Good evening and welcome to Gary Snyder Reading Mountains and Rivers Without End. My name is Mark Gonnerman. I'm a graduate student in Religious Studies, organizer of this reading and convener of the Stanford Humanities Center Research Workshop, Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End. It is my privilege tonight to welcome you and introduce Gary Snyder. In organizing this reading and our year-long workshop, my aim in large part has been to foster a sense of community among scholars through explication and exploration of Gary's long poem. We're off to an excellent start, for as you will see in your program, numerous Stanford departments, programs, and offices have contributed money, time, and ideas to make this evening possible. I am especially grateful to the Office of the Dean of Humanities and Sciences, the Center for East Asian Studies, and to the new Center for Buddhist Studies housed therein. The Center for Buddhist Studies opened at Stanford this year.

[01:03]

Its purpose is to support scholarship on Buddhist traditions and encourage greater public understanding of Buddhists. A flyer describing the center is available in the Kresge foyer. Please pick one up during intermission or on your way out if you don't have one already. I'm also grateful to numerous individuals, some of whom are listed in the program. I extend special thanks to Carl Bielefeld, professor of Buddhist Studies and co-director of the new center, whose sharp mind, keen eye, and good sense of humor have made our work on this project a pleasure. I'm also very grateful to Kaz Tanahashi for painting the beautiful bristle-toned pine in Kansas that adorns the stage. I'm thankful to Gary for writing program notes for this evening's reading, which you, I hope, have in your hands. And I've just been asked to announce that the Stanford Channel, Channel 51, will broadcast this reading on November 17th, 7.30 in the evening. Many people have come together and contributed in making this evening possible, and I urge

[02:08]

you to read through the list in your program and remember all of the people with gratitude and thank them when you see them. Before introducing Gary, I would like to explain briefly our year-long research workshop at the Stanford Humanities Center. Our workshop will meet throughout the year, approximately six times each quarter, usually on Monday afternoons, to hear eminent scholars from Stanford and elsewhere discuss mountains and rivers from their own areas of interest and expertise. The seminar will conclude with a day-long symposium next spring, May 16th, a Saturday, and, I hope, a published collection of our papers. Our workshop began this afternoon with a fine general introduction to the poem by Professor Anthony Hunt of the University of Puerto Rico at Mayaguez. Tony is now completing many years of work on a commentary on the poem we'll hear tonight. He's followed the poem over the years as various parts have been published in different

[03:08]

literary journals. Information on how to learn more about the workshop is on the back of your program. Please feel free to contact me directly. This workshop is sponsored by the Humanities Center with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. As the Mellon Foundation charter explains, their grants are intended to promote projects urging the well-being and well-doing of humankind. I want to say quickly that if you want to get on the mailing list for the Humanities Center, there is also a sign-up sheet for that in the foyer, so you can learn about their many fine programs. When I first read the Mellon Foundation charter, I thought, oh, that's perfect, for Gary Snyder has, throughout his life, worked tirelessly to promote the well-being and well-doing of humankind. Born in San Francisco in 1930 and raised on small farms in Washington State and Oregon, Gary has lived most of his life on the Pacific Rim, the west coast of Turtle Island, and

[04:10]

in Japan. For more than four decades, he has inquired deeply into Zen and other forms of Buddhist practice and East Asian aesthetics, practices and forms fundamental to mountains and rivers without end. Gary began finding his own voice as a young poet scholar at Reed College, where his interest in Native American traditions motivated high-level work toward a bachelor's degree in anthropology and literature. His 1951 B.A. thesis, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village, the Dimensions of a Haida Myth, published in 1979, still repays careful reading. After one year in graduate school at Indiana University and two of three years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied East Asian languages, Gary discovered his authentic voice as a poet while working and backpacking in the Sierra Nevada in the summer of 1955. Since then, he has published 18 books of poetry and prose, translated into more than 20 languages,

[05:11]

and has received numerous honors, including three years as a Bollinger Foundation Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Turtle Island in 1975, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993, and earlier this year, the John Hay Award for Nature Writing and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry. Since 1985, Gary has served as professor of English at the University of California, Davis, active in the creative writing program and the program in nature and culture. He inhabits a mountain farmstead in the Yuba River, the Yuba River watershed of the northern Sierra Nevada, where he is an active founding member of the Ring of Bone Zendo. He is married to Carol Koda, a Stanford graduate, who I'm happy to say is here with us tonight, and has two sons and two young stepdaughters. An extraordinarily self-disciplined person, Gary articulates a vision of life that helps

