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| Randy Roark, photograph by Kai Sibley, 2015 |
Kirpal Gordon: I want to ask first how you conceptualize
poetry as a prelude to the work. Your books of poems—Awakening
Osiris (1996), Mona Lisa’s Veil (2001), LIT
(2008)—and
your notebooks of travel writing and poems—The
Convalescence Notebook (2008), Map of the World (2007), What Have I Become
(2007)—and your
online travel-reportage-with-poems in Newtopia
(2011-2014) not only turn prose into poetry and back
into shimmering prose, they read like manifestations of a larger life project,
one that includes intensive research into poets and movements as well as actual
pilgrimages to ancient, spiritual, and literary locales all over the world.
Randy Roark: Yeah,
a little over ten years ago I began to wonder if I had the time and vision for one big work, what would it be? That
became The Illustrated Decalogue: A
Decade of Removal. I made a list of places I wanted to visit before I died
and there was about twenty, and I decided I’d take two trips a year over a
decade and write my way through the experience. I thought that’d be something
I’d be happy about when I was on my deathbed, that I spent at least a decade of
my life exploring what I enjoyed most.
So from March 15
2005 until May 3 2015, I traveled each spring and fall to some destination on
my list: Morocco, southern Africa, a couple of trips to India, China, Tibet,
Nepal, Cambodia, Myanmar, Thailand, Peru, the Amazon River basin, a trip up the
Rhine from Vienna to Holland, La Routa Maya through four countries in Central
America, several trips to Amsterdam, Greece, and Cyprus. And places in the U.S. Chicago Washington
D.C. San Francisco L.A. New
York City
Most of my work
since my first trip to Europe in 1990 has been what I’ve
called “research” works. A study of the history of art, of alchemy, of
shamanism, of celtic mythology, surrealism, dada. When I want to learn
something, I use the model of Pound’s Chinese and Adams cantos—I shut up and
let the works speak through me. I call these “history” poems, and also
distillations.
My first solo
traveling writing was done on that 1990-1991 trip, which resulted in DODO,
which I published through my Laocoon Press. I’ve just rediscovered some of that
writing and even then I was erasing the narrator as much as possible, focusing
on my senses, trying to become aware of as much of the important raw data of my
actual experience as possible. And I learned that what I wrote about I
remembered, because I noted it, then I translated it into words, and later I
typed up my notebooks and then read the transcript and edited it and read it
many more times until it was published. That imprinted what I wanted to
remember pretty firmly in my brain. I also discovered that focusing on just
what actually happened rather than what it “meant” to me resulted in more
variety and ambiguity in the writing, which was especially pleasurable to me as
the book got longer over a decade of writing and editing and rewriting.
Since The San Francisco Notebook in 2002, I’ve
been aware that I’m at my best when I’m alone and working on my writing five-six
hours every evening. I like the rhythm of it, the focus. I’ve worked on
something almost every evening after dinner until it was time for bed since at
least 2005.
That rhythm and
focus intensified in 2011-2014, when I published forty-two columns from the Decalogue material in Newtopia magazine. Each month I’d send
in 5000 words and about a dozen photographs, based on trips to Morocco Africa , India Nepal China Tibet
The next period
in my life—where I’m about to take off to Europe for at least three years and
not return to Boulder for at least five—is an attempt to recreate that period
of my life by crafting at least one 5000-word piece each month, and then moving
on to the next one. I have plans to also write a daily series of mini art
essays and a book about what happens over the five years, like what I created
for The Decalogue.
The common
denominator of all of my “projects” is that I decided decades ago to follow the
advice that was carved over the entrance into Apollo’s temple in Delphi :
Know thyself. Every trip has
eventually become a journey deeper into myself.
What I’ve learned over all these years is that I’m a roamer, not a settler. I’ve learned that—paraphrasing Oliver Sachs—I will always have problems bonding, belonging, and believing. And that’s okay, no matter what anyone thinks. I know that I’m most alive when I’m a stranger on my own in an unfamiliar place, especially when I don’t speak the language. I also know that I like to settle for an extended stay rather than moving around, and that I prefer to be in a walkable city with a lot of culture and history rather than being “on retreat.” And I’ve found that traveling is—for me—the safest and sanest and most productive way to experience that state of continual newness I’m most excited about in an extended and focused way. I also like the way I can be anyone I choose to be when no one knows who I am—and I like who I choose to be in most situations.
So, knowing
myself, I’ve designed a future that played to my strengths and interests. For
the next five years I will be a wandering art pilgrim. These are going to be my
Henry Miller years, where I focus on my
life and my writing. I don’t need any
more money—more money isn’t going to substantially change my life. But I only
have so much time, and I’ve also learned how much time art takes.
So when I
realized I had an opportunity to get out of
the workforce and wander for the next five years, I was ready and I jumped.
Even the part about it being for five years is perfect. I wouldn’t have been
able to do it if I thought I’d have nothing to come back to.
In addition to
finalizing the bulk of The Decalogue, I’m taking my journals and my
collected correspondence—which go back to when I was 20, five years before I
left Connecticut to apprentice with Allen Ginsberg—and all of my slides and
photos with me when I leave on October 31. I’m also bringing along
my saved e-mails and my published work, and I’m going to see if can craft some
kind of memoir out of them.
