theirongarters

[theirongarters]

A New Teaching Year

Three days away from starting my new "career" as a Part-Time Instructor of college-level English composition at UNLV. On the side, I'll have freelance opportunities, part-time experiments and ample time to write, revise, & apply for other ventures. I feel reasonably good and pretty blessed about all that. I also think that embracing Vegas means I can embrace many other places that I might not have considered three years ago = versatility.

Teaching Composition can be hard of course, as well as draining, monotonous, emotional. And especially, it seems, if you "care." My reasons for caring too much in the past haven't always been because of any ethical high standards, but often from lingering social anxieties.

One approach I'm taking this year, which I've sort of begun over the last year is to treat teaching, as I do most parts of my life, as a springboard for writing and art and spiritual inquiry. It never made sense to me to quarantine any "job" I had as being somehow divorced from my creative or philosophical aims. Even the job where I wore a banana suit or that other one where I mopped up vomit in the ship's bathroom or the other one where I dismantled architectural models while answering phones.

So, in the coming years as a teacher/writer, I want to work on an ongoing anthology of essays and stories, hopefully in collaboration with other teachers/activists/thinkers, that explore the intersections of art, radical education, and ecology/eco-poetics. More on this soon!

One frame for this project, and which I want to base this year's classes on, is the notion that maybe all these humanistic skills we hope to instill in students, like Intellectual Breadth, Critical Thinking, Multicultural Awareness, Intersectional Literary, etc. might all contribute to building up something very ancient and radically holistic: a largely under-appreciated, extremely subtle virtue called Wisdom.

Even bringing up the word "Wisdom," I've noticed in the past, can create an expectant hush in the classroom as if all these endless exercises in rhetoric and writing might now be finally amounting to something Real and True and, also, quite Rare.

For one constantly hears students, and everyone else for that matter, including myself, saying things like: I wish had more money, I wish I was smarter, I wish I was stronger, I wish I was less tired, I wish I felt better, I wish I was sexier, I wish I was more balanced, etc.

Rarely, if ever do you hear: I wish I was wiser.

For there is the assumption that wisdom is NOT cool, or not profitable, or not validating, or wisdom is simply a bittersweet compensation for growing old, or for having suffered.

There is also the collective feeling that maybe we no longer know what Wisdom is -- for indeed, its manifestations can vary and, often, seem rather sparse anyway if one considers, especially the ecological threats affecting our home.

But I suspect that if one began with Wisdom as a foundational, wellspring desire in one's life than all those other constantly troubling desires we are so beholden to would be much more reasonably and responsibly sought. The Bhagavad-Gita says this in much more eloquent terms. So does Thoreau.

I often think of such a Wisdom expressed in the Greek concept of "Eudamonia" or "human flourishing" --something a bit more ecological and holistic than "happiness" exactly, and something that requires that individuals live "for themselves & also with/among others." No Autonomy without Otherness, human & non-human.

Such a Wisdom would be just as much about the joys of conscious restraint and deliberate simplicity and benevolent confusion as it would be about the beauty and pleasures in the world.

Such a Wisdom would mean that certain sacrifices and disruptions in one's life could be grasped as opportunities for inquiry and adventure. And, most importantly, such a Wisdom would demand honing the completely un-hip virtue called Listening.

At the same time, too, developing such a Wisdom could help fight against this toxic, pop-psychology illusion of "Balance" that many people painfully seek, and often myself included: this insidious notion that "things" like "Free Time" and "Social Life" and "Friends" and "Health" and "Self-Development" and "Recreation" and "Intimacy" can ALL be deftly "balanced" within one's sparse, waking hours; and that such a balance is the equivalent of "happiness."

For all this presumes, dangerously, that these are all static things, unchanging concepts, all of a measurable weight that can be joined together in some kind of balanced arrangement.

I think it's more accurate that all those "things" are dynamic occasions and fluctuating events that, instead of being stacked together like objects, must be constantly blended and re-blended, re-worked and re-imagined, all while considering the ever-tenuous nuances of the given situation or the context.

Wisdom, then, might mean the ability to blend and mix all the many mercurial forces and occasions of life, while knowing full-well, and gladly, that not all things WILL or CAN mix together peacefully or even at all. Wisdom then is more alchemy than architecture.

If all the work people do teaching rhetoric, critical thinking, communication and "good" sentence writing could also be in service to what goes by the bold, archaic name of Wisdom then people, eventually, might come around to the radical idea that Wisdom, however it manifests, is worth pursuing. And I think this is a good thing, if radically naive.

So these are a few thoughts as this part of my life..re-begins..for now.

[theirongarters]

An extraordinary novel about an individual striving to preserve some kind of autonomy in a decaying, decadent, totalitarian world. Eumeswil is an extremely subtle, lyrical and philosophically complex book that demonstrates that the fight for freedom and integrity, however you conceptualize these terms, must always take place dangerously within the bellies of various Leviathons. Junger was a fascinating and complicated figure who embodied many of the struggles and paradoxes of the 20th Century, which are still with us more than ever. #ernstjünger (at Las Vegas, Nevada)

[theirongarters]

We do the things we do, and feel what we feel, essentially because we must -- we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one's knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things which we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of those forces within us which perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet, the forces are there, and we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be. The human effort is to bring these two realities into a relationship resembling reconciliation. The human beings whom we respect the most, after all --and sometimes fear the most--are those who are most deeply involved in this delicate and strenuous effort: for they have the unshakable authority which comes only from having looked on and endured and survived the worst. The nation is healthiest which has the least necessity to distrust or ostracize or victimize these people -- whom, as I say, we honor, once they are gone, because, somewhere in our hearts, we know that we cannot live without them.

James Baldwin, “The Creative Process,” Collected Essays. 