[06:13]

us all understand what it means to live with integrity and become truly human, more humane in our treatment of each other and all life on the planet we co-inhabit. His poetry and prose have long served to defend nature and human nature, drawing attention to the wildness of human imagination and those places where inner mindscapes and outer landscapes coincide. As many of you know, Gary Snyder's character was celebrated as Jaffe Rider in Jack Kerouac's 1958 book, The Dharma Bums, a book Gary says is, quote, essentially accurate, essentially accurate in its depiction of his and Jack Kerouac's adventures in Marin County in the spring of 1956. In this book, we first hear of mountains and rivers without end. Know what I'm going to do, says Jaffe in Kerouac's report. I'll do a new long poem called Rivers and Mountains Without End and just write it on

[07:13]

and on on a scroll and unfold on and on with new surprises and always what went before forgotten, see, like a river, or like one of them real long Chinese silk paintings that show two little men hiking in an endless landscape of gnarled old trees and mountains so high they merge with the fog in the upper silk void. I'll spend 3,000 years writing it. It'll be packed full of information on soil conservation, the Tennessee Valley Authority, astronomy, geology, Xuanzang's travels, Chinese painting theory, reforestation, oceanic ecology, and food chains. Not a bad introduction at all to the poem that was completed 40, not quite 3,000 years later in April 1996. Congratulations to Gary Snyder on remaining true to his vision. With grace, gravity, hard work, and good humor, Gary Snyder has labored steadfastly

[08:14]

to give us this gift of mountains and rivers without end. Thank you. Welcome to Stanford, and now welcome to the Kresge stage. Thank you. Try again. Working. Okay. Thank you, Mark Gunnerman, for a wonderfully generous introduction, and thanks to Mark in particular for his initiative, his, if I may say so, nutty vision in thinking that

[09:19]

he should do this at Stanford for a whole year, so that I have to run to keep up and find out what people are going to say about my poem. It's wonderful. I'm delighted and deeply touched, and I'm very grateful to Mark for his wonderful energy and commitment to this, exploring this particular piece of poetry. And my gratitude to all of the other people from the Department of Religious Studies, from the Humanities Center, from Continuing Education, and other sectors that have gotten behind this. It's so generous. I'm charmed. I always thought Stanford was an intimidating place. You all have program notes tonight. This is going to be a somewhat longer poetry reading than some.

[10:21]

It's not just going to be a 50-minute hour. Please relax with it. I'm not going to give you the taste of what an Indian or East Asian poetry reading would be like, although I wish I could. Maybe someday I will. In India, and in some parts of East Asia, a musical performance, a poetry reading, or a dramatic performance might well start at dusk and run until dawn the next day. I went to Mushaira, just outside of Delhi, with Allen Ginsberg in the early 60s, to poetry readings that had 25 or 30 poets reading in Urdu, starting at dusk and running until dawn, with maybe 800 or 1,000 people. This is outdoors. Wandering around, napping, buying snacks at the little stalls around the outskirts of the event, candles flickering on stage, children running about all night, children crashing.

[11:25]

That's art. That's my idea of performance. One of the things that we have lost in the Occidental world, in terms of artistic experience, is the patience to explore and to experience these extended dramatic and literary events, seven or eight or twelve hour long, that were very much part of Asian life, and probably part of our experience of drama in Europe as late as the Middle Ages. But we're not ready to bring that back quite yet. However, feel free to fall asleep, which is okay in Asia, and feel free to walk out and come back. There will be a break, and I don't think, actually, that all of this is going to run much longer than two hours. And since there are program notes, I'm not going to stop and make too many comments as

[12:33]

we go, but treat it more directly, as I would like to treat it, as performance. I'm very grateful to Kaz Tanahashi, who's here tonight, for this marvelous backdrop. As the program notes say, Mountains and Rivers Without End was composed over the years in the shadow of two controlling artistic metaphors. One was the horizontal East Asian hand scroll of landscape painting, the shojuan. The other is Japanese no drama, which I was privileged to be able to attend numerous times over the years that I lived in Kyoto. And a no drama performance at one of the no houses, the no theater houses, starts around

[13:35]

eight in the morning and runs till about eight at night, and is always a set of five plays. Again, it's a performance that calls on you to relax, be present, but not be too present, and not be anxious about your enjoyment of it either, which is also true of poetry. I mean, the one complaint that one hears from students most about poetry is, I don't understand it. Well, whoever said you had to understand it? Only the high school teachers say that. What a mistake in teaching poetry. You don't have to understand it. You just have to listen to it, let it sink in, come back to it, come back to it again, forget it if it doesn't do anything for you, but taste the flavors. So no drama, the no stage has one stage set design element always.