KG: So what about your concept of
living/writing your life in a kind of classical sequence, reminiscent of T.S.
Eliot or Dante Allighieri?
RR: My model for The Decalogue was John Bunyan’s 17-century
book-length Christian allegorical poem The Pilgrim's Progress from
This World to That Which Is to Come; Delivered under the Similitude of a Dream. That’s where I got the name for my
column in Newtopia—“A Poet’s Progress”—because the organizing principle
of the Decalogue is that I’m testing Bunyan’s
theory that each individual life has meaning and that there’s an extra-personal
dimension to every life. In other words, for Bunyan, there is a God and there’s
a heaven and hell, and every human being has a soul, and the days from their
birth to death are filled with challenges, and how they behave during these
tests determine the eternal fate of their souls. I no longer believe in heaven
and hell, but that still leaves a lot of questions: What’s the most accurate
way to understand my life and my relationship with others? Is there
a purpose to my joys and suffering? Is each individual life a test, or does
“deserve” have no meaning here? Is there an extra-personal or personal path or
map or plan I’m following? Is there a portion of my story that’s archetypal—that
existed before I was born and will continue to affect others long after I'm
gone? Is there a God or a higher power, and are there angels among us? What should I be doing with my time?
And the big question, of course, why?
Part of it is probably that I’m getting older and want to
be sure I’m making the right decisions for the right reasons. I don’t want to
feel at the end of my life that I missed the opportunities I was given, or that
I failed to make the right “bigger picture” decisions. I want to feel that I
lived my life as fully as I could and missed as few opportunities as possible
to learn or to do better. There are some things I've done that I'd like to do
over, and I'd like to have as few missed opportunities as possible in my
future.
And it was
important to me to write my investigation of the possible meaning of my life going
forward, not in retrospect. Most of the books that make claims about the
meaning of life are written looking backward from a pause on the path. I don’t
trust that kind of hindsight. I see my job as focusing on the trees—I’ll leave
the forest up to anyone who can find one.
KG: Regarding the urge to living vitally, I quote your opening poem in Map of the World (2007):
The Erotic Heaven
This is the point at which all alchemists
begin, half on water, half on land,
first as pilgrims, then as pilots—
to find everything Other within us,
to know all we are and deny nothing—
as sunlight—mixed with moisture—
flowed into darkness, awakened
flesh from dark matter—that
all mortal and immortal things
arrive in the realm of the visible
subtle and fiery—atoms vibrating
between one state and another.
What a way to open
a book of poems! It rolls off the tongue like a prayer, as if what you are
observing is none other than the poem’s invocation come to life, its
alliteration and economy of language calling me back to read it again.
RR: “The Alchemy
Poems” was mostly written on a trip back to Connecticut
Then, as I was packing to return home for my father’s
funeral, I impulsively threw a copy of Hermeticism
and Alchemy into my bag. It’s a series of alphabetical encyclopedic entries
about alchemy, and when I returned to my hotel after supper each evening, I would
continue reading the book, making the notes that grew into “The Alchemy Poems.”
It actually wasn’t until much later that I returned to the
poems and finally understood what they were about. They were about what dies
and what doesn’t. They were about what’s worth saving and what’s best left
behind. They were about how change is a transformative process and one thing
ceases to be by being transformed into another. For instance, my body will die,
but my flesh will continue to live on as soil until I get picked up by a root
and become part of a lettuce leaf or something. And then that leaf might get
eaten by a rabbit and the rabbit gets eaten and becomes part of another living
thing while pieces of it are returned to the earth for another trip.
So if you start to look at things that way, everything that
seems so solid, so real—even a mountain or a tree—has been many things before
and will be many more things in the future. So which one is the real one? If I
identify with my body, I’m going to cease to exist when I die. But if I
identify with the continuous story, I’ll be free to know that I can’t help but
live forever, in some shape of form, but only once during a few years as this particular
person.
So “The Erotic Heaven” was the first poem from my notes,
trying to imagine all of the possible permutations of matter I’ve gone through
in order to arrive as a human body, and how I might possibly be transforming in
the future. It’s an attempt to redefine who I am in a way, to reimagine “me.”
I’m really proud of the three long poems in that book. It
was a very special time for me and everything came together in a very iconic
way. I had just been discharged from the hospital after having broken my neck. I
was alone in a hospital overnight, unable to move my left arm, expecting to
have spinal surgery at any moment. But the surgical orders never made it to the
floor and I wasn’t prepped when the neurosurgeon arrived the next afternoon. It
was impossible to get a second crew in on a Sunday for a non-emergency, so his
assistant re-examined me and determined I was no longer a “candidate” for
surgery, and they discharged me that afternoon, even though I could barely
stand.
In the days after I returned home, after I stopped taking
pain medications and my head cleared up, I found a pile of unpublished
manuscripts and began to re-read and re-edit them. That’s when my daily writing
practice began in earnest, in 2005. It took me about two years to get
everything “finalized,” and I ended up with enough material for five books, and
one them was Map of the World. I just
so happened to have three long unpublished poems that seemed to fit together
quite nicely under that title—the alchemy poems, the shaman poems, and poems
written in dream language. Each was like a different map of the world.
