two fish

The Zen monk Ikkyu seldom painted landscapes, preferring instead such subjects as birds, orchids, prunes, and especially poems and Zen parables written in his powerful calligraphic brush manner. These bokuseki (ink traces) are revered in Japan because they reveal the spiritual character of this eccentric cleric’s life and thought (Cleveland Museum of Art).

It’s nice to read something beautiful from 15th century Japan:

Natural, reckless, correct skill;
Yesterday’s clarity is today’s stupidity
The universe has dark and light, entrust oneself to change
One time, shade the eyes and gaze afar at the road of heaven.

(Ikkyu Sojun, number 291 in Sonja Arntzen)

Ikkyu also ponders sexuality, passion, as Jusin Hall writes:

There’s something nicely saucy about sex poems that last five or six hundred years. Ikkyu wrote graphically, straightforwardly, about a woman’s vagina as a beautiful, alluring, important place, “the birthplace of all the ten thousand buddhas” and his own penis and the joys that could be found playing in his loincloth.

A Woman’s Sex:
It has the original mouth but remains wordless;
It is surrounded by a magnificent mound of hair.
Sentient beings can get completely lost in it
But it is also the birthplace of all the Buddhas of the ten thousand worlds.

A Man’s Root:
Eight inches strong, it is my favourite thing;
If I’m alone at night, I embrace it fully -
A beautiful woman hasn’t touched it for ages.
Within my fundoshi there is an entire universe!

(A fundoshi is a type of loose-fitting underwear once worn by Japanese men.)

Definitely a different take, for a Zen Buddhist Priest, on the age-old Buddhist precept, expressed in contemporary language in Thich Nhat Hanh’s 14th Precept: Three Sources of Energy

Do not mistreat your body. Learn to handle it with respect. Do not look on your body as only an instrument. Preserve vital energies (sexual, breath, spirit) for the realization of the Way. (For brothers and sisters who are not monks and nuns:) Sexual expression should not take place without love and a long-term commitment. In sexual relationships, be aware of future suffering that may be caused. To preserve the happiness of others, respect the rights and commitmennts of others. Be fully aware of the responsibility of bringing new lives into the world. Meditate on the world into which you are bringing new beings.

One zen priestess writes glowingly about Ikkyu:

One of the miscellaneous koans is, Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? The vermilion thread is the red thread, and the red thread is symbolic: I have recently learned that it is not the line of tears , as I used to think, but it comes from early China, where the geisha girls and courtesans would wear a red garter on their thigh, as the line of passions. So: Why are perfectly enlightened bodhisattvas attached to the vermilion thread? One of the characters I want to introduce you to is a wonderful character in the Zen tradition, called Ikkyu, who is one of my longstanding and favourite Zen masters and who appeals, I guess, to the wild woman in me. He was born in 1394 and was an illegitimate son of the emperor Go-komatsu. He was known by some as the emperor of renegades, a wild wandering monk and teacher, sometimes called Crazy Cloud. He was a lover, a poet, and he could write very tenderly about the beauty of women. He relentlessly attacked the hypocrisy of the then corrupt Zen establishment, and even had women as his students. I think he was one of the first Zen masters to have women as students; that was considered quite radical. It was in the brothels and geisha houses that he developed the Red Thread Zen, a notion he borrowed from the old Chinese master Kido and extended to deep and subtle levels of realisation.

This very body is the lotus of the true law. This very body is the lotus of the true law, linking human beings to birth and death by the red thread of passion. This approach was closely related to Tantric Buddhism, that used sexual union as a religious ritual. Ikkyus Red Thread form of Zen practice was a radical approach, a non-dualistic interpretation of the sexual act, realising this very body is the Buddha-dharma. Ikkyu wrote a poem after his first realisation experience:

From the world of passions returning to the world of passions:
There is a moments pause.
If it rains, let it rain; if the wind blows, let it blow.

Ikkyu’s Red Thread Zen and wild, poetic, passionate nature was also tempered, though, by his extensive training in the Rinzai school, very intense training. Rinzai was a very strict master, and Ikkyu was very strict and demanding with his own students.

