Robert Aitken, born June 19, 1917

“Our practice is not to clear up the mystery. It is to make the mystery clear.” 

 Robert Aitken

(June 19, 1917-August 5, 2010)

Naropa University archive is now online: a list with links, from The Allen Ginsberg Project

THE NAROPA UNIVERSITY DIGITAL ARCHIVE 

Great news! Naropa's extraordinary audio archive (hitherto hosted as part of the estimable Internet Archive) has now been upgraded, refurbished and newly-hosted by Naropa University - The JKS (Jack Kerouac School) audio collection (part of a wider collection held by the university) is now available and ready for on-line exploration and practical use here 

Close to 2,000 (1,925) recordings are now immediately accessible. (A further 1,500 - 1, 800 more have been digitalized and will subsequently be made available - and this is just the JKS component!).

As Naropa, on their web-site, declare:  

"The Naropa University Digital Archive is an ongoing project to preserve the institutional heritage of our university by making available all institutional audio and video files created from our inception in 1974 up through today. This collection will continue to grow as new recordings are created every year and will include audio and video from every program Naropa University offers."

An astonishing trove of material (we'll be drawing from it extensively in the months (years) ahead). We asked Archivist, Nicholas Weiss, and Archival Processor, Ani Thubten Palmo, to come up with a few (select) gems, half a dozen or so, just to give a taste. This is what they selected:

Allen Ginsberg and David Henderson - from the  Naropa Wednesday Night Poetry Series June 24, 1981 - here

Allen Ginsberg, Jim Nisbet and Peter Lamborne Wilson (with Introduction by Anne Waldman and Bobbie Louise Hawkins), June 18, 1996 - here

From The Jack Kerouac Conference: Kerouac in the 80's, June 1, 1982 - Timothy Leary (Introduced by Diane di Prima) here

Letters To The New Century - three talks (given in 2001) by the late great Anselm Hollo, here, here, and here

and, June 18, 2009 - the Summer Writing Program Faculty Reading (with Anselm Hollo, Junior Burke,Janine Pommy Vega, Samuel R Delany and A.B.Spellman  (with Introductions by Bobbie Louise Hawkins and Akilah Oliver) - here

Wonderful to be able to report this news. Happy hunting!

"I'd like to see it that way" (Norman Fischer)

"I'd like to see it that way"

(Norman Fischer)

A compendium of words was stored here

Just underneath the chimney

I'd like to see it that way

Fortune won't stand still for that

And pressure of the air flattens paper

I'd like to see it that way

One comes into the room groomed, a pleasure

There's a patch of glitter in the glamour

I'd like to see it that way

Each moment opens up sudden as an umbrella

On a day storms gather like wool

A way I'd really like to see it

So you can't assume a face again

Before the non-face puts in its appearance

Nor can you push at the door

expecting satisfaction on the other side

I'd like to see it that way

Many's the time and time for reflection

Truer than truth the subject's interconnections

I'd like to see it that way

I was born on a day absolutely unique in human history

Birds grasp their path in air

I'd like to see it that way

It's standard to pack half-a-dozen at a clip

Imagine the red thing yours alone at last

I'd like to see it that way

The image almost takes shape superimposed

As a mist on top of ordinary daily objects

I'd like to see it that way

Life goes on forever like a dusty road

Down which we peer as we drink a glass of water

I'd like to see it that way

We return again and again born into wombs

The shape of inverted ice cream cones

I'd like to see it that way

So I could relax, put on my enormous suit

And ring your doorbell holding my breath and flowers

I'd like to see it that way

In order to be able to end war but

Would war ever end or would my wanting

To end it ever end if nothing ever ended

I'd like to see it that way

Everything is standing up and falling down again

Constantly like hair in wind

I'd like to see it that way

For the good of the nation behind bars

For my own good bundled up into piles

I'd like to see it that way

I blow continuously on this thing the landscape

Crumples around me like a felt hat

I'd like to see it that way

But the problem is I put out my hand

And only clutch air wanting to understand

I'd like to see it some way

Any way as long as I could know it was there

And could pull back the covers at will

To reveal my heart's desire and measure it

I'd like to see it that way

"I'd like to see it that way" appeared in the 1989 collection Turn left in order to go right. Norman Fischer is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest, the founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture. He has often participated with beat generation poets, especially Phil Whalen, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure. His latest collections of poetry are Slowly But Dearly (2004), and I Was Blown Back (2005).