[14:36]

It's a great pine tree painted on the backdrop. The talismanic poem of this whole series is called The Mountain Spirit, and the one that is closest to being in the structure of a no play, and that comes toward the very end of the performance tonight. The poem The Mountain Spirit is to a great extent about the spirit of the bristlecone pine. The bristlecone pine, for those of you who may not know, and haven't looked at your program notes, is a rare high altitude survival of the last ice age, actually, in relic stands out in the Great Basin, where it has retreated up to 11,000 or 12,000 or 13,000 feet since the climate's warmed up, and lives in these isolated pockets at high elevations, where for some reason in these highly inhospitable habitats, it lives longer than any other tree on earth.

[15:38]

And so there's a group of bristlecone pines up in the White Indian Mountains, in one particular area, where there are a number of trees within several acres there, that are all over 4,000 years old. And I have visited that little group of trees, and if I may say so, communed with them a number of times. So this, so Kaz Kanahashi's painting is not just any pine. I guess that the Japanese pines are based on the Japanese three-needle pine, or akamatsu, the red pine. But this is bristlecone pine, and Kaz has caught the look and the flavor of bristlecone pine beautifully here. So I'm very grateful to you, Kaz, for having given us this extra bit of magic. Which will be used again, I trust. Okay. Endless streams and mountains,

[16:48]

chi shan wu jin, clearing the mind and sliding in to that created space. I'm going to have to stop, I forgot something here. Start again. Some quotations. The notion of emptiness engenders compassion. Milarepa and Dogen. Again. An ancient Buddha said, a painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger. An ancient Buddha means some wise old-timer. The Chinese quotation, Chinese proverb, a painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger, is like Gregory Bateson, who used to say the map is not the territory. Or like Alan Watts, who used to say the menu is not the meal.

[17:50]

Okay. A painted rice cake does not satisfy hunger. Dogen comments, there are few who have even seen this painting of a rice cake, and none of them has thoroughly understood it. The paints for painting rice cakes are the same as those used for painting mountains and waters. If you say the painting isn't real, then the material phenomenal world is not real. The dharma is not real. Unsurpassed enlightenment is a painting. The entire phenomenal universe and the empty sky are nothing but a painting. Since this is so, there is no remedy for satisfying hunger other than a painted rice cake. Without painted hunger, you never become a true person. Famous mind boggler, that guy.

[18:54]

Endless streams and mountains. Qi Xia Mu Jin. Clearing the mind and sliding in to that created space, a web of waters streaming over rocks, air misty but not raining, seeing this land from a boat on a lake, or a broad slow river coasting by. The path comes down along a low land stream, slips behind boulders and leafy hardwoods, reappears in a pine grove. No farms around, just tidy cottages and shelters, gateways, rest stops, roofed but unwalled workspace. It's a warm, damp climate. A trail of climbing stair steps forks upstream. Big ranges lurk behind these rugged little outcrops, these spits of low ground rocky uplifts, layered pinnacles of slant, flurries of brushy cliffs receding.

[19:59]

Far back and high above, big peaks. A man hunched over, sitting on a log. Another stands above him, lifts a staff. A third, with a roll of mats or a lute, looks on. A bit offshore, two people in a boat. The trail goes far inland, somewhere back around a bay, lost in distant foothill slopes and back again at a village on the beach and someone's fishing. Rider and walker cross a bridge above a frothy braided torrent that descends from a flurry of roofs like flowers, temples tucked between cliffs. A side trail goes there. Oh, I read that. What happened here? No. A man with a shoulder load leans into the grade. Another horse and a hiker. The trail goes up along cascading stream beds,

[21:01]

no bridge in sight, comes back through chinkwa pin or liquid and bars. Another group of travelers. Trails end at the edge of an inlet below a heavy set of dark rock hills. Two moored boats with basket lifting. A boatman in the bow looks lost in thought. Hills beyond rivers, willows in a swamp, a gentle valley reaching far inland. The watching boat has floated off the page. At the end of the painting, the scroll continues on with seals and poems. It tells a further tale. Wong Oneway saw this at the mayor's house in Hodong Town, year 1205. Wrote at the end of it, The fashioner of things has no original intentions. Mountains and rivers are spirit, condensed. Who has come up with these miraculous forests and springs?