At the age of 77, Ikkyu had a passionate relationship with a mistress named Lady Shin. She was a blind singer and composer and a very skilled musician, and she was in her late thirties. He wrote lots of beautiful graphic poetry celebrating their love, and it was in Lady Shin that Ikkyu finally located his own missing female self.

As Manfred Steger commented in his book Crazy Clouds [Crazy Clouds: Zen Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers (with Perle Besserman: A cross-cultural study in Zen Buddhism and Politics; Shambhala Press, 1991], Ikkyu incorporated bold elements of the physical relationship into his teaching of Zen, playing on koans in an erotic context, and bound the manifest and essential worlds in a love-knot. His radical methods and practices honoured women and the red thread that binds even the most enlightened Zen masters to passion, birth, and death.

Ikkyu celebrated the joy in human love, and within sexuality there lies a profound sacred practice, similar to Tantric Buddhism. He infused Zen for the first time with a feminine element that had long been missing. When Ikkyu was about 80 years old that he was asked to be the abbot of Daitokoji, which is one the great temples in Japan. At that time it was completely in ruin from a civil war, so it was an extraordinary thing to do at 80 years old, to rebuild Daitokoji: which he did. He had an extraordinary enlightened mind.

Ikkyu Sojun, Crazy Cloud, Zen priest and haiku master, (brief bio; 1394 - 1481), is one of the most eccentric figures in the history of Rinzai Zen. He has become quite a cult folk-hero in modern Japan. He once defended masturbation by quoting the Sixth Patriarch (who had written that “outside of licentiousness there is no true Buddha-nature").

Links to Zen poetry
Buddhism – free eBooks
Chan Buddhist texts – comments
online Zen Buddhist texts.

Shin-ju An Temple, dedicated to Ikkyu

Shichi Butsu Tsukaige

Ikkyu inadvertently
omitted the character
zen
and so wrote it in smaller
at the side. He later said
this accident gave
the calligraphy its
tasteful feeling.

I was asked, “How does this zeal for life shape your haiku and haiku spirit?” (what zeal you ask . . .) by Robert Wilson, co-founder of the new and exponentially growing site Simply Haiku. His question inspired the below speculations on haiku and sacred space.

What is poetry, why do we need it, what does poetry do—to us, for us? In The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, Lewis Hyde affirms a sense that the poem, indeed all art is created fundamentally as an offering. Our culture commodifies artworks, a rather aberrant activity, apparently. Hyde reminds the reader of a truth concerning artwork – the desire to offer a gift, not only to humanity but to the cosmos, the sky, sun, moon, animals, plants, universe, to the moment, to history, one’s ancestors, to the invisible. To offer in a sacred way. Mircea Eliade discusses another aspect of offering in The Myth of the Eternal Return, the means for constructing sacred space, and of enacting life within that space (and timeless time) of the sacred. Experientially investigating the absence and presence of the sacred has been a high value in my life, and also a “saunter: a sense of being sans terre, without Earth, has involved a meandering desire for holiness, a goal echoed in the last stanza of Goethe’s The Holy Longing:

And so long as you haven’t experienced
   This: to die and so to grow,
   You are only a troubled guest
   On the dark earth.

A portion of my research has been concerned with oblivion: the figure of Lethe, mother of the Graces. Why might Forgetting give rise to Splendor, Delight and Blossoming, the three Graces? Heidegger writes,

       The oldest of the old follows behind
   us in our thinking and yet it
   comes to meet us.

      That is why thinking holds to the
   coming of what has been, and
   is remembrance.

      ("The Thinker As Poet,” Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper & Row, 1971, p. 10)

To remember that thinking is remembrance. . . It seems the sacred is easily forgotten, and entering again, in the encounter is a sense of remembrance, a return of “the oldest of the old. I’ve been interested in why not only the sense of poetry but the experience of poetic dwelling becomes lost. The danger inherent in a world, in any society, which loses poetic dimension and thereby becomes overtly literalistic, is a danger perhaps greater than that of terrorism. To know or feel the sense of poetry in life is to know “the coming of what has been, to desire remembrance: to re-member the world, cosmos, oneself, a leaf, a tree. It may be that a necessary means of entering the zone of the sacred is the experience of oblivion.

