8/14/2024 10:27
During many years of obsessive writing, which is when I identified as a poet, everything was always on the line. I felt I was nothing if not a poet. My life was extremely difficult because of this. I lived in poverty. I lived in constant anxiety. I was often suicidal.
When I became more bourgeois, had a job, had money, had food, had rent covered, I was no longer obsessively writing. I hadn’t given it up, but it wasn’t at the center of my life. My entrance into Buddhism was also part of that. Buddhist practice is the elephant in the room here. The identity of “poet” was abandoned. It was no longer a definition and summing up of “me.”
Well, then, if your identity isn’t “poet,” how do you pursue poetry? Can you be taken seriously as a poet?
This is really the crux. Although I fear going back to anxiety and poverty and although I connect writing with anxiety and poverty (and even with wasting time, i.e. spending time doing things that are destructive to me), the more difficult canyon to cross is identity. I can act in the face of fear if I have reason to act. But take away the reason for acting (here, that’s identity) and I can’t actually act.
Now, from Richard Dixey’s advice in his commentary (Searcher Reaches Land’s Limit) on Tarthang Tulku’s Revelations of Mind and Lama Jinpa’s advice to begin to write autobiographically, plus having found it impossible until now to simply begin doing that because of the weight and pressure writing represents for me, I turned to “A Year of Writing to Uncover the Authentic Self” by Rachel Astor as a course on DailyOM, and I’m running with it. I had to look up Rachel Astor while writing this because I couldn’t remember who taught it, probably refused to remember because I’m so resistant to writing as therapy and/or “self” discovery and all forms of “self help.”
Well, this is itself a giant leap. For me to connect writing with some kind of popular therapeutic approach is nearly unthinkable. Brian Wood has given me books about unleashing creativity and I’ve never been able to use them. This type of approach has always left me cold.
But here it is, working. At least for now. I’m writing even if I do feel afterward that I wasted my time. This might also have to do with what I’m writing: I’m not writing poetry. And I’m not going to write poetry today. I need notebook time. I really need it. Writing in my journal was a daily obsession during the time when I identified as a poet. There was that class in world literature at Moorpark College wherein the instructor told the class that their assignment was to keep a notebook about what they read. I asked him if I could just use the notebook that I already used for everything that I read and did. He said, “sure, just turn that in.”
After two weeks, I had completed my first notebook (81/2 x 11, about 150 sheets, bound) and turned it in. The following week, he said, “I read the whole damn thing. It’s an authentic diary of a madman. You have an A in this class. You never have to attend class again or do any more classwork.”
I asked, “but can I still come to class?” He replied, “I would love to have you in every class.”
So that’s how it was when I was young. This wasn’t exceptional, though for me it was memorable and encouraging. I attended every class.
And yet, somehow, some way, I’ve come to devalue writing a journal. This has now been going on for decades. When Tamara, in the early 1980s, asked me if what I wrote in one of my journals referred to her, I realized that she had read my journal even though I always made it very clear that I forbade it. Maybe I should have just killed her and kept writing in my journals. Instead, I destroyed all of my journals in a fit of rage and have never since been able to keep a consistent journal for any length of time. She knew that I considered my journals sacrosanct and completely private unless I gave permission, and that she had no right reading them. For me, it was a major betrayal.
So I also connect journal writing with betrayal. And with fruitlessness. I write and write and write, only for it all to be lost and have no meaning or effect.
So, as I criticized the presentation of Abhinavagupta in Dr. Ben Williams’ excellent class on Yogic Studies by asking, “what’s the motivation?” I criticize my own relationship to writing in a journal. What’s the motivation? Writing isn’t an identity. It isn’t a refuge (it’s ephemeral). It’s dangerous. Why write? Why do I feel that I need to write? Why do solid Lamas think that I should keep a journal? Why do I feel that I should keep a journal? Why would I write autobiographically? Who cares about my life? Does it make any difference at all?
When young I thought I was doing amazing things that were worth writing about: casting myself into the wide world without a net, hitchhiking and riding freight trains through the great northwest without any logistical support; studying with my heart instead of my mathematical brain; experiencing extreme ascetic periods of action, και τα λοιπά. But, really, it was rather mediocre. While I was doing this, other kids were casting themselves into Asia, learning Tibetan or Pali or Sanskrit and/or Thai or Burmese or Japanese or Chinese.
I lived in poverty and ignorance and studied mostly alone.
But I did have something of a vision. From the time I could read, I was fascinated with India. Not literary or religious India, India India. I scoured Dad’s U.S. News and World Report for any tidbit I could find about India. There wasn’t much. On the rare occasions that India was mentioned, they were reporting famine and poverty.
Fuck J.D. Vance, by the way. This is not out of context. It’s straight to the point.
When we lived in Alabama I first witnessed poverty firsthand. We lived on Broadwater Drive outside of Athens. Broadwater Drive was named after the plantation owner. It was a red clay dirt road that came off the highway, later to become I-65, but at the time just a highway with a billboard that said, “George Wallace is building this highway for you” with his picture. Well, I never saw him out there.
