So, good evening everybody. My name is Norman Fisher, I'm co-abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, and it is my great pleasure tonight to welcome all of you to the second lecture of our year-long series titled Buddhism at Millennium's Edge. Last week, Professor Robert Thurman gave us the kickoff lecture of the series and he reminded us that although the idea of the year 2000 as the Millennium is only a human construct, which only a certain number of humans construct it, not everybody necessarily, still there is in all of us a very deeply embedded notion in our consciousness of a millennial possibility, a vision of a world in which there can be peace and justice and a way of living on the

[01:06]

earth with compassion and awareness. I think all of us are hoping for this and many of us are trying to work toward it. And I believe, and I hope very much, that Buddhism has a part to play in the challenges that lie before us. It is in this spirit that we are very glad to be able to bring you this year a number of really remarkable speakers, each one a Buddhist teacher, each one with a uniquely modern and millennial translation for our time of this noble tradition. Tonight's speaker, who I will introduce in a moment, Gary Snyder, has been for nearly half of our century one of the world's strongest voices for this new and very, very old way of looking at things. Later this month, I think the last weekend of the month, we'll be hearing from a Zen

[02:11]

priest, naturalist, and novelist, Peter Matheson. Following Peter will be John Kabat-Zinn, Joanna Macy, Natalie Goldberg, Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, Tenchon Anderson, David White, Pema Chodron, and Ed Brown. Each of the speakers will offer a public talk here in the church on a Friday night, followed by an all-day Saturday workshop so that you can get a chance to explore and digest the important messages that they will be bringing us. If you haven't already signed up for more of these events, check the tables outside. Both the church here in the church and the Zendoa Green Gulch, where almost all the workshops are being held, have limited seating, and the events are selling out. At Green Gulch, in recent years, we have renovated our meditation hall, and now we

[03:14]

really need to build some staff housing, and your dollars tonight will help us do that. So if you've never come to one of our temples, please come whenever you feel like it, on these Saturdays and Sundays especially. Come whatever your religious affiliation is or isn't, and consider yourself, as of tonight, personally invited. Now I really am quite thrilled, actually, to be able to introduce someone whom I admire very, very much, who has been for most of my life a personal hero of mine, and of so many of my contemporaries. I think that many of us here tonight could say, as I could say, that my life would not have taken the shape that it has, were it not for the vision and courage I found in

[04:16]

my early 20s in the words and deeds of Gary Snyder. To begin with, we could say that Gary Snyder is a great American poet, widely anthologized and taught. His work is key and representative for American poetry in the second half of our century. We could say that. That would certainly be true, but that would not even be half the story, I think. Throughout his career, Gary has returned the role of the poet to its ancient human roots, poet as maker, poet as spell weaver, poet as social and religious visionary. His lifetime work with and interest in Asian languages and literature, especially Japan, native peoples and their ways, ecology and mountaineering, Buddhism, community organizing,

[05:16]

and the building of alternative lifestyles have made him truly one of the grandfathers of a new culture, a leader, creator, and continuous inspiration for an America that simply did not exist before he, with many of his friends and associates and colleagues, brought it into being. And those of us who are fortunate enough to know him personally can attest to the fact that he has somehow managed to work all of this out quite naturally and easily without losing his native friendliness and simplicity or his sense of family and fun. So it is really a great honor for me tonight to present to you a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author of the recent Lifetime Master Poem, Mountains and Rivers Without End, longtime

[06:26]

Buddhist meditator and sage, ecologist, naturalist, essayist, ne'er-do-well dharma bum hero, distinguished University of California, Davis professor, scholar, translator, husband, father, community leader, and friend, please everybody, let's give a millennium-ending welcome to Gary Snyder. Thank you very much, Soketu Norman. Soketu Norman Fisher. That was charming. Really.

[07:40]

My wife says to me, when are you going to settle down and just do one thing well? Like be a good husband. So it's a real pleasure tonight to be able to do this on behalf of Zen Center, student housing at Green Gulch, and other needs. And remembering back, you know, it just seems like yesterday when Ananda-Claude Dahlenberg and Alan Watts and I were sitting around in Alan's house over in Homestead Valley in Marin County, probably about 1952, joking, saying, yep, someday there's going to be a Zendo in Kansas City, ha, ha, ha. We couldn't have imagined that, you know, be careful what you wish, it might come true. And I remember driving out to Muir Beach in my old 1937 Packard with some of these characters, going down the

[08:45]

hill and looking at the Wheelwright Ranch. I'm not kidding. I really said this. We were looking at the Wheelwright Ranch and I said to Claude, wouldn't that make a great place to have a Zen monastery? This is about 1954. So I'd also like to acknowledge this beautiful space, this Unitarian Church. I think this must be at least the fourth time that I've read in here, read poetry in here, and the last time was for the Sierra Club. So, many uses. Well, okay, the millennium. My presentation tonight, I called it Poems and Stories and that's a fair enough way to describe it. It's going to be in three parts, dealing with some ideas about the millennium and which millennium it might be. Secondly, some tributes and a few

[09:46]

life and death poems. And third, I'm going to do a few more poems of my own and I'm going to read some poems by some other people too. And then I'm going to do again a performance of one of the longer poems in Mountains and Rivers Without End, which I am working on, learning how to do. I'm going to do the Mountain Spirit poem again. So how many of you have heard me do the Mountain Spirit? No, it's not too many. And I'm getting better at it too. So let's relax and see what happens here. Entering the 50th millennium. Let's say that we're about to enter not the 21st century, but the 50th millennium. Since the various cultural calendars, Hindu, Jewish, Islamic,

