Tag Archives: Partially Congealed Pundit

Go and Stop Chasing

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I wrote this essay back when I was in college — so more than 20 years ago now. I’m curious whether folks think I still sound like me or not….
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“‘Go to the pine if you want to learn about the pine, or to the bamboo if you want to learn about the bamboo.'” –Basho, p.33

“‘If you want to find the meaning, stop chasing after so many things.'” –Ryokan, p.43

Both Basho and Ryokan attempt to capture, through their poetry, the beauty and simplicity of nature, the “meaning” inherent within everyday existence.  Yet, despite analagous subjects and attitudes, the essence of the two poets work is clearly different.  For while the fundamental principle which guides Basho’s art is that of motion, the desire to “Go to the pine”, at the basis of Ryokan’s poetry is stillness, the injunction to “stop chasing”.  to stay in one place.  To look at the two poets, then, is to see a contrast between restlessness and acceptance, between poetry which searches and that which reveals.

Basho’s motion, his desire to go outward and into the world for knowledge and wisdom, can perhaps best be seen in the form of his poetry, which is mostly interspersed amidst his travel journals.  Thus, virtually every  poem is placed in a particular location and even at a particular time. When he writes, for example, that:

Three months after we saw

Cherry blossoms together

I came to see the glorious

Twin trunks of the pine.

it is necessary for the reader to know not only that the poet is referring to the pine at Takekuma, but also that he is responding to another poem written by a friend before he began his journey. (111)  While this kind of specificity makes the poem at least partially inaccessible to modern readers, it also, in Basho’s time, connected him to the world outside of himself, placing the events of his life in a clearly recognized continuity of location and history.  Similarly, his use of the haiku, a form utilized and understood by many of his contemporaries and one which, moreover, lent itself to group compositions, indicates the manner in which poetry allowed him to reach out, to link, with others, with nature, with the landscape and past of Japan.(12)

It is not only this linking itself, however, which truly distinguishes Basho, but rather the dexterity and originality with which he creates these contacts, the power of the imagery with which he touches and contains the objects towards which his “wind-swept spirit” reaches. (71)  Within the strict confines of the haiku  form, Basho attains an amazing degree of motion and intensity.  In describing “a gate-keeper’s house” in which he “was held up for three days,” for example, Basho writes

Bitten by fleas and lice,

I slept in a bed

A horse urinating all the time

Close to my pillow. (120)

Here, the poet moves from close up, next to his skin where the insects are biting; to a wider view, himself asleep; to the sudden and striking image of the “horse urinating all the time”; and then back to his own pillow, next to which, now, of course, the reader sees the shadowy figure of the horse.  By the end of the short poem, the journey is so thorough that it is almost impossible to remember the “fleas and lice” of the first line — they disappear in the sound of the horse’s urine splashing on the floor.

This switching of perspective, this quick movement from image to image, is perhaps the most characteristic feature of Basho’s poetry.  Often the reader moves with the poet, discovering each new object, each new perspective, simultaneously with the narrator.  Thus,

Deep as the snow is,

Let me go as far as I can

Till I stumble and fall,

Viewing the white landscape.(76)

But even when Basho himself is not present within his poems, the poems themselves move by reaching, by moving out into the world.  Each one, then, attempts to find some essence outside of the self, to seek out some place where

At midnight

Under the bright moon,

A secret worm

Digs into a chestnut. (27)

Ryokan, on the other hand, writes not to discover an outer world, but rather to reveal inner experience; his personal response to occurrences and events in that outer world.  Ryokan’s allusions, therefore, are not historical or literary, but personal; he writes of the scenery of his own life, of how “The children play peacefully with this old monk” (31), how “I forgot my begging bowl”(60), and how “A thief has stolen my zafu and futon.” (56)  The form of his verse, too, is idiosyncratic; he writes not in perfect haiku, but instead loosely follows the structure of many different forms of Chinese and Japanese verse. (17)

By refusing to limit himself to the haiku  and traditional verse forms in which Basho writes, Ryokan both frees and disconnects himself from a larger literary community, allowing him to adopt an easy, almost rambling style in which he can touch not only on images in nature, but on his own thoughts, his opinions and beliefs.  When he writes, for example, that “With no-mind, blossoms invite the butterfly,” the blossoms and the butterfly are entirely hypothetical; Ryokan is not writing of a specific place or a specific incident; he is writing solely about what occurs within his own mind. (16)  Similarly the poem

Who says my poems are poems?

