Gone To The Farthest Shore

Back it up the mountain

2010-11-21T20:19:00.000-08:00

Back in Pokhara
Where the blue lake
Is a foundation for green hills
Which are the first floor

Of a building
Grey back at the bottom,
It's God's wall
The white snow line
Is getting lower

Going back up there
Amongst the rocks and green rivers

To walk through clouds, freezing
And emerge
On Thanksgiving Day, no less

Among the top floors
Above the lake and the trees
In the snow
In the sky

Shout to my family
(I miss my wife, my parents,my friends)
That I will return soon.

It hurts to look at them
From the bottom.

An unbearable list of new poems

2010-11-13T02:47:00.000-08:00

Going Forth

Then servant of the divine
And a young gun's whisperers

They told me:

"The cold face of the world,"
"stoning us from behind."

Bright blue tissues
And films of fuchsia rose.

The servants shrank
from the task.

"I fear why I see,
ruined what I have loved."

Leave us alone
You are
I am

The seed bursting into ripples
On the still jade surface of a
Salty salty sea.

Our busted Sherpa God
His lamed, depressed prophets.

"Do you want curd, child,
or do you want milk?"

Nothing.
We want nothing.

The red sun in the bright green paddies
Do you want curd?
Through blue mist rising
Or do you want milk?

We can see and we go forth
Limping and blinking
For all it's worth.

Vippasana Buddhist Poem Concerning Existence

I
Ain't.

Salute

Two words you not want to hear in Nepal:
Local
Bus.

The crone from the middle ages
With copper teeth

Blowing thick green mucus onto the plaid seat beside her.

She caught my eye
"Namaste," she said.

(I salute the God inside you)

"Namaste yourself," I said.

Chalice

Behind the bolted door
Guarded by snarled
Rottweiler, dead for two years now,
Lives anger.

It's a brimful of poison, a chalice we hunt for
Swallow it, call it medicine

All medicine is bitter,
It takes an act of will just to get it down
But then you are better.

Right?
Venus

Morning gongs in heavy mist
Venus still up in the darking purple

And the silence of 19 people
Breathing together
In a cavernous room
With one candle
For two hours.

The black butterfly in the orange flowers.

Antlers, verbatim

One was whole
Till he took on the antlers of knowledge

I see me through a smoked glass now
Caught between interior weather
And the wider, wicker world

Rams crack together
Maybe if I had a different mother/father/house/hairstyle.

Smelling of young son's photo whispers
Entranced by the silent cumquat of Mars
Hanging in an adamantine, flawless night

The flawless night clears the smoked glass
A little.

this night baffles
don't they all

A widening journey, lost
Lost is the natural order of things.

Name

Name is the tethered shadow
Name is the shambling monster

Keeping love to himself
And always hungry

So patient.
Grief, hidden in the crevasses and crannies
Like oil pooled in shale

Pull the trigger

The Pali chants died into the trees
Yo edam mito sa
Anicha
Anicha
Anicha

I turn and Name turns with me
Another cloak out of my shale.

Where have you been?
Here all along, here all along.

Look: here is the cold face of the world
If you dare.

On the Way Down

Another
Triumph of orange ego
The cold sudden plunge

Surrender, surrender, surrender
Good sir, finally at last
Won't you just surrender?

The way down is rush and soften
A velvet wind and red red drums, regret
Wistful regret and a harmless dog's snarl
As the trees grow their vines
As the fiddles saw
As the vines pluck out steady solos
Of greed.

The Event

Extra brick facade
Rumbled to the street

My P.R.version of myself
A travel brochure starring me
Had become exhausted,
Finally, it was like a corpse all dressed up
For a party.

Inside was the ghost of me.

At the time, of course, this all felt like the death of the sun itself.

Commentary

You and your dumb-ass "secret journey"
Motherfucker.
Lookit choo now.
Juss look.

Dal Bat

One thing they have
In plenty
Is rice.

I cannot eat anymore
Rice,

Though it does wonders
For my poopies.

Prescription

A man becomes very sick. He goes to a doctor, who writes him a prescription for antibiotics and regime of treatment that if followed, will cure him. The man goes home and sets up an altar, with a large painting of his doctor. He bows to this picture each morning, lights candles, and recites from the prescription pad:

"Take one pill in the morning. Take one pill in the afternoon, take one pill in the evening."
"Take one pill in the morning. Take one pill in the afternoon, take one pill in the evening."

He does not take the pills.
This is the church in the world today.