[10:51]

Christian, Japanese, are each within the terms of their own stories, we can ask what calendar would be suggested to us by the implicit narrative of Euro-American science, since it is science that provides so much of our contemporary educated worldview. We might come up with a Homo sapiens calendar, and that might well start about 40,000 years before the present. BP, before the present. Back in the Gravetian-Organesian era, when the human toolkit, already long sophisticated, began to be decorated with graphs and emblems, and when figurines were produced, not for practical use, but apparently for magic and beauty, 40,000 years ago roughly. Rethinking our calendar in this way is made possible by the research and discoveries of the last century in physical anthropology,

[11:55]

paleontology, archaeology, and cultural anthropology. The scholars of hominid history are uncovering a constantly larger past in which the earlier members of our species continually appear to be smarter, more accomplished, more adept, and more complex than we had previously believed. We humans are constantly revising the story that we tell about ourselves. The main challenge is to keep this unfolding story modestly reliable. One of my neo-pagan friends, an ethnobotanist and a prehistorian, complains about how the Christians have callously appropriated his sacred solstice ceremonies. He says, our fir tree of lights and gifts has been swept into an orgy of consumerism, no longer remembered as the sign of the return of the sun. And he says, people have totally forgotten that the gifts brought from the north by Santa Claus are spiritual, not material,

[13:02]

and his red clothes, white trim, round body, and northern habitat shows that he represents the incredibly psychoactive mushroom, Amanita muscaria. My friend is one of several poet-scholars that I know who studied deep history, a term that they prefer to prehistory, deep history, in this case that of Europe, for clues and guides to understanding the creatures that we are, and how we got that, how we got here, the better to steer our way into the future. Such studies are especially useful for artists. I went to France the summer before last to further pursue my interest in the Upper Paleolithic. Southwest Europe has large areas of karst, limestone plateau, which allow for caves, but the thousands, some of them enormous, quite a few were decorated by Upper Paleolithic people. With the help of the poet

[14:05]

and the paleo art historian, Clayton Echelman, my wife Carol and I visited many sites and saw a major sampling of the cave art of southwest Europe in the Dordogne and in the Pyrenees. Places like Pêche-Merle, Cognac, Niol, El Portel, Lascaux, Trois Frères. The cave art, with its finger tracings, engravings, hand stencils, outline drawings, polychrome paintings, flourished from 10,000 to 35,000 years ago. 10,000 to 35,000 years ago. The Paleolithic cave and portable art of Europe thus constitutes a 25,000-year-long continuous artistic and cultural tradition. The people who did this were fully Homo sapiens, and it must be clearly stated, not ancestors just of the people of Europe, but in a gene pool that old, to some degree

[15:06]

ancestors of everyone, everywhere. The art that they left us is a heritage for the people of all the world. But this tradition is full of puzzles. The artwork is often placed far back in the caves in almost inaccessible places. The quality fluctuates wildly. Animals can be painted with exquisite attention, but there are almost no human figures, and the ones that are there are strangely crude. Almost no plants are represented. Birds and fish turn up only two or three times. One cave provides an exception. Many animal paintings, otherwise quite beautifully finished, appear unfinished with the feet left off. The theories and explanations from the 20th-century art experts, the great Abbe Broglie and the redoubtable André Leroy-Gurhan, don't quite work.

[16:06]

The hunting magic theory, which holds that the paintings of animals were to increase the take in the hunt, is contradicted by the fact that the majority of animal representations on the cave walls, the greatest single animal represented, is wild horses, which were not a big food item, and that the animals most commonly consumed red deer and reindeer. We know this from the bones that we find in their campsites. We have a pretty good estimate of what they were actually mostly eating. These are depicted in very small numbers, and the horse at that time, of course, was not yet domesticated. So why this fascination with horses? My wife suggests that maybe the artists were a guild of teenage girls. The other most commonly represented animals, the huge Pleistocene

[17:14]

bison, the oryx, or wild cattle, which was still living in the forests of northern Europe up until the 16th century, were apparently too large and too dangerous to be a major hunting prey. Ibex, chamois, leopard occasionally show up, but they were never major food items. There are also pictures of animals long extinct now, the woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the cave bear, the giant elk. In the art of early civilized times, there was a fascination with large predators, in particular the charismatic Anatolian lions and the brown bears, for which the word Arctic derives. Big predators were not scarce in the Paleolithic. They were truly abundant. But sketches or paintings of them are scarce in all the caves but one. It was the bears who first used the caves, and in some, they entirely covered the walls, especially at the

[18:22]

base of the cave called Rufinyak, with long scratches. For a quarter of a mile, long scratches down the whole wall on all sides. Seeing this may have given the first impetus to human beings to do their own graffiti. So maybe we learned art from the bears. The theory that these works were part of a shamanistic and ceremonial cultural practice, likely enough, but still, just speculation. There have been attempts to read some narratives out of certain graphic combinations, but that cannot be tested. After several decades of research and comparison, it came to see that cave art began with hand stencils, that's putting your hand against the wall, and then spitting red or black water with pigment in it, or blowing it through a little cane tube

[19:24]

or a bamboo tube, so that you make a stencil of your hand on the wall. There's a lot of those in the Western Hemisphere, too. That 40,000 years ago, crude engravings and hand stencils were the beginning of all of this, and then the art progressively evolved through time to come to an artistic climax at the great cave in the Dordogne called Lascaux. This most famous of caves was discovered during World War II. Generally, it is felt to contain the most remarkable and lovely of all the world's cave art. The polychrome paintings here are dated at around 17,000 years before the present. Last summer, the summer before last, I had the rare good fortune to be admitted to the vrai grotte of Lascaux, the real Lascaux, as well as into the replica, which is in itself excellent, and is what most of the