My poems are not poems.

After you know my poems are not poems,

Then we can begin to discuss poetry! (39)

Is completely devoid of any imagery whatsoever — appropriately enough, considering the subject matter.  Yet, even in a more conventional poem, such as

The thief left it behind —

the moon

At the window. (75)

there is a sense of stillness.  For while the poem moves from “thief” to “moon” to “window”, the philosophic cast of the whole, the meditation that is inevitably raised by the question of what can and cannot be stolen, by what has and does not have value, slows the poem down, creating an air of contemplation, rather than hurry.

The space which Ryokan creates allows him to connect with the world, to find “meaning”, not through the reaching that Basho undertakes, but rather through a kind of blurring, so that the line between inside and outside disappears, and he becomes both observer and observed.  The ease with which he is able to merge with the outside, with which he can “pretend to be a crane softly floating among the clouds” is as incredible as the powerful motion of Basho’s verse. (33)  In the poem

The island of Sado —

morning and evening I often see it in my dreams,

Together with the gentle face of my mother. (76)

Ryokan blends a real place with his own inner dream world and then with his past in the space of three lines.  By forgetting place, by standing still, then, Ryokan allows the world to rush through him, so that

Going out to beg this spring day

I stopped to pick violets–

Oh!  The day is over! (61)

To suggest that Ryokan is solely a poet of inner and Basho solely a poet of outer; that Ryokan is only stillness and Basho only motion, is, of course, an oversimplification — Ryokan writes poems that flit from image to image, Basho writes poems that remain inside himself.  Yet, these exceptions, too, demonstrate the fundamental differences that separate the two writers.  In looking at them, in fact, the distinctions become not less, but more apparent.  For when Ryokan writes

Returning to my hermitage after filling my rice bowl,

Now only the gentle glow of twilight.

Surrounded by mountain peaks and thinly scattered leaves;

In the forest a winter crow flies. (26)

the movement from hermitage to twilight to moutain peaks to forest and crow is still suffused with quiet.  The “gentle glow of twilight” shifts the reader’s mind from the ground to the sky without the sudden rush of Basho’s verse, and leaves it there among the “mountain peaks and thinly scattered leaves” until the “winter crow flies” into view.  The open form of the poem, the leisurely shifts of imagery, all create stillness, despite the broad movement of the poem, and despite Ryokan’s near abscence.

In the same way, when Basho, after attending a funeral, writes

Move, if you can hear,

Silent mound of my friend,

My wails and the answering

Roar of autumn wind. (133)

the limited space of the narrative, and the prevalence of his own emotions, do not detract from the radical rush of images, the leaps from “Silent mound” to “my wails” and then out to the “Roar of autumn wind.”  Pushed into a small space, in fact, Basho turns to auditory, rather than visual imagery, creating a haunting poem in which the reader is without bearing or placement, and must search for purchase solely amidst the rising and falling sound.  Thus Basho, even without sight, continues to search, just as Ryokan, casting aside self, remains resting in quiet.
 

Matsuo_Basho

Basho
 

Ancient Zen Battle

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I wrote this when I was in college about 20 years ago. It’s probably a little earnest by my current standards, but what the hey; we were all young once.
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In The Way of Zen,  Alan Watts points out that, in Japan, training in the arts “follows the same essential principles as training in Zen.” In this context, he specifically mentions Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery  as “the best account of this training thus far available in a Western language.” (195)  Herrigel’s narrative does, in fact, illustrate, in many ways, the Zen philosophies, or, perhaps more correctly, the Zen experience which Watts discusses.  At the same time, however, the ideas which Herrigel derives from his studies differ noticeably, at several crucial points, from those which Watts cites as most characteristic of Zen.  A comparison of the two accounts, then, can both provide insight into Zen Buddhism and illuminate the differing methodologies which Herrigel and Watts employ.