Nabaral Barat

My trekking guide Nabral Barat
Who had saved my life twice
Said to me
I wish to move to New York one day sir.

I looked at the peaks of the Himalayas catching the pink light of dawn.
Why? Why would you want to do that?
Do you want some power, or some money?
Oh no sir, i haven need of such things.
But you wish to move to New York.
Yes sir.
How will you live, with no power, and with no money?
On kindness sir, and on fate.
Also, I can guide treks, as you have seen,
There are treks in New York?

Oh yes.

Aha

Now I get it
Why there are more fools
Than holy men

Holy is harder
Than you can possibly imagine.

It's the aloneness of the tightrope walker
Over the Grand Canyon
It's the pressure
Of the diver in the black sea
Run out of air.

Matthew: six new ones, the best I can manage before flying out to Everest trail head. I may not get you more before Thanksgiving, but soon after. I'll be on Everest for at least three weeks and out of range of technology.

The Split

"It's true."
I panted on the mountain's top
And for once,
I meant it.

Below me was the distance I had walked
The rivers crossed
The mosses, stone, trees
And the path
Narrow and deceptive

Above were the Himalayas
Pink in the sunset
And impossible
In their dignity

I reached down in the dust and picked up a stone
I split it open
And inside there was the fossil
Of a nautilus
As perfect in its spiral as a newborn fern.

"This place used to be an ocean."

And it was the truest thing I have ever said.

Earth, Totally

Earth is only half day, you know
The other half is always night
That we flee

Howling down the sunset
Building our fires
Locking our doors

But me, I have a shadow
Wisely named Name
Who loves the cusp of night

Name goes howling down steep mountains
And through swamps and ditches
In charcoal black night

I've discovered
A way to unchain Name.

I tried whiskey, painkillers
Acid cocaine, sex of any kind
Trying to find a bridge
Between the Names night
And the day that belongs to me only.

Nothing lets him out
Nothing.
Nothing lets me out.

Nothing can heal up the wound
Between day and night
Except climbing a mountain
By starlight
To see the sun come up

Pink and cantaloupe
All over the created world.

Myself and Name, we sit in the dirt
For a little while
Grinning like idiots.

Wild White Pillows

Thick,white and yellow smoke
Pillows up from a roadside fire
Competes with brown dust jealously
For the attention of the fickle wind.

In long grass
A ewe licks clean
Her pink lamb.
Between fire and lamb
Is a field of mustard flowers
The yellow God intended
Before us painters
Fucked it all up
With our interpretations.

Let it all come down

The glossy black buffalo
In deepest shadow
Moves through green bamboo

I open my eyes and see
That green fireflies
Are brighter than the crescent moon.

I breath the cool air
Thankful
And desperate that some avenging angel
Stops us
Before we succeed in destroying it all.

As time itself becomes a vertical river
In all the colors we have to offer
I sit and watch
The way I would watch a carful of clowns
Careening into a telephone pile.

First the Monastery, then the Field

We grope on through, some of us blinded, others lamed, others with sight. Plopped here in a place none of us can recall asking for, and certainly did not make. It goes on like that, till the velvet curtains close and we take our bows, to a tepid smattering of applause.

The old woman in the red sari harvesting her rice paddy.
"Who do these fields belong to?" I asked.
"To all of us," she said.

Ego

An orange Popsicle
Melts in the morning sun.

Allison

I thought about her, then
And all the things I had left behind

Something generous there was about her,
In bodies movements,
The sweep,of a hand,
Or a quick,light step.

Her hair had once been red
Orange when she was young
Then the rich autumn color
So mqny women pay
To have created with chemicals,
But in the bright sun
The artificiality always shows,

Hers was showing some thick kinked pieces, now
And watched het prepare herself each
Morning,
grooming herself unhurriedly
With same care she gave toherfamilytoourhouseto
Everything

Including me
Sitting now on a foggy airstrip
Dusty, and alone.
Not unhappy,,exactly,
One can find any unhappiness anywhere

Even here, even in the Himalayas
Diamond Gateway to the promise
Of the sky

But the fullness of my life with her
In al its pink warmth and yes
It's share of falseness,
That fullness I've not found anywhere else.

2010-11-05T01:09:00.000-07:00

When we got the river,
Ratna told me the cold and calm areas were to be found in the deeper pools, with the dangerous, turbulent water frothing and banging around on the surface. He picked up a rock from the boulder strewn shoreline and dove straight into one of the deeper blue areas. When he came back up, he clung to a smooth boulder and indicated I should do the same.
I found a yellow rock, oval and the size of a volleyball, and jumped into what I hoped was the exact place Ratna went into. Instead of being swept along with the current, the weight of the rock brought me stqight down to the sandy bottom, where I stood in the calmly swirling waters.
When I opened my eyes the would was aquamarine, and i could hear the muted violence of the river qbove me.