[22:03]

Pale ink on fine white silk. Later that same month, someone named Li Hui added, Most people can get along with the noise of dogs and chickens. Everybody cheerful in these peaceful times. But I, why are my tastes so odd? I love the company of streams and boulders. Tianxie of Weiluo, no date, next wrote, The water holds up the mountains. The mountains go down into the water. In 1332, Zhe Xun adds, This is truly a painting worth keeping. It has poem colophons from the Sun and the Qin dynasties. That it survived dangers of fire and war make it even rarer. In the mid-17th century, one Wang Tou had a look at it. Wrote, My brother's relative by marriage,

[23:05]

Wang Xun, is learned and has good taste. He writes good prose and poetry. My brother brought over his painting to show me. The great Qing dynasty collector, Liang Qingyao, owned it, but did not write on it or cover it with seals. From him, it went into the imperial collection down to the early 20th century. Zhang Daqian, a remarkable Taiwanese collector and art dealer, sold it in 1949. Now, it's at the Cleveland Art Museum, which sits on a rise that looks out toward the waters of Lake Erie. Step back and gaze again at the land. It rises and subsides, ravines and cliffs like waves of flowing leaves. Stamp the foot. Walk with it. Clap. Turn. The creeks come in, ah,

[24:06]

strain through boulders. Mountains walking on the water. Water ripples every hill. I walk out of the museum. Low gray clouds over the lake. Chill, march, breeze. Old ghost ranges, sunken rivers, come again. Stand by the wall and tell their tale. Walk the path. Sift the rings. Grind the ink. Wet the brush. Unroll the broad white space. Knead out and tip the moist black line. Walking on walking, underfoot, earth turns. Streams and mountains never stay the same.

[25:10]

Old bones. Out there walking around, looking out for food. A root stock, a bird call, a seed that you can crack. Plucking, digging, snaring, snagging, barely getting by. No food out there on dusty, slopes of screen. Carry some. Look for some. Go for a hungry dream. Dear bone. Dell sheep. Bones hunger home. Out there somewhere, a shrine for the old ones. The dust of the old bones. The old songs and tales. What we ate. Who ate what. How we all prevailed. Night Highway 99.

[26:19]

This is a, in melodrama terms, this is a journey song. A journey poem. It's one of the oldest, one of the earliest poems in Mountains and Rivers. Written in the very early 60s. I'm not going to read it all. I'm going to give you a taste of it. Written under the sign of jazz. Highway 99 now is Interstate 5. Right? Runs from the Canadian border, Vancouver, B.C., down to Tijuana, Mexico. In those days it was 99. Before I-5. Nothing lasts. Everything is impermanent. Even the concrete highways disappear into the underbrush. So, quote. Only the very poor or eccentric can surround themselves with shapes of elegance soon to be demolished,

[27:21]

in which they are forced by poverty to move with leisurely grace. We remain alert so as not to get run down. But it turns out you only have to hop a few feet to one side and the whole huge machinery rolls by, not seeing you at all. That was the poet Lou Welsh. We're on our way, man, out of town. Go hitching down that Highway 99. Too cold and rainy to go out on the sound. Sitting in Ferndale drinking coffee. Baxter in black, been to a funeral. Raymond in Bellingham, the Helena Hotel. Can't go to Mexico with that weak heart. Well, you boys can go south. I stay here. Fix up a shack. Get a part-time job. He disappeared later. Maybe found in the river. In Ferndale, in Bellingham,

[28:25]

went out on trail crew. Glacier and Marble Mount. There we part. Tiny men with mustaches driving ox teams deep into cedar groves. Wet brush, tin pants, snooze. Split-shake roof barns over berry fields. White birch chicken coop. Winters coming in the mountains. Shut down the show. The punks go back to school and the rest hit the road. Strawberries picked. Shake blanks split. Fires all out. And the pack strings brought down to the valleys. Set loose to graze. Gray wharves and hacksaw gothic homes. Shingle mills and stump farms overgrown. Now down the highway.