We lived in a modest three-bedroom brick house on 6 acres with a fenced-in backyard lawn and long front driveway through a small grove of maple trees, maybe an acre, in the middle of a gigantic cotton plantation, with a barn under which were gravestones, and a machine shed that housed a tractor and a bag of dynamite used to deepen our limestone rock well (and later, the wrecked Simca car that my father drove off the road into a creek), plus a streetlight between the house and the machine shed that bats flew around to catch insects around dusk.
There was a ditch that ran next to the dirt road. It usually had water in it. Maybe you could call it a creek, but I never heard it called by a name. I always just thought of it as a ditch. Across the ditch from the road was a two-wire electrified fence. The electrification wasn’t strong, but touching it wasn’t pleasant. It was the border of the cotton fields.
Dotted along the dirt road heading away from the highway, on the same side of the road as our house, were one room shacks that housed families of Black cotton pickers. The walls were single planks of wood. There were gaps and broken planks. In the summer, you could see into the shacks a little. Not enough to tell what was going on, but enough to know you were looking inside. In the winter, the walls of the shack were covered with blankets inside. I only know that because I could see the blankets through the cracks and missing pieces.
The segregated school I attended was in Athens. My parents drove me to school every day. And every day a school bus would come down Broadwater Drive and pick up the children of the black sharecroppers to take them to their segregated school. I never even knew where their school was.
Though I wanted to meet the kids on my street, it wasn’t allowed. My parents had nothing against it, but the parents of the Black children and the children themselves wanted no part of me. At the time I think I understood a little bit (I was 9, 10, 11 years old, mostly 10), but I definitely understood later. I was extremely dangerous to them. I could say they hurt me and there would be hell for them to pay. The only thing they could hope to get from knowing me was problems and heartache. So we didn’t mix. And there’s no question about it. I had power and they didn’t, even though Bertha, who was a mother of one family in one of the shacks, babysat for us sometimes. And sometimes people would stop by to ask my parents to call someone for them. They had never used a phone, but they knew my parents would treat them well.
Not that Alabama was easy for me. Sure, I was white. So I was very dangerous to Black people. The KKK was riding big — it was in the middle of the Civil Rights movement, c. 1964. But I was also shunned by the white teachers and kids because I was from the north. I thought they were a bunch of ignorant assholes. It turns out that I was right.
This poverty and powerlessness made a big impression on me. There were times when I briefly forgot it, like when we lived in Cypress, California, in the 8th grade when I hung out with Boyd Reedy, who was clearly racist and thought Martin Luther King was an asshole and anyone who cared about civil rights was a bleeding heart clown. Boyd’s brother was in the Hells Angels. We moved from Cypress to Thousand Oaks in 1970 and I never contacted Boyd again, never missed him, and never thought of him again. But it turns out that Boyd moved to Thousand Oaks about the time that I moved to NYC, which was 1978.
I discovered this because Boyd eventually found me on Facebook. At first I didn’t even know who he was, but after a year or so remembered. We constantly disagreed about politics and racism. He died a couple of years ago. I don’t know the circumstances of his death. We weren’t close. I only knew him from his comments on Facebook.
Poverty and powerlessness became more and more important to me through highschool. This was partially fueled by Dad abandoning us, so that we went overnight from living in a house that included membership in a country club to being on welfare while Mom trained to do a job, eventually becoming the Captain’s secretary at the local Sheriff’s substation, which is when we rose from being poor to being working class.
But I also revived my interest in and sympathy for civil rights. I often hitchhiked to L.A. and took busses to Watts to attend films at the Inner City Theater, where I learned much about the Black Panthers and the plight of being Black in the United States. But I only got there at all because of Mrs. Brown, who taught elective Black History at T.O. High. I also took a year of independent study in Black History with her after the elective course ended. This of course didn’t make me an expert, but I was very interested and sympathetic.
When I attended SDS meetings at USC while in highschool, I argued with them about what would make meaningful change. The liberals and the socialists agreed that what we needed to do was integrate and work for acceptance of Black people by white people. While I agreed that this was a good thing, I believed (and still do) that economic equality must come first. Americans hate the poor, regardless of color. The general American ideas is that if you’re poor, there’s something wrong with you because nobody should be poor in America and if you are it’s your own fault.
While racism based solely on skin color has a long and disgusting history in America, the connection of “black” with “poor” sealed this racism into a permanent feature of American life even after the Civil Rights Movement. If only poor white people realized that they have more in common with poor black people than with anyone else in America, things would radically change.
Of course, nobody wanted to hear that on the so-called American left, so I was always shouted down and told that I just didn’t understand. But look around. The Civil Rights movement was a long time ago. Poverty is still the main problem. Poor people are criminals. Black people are poor. Therefore Black people are criminals. They figure that a Black person driving a Mercedes Benz either stole it or bought it with money from selling drugs. That’s what most people think. And this won’t change until there is economic equality, even with Black Presidents, Supreme Court Justices, Senators, Congresspeople, CEOs ktl. adi etc.