[20:28]

tourists get to see. Only a handful of people a year are now allowed into the real Lascaux. I can testify to the magic of Lascaux. There's a 15-foot-long painting of an orc arcing across the ceiling, 12 feet up above the floor, and many other things. A sort of Lascaux style is then perceived as coming down in other later caves, excellent work, up to the Salon Noir in the Niault cave in the Ariège, dated at about 9,000 years before the present. After Niault, 9,000 years ago, cave art stops being made, and that date corresponds with the end of the Ice Age and the transformation of the ecology of southwest Europe from something rather like Montana, more into what it is today, more hardwoods, less open

[21:35]

grasslands, warmer climate, and not the disappearance of the larger game, they just moved on way back up north, and they are still up there in northern Russia and in northern Scandinavia, of course except for the ones that went extinct. Many caves enclosed up, so people's lifestyles and cultures totally changed and adapted to a whole new ecology, smaller scale hunting, smaller scale fishing, nets, fish netting, fish traps, a much more diverse and in some ways more sophisticated hunting and gathering system. And then many caves closed up from landslides and cave-ins and got lost. So, until quite recently, everyone was pretty comfortable with this evolutionary chronology, starting with crude paintings and moving up to really elegant

[22:35]

paintings, which fits our contemporary wish to believe that things get better through time. But in 1994, some enthusiastic speleologists found a new cave on the Ardesh River, a tributary of the Rhone, squeezing through narrow cracks and not expecting much. These were three young people in their early 20s that went out looking for caves every weekend as their hobby. Squeezing through narrow cracks and not expecting much, they almost tumbled right into a 50-foot high hall and a quarter mile of passageways of late chambers full of magnificent depictions that were the equal of anything at Lascaux. There are a few animals shown here totally new to our experience of cave art. Images of woolly rhinoceros, the Pleistocene maneless lion, which are rare in other caves, are the most numerous. This site is now known after the lead

[23:39]

discoverer as the Chauvet Cave. The French scientists up in Paris did their initial carbon dating, were puzzled, looked again, and then finally had to conclude that these marvelous paintings were about 33,000 years old, 16,000 years older than those at Lascaux, almost as distant in time from Lascaux as Lascaux is from us. The idea of a progressive history to cave art is totally in question, and a new and again larger sense of the human story has opened up for us, and the beginnings of art are pushed even further back in time. I wrote in my notebook, out of the turning and twisting calcined cave walls, a sea of fissures, calcite concretions, stalactites, old claw scratchings of cave bears, floors of bear

[24:42]

wallows and slides, then the human finger tracings in clay, early scribblings, scratched in lines and sketchy little engravings of half-done creatures or just abstract signs, lines crossed over lines, images over images. Out of this ancient swirl of graffiti rise up the exquisite figures of animals, swimming deer with the antlers cocked up, a pride of lions with noble profiles, fat wild horses, great-bodied bison, huge horned wild bulls, antlered elk, painted and powerfully outlined creatures alive with the life that art gives. On the long lost mineral walls below ground, crisp, economical, swift, sometimes hasty, fitting into the space, fitting over other paintings, spread across, outlined in calligraphic confident curving lines, not photorealistic but true.

[25:49]

To have done this took a mind that can clearly observe and hold within it a wealth of sounds, smells and images and then carry them deep underground and recreate them. The reasons elude our understanding. For sure, the effort took organization and planning to bring it off. We have found hundreds of stone lamps and the evidence of lighting supplies like wicks, traces of ground pigments that we know sometimes came from very far away and the people must have gathered supplies of food, dried grass for bedding, poles for the scaffolding and somebody was doing arts administration. It's true. One important reminder here then is that there is no progress in art. It is either good or it isn't. And there is probably no progress in religion.

[26:57]

Art that moves us today can be from anywhere, from any time. The cave paintings had their own roles to play back in the late Pleistocene. Having been protected by the steady temperatures of the underground, they return to human eyes again today and across the millennia they can move us. No master realist painter of the last 500 years could better those painted critters of the past. They totally do what they do without room for improvement. This is quite true in certain ways for all the arts and for our spiritual practices. What was the future going to be is a question we want to ask ourselves. One answer might be the future was to have been further progress and improvement over our present condition. This is more in question now. And the deep past confounds the future by suggesting how little we are agreed on what is good.

[28:09]

Now this question about painting human beings. If our ancient rock artists skipped out on painting human figures, it just may be that they knew more than enough about themselves and could turn their attention wholeheartedly to the non-human other. In any case, the range of their art embraces abstract and unreadable signs and graphs and a richly portrayed world of what today we would call faunal biodiversity. They gave us a picture of their animal environment with as much pride and art as if they were giving us their very selves. I think maybe in some way they speak from a spirit that is in line with Dogen's comment, we study the self to forget the self. When you forget the self you can become one with all the other phenomena. At any rate, they forgot to paint themselves. We have no way of knowing what the religious practices, the rituals, or the verbal arts of 35,000 years ago might have been.

[29:23]

It's most likely that the languages of that time were in no way inferior in complexity, sophistication, or richness to the languages spoken today. If you doubt that, just remember that 40,000-year-old, 50,000-year-old Homo sapiens were almost indistinguishable from us today. They had larger brains, probably. That seems to be the case. And maybe they were a little larger in stature. They may have been smarter. But if one was dressed up in a suit or a dress and walking down the street, they would be unremarkable in a modern city. If we're talking about a larger Homo history, we're talking about half a million years. So, you know, talking about 40,000 years is just very, very recent. And so languages can be expected to have been fully developed already by then. I get this opinion, incidentally, in a recent personal communication from the eminent linguist William Bright, Bill Bright.