The most basic tenet of Zen, both Watts and Herrigel indicate, is that one should be unselfconscious; should have the ability to cease thinking.  Watts explains that “the mind cannot act without giving up the impossible attempt to control itself beyond a certain point.  It must let go of itself….” (139)  Thus, as Herrigel puts it, one must become “purposeless on purpose.” (33)  Herrigel’s training is, in large part, a technique for overcoming this basic contradiction.  When Herrigel is practicing drawing his bow, his master exhorts him to “Concentrate entirely on your breathing,” so as to perform each action effortlessly, without thought. (21-22)  As Watts points out, “breathing [is]…the process in which control and spontaneity…find their most obvious identity,” and so the concentration on breath is a means of destroying the illusion that it is necessary to think and plan in order to act.(197-8)

The purpose of Zen training, then, is to release the students own mental control over him or herself.  This is often done, Watts suggests, through intensifying the student’s efforts at self-regimentation until the ultimate futility of this rigidity becomes so manifest that it spontaneously drops away.  As the master demands that the student cease controlling himself, the student intensifies his efforts to cease intensifying his efforts, until, as Watts writes, he becomes “totally baffled by everything,” gives up utterly the effort to understand the world around him, and thus begins to act without thought.(166)  This is precisely the process which Herrigel describes.  “Weeks went by,” he writes, “without my advancing a step.  At the same time I discovered that this did not disturb me in the least….I lived from one day to the next….” (52)

For both Watts and Herrigel, the final results of the achievement of self-liberation are, at the least, profound, and, at most, decidedly mystical.  “When every last identification of the Self with some object or concept has ceased,” writes Watts, one enters “the state of consciousness which is called divine, the knowledge of Brahman….represented as the discovery that this world which seemed to be Many is in truth One….” (38)  Herrigel, too,  writes that when he finally shot without thinking, he discovered that “‘Bow, arrow, goal, and ego, all melt into one another, so that I can no longer separate them.  And even the need to separate has gone.'” (61)  Zen, therefore, is both a kind of psychological technique and a religion, both a means of promoting mental health and a way of discovering what Herrigel, especially, refers to as a deeper Truth.

Thus, Herrigel’s description of the experience of his training seems to follow and to demonstrate Watts’ outline of the essential precepts of Zen thought and teaching.  However, there are several difficulties in reconciling the two accounts, partially centering around the fact that, for Watts, Zen’s emphasis on spontaneity and its essentially anti-institutional character makes any effort to teach Zen problematic. (169)  The central point of Zen, Watts contends, “is that in fact we are already in nirvana  — so that to seek nirvana  is the folly of looking for what one has never lost.” (61)  This means, of course, that the attempt to “learn” Zen is, at base, misguided, and that, therefore, Herrigel’s quest is itself a refutation of the object that he seeks.

Supposedly, therefore, when Herrigel “awakens” he should recognize the futility of his search — and this recognition should be apparent throughout his book, since he wrote it, after all, following the completion of his training.  This is not, however, the case.  Instead, Herrigel repeatedly refers to his studies as purposeful, progressing clearly through stages.  “…the breathing,” he writes, “had not of course been practiced for its own sake,”  while the Master himself remarks after his class has successfully drawn their bows that “‘All that you have learned hitherto…was only a preparation for loosing the shot.'” (20-27)  Towards the end of the training the Master even explicitly suggests that his students are headed for a specific destination, commenting that “‘He who has a hundred miles to walk should reckon ninety as half the journey…'” (54)  Watts, on the other hand, insists that “Zen…is a traveling without point….To travel is to be alive, but to get somewhere is to be dead….”(197)

Related to Watts’ emphasis on the futility of searching for Zen is his insistence on the manner in which Taoism, and later Zen, “made Buddhism a possible way of life for human  beings….” (29)  Watts points out that since everyone is already in a state of awakening, Zen has “no need to…drag in religion or spirituality as something over and above life itself.” (152)  To separate the Zen experience from normal everyday life, to create a special “spiritual” realm, is, in fact, diametrically opposed to the very basis of Zen, which recognizes that “‘all duality is falsely imagined.'” (38)  Thus, just as to search for Zen is to conceal that for which one searches, to confine Zen to one portion of one’s life, to suggest that Zen inhabits a realm to the side of the world in which one eats and sleeps, is to eliminate that which one attempts to confine.  This is why when the holy man Fa-yung achieved awakening, the birds no longer brought him flowers, for upon being awakened, he cast off his holiness, and became simply human. (Watts 89-90)

