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BEYOND_WILD

                                             September 13, 2007


Quotations from the essay
"A Single Breath", p. 114,115:


Snyder quotes Ikkyu, "Ridiculing Literature":

  Humans are endowed with
      the stupidity of horses and cattle.
  Poetry was originally a
      work out of hell.
  Self-pride, false pride,
      suffering from the passions,              Some Snyder
  We must sigh for those taking this path       comments:
      to intimacy with demons.
                                                "His 'intimacy with
                                                demons' is not to be
                                                interpreted in the
                                                light of the
                                                occidental romance
                                                with alienation,
                                                however.  In Japanese
                                                art, demons are funny
                                                little guys, as solid
                                                as horses and cows,
                                                who gnash their fangs
                                                and cross their eyes.
                                                Poetry is a way of
                                                celebrating the
                                                actuality of a nondual
                                                universe in all its
                                                facets; its risk is
                                                that it declines to
                                                exclude demons.
                                                Buddhism offers demons
                                                a hand and then tries
                                                to teach them to sit."

                                                    The Animal can
                                                    be domesticated?
Synder goes on to quote
his friend 'Doc Dachtler':

      Ikkyu says, 'Humans are endowed with
      the stupidity of horses and cattle.'

      I think Ikkyu is full of shit.

      Humans are endowed with
      a stupidity all their own.

      Horses and cattle know what to do.                  I suspect someone who
                                                          worked at training
      They do it well.                                    horses would
                                                  [...]   disagree.  Happy
                                                          (domesticated!)
      Phenomena experience themselves as themselves.      animals that just
      They don't need poetry.                             know what to do has
                                                  [...]   that romantic smell
                                                          about it.
      You say language is (a wild system born with us).
      I agree.
      It is wilder than wild.
      If we were just wild we wouldn't need language.
      Maybe we are beyond wild.
      That makes me feel better.

                                                      REBEL_YELL

  And Snyder concludes
  (whitespace added):

     _Beyond wild._

     This can indeed
     include language.

     Poetry is how language
     experiences itself.

     It's not that "the deepest spiritual
     insights cannot be expressed in words"
     (they can, in fact) but that "_words_
     cannot be expressed in words."

     So our poems are full of _real presences_.

     "Save a ghost," you might be asked
     by your teacher, or an owl, or a
     rain forest (or a demon).

     Walking that through and then putting
     a poem to it are steps on the way
     toward realization.

     But the path has many switchbacks,
     and a spiritual journey is strewn
     with almost as many land mines as
     a poet's path.

     Let us all be careful
     (and loose as a goose) together.


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