[30:30]

And it's not far-fetched to think that if the paintings were so good, the poems and songs must have been of equal quality. So I imagine the myths and tales of people, places, and animals back then. In poetry or song, I fancy wild horse chants, salutes, as are sung in some parts of Africa, to each creature, little lyrics that intensify some element in a narrative, a kind of deep song, cante hondo, to go together with deep history, or on the other side, lots of little bison haiku. It was all, however, in the realm of orality, no writing, which, as we well know, can support a very rich and intense literary culture, just pure orality, no writing, that also interacts with dance and song and story. Those were the arts of earlier times, and such are our prime high arts today, opera and ballet.

[31:38]

Today, then, the Franco-Germanic Anglian Creole, known as the English language, has become the world's second language, and as such is a major bearer of diverse literary cultures. The English language will be, in the future, truly a host to a multicultural rainbow realm of writings. The rich history of this English language tradition is like a kiva full of lore to be studied and treasured by writers and scholars wherever they may find themselves on the planet. This language that we speak now will also continue to diversify, to embrace words and pronunciations, moving it farther and farther from London over time. And even as I deliberately take my membership to be North American and feel distant from European culture, I count myself fortunate to have been born a native speaker of English. Such flexibility, such variety of vocabulary, such a fine sound system, and we'll look forward to its future changes.

[32:44]

Performance, poetry, storytelling, fiction, they're all still alive and well. Orality and song and poetry will be with us as long as we are here. And as I said, there may be no progress in religion, in practice, or in the dharma, either. There was an ancient Buddha. There were archaic Bodhisattvas. All that we have to study of them is their shards and their paintings. We can try to hear their teachings coming through paintings of lion and bison. This is now part of what our past will be. And we can also wonder through what images, our voices, our practices will carry to the people of 10,000 years from now. Through the swirls of still-standing freeway off-ramps and on-ramps, through the ruins of dams.

[33:47]

For those future people will surely be there, listening for some faint call from us when they are entering the 60th millennium. Thinking and the research I put into this, and I'm continuing to work on, is part of a new project of poetry and reflection that also connects with a 1994 trip I took in southern Africa, in Botswana and Zimbabwe, with my sons, looking at the wildlife in northern Botswana. It's a very vast area of the wildest wildlife left in Africa.

[34:49]

Where I saw, with my contemporary eyes, the profiles at dawn of giraffe, eskimo, elephant. The profiles of giraffe, elephant, lion sometimes, baboons, impalas and other kinds of antelopes walking across the sunrise horizon. In a procession, such as you see painted in the caves of 30,000 years ago. Elephants in particular have been such a powerful image in the human mind for so long. Look at all the lion and elephant imagery in the Buddhist art of India, for example. In the art and in the literature of India, the Buddha gives the lion's roar. The lion's roar of the Dharma. Hey man, that doesn't mean much to you, until you've heard a lion roar.

[35:53]

And then you get the sense of what authority is suggested by that. Anyway, here's a poem from Africa that you can see the connections here. And the reference here is to the story, the Greek story about Artemis and her pool deep in the forest. I'll just go over that story a little bit. One of the stories about the Artemis. In some versions, virgin goddess, not so in others. The huntress, the lady of the wild, the mistress of the wild. Who loves hunting with her bow. Also known in Latin as Diana. She has a pool deep in the wilderness that she repairs to once a year. After apparently a pretty rowdy year. And the pool restores her virginity. It's the pool of Artemis.

[36:58]

Every year she goes back there. So a hunter named Actaeon was deer hunting with his hounds one day. And as he plunged deeper and deeper into the forest in pursuit of a stag, or as we would say, a buck. He saw this glimmer of a body through the trees. And letting his dogs go for a moment, he crept near. And he saw Artemis naked taking a bath. And then she saw him. And she said, aha. So you've seen me naked. Okay. Change then. And the story goes on to tell how he, with horror, watched his hands turn into hooves. And antlers began to grow out of his forehead. And fur and hair began to grow all over his body.

[38:01]

And he tried to talk, but just sounds came out. And then in terror, he started to run. And as he ran, his own dogs chased him and killed him. I wrote a little poem about that. Artemis. Artemis, so I saw you naked. Well, go and get your goddamn virginity back. Me, me, I've got to feed my hounds. Well, this poem is for an elephant. And I call it Diana. But I spell it Diana, D-H-Y-A-N-A. It's one of my favorite puns. Diana, meditation and Diana. The heavy old truck lurches into a glade, an opening. There's a large wet elephant, splashing, gravely walking up and down a pool and out to the rough dirt track.

[39:09]

Glistening, shining back, I want to see her. She's lifting from the water, getting nearer. This is no place for us. We gun the truck ahead and go. She chases us. Her giant, glistening body stays in mind and watches us from behind. Sparse, grassy cover, a shrubby, small tree forest, scattered big trees, mopane, acacia. Crossed by well-beat creature ways, all-size pathways and elephant freeways. To the east, see a band of baboons sift through the woods. No path needed for them, they go like the wind. A freshly broken tree arm, bark munched by elephants, elephant jawbone in the road. Pile after pile of dung, huge piles, holy shit. The melodic moans of hyenas at night, the relentlessly social baboons.