[theirongarters]

To Jean Paulhain (Jean Paulhain had written in March, 1937, "You seemed concerned the other day.") April 4, 1937 Dear friend, (...) There are various causes for concern: The brevity of life compared with the length of the task is a great concern. The obliviousness of the card players in the burning house is a great concern. The need to do something although one is nothing is a great concern. The equal needs to eat and to be hungry, everywhere in this world, are a great concern. The force, the energy, the courage, the heroism, the charm, the eloquence, the intelligence and the subtle philosophy of the devil are a great concern. The inverse qualities of man are a great concern. To see one's family and friends slide with joyful laughter and sublime words toward an abyss of rottenness, where one can't even say anything to warn them, is a great concern. That is why, if it happens that a man is neither completely drunk nor entirely inert nor utterly distracted, he may be found to have a concerned look. But these concerns have more the nature of joy than what are ordinarily called joys. I must not forget to say that the poverty, the impurity of these concerns, the filth that mixes into them, is yet another great concern. So be reassured. But thank you for the question. -Rene Daumal

Letters on the Search for Awakening by Rene Daumal 

[theirongarters]

August 6th: One year ago today I stayed the night at Little Gidding, Cambridgeshire, England in the Ferrar House Retreat Centre. 

Some memory notes, in honor of a temporarily lost friend: 

1. At the beginning, when I was walking in the woods towards Canterbury, or even later, when I was in Glastonbury ascending the Tor I did not plan on going to the village of Little Gidding. But then a dear friend and mentor asked me to go on his behalf. And I knew I had to honor this request. 

2. What I didn’t know was how difficult it would be to actually get to Little Gidding: this small civil parish and village with a population of about 20 people nestled in the countryside of Cambridgeshire, and famous for a humble little church that inspired T.S. Eliot’s poem “Little Gidding”, as well as for -- as I later discovered -- a 17th century intentional religious community. 

3. At the very last minute I requested, if possible, lodging for one night in the Ferrar House Retreat Center next to the famous St. John The Evangelist church at Little Gidding. Andrew, the retreat centre warden, said that he could accommodate me and for a very reasonable rate, too, which would include a cooked evening meal, afternoon tea and free breakfast the next day. He said that the best and most common way to get to the village was by car -- which I lacked. He added: the busses are very unreliable here. No matter, I would worry about that later, I said to myself, as I sat in my guesthouse in Salisbury figuring out which trains I needed to take to get me within at least 20 miles of Little Gidding. 

4. Chesterton writes: “The moment we have a fixed heart, we have a free hand.” This suggests that devotion only increases our ability to act and engage with the world. Freedom is only liberating when it joins us energetically to things, persons, places and forces outside ourselves. Keeping a promise, maintaining a pact, honoring a covenant, fulfilling a vow: the world amazingly becomes more welcoming, more spacious, as do our hearts and minds. The hobbling, crippling internal doubts, worries, dialogues and ambivalences can become burned away in the devotional blaze.  

5. I had many moments on my England trip where my thoughts and actions were framed and fueled by a particular Quest for that specific day. Today I will find an old key; today I will make it to that famous pub for lunch; today I must cover 22 miles and make it to the inn before night; today I will follow the river for however far I can; this afternoon I will find a way to breach the castle walls; for the next two hours I will find at least six different colors of flint on the ground. And my new quest in Salisbury was to get to Little Gidding, stay the night and absorb whatever magic or guidance lived there. And then go back to Las Vegas.

6. The train from Salisbury to London was simple enough; but then trying to get to King’s Cross Railway Station in London was something of a confusing, collective frenzy because of “tube strikes.” That afternoon I met a Welsh man, Andreas and a British woman, Kate and the three of us teamed up for an hour to figure out the best way to navigate the chaos of London in light of the strikes. Then we bid farewell: but the two of them, total strangers to each other at that point, realized with a shock that they were on the very same train, so their companionship continued in some form I can only now imagine, while I went off alone to Huntingdon. When I arrived, the bus schedules I found did indeed appear to NOT accommodate anything remotely close to Little Gidding. So I approached a bunch of jovial-looking cab drivers. 

7. Little Gidding was about 12 miles or so from the railway station so I asked a cab driver to take me there. He looked confused and asked his fellow cabbies for any suggestions. Finally he seemed like he understood the way there, at least in theory, and we drove off. But five minutes later we were lost, and he checked his GPS, corrected, and maybe five minutes later we were lost again. 

8. Then, finally, after about a half hour, we passed the small town of Steeple Gidding and found the narrow dirt lane that was the main and only artery of Little Gidding. At the road’s end awaited the Ferrar House and the Church of St. John and a bunch of other small houses and gardens. 

9. The beauty of the place floored me -- and still does when I relive it in memory. For it is not only beautiful, Little Gidding is perfectly simple and self-contained in its beauty: an effortless, natural harmony arising from subtle alliances between a rugged, little church, a converted farmhouse, a handful of small brick houses, a few majestic, solitary trees, rolling fields, sheep, a couple gardens (one for food, one for flowers), a manicured hedge and several crooked tombstones and battered benches. I feel that had I not known its history I would have been entranced by the place all the same; but of course the history -- which went far, far deeper than just Eliot’s visit there -- only added another layer of enchantment. And the land itself, sloping here, and undulating there, has the dazzling look and feel of being almost oceanic or tidal: a real living and seething ground beholden to ancient forces. The skies, too, over Little Gidding couldn’t have been more captivating, as they dramatized the trees, grasses, buildings and sheep.

10. Andrew, a middle-aged English man and the warden of Little Gidding radiated genuine tenderness and warmth. His wife and young son lived with him at Little Gidding, right in the buildings next door to the retreat center building. I was only at Little Gidding for the latter half of one day, and part of the next morning: less than 24 hours. But Andrew made an impression on me like very people have.

11. Perhaps it was the fact that he would choose to commit himself to nearly singlehandedly running the retreat center in this beautiful, albeit remote and isolated location or the fact that along with his wife, he made delicious evening meals of Thai curry to feed visitors and pilgrims, and also meticulously prepared afternoon tea and biscuits for visitors. Mornings too, as I found out the next day, an abundant, free breakfast was offered in a quiet second-floor study room with a view of the fields and sheep. 