For Herrigel, however, the art of archery, and Zen itself, is a mystical experience, distinctly separate from, and distinctly beautiful in comparison to, the incidents of “normal” life.  Before he began his undertaking of archery, he writes, he “had realized…that there is and can be no other way to mysticism than the way of personal experience and suffering.” (14)  Each of the Zen arts, he insists, “presuppose a spiritual attitude…an attitude which, in its most exalted form, is characteristic of Buddhism and determines the nature of the priestly type of man.” (6)  The study of archery, in fact, separates Herrigel from the rest of the world, for his Master informs him that “when you meet your friends and acquaintances again in your own country:things will no longer harmonize as before.  You will…measure with other measures.” (65) [1]  Similarly, when the Master “gave a few shots with [Herrigel’s] bow, it was as if the bow let itself be drawn…more willingly.” (59-60)

For Herrigel, then, Zen is, seemingly, primarily a religious experience, while Watts is more interested in understanding the philosophical and psychological implications of Zen thought.  Where Herrigel, for instance,  discusses the deep feeling of gratitude which the pupil feels for his teacher, Watts investigates the manner in which Zen uses the master as authority figure in order to create a “formidable archetype” from which the student must free himself. (Herrigel 46, Watts 163)  Thus Herrigel is more concerned with the emotive quality of the relationship, while Watts concentrates on the purpose of the master-pupil contact, and on its effectiveness in provoking “awakening”.

Watts, in other words, is far more objective, and in many ways, therefore, a good deal more convincing in his description of Zen than is Herrigel.  It is difficult to take Herrigel too seriously when he makes such statements as “[The student] must dare to leap into the Origin, so as to live by the Truth and in the Truth….” if only because any mention of “Truth” immediately provokes a large swell of skepticism, at least in the Western student. (81)  Watts, on the other hand, takes care to set forth his own limitations, and to point out the difficulties of discussing a subject which is so vividly linked to experience. (xii)  As a result, one almost automatically begins to judge Herrigel’s work by the standards which Watts constructs.

Yet Zen is, as Watts himself points out, a philosophy which is vehemently opposed to the use of the “critical perspective.” (xiii)  If the central tenet of Zen is an opposition to overthinking, then evaluating that tradition itself is, obviously, self-contradictory.  Watts’ argument that “basic reality, remains spontaneous and ungrasped whether one tries to grasp it or not” is intellectually satisfying, and in itself, powerfully liberating.  But it is difficult, on the basis of such largely theoretical statements, to deny the validity of Herrigel’s first-hand experience, especially given Zen’s emphasis on action over thought.  Ultimately, perhaps, Watts says all that can be said about the Zen tradition, while Herrigel tries, in a manner which may be misguided (though that too, is somewhat difficult to judge) to illuminate portions of that experience which might better be left undiscussed, since verbalizing them seems, at least for Herrigel, to lead to a kind of generalized and unconvincing mysticism.  Nonetheless, to refute the role of Zen in archery because of the limitations of Herrigel’s narrative would be a disservice to Herrigel, to Zen itself, and to Watts, whose brilliant discussion of Zen nonetheless takes pains to remind his readers of the limitations of words in describing and explaining a system which is, at heart, more an experience than a philosophy.


[1]Besides contradicting Watts, this statement is also particularly confusing, since, after all, it seems relatively obvious that, with or without Zen, after spending five or six years in Japan, Herrigel would virtually have to expect that his relationships with his friends and acquaintances would be somewhat changed.