Haiku are not always instantly irruptive, do not always enact a sudden shift, yet they seem to draw us into a new resonance, creating a sense of the sacred, a context. Hoshinaga Fumio’s haiku,

nigemizu e sengo no chichi wo oitsumeru

      towards the mirage of water
the postwar fathers
            chasing after . . .

       (Kumaso-Ha, Honami Shoten, 2003)

is a haiku which seems to have layers (allusive adumbrations) of mirage: of image, time and space – heads curling Esherlike around tails. It’s a haiku I work into, never quite out of. There is an unfolding which I sense as lament, echoing back through millennia, through a myriad of cultures. I recall this haiku,

spring evening -
   the wheel of a troop carrier
   crushes a lizard

        (Knots: The Anthology of Southeastern European Haiku Poetry, Red Moon Press, 1999)

by Dimitar Anakiev. Its main image is violent, shocking. But this haiku is not merely violent. There is also a sense of sacredness, the context or field of reality which is only partly given by the poem; the haiku also requires rapprochement on the reader’s part:

The genre itself indicates the boundary lines of the sacred, as context, and it is within the landscapes of the sacred, oriented by the genre as a whole, in which image and action occur.

Concision, disjunction and image elements largely contribute to a haiku’s effect, but these elements alone aren’t enough. If one reads the above poems without a pause, they quickly lose much of their drama and vividness. So, what happens when we slow down, allow this unique poetic form to come to life? I would argue that in some measure we experience oblivion(s), if for instants, and through such psychological moments, remembrance. Mnemosyne, anamnesis, Lethe’s sister, is mother to the Muses. Such may be said for any art one becomes absorbed in and passionate toward; nonetheless, haiku are quite uncompromising in the way they cut into reality. There is extreme and concise rupture. To my knowledge, the phenomenology of poetic process has not been explained by science. In fact, qualitative conscious experience itself has not yet been demonstrably elucidated—there is so much we experience and feel which is immeasurable. Without being able to precisely measure or define, it is nevertheless apparent that haiku becomes a genre due to demonstrably unique modes of poetic encounter and dwelling. I should say that what is truly unique isn’t the experience itself, but its prevalence and intensity, when compared with other poetic and artistic forms.

We may tend to devalue the significance and importance of poetic movements which open us to the sacred, to remembrance because of their immateriality, contrastive with the predominant materialist cultural ethos. I know I have, and it is one reason for my returning to the wellspring of haiku. The haiku genre (which includes a reader) constructs an environment within which its language (i.e. symbolic representation) uniquely occurs. It may be a zest for life that draws me to haiku, but likewise a zest for oblivion and erasure. Though not erasure in itself so much as what happens through it.

Some years ago, Barbara Dilley (a Merce Cunningham dancer, Naropa teacher and former Naropa President) introduced me to “square work, in which a length of bright red yarn is made into a large square on the dance floor, tacked down with a few bits of masking tape. What is within the square is defined as sacred space. Dancers (people) relate to the fact of the square, and to entering and exiting that space. It is quite difficult to remain conscious as one steps across the boundary, quite hard indeed. A gap in consciousness nearly always occurs right at the apotheosis of transition. This is one of the consciousness research-questions we explored in an embodied manner as dance. There’s nothing much to taking some twine and making a square on a patch of bare ground. The square has only as much meaning and significance as is intended by the participants; and, what grows from experiences of many crossings and movements (object and human arrangements) within and without. After the dancers have gone, seeing that red twine on a darkened stage, would an aura exist? Is there a magical quality to that bare ground, so carefully demarcated? I would say, yes, to a sensitive reader there is, because there is an intentional architecture, much like a temple or church, just much more minimalist. Haiku likewise possess an intentional architecture; hence, natively embody natural and nuministic aspects of being.