It was also after being discharged from the hospital that I
walked into my basement and saw all of my books as crackling with energy.
That’s when I began to sell my library and use the money to travel, while I
still could. The books meant nothing to me at that point, and life meant everything.
KG: “The Erotic
Heaven” is also a fine example of the poetry side of what you’ve described
elsewhere as creative non-fiction or unreach-prune back-simplify. Here’s a much
different but equally evocative example from Mona Lisa’s Veil (2001):
The Body Is the Boundary
In the graveyard
shift emergency room
where I undress
the slender 24-year-old,
her body glowing,
turning blue,
the heroin
saturating her
heart, or the
19-year-old who
drove her Blazer
through a light pole,
smashing her skull
into moonlight,
or the mother whose
14-year-old thought it
would be fun
to toss live bullets
into a fire, until
one entered her
scalp through that
tiny blue hole there,
ricocheting through her
brain until it found
that purple
wound there,
where her shoulder
joins the neck.
A very sobering poem. It sounds like you are making
excellent use of your day job as an opportunity to use real life events to move
us in literary ways.
RR: Yeah, the instructions I give myself when I feel I’m
reaching a bit to create or heighten the significance of a piece of writing is
to “unreach”—to prune back, to simplify.
I remember that beautiful young girl turning blue. I
remember waking up that mother with a middle-of-the-night phonecall that she
had to get to the emergency room as quickly as possible. I remember the
ambulance crew telling us that there were no skidmarks where that college
freshman had driven into the only lightpole on that side of the road for miles.
That was all one very long weekend.
I wrote very few poems about my emergency room work because
it’s all so loaded, for me and for anyone confronted with a poem like that. Those
are all real people, precise nights of my life. Working in the emergency room
isn’t all like that, so those big deaths touch me too. And no matter how much I
talk about the ultimate reality being alchemy and nothing really dies, the
point of that poem is that people do die,
every day. And I don’t care if they come back as a lettuce leaf. I don’t care
if Layne is in the wind now, I want her body back. The living body is the
boundary between being and nothingness for the only ones who remain.
KG: It seems
important to you that you “tell it like it is,” even if the truth carries less
revelation than metaphor; i.e., fiction.
RR: I keep going back to one particular memory. I was 16 in
1970 and a junior at St. Bernard’s Boys High School
It was also the time of the Vietnam War and they would
encourage us to attend anti-war demonstrations. One time they bussed us to New York City
But the memory I keep returning to happened during my
junior year, in the Spring of 1970. Several of my friends had gone to NYC for a
long weekend organized by something called the Encounter Movement. I was no
longer a practicing Catholic and had a very conflicted relationship with the
Church, but I liked the effect the weekend had on my friends and I decided to
check it out. It turned out to be a mixture of Gestalt Therapy, Esalen, and a
3-day rap session, but with a lot of talk about Jesus and The New Testament. It was
a kind of Liberation Theology turned inward.
On day two, one of the presenters—the one everyone liked
best; the jovial, down-to-earth guy—gave a talk after lunch. This was probably
the third or fourth session of the weekend. He started with something like,
“You know, I’ve been listening to everyone talk about their faith and love and
desire for a life of Christian compassion over the last two days, and I think I
can summarize what I’ve been hearing in a single word.” And he held up a sheet
of paper that said, “Bullshit!”
That was a moment of revelation for me at that point in my
life because, if I was honest—and even at 16 I had learned not to be—when I
heard people talk, I heard two things: I could sense who they were, which was
perfectly clear, and then there was what they were saying, which was often
confused or opaque, and some times in conflict with what I sensed were their
actual beliefs. It was as if everyone was using words to distract others from
what they were really feeling.
I was pretty confused too, but not enough to say what I
didn’t believe in order to deceive people, so I usually—and still do—kept my
mouth shut. There were times where I wondered if this is what growing up was
all about, to learn the proper opinions and repeat them, whether or not you
personally believed them or could live up to them.
But when I saw and heard the word “bullshit” in that
moment, I knew I’d be committing myself to the truth. It was a born-again
moment—something changed inside of me. I became certain in a way I never felt
before, because I was always surrounded by people who had made me doubt my own feelings
and perceptions. But I saw in that moment that when we disagreed, it could be
because they were bullshitting! And my intuition, my feelings, my “vision” could be right! That moment changed
everything.
Of course, when we broke into small groups, everyone was
furious! “How dare he!” “We are not bullshitters!” “Who does he think he is?
He’s the bullshitter!” I kept quiet until things slowed down a bit and said, “I
kind of agree with him.” And there was a palpable shift of energy in the group,
turning their anger toward me.
At some point someone agreed with me, and then slowly,
one-by-one, people kind of grudgingly changed positions. But people—it seemed
to me—were changing their opinion because the tide had turned, not because they
thought or felt differently. Everything was still about the outside, about what’s “right,” what’s
acceptable, instead of what’s “true.”