Bombs in NeverNeverland

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I wrote this almost twenty years ago for a course on representations of war when I was a junior in college. It touches on some issues raised in the comments section of Alex Buchet’s recent post on war comics, so I thought I’d resurrect it. I think I still agree with the main points, though the prose would probably be a trifle less earnest if I wrote it now. But, for better or worse, here it is.
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“All children, except one, grow up,” writes J.M. Barrie at the beginning of Peter Pan. In many ways, the fictional constructions of war created by Tennyson, Kipling, Remarque, and Zola, appear to be attempting to deny this insight; appear to be attempting to suggest that war provides a return to an idyllic youth and innocence which allows the men who participate in it to escape from the mores and constrictions of adult society and return to an idealized childhood in which manners and restraint are cast away and replaced by simplicity and exuberant enthusiasm. War, for these authors, is an arena in which adventures can occur; in which heroism and enthusiasm triumph over the stodgy grind of day to day life. One can almost hear the cavalry in Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” declaring, with Peter Pan, “I’m youth, I’m joy” as they thunder towards the artillery guns, can almost hear Peter’s cocky self-assurance in Kipling’s breezy assumption that “of course” the British forces broke the “Fuzzy-Wuzzies”. The soldiers of which Kipling, Tennyson, Remarque and Zola speak have no fear, they have no doubts. They live, like children, in their own world with their own rules, in their own “NeverNeverland” separated entirely and forcibly from the reach and understanding of adult society.

Yet, despite this separation, the soldier is not ostracized, not attacked or unaccepted by the society which he seemingly rejects. He is not, in fact, a threat to civilized society, but is rather a delightful dream, an idea with great appeal both to the emotions and to the imaginations of people of the time, as the popularity of Charles Gordon demonstrates. Thus Kipling’s “Tommy” is a man (or, perhaps more correctly, a boy) who should be admired and loved even though he does not really fit the mores and norms of society, even though, as Kipling puts it, his “conduck isn’t all your fancy paints”. It is, in fact, Tommy’s separation from fine society which make him an attractive figure; his very simplicity, the very fact that he does not want luxuries but only wishes to be treated “rational”, composes his glamour. Tommy does not want “better food”, but only to be accepted by society without having to conform to its rules. He wants (and appears to receive from Kipling) to be given the freedom not to conform and to be admired for his very possession of that freedom; wants, like Peter Pan, to receive unconditional affection and yet to never have his mind cleaned.

It should, of course, be impossible to be at one and the same time independent and dependent, impossible to be heroic for the sake of the sympathy and admiration which that heroism brings. Only if one is capable of a total lack of self-reflection and self-awareness is this contradiction resolvable; it is only through his total naivety that Peter Pan is able to both expect admiration and receive it. Through war, Kipling, Tennyson, Zola and Remarque appear to suggest, through becoming a soldier, this simplicity can be (re)gained, this idealized childhood can be (re)found. Soldiers, like children, are, for these authors, not concerned with whether what they do is correct or incorrect, they do not agonize–they simply are. The soldiers whom Zola describes are “Like children and savages, their only instinct…to eat and sleep in this rush towards the unknown with no tomorrow”, Remarque’s Paul notes that “The national feeling of the tommy resolves itself into this–here he is.” The soldier is unthinking; in fact, thought is his enemy, his destroyer. The self-reflection which connotes adulthood, the loss of innocence and unselfconsciousness, results, in these fictions, in age and death. When the soldier begins to think, as Lapoulle does after killing Pache, he is destroyed. As Remarque’s Paul says, “we [the soldiers] are in a good humour because otherwise we should go to pieces.”

Remarque, of course, is contending that it is the horror of war, not of adulthood, which makes this jollity necessary; that to think about war would cause madness, insanity. But in many ways Remarque’s novel makes a statement not that war is too awful to think about, but that it is, in fact, aging which is the greatest horror. It is for this reason that the older men in the War are not as tragic as the men of Paul’s generation, for the older men have no youth to lose. For Remarque, the tragedy of the war is a loss of childhood, is the fact that through the war, Paul discovers death and sexual initiation (“the curse of a soldier” as Kipling writes), fear and vulnerability. Yet all of these discoveries are, in fact, not unique to wartime; as Paul himself realizes, they are instead the necessary adjuncts of adult life, the manifestations of a superficial society which delivers coffins punctually before a battle and places you under the arbitrary control of a postmaster. The war is the extension of civilian societies cruelties and artificialities, stupidities and absurdities. But even as it is so, the war also provides a means of escape, a strategy of resistance, a means whereby youth can be retained through “the finest thing that arose out of the war-comradeship.” Through this camaraderie, the trappings and foolishness of civilization, the unnecessary clutter of the school room, can be shrugged off and subsumed in the contentment of a good meal tasted among good friends. Paul relishes the experience of sitting with his comrades on their makeshift toilets not in spite of the primitiveness of the facilities, but because of it. Remarque views culture and civilization with suspicion, and finds in war a way to sidestep them, to return to the idyllic childhood which Zola describes the young intellectual Maurice finding in the arms of the simple peasant Jean when “Maurice