These days I watch Sumo on television; the dohyo, or fighting square, is a sacred space. Rikishi (wrestlers) climb the steps and enter throwing salt, an act of purification, as they step across the sacred rope boundary embedded within the clay ground, into the inner ring. Above, a temple roof hangs suspended, emblemizing the divine. Such an arrangement of objects in space is an example of an archetypal sacred architecture, explored in detail in Eliade’s works, among others. The sense of sacred space existing or inhabiting cultural constructions is no doubt a deeply archaic if not an intrinsic aspect of the human spirit. Haiku as poems are a bit like that length of red twine, though the boundaries and evidences of sacrality may appear more subtly. An objectively intentional aspect exists, not necessarily in the poem itself, but in the fact that sacred space inhabits the poem, out of which the poem presents new ideas of reality. Isn’t this what is implied by the term, “poetic tradition. The oldest of the old follows behind us in our thinking and yet it comes to meet us.

mirai yori taki o fukiwaru kaze kitaru

From the future
   a wind arrives
   that blows the waterfall apart

      (Ban’ya Natsuishi, A Future Waterfall, Red Moon Press, 2nd. ed. 2004)

In that art is an offering to the cosmos, the reader is returned by that offering to a cosmic sense or scene. Returned to the world purified and renewed by the “first moment, the moment before creation.

Rising out of the sea and shedding the tank it’s a bit surprising to not be with fish, feeling weightless in the strangeness of air. What was that dreamlike place, filled with unblinking creatures, turtles with flippers, sharks large enough to blot out the far-off sun? The twine, like sunlight is imaginal, extending along an invisible line between land and sea. Returning, instants of vivid memory quickly fade. But a drop of ocean coheres within, adamantine. It is for that one drop, so pure and crystalline, that haiku seem to speak.

Hoshinaga Fumio is an acclaimed Japanese gendai (modern, stylistically contemporary) haiku poet, whose career has spanned five decades. His sense of soul and brilliance extends far beyond the literary world of haiku style and composition. Th following articles appeared in the autumn issue of Modern Haiku, and are now posted on this haiku research page. I to invite you to read this interview, The Miraculous Power of Language: A Conversation with the Poet Hoshinaga Fumio [PDF], which took place in Kumamoto, Japan. Aa second article, Hoshinaga Fumio: Selected Haiku from Kumaso-Ha [PDF], contains 22 new poems with commentary. This is Hoshinaga’s first substantial appearance in English. A poetic sample from the second article:

The playfully dark, ironic metaphor of “becoming Hitler” is disjunctive, allowing a sense of depth to enter the haiku, a depth partly created through allusion. Due to itchy feet (a summer kigo; season word), the author cannot smartly click his heels or march in goose-step. The poem presents a disturbing psychosocial complex indicating the will to power or assumption of dictatorial authority which often remains hidden in persons or society.

A rhythmically outstanding haiku, which breaks up time into fragments of immanence. In reading this haiku aloud, it was suggested that the last ku, which is the verb, be preceded by a long pause; a dramatic semantic and rhythmic break. The final verb seems more a force of space than time, a wave of sorrow or grief in intimate quiet.

 
 

 

Jim Kacian is among a handful of truly excellent haiku poets in English. He is also the publisher/owner of Red Moon Press. Jim has kindly given me permission to reprint the introduction to his book, Presents of Mind: Haiku & Illustrations (Katsura Press, 1996). This is writing which I’ve wanted to share for some time.

 

 

 

When the atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima at 8:15a.m. on Aug.6, 1945, I was 26 years old.

So begins the speech given by Toshie Une. I was visiting Fukuoka two days ago, watching some of the Peace Memorial Ceremony taking place, on TV. In the ceremonies, the giving of water figured heavily.

Toshie Une, 85, of Minami Ward, Hiroshima, watched Yasuhiro Tani, 25, of the same ward, slowly pour water into a bucket in front of a monument for atomic bomb victims.