It was through that experience that I changed from someone
who always doubted himself when there was a conflict, to someone who took it
for granted that when we disagreed that I could be right and everyone else
could be bullshitting. I also realized it was okay if people thought I was
wrong. And it was clear to me even then that often disagreements won’t be
solved until years after all the principles are dead, but that the truth would
win out in the end.
So my life and my writing became an attempt at uncovering the
truth, and looking for it inside and not outside of me. And once I chose
telling the truth over being accepted, I began to enjoy telling my truths in
difficult situations, even when I got the same response the guy from the
Encounter Movement got—“What an asshole!” Being an outsider is actually the
easiest path for me, as someone who has trouble believing, bonding, and
belonging in the first place.
Years later, I was living with my wife in Mystic, Connecticut Connecticut
One night I was talking to a deaf kid at a Christmas party
when a married couple arrived. When they came through the door they were
smiling and shouting “Hey,” “Hello,” and “Good to see you!” but when they
stopped smiling and turned away from the party, I could see the strain and
anger in their faces. It was obvious to me that they had been arguing in the
car, and that they were using conversation to hide what was really going on.
And I saw people respond to what they were saying, instead of what they were
feeling. It was like everyone was actively avoiding seeing through the false
words to what was really going on, as if that would be impolite.
I also began to notice how few of the people in the room who
weren’t deaf were actually looking at each other as they talked. It was like
everyone else was creating big word balloons to hide behind. And in that moment
I made another decision, that I would never use words to conceal what I was
feeling, even if that meant mostly not saying anything at all.
I also have a very strong memory of the effect it had on me
when my father began telling me, “I can see right through you.” The funny thing
is that he was usually wrong. But I also feel I can see through people who are
lying or exaggerating, or self-aggrandizing, or being manipulative and phony,
or lying to themselves. When that happens I feel so embarrassed for them that I
try to catch myself before I exaggerate or self-aggrandize or lie myself. But
sometimes I get caught up in it too. I often have to get into trouble before I
realize what I’m doing. It’s tricky.
So in my writing—especially my “creative non-fiction”—I
always go over it in the editing and rewriting phases with an eye toward
whether what I’m saying is “true.” And perhaps more important, is it honest?
Because the “creative” part of creative non-fiction is making shit up. But I
don’t make stuff up to mislead people—I make stuff up because I sense it, right
under the surface. That’s why I feel an obligation to be very careful about
what I write and how I write, but not about whether something actually
happened, or if I found it originally in someone else’s work. I’m creating a
mosaic, precisely as it comes to me, before I even understand it myself.
KG: Your notion
that the truth is ever changing reveals how the teller is transformed by the
experiences he is telling, which seems to be your point of departure. It
reminds me of D.T. Suzuki’s idea that the arts—haiku, tea ceremony, landscape
painting, calligraphy, ikebana—are the ideal place to express the inexpressible
essence of Buddhism. In your "Journal Entry, Istanbul
RR: I worked with a lot of people who woke up every morning
and made a vow to save all sentient beings. If I was in a studio working with them,
I was the only thing on the menu. But it’s a little like that story about how a
pickpocket only sees a great teacher’s pockets. I was trying to get this thing
done, trying to record the program, I wasn’t really there for spiritual
enlightenment—I was there to do my job as a producer. Later, when I was editing
the recording, it’s the same thing: does this make sense, is it clear, is it
well organized?
But there are things I learned, sure. Not just from
Buddhists. I think I learned at least one thing from every program I worked on,
and I produced or edited over 300 programs in the 17 years I worked here.
When I’d prepare for a recording, I would usually work with
the author ahead of time to plan and shape the content, and we’d create a
program on—say—the Kabbalah one week, and then the next I’d be working with a
Christian mystic, and then something on Buddhist psychology or neuroscience. After
about fifteen minutes in the studio I’d realize, “Oh, we’re recording a program
about what it’s like to be human.” And of course we were. What is a Kabbalist
going to be talking about: a different universe than a Christian mystic, another
reality than a Buddhist monk or a brain scientist? Most of the really good
projects I worked on—it seems to me—were really saying the same things, using a
very particular language and set of references. And if you join a particular
group, most people spend a lot of time focused on learning that language and
set of references as if the answers are there. But I had to learn how to work
with everyone, so I learned something joiners don’t learn, which is that every
path is more or less the same. And if one isn’t, watch out!
The main thing that interests me about the heavy-duty
Buddhists is their humanity. Compassion isn’t just an American thing of course,
but the American Buddhists are probably the best at this humble sense of shared
humanity. And I hear it in our Buddhist poets too—Gary Snyder and Allen
Ginsberg, particularly.
What I mean by “humanity” is that they don’t claim to be
any different from who they are. They get angry, they’re greedy, they gossip,
they joke, they listen with their full attention, they can be emotionally
intimate to a powerful degree. They’re pretty much totally themselves. Plus
aware. So they can pretty quickly recognize their anger, and they drop it.