[40:16]

Woodlands, again now, the butterfly wings of the mopane leaves, termite towers, water in the soil. And perfect elephant footprints in this ancient lakebed sand. The whole elephant footprint made up of many smaller sub-pads, each etched in tiny lines. Semi-circular dragging, scooping, marks in the sand of the trunk as it trails along. Endless miles of sand, many weeks inland. It's all an ancient beach, soft, faintly pink, fine sand. Ghost waters, an African Lake Lahontan. The great wild elephant herd of northern Botswana, with all its dung and tracks and broken trees and Artemis bathing in her pond. Guizumba Wadi, Botswana, April 1994.

[41:20]

Footnote. So, people moved through the landscape, walking, running on foot. Quoting it, cross-referencing it, writing it, footnoting it. A source of food and fiber, of truth and value. Minding it. It was their minds. This series of readings, I am going to save some time to take some questions if anybody wants to harass me about any of this. The second part tonight is, as I said, tributes and some poems of life and death. These are out of the last year of our lives.

[42:28]

And I'll read them now. This is the little prose poem I wrote on the death of Allen Ginsberg. I call it Allen Ginsberg Crosses Over. Mid-March. I heard from Bob Rosenthal that Allen wasn't feeling well, and that he was in the hospital for a check-up. I called Bob, and he explained that the combination of Allen's diabetes, heart murmur problems, and several different medications had coincided in such a way to make him extremely fatigued and disoriented. And then, when I called Allen at the hospital, he told me he had been diagnosed with a recurrence of Hepatitis C from years ago in India or Mexico. He was so medicated that he wasn't able to talk very clearly.

[43:33]

22 March, 1997. About 20 days earlier than usual was the perfect afternoon for cherry blossom viewing. A few friends came over to the house. We heated up some sake, sat out on the porch to Engawa, and had some sashimi as well. The two 13-year-old girls, Robin and David's daughter, Maika, amused themselves bounding on the trampoline as we gazed through the fully opened Japanese sakura cherries and into the sunset. Sitting, cross-legged, chatting on the board deck. Then the cordless phone trilled. Allen Ginsberg, in Beth Israel Hospital, calling me back, this time wide awake to chat. The phone, the cordless phone, went around to several old friends, talking with Allen and viewing the flowers. Haiku. Cherry blossoms falling. Young girls rising.

[44:37]

Us on the deck. Raw tuna. Sake. And blossoms. Spilled shoyu. End of March, I had a call from Allen, late at night. He said that he had just been diagnosed with liver cancer, and the doctors said that he had two to five months to live. He also told me at that time that his affairs were in order. He had decided his will. And that things were, in that sense, in good shape. And that he would be going home to his own apartment in a few days, because there was nothing they could do for him in the hospital. I told him I would come to New York and visit him in a few weeks. It was a sweet conversation, which he closed with a goodbye that started gaily and ended with a little sob. A few more days went by, and wondering if Allen was back home yet, I called again.

[45:39]

Bill Morgan, in his office, told me that Allen had come back, had had a stroke the previous night, and was right now in a coma. He said Allen probably didn't have more than 24 hours to live. That was on the morning of Friday, April 14th. They said Gellick Rimpoche was flying in from Jewel Heart in Ann Harbor. The next morning, 2.30 a.m., April 5th, Allen died, still in a coma. A few days later, I flew to Illinois to give a talk. I wrote this haiku called, Reading Basho on a Plane. Between lectures, this little seat by the window, my hermitage. Got back, got back home, had a call from Gellick, who told me of chanting and sitting with Allen before and after he died. He had no attachments, Rimpoche said.

[46:44]

He was really ready to go, the Rimpoche said. And this haiku came back to me by Kyorai. The day before yesterday, crossed the mountains over there, in the full bloom of cherries. So early this fall, John Hollander, the poet John Hollander from Yale, contacted me and said he had been asked to give the memorial tribute to Allen at the Academy of Arts and Letters every fall when the Academy of Arts and Letters meets in November. They have a series of tributes to all their members who died every year, who died that year. Of course, everybody in the American Academy is pretty old, so a lot of people die every year. And that's how they admit new members. It's true. This year, six people in the literature division died, this year we will elect six more people.

[47:49]

That's the way it works, they always have the same number of people. So John wrote me, or called me, or emailed me is what he did, right? He emailed me and he said, would you like to contribute something to what I'm going to say about Allen, because I know that you are close to him. You might have something you'd like to say that would be different from what I'd say. Well, I'm sure what I would say would be different from what John Hollander would say. So I wrote this and I called it A Few Words from the West Coast Side for Allen Ginsberg. In 1955, I was a graduate student in Far Eastern Languages at UC Berkeley, living in a tiny cottage. My connection to other writers was across the bay in San Francisco. An occasional visit to Kenneth Rexroth's Friday evenings, or a meeting with Jack Spicer in some North Beach bar. It was quiet, almost solitary life. All that was changed one October afternoon, when Allen Ginsberg turned up at my little house to quiz me about who I was, who I knew, what I wrote, my politics, my preferences, my drugs.

[48:59]

I was swept along by his warmth and relentless curiosity. Kenneth Rexroth had told him to look me up. At that time, Allen was dressed like a fifties professor, and he seemed ready to go get a university career and go straight. But even as he tried to do a graduate semester at Berkeley, he was pulled, partly by the events of that fall, into the writing of Howl. Our whole Bay Area music and literature world began to change after the night he read that poem aloud in public. That was in October, 1955. We had no sense then of how far those ripples might reach. It was enough that the semi-underground black and white hipster, gay and lesbian, anarchist poets, the nascent wilderness philosophers, and the pacifist communards of that time, and there were some, found in Howl, and in Allen's person, some linking story and an intense, critical, intelligent, warmly sexual, Whitmanly, comradely style.