Une has visited all the atomic-bomb memorial monuments in and around Hiroshima to make offerings of a glass of water for the past 49 years. She has taken part in the water-offering ceremony since it became part of the memorial ceremony 30 years ago. She entrusted Tani, who sympathized with her experience, with this important role of offering water to atomic bomb victims this year.

The Mayor of Hiroshima lashes out at US, reads the Japan Today headline. As well, the Prime Minister received a tepid welcome: “In front of about 45,000 people at the ceremony to mark the 59th anniversary of the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima, Koizumi reiterated his pledge to observe the war-renouncing Constitution. But in sharp contrast to the reception given to Hiroshima Mayor Tadatoshi Akiba and other speakers, the premier received only thin applause after his speech and was even booed by some in the crowd.” As well, Nagasaki marked its anniversary of the atomic bombing of the city today (August 9). “Nagasaki Mayor Itcho Ito called on American citizens to stand against their government’s pursuit of enhanced nuclear capabilities, and the Japanese government not to take any action that would disturb the peace and security in Northeast Asia.“

Toshie Une’s story is here. A few paragraphs,

Arriving at the shelter, we found so many people there, crowded inside or in front of the shelter, with burns and wounds all over their bodies. “They all look like monsters. Maybe our children were afraid of them and went back to the nursery. We may have passed each other. Let’s go back,” the mothers said. The people were naked, and had swollen reddish faces. From behind it was impossible to tell if they were men or women.

I asked several of the burned people, “What happened? Who are you? How did you get like this? Where are you from?” But their tongues were cut or twisted and they couldn’t utter a word. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. When I tried to hurry back to the nursery as I couldn’t find any of the children there, the people started making gestures, as if they were squatting, scooping up soil and drinking it.

“Uhmmm. . . Waaatt. . . ” They said, in very weak, unclear voices. I couldn’t understand what they were saying. “Waaatt. . . giiiiv. . . ” “What? I can’t hear you. What do you want?” I listened to their appeals and finally I saw what they had been asking for with their gestures. “Water? Water?” I asked them. They nodded. Their expressions changed and they tried to follow me in a gesture of adoration. “Don’t follow me. Wait here! I’ll bring water. Just sit down here!” I persuaded them to stay there and immediately left to get water.

One man, badly injured and bleeding, said to me, “Just now some strange terrible bomb was dropped on the center of Hiroshima. It contains horrible poisonous gas. All the water in Hiroshima is mixed with the gas. If you give them that water, they’ll die straight away. Don’t give them any!” He was shouting at me, repeating his words, “Don’t give them any! Don’t take it!” I was horrified to hear what he said, so I stopped trying to take water to them. They must have kept waiting over there for me to bring them water. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t give them that water. I felt terribly sorry, in agony about this. I could imagine the people over there probably would have died waiting for water I was meant to have brought.

One day, around 1955, I was climbing Mt. Dai-chausuyama at Koi with my friend, and we came across the statue of the “Taki no Kannon” or “Mercy of Goddess at Waterfall” at the site of the Kyojunji Temple on the hillside. There we found some very pure mountain water. Then the events on that day ten years before came back to me clearly. An encounter with the purest water in Hiroshima led me to make this wish: I’d like to let the victims drink this pure water. I’ll bring the water to atomic-bomb memorial monuments and apologize to them. Please forgive me. I’ll do it as long as I’m alive and my health allows.

Forty years have passed since then, and I’m now over eighty. On fine days, as I’m pulling my cart with its water bottles, I am still offering water to over 120 monuments in and around Hiroshima. I wish to console the souls of the victims by offering water from a small clear cup with the words Comfort Water for the A-bomb Victims written on it.

I have never seen such an atrocious way of dying. I never want to see such a hell again nor to be forced to see it. Nuclear weapons annihilate all living things, all created arts and culture, not to mention human beings. My earnest desire is that they will never be used.

Two additional eyewitness accounts are here, in French and English.