They’re aware of their greediness, so when it bursts out, they acknowledge it
and move on. I had one lama tell me after a tirade, “I’m sorry. That was my
arrogance speaking.” But he didn’t collapse. He didn’t beat himself up. He
didn’t try to defend his outburst or pretend it was anything other than what it
was. He didn’t try to confuse me about what just happened or what was happening
now. It was like a little dramatization of arrogance speaking. And in case I
missed it, he explained what just happened. His main concern was that I might
misunderstand and assume his response was somehow in response to something I
had done. It was so clean. He didn’t hold onto anything—he just owned it, explained
it, apologized for it, and moved on!
All I want is to be a human being—this human being—fully
me, in this lifetime, while I’m alive. That’s all I’m after. Not to be a great
poet or an acknowledged writer. And I’m not interested in powers or siddhis or enlightenment, any of that.
It just seems to be a trap to me. I actually feel sorry for people I’ve met who
believe they have to convince me they’re powerful and wise and special in order
to feel “good enough.”
If my goal is being me, the truth is always right here,
it’s never “out there.” It can’t be anywhere else. I ultimately can’t escape
myself and although I’m in a constant state of refinement, I can never become
anyone else, no matter how much I admire them. But I can always choose to be as
big as I can imagine. That’s who I want to discover in this life—the biggest real me.
KG: Regarding your sense of the phony/authentic aspect of the Sounds True teachers you have worked with, what comes to mind is the old dialectic ‘tween philosophies that are actually systems of thought (e.g: Torah, Aristotle/Aquinas, Hegel, Sartre; Veda, Confucius; Islam) and philosophies that remind us that the system of thought has a gaping hole in its bucket (e.g: New Testament, Plato/Augustine, Marx, Kierkegaard; Buddha, Lao Tzu; Sufism). The systematizers say follow the map while the post-systematizers remind us that the map is not the territory. So in this scenario, the examples of Alan Watts’ prodigious scholarship on liberation “systems” along with Krishnamurti’s liberation from Theosophy’s “system” would be celebrated as whistle-blowing to those who would bow to a system instead of opening their hearts or minds. Is it too much to say that you are in the reminder school and that you are exercising-exorcising rites that reveal the limits of systemic thinking, hence your interest in not fictionalizing, pretending or faking it in your own writing, living, recording, witnessing?
RR: I wouldn’t use the word “phony” to describe
Krishnamurti, but from what I learned in putting together Truth Is a Pathless Land from his audio archives, I think he quite
possibly did some real damage with his hypocrisy; especially hiding his decades-long
affair with his best friend’s wife while preaching against “the carnality of
the body.” I also found his attacks on other belief systems—including some I’d
had training in, like Transcendental Meditation and Christianity—were
remarkably ignorant about what was actually being taught. I was also disturbed
by his dismissive and repugnant attitudes toward women.
But that’s an interesting idea—that I’m working against the
limits of systemic thinking. I’d never heard it expressed that way before, but
what jumped out at me is that I do not like most of the works and authors in
your “systemic thinking” category except for Sartre—who is a very important
touchstone in my life—and I love almost everyone and everything on your “hole
in the bucket” list. Sufism is probably my favorite religion, if I had any interest
in joining a spiritual community, which I don’t.
I’m actually repulsed by Aristotle and very defensive about
Plato. One night Jack Collom suggested we collaborate on a poem celebrating
Aristotle’s appreciation of Nature, and attacking Plato and his creation of the
Platonic Ideal (which Jack believed allowed people to trash anything in the
natural world as not as important as the “ideal”). I shocked even myself by yelling:
“I love Plato! I hate Aristotle! Aristotle is the kind of guy who would dissect
a duck and pin him to a board. Yeah, but he can’t fly!”
I guess I bristle when someone suggests that they understand
the true significance of anything, like Aristotle and Aquinas and Confucius. I
find them almost bullies in a way. I don’t want to be presented with a closed
system, even the right one. I want one that opens out to include me, that
includes wonder and magic, where there’s room for everything I’ve experienced,
including large areas of “I don’t know.” I prefer a system that I can step
into, look around, see things in a new way, personalize it, and then step back
out into the world, blinking. Each of the poems in Map of the World is a mirror that you can step through into a
different world for a little while. Each of them returns you to the “world” at
the end, where everything is slightly altered but exactly the same.
I no longer think anything valuable can come from the study
of others or trying to learn a system of thought other than to understand it as
an active part of my own reality. I think it’s all right here, inside me, and that
looking “outside” is looking in the wrong direction. I want to understand
myself and my experience before it’s all gone. Confirmation or conflict with my
own experience based on my interactions with the outer world is not very useful
for me. I even believe that accepting any ideas second-hand can contaminate
what’s true about it. Lineage is like that too—you don’t choose your lineage,
you come to understand it. You can’t recognize your lineage until you discover
your place in it, and come to understand the whole idea of lineage as a priori, not ex facto. Like Burroughs said, you can’t learn anything you don’t
already know, so you can’t really choose your lineage.
Or maybe lineage is how Ted Berrigan described it, that
every poet is picking up the ball from another poet and trying to carry it
forward a yard or two. He said Corso was looking back to Shelley, and Allen to
Whitman. For Burroughs it was a friend and contemporary: Brion Gysin. And Ted
said that he was continuing the poetry of Robert Creeley, who was still very
much alive, and whose poetry couldn’t have been less like Creeley’s. Creeley’s
was cramped, handwritten, gnarly, sharp. Ted’s was wild, spontaneous,
typewritten. Creeley’s was folk art, it was home-spun, it was New England .
