Crossing Nebraska

Sweltering summer afternoons such as these inevitably remind me of my childhood – the still air, the unrelenting sun, and the silence only intermittently punctuated by the ratcheting sound of a grasshopper in mid hop, or the unanswered call of a field sparrow, or the sticking sound that automobile tires make as they accelerate down an almost melting asphalt road. “How about we go fossil hunting?” I’d pose the question over the phone to my childhood friend, Charlie, or he to me. “What time?” was the usual response, neither of us needing much in the way of convincing when it came to such suggestions. “After lunch. One o’clock. Under the railroad trestle.” And so we’d meet in the shade of the old wooden bridge and ride our bicycles along the dusty trail to where the new highway cut through the layers of a limestone undergirded hillside. Once there, we’d make our way slowly, almost wordlessly along the fractured strata, carefully overturning the loose rock, becoming more ...

Human is a human is a human is a human. Clearly, I’m riffing on Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose”…, not to mention my previous post! My question, however, is a serious one. Whereas I previously pondered the nature of things – their roseness , suchness , emptiness , the two levels of truth regarding their independent existence, and so forth – here I will ponder humanness . Now, the astute reader might already be questioning why this post is even necessary given the fact that we and the rose are of the same “stuff” of ultimate reality, given the fact that humanness and roseness alike are but worldly manifestations of the suchness spoken of in The Nature of Things . Well, since I’ve already got your attention, how about staying with me for just a little bit longer, anyway? In The Nature of Things I stated that “what I am calling roseness … is something that the rose can’t help but actualize, but which we, with our incessantly conceptualizing minds,...

Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. What are we to make of such a statement? On one hand we might be inclined to interpret it from a post-modern, image-saturated perspective such as: “if you’ve seen one rose you’ve seen them all.” Ah, but would a poet really endeavor to convey such a jaded sentiment? Quite to the contrary, I think that Gertrude Stein is striving with this line in Sacred Emily to deepen our understanding of the nature of the rose, its essence of being, its roseness . The rose is what it is, fully and completely. It is not like anything. It is not like something red; it is red. It is not like something beautifully scented; it is beautifully scented. It is not like something that is pleasing in form, or delicate, or fleeting; it simply is all of those things. But to say that a rose is all of those things might tend to imply that it is simply a collection of attributes, the totality of which somehow add up to roseness . No, roseness precedes and transcends...

It seems that I’ve gotten a little off track of late with respect to my posting frequency. My apologies and kind regards to anyone who might have been wondering where I’ve been. Actually, I was under the weather all last week – with barely enough energy to drag myself off of the couch, let alone sit up writing at a computer. I knew I’d be writing about poetry and Zen, though, so I was at least able to pull a dozen or so books down from my bookshelves to sift through as I lay about in recovery. I even managed to scribble out a few pages of notes related to inspiration (which I didn’t actually have), and the unconscious mind (which I had in abundance), and poetry as a spiritual practice, and how it is that words have anything at all to do with the largely wordless practice of Zen. I was even intending to include a few poems of my own – they are Zen poems, after all. Up until a couple of days ago, though, I had no idea how I was going to tie it all together. So what happened since th...