"Poets on the Peaks": Snyder, Whalen, and Kerouac in the Cascades

Although he has been linked with the Beats since the mid-50s, Gary Snyder is less the shaman or the showman than Ginsberg and Kerouac, and his writing shuns the wild word-is-a-virus pyrotechnics of William Burroughs. He shared the Beats' post-war restlessness: he studied in Japan, and learned Japanese and Chinese and traveled to India; his interest in Buddhism was coincidentally shared with Ginsberg and Kerouac when they came to San Francisco in the mid-50s, meeting up with poets Kenneth Rexroth and Philip Whalen. That became Beat poetry's East-meets-West moment, New York-to-San Francisco's transcontinental linkage. He was present at the Six Gallery when Ginsberg read "Howl" in October 1955, the first Beat cannon shot across the bow of 50s conformity.

Yet Snyder's individual impact on twentieth-century poetry and ecology -- the actual sinew, flesh and bone of man's place on the planet -- has been considerable, and has continued so for more than 50 years. Reviewing The Gary Snyder Reader in 2000, William Pitt Root puts Snyder's contribution pretty nicely: "Except for Gary Snyder, post mid-twentieth century American poetry might never have gotten further out-of-doors than the nearest garbage dump, golf course, or catfish farm." And Snyder's essays on nature (Earth House Hold, The Practice of the Wild) prove that these ideas are not the stuff of airy, lost-Edenic poetry. To the careful reader, his essays reveal exactly what America is losing more rapidly with every passing season.

Writer and photographer John Suiter trekked to the mountain lookouts where Snyder and others spent several summers in the mid-50s and captured images of the western mountains that inspired them. Poets On the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades (2002) is a literary and photographic recreation of the Beats' original sojourn in the wilderness. Snyder began his long poem, Myths and Texts; Kerouac found inspiration for The Dharma Bums (Snyder was the model for the book's main character, Japhy Ryder) and Desolation Angels; Whalen's Sourdough Mountain Lookout was published in 1957. Suiter pulls together the books, notebooks, letters and diaries of poets and writers creating a wilderness ethic in mid-century America, away from the cities and highways that were beginning to mark the country, and into one of the last great wilds on the continent.



When The Dharma Bums was published the year after On the Road, Suiter writes, Jack was tremendously excited and wrote to Snyder that 1958 would be "the Year of the Dharma." Snyder, in his fashion, was planning another trip to the wild, but wanting to include Jack in his plans. Returning from sea aboard the oil tanker Sappa Creek, Snyder wrote:"Maybe this is the Year of the Dharma. Now Arabian Sea and heading in for last load and trip home. Tiger, if you like, join me in the mountains this summer. I mean to wander the Sierras and Cascades both. Also, bhikku cabin around SF area -- we'll look into it."

To Whalen, Kerouac wrote that Gary's arrival would spark big changes:"With Dharma Bums I will crash open the whole scene to sudden buddhism boom and look what will happen closely soon ... everybody going the way of the dharma ... then with the arrival of Gary, smash! Watch, you'll see. It will be a funny year of enlightenment in America."

It was telling of them both that Kerouac's comments envisioned a grand change in American values, while Snyder was planning a return to isolation and the high mountains. For Snyder, there was the real work to be done of living, creating and conserving. Kerouac's wild enthusiasm was not bound to last; within ten years he was disillusioned and drunk, full of despair -- even if his roman candle of a book inspired a generation, he was not part of the social revolution it created, and he despised the unintended counterculture that came up around On the Road.

What a contrast to the ecological awareness Snyder's work has encouraged. His poetry and essays have been enjoying a rediscovery, with a lengthy appreciation in the October 20 issue of the New Yorker ("Zen Master") being the most recent. Snyder's long career as a poet, his translations of the Cold Mountain poems by Han Shan and others from the Japanese, and his ecological essays have made him, in a way, the remaining Beat presence. It's ironic that his quiet and unassuming poetry (and his life away from the literary spotlight) would continue to give meaning to Kerouac's "rucksack revolution" and its subsequent 60s fireworks.

Now 82, and after a lifetime of writing and contemplating what he once called "the real work", Snyder is still at it -- though his tools have changed from those he used at his Sourdough Mountain lookout in 1953. Here's an excerpt from "Why I Take Good Care of My Macintosh Computer":

... Because its keys click like hail on a rock& it winks when it goes out,

& puts word-heaps in hoards for me,
dozens of pockets of gold under boulders in streambeds,
identical seedpods strong on a vine,
or it stores bins of bolts; 
And I lose them and find them,

Because whole worlds of writing

can be boldly layed out and then highlighted,

& vanished in a flash at "delete"
so it teaches of impermanence and pain ...

The book is a valuable (and very beautiful) addition to Beat literature, putting into pictures as well as words what made this brief period of 1952-1956 so important to the scene that followed. Suiter is at work on a Snyder biography, and his research has turned up an unexpected find from this period: the autumn 2008 Reed College magazine carries information about a recording of Snyder's February 14, 1956 reading with Allen Ginsberg on the Reed College campus. The two reels of audiotape -- a copy made by a student -- contain Snyder speaking about his Cascades lookout experiences, and the first known recording of Ginsberg reading "Howl."

"Each Moment Is the Universe" (Dainin Katigiri): "you believe that another person's time is separate from yours"

Getting the opportunity to sit on the porch and read for pleasure is one of the benefits of summer's lazy days, a luxury I miss in the colder months. The books and magazines that used to clutter my nightstand instead teeter next to the rocking chair, but I make time each night to light the citronella and attack the stack. Carefully and mindfully, as the Buddha would instruct.The cold January days are a reminder that if I just wait, summer and its delights will come around again. 

From Dainin Katagiri (1928-1990) comes the following advice about the nature of time itself. It's a pleasant rumination even on a winter's night, as the stars come into view and the moon rises above the trees out my window. I read until the light from the candle fails or the cat jumps into my lap and reminds me that it's his dinnertime. Both are insistent markings of time's passage more sure than any clock.

Reprinted in Tricycle from his book Each Moment is the Universe (2007, Shambhala Publications) Katagiri writes:

"Usually we think of time in the common sense, as a stream running from the past through the present to the future. We think that way because we base our idea of time on the law of cause and effect. If someone hits you, you feel pain, so your human consciousness creates an idea of time that connects the past, present, and future. Then you believe that time is passing quickly and is characterized by the continuous existence of separate beings.

But that is a narrow understanding of time, which creates lots of problems and lots of suffering, because when you think about time that way, you become egoistic. You believe that another person’s time is separate from yours and that you only have to take care of your own time. Then you feel isolated and cold. You don’t feel a warm relationship with other people or beings, and you can easily hurt them.

When we see human life only from that narrow view of time, we are blind to the total picture of time. This is a big problem. It is like always climbing a mountain and never seeing the mountain from a distance. Sometimes, to understand the life of the mountain, you have to see the beauty of the mountain as a whole, connected with the clouds and the sky. We cannot ignore or escape from the stream of time. We must be there. But we cannot be blind.

In Shobogenzo, “Uji” (Being-Time), Dogen Zenji says: Open your eyes and let’s see time from a different angle! When you see your life from the broad view of time, you see that your life is not something separate from time — your life is time.

It is very important to see your life not only from the narrow view of your egoistic telescope but also from the broad view of the universal telescope called egolessness. This is why we have to practice. Right in the middle of the stream of time, we have to open our eyes there and see the total picture of time.

Through spiritual practice we can go beyond our egoistic point of view. We can touch the core of time, see the whole world in a moment, and understand time in deep relationship with all beings. Then we cannot be isolated and cold people. We become beautiful and warm people, appreciating and helping all beings."

An excerpt from "Crowded by Beauty," a new biography of Philip Whalen

Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen

Here is an excerpt from Crowded by Beauty: A Biography of Poet and Zen Teacher Philip Whalen, by David Schneider, forthcoming from University of California Press. A longer extract is published in the current issue of Trticycle magazine.

Whalen, along with Gary Snyder, was integral in the San Francisco group of poets who read at the Six Gallery in 1955. They were introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, a San Francisco poet of an older generation, who was a kind of literary father-figure for the younger poets and had helped to establish their burgeoning community through personal introductions at his weekly poetry readings. That night, Snyder read "A Berry Feast", and Whalen, "Plus Ca Change."

This excerpt describes Whalen's experience living as Snyder's roommate in 1952. Whalen eventually followed Snyder to become a Forest Service lookout, although as Schneider notes, Whalen "was much given, even then, to the sedentary life."

...Philip might never have found work in the mountains: sitting in that same Telegraph Hill apartment in the hot summer of 1952, Whalen read one of Gary’s regular letters, this one from a Forest Service lookout on Crater Mountain in the North Cascades of Washington State. Provoked by it, and by working (“bad anytime, but especially nasty in summer in the city”), Whalen wrote back to declare, “By God, next summer, I’m going to have a mountain of my own!”

This he did; then got another mountain the following year, and spent a third summer as a forest lookout the year after that, making this by far his steadiest, most satisfying job until many years later, when he became a “professional” man of the cloth—that is, a Zen priest. Whalen would never have read in the historic Six Gallery reading had not Snyder put Philip’s name and poems literally in front of Allen Ginsberg’s face. Philip certainly would have floundered longer with unemployment and flirted more dangerously with outright homelessness had Gary not taken care of him whenever the two were in the same town at the same time.

They roomed together in San Francisco off and on from 1952 to 1954 in a flat on Montgomery Street, above the city’s North Beach district, to which they descended together nearly nightly for beer at Vesuvio and other drinking establishments. Thus Philip and Gary came to know the writers, players, merchants, philosophers, painters, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars circling around the Bay Area in the gestation phase of the San Francisco Renaissance.

During this same period, Snyder and Whalen began going together to the American Academy of Asian Studies (now the California Institute of Integral Studies), where they heard and met Alan Watts, and later also D. T. Suzuki. From among the audiences there, they got to know Claude (Ananda) Dahlenberg, who cofounded the East-West House and later became an ordained Zen priest under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. And from connections there, they began attending the regular Friday evening literary gatherings held at his home by the poet Kenneth Rexroth.

Snyder, Whalen and Lew Welch

Other Friday evenings found Whalen and Snyder in Berkeley for the study group with Rev. Kanmo Imamura and Jane Imamura at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. Together the Imamuras were descended from the most important old families of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, yet they welcomed the young men, going so far in the subsequent years as to turn their little church publication—the Berkeley Bussei—over to the artist Will Petersen for a time. Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all published early poems in its pages. The benevolent Imamura family gave both Snyder and Whalen their first contact with people actually practicing Buddhism instead of purely discussing its philosophies and traditions.

Whalen might have made his way out to the Academy or over to the study group without Snyder’s impetus, but Philip was much given, even then, to the sedentary life. As long as he could, he spent hours each day reading, writing, drawing, playing music, doodling, staring into space—wondering from time to time where and how he could find a job that wouldn’t drive him crazy. He ventured out when he needed to—for cigarettes or food or for fresh air—but he had nothing like the get-up-and-go Gary had. It is, in fact, difficult to think of anyone with the drive and sense of adventure the young Snyder had.

These qualities propelled him up mountains, up trees, down the hole of tankers, out into deserts, back into libraries, into universities, into monasteries, across the country, out of the country, across oceans; they armored him against the many outer and inner obstacles an un-moneyed young man might encounter in such travels; they sustained him as he went where he needed to go, saw what he wanted to see, studied what, and with whom, he needed to study, worked as he had to, and cut loose when he could. ...

Photos: (top) Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen sit outside a temple above the village of Shimoyama in Japan (Brancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). (bottom) Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch before a poerty reading at Longshoreman's Hall (Photograph by Jim Hatch).

Tricycle Magazine: "Time & Again," Adam Frank

"Buddhism's essential insight on time's passage is it's fundamental lack of substance."

(Adam Frank, professor of astrophysics, University of Rochester)









It's rare when scientists contemplate the mysteries of spiritual belief in print (even during the Christmas season, when the approach of winter and year's end makes the idea of "time" and its "passing" loom large). Professor Adam Frank, whose aching knees in meditation are a constant marker of time's passing, gives it a try in "Time & Again," in the Winter issue of Tricycle magazine, the Buddhist quarterly. And though I'm still not sure what Einstein would have had said to Buddha about the concept of time, by article's end I'm more sure that the "here and now" is more important than yesterday's news or the future that always seems just out of reach.

Tricycle often offers some very heady reading, and usually does. It can be overwhelming to sample the constant, complex flow of ideas that run across its pages. While some may doubt even the value of bringing Buddhist concepts to the West, an old battle, there's generally a consensus in Tricycle's thoughtful writing that it's at least worth a try: as a ten-year subscriber I have read pieces outlining Buddhist concepts in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, the music of John Cage, Marilyn Nelson teaching poetry and meditation at West Point.

I'm not a practicing Buddhist by any stretch but it's human enough to think about the big ideas (like the nature of time) when I'm not caught up in the daily spin. It's a battle at year's end to contemplate, once again, where I misplaced an entire year. So I'm very comfortable in appreciating the smaller things, and even making the big things seem less daunting, usually expressed in some odd phrase that resounds like a koan: the beauty of time is that it's snowing. Let's leave it at that.

Of course, I miss a lot of the here and the now when I'm thinking in non-sequential ways, but it helps connect the dots of existence -- my own, at any rate. (That mystical conundrum about snow is from the great rock music philosopher, Steve Miller, circa 1968. See?) Another way of keeping time's track is the making of year-end lists, and I'm waiting for this year's share of ten-best and ten-worst of everything. As I said, I discover I'm missing a lot; generally speaking I'm missing the bests more than I'm hitting them, judging what's on the critical to-do lists. But I do like what I read, and that counts for much.

I soldier on bravely, though, reading and watching and listening to the things that increasingly have meaning to me as I get older. It's one of the curses of a liberal-arts education that the simple act of keeping an open mind about so many things means there's a lot of freight being moved about in the hold: that, say, Larry Rivers' 1992 "unauthorized autobiography" What Did I Do? (a friend's gift) and H.S. Bennett's 1947 study Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (a library find) are next to one another on the bookshelf. On the next shelf, and a world away, is the Dover paperback of Japanese Homes and Their Surroundings by Edward Morse, first published in 1885.

Most of the time I look at lists to see what I'll be reading in the future, whenever those glorious days arrive. Magazines of course arrive with the weeks and months, and I depend on them to tell me what's happening now -- or maybe a month ago -- when I was busy catching up with the month (or the week) before that. I know the internet is a wonderful, instant source of the here and now; it's nearly the closest thing we have to spontaneous human combustion. But so much of the internet is wet with the fresh paint of people thinking. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but the opportunities are too great to launch an anonymous zinger at those with whom we disagree, or to enjoy instant self-congratulation when we discover a fellow traveler.

Calvin & Hobbes contemplate the universe (Bill Watterson, 1990)

And yet, and yet ... I'm learning that the hustle-and-flow spontaneity of the internet is more like real life than I care to admit, and its Buddhist here-now, real-time qualities are bending time and space for anyone with an internet connection from Fiji to Abu Dhabi. So I read Adam Frank's "Time & Again" to understand how the University of Rochester astrophysicist reconciled his Buddhist practice with scientific theories about the nature of time or, really, the complete lack of agreement on what "time" might be.

Like so many ideas, there are many approaches to describing time: "The presence of the present is the only time you have," which certainly seems Buddhist in it's nature, collided head-on with Frank's observation that "Einstein showed us time is malleable. It can bend and stretch." Then there is the continuing strangeness of something like quantum physics -- well, as the physicist Niels Bohr put it, "Anyone who is not shocked by quantum mechanics does not really understand it." Frank is certainly not out to settle any arguments here, or quiet any discussion. It did occur to me that Bohr's comment might frame a new kind of "quantum koan," but beyond that, Professor Frank is scientifically blunt about comparing science and spirituality:

"With a few notable exceptions -- B. Alan Wallace (no matter how much I may disagree with his conclusions), the astrophysicist Piet Hut, and the physicist Vic Mansfield, to name three -- most writings about Buddhism and science are at best misguided and at worst so deeply wrong that they drive practicing physicists like me to breathe into a paper bag to stay calm. Their failure is an attempt to substitute wishful thinking for the hard work of rigorous thinking.

... Making tidy claims about tidy connections between science (a la quantum physics) and Buddhism (or some version of 'Eastern mysticism') fails to do either one much justice. Indeed, such claims fail utterly to hit the essence of what makes both science and contemplative practice so dynamic, so interesting, and, ultimately, so worth our effort."



Well. Professor Frank might as well go ahead and use the achy knees as a scientific, and spiritual, marker. A year's end can certainly make us wonder if it's all so worth our effort. Yes, even the things that make nonsense seem to have a place somewhere. I'm reminded of this every time I run across It's a Wonderful Life when I see the upside-down world of Pottersville, the world that might be if Jimmy Stewart's character hasn't been born. And I haven't yet seen an article in Tricycle about Bill Murray's dilemma in the wonderful Groundhog Day, where he wakes up to the same day (and Sonny & Cher's "I Got You, Babe" on the radio) until he gets it right about love and life and caring for others. It's a great, Westernized allegory of Buddhist enlightenment.

I'll have to wait for Groundhog Day to come around again on my (non-cable, rabbit-eared) television, which is about to join time itself in its pre-DTV past. Or I could just watch the 24 hours of snow when the TV stops broadcasting analog signals in February -- now, that would indeed be the beauty of time in all of its non-sequential, bendable, quantum, or even string-theoried variety. Take your pick -- we've got all the time in the world. If only the FCC had a sense of humor and had selected February 2 for the conversion. Groundhog Day, when the TV stops: that would be perfectly Buddhist, in a Bill Murray sort of way.

(Art from Tricycle magazine by Steven P. Perkins)