My last time at Tassajara was 1979 with Jan, who’s been going regularly before and since.  The combination of romantic getaway and monastic retreat was dissonant for me then, and I never accompanied her again until now.

June 16 8:30 A.M.

I was sitting on the bench built into the bridge over the arroyo listening to the water tumbling beneath and converging with Tassajara creek.  I was feeling solitude at the crossroads–monks and students and guests walking in opposite directions, stopping, bowing, moving on. I was looking at sunlight crawling downward through the leaves on the opposite bank. I was feeling the afterglow of last night, the buzz of morning meditation, the warmth of the sulfur bath, the sparkle of caffeine–all blending like flavors. That was before she woke up and joined me, before I descended the rock stairway to the edge of the water and stared at back-eddies and rills, before the sun ignited submerged rocks and the remains of yesterday’s food passed through me and I started to record what long had passed downstream.

6:30 P.M.

The sun has gone from the top of the valley’s vertical walls. A subtle breeze riffles armhairs and cools cheeks and eyelids still radiating midday heat from rounded rocks I embraced naked after a cold swim down below the narrows.

June 17  8:30 A.M.

Sitting  on the great boulder in the creek approached by the tiny arched bridge.  Feeling again the blend of zazen, chant, bath, and coffee.  The second morning of effort to achieve non-achievement. “Enjoy,” sings the creek that feeds life in this burned over and regenerated wilderness.  “Feel yourself,” gargles the water boiling from the rock.

My Rule of Tassajara

 4:30: Wake up in the dark and watch the full moon dip below the peak closing the valley upstream.

5:00 Drink coffee

5:50  Remove shoes outside zendo, parade in, receive seat assignment, hearing large bells, drum, knocker, small chimes, large chime. Practise zazen facing wall for 30 minutes, smelling incense. Follow with genuflections and chants.

7:30 Drink more coffee, walk to bath, watch sunlit alder branch reflections on surface of outdoor plunge, sit in hot plunge,  float in creek, shave.

8:30 Walk back to dining area and drink coffee.

9:00 Meet for quiet breakfast; move belongings to a different cabin; pack lunch

10:15 Hike to Suziki Roshi memorial led by Jan, then up steep promontory to waterfall overlook, in fields of flowers and charred trees.  Find beehive.  Walk through creek to waterfall base.

12:00 Find way back to new cabin, eat lunch at table above creek.

1:30 Drink coffee, nap in cabin

3:00 Go to baths—steam room, hot plunge, float in creek, nakedness nibbled by fingerlings.  Young men and old.  Everyone quiet.

4:00 Read old histories of Tassajara going back to Indians and first resort development in 1870’s

4:40 Return to cabin and read Gary Snyder.

5:00 Practise zazen on floor in cabin.

5:45  Read Snyder and Mary Oliver

7:00 Eat dinner and converse with people from San Luis Obispo at table.

8:00 Return to cabin; read by kerosene lamp; give over to nature.

I began this blog six years ago at the start of a long, gradual splashdown toward full retirement, and yesterday it concluded.  Larry and I chose Bob Dylan as the topic of the final week in the Great Works course we co-taught, and hoping to make a small gesture of farewell, I selected a song which has been my friend since I was the age of this year’s students for the last interpretive sally.  I woke up at the usual time, gripped by the usual anxiety about facing the class eight hours later, and decided to write out some parting remarks.

Song lyrics

1965 Performance

This song is about departing and starting, about being through and beginning anew, about relinquishing the past and welcoming change, about what Virginia Woolf called “Time Passing” and what Mary Oliver called “The Journey,” and what Thoreau called “Spring.”

The song’s emotion is elegiac, the paradoxical bittersweetness of a eulogy–a mixture of strong feelings that modulate from harsh to insistent to comforting and encouraging.  That mixture is expressed in the repeated melodic line of every stanza, the regular meter of the lyrics, the amazing congruence of the rhymes, and the complexity of the singer’s tone.

The situation the song sets up is one of forced evacuation from one’s home—the rocky transition from resident to refugee. The speaker’s rough voice is that of the cherub holding the sword at the Gates of Eden, chasing Adam and Eve out of Paradise—proclaiming the end of Innocence.