Prescription

2010-11-04T05:31:00.000-07:00

A man becomes very sick and goes to see a doctor. The doctor prescribes a regime of treatment, including antibiotics. Grateful, the man returns home, builds an altar to the doctor, along with candles and inscence and a large painting of the doctor.
Each morning he reads from the prescription pad:
"take one pill in the morning. Take one pill in the afternoon. Take one pill in the evening,"
but he does not fill the prescription.

This seems like the state of the church today.

This is why I am enrolling in the Vipassana course- they are teaching the course of treatment outlined by Buddha himself. I propose to fill the prescription.

Down through the trees

2010-11-04T04:32:00.000-07:00

Ratna and crept down the animal trail through the bush. A dog passed us, his snout covered in roundblack scars i realized were from fighting othrer dogs, I thought then about my own anger, and reasons for ousting this meditation course in the first place,

Vippasana meditation training can be summed up in one phrase: do not become a Buddhist, become a Buddha. The ten day course i had enrolled in was designed to be an intensive introduction into the life of a vudhist monk or nun, and to show an individual the progress that can be madwoman through continuity of practice. Up until this point, my meditative practice consisted of sitting in a chair for about 15 minutes at a time, while an American meditation teacher gently explains the most general outlines of meditative practice.

This program would be quite different. There would be no speaking or communication of any kind, one meal a day at noon, wake up gong at 4:30 am, medi tar ion all day in two hour blocks, followed by an hour and a half of instruction ril 9:30. Any violation of the rules would result in dismissal.

On the trail down to the river, Ratna crouched own suddenly as an orange flash orf color went across the open space between the bush, then another. He relaxed visibly, and said "it's only a pack of jackals. Sir, you must never come here by yourself."

I said Ok, and then though to myself- it's only a pack of jackals.

The monks and other aspirants would begin arriving soon, and i had already broken a rule by leaving the monastery grounds. The monastery backs up directly in the Chitwan nature preserve, one of the worlds most successful endangered specieces breeding programs. Here they have brough back the Bengal Tiger, the One Horn Rhino, the Red Panda and a host of other birds.
We followed the l down to where it opened up at the river. The rising sun was coming in through the thick forest and catching orange in the morning mist in rays seen usually in places like St. Peter's cathedral. The night chorus of birds and frogs had fallen silent, and the daytime creatures were just getting warm red up when we crested a boulder strewn bank and looked down to the fog covered green river. The rocks and boulders had made the surface into a series od connected fasets, each linking to the other in a glacial flow the general color of toothpaste.

The mud around the river bank was covered with rhino tracks and what could only ace been tiger tracks. There are those of us who are endlessly longing for stimulation and more and more excitement, but then when we get it, it can make us happy for a short time, before the whole carnival starts over again. One of the attractions odd Buddhism is that it offers a way out of this mode of existence, this constant pinging from subtraction to aversion, and back again.

"go swimming now?" Ratna asked. " a little cold.".
I st ripped to my underwear and regarded the rushing white water and the deep green blue pools. I jumped in and it was like obeing in a snowbank.

First day at monastery

2010-11-03T23:22:00.000-07:00

"You want to see jungle?" there was a boy peering through my open window and mosquito netting. I had not slept, las I was alone in a large stone veiling with the orchestra of the jungle to keep me company all night. At about two in the morning there had started a series of human shouts, like cry and response across an acre of land. They sounded quite urgent, and i imagined them coming my way, to do God knows what.

I had no idea who this boy was, but I did need to get out of that damp building.
"yep," I said, " I do wanna see jungle."

The. Kid hopped around in excitement until I got my boots on and joined him outside. The monks had told me to, under no circumstances, leaves the monastery grounds, but I knew there were rhinos out there and a big river that I was dying to swim in.
We went out and he told me his name was Ratna, I noticed his hair was caked with bright red Henna. I asked him about tthr rhinos and he pointed down to the mud we were slopping through. There were tracks there as big around as basketballs, a lot of them, and he
"rhinosauraus" the same way we would say stegosaurus.

I looked back and we were about forty feet away from the gate of the monastery. I understood the double row of razor wire around the grounds then, and calculated I had about 8 hours left before the monks returned with the other aspirants.