[29:29]

Mount Vernon. Fifty weary Indians sleep in the bus station. Strawberry pickers speaking Kwakiutl. Turn at Burlington for Skagit and Ross Dam. Under apple trees by the river banks of junked cars. B.C. riders give hitchhikers rides. Everett. The sheriff's posse stood in double rows. Flogged the naked wobblies down with stalks of devil's club and run them out of town. The Everett Massacre, 1914. While shingle weavers lost their fingers in the tricky feed and take of double saws. Skip a couple hundred miles. East marginal way, Seattle. The hitchhike zone. Boeing down across Duwamish Slough and Engle out and on.

[30:31]

Night rain, wet concrete, headlights blind, Tacoma. Eating peanuts, I don't give a damn. If anybody ever stops, I'll walk to San Francisco. What the hell? That's where you're going? Why you got that pack? Well, man, I just don't feel right without something on my back. And this character in Milkman Overalls picks me up. I have to come out here. Every once in a while there's a guy blows me here. These guys got babies now, drink beer, come back from wars. Says, I'd like to save up all my money get a big new car, go down to Reno and latch on to one of those rich girls. I'd fix their little ass. Nineteen-year-old North Dakota boy. He's fixing to get married next month to Centralia in a purple Ford. Car struck dead doe

[31:34]

by the Skookumchuck River. Fat man in a Chevrolet wants to get back to L.A. Too damn poor now. Air brakes on the log trucks hiss and whine. Stand in the dark by the stoplight. Big cars tool by. Drink coffee, drink more coffee. Brush teeth back of shell. Hot shoes stay on the right side of that yellow vine. Toledo. Castle Rock. Freeway. Four-lane. No stoplights and no crossings, only cars. And people walking, old hitchhikers, break the law. How do I know? The state cop told me so. Come a dozen times into Portland

[32:36]

on the bum or hasty lover. Late at night. Portland. Dust kicking up behind the trucks. Night rides. Who waits in the coffee stop? Night. Highway. 99. Soke On met an old man on the banks of the Columbia River growing potatoes and living all alone. Soke On asked him the reason why he lived there. He said, Boy, nobody ever asked me the reason why. I like to be alone. I'm an old man. I have forgotten how to speak human words. Portland, sawdust, downtown. Buttermilk corner. All you want for a nickel. Sujata gave. Gotama. Buttermilk. No doubt, says Soke On.

[33:37]

That's all it was. Plain buttermilk. And on down a few hundred miles. Oil pump broken. Motor burning out. Salem. Ex-logger selling skidder cable wants to get to San Francisco fed and drunk. Eugene. Guy just back from Alaska. Duh. Don't like the States. Now. Too much law. Sutherland. A woman with a kid and two bales of hay. To Roseburg. A sawmill worker. Young guy. Thinking of going on over to Eureka for redwood logging later in the year. To Dillard. Two Assembly of God Pentecostal boys from a holy roller high school. One had speaking in tongues. To Canyonville. Grants Pass. I picked up a young mother with two children once. Their house had just burned down.

[34:39]

I picked up an Italian tree surgeon in Port Angeles once. He had all his saws and tools all screwed and bolted on his beat up bike. Phoenix. Reading. Anderson. The road that's followed goes forever. In half a minute crossed and left behind. Going to San Francisco. Yeah, San Francisco. Yeah, we came from Seattle even farther north. Yeah, we've been working in the mountains in the spring in the autumn. I always go with this Highway 99. Sixteen speeds forward. Windows open. Stopped at the edge of Willows for a bite. Grass shoots on the edge of drained rice plains. Where are the Sierra? Standing in the night in the world's end winds by the overpass bridge

[35:42]

junction US-40 and Highway 99. Trucks. Trucks roll by kicking up dust dead flowers level, dry. Highway turns west. Miles gone. Speeds still. Pass through lower hills. Gray on the salt bay water. Brown grass ridges. Buck brush blue. Herons in the tide flats. Have no thought for states of cars. I'm sick of car exhaust. City. Gleaming far away. We make it into town tonight. Get clean and drink some wine. San Francisco. Nobody gives a shit, man, who you are or what's your car. There is no 99.