Anyway, the vision.
Hesse’s Siddhartha had a big impact on me in my youth. It didn’t inspire me to become a Buddhist. That only started to happen when my skull was fractured and I needed to be able to concentrate and talk again. I read Siddhartha as a template for life, but I didn’t adhere to it as a script. Instead, I wrote my own as a variation on it.
First: Become Poor
It seems that I’ve known all my life the difference between being broke and being poor. Being broke is a temporary condition. Being poor is a permanent mindset. J.D. Vance went broke as a youth and used it to pretend to understand what it’s like to be a poor white man. He was never poor, only broke. He grew up knowing the difference. And so did I.
But later I actually set out to be poor. A ridiculous endeavor to be sure. But it was my vision to actually know what it was like to be poor; to be poor, not just broke. I thought this would provide tremendous insight. In fact, I had already begun to identify with the poor back when I was scouring U.S. News for information about Indian famines. This continually became stronger. Even when living in Sunset Hills, before Dad abandoned us, I felt the dissonance between living with a country club and the way most people lived. I was conscious of being privileged. And I knew that most of the people in the world were poor in ways that most middle class people can’t even imagine.
So, I set out to be poor. It was a bit Faustian. After all, I knew the difference between poor and broke. And I never actually expected to be poor for my whole life, though I did notice it as a risk factor. I thought I would gain a real experience of being poor and somehow be able to emerge from it and contribute to a better world by understanding poverty from within. Maybe I would even actually become rich one day and be able to make positive changes to help the poor. But first, I had to become poor in my mind.
In fact, I always had something of a poverty mindset. Money never came to me easily, and dad was stingy. I never felt that I deserved to have money. It wasn’t something like, “I don’t have value and so I don’t deserve money.” In some ways, it was actually a type of extreme pride. Other people needed money but I didn’t. Like when, as a child, one of my class mates would be cold and I would give him or her my jacket (and get in deep trouble with my parents). They were cold. They were too weak to take being cold. I knew the cold wouldn’t hurt me. So I gave them my jacket.
Hell, when Ron Mitchell and I were in Jackson Hole there was that useless guy who bragged that he had Army Survival Training and knew how to survive in the cold — it went down to 17 F that night and the three of us wound up together in the woods. How we got there is a whole other story, though not completely unrelated. All I had was a Levi jacket, no lining. But he kept complaining about how fucking cold it was, so I gave him my jacket. True, I also just wanted him to shut the fuck up. But I knew I could take it, and he didn’t seem able to.
Then I found a flat stone and used it to dig three holes, one for each of us. The Ron helped once he saw what I was doing. The other guy thought he knew better. Ron and I started a fire, collected rocks bigger than our hands, and put them in the fire. Then we pulled them out of the fire, put them in the holes, and covered them with dirt so we would all have warmth under us. And we added more rocks to the fire to keep it going all night. Meanwhile, the guy kept saying it wouldn’t work and he knew it wouldn’t because he had training and doing this was just something I made up.
But of course it worked.
Then, in the morning, I pawned the diamond ring my grandfather left me when he died. I only got $10 for it because the pawn broker thought I stole it so he stole it from me. Back then, $10 was more than it is now, but it was nowhere near what the ring was worth. I was able to buy us all something to eat at a grocery store. I also wanted to get rid of the other guy. I could never stomach someone complaining when things got rough. That’s why I traveled alone unless I traveled with Ron Mitchell or Art Jacqueline. But usually alone. He wouldn’t shut the fuck up about how hard it all was, and I was worried that he wouldn’t survive on his own. So I gave him the rest of the money and said goodbye to him.
Ron and I spent the next night in the National Forest between the Tetons and Idaho Falls (I think it was Idaho Falls, sometimes I mis-remember which town is which). It got down to 17 again, and Ron and I only had our denim jackets and no more matches and no place to safely build a fire anyway. But we hunkered down and managed to get a little sleep, though we would wake up shaking uncontrollably, If one of us woke up he would wake the other to be sure he wasn’t freezing to death.
And that’s how it was. Ron and I thought we were invincible, even after the car crash that fractured my skull and robbed me of an eye.
So there was some heroic sense at play when I decided to become poor. It was a crazy goal, but I did achieve it. Anyway, I achieved it as well as someone with my background could. When I was living in abandoned buildings in NYC, I had by then actually become poor: there was no hope for a way out. I felt completely hopeless. This hopelessness lasted for years. Ultimately, my background, personality, education and so forth inspired others to help me without being asked (it was impossible for me to ask for help). And this could be thought of as a kind of grace. But really it’s the mark of privilege in a stratified capitalist society that took me out of poverty.
And I recognized that I had achieved my dubious goal, the first stage of my vision.