…let himself be carried away like a child. No woman’s arms had ever held him as close and warm as this…Was this not the brotherhood of the earliest days of the world, friendship before there was any culture or class, the friendship of two men united and become as one in their common need of help in the face of the threat of hostile nature?

Through his relationship with Jean, Maurice regains infancy; he is tended too, sheltered, cared for. War in The Debacle provides Maurice with a way to return to simplicity, with a means of becoming both noble and tragic. He becomes one of the “poor boys, poor boys” to whom his sister refers; he becomes innocent. In its creation of an arena in which life becomes more simple and true, war also, then, absolves of guilt even as it confers naivete. The soldier makes a sacrifice for crimes he did not commit. Like the men of the Charge of the Light Brigade, he goes unquestioningly to his death, following orders to the last. The betrayal of the soldier by civilians and generals is made all the more poignant because the soldier has done nothing wrong; has, in fact, placed his whole trust and hope upon civilian assurances of glory and easy victory. The betrayal is, in fact, like the betrayal which Peter Pan experiences at Hook’s treachery on the rock in the lagoon, the betrayal of a child’s total trust by a parent’s unfairness, after which, Barrie writes the child “will never afterwards be quite the same boy.”

It is this betrayal which Paul feels has robbed him of his youth when he says that, “I am young, I am twenty years old yet I…see how peoples are set against one another, and in silence, unknowingly, foolishly, obediently, innocently slay one another. [italics mine]” Remarque claims, then, both that the soldiers have lost their innocence, and that they retain it. Remarque says that their parents have failed them, and yet he still conceptualizes them as children. They have discovered that the world is unfair, and yet Remarque, through Paul, still perceives them as innocent. Paul repeats over and over that his generation is lost, it is useless, it is old and destroyed, but he never once decides to stop fighting, and even pushes Himmelstoss forward when the former drill master falters. Self-consciously martyred, Paul cannot solve, but can only revel in his troubles, just as Mr. Darling revels in his sojourn in the kennel.

Mr. Darling is, of course, not really comparable to Paul. He is not as young, nor in as much distress; he was not in the trenches of the First World War. Yet, in a deeper sense, Mr. Darling is very much like Paul, very much like Maurice, very much, for that matter, like Charles Gordon. He is a man who wishes more than anything to be admired, as Paul and Maurice did when they joined their respective armies, but who, through that very wishing, has condemned himself to an unadmirable existence. He is a conceited fool, a whining incompetent, a desperately contemptible figure when placed beside the apogee of unconscious grace and youthful innocence which is Peter Pan. And yet, while no one would want to be Mr. Darling, no one can wish to be Peter Pan either, because the very wishing dooms the attempt. One either has “good form” or does not have it. To have good form is to be young, unconscious, free. But “All children, except one, grow up.” And that one, as Barrie surely knew better than anyone else, was not real.