[36:45]

Great. Jackrabbit. Black-tailed hare. By the side of the road. Hop. Stop. Great ears shining. You know me a little. A lot more than I know you. The sea. Bubs Creek. Haircut. High ceilings and the double mirrors. The calendar, a splendid alpine scene. Scab. Barber. In stained white barber gown. Alone. Sat down.

[37:51]

Old man. A summer fog. Gray San Francisco day. I walked right in. On Howard Street. Haircut. $1.25. Just clip it close as it'll go. Now, why do you want your haircut back like that? Well, I'm going to the Sierra for a while. Bubs Creek and on across to Upper Kern. He wriggled his clippers, says, Well, I've been up there. I built the cabin up at Cedar Grove in 1905. Old haircut smell. Next door, the Goodwill, where I came out. Sixth Street. A search for a sweater and a stroll. In the bored and concrete room of unfixed junk downstairs. All these emblems of the past. Too close. Heaped up in chilly dust and bare bulb glare. Of tables. Wheelchairs. Battered trunks and lamps. Pots that boiled up coffee. 1910. Things. Swimming on their own and finally freed.

[38:54]

From human need. Or, waiting a final flicker of desire. To tote them out once more. Some freakish use. The master of this limbo. Drag-legged. Watches. Making prices. As the people seldom buy. The sag-assed rocker has to make it now. Alone. A few days later. Drove with lock. Down San Joaquin. Us, barefoot in the heat. Stopping for beer and melon on the way. The giant orange. Rubber shreds of cast truck retreads on the pebbled shoulders. Highway 99. Sierra marked by cumulus in the east. Car coughing in the groves. Six thousand feet. And down to Kings River Canyon. Camped at Cedar Grove. Hard granite canyon walls that leave no screen. I once tried a haircut at the barber college, too.

[39:59]

Sat half an hour before they told me white men use the other side. Goodwill. St. Vincent de Paul. Salvation Army up the coast. For mackinaws in boots and heavy socks, Seattle has the best. For logger gear. Once found a good pair of tricone boots at the under-the-public-market Goodwill store. Mark Tobey's scene. Seattle. Torn down, I hear. And a Filson jacket with a bird blood stain. A.G. and me got winter clothes for almost nothing at Lake Union. Telling the old gal we was on our way to work the winter out up in B.C. Hitchhiking home, the green hat got a ride. Of that, more later. So now, hiking up Bubbs Creek, saw the trail crew tent in a scraggly grove of creekside lodgepole pine.

[41:02]

Talked to the guy. He says, if you see McCool on the other trail crew over there, you tell him Moorhead says to go to hell. Late snow that summer. Crossing the scarred bare shed of Forrester Pass, the winding rock-braced switchbacks dive in snowbanks we climb on where pack trains have to dig or wait. A half-iced-over lake, 12,000 feet, its sterile boulder bank, but filled with leaping trout. Reflections wobble in the mingling circles, always spreading out. The crazy web of wavelets makes sense, seen from high above. A deva world of sorts, it's high. A view that few men see, a point, bare sunlight on the spaces, empty sky, molding to fit the shape of what ice left of fire thrust or of tilted, twisted, faulted, cast out from this lava belly plume.

[42:11]

The boulder in my mind's eye is a chair. Why was the man drag-legged? King of hell? Or is it a paradise of sorts, thus freed from acting out the functions some creator-carpenter thrust on a thing to think he made himself? An object, always chair. Sinister ritual histories. Is the mountain god a gimp? The halting metrics in the ritual limp? Good. Will? Daughter of mountains, stooped moon-breast Parvati, mountain thunder speaks, hair tingling static as the lightning lashes, is neither word of love nor wisdom. Though this be danger, hence the fear.

[43:18]

Some flowing girl whose slippery dance entrances Shiva, the valley spirit, Anahita, Saraswati, dark and female gate of all the world, water that cuts back quartz flake sand, soft is the dance that melts the matte-haired mountain-sitter to leap in fire and make of sand a tree, of tree, a board, of board, ideas, somebody's rocking chair, a room of empty sun, of peaks and ridges, a universe of junk, all left alone. The hat that I always take on mountains. When we came back down through Oregon, this is three years before, at nightfall in the Siskiyou, a few cars pass, a big truck stopped a hundred yards above,

[44:22]

said, Siskiyou stoneware, on the side. The driver said he recognized my old green hat. I'd had a ride with him two years before, the whole state north while hitching down to Portland from Warm Springs. And Alan in the rear on the straw forgot salami, and we went on south all night in many cars to Berkeley in the dawn. Upper Kern River country now, after nine days' walk, it finally rains. We ran on that other trail crew, setting up new camp in the drizzly pine, cussing, slapping bugs, four days from Rhodes. We saw McCool, and he said, till that moorhead gives my ass. We squatted, smoking by the fire. I'll never get a green hat now, the foreman says. Fifty mosquitoes sitting on my brim.