This is a metaphor for other endings:

• breaking up a love affair
• striking the set after the performance of a play
• concluding a dinner party
• attending the last day of a class
• graduating from college
• retiring from a career
• facing death

One strain in the voice is threatening, cruel, even sneering.

• You must leave now– the place you occupied is no longer yours—you have to abandon whatever you’ve surrounded and protected yourself with.
• Take what you need…you better grab it fast—And make it quick, I mean it.
• Otherwise you’ll be shot or trampled: Yonder stands your orphan with his gun… Look out the saints are comin’ through.
• Your position has been given to someone else, who’s waiting to occupy what used to be your room and is already wearing what was in your closet: The vagabond who’s rapping at your door/Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
• Whatever you’ve committed to, accumulated and relied on in the past has lost its strength.  That means the forces with which you built your defenses—All your seasick sailors, they are rowing home/All your reindeer armies, are all going home–and also the desire that let you to drop those defenses in bed: The lover who just walked out your door/Has taken all his blankets from the floor.
• The reality on which you’ve based your life is shifting: The carpet now is moving under you– and even the heavens above are collapsing like a tent: This sky too is folding over you.

Another strain in the voice offers cold but prudent counsel:

• take what you need, you think will last. Now you must distinguish your grain from your chaff, your goods from your stuff.
• The highway is for gamblers, better use your sense: there’s no more security and predictability, so be wary and wise.
• Take what you have gathered from coincidence. You cant rely on abstraction or principle, only the tentative knowledge gained from your own personal experience.

The chill in the voice is also bracing.

• It urges courage: Leave your stepping stones behind
• It promises freedom: Forget the dead you’ve left, they will not follow you.

And finally the voice redirects nostalgic longing for the old flame that’s burned out to the opportunity for beginning: Strike another match, go start anew

And it alerts us to the sound of a future unseen, perilous, and yet beckoning, where something calls for you.

So on this last day of our class, where the works we’ve read have stimulated all of us into affirming new beginnings, this day before all of us “must leave,” lets listen to what this song of Innocence and Experience has to say.

This morning I finished the transfer and update and backup of files, erased all my data from Lubertson and turned him in to the College of Liberal Arts. Most likely he’ll be sent to China for recycling of parts. Now I sit in my armchair comfortably typing in front of an extremely bright glass covered screen with a good deal higher resolution than Lubertson’s. There’s no power cord to worry about, no throbbing furnace in my lap, no loudly whirring hard drive, no long waits between operations or need to shut down applications to move from one to another, no need for an external hard drive except for backup. My pose is a lot like that on the ubiquitous billboards for ipads in Los Angeles: relaxed, at leisure. This is all extremely nice: a huge upgrade in comfort and convenience in using the instrument I spend most of my waking hours with.

But what’s more amazing is the fact that this machine, nine years newer than Lubertson, has no functions, cant do anything, that he couldn’t do, simply does it all better. If one compares technological progress in the most recent interval to the progress of the previous nine years, 1992-2001, the slowing of innovation is what’s striking. Netscape was founded that year—the beginning of the world wide web. In 1992 Doug and I created the Multimedia Blake Hypercard stacks that within two more years were rendered obsolete by html. 1998 marked the advent of the Powerbook G3 laptop, allowing for portable computing. I carried the machine everywhere—to England for the Shakespeare conferences, to Lund, to Ketchum. Digital cameras and iphoto and itunes came online at the end of that span, in 2001, just before I got the Titanium. By then I had all my course materials generated in Dreamweaver, was working paperless and was taking the computer to every class and projecting onto the screen most of the time, for better and for worse.

The technological change of the preceding nine years was even more transformative. In 1983, computers were only for geeks. My high technology was a selectric IBM typewriter. We got the first Mac 512 in 1984, when Jan started law school. The power it conferred to delete, replace, find, cut, paste, outline, and save was as magical as the ability to flap my arms and fly in dreams. I still have it in the garage.

Yesterday morning I went to Dusty’s office for a consult on my blog and other computer matters and he looked at my old Titanium Mac and shook his head—how can you still be using that thing? I’ve been planning for a couple of years now to replace it and purchase my own computer instead of using a university issued one, as part of the large retirement strategy, and lately old Lubertson has been going slower and slower and louder and louder and behaving more erratically, and any day I was fearing it would crash. I went home, spent an hour researching different purchase options and then biked down to El Corral Bookstore and returned with this new Macbook Pro—cost $1099.