Ted’s was urban, impatient, city-wise. But Ted swore his was the same
sensibility as Creeley’s, a generation forward.
Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about my lineage, and I think in
the first sense of lineage I’m probably closest to Goethe and Joyce and Tzara
in my sensibility, and Ezra Pound in his curiosity (although not at all in
Pound’s creativity and genius), and maybe Joan Miro in the sense of not wanting
to repeat myself.
But in the second sense, I see myself as trying to carry forward the work of Yeats. I mean, who’s done that? Eliot, a little. Pound a little. But they were both using Yeats as a point of departure, and they’re both long dead now. I think in a way my work goes back to Yeats—as if everything in poetry since then has been a dead end—to pick up a thread and see how far I can carry it forward. What makes it a little less immodest is that I’m not competing with him head-to-head. I’m mostly doing his thing in prose.
My patron saint, though, the one I owe almost everything I
am as a person is the one whom I probably identify with the least, poetically.
That’s Allen Ginsberg. We disagreed about everything, but I loved him more than
my father.
And the one I identify with the most as far as my
sensibility is Duchamp. Coming upon his written work in Anselm Hollo’s 1981
Naropa class on dada was another lifechanger for me. It’s from Duchamp that I
got the idea that the greatest creation of an artist is his life. It was via my
study of Duchamp that I figured out my own way, which was to focus on two
things—what is my actual experience pre-thought and conditioning; and how can I
use language to say something specific and true? And the sentence from him that
has helped me as an artist more than any other is “Sharpen the eye (a method of
torture).”
KG: Perhaps
Krishnamurti was rejecting what you are rejecting: entitlement, insincerity,
elitism and the con game. In his case, that included the hierarchy not only of
Theosophy, “advancement on the path” or the New Age racket (a symptom of the
American illusion produced by greed that we can purchase satori with a credit
card?) but of his own Indian tradition of lineage, succession, caste and
religion. TM’s mantra yoga, a well respected practice, is about mind
protection. He maybe was trying to get out of what you are trying to get into.
In any case, the traditional Sanskrit reminder-response to “I’ve found the
final enlightenment,” is “Neti, neti” (neither This, nor That).
RR: I think Krishnamurti was wrong to reject the Hindu
practice of (and I’m paraphrasing) catching a child’s attention with a shiny
toy. How are you going to lead people out of a lesser understanding to a
greater one if you can’t convince them that it exists? First you find out what
they are willing to work for and you use that as a lure.
I learned a lot about how to skillfully do this when I was
trained as a meditation instructor with Deepak Chopra in 1995-1997. He used to
teach a workshop called “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,” and he’d start with, “I
can teach you how to live forever.” (Very long pause.) “Plant a tree. Teach
your children well. Change an unfair law, stand up for a politician you believe
in, improve a life, work for a cause you believe in, preserve something
beautiful and endangered.” He had another workshop called “Creating Abundance.”
He’d start with, “I can teach you how to manifest a Porsche. But it’s not for everyone.
You need focus and determination. Do you want me to tell you a foolproof way to
manifest a Porsche, using nothing more than focus and determination? Okay,
here’s how you do it: 1) Be determined to work as much and as hard as you can,
and 2) Focus on saving your money. If you are able to remain focused and
determined long enough, you will one day save enough to buy the Porsche. But
think back to the last time you achieved a goal like that, something you bought
because you thought it would change how you felt about your life. How long did
that feeling last? Now think about the last time you achieved an interior
goal—like learning meditation or becoming a genuinely more pleasant person to
be around. Or imagine being caught acting heroically in a stranger’s benefit.
If they sold that feeling at 7-11, the line would be down the street. In fact,
that’s probably the feeling you’re trying to get with the Porsche. So let’s
examine your goals first and then look closer at how to manifest them. What is
this longing and what is it longing for?”
It’s bait and switch, but it’s like baiting them with a
Porsche and giving them a shot at the happiness they’re really looking for. He’s
pointing out that what they’re looking for is actually inside of them and can
only be symbolized by a Porsche, or whatever. What they’re looking for can’t be
found outside of the self and it’s always been inside of them and will always
be inside them and it will always only be inside of them, because it has to be
inside them in order for it to be real for them. So the Kingdom
of Heaven
But I believe in spiritual practice. Emotions and feelings
have arisen when I’ve been involved in spiritual practice that are central to
how I see myself and others. Spiritual and psychological practices are really
about learning who you truly are, and the deeper I come to understand myself,
the better I can understand others. I know that my daily meditation practice has
changed me, although I can’t point to how, because there’s nothing to compare
it to. And the effects of a meditation are subtle and take place over decades. But
I can say that it made me more sane and grounded. And it’s made me quieter and
more appreciative, more aware. But it’s also made me more agitated at times,
and this next five-year trip is really an attempt to escape people. I’m sixty-one,
which is traditionally the time of life people in several Asian cultures are
expected to retire from their worldly responsibilities and focus on their inner
life. I can feel the desire to focus on my inner life tugging at me too. I have
to take off. It’s time.