[45:24]

They must like green. Winter rises, chair turns, and in the double mirror waver. The old man cranks me down and cracks a chuckle. Your Bub's Creek haircut, boy. The boat of a million years. The boat of a million years. Boat of morning, sails between the sycamores of turquoise. Dawn, a white Dutch freighter in the Red Sea with a red stack. Heads past our tanker out toward Ras Tanura. Sun already fries my shoulder blades as I kneel on ragged steel deck chipping paint.

[46:31]

Gray old T2 tanker and a white Dutch freighter. The boat of the sun, the ebbed fish, the yut fish, play in the waves before it. Salty Red Sea, dolphins rip sunlight, streak in, swirl and tangle under the forward arching wave roll of the cleaving bow. Teilhard said, seize the tiller of the planet. He was joking. We are led by dolphins toward morning. There's a point, a section in here called Maw.

[47:45]

I'm going to read just the last two parts of it. The markets, no wait a minute, I'm not at Maw yet, I'm at the market. This is a point called the market. And the market evokes the markets of San Francisco. That was the old Crystal Palace market of San Francisco. The public market of Seattle. The public market of Saigon as it was in 1961. Of Kathmandu as it was in 1962. Of Varanasi or Benares as it was in 62. I'm going to do a little bit of Kathmandu and Varanasi here. The market. Kathmandu. 75 feet hold rows equals one hour explaining power steering.

[48:47]

Equals two big crayfish. Equals all the buttermilk you can drink. Equals hitchhiking from Ogden, Utah to Burns, Oregon. Equals whipping dirty clothes on rocks three days. Some Indian River. Equals mangoes, apples, custard apples, raspberries. Equals picking three flats of strawberries. Equals a fresh-eyed bonito, live clams, a swordfish, a salmon. A handful of silvery smelt in the pocket. Whiskey in cars out late after dates. Old folks eating cake in secret. Best milk enough if the belly be fed. And wash down, hose off aisles. Reach under fruit stands, green gross rack. Meat scum on chopped blocks. Bloody butcher concrete floor.

[49:49]

Old knives sharpened down to scalpels. Wet spilled food. When the market comes, the cleanup comes. Equals a billy goat pushing through people. Stinking and grabbing at cabbage. Arrogant. Tough. He took it. They let him. Kathmandu. The market. I gave a man 70 paise in return for a clay pot of curtains. Was it worth it? How can I tell? Varanasi. They eat feces in the dark. On stone floors. One-legged monkeys. Hopping cows. Limping dogs. Blind cats. Crunching garbage in the market. Broken fingers. Cabbage head on the ground. Who has a young face?

[50:50]

Open pit eyes. Between the bullet carts and people. Head pivots with the footsteps passing by. Dark scrotum spilled on the street. Penis laid by his thigh. Torso turns with the sun. I came to buy a few bananas by the Ganges while waiting for my wife. Now the point ma. A little bit of this. Hello, boy. I was very glad to hear from you. I know by the way you write and what you said that you was just okay. Yes, I know you all have been busy working long hours. Fifteen dollars isn't bad at all.

[51:51]

I never made but 50 cents a day. I never made but five dollars a day. I thought that was worth it. I thought that was good. Try your damnedest to hang on to a little of it. So if you quit, you will have a little to go on. Glad you are satisfied. That's all you need. Guess you need good saws. I hope you can get them. They cost a lot, too. Gee, those boots are high. They should wear real good. Sounds like you like it up there and like to work in the timber. I am glad. One thing, don't be drinking too much. Cut down once in a while. Ray talked like Walter, charge too much a week. Don't let him cheat you. Food is getting higher every place. You buy a couple of calves, I'll raise them for you. I'm going to raise some more this year. The little mare looks much better and she leads. So you cook.