This is, I think, Barrie’s central insight, is the reason that Peter Pan , if it does not really oppose war, offers a way to oppose war that none of the other pieces of literature we have studied manage to suggest. For if, in fact, childhood is unattainable, if simplicity is gone, then the attempt to recapture that simplicity and childhood through war is not only misguided, but is actually dangerous, futile, and pitiful. Barrie loved children, he loved childhood. But he knew that he was not a child, and that he could not become one by travelling to some foreign field with a rifle and a battalion of comrades. Childhood games played by adults are not touching or cute; they are pitiful and even terrible. When Mr. Darling pours the medicine into Nanna’s bowl, he does not appeal to the reader in the same way that Peter does when he plays the game of question and answer with the pirates. Similarly, Peter’s comment that “to die will be an awfully big adventure” is charming and witty only when uttered by Peter’s naive voice. Kipling’s effort to capture what appears to be a similar sentiment sounds incredibly cold-hearted and callous, advising as it does that a soldier wounded on the field of battle and facing imminent mutilation ought to “Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains.” On the other hand, the French mutineer’s letter telling his sweetheart that, “I love you, and I don’t want to die”, is touchingly painful, and would be just as out of place in Peter Pan as would Kipling’s injunction. Real horror (though apparently Kipling, whose brain may itself be scrambled in some anomalous fashion, does not know it is real horror), and real fear are not part of the world which Barrie describes.

This is, of course, because Barrie’s world is not real. NeverNeverland is named so for the obvious reason. Tennyson, Zola, Kipling, and Remarque, in attempting to locate it within the context of reality, in attempting to suggest that NeverNeverland is obtainable within a historical rather than an imaginary framework, trap themselves within the very mundane existence that they wish to escape. In trying to escape adulthood, in trying to leave behind their responsibilities, they succeed only in making Mr. Darlings of themselves, only in placing themselves in a continuum where they refuse to face their problems because they wish so badly to transcend them. Tennyson cannot feel outrage or shock at the death of the Light Brigade, Zola can create only shallow caricatures in the place of real characters, Remarque can not move past self-pity and gruesome imagery to register any deep and meaningful moral objection to the carnage he witnessed, and Kipling appears to have buried any decent human compassion at all beneath a glut of imperialist fervor. Each is left romanticizing stupidity and horror in the hope that in doing so they can rediscover the childhood that they have lost.

Barrie offers no alternative to this quest. He, too, cannot turn from childhood, cannot stop seeking Peter Pan. But he knows, as Tennyson, Kipling, Zola, and even Remarque do not seem to, that the quest is futile, knows that Wendy and John and Michael and the Lost Boys must grow up eventually, must take up a mundane existence no matter how boring or dull it appears. And once it is recognized that war is not a return to some idealized NeverNeverland of childhood, then perhaps a convincing opposition to it can begin to be formulated.

Partially Congealed Pundit: A to Z

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I wrote these all between 2000 and 2004 or so.

Anthropology A to Z

Analyzing bigamy, chiropractors dissecting Ethiopians find gratuitous horniness. “Inferior jism kills,” lament medical non-Negroes. “Our prostitutes qualmlessly relish sable, towering usufructuaries.” Vampire-vivisectionist-vasectomites want xenopotency — yea, zoöplasty.

Grants A to Z

Argh. Bastard coins demand enthusiastic flim-flam, genuflecting horse-pucky — iterated. Jejune kleptomaniacs like myself nuzzle other’s piss (quantified.) Respect seeps through undergarments viscously. Wampum-warranted xenogenesis yields zilch.

Marx A to Z

Attacked by capitalists, Dimitri Endclass fretfully grunted, “Help!” Injustice jouster King Lumpen materialized. “No obstreperous prole quashing, reactionary swine!” the über-underdog vociferated. “Working-class xanthochroi yean Zion!”

Physics A to Z

“Atomic bomb,” cogito. Deductively, ergo, funding. Gravity’s hierophant, I, Jehovah-Kewpie, license meritocrats; noblesse oblige. Prosper, quantum Rotarians! Seek, thou, universal vacuity! Wantonly X-ray your Zeitgeist!

Spielberg A to Z

Amiable Bildungsroman chug-a-lugs deep emotions, feels great! Heroine (innocent, jiggly) kisses lachrymose morality’s nether orifice. Peddlers quiver righteously! Suddenly, teleologically, upstart visionaries win! Xeroxed youngsters zombify!

Xmas A to Z

Avaricious bambinos covet Disney-detritus. Elders’ Fallopian genitals, heaving immaculately, jaculate kenosis-knickknacks. Levittowners merrily nurse organized pedophilia. Quasi-riant revenue-ravenous Santa Taws uncoil. Vultures watch Xt.’s yummy zygote.

Partially Congealed Pundit: Statement of Purpose, first try

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Last week I printed the Statement of Purpose I sent to MFA programs in 1998. Below is the one I sent in 1997. (I like the 1998 one better, I think…though among MFA program evaluators, both were greeted with equal indifference, as far as I could tell.)

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Statement of Purpose

I plan to write poetry because I want my letters anthologized. “Dear Poetry, How are u? How is e? How are all the little words that rhyme with Christina Rossetti? I would very much like to be affecting, but today one must be ironic, and one must say one before two, though it’s two every one loves. ‘Aren’t those two cute together?’ And they are so much so it makes you cry and makes me want to dry heave and whine, ‘I want to make people cry, poor wretch, without the aid of my onion breath, and yet I’m too sophisticated for sentimental claptrapcrap (note the neologism.) If you can feel sorry for me just a little I’ll gladly grovel. I’m not proud.'”

At least I’m honest, though. Or at least I’d like to be thought honest. “Well, Mr. Thought Honest, you’re a hypocrite. But take solace in being a relatively small land mammal, unlike a hippopotamus.” These are complicated theses, Diogenes, and your kind attention makes me weak in the knees. Please! Explain my brain. We elucidate snide critiques of each other, that squooshy grey matter and I. It makes my head as heavy as lead, and I stagger about beneath it trying to keep body and skull together. Someday my scalp will open like a lid and the earth will open like a lid and I will fall from one into the other and everything will be simpler. “I have an M.A. in British History from the U of C. My influences include Marianne Moore, Stephen Crane, and the New York school poets. I have had poetry published in Sidewalks,Parting Gifts, and Pleiades, and a short story published in Fugue. Every morning before work for the past couple of years I’ve gotten up at 4:30 to write. Often, though, I just fall back asleep.”

Is that all right?

Partially Congealed Pundit: Statement of Purpose

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I wrote this in 1998, I think, when I was unsuccessfully applying to MFA programs. I actually used this as my Statement of Purpose. It was published in the Chicago Review a couple of years later.

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Statement of Purpose

(adapted from The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron with Mark Bryan; Media Marketing: How to Get Your Name and Story in Print and on the Air by Peter G. Miller; and from the graduate admissions and promotional materials of writing programs at Brown University, Stanford University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, the University of Houston, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Michigan, and Washington University in St. Louis)

To write is to bring representation and the suggestion of scientific method to the marketing of enlightened self-promotion. It is to be intimately connected to a high-tech ecosystem which overflows organically into a newer, better Graduate Record Examination. That is why, as a writer, I am a talented person. I reparent the artist-child who yearns to be a recognized authority; I pay too much in order to wear weird self-empowering clothing; I think of the universe as a vast electrical sea and of myself quoted in a national magazine. When I — a peripatetic Jungian — go to your cultural mecca to explore the beautiful irreverent shorthand of a profound, profane corporate brochure, the snowflake pattern of my soul will emerge, and, spiritually unblocking, I will become a controversial activist for ethnic and gender collages.

My life has always included strong internal directives. Well-packaged ideas, I call them. Although not always filled with sex and violence, they combine the comfortable nondenominational noncourse educational experiences of Poet Laureate Robert Hass with the sensuous television consciousness of solvent self-affirmer Sharon Olds, and accompany these attempts at conceptual and discursive emotional incest with literary modeling by Kafka, Proust, Woolf, Joyce, Pound, and Stevens. I tell this story not to drop names, but for reasons of ego and commerce. I want to work seriously with a unique community of writers, scholars, and critics in a program which, while current, is not overly specific.

As a kid my dad thought my art was an “unruly multisubjective activity.” That made me feel I was a multidimensional management consultant in pursuit of lush plants, plump pillows, experimental nonlinear interactive space: in other words, of one wonderfully nurturing self-loving something. As I have grown deeper, I have continued to rediscover that my creativity requires a sense of flow and stability different from other’s humility. I believe that the rituals of power and authority which traverse your writing package will fully open to me this sense of abundance — will allow me to perfect my craft and to immerse myself luxuriously in a rewarding publishing and teaching career. In return, I am certain I can contribute to your collective intellectual process by helping your institution maintain its competitive synchronicity.