole thing. Yeah. I'll take one more and let you folks go. Yes, the young lady. You have a drawing on cults

[26:12]

in some sense. Are you talking about cave art? Yeah. Yeah. Oh, I'm so deeply moved by cave art. And it's such a puzzle. And there's not, you know, you come up against a wall where you know that there's never going to be any answers to some of these questions. And so then it becomes really a place to meditate, really. And the most frustrating thing about visiting the caves in France, most of them, they won't let you stay in them very long. I would have to, and I've talked about this with Clayton Eshelman, you'd have to get some special permission, which isn't easy to get from the French Bureau of Archaeology, to be allowed to go and spend 24 hours or 48 hours in some of these caves using instead of electric lights, say candles, so you would get the light on the walls that was there when they painted them, and you could see them as they were probably,

[27:12]

quote, intended to be seen, but also to feel the space, feel the temperature, which is cool, the dampness, and to try to put yourself somewhere toward the mind that painted them at the time they were painted. The next step in understanding and appreciating cave art is going to have to be, you know, living with them and living that way in the caves a little bit, and nobody is allowed to do it at the moment. So that's kind of frustrating. Without having to go to France or Europe, you know, there is a remarkable array of petroglyph and pictographic art here in North America. It's actually all over the place if you are careful and know where to look. And we don't always talk about it too much because there's a lot of vandalism on it too. But one can, you know, indulge one's interest in rock art speculation and rock art visiting right here in North America wonderfully, right here in California

[28:13]

without going very far. And this is like a planetary, it's a planetary treasure because rock art is found on every continent. It's a planetary treasure full of images and graphs and graphics that are suggestive to us and we don't know how or why. So there's some touching base there with something very archaic in human nature that some of us are working at. And so I call that, for lack of a better word, the ancient Buddha. There's some great sutras about the ancient Buddha. Okay, thank you very much folks. applause

[28:56]

@Text_v004
@Score_JJ