12. Or it was the fact that he told me stories of his own struggles and epiphanies and related them to my own life and to other people he had met, while a lively, empathetic light sparkled in his eyes. Even though he was busy replying to emails, organizing visits, and all the other business of running a retreat centre, he made time to be present to my words and to listen to me. I, in turn, felt like I could talk to him for hours, even days. 

13. For when I talked to him I realized this kind of vocational work of running a retreat center sounded incredibly appealing to me. And that the decision to do it was a bold and radical rebellion against certain toxic tendencies of the modern world. For Andrew’s work as warden is a form of service as well as preservation, an embrace of rustic simplicity as well as spiritual attention, a method of slowing down and going deeper into the present, and a way to keep and protect a sanctuary for those who most need it while also benefitting oneself from the sanctuary. 

14. “One of my favorite spiritual ideas, he said, is the ‘sacrament of the present moment’” -- and a kind, gently persuasive smile crossed his face as if he had shared with me something incredibly simple but also incredibly timeless and rare. Which he had. And that briefest of utterances in the amber light of the entranceway to the retreat center has become for me something of a wellspring-memory: an event in my past that I can tap back into for much-needed renewal. 

15. Andrew told me that I was lucky for there were few people staying there presently so he gave me the large second-floor room with a direct, glorious view of those fields and their famous horse chestnut tree, under which the sheep played. How lucky I am! I thought. 

16. An elderly, loquacious gentleman who lived in Little Gidding (or nearby I can’t quite recall) and had, in the last few years, devoted himself to the lore, history and preservation of Little Gidding, heard I was staying there and made haste to find me and tell me stories as he stuck informational leaflets on the bulletin board inside the church. Later, after he went back to do more work in his room, I spent some quiet time in the church and then sat outside under another chestnut tree reading Eliot’s Four Quartets which I had borrowed from the retreat center library. I must explore all the Vedic references in the poem, I told myself. But then I put the book down and just watched the sheep move through the field, as the clouds moved slowly above them. 

17. Towards evening an English couple checked in to the center and we shared dinner together. They were fascinated by the fact that a solitary American had made his way so far afield to this reclusive pilgrimage spot. They told me that they make regular trips to Little Gidding simply as a place to get away and replenish their souls. “There’s something about this place,” the woman said, “and it doesn’t matter what you believe...it’s magical here.” 

18. Historically, Andrew said, Little Gidding has been occupied for at least two thousand years. And all the many people who have passed through here and occupied it have often referred to it as a “thin place”: where the veil between the worlds becomes thin and insubstantial.

19. Less than 24 hours I stayed there and yet it feels like so much happened on a deeper, more substantial level. Not least of which was that it strengthened the spiritual bond between my friend and I: my friend and mentor who had requested that I visit Little Gidding on his behalf. And it allowed me to make a new friend in Andrew, a friend and also possible mentor. 

20. And now today, as I assemble notes for a longer essay about Little Gidding, I’ve somehow lost touch with Andrew. Several months back I emailed him, thanking him for his graciousness and kindness but also asking him if he could tell me more about his own life and his spiritual vocation. He wrote back enthusiastically and warmly, but also said that, due to unforeseen changes, he and his family’s time at Little Gidding was coming to an abrupt end. Indeed, they would have to vacate as of July, 2016 to make way for a new warden and a new system of management. 

21. “We do not know what will happen next or where we can go,” he said. “Keep me in your prayers, my friend.”

22. My last few emails to him went unanswered and now, when I check online, he is no longer listed as the warden of the Ferrar House. I’m hoping the new warden can tell me where he went, and hopefully provide me with accurate contact info for him. 

23. The morning of my departure from Little Gidding Andrew had a very full schedule and was expecting at least five new visitors that afternoon. At the same time, he wanted to secure a cab for me to the train station because he knew I had to get to the London airport that evening. But all his phone calls to cabbies proved futile. There was absolutely no available cab service to Little Gidding that day. So, even though it was immensely inconvenient but seeing as there was no other option, he generously decided to leave the retreat center temporarily to his wife’s direction while he drove me the 20 minutes to the train station. 

24. But there was horrible traffic that day. And the ride took much, much longer than 20 minutes. But Andrew remained affable, and even joked: “Now you see why we choose to live out at Little Gidding! To avoid this kind of world!” 

25. I asked him about the sheep for they fascinated me. “Last spring, a handful of lambs broke through the fence and started eating the flowers in the church garden! I had to chase all these little lambs back into the field! Can you imagine?!” he exclaimed and a look of total, contagious mirth filled his face. 

26. When it got close to an hour he called his wife and kindly reminded her about the tea and biscuits that had to be put out by three p.m. for the new guests. Although I sensed he was growing stressed because he had abandoned his post for far longer than he had anticipated, he was still as warm as ever and told me more stories about his life, while asking me more about my own life. “You know the previous warden didn’t even make tea or prepare any meals for guests! Can you imagine? What were people supposed to do? Drive to a pub for every meal!?” Finally we made it to the station and bid each other a quick, affectionate farewell. 

27. How quickly we lose our friends in the world, and lose a part of ourselves at the same time. And how suddenly a new friendship can emerge which you absolutely know you cannot abandon or lose. I hope I can reconnect with Andrew at some point soon, and I hope he has found a place of plenitude and sanctuary for him and his family. 

28. 

from “Little, Gidding” by T.S. Eliot

[theirongarters]

Notes from the Mountain, July, 2016, Woodstock, New York, Byrdcliffe Art Colony...

1. The month of July, on a global level, was shockingly violent and unhinged, as my new friend T. mentioned to me while we walked one night to town from our forest-enclosed 100+ year old inn on Mount Guardian. We agreed that our political and cultural worlds, if only as they come to us filtered through anxiety-accelerating, technological devices, are in near-cataclysmic conditions. Or are they are in complete cataclysmic conditions? And what actions and thoughts should this knowledge of cataclysm, however partial or total, compel?