An atomic bomb resource site for teachers and students K-12 is here. US bombadier Thomas Wilson Ferebee, the poor fellow who dropped the bomb, passed away March 17, 2000. A movie was made, The Beginning or the End (1947).

Check out Simon Cozen’s page here, he’s translating Sei Shonagon’s 10th century Pillow Book (Makura no Sôshi – from this Japanese source text). A brief informative overview of Sei Shonagon can be found at Liza Dalby’s site (where the above image was found). Boing Boing reports:

It’s easy to forget the fact that these words were written in the tenth century, because the results in this format read – well, rather like a blog. Some dates are fictitous, and some liberties have been taken to produce a coherent narrative stream in blog format – but the content is purported to be a faithful translation of the original.

Here’s a teaser, a post dated November 12, 987, titled Huh, Men!, which begins:

Current music: Banshikicho Netori
   Current mood: Confused

I will never understand men. Their emotions are just really strange, and I just can’t work out why they behave the way they do.

I mean, you’ll hear about a man who leaves a really pretty woman, and . . .

10 seconds

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(About this web log. Note concerning web presence: you can find my bio here, here are some writings on haiku; a recent music project is here, composed with Jeff Cairns. )

This web log is loosely concerned with the theme of wildness and the wild; its loss, invalidation and voiding, whether this arrives from the personal microcosmically stray dream-image, political, social, scientific perspective (e.g. genomic, cybernetic), literary perspective, cultural noodling, work-stress realm, psychology, etc. So, critique is one purview. On the flip side, the question of what the wild is, how wildness might be touched, moved towards, sensed – what its value might be – these represent arcs of question and aspiration. Rather than answers, I believe relationship is a focus. James Hillman discusses the classical Greek meaning of the word therapy as “therapeia,” “to attend upon.” The meaning of psychology (a logos of psyche: to give psyche an adequate account of itself) then is “to attend upon psyche.” In this sense, the psychology of the wild becomes relevant as an active movement: how to attend upon, give attendance to wilds; to wildness. To attend and enter.

An example of attending to the psyche of something primordial, elemental is Gaston Bachelard’s Psychoanalysis of Fire. Thoreau found wildness as a highest value, articulating a non-dual awareness of wildness. Wildness as not merely an outer environmental issue nor interior state disconnected from relative extensive reality. This brings up the old question of subjectivity vs. objectivity (with subjectivity, as fancy, often getting short shrift). One response to the subjective-objective conundrum regarding nature comes from modern haiku. The Japanese poet Hoshinaga Fumio comments,

I write about or touch upon human heart and feeling, by creating human mental images. The human mental image does not have a typical form, such as a cake cut into four quarters – a mental picture is not like that; it has no form. . . . Disharmonies lead to harmonies . . . the Japanese sense of nature is in harmony, that is, the harmony of: person (human being) and nature; no separation – in its widest sense. Without the sense of harmony with nature, Japanese literature would become very weak (personal communication).

Hoshinaga’s creation of “human mental images” is directly related to his 40-year oeuvre of acclaimed haiku. How we find harmony, in the sense Hoshinaga describes, seems relevant. At this precise point in human history various writers have sensed we are on the brink of losing the wild, except perhaps as fairytale or entertainment fantasy; this process is happening on a number of levels, imaginative, social, technological, etc. I’d like to present a few phrases from Emerson and Thoreau. Here is the opening sentence from Thoreau’s essay, Walking:

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil – to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society. I wish to make an extreme statement…

Thoreau includes “person” in his sense of nature, through advancing the idea of a person leaving the three estates of church, government and society, in order to seek direct contact with the wild, not by goal-oriented behavior, but rather by meandering or wandering in or through wild places, spaces, with the sense of never returning.

We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return, prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again – if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man – then you are ready for a walk.

Seeking a sacred earth, sacred sense of being. To do this one must become “a sort of fourth estate, outside of Church and State and People.” A bit later, a statement which resonates strongly 150 years later:

In Wildness is the preservation of the World.

Thoreau is often misquoted, with “wilderness” replacing “wildness.” While the two are related, one is external, extensive, while the other is a move towards an aesthetic in which experiences are sought: varieties of contact.