[50:11]

Allen suddenly gave us all cheer, and out of that came a much greater spirit of community. Six years later, I was traveling all over India with Allen, dirt road, buses, sleeping in train stations, tenting up with Tibetans. His patience and compassion and concern and total freedom from serious whining made him a lovely, instructive companion. We took to the Buddhism and Hinduism of some of those we met because of their personal clarity and warmth, not for ideology or from some spiritual neediness. He stayed on in Banaras, but came to join me back in Japan a year later. As usual, always ready to try something, he trooped along with me to the Daito-koji Zendo, the Daito-koji Sodo Zendo, where I got him a seat, and he liked the cool rigor. He was comfortable with Asia, and as attuned to its manners as anyone I've seen.

[51:14]

Yakety-yak talking, hot dreams and visions, yes, but also a lot of surprisingly quiet and contemplative days together. Allen in those days was physically strong. In 1965, he and I roped up and climbed a 10,000-foot snow peak in the North Cascades of Washington, Glacier Peak, chopping steps and threading between crevasses. This was part of a seven-day high country backpack trip we did. Ten years later than that, 1975, he was my land partner in the Sierra Nevada, and he spent a good part of the summer of 75 carrying lumber, pounding nails as a worker on his own little cabin job. He is still remembered as a person of great availability and sweetness by working people here in the Yuba country, some of whom never knew him as a literary figure at all. And my younger son now lives in that cabin that Allen built, where there is an old construction wheelbarrow leaning against the woodshed, and on the bottom of it is painted Ginsberg.

[52:23]

Allen was a comrade, a partner, a teacher in urban smarts, a role model, and also a caution. Me, I'm not gay, but I loved him. Another person who died this year who has been very important to many of us, whom some of you may not know as much about, was James Laughlin. James Laughlin was the founder of New Directions Press. As a young Harvard student, 1936 to 1937, writing poetry and I think editing the Harvard Poetry Magazine at that time, Laughlin went over to Paris to look up Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein.

[53:29]

And Pound befriended him, Pound and Stein both befriended him, and Laughlin asked Pound, what should I do? Now it happened that James Laughlin was the heir to quite a bit of money, Jones Laughlin Steel, Pittsburgh. So Pound said to him, publish books, publish good literature, publish our 20th century poetry. So Jay, as everybody calls him, called him, went back to the United States, finished up at Harvard and took some of the money that he could get a hold of from his family and started New Directions Publishing House in New York City, which became one of the most influential, for those of us who paid attention to it, publishers in the country, the publisher of William Carlos Williams of Ezra Pound, of Gertrude Stein, of countless European and South American poets, new prose and poetry over decades, and it still is going.

[54:37]

But there are other publishers who carry on, as well as New Directions, who carry on that kind of publishing now. When Jay started New Directions, it was the only publishing house on a nationwide scale that was publishing any of those things. And he was my first nationwide publisher, Jay Laughlin was. I first heard the name of James Laughlin while I was a student in Oregon. I'd been reading Ezra Pound's Selected Letters. This is the memorial, the tribute that I wrote for Jay Laughlin. That's what I'm reading you now. I said, these are tributes. This is the tribute I wrote for Jay. And I couldn't go to his memorial ceremonies back east either, so I wrote this. This was this fall, October of this year. I had been reading Ezra Pound's Selected Letters. I'd been drawn to Pound because of my interest in East Asian art. And went from there to Pound's poetry. Then I discovered what Eliot Weinberger calls the list. The list of the New Directions writers. And that brought me to the rest of 20th century modernist writing.

[55:42]

Edward Dahlberg, Rimbaud, Gertrude Stein, Paul Goodman, Juna Barnes, William Carlos Williams, so many others were the new writers whose wake we sailed in. Later, as a graduate student in East Asian Languages at Berkeley, and meeting the artists and poets of the Bay Area, I learned more of Jay through Kenneth Rexroth. Kenneth, it turned out, knew Laughlin quite well. They skied and sometimes climbed together. And New Directions was Kenneth's main publisher. Now Kenneth always had terrible things to say about Ezra Pound. Not just about Pound's politics, but also about his poetry. Pound and Rexroth, two very different men. But Jay was the friend, publisher, and colleague to both. And he clearly liked them each for their own special qualities. I thus became aware of Laughlin's Mahayana, or, my translation, big open spirit. In this way.

[56:44]

I think it was Don Allen who connected me with Jay. They were all at a party in San Francisco, one of those years in the early 60s, when I was living in Japan. A friend wrote me to say that over drinks, Don, of Gray Fox Press, Don Allen is still alive here in San Francisco, had said to Jay, why don't you take a good look at the work of Gary Snyder. And supposedly James had replied, those beat generation guys, they never answer their mail. At any rate, one day in Kyoto, I received a note from James Laughlin of New Directions, asking, would I show him some poems. I sent him the manuscript of The Backcountry, and Jay accepted it. By the time we had completed the transaction, and the book was published, he wrote to say, I am glad you are a person who answers their mail. That was the beginning of a long association. I finally met him while on a brief trip to the United States, was graciously taken to lunch,

[57:50]

met the whole remarkable staff of New Directions, entered into a productive friendship, in which I always remained properly awed by the honor of being with such an eminent press, and under the wing of such a great and sophisticated literary man, who was also six foot four tall. I returned from East Asia to live in the West Coast in 1969. A few more trips around the country, hanging out in New York City, hearing horror tales of publishers from other writers, I came to realize indeed how lucky I was to be with Laughlin. The steadiness, the integrity, the respect for writers, a culture that pervaded the whole office. Jay and I kept up our correspondence, as he did with so many, an intelligent, quirky, friendly, unpretentious exchange. One time I felt moved to write him and tell him how grateful I was that his press was there for me to work with. We also shared an interest in the cultures of India and East Asia.