[52:53]

You don't mind that, do you? Just so you had plenty to cook. Cooking always looked like it was easy for you. Do your best. That's all that you can do. We had a few funerals here lately. First Pablo died, then Gracie Cuarto got word her boy was killed in Vietnam. So the two were buried the same day. Just lately ninth, Sabrina died and was buried here. There were quite a few from all over. Frank and his wife sang. That was nice. All our cattle are falling off. We had a thundershower ruined the grass. A big fire at Antelope Wells. Sure was smoky here. Said lightning started it. Pretty clear now so they must have put it out. Been hot here the last couple of days. Rained all around us. Not a drop fell here. I am pretty busy since everyone here is gone watering things.

[53:55]

Will said you was real good when you were with them. Said I don't mind drinking but I can't stand a drunk. Maybe the work is hard. Nothing here, same old thing. People always drinking then dying. Don't seem to mind though. Well boy, I'll quit writing for now. Write when you can. Be careful. Drink but don't get drunk. Huh. Tell all hello. All said hello to you. Charlie was telling me she got a letter from you. Bye boy. As ever. Ma. Ma. Like I say in the program notes, I picked that up off the floor of an abandoned loggers cabin. Up in the Sierra. And I changed the names.

[55:00]

Falls. This is for Yosemite Falls. Over Stonelip. The creek leaps out as one. Divides in spray and streamers. Lets it all go. Above, back there, the snow fields. Rocked between granite ribs. Turns spongy in the summer sun. Water slips out under. Mucky shallow flows. And meshed with roots of flower and moss and heather. Seeps through swampy meadows. Gathers to shimmer sandy shiny flats. Bends, soars off ledges. Crash and thunder on the boulders at the base. Painless playing. Droplets regather.

[56:14]

Seek the lowest and keep going. Down in gravelly beds. There is no use. The water cycle tumbles round. Sierra Nevada could lift the heart so high. Fault, block, uplift. Thrust of westward slipping crust. One way to raise and swing the clouds around. Thus pine trees leapfrog up on sunlight. Trapped in cells of leaf. Nutrient minerals call together like a magic song. To lead a cedar log along that hopes to get to see at last and be a great canoe. A soft breath worldwide of night and day. Rising, falling. The great mind passes by its own fine-honed thoughts.

[57:18]

Going each way. Rainbow hanging steady. Only slightly wavering with the swing of the whole spill. Between the rising and the falling. Stands still. I stand drenched in crashing spray and mist. And pray. The humpback flute player. Cocopahele. The humpback flute player walks all over.

[58:23]

Sits on the boulders around the great basin. His hump is a pack. Xuanzang went to India 629 AD. Returned to China 645. With 657 sutras, images, mandalas, and 50 relics. A curved frame packed with a parasol. Embroidery carving. An incense censer swinging as he walked. The Pamir. The Tarim. Turfan. The Punjab. The Doab of Ganga and Yamuna. Sweetwater. Quileute. Ho. Amur. Tanana. Mackenzie. Old man. The bighorn. The plait. The San Juan. He carried. Emptiness. He carried. Mind only. Vishnuptimatra. The humpback flute player.

[59:25]

Koko Paele. His hump is a pack. In Canyon de Chelly, on the north wall up by a cave, is a humpback flute player, petroglyph, carved in the wall, lying on his back playing his flute. Across the flat, sandy canyon wash, wading a stream, breaking through the ice, on the south side, on the south wall, the pecked out pictures of some mountain sheep with curling horns. They stood in the icy shadow of the south wall two hundred feet away. I sat with my shirt off in the sun, facing south, with the humpback flute player just above my head. They whispered. I whispered. Back and forth, across that canyon, clearly heard. In the plains of Bihar, India, near Rajgir,

[60:28]

are the ruins of Nalanda, of Nalanda University. The name Bihar comes from Sanskrit vihara, Buddhist temple. The diamond seat where Shakyamuni attained enlightenment is in Bihar, and Vulture Peak, where he gave a great discourse. Tibetan pilgrims still come down to these plains. The six foot thick walls of Nalanda, the monks all burned. The monks all scattered, the books burned, the banners clattered, the statues shattered by the Turks. Xuanzang describes the high blue tiles, the delicate debates, these logicians of emptiness, worshippers of Tara, joy of starlight, naked breasted, she who saves. Ghost bison, ghost bears, ghost bighorns,

[61:35]

ghost lynx, ghost pronghