Back in US. I was suddenly reduced to nothing more than a 'local poet.'
Carol Bergé said to me, 'You ass-hole, what do you think? Do you
think the word does not get around?' I was so stunned it never
occurred to me to wonder 'what word'? But how stunningly
true it seems more and more. (My work, absolutely is
better than it has ever been). But it is, almost, as if
I were Rimbaud, crawling back to Paris to die.

 

Outside the cafeteria in Portland, Oregon, dark rainslick streets bathed in pools of red neon. Nuzzling coffee and apple pie, I said goodbye to shipmates, most of whom were headed for Reno to gamble, get laid, ship out again. Then a hazy moon slowly slid north, and I awoke to a gray San Francisco dawn.

feels like home again--
rotting fruit in refrigerator,
faint cat smell, then the smelly
cats themselves back again,
waiting for flea bites,
piles of scribbled notes, books,
half-read magazines from around
the world scattered yet comfortable
home-feeling, two weeks before
leaving again.

"You're back," Jay Stattman said, as if I'd just returned from a trip to the market around the corner, not Japan. "Let's have breakfast." Over eggs (tamago), he told me that his girlfriend had recently died in a car crash. "I want to hear about your trip," he continued, "but not now." I understood. But with our lives continuously eventing, the time to reminisce never arrived.

Ellis stayed in Tokyo, teaching English, getting married, taking his bride to Brooklyn. Jay eventually moved to Europe, settling in Holland, where he married, had three children, got a PhD., and built a career. One afternoon, overworked, a heavy smoker, his life dedicated to healing others while sacrificing himself—

in the middle of a rebirthing group he took a break to walk in the street near his home. He was with a co-leader. Suddenly he felt tired, then the pain in his chest. A massive heart attack and he collapsed. In the ambulance he revived, said he didn't want to die, to leave the children so soon.

Now Ellis, divorced, is visiting New Mexico to attend a friend's wedding. Anywhere in the world, Ellis is a warm and generous man with nervous New York energy and a flippancy that hides his obvious intelligence.

in which light bulb
is the moon's long hallway?

Four years after I had renounced writing and became a sculptor, I stood in front of a row of photographs by Anne Noggle. She had been one of a group of women pilots who ferried supplies to England during WWII. In her thirties, she began to attend The University of New Mexico, working her way up to a professorship. The quality of her starkly revealing pictures of herself and others stood out from work by the other photographers in the show. I had to critique them. This would be my first prose piece of any substantial length.

Soon after it was finished, having submitted it to Artspace, Kathleen Shields, then the magazine's Associate Editor, and a contributor to Art in America, phoned and said, "We've never published anything like this before, but we want to feature it."

 

Raining intermittently for the past week, wonderful days that return me, if only in spirit, to the winter I spent walking in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, sitting for hours in a wooden kiosk near the Japanese Tea Garden, mist brightening my thoughts and coloring my words—

empty
wooden bench
rain sits down.

Hours spent in the De Young Museum studying ancient Chinese scrolls, standing buddhas, sitting buddhas, El Greco's pale buddhas. (Was it a problem with his eyes that made him see differently? Beethoven was a genius before he was deaf.)

I am morphing images from an official photograph of Sandia National Laboratory's Particle Beam Accelerator that illuminates pulses formed in a tank of 2000 gallons of electrically charged water. My idea is to explore the solar plexus where the contraction of fear is turning to the safety of something as a safe place. We use a superstructure of images, beliefs and conditioned responses as a strategy. And our recoil from this knowledge is felt physically as a feeling of too much of my energy gets blocked. It has something to do with my feet.

Robert Hall was the rolfer I wanted to work on me. Hall was a psychiatrist who had studied the solar plexus (that) is governed by Leo, sign of the summer sun, passion and aggression. This aspect of the stomach of the area, to so-called manipura, center of passion, fire and rolfing with its founder, and yoga in India. I had to wait several years before he was able to dig his fingers into the sole of my right foot, at which point heat rose from my abdomen and my left leg was vibrating.

I tried to slip from beneath the therapist's hands, but they would gently guide me back to the center where all directions and all manifestations are equally void. This realized, we can afford the luxury of differentiation, assuming each entity as differently the same. With the assignment of this notation, human existence, or at least its possibility, comes into Being, which now has function. e.g., articulation. It is these assignments that we take for "reality;" ironically, their only reality is their emptiness, the illusion of the table. When Hall told me that I was creating the pain, this seemed unbelievable. But as the work continued, I found that this was true. One day a sensation flowed up from my feet, heading for my brain, which I knew it would label pain. Instead, I fended it off, like returning a tennis ball over the net.

Near the end of the ten sessions, Hall called in his associate, Richard Heckler, to work on me in tandem: four hands, twenty tessellating fingers doubling my agony. Afterwards, Heckler mentioned "the Aikido people," of which he was one. I had heard the word before, knowing it was some form of martial art. Hearing it now, I knew this would be my next step.

Aikido of San Francisco was located in a second-story building the size of a parking garage. There were nearly 100 students, as many women as men. Each sensei approached the art differently. Frank Duran moved smoothly, inviting the aggressor to join him in a circular dance. Bill Witt, a squat, powerful man. taught stability. And Robert Nadeau, brilliant but erratic, taught us how to blend energy with fluidity. The junior instructors included Betsy Hill, Wendy Palmer, and George Leonard. Leonard was Vice-President of Esalen Institute, writing books on the emerging New Age. His first book was Education and Ecstasy.—

Did you ever read it? It is kind of corny...he belongs to that world of Howard Gossage, Jerry Et-Hopkins, and Herb Caen, the Squirt Set, the junior jet set. He can't help it. But his ideas are right.

He had begun practicing Aikido in his mid-forties, old for such a physically demanding art. Soon after I joined the dojo, he and Heckler took their black belt test, an event that took place in the Stanford University gymnasium. In overheated prose, Leonard wrote that at one point during Heckler's test, he

glanced up at the portrait of O Sensei. A powerful arc of golden light seemed to be streaming from the eyebrows on the picture toward Richard's head, covering him.

At the 100th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration, after browsing the various arts and crafts booths, I walked past an array of demonstrations by martial arts masters, some of them so old that when they bowed they couldn't rise without assistance. I was attracted to a crowd gathered around an old man with a wispy white beard and a flowing white robe. As black-belted students attacked they went flying in all directions without having made contact with him! I thought it was staged, and didn't think any more of the incident until seven years later when I saw a picture of Aikido's founder, Morihei Uyeshiba, called O-Sensei, "Honorable Teacher," hanging on the San Francisco dojo's wall.

In another book, Leonard continued:

Everyone I contacted noticed the shift of illumination when Richard rose to a standing position. Some people also began seeing an aura—some described it as 'golden,' others as 'clear plastic'—around his entire body.

It is not that we see more than our ancestors did, we probably see less. It is that after two thousand years of history and civilization, some Europeans decided during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to go live in the American wilderness more or less like primitive man. They were called coureurs de bois. Instead of remaining on the coast and farming, these Europeans chose a life of hunting and gathering that was equivalent of Stone Age life....within a few years many of them had regained these forgotten powers: how to track down an animal, how to live in the wilderness, as Stone Age man did. The lesson is obvious. We still have these powers within us and can call on them if conditions require it. In like manner, we are able to put it into words.

stuff wood's hair, not fresh gray
in pain from a pinkish Druid copse,
legs cracked but needing nothing,
nails cut oak's solid stack.

you've cut through the brain,
jumped on dung, someday
you'll hit on a cure.

sprawled in mud,
sledge homed not into heart:
a hole set green would turn
to a chainsaw's length.

peering inside,
no heat appears;
split, it bounces back,
edging out the sun.

It was the En-Sof's retreat from infinite space into an infinitesimal monad of pure energy that the world comes into being. If the En-Sof had not contracted Himself there would have been no space for the activity of Genesis to take place.

A one-month residency at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, in Taos, has been offered to me. During my first stay, for nine months, I lived in a small abode house. Recently, I mentioned this to the painter Russell Adams, who replied he had lived in that very house several years before me. "There was," he said, "a crabapple tree in front." Yes, I had written a poem:

live like old apples ripening;
be lovely to this.

bending under the snow,
recently awakened,
branches weigh of
wild crab apples.

Fall semester at UNM begins tomorrow.

What is life when death keeps
returning? The hub of the wheel,
or the spokes blurred by its speed?

Bill Witherup sent me the Introduction to his forthcoming book, Men At Work. I had suggested that he title it Man At Work, which opens at once a more personal and less personal context. Unfortunately, the original title prevailed.

The Nuclear Enchantment of New Mexico is moving ahead slowly. Nagatani hasn't given me any pictures in over a month. Meanwhile, I research, make notes, keep in shape. In what shape? There seems to be a coming together in our nuclei (DNA) that may have come, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of contingencies, constantly reforming, as 'Solutio is the root of alchemy.' Another says, 'Until all be made water, perform no operation.' In many places the whole opus is summarized by the phrase of something further along.

Shortly after returning to San Francisco from an extended stay in New York, I was staying at Jay Stattman's apartment in the Haight-Ashbury. One morning Jay, John Bell, and I were sitting in the kitchen, reading aloud passages from The Gospel of St. Thomas, struggling through the words. I began to feel strange, as if my mind were turning into water. Needing to be alone, I walked to a nearby park, where, sitting on a steep hill, trying to meditate deeper, I began sailing on the serrated sea of psychosis, only able to return home by willing one foot in front of the other.

That evening, a woman whom I had last seen in New York phoned to invite me to a party. I told her what had happened. She said that being among people would do me good, as in those days psychotic breaks were as common as spectacular sunsets.

In order to get their children used to riding horses, the Hippoean People invented the hobby horse, which also served as a nurse. The children were literally reared on these wooden rockers whose eyes stared into infinity. When they were old enough to mount live horses, Hippoean children would mount and rock up and back, yelling, DADA...DADA... DADA...

The next day shivers were traveling up and down my spine, and it was months before I could look a stranger in the eye. "The breakdown of the signifying chain," "linguistic malfunction," the language of schizophrenia's relationship to the Buddhist conception of ego, with no direct link to its signifier, the sentence assumes this: the signified is not born but only conceived.

I am dead, a spirit flying along with another, and a third I only sense. I ask where everyone else is, as billions of people had died before me, and am 'told' they are higher up.  Now I am striving to rise higher. Above me is a dome, with a disk at its center my 'arm' is stretching to reach, while I'm desperately shouting GOD! GOD! GOD!...

I'm still amazed at the depth from which this dream had risen.

 

 

Met with George Hartley today. He had asked to read my Pecos Reconstructed manuscript, which I loaned to him. Said today that he hasn't had a chance to read it, and asked if I would xerox a copy that he could keep. Which I'll do.

Last week Nagatani proposed that we look for a publisher together for one year, as the project began with a book in mind. I agreed . Today he told me that he took his photographs to the University of New Mexico Press, a press that has very conventional literary credentials, but they do publish excellent photography books. As Patrick is a professor at the university, this is his best chance, and my worst. Where is this "collaboration" heading?

I've entered a painting in a competition. I arrive at the gallery late, walk in and wave to a few people who are behind a long table at the other end of the room. The painting hanging by the entrance is the big winner. I examine it down to its brushstrokes. It is mundane, safe. I feel it is to be expected that such a painting would win. Then I come to a room in which there is a wonderful installation, consisting of various pieces of furniture that form a mysterious unity. Why didn't this win? I'm told that this is a storage room, and these pieces were moved there to make way for the show! Walking on, I see that my painting has already been removed.

A clear day. Finishing "Sandia/Dinosaurs." Again I'm concerned about how long it will be before I receive the next picture, as there's a rhythm to the work. Meanwhile, Bill Peterson, the editor of Artspace, is still wavering on the Heisenberg piece. He says that he likes the writing, but not Tanaka's video.

Yesterday, Nagatani received a letter from Elizabeth Hadas, Director of The University of New Mexico Press, informing him that the Advisory Board met and recommended publication of his pictures. As for my texts, he said that she finds them "distasteful."

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