2. Later, after a few beers in a converted freight train station, we were greeted on our steep, dark way back by spastic fireflies in lieu of still streetlights, as well as a scattering of pulsing stars (some bluer, others redder and some, perhaps, planets) through the skeletal tree canopy, and chortling frogs lost in the grasses between the narrow, ghostly birches on the side of the road. Rarely have I ever walked through such total, dizzying darkness. On other nights we had the advantage of an unpolluted moon spilling its light on trees and grasses, turning them that unfamiliar, almost negative color of smoked, grayish opal. 

3. We are staying and working for most of July at the Byrdcliffe Colony: 1500 acres of cabins, inns, woods and studios on the south-facing side of Mount Guardian (in the Catskills) a couple miles from the town of Woodstock. Byrdcliffe began in 1902 as a “Utopian experiment” inspired by the Arts and Crafts Movement and the philosophy of John Ruskin and is the oldest operating arts colony in the United States. Historically, most colonies, colleges or communal experiments based on artistic principles eventually fail (I’m thinking particularly of Black Mountain College), so it’s humbling and energizing to be welcomed into such a rugged, earthy, persevering place, not to mention in a landscape so beautiful and remote. 

4. “Utopia” is a troubling and problematic concept, of course, and yet one that I’ve explored, in various ways, in my last two years of teaching English Composition to college freshmen. The problems of theorizing “Utopia” are manifold but one obvious one is that in Thomas More’s version of “a perfect place” slavery is legal. Thus, one person’s Utopia is another person’s Gulag, as also exemplified by the current election season. Relatedly, another problem, testified by various “utopian” experiments through the ages, is that “Utopian” ideology can be a virulent cause of homogenization and fascistic tendencies; under the always-false rallying cry of perfection and idealization the wild pluralism of the human condition is forsaken. Even the very abstract word “society” presupposes an Utopian ideology in which our actual pluralistic complexities are obscured.

5. Taking a cue from “critical thinking” I decided to theorize to my students an idea called “Utopian thinking”: instead of some ideal, global place to design and implement, or some impossible perfection to collectively aspire to, what can each of us, as autonomous, imperfect individuals do to enrich, empower and edify every context and situation of our lives, as well as the various others we encounter and engage with in those contexts? Such thinking can only be “local” and always process-based and, usually, small-scale; one’s ethical range begins with your closest neighbor, in the town that you live in; such thinking, too, has everything to do with the shifting of rhetorics and discourses and the new thoughts and actions these changes can bring about; as well, it depends on the exercising of the critical imagination. It occurs to me, now, that perhaps at some radical points in history this kind of thinking was at the heart of what we mean when we say “politics.” 

6. Politics now, at least on the national level seems to be more concerned with the rhetorical destruction of other people’s experiences. I imagine for politics to become, in some way, legitimately political again it must engage actual, material conditions and daily, local complexities, and it must insist on patient, disquieting conversations across jarring differences rather than insisting on rigid offensive positions between ideological adversaries. It must also emphasize the accumulation of short-term, small-scale actions of reform and renovation in tandem with long-term, big-picture enrichments. Politics, like education, also needs to ruthlessly interrogate the many toxic assumptions of “progress” and to take into ethical account the imperatives and needs of the non-human.

7. Based on my limited experiences as a teacher and a citizen, I realized recently that an ideal political arena (and maybe only for me) might be the English classroom, or at least the classrooms I’ve taught in for the last few years. In such small places, very different citizens gather, physically, mentally, spiritually and emotionally to tease out possible solutions, raise and follow questions and collectively explore the labyrinthine natures of their shared and conflicting contexts and stories. Theoretically, at least, this is what should begin to happen in such a space. And as slow as such beginnings can be they are always exhilarating when they do happen. 

8. The classroom, (in this case, the English class), like older models of the salon or the coffeehouse or the town hall even, can become a common gathering place where ideologies and institutions, presuppositions and prejudices can be put into question in the hopes that such questions, while not necessarily leading to succinct or convenient answers, can compel rhetorical, ethical and aesthetic energies that might increase our individual and collective autonomy. Instead of the instrumental view of education -- in which education’s purpose is to make people more employable -- there remains the possibility of reinventing and radicalizing what the Greeks called “paidea”: a complete education of the citizen, assuming, indeed that to be a citizen today is to acknowledge a deep responsibility to a complex world larger than one’s self. The citizen as an ecological agent and ecology as the necessary political philosophy of the present and the future. A lot of this thinking, as well, especially about autonomy I gleaned from my readings of the polymath thinker of the 1960′s Cornelius Castoriadis. 

9. But at Byrdcliffe, I’m not really thinking about the actual daily realities of teaching but these pleasant, inspiring theories behind teaching: the writing behind the actions, the abstracted harmonies behind the concrete muddle. The “reality” of teaching -- especially in a place like Las Vegas -- can feel sometimes much more dire and frustrating, so right now I won’t think about that. It disheartens me, for example, that some addictive smartphone video game will deter most of my students from appreciating any passage at all from MLK’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” But no-- soon enough, come late August, I will have to think about these matters more practically. Instead, for now I’m writing as much as I can because the activity stirs, centers, expands and delights me. A part of me even thinks that my writing might, conceivably at some point give some delight or reassurance to others.

10. When I’m not writing or researching in my studio cabin, I’m off into the woods, running and hiking, stopping to photograph moss, boulders or mushrooms, hoping to find a cardinal feather (and failing) after seeing rare, flying dashes of red through the trees, dipping my feet and face into cold creeks and streams, arranging stones on the ground into beguiling faces or simply sitting on a boulder in a glen allowing the vibrating leaf-light to wash over me. When it’s time to eat, I’m learning to enjoy this shared 15 person kitchen, and simple, cheap, fortifying meals shared among a diverse group of fellow artists and writers. I’m lucky to count among these people new friends and allies. And I’m becoming very comfortable with spiders, those otherworldly sentinels: on my desk, in my bed and on the walls. 