I’m calling it Independence, offspring of Lubertson2, the Titanium I wrested from the University as a prize for producing the Field Guide, offspring of Lubertson 1, the first laptop I inherited in 1998 from an unnamed colleague who never used it, offspring of LuLu, the office computer I worked on with Doug Smith, and Albert, my home computer.

I spent the night until Jan came back from City Council at 12:45 am migrating all my data and then loading my songs from Tucson, the portable hard drive, onto it, with much troubleshooting along the way. And this morning I started to transfer the 20 Gig Photolibrary which right now is still copying its 28 thousand pictures. That was going on while I meditated, after a short night’s sleep, and it felt as if my brain itself were undergoing some kind of transfer procedure like the one they show with androids in the movies. The new machine feels clean and powerful and ready for a lot of new beginnings. Acquiring and using it is part of my own cleansing and regeneration efforts.

Slideshow

This is a win for San Luis Obispo. Jan will serve effectively and humanely. She has the talent, the experience and the dedication to do an excellent job as mayor, leading and representing the City—which according to last month’s newspapers is both the most desirable place to live in America and is about to fall off a cliff. Either way, it will benefit from her leadership.

It’s a win for her, because it provides the opportunity to fulfill not an ambition, but an ongoing mission of public service and leadership. When I first met her 44 years ago as a junior at Stanford, she organized a campaign to get women equal rights with men to live off campus at much cheaper rents than those in the dormitory. This involved facing down the President of the University who wasn’t eager to lose the revenue provided by the policy of protecting female purity.

When we lived in the wilds of British Columbia during the 1970’s, she helped found a satellite campus of a community college and became its first director. When we moved back to California, she got a job as Director of Graduate Student Housing at Stanford and devised a network of neighborhood coordinators—now called Community Associates–which still remains vital.
While attending Law School, she organized the mature returning students and then took a part-time job as a law clerk involving the preparation of a landmark Supreme Court case assuring equal opportunity for women in the workplace.

When we moved to San Luis Obispo 22 years ago, she immediately embarked on a course of public service that led to appointment to the County Parks and City Planning Commissions and to her election to City Council in 1998 and again 2008. All of her political and humanitarian work in this place has been volunteer or for minimal pay, for she’s been able to make her living as an attorney.

The mayor’s job will allow her to use and expand abilities cultivated over a lifetime.

It’s a win for me, not only for the reflected glory—imagine the pleasure I’ve taken in knocking on thousands of doors and telling whoever opens them about the virtues of the woman I love, and in posting hundreds of signs of tribute to her all over town. But also imagine what it would be like to live with someone this energetic and smart whose time was not occupied being in charge of a whole city.

So here’s to our new mayor, and to this fleeting moment of triumph, and to all of you who contributed in one way or another to make it happen.

A doleful awakening on a foggy Sunday morning,  joints aching from the strain of lifting boxes of steel wires and forcing them into hard ground to hold Elect Jan Marx Mayor signs.  Looking forward to meditation for escape from the nattering in my head, then impatient for it to be over.  Not swimming enough because I wont use the Poly Rec Center in protest against that revolting expansion.

I wont let my alienation from the University–latest outrage disbanding the CSA- alienate me from Poly Land.  I’ve been wondering about the red blanket of vegetation on Poly Mountain since June.  Is it dried monkeyflower or buckwheat?

As soon as I slip into my West Coast Trail boots, my mood lightens and my legs urge me to get started, like the dog when he sees Jan lace her runners. I stride through the silent foggy streets, climb over the fence, and feel the spring of my footfalls through the grass.  The sensation of freedom in the question, which way to go? Feet find a trail of cracked soil showing through trampled grass pointing straight uphill.  Breathing muscles mobilized.  The absence of the forty-pound pack makes the steepening ascent effortless, and the mixture of tarweed and horsemanure pleasures my nostrils. The trail continues beyond the fence.  Two strands of barbed wire slack enough to allow me through.  The sun is a faint disk penetrating the fog, recalling its appearance at Klanawa River.

Perhaps I’ll go to the tree house and sit there and write.  I’ve done it before. The trail winds through the chapparal right to it.  A new resident?  Entering the secluded clearing under the great  oak, I see a  spade and a rake leaning against the twenty foot ladder that reaches the lowest branch.  Ten feet above the tree house a large improvised hammock hangs atop another ladder. As I stare I hear a sleepy “hello?” Not wanting to trespass, I say “Hi, my name’s Steven. I come here every few months.  Do you know E.C. the guy who built this house?”  “Yes, met him once,” answers a voice whose origin seems to be a pile of blankets in the hammock.  I ask if it’s OK to come up, and then mount the lower ladder. At the treehouse platform I see a mop of hair at the edge of the blankets above and try to build more trust.  Yes they know M, they’re his students.  I wrote in the guest ledger here on previous visits.  I climb the next ladder into the bedroom.  Two people snuggle under the blankets, K. and T.  They work with the same environmental organization I do.  I  built a hammock like that forty years ago for kids on our farm in B.C.

After fifteen minutes chat I descend the ladders and continue up the mountain,  serpentine boulders providing foot and handholds.  The fog  now just a ribbon draping Bishop Peak. The dark red scrub I’d been wondering about from the house and while approaching SLO on the freeway is neither monkeyflower nor buckwheat, but deerweed stalks, all the leaves and flowers gone. A huge exclusive patch, easy to walk through. Three years after the fire, it’s choked out all the poison oak.

Sunday August 15

Slow morning to enjoy the sunshine and instant coffee.

Next time it will be fine ground beans. Hike is partway on beach, partway on forest trail facilitated by boardwalks, ladders, suspension bridge, steel bridge and cable trolleys.  Views of water and rock and little coves below alternate with deep forest, ancient bogs and a beaver pond bypass.

Arrive at Nitinat Narrows ferry in time for another Indian Reserve restaurant lunch.  We benefit from the assertion of First Nation rights.

A four year old girl, strong Indian features but with blond-brown hair cavorts around the dock.  Her Daddy runs the little ferry and the family enterprise. He pulls a rope up to the dock and lifts out the crab ordered by Peter, tears it apart for cooking by his son and throws some scraps into the water where a large school of salmon fry clean them up.

I get salmon caught off Bonilla Point, which we walked by yesterday, Paul gets halibut.

At the next table two strapping women who passed us at intimidating speed are having lunch.  We chat.  They are carrying three bottles of booze and will finish the trail in four not our 8 days.  One with a French accent is from Montreal, has just finished school and earlier in the summer cycled down the coast to San Francisco.  Steve and she compare notes about the roads.  He did it with his son 20 years ago.

The dock where we sit is anchored at the edge of Nitinat narrows, which drains and fills a huge saltwater lake (lake not inlet because it also has freshwater that flows into the ocean).  The deep green water heads upstream at an astonishing rate, the surface curled by whirlpools.  After lunch Daddy ferries us across to the trailhead.

Late in the afternoon we find a beach access. Paul and I search for water while Peter and Steve wait, refusing to go on further.  A spring is found hidden in the brush at an unmarked spot south of Tsushiat point where we set up for the night.

Wind has shifted onshore and we see the fog approaching.  Noone else in sight in all directions.  I listen to the gravelly rumble of pebbles pushed and pulled by the waves rolling against one another .

[Full set of 196 pictures, slideshow and all sizes]

On my birthday last week I ordered a zafu and zabuton—a meditation cushion and pad. They arrived yesterday and I tried them out this morning.  For a while they felt good, aids to being comfortable and maintaining position.  Then my right knee started hurting and I had to shift.