"dangerous?" I asked him,"rhino?
He shrugged in the fatalistic way you see in country people all over the world.
"if chase," he said,

The phrase trampled to death went through my mind, but by that time we had walked over a log and a clear stream on our way into the green wall of the jungle. Ratna reached up and picked a leech off my neck, flicked it into the bush, and asked me for a cigarette.
"What are you, like twelve?"
"Fourteen" he said, all wounded.

"Any tigers around here?" I asked him.to explain to me that the rhinos, too were considered pests. At night, they swim across the river and crush and feat in the carefully tended rice paddies. That's what I had been hearing last night, teams of farmers with torches and with smudge pots chasing a two ton rhino out of their crops. Ratna told me they used to just shoot them, but the education programs about endangered species had actually worked and changed the way these guys had been conducting themselves for hundreds of years.

I thought about how easy it is to be all upset about extinction until it's your food that's being eaten, but here these guys are, chasing them off instead of just shooting them.
" big problem," he said, "kill goats.". He went on

Color Kurtz

2010-11-03T23:13:00.000-07:00

You are a man alone in jungle clearing
There is a red cloth wrapped around your head,
And you breathe in the sandalwood smoke.

RitualRitualRitual

You Tell Yourself A Story

The stone god with its face worn out
You rub blood on it and it comes alive

Then the molecules
All the molecules come alive
Breathe in and are watching.

You gut them, one by one
Like tiny clear fish
Eventually, they turn to soil
And then into crops.

Into your children's crops.

You tell yourself a story that starts in fear,
this before you understood about kindness
Your story is about being killed
In some way or another.

Frogs/moonlight

2010-11-03T23:10:00.000-07:00

On the Way Home

By moonlight
I shoo baby frogs
From the path
So the monks can pass through.

Existence

2010-11-03T23:07:00.000-07:00

The Viappasana Buddhist Theory of Inherent Existence

I
Ain't

The God Within You

2010-11-03T23:00:00.000-07:00

Two words you do not want to hear
In Nepal
Local
Bus

The crone from the middle ages
Wiping thick mucus
On the plaid seat beside her,
She caught my eye.

"Namaste," she said.
(I salute the God inside you.)

"Namaste yourself," I said.,

The missing gunshots

2010-10-01T07:09:00.000-07:00

I just realized i have gone more than a week without hearing a car alarm or gunshots. Not so surprising, I guess, but you know what? I haven't heard much shouting, either.

How long can you go on New York without hearing shouting?

The vippassana monastery worry

2010-10-01T06:50:00.000-07:00

Another drala:
Ive been weathered in here inPokhara for a few days, the monsoon season this year is persisting well past it's traditional end date of Mid September. What this means is 1) i can't see the himalayas and 2) i can't go to the himalayas.

Today I learned from Bishnu, my travel agent and new friend, that there is a Vippassana monastery deep inside Chitwan National park that runs one of the intensive programs. It turns out the program starts in two days.

This will be me in a monastery, in the jungle, with no talking, no eating meat, no reading no writing, only meditating.

Th e worst part of this is that i can also eat only one meal a day, at noon.

The up side of this is that through an intensive experience of deprivation, instruction and meditation, I can take a shot at learning whether or not this contemplative life is something I want to pursue.

They are very strict. I will have to surrender my computer, camera, notebooks, books and cigarettes. Alos the cross i wear, also my watch and for some reason, all my shirts.

Why in the world do they want my shirts?

To get there i will take a taxi (or ride on Bishnu's motorbike) to a bus to a raft.
Yes, I said raft.

I'll be out of touch at least until October 14th. But, they do kick people out, and have some sobering warnings about not taking people with mental illness of any kind. Apparently people sometimes just flip out when they have n othing but their own true natures to sit with.

I live in New York, and everybody I know has some kind of mental illness.

But I am fairly conversant with my demons, at least I think I am. I suppose I will find out.

At the monkey temple a cobra

2010-10-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

The other day, at the Monkey Temple, i was given a quick lesson in the fleeting nature of life. Monkey Temple is a Buddist stupa and monastery on a prominent hill outside Kathmandu.

(they call them hills, we would call it a mountain)

I had been snapping photos of the stupa (large hat shaped structure containing relics either of Buddha or a bodhisatva, which is very roughly speaking a Buddhist saint) and of the monkeys that are everywhere, when a Nepalese man jumped into my arms.
Ive been inNew York too long, probablybecause my first thougt was the ruse of distraction teams of pickpockets use.
This had a different, desperate edge though, and the man was dancing around and squealing, never taking his eyes off a spot behind me. I turned to look and there in the sunlight, on the rottenold stone paving, was a cobra. It's very distict, even when small, like this one.

I spent a few months painting murals in the reptile house at the Bronx Zoo, and have seen what cobras look like at feeding time. Lets just say it makes everyone involved very ALERT.

This one was perhaps twicwe as big around as a quarter, and was sort of probing and striking the air in front of him. The man and I looked at each other.

"Dude," I said, "you're alive." We exchanged an awkward man h u g, which apparently knows no cultural boundaries, as a croud gathered and marveled at the snake, ,which eventually lost interest and went back into the florescent green foliage. As the monkeys chattered away in the fig trees overhead, one of the guys in the crowd explained to me how glad they were, not have all escaped being bit, but because they considered cobras to be symbols of protection.

I learned later that Buddhist temples are a great place to see animals, because there is an injection against killing, so fairly helpless things. Ike monkeys, deer and yes even small cobras have learned to live where it is safe.

In the US, the monks would have been sued for allowing unsafe conditions to persist.

Kathmandu

2010-09-30T06:30:00.001-07:00

How to describe this city, this thing?
It's an anthill
It's swirling vivd red and oranges set against green rotting stone and idols
It's jamming through a cloud of hash smoke in a rickshaw
Its bells at dawn and trumpets
No sidewalks
No traffic lights or stop or yield, just go go go
It's rolling blackouts that freeze you in the dark as the whole city goes quiet, just for a second
Then the whole thing starts up again, under cover of humid charcoal black smoke
And candles

The name

2010-09-30T06:13:00.000-07:00

I've called this blog "Gone to farthest shore" because Nepal seems to me to be one of the most far flung places on earth, but also in reference to a quote from Buddha Shakyamuni, when he described the phenomena of enlightenment.
"Gone, gone, gone. Gone to the farthest shore, gone."
Im pretty sure enlightenment is not something i will be able to achieve in this lifetime. However, while studying Buddhism I have been struck, again and again, of the similarities between the way saints in the Christian faith and even Christ himself describe the kingdom of God and what the Buddhists say is the path to enlightenment, the experience of enlightenment, and the mindset that is essential to produce it. That mindset, in both the Christian and Buddhist faiths, is compassion.
I am convinced they are talking about the same thing, and it is a thing attainable, indeed a birthright, of every human being.
That's a pretty easy statement to make, and much harder to accept, primarily because "every human being" includes the speaker.
Why is so difficult to accept this could be a personal, and not academic or abstract truth?
Anyways.

Gone to the farthest shore

2010-09-30T05:42:00.000-07:00

Is there anybody out there?
I'm sitting on the second story of a cafe overlooking the anthill like main street of Pokhara, Nepal. Across the street is a large blue-green lake, past that is a bright green mountain partially obscured by thick clouds. They have had an especially long monsoon season this year, so i cannot see what lurks beyond the clouds, which is the Annapurna Massiff, or the leading edge of the Himalaya Mountains. I did see part of e Himalayas from the plane into Kathmandu. I woke to hear the entire plane gasping, which is usually not a good sign, but this time it was. Emerging from the clouds-and looking as if they were made of cloud themselves-was the portion of the Himalayas containing the peak K2, so knew we were circling in over Pakistan.
In addition to obscuring the peaks from ground view, the long monsoon season has had tragic consequences; a small plane out of Kathmandu crashed last week, apparently because the tourists insisted on flying in unseasonably wet weather. Its ugly, but this will work to my advantage, as the same small plane i will take to the airstrip near Everest base camp will be especially careful, as they do not want to lose more than one plane per season.
So: what am i doing here? I ask myself this each day, usually in response to some fresh outrage of hygiene or, just as frequently, some stunningly beautiful view or smell or taste. I've been lucky in life, so lucky, and to find myself in this place is simply a confirmation of something i have always suspected: existence is alive, and it responds to our positive wishes, both for ourselves and for others.
In a way, what i am doing here is nailing down the truth of this (fairly hard won) theory.
Another less esoteric way of saying this is I got a fellowship from the City University Of New York to study Vajrayana Buddhism, specifically practices surrounding something called Death Meditation and an art form known as thangka painting.
But oh! The pat to tis point has been an incredible series of meeting the right people, writing the right essays, making the right paintings, etc., with a generous sprinkling of the dumb, blind god given luck that seems to be my lot in life. (ok I also work my ass off, but still.)
Buddhists call this luck drala, and it seems to be similar to what Carl Jung describe as synchronisty.