In Nature Emerson wrote, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” A short way down the page he added, “But to a sound judgment, the most abstract truth is the most practical.” Valuing the wild implies sensing, contemplating universals, which tend to be discredited or devalued, in comparison to realistic, pragmatic ideas or goals. It can be argued that strong thinking itself is now held in social question. These lines from Yeats’ Second Coming seem to match the current media climate:

. . . everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
. . .

Gary Snyder writes that mind is fundamentally wild:

I will argue that consciousness, mind, imagination, and language are fundamentally wild. “Wild” as in wild ecosystems – richly interconnected, interdependent, and incredibly complex. Diverse, ancient, and full of information. At root the real question is how we understand the concepts of order, freedom, and chaos. Is art an imposition of order on chaotic nature, or is art (also read “language") a matter of discovering the grain of things, of uncovering the measured chaos that structures the natural world? Observation, reflection, and practice show artistic process to be the latter (A Place in Space, pp. 163-172).

These are some of the ideas that hover, in terms of this web log. I feel that we have reached a time when the perseverance of the wild is at issue.

One of the challenges of cultural existential bias is acknowledging that we possess it. Without looking toward the obscure shadows cast, we may end up destroying or eroding what is of universal value: human identity and meaning, in one instance. I think this is one of Bill McKibben’s points when he writes that,

[Human gene manipulation and DNA improvement is] “Going for perfection,” [as] Watson calls it. But in fact such genetic tampering threatens to destroy the very things that give meaning to human life. From a certain vantage point, meaning has been in decline for a very long time, almost since the beginning of civilization. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors inhabited a very different world from ours, a meaning-saturated world where every plant and animal was an actor the way people are actors, where even rocks and canyons and rivers could speak. We look at that same world and see either silent landscape or pile of resources; either it has gone mute or our hearing is nowhere near as sharp. . . . the context of our lives began to shrink much more quickly in the last five hundred years. As science offered first new explanations and then new technologies, we have traded in the old contexts that informed human lives, bargaining them away in return for freedom, for Liberation (Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age).

As we advance we may wish to turn anew toward the forgotten or abandoned. I would like to extend my brief encapsulation but this post is becoming long. Ursula Le Guin’s A Very Warm Mountain, discusses the personification of the natural world in a way that has provoked my introspection: must we personalize the non-human, incorporate it into society in order to preserve its value, living in an age between myths? James Hillman comments in Beauty Without Nature; Refounding the City that “nature” should not necessarily be equated only with wilderness or non-human zones, that (to reduce a complex story) the crucial experience of aesthetic arrest may be found in the city, in art, as well as within wilderness – aesthetic perception of the wild is qualitative and not mutually exclusive (one zone cannot be sacrificed for another). One of Hillman’s points is that it may be possible to design a sense of the wild into the city – in such a city, it would become less necessary to mass exodus to the beach or “managed” nature on the weekends, in order to seek after the longed-for distance, in Weil’s sense, distance which is the soul of beauty.

The wild and anarchy are dissimilar templates. Gary Snyder points out that sensing the wild involves “the grain of things . . . measured chaos,” ideas also found in Classical Greece. Chaos (lack of pattern) was equated with aesthetic ugliness. So, the cosmos as cosmetic, cosmos as craft.

The above are loosely related speculations. I believe it is possible to go beyond a dualistic psychology that polarizes nature and culture. At the same time, whatever polemic or dialectic might be hashed out, I’m working from an internal poetic course, an unformed and unframed discontinuity, from disharmonies that may lead to harmonies – saunters on occasion, seeming to be a verb.

     A drawing of the gaijin Commander Perry, made following his arrival in Japan, 1853. I recognize the nose. This is the beginning here; something from Hubble would have been appropriate, you know, the big bang, Ultra Deep Field, maybe a photo of dark matter? Right, apparently more than 90% of the universe is composed of – a bit ironic. Perry’s vessels received the appellation black ships.