Yesterday, I finished reading Yukio Mishima’s Temple of the Golden Pavilion, which Jan selected to present to her book group.  It’s a heavily fictionalized account of the arson of a 500 year-old World Heritage site by a psychotic young Zen monk in 1950. The protagonist-narrator, Mizoguchi’s description of the building recalled my encounter with the reconstructed edifice last March in Kyoto:

Thanks to the power of memory, the various aesthetic details began to glitter one by one out of the surrounding darkness; then the glittering spread wider and wider, until gradually the entire temple had emerged before me under that strange light of time itself, which is neither day nor night…As my eyes took in the entire prospect, I could perceive the temple’s structure and the clear outline of its motif, I could see the painstaking repetition and decoration of the details whereby this motif was materialized, I saw the effects of contrast and of symmetry.  The two lower stories, the Hosui-in and the Choondo, were of the same width and, though thwere was a slight difference between them, they were protected by the same extensive eave; one story rested on top of its companion so that they looked like a pair of closely related dreams or like memories of two very similar pleasures that we have enjoyed in the past.  These twin stories had been crowned by a third story, the Kukyocho, which abruptly tapered off.  And high on top of the shingled roof the gilt bronze phoenix was facing the long, lightless night.

I was prompted to pull up  pictures I’d taken there to capture a bit of that encounter’s  power.

His account of the ascent of Beauty from the pool of sensual desire to the gilded phoenix at the apex of the roof reminds me of Plato’s ladder of love in the Symposium, the primary text of Western mysticism, reimagined here in a Japanese Buddhist framework.

The vast power of sensual desire that shimmered on the surface of this pond was the source of the hidden force that had constructed the Golden Temple; but, after this power had been put in order and the beautiful  three storied tower formed, it could no longer bear to dwell there and nothing was left for it but to escape…back to the surface of the pond, back to the endless shimmering of sensual desire, back to its native land….

Plato refers to desire as the offspring of Plenty and Penury, the appetite for the possession of beauty propelled by incompletion, leading to ever more elevated objects.  Mishima’s character imagines each satisfaction generating a more expansive need.

If one examined the beauty of each individual detail—the pillars, the railings, the shutters, the framed doors, the ornamented windows, the pyramidal roof, the Hosui-in, the Choondo, the Kukyocho, the Sosei—the shadow of the temple on the ond, the little islands, the pine trees, yes, even the mooring place for the temple boat—the beauty was never completed in any single detail of the temple; for each detail adumbrated the beauty of the succeeding detail.  The beauty of the individual detail itself was always filled with uneasiness.  It dreamed of perfection, but it knew no completion and was invariably lured on to thenext beauty, the unknown beauty.

But whereas Plato envisions ultimate perfection as the concentration of all being into pure unadulterated substance–the Form of Forms–Mizoguchi defines the final object as nothingness:

Such adumbrations were the signs of nothingness.  Nothingness was the very structure of this beauty.  …this delicate building, wrought of the most slender timber, was trembling in anticipation of nothingness, like a jeweled necklace trembling in the wind.

In doing so he seems to be adhering to orthodox Buddhist doctrine.  I think I can grasp the paradox of identifying ultimate being with ultimate nothingness, but what makes this novel so disturbing is Mishima’s habitual connection of salvation with the human destructiveness that brings nothingness into the world.  Mizoguchi’s crime turns out to be his redemption. He’s finally encouraged to go forward with the deed by his memory of another orthodox Zen injunction repeated to him earlier in the novel by his philosophically inclined friend, Kashiwagi.

“Face the back, face the outside, and if ye meet, kill instantly!”
Yes the first sentence went like that.  The famous passage in that chapter of the Rinsairoku.  Then the remaining words emerged fluently: “When ye meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha! When ye meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor! When ye meet a disciple of the Buddha, kill the disciple! When ye meet your father and mother, kill your father and mother! When ye meet your kin, kill your kin!  Only thus will ye attain deliverance.  Only thus will ye escape the trammels of material things and become free.”  257-8

This is confirmed by the spiritual vacuity of all the Buddhist institutions and traditions the book portrays while strangely omitting any reference to the experience of meditation.  Such fiery iconoclasm also permeates the apocalyptic utterances of the old and new testament prophets, where Isaiah, Ezekiel and Jesus excoriate the traditional religious institutions and authorities of their times.

On the last page of the novel, as he sits on a mountain top watching the Temple burning below, Mizoguchi lights a cigarette.  For the first time in his life he feels good about himself and wants to go on living.

Mishima’s death-loving life and art are diametrically opposed to the gratitude and service centered values that I aspire to, but while reading the book, my revulsion sometimes yielded to wonder and even inspiration.   If I remain on the path that led to Japan and Hollyhock, I may be meeting him again along the road.