[58:51]

Though my knowledge of Mediterranean culture and the classics was scanty, Laughlin's poetic engagement with classical references and themes fascinated and instructed me. I saw Jay at work a few times. Once when I was staying as a guest in the Bank Street apartment, he came in as I was leaving. We overlapped for half a day. He was dictating a letter into a little tape recorder even as we chatted. I never wrote a letter to Jay that he didn't answer. Looking back, I realize that that letter-writing spirit belongs to the old days, and old days of which I am part of too, a time when people took pleasure in writing letters by hand and were gratified truly to find others who would be timely and generous in sharing their thoughts and feelings in this medium. But grace and appropriate etiquette, good form and good playfulness conviviality and integrity are timeless.

[59:52]

Jay Laughlin's cool, elegant, understated wit and his alertness came out of a poet's mind, came out of wild mind. Jay was a fine skier. I would like to claim him as an Irving Mountain Man. Now I'm going to read you a few points by Jay Laughlin. He was so modest about his own poetry through his whole life that he published never through his own press but through little tiny presses on the side and he never advertised anything he wrote, but he was very good. And he was a great lover of women. Why do you never enter my dreams? Nightly I await you, but you do not come. The lamp burns and the table is spread, the Thalernian wine is decanted, yet it is dawn and you have not appeared. Are you afraid of my dreams?

[60:55]

They are loving and will not harm you, or do you in sleep go visiting the dreams of another? Two Spoons After we have made love and are sleepy, we curl together like two spoons, each fitting closely in to the other. My arm is around you, you my hand holding your breast. I can even feel your feet with my toes. Your long hair is between my eyes. Between your back and my chest, I whisper very softly into your ear for a moment. You squeeze my fingers and we fall asleep. The Goddess I have seen the Goddess with my mortal eyes. They were filming down the street.

[61:57]

It was Meryl Streep. She was attended by five trailers, eight trucks, thirty technicians and four policemen. The whole street was illumined with a heavenly blaze. She walked up the steps of the house four times, and I know that she saw me and smiled at me. She knew that I was her devotee. She went into the house, but they said the next scene was inside, and I couldn't go in. Will I ever see her again, my Goddess? But it doesn't really matter. I saw her, and she knew me. Love's Altar Let me bow down before the altar of love. Be genuflect at that sacred place.

[63:01]

It's useless for you to protest that this shrine is ordinary and common to all your sects. For me, it's the locus of the sacrament, the altar where the ritual of the mysteries are enacted. What are you smiling about, my dear wife asked me this morning at breakfast? Nothing, I said. Nothing in particular. Oh, she said, you're back at that again. Imagine that you are a reincarnation of the Buddha. Let me do that one again. This is good. You can all live with this one. What are you smiling about, my dear wife asked me this morning at breakfast? Nothing, I said. Nothing in particular. Oh, she said, you're back at that again.

[64:04]

Imagine that you are a reincarnation of the Buddha. And one more by Jay Laughlin, which actually is sort of partially dedicated to me. It's called My Old Grey Sweater. Not dedicated, but I'm in the poem. My old grey sweater in the back of the closet. What will you do with it? The one with buttons down the front, the heavy one I used to wear when I could still cut firewood. What will you do with it? The Salvation Army? I guess some worthy and needy man can still get a lot of use out of it. But you know, I'd really rather not. Please take it out into the woods and nail it to that big oak. Gary jokes that he wants to re-enter the food chain. He wants to be eaten by a bear. I'd like my sweater just to rot away in the woodlands.

[65:06]

Let the birds peck at it and build their nests with the grey wool. Please nail me to the big oak. And I'm going to finish with Jay Laughlin by reading a poem that I wrote for Jay that I wrote six or seven years ago while I was reading the manuscript of his collected poems and was so struck by his beautiful love poems for all the affairs he had and wondering how he had the nerve to actually write those poems and publish them. There's a real tension between truth and safety. So this is a poem. I said I can never publish this while Jay's alive or even read it aloud. So I've never read this aloud in public and it's never been published.

[66:09]

This is my first opportunity to share it with anybody. It's called What to Tell Still. Reading the manuscript pages of Laughlin's collected poems with an eye to writing a comment how warmly Jay speaks of Pound. I think back to at 23 I sat in a lookout cabin in grey whipping wind at the north of the northern Cascades and wondered if I should go visit Pound in St. Elizabeth's and studied Chinese at Berkeley and went to Japan instead. Jay puts his love for women his love for love his devotion, his pain his causing of pain right out there. I'm 63 now and I'm on my way to pick up my 10-year-old stepdaughter and drive the carpool. I have just finished a five-page letter to the county supervisors

[67:10]

dealing with a former supervisor now a paid lobbyist who has twisted the facts and gets paid for his lies. Do I have to deal with this creep? I do. James Laughlin's manuscripts sitting on my desk I read them late last night preparing to write a comment. And Bert Watson's book Translations of Suchre next in line for a comment on the back. September heat the Watershed Institute meets planning more work with the BLM and we have visitors from China, land managers who want to see how us locals are doing with our plan editorials in the paper are against us a botanist is looking at the rare plants in the marsh. I think of how Jay writes stories of his lovers in his poems puts in a lot it touches me so stubbornly courageous