But back when I first started at 19 years old, meditation
led me much deeper into life, into my interactions with others. The right
answer at one point in your life becomes the exactly wrong thing at another.
That’s a big part of it, too. You’ve got to keep your eyes and ears open until
the end.
I’ve studied mantra under various lineages and I’m not quite
sure what “mind protection” means, but the way I see it, I plug my mantra into
my otherwise continuous thought process so that my awareness can float free.
The way I describe it is, I give my mind something to chew on designed to
destroy it. I give my mind a shiny toy to keep it occupied, while I get out of
the car and stretch my legs. There are also some teachers who claim that the
sound of the mantra is designed to have a specific healing or orienting effect
on the mind and body, and I know of no reason why this couldn’t be true. But a
brief vacation from my boring repetitive judgmental thoughts is enough of a
benefit for me.
I’m encouraged by the desire in human beings that brings
them to spiritual practice. Of course that desire is not going to be purified
before they start their practice. But the longing alone, I think, will continue
to correct their path over the course of their lives, at least somewhat, if
they continue to practice. And I think that once you practice, even a little,
you do see more opportunities around you to sow peace, to alleviate at least a
little suffering while you can. And often the first person’s suffering you need
to address is your own.
I do see a difference between someone whose desire is to
become enlightened and someone who is motivated by a desire to be a better
person. But I support anything that lessens human suffering, and I believe that
just about any spiritual practice and any motivation will do that, although
with all the scandals in the spiritual communities over the years, it’s
sometimes difficult to believe.
I have met teachers I consider phonies or toxic in my work,
and I’ve heard too many stories about spiritual teachers who have behaved
criminally. When I was in Myanmar
And I totally get the “neti, neti” thing—perhaps too much.
The way it manifests in me is self-doubt. When I come to some conclusion, I
immediately back away from it, begin to test it, doubt it. Like how I
experienced Krishnamurti talking about sex as really creepy. But maybe it’s me
who’s creeped out by the sex? They were consenting adults—why do I feel
competent to judge them? Or to use the previous example of how I get annoyed by
people who pretend to others that they have it all together, maybe it’s me,
unable to accept the authority of anyone else? Maybe I’m resentful that it’s
not me whom everyone’s treating like a genius? It just goes on and on like
that. Sometimes it seems like all day, every day, my thoughts are just judging
everything I see. I need an off-switch that stops my thinking, and I found one
with mantra.
I’m with Krishnamurti in wanting to get rid of succession,
of caste, and I’m not crazy about religion. But discovering you’re part of a
lineage and learning what that lineage stands for has been very comforting for
me. It’s my sangha, more or less, encompassing
the Pre-Socratic philosophers and Plato and Yeats and Pound and Ginsberg and you
too, Kirpal.
In a way I think I write in order to help explain and pass
along my lineages, and I have several. I have my poetic lineage, my prose
lineage, my memoir lineage, my artistic lineage, my spiritual lineage, my
philosophical lineage, my traveling lineage, all mixed together. It’s not
something that’s been imposed on me, it’s something I’ve discovered. And it’s
something that I’m now consciously trying to pass on, to restore, to expand and
explore and perhaps renew. To add my voice, my take, my version of it. To make
it new, as Pound said.
KG: Regarding your
eye to people who think they have it all together and who pose as your betters:
what if the humility you express as not-having-it-all-together proved not only
to be a universally true reality for all humans but also an effective way to
access more truth? What if your “re-sent-ment” is a “re-act-ion” to an untruth
that perpetrates the fraud that there are such things as one’s betters? Who
would you bet on to be better at being you than you? Your writing reveals
you’re a great-grandchild of Father Walt who could not abide any form of
condescension. What if you’re revealing that the quest for better-dom is the
disguise of the self-loathing? What if your poet-warrior heart is rightly
wronged by a system(izer) that bullies, excludes, dominates and denies others’
humanity in the name of liberation? What I’m saying: at its most complimentary
level perhaps, these two styles of system and reminder, for all their
differences, may be holding hands under the table as both are selling a point
of view based upon what’s missing in the other’s point of view. The
“authentics” need the artifice of a system to amplify their reminders to be
authentic and the “accountants” need the inherent anarchy in the reminder
philosophy to validate their need for a system. Consider your poem from What I Have Become (2007):
What Wisdom Has Hidden From Us
The wise know how
everything works
and they have all the
answers,
and they know better
than we do
where everything is
headed.
In Central Park
a boy is crying—
he sees monsters under
the bridge.
Don’t be silly, his
mother yells at him.
There are no monsters here
at all.
RR: Oh, I get it now. Yeah, that’s a really good point.
Yes, I need someone to push against. But it’s very tricky. First of all, it’s
very difficult to put myself in the line of fire because I get triggered so
easily, having grown up in an abusive household—either I fall apart when
attacked, or I put myself in danger if I think someone is being unfairly attacked.
Especially when it’s a woman threatened by a man. Even as a pre-teen I would
sometimes physically impose myself between my raging father and my two younger sisters.
Secondly, my experience is that when I think I’m right, I
don’t learn anything. I’ve wasted a lot of time defending my opinion rather
than expanding it to include new information.
KG: Continuing to
probe how your thinking impacts your writing, your insistence on reportage
reminded me of Charles Reznikoff and the work of the Objectivists who I am sure
you know, yes?
RR: You know, I haven’t really thought of Reznikoff in a
long time, but you’re absolutely right. You have this uncanny way of sensing
the roots and influences that I’ve assimilated and completely forgotten about.
There’s a story about Allen Ginsberg reading Reznikoff to
me on the last day of my apprenticeship that I used as the final passage of
“The Object Is to See Clearly,” which was published in the “Naropa Bulletin” in
1981 when I was 27.
It was my first attempt to write a memoir, and it strikes
me that even though I keep talking about how much of a discovery my experience
of writing The Decalogue was, the
entire memoir would fit quite comfortably alongside anything in it. It has no
over-arching narration, it doesn’t try to be objective. It’s a collection of real-life
events reported in chronological order without commentary, just like real life.
[And I’m suddenly reminded rereading it almost 35 years later that I stole much
of its style from Tom Pickard’s excellent account of his time apprenticeship
with Basil Bunting that I read in an issue of “Peideuma” around this time.]
Our last meeting went long, trying to tie up all the
loose ends, and I was burnt out and wanted to go home. But when we finished,
Allen put his papers aside and said, with a great deal of enthusiasm, “Well,
what did you bring today?” So we tinkered with my poems a bit and then he asked
if I knew the work of Charles Reznikoff. I wasn’t very familiar. “I think he’d
be a good model for you.”
He went to his bookshelf and pulled a chair beside mine
in the dim light of the living room window. He flipped through the first few
pages. Then he began to read, looking up occasionally as some line or image or
word struck him as important. His voice was clear and his eyes were bright. He
was using his speaking voice—the same voice he’d been using in our conversation
only a moment ago—but now he was luxuriating on the vowels and chewing on the
consonants, but still talking as naturally as any excited stranger might,
striking up a conversation in a bar or at a bus stop.
I began to shiver a little. There was something very
strange about this. I found I could lean into what he was saying, and when I
did I could hear a voice coming from a dark apartment in turn-of-the-century
New York City. It was sometimes a young man, sometimes an old man, writing
alone at his kitchen table while the family slept. He wrote without hope that
what he was writing would one day be read from one poet to another, in a future
he never imagined.
When I closed my eyes and leaned forward, I began to feel
bursts of energy in my chest and forehead that were unpleasant in the sense
that I was afraid of being overwhelmed by them. So I’d lean into what he was reading
and ride those waves until it got scary, and then I’d back off. Sometimes I’d be
able to go quite deep; other times I wouldn’t get very far before having to
back away.
Finally there was a moment when I decided to see how far
I could go and I quickly realized I’d gone too far—I’d gone past the point
where I could pull my body back under my conscious control, and I was afraid
that Allen would notice my hands shaking and my heels tapping the floor, my
head dropping forward, and the thought crossed my mind that I was in danger of
falling onto the floor. But since Allen had pulled his chair so close to mine,
I knew that if I fell it would be right into his lap.
And throughout it all there was the continuity of Allen’s
voice and Reznikoff’s poetry of intense internal turmoil, recited in a quiet,
understated, almost urban voice: stories of gray and off-white and deep,
cracking black.
Allen read for about twenty minutes. During that time
everything in the room was calm, clear, and very real: the color of the words,
the wind that moved through Allen as he read, the coming darkness. Then he stopped
and brought the covers of the book together. “Well,” he said, “that’s it.”
There’s one sentence in there where I realized I’ve already
accomplished what I’ve been trying to achieve in The Decalogue: “During that time everything in the room was calm, clear,
and very real: the color of the words, the wind that moved through Allen as he
read, the coming darkness.” It’s very precise about things that are not at all
precise: “the color of the words, the wind that moved through Allen as he
read.”
And to counter your statement about
fiction being better than non-fiction at revelation through metaphor, I’d hold up
“the coming darkness” against anything in fiction. But in order to get there, I
felt I had to ground it in reality or it’d just be bullshit. Sentimentality is
a form of bullshit. And people only shout when they’re not sure themselves, as
if shouting something would make it true.
I haven’t really read Reznikoff in years, but you’re making
me see how I’ve borrowed so much from his writing: his use of story as
scaffolding rather than poetic forms, his focus on what’s human to the
exclusion of all else, his sense of time passing inexorably toward a
fast-approaching end, his commitment to understatement and concreteness as he
reaches for the universal, his focus on looking out from “in.” I think I don’t
read him more because I’m afraid I’ll realize that I’ll always be his inferior.
I’ve forgotten about all of these moments—“bullshit,” the
deaf theater kids, my dad, and Reznikoff’s poetry—but these are the things—or
some of the things—that have given me a vision of my limitations and interests
as a writer—my “field” so to speak—much more than the famous poets I’ve studied
with. Or the prose writers who have inspired me and shown me what’s possible. Even
Flaubert, who taught me how to write a good sentence (the secret is to have
three parts; like this one has).
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