11. Any “Utopian” thinking worth its salt requires an appreciation and cultivation of two forms of Otherness: Friendships/Alliances & The Wild/Wilderness. Both kinds of Otherness are embraced through creative risk and ethical courage. And any political or educational vision of any real value requires the same double awareness: the healing need to courageously expose one’s self to human difference, to the surprise of others, to unforeseen assistance, difficult mentorship, baffling apprenticeships, and ennobling interpersonal conflicts. Unlike the static word “society�� hanging limply in the air, real friendships and real alliances need to be re-forged, re-imagined, and re-won on a daily basis. And, as well,we must learn to occasionally breach our own physical and spatial comfort zones and violate our own habitual, overly-domesticated territories in favor of more primal, less-civilized, non-human places and zones. Like the cultivation of inspiring and catalyzing social relations, the Wild needs to be entered into and explored on a daily basis, lest one’s vitality goes stagnant and one’s imagination becomes too docile and tame. 

12. Much of the writing I’m working on at Byrdcliffe is about my month-long pilgrimage walks last summer in England. As I write about those journeys, as well as about the tragic death of an ex-girlfriend that happened to frame some of my travels, I realize the story I am trying to weave is largely about strangers, companions, allies, mentors, spirits and friends who crossed my path and temporarily imbued my life with wisdom or strangeness or assistance or pleasantness as I made my way across those ancient trackways of England. I consider how the spiritual thinker Gurdjieff titled his most autobiographical book, Meetings With Remarkable Men, a book in which his encounters with various teachers and masters (both men and women) in his journeys becomes the story of the person and thinker he ultimately becomes; likewise how Dante, lost and frightened in a dark wood, is relieved of his panic and disorientation by a mentor, Virgil.

13. Nights of heavy rain and thunder on the mountain as I lie in my small, second story loft room watching giant bugs flap against the screen. The next day, in the swampy woods, the greenness is profound, shining and heavy, as new moss and lichen crawl up the wet wood and newts scamper over the rocks. The jarring arrival of orange, via newt, via lichen, in these otherwise green and silver and brown woods is cause for wonder! New growths have arisen on the ground: crimson, bronze, auburn and white fungi and parasites and mushrooms. Old, soaked birch limbs turn copper blue with rot, while the drier ones are starkly white against the brown and green ground. The air is redolent of fertility while the rock slabs I keep encountering, often driven against the bases of trees, suggest ritual and sacrifice -- or else old human territorial markings now given over to the devouring woods. 

14. I’ve been writing for hours in the morning, and then going out into the woods in the afternoons to sweat out my analytical mind. As habitual thinking leaves my pores, newer and sometimes quite alien thoughts might enter from the breathing earth around me. Or instead of thoughts, sensations. Instead of reason, intuition. Once, I tripped on a log and nearly hurt myself quite badly, which reminded me to splash cold creek water on my face. Give attention! I said. And not just attention to the usual mind muddle. Another time, I saw a ghastly face in the hollow of a tree that pinned me to the spot. The longer I looked the more ancestral the face became. 

15. And yet another time, I had that uncanny experience of the Scottish “grue” -- as poet Helen Adam calls it -- when, for longer than I thought necessary, I inspected, without understanding or identifying it, a methodical, twitching movement on the ground only to discover its source under rotting bark and crushed leaves: a black, bulbous horned and pincer-prodding beetle-type-thing the size of a baby bird. It seemed, too, that it was vibrating and/or expanding its body towards some glutinous ends...Shivering, I ran off with a new eeriness puckering my limbs. These woods are secreting and writhing and on the days after the storm they testify to their forces of replenishment and renewal in spite of the ever-encroaching human predator and our ever-sensitive views of “nature.” 

16. When I’m finished being enraptured and unsettled by the woods, I come back to friendly people talking on the porch. In a word, I am welcomed back into a provisional community. I come back sweaty to a rickety, human-tended hearth, and there is relief mixed with admiration, hunger mixed with curiosity, humor mixed with awe. We don’t often acknowledge, I think, how our emotions and sensations are so strangely blended. And so we sit there as the thickening night sits, and we talk about sexuality, art, pain, loneliness, mean people and good people: and it’s a wonderful, grounding way to end a largely solitary day. Then the fireflies come out, or the moon does too, and, if I walk down the road a bit, covered again in near-total darkness, bats begin to zigzag above me, bespeaking chthonic hungers.  

17. It occurs to me that the immense privilege of being here for a month, immersed in my work, in the woods, in walking and running, in the collective, historical-based experiment of mingling and eating and creating together is a living diagram for something indeed utopian or political: each of our solitudes and our imaginations (and we can’t be real without cultivating both of these) must be refined in the fires of human and non-human others. And as with most days, there is a delicate, often precarious balancing to this refinement process, an alchemical artistry to being wildly alone and also being wildly with others. The fact that these interactions are Wild, and should remain Wild is what we must keep acknowledging and preserving. For in forgetting or forsaking our innate wildness, we are doomed to become more and more servile to the purely automated, profit-driven, homogenizing, hyper-mechanized worlds that beget ecological catastrophe and paralyzing soul sickness. 

18. Moreover, I think of how Allegory works in the service of Wildness, especially through poetry and myth and ritual: there are Dark Woods, there is a Cryptic Stranger, there is a Enigmatic Guide, and there are Ominous Creatures and Uncrossable Chasms and Ravishing Gardens and Mysterious Temples. Generally, we work with the Images that our Star-canopied Earth induces and inspires throughout the ages. These general images recur with different allegorical intentions and meanings through time; and yet they also refer to very specific, truly singular entities and occasions that happen in moment-by-moment actual life: THIS temple, THESE woods, THIS stranger, THIS mentor, THESE crossroads, etc. The ever-renewing Primordial becomes grasped in a present, fleeting singularity and so what is new and novel comes to be seen, beautifully, as something or someone quite ancient and imperishable. 

19. And indeed, Allegories can help us or, at least, they should help us if we allow them to: For our individual and collective betterment, we have to believe that the Wild Woods beyond our electric fences and gated communities harbors healing insights and beneficial visions, and that it is not naive or fruitless to embark on a devoted Quest or Pilgrimage that is not inspired solely by financial or career gains. And that certain Strangers, should we have the intuition and courage to engage them wisely, can give assistance or inspiration, and that certain Exiles we undergo, whether chosen or not, from the violent yet normalized marketplaces of status and exploitation, or away from the familiar citadels of family, career, security and polis can, perhaps, lead to rarer and more rugged jewels of wisdom. And that, despite the seemingly endless and ever-renewable Darkness engulfing us there must arise, at some points, a Hearth or a Refuge, a place of Fire and Sustenance, however temporary or ramshackle or out-of-the-way. 

20. Likewise, if we keep our faith in Fairy Tales and Allegories alive -- which is to say, if we still adamantly believe in the Universe --  each of us can become at some point a Wise Guide or an Insightful Stranger for another. Each of us can be in the lucky position to provide respite for the Pilgrim, sanctuary for the Exile and nourishment for the Mendicant. When encountering a befuddled Wanderer we might, miraculously provide the very coordinates she is seeking. Our own navigational maps, often taken for granted, might be received as miracles by some unknown Other. The look of pleasant Surprise on another’s face is alone worth the risk of poetic encounter. And for those brutalized souls who most desperately need healing proof that such fires can still exist, we can provide a Hearth Fire (a real fire, and not a computerized one!), around which more catalyzing and medicinal stories will gladly be told. So then stories and fairy tales, poems and allegories are no longer the stuff only of imagination and escapism, entertainment and academia, but become conduits of real energy that we give back to the world to enrich its transformational possibilities. 

21. Thus, Allegory can throw us into the Outside, into Otherness, into Companionship with the Strange and the Archaic. Allegory invites us to set out and to venture forth and it is by doing so that meaning emerges, along with, eventually, some kind of wisdom if we’re attentive. 

22. An unsettling event happened the other day on the mountain. Actually it was the same day I tripped in the woods while running. Somebody else that day slipped in a creek and hurt her head. Something strange in the air, we later reported to each other. We must give extra attention to the elements, I told myself. But it’s so easy not to.

23. That afternoon, I decided to ascend the very steep road towards the summit of the mountain upon which sits a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery. The monastery, itself, is directly right next door to a Christian Orthodox Church. It seems that there was a conscious recognition that this mountain, like so many others, is sacred terrain, and conducive to sacred rites. On the way up the mountain I saw a “Fire Investigation” truck driving fast towards the summit, and, maybe before or a little after, I smelled something burning in the air. When I got in sight of the trailhead parking lot on top, right next to the Monastery, I saw a police car and a Fire Investigation car parked in front of some other cars. As I got closer I realized something strange had happened: there were four cars parked close together by the Monastery sign, and they were all in varied stages of demolition. 

24. The one car, a VW sedan, parked closest to the monastery sign was a completely incinerated husk of a car, blackened, melted, stripped by flames and reduced to a charred skeleton. Where the engine once was, the Fire Investigation man quietly and carefully investigated, trying, I assumed to deduce some kind of reasons for whatever had happened. The other three cars around the exploded car appeared as if parts of their fronts and sides had been semi-totaled and all their windows were shattered, too. An orange-robed, friendly-looking monk from the monastery calmly watched the investigator, as did a very befuddled police man. 

25. The whole atmosphere had a somber silence to it which was even more unsettling. I couldn’t begin to fathom what had happened but a pedestrian nearby explained that somehow, after the family had parked their VW and gone hiking towards the look-out area several miles away, their car had exploded. But there were no fatalities? I asked, uncertainly. None, she said. How did it happen you think? I asked. Well it’s possible it could have over-heated, someone said. But does an overheated car simply detonate like a bomb? It didn’t seem likely. So, I asked, the family is out hiking and doesn’t know yet that their car has exploded and that’s it also wrecked the three pretty nice cars around it? 

26. No, she said, they have no idea. And I can’t even imagine how they will react when they get back. 

[theirongarters]

Just another lost scimitar on a humid afternoon... (at Boulder City, Nevada)

[theirongarters]

On July 1st this year we lost the great French poet and visionary, Yves Bonnefoy. Up in the Catskills this July I spent time again with his painfully beautiful book of prose meditations, The Arriere-pays, as I worked on my own prose, and as I ambled through the woods. The French phrase, Arriere-pays is somewhat untranslatable but suggests a sort of "backcountry" or "hinterlands" just beyond the horizon or the closest hills, a mysterious, perhaps inaccessible place that keeps wayfarers seeking and roaming. It is these hinterlands, as they manifest in various art works and cities and lands that Bonnefoy explores with the discerning spiritual eye of someone devoted to earthly life. And now back in Vegas, rereading parts of it again as I begin the next post-graduate path, however obscured by heat and sand and car exhaust...There are some books that I wish I had written and this is one of them, a truly perrenial soul guide, and beautifully designed and illustrated throughout with exemplary artworks that Bonnefoy loved. #yvesbonnefoy

[theirongarters]

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal- that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

Thoreau, Walden 

[theirongarters]

A spiritual testimony, a book of conjuration, ritual and collective healing, H.D.'s long poetic sequence Trilogy was begun during the London Blitz and testifies to the human need to retain and perpetuate sacred truths in a world become a senseless slaughterhouse. Like most of her poems, but especially in these later ones, I'm awed by how each poem is so pristinely sculpted to almost feel like a small shrine. Here, in the woods, as I write about pilgrimage and memory, I like to open this book at random, see what the page evokes, see where these compact stanzas take me. (The notion of using Trilogy as something of a hymnal was suggested by Robert Duncan in his The H.D. Book)..and just now trying to write about ancestors and strangers, I turned to this page. "The experienced stranger"...indeed, I feel I've met a few and that they now will never leave me, much to my benefit. May I retain the eyes and words to cross paths with many more... #hildadoolittle (at Byrdcliffe Colony)

[theirongarters]

A year ago today, I began walking the Canterbury Pilgrimage trail from Winchester to Canterbury, a distance of over 130 miles or so. 