[68:12]

or foolish to write so much about your lovers when you are a long-time married man. Then I think what do I know about what to say or not to say what to tell to whom and when still. Thank you. And finally, finishing with a few poems by some other people for this section is Rick Fields here? Rick Fields? Are you here, Rick? Just in case? I would ask Rick's permission to read from his recent book, Fuck You, Cancer

[69:14]

but I don't think Rick would object to my reading it and so I'm going to read a few poems from this. Rick Fields, I'm sure many of you know Rick he's the editor of the Yoga Journal he's been the editor of the Shambhala Sun he's done good work in East Coast and West Coast and Colorado venues for years wonderful man and he recently published this little book called Fuck You, Cancer this poem is called Here We Go There was the cough slight, irritating no more than trying to clear my throat of some minor obstruction a test for tuberculosis? negative for ulcers? negative x-rays? negative allergies? negative tropical disease specialist? negative psychics came up with disastrous, dramatic past lives

[70:16]

but still the cough persisted one night I dreamed there was a nail lodged in my throat the next day, heeding the call of the unconscious I saw an ear, nose and throat man a dryness in the larynx nothing more he gave me some pills and I went off to India reassured on the Ghats of the Ganges in Varanasi Shiva's city just one hit off the chillum with the naked sadhus and my voice broke to a froggy, whispery croak when I got back to the States I had the hard lymph node above my collarbone taken out and biopsied while the doctor and nurse listened and laughed at the O.J. trial on the radio I called next Friday afternoon I'm sorry, he said it's not good here we go, I thought as the floor disappeared beneath me

[71:19]

petals for Marsha I spilled the flowers pale pink petals funny, what can scare you in this world? one day pale pink petals scattered on the table another day grey black petals, three little shadows spilled, scattered backlit on the shiny film there, in the lower left lobe I reach for your fingertips pale pink petals brush my cheek this world funny how in the light of death everything shines Varanasi, Banaras passing by

[72:27]

silver and gold sari covered corpse Dawa a hip, twenty year old Dharamshala girl says to me Tibetans say when you see dead it's good luck why? makes people pray and May 16, 1997 on my 55th birthday two years to the day from my first chemotherapy I'm still alive against all odds, they say to celebrate I meditate for half a day on strange Tibetan deities wrathful and peaceful who rise and fall with my breath in emptiness later in the day a dip in the chill Pacific

[73:29]

a wave lifts me up turns me down then a kayak seals pop up in pairs like us curious, inquisitive arcing, protective two snowy egrets stand like sentries on stilts long necks coiled strike like snakes floating aimlessly rising and falling water flashing from the curved blades what are the odds of me being here today? golden sunlight gently with the tide from the rising sea two Chinese poems everyone's journey

[74:31]

no, I'm sorry this is Japanese this is early 16th century Japan everyone's journey through the world is the same so I am done with regrets here on the plains of Nasu I place my trust in dew Sogi and here's one by Li Bo Li Bai or Li Bo called Zazen on Jingting Mountain the birds have vanished down the sky now the last cloud drains away we sit together the mountain and I until only the mountain remains give you one more from the west and then I'm going to move on

[75:34]

to mountains and rivers about end this is quoted by Lorca in his essay Duende Lorca says Lorca is talking about blood and death in poetry actually he first quotes a woman poet La Marbella of the 17th century who dying in childbirth on the highway says the blood of my entrails covers the horse and the horse's hooves strike fire from the pitch and then he quotes a recent young man from Salamanca killed by a bull who exclaimed my friends I'm dying my friends it goes badly I've got three handkerchiefs inside me now and this I put in makes four the long poem

[76:57]

mountains and rivers without end that I managed to finally bring out in the fall of 1956 for me one of the most interesting and challenging parts of it is the keystone poem called the mountain spirit and it's a performance piece really and so I'm going to perform it that is to say it takes a bit of chanting and a bit of voicing and I'm still learning how to do it the poem follows to some degree the structure of a Japanese no drama and it's those styles of chanting and speaking it retells the story of the no play Yamamba in North American terms the North American way to tell this story we go like this throughout Western North America there are tales of mountain spirits

[77:58]

sometimes fierce and jagged sometimes smooth and sweet as rainbows sometimes seen as an old ragged woman now some years back in San Francisco there was a poet who made his reputation largely on the basis of a point that he had written about the mountain spirit even though he had not actually visited the mountains very much himself so one year this poet decided to pay a visit to the unique groves of ancient bristlecone pine the oldest living beings in the world that are located in the remote upper elevations of the white Inyo mountains of Eastern California you all know where that is after considerable travel he made his way into the white mountains and he set up camp as it was getting dark as it happened it was also the time of the annual Perseid meteor showers which he also hoped to enjoy while looking out over

[79:01]

the dusk landscape a voice came out of the dark challenging him and then asked him to read aloud his famous poem on the mountain spirit it was the mountain spirit he promised he would do that at midnight and then he tried to put this strange encounter out of his mind at midnight however he was awakened he saw that his visitor was indeed the legendary mountain spirit so as the meteors streaked through the sky he read his poem to this mysterious personage and then the two of them danced the dance of the bristlecone pine there are stands of bristlecone pine Pinus longaeva in the mountains at the western edge of the great basin that contain individual trees which are dated well over 4000 years old those that live on the bone white outcroppings of the most ancient

[80:06]

of living beings okay so this poem tells a kind of a story and is partly chanted, partly sung partly recited

[80:31]

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