Above is one of the typical trails I walked on those first few days. 

Tonight, I’m nestled in the Catskills, above the town of Woodstock, near the summit of Overlook Mountain. I’m about three weeks into a writing residency on a hundred year old art colony, Byrdcliffe. Much of the writing I’ve done here has been about my trips last summer, but also about the notion of pilgrimage and wayfaring in other aspects. 

That first day of walking from Winchester Cathedral began in the late morning after a few overnight trains from Penzance, Cornwall. 

I remember sitting in the train station of Penzance the day before my walk began, feeling pleased with how smoothly things seemed to be going. I had just had a wonderful dinner of crab, arugula and warm sourdough bread. I felt sun-and-sea blasted and revitalized from the four previous days I had spent on the Scilly Isles. My heart felt renewed and focused and I was eager to embark upon the many different, enchanting and obscure paths the Pilgrims Way/North Downs Way had in store for me. 

Then the train station manager came out and said there would be indefinite delays because a man had thrown himself in front of a train. 

I remember how horrific that sounded -- but I also remember how panicked I became because my own “pilgrimage” plans were on a very tight timeline: I had to walk a certain number of miles -- usually, it turned out, a lot more than I had realized or planned on -- in order to arrive at certain small towns along the way, in each of which I had booked a room at an inn. In some of the towns, there were only one or two inns to choose from. And camping along the way seemed strictly verboten.  

Since it was peak tourist season in the parts of England I would be walking through, like Kent and Surrey, I had to book rooms a month or so in advance. It was imperative that -- even if 25 miles separated me from my destination -- I had to make it to my booked room in whatever specific town or village I was setting out for that day.

Unlike those archetypal traveller’s tales, I couldn’t just amble into a town, bent under my bag and staff, and look for vacant rooms in whatever inn was open. However beautiful the notion, I was quickly disabused of that a few months earlier when I had emailed a revered at Winchester Cathedral. 

So, I figured, if my trains were delayed, my hastily and somewhat poorly-planned timeline, as well as my non-refundable rooms might be in jeopardy. 

I sat there and panicked, texting my then-girlfriend all about it; and she, wisely, told me not to worry, to remain calm, all would be well, and all manner of things would be well....I’m not sure if I mentioned to her the reason for the delay: a man leaping in front of a train. 

But I know all I was really asking for was to be reassured. And, in a few sentences, she did just that. 

Then I thought about the dead man again, in contrast to my own worries, and I felt chastened. I may have said a little prayer for him, as well as a little prayer to myself to remain grateful, humble and nonchalant, as pilgrims, if they intend on remaining so for the remainder of their journeys, must be or try to become. 

But then I still wasn’t sure what kind of pilgrim I was, or would become. 

The travel tales I have read would probably omit what I just shared. 

Or at least the part where I was worried and a loved one an ocean away from me was calming me down via text message. But I find such anxieties are instructive, and these small moments of reassurance become integral to any journey, however minor they may seem in the telling. 

There’s also the fact that a stranger ending his life put my own life into momentary disarray, and, although I’ve tried to learn about his death online without success (instead, pulling up other articles of train-related deaths and suicides and accidents,) I remain curious about him, and still somber when I think about that morning. 

(The pilgrim brings the unthinkable along with her and rediscovers it constantly along the way. Daily, she uncovers those aspects of life and death that are so difficult to consider, to bear witness to, even when it feels like she must, and especially when it feels pointless to do so.)

It turned out my train was maybe delayed an hour which, in the end, made very little difference. 

I only have vague memories of those two train rides -- or were there three? I remember arriving in Winchester right when its stores and cafes were opening in the morning. I remember the somewhat unsettling sound of a solitary man whistling behind me as his boots idly struck the pavement. 

Rising cobbled streets led from the station into the main part of town, beyond which stood the Cathedral. I remember the streets were empty and I desperately needed a place to drink coffee, splash water on my face and fortify myself with some snacks for the 23 mile walk ahead of me to the town of Alton -- all while hauling my 30 pound backpack (which, I would later learn that day, could have used some extra back padding, and, perhaps, a few less books inside of it.)

The Cathedral opened, I think around 10 that morning and I told the woman at the front desk that I was a pilgrim en route to Canterbury. She seemed surprised and a little taken aback. 

You’re traveling alone? she asked with some skepticism. Yes, I said.

We normally only see big groups doing the Pilgrims Way, she said. 

Then she pointed me to the young vicar who would help get my bearings, give me a short blessing and provide me with my “Pilgrim Passport” that I could get stamped at certain churches and inns along the Way. 

The young man -- and I’m sad that I’ve forgotten his name, although I might have it written down -- was very kind and also somewhat frantic, as he was beginning a very packed day of Cathedral events, and I was one one, oddly-solitary pilgrim that he had to help out. 

But he was also delighted to do so. 

The first order of business was to help me figure out the first part of the trail -- a 34 mile stretch of pathways called St. Swithun’s Way. This was the path that would take me to my first destination: Alton. And then, the following day, to Farnam. But it seemed all we could come up with was a small tourist guide-map of Winchester, while cross-referencing it with North Downs Trail guide book. 

After I left the Cathedral, I was lost within the hour, close to the wooded shores of the River Wye, as the St. Swithuns Way signs gradually vanished only to reemerge hours later, but only for short stretches, until, later that afternoon, six miles from Alton, and lost on the overgrown shoulder of a busy motorway, all trail signage vanished entirely...

To be continued...as the rain and thunder come down in the Catskill Mountains...

[theirongarters]

Poem" I lived in the first century of world wars. Most mornings I would be more or less insane, The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories, The news would pour out of various devices Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen. I would call my friends on other devices; They would be more or less mad for similar reasons. Slowly I would get to pen and paper, Make my poems for others unseen and unborn. In the day I would be reminded of those men and women, Brave, setting up signals across vast distances, Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values. As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened, We would try to imagine them, try to find each other, To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other, Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves, To let go the means, to wake. I lived in the first century of these wars.

Muriel Ruckeyser, 1968

[theirongarters]

July 6th, 5:40 p.m. The Catskills Mountains, Woodstock.

I’ve been traveling in New York now for about three weeks, beginning in Brooklyn in mid-June, segueing into Rhinecliff and Bard College for work and a brief apprenticeship, and now culminating for a month at Woodstock in the Brydcliffe Art Colony. 

Then, late July, I’ll be back in Las Vegas to “figure out” the next life phase.

July 6th: It’s been one year since my first book got published and one year since my ex-girlfriend, Michelle took her own life. And exactly one year ago today I boarded a plane for London where I would begin a series of pilgrimage walks through the countryside of the UK. Upon that trip, Michelle’s presence became an intensely and poignantly felt companion as I grieved for her all alone in the ancient English landscapes, while also turning my grief into some kind of spiritual energy. Or trying to. These intersecting influences, these molecular alliances, these conflated motives unnerve and startle me, as if, somehow they are infrequent. 

When, indeed they are life’s weaving work. 

(Today, as well, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy died: his prose meditation, The Arriere-pays is one of my favorite works of any kind, an exquisite exploration of pilgrimage, art and the spiritual richness of place.)

These historical coincidences are troubling to consider: linked together, they mean this is a day I won’t soon forget, a time for slow remembrance and beautiful ritual, bound together, as they should be. For all actions are predicated on past actions, and all actions require past agents: ancestors. At the same time, I’m sure, at some point, another July 6th will pass me be unobserved, and simply because of the layering and burying labors of time. 

Michelle’s friends are gathering at dusk today in San Francisco, in Golden Gate Park, at her memorial tree, to pay their respects. One of them is a young woman, N., who I’ve never met in person but I’ve exchanged texts with: she read online my first elegy-essay about Michelle and was moved and wanted to get in touch to talk more about Michelle, and, perhaps, share some of the things I probably didn’t know much about since I last saw Michelle five years ago. 

This phone conversation hasn’t happened yet, and that’s fine; we’ve played phone tag, barely missed each other, and exchanged warm and kindly texts along the way. I’m glad to be connected to the unknown part of Michelle’s life in such a way. When the time is right, N. and I will talk. In the meantime, I sent N. a text today to tell her, and her friends, my thoughts are with them on this one year anniversary as they gather solemnly in the redwood grove. 

She immediately wrote back: “I’m at work now but I saw this and had to respond. Thank you! It’s really rough man...”

Which was quietly heartbreaking. 

(Now the thought assails me but it hadn’t really ever crossed my mind before: although I know the last thing she ever said to me, I can’t recall for certain the last place, or space-time, I ever saw Michelle, because I have a memory, I think, of seeing her by accident while she was working in the vintage clothing store in the Upper Haight, and both of us -- me striding too fast down the sidewalk, and her behind the counter -- smiling yet abashed, nervous yet maybe pleased, insecure yet secretly gleeful: a fleeting exchange of all-too-fast recognition and quite possibly the last time we ever faced each other.) 

And sooner than I can imagine, another year will pass, and her tree, which they planted last summer after her death, will grow taller and greener and wilder, until the small bronze bell on top will be impossible to reach. 

(Above, Michelle pictured in the Levi’s catalogue for Spring Summer 2016....a random discovery I made on the Internet.)

Now, in this writing residency in Woodstock, I’m trying to finish writing several essays about her and how her life and spirit intersected with some journeys I made last summer in the United Kingdom. 

As well, I’m working on revising another book length project that is more fictional in scope, but not entirely.

Today’s heat and humidity have made for weariness, though. The writing has been sludge-like, the focus blurry and the mind nervous. At night though the heat is welcome for it brings out the fireflies, and the last time I saw them was on a late night walk through the Peruvian wilderness several years ago. I had forgotten that their lights are often green. A few evenings ago, too, I walked back to our mountain artist’s retreat and as the dark spread over the trees and the moss, I heard a riot of bullfrogs among the trees, another comforting chorus. 

I found time this morning to walk up the mountain to the Tibetan Buddhist Monastery on top. The shrine is open to the public. You take your shoes off and go into a square room of polished wood and high beams, windows along the far walls, their ledges filled with flowers. A large glimmering gold Buddha sits at the far end, in the center, under colorful tapestries, and besides memorial candles. So much vibrant color and life in the wall hangings and the lights. 

I sat for a while, and bid a flame be lit for the dead, for Michelle, for the silence we all need to join our limited individual histories to larger, more cosmic ones. 

Every day of writing here I want to complement with an hour or more of walking, of running, of being out in the woods, of getting dirty and sweaty and bug-bitten. These actions must all be in constant proximity. Today’s walks were interrupted by outside messages, a few of a disruptive nature, including, a notification from the University that I work at in Nevada that a suspect with a firearm was seen on campus today. Apparently the situation got resolved, and, I hope peacefully. And now they are saying, actually, there was nobody with a firearm at all, it was just an Error Message....

The photos and quotes above will be included in the Elegy-Travel Essay I’m still composing. Words from the poet H.D. and Ernst Junger, respectively, a free pamphlet on pilgrimage I got in England,  and pictures from the Scilly Isles...

[theirongarters]

Sappho.

[theirongarters]

[theirongarters]

But I believe above all that I wanted to build the palace of my memory, because my memory is my only homeland.

Anselm Kiefer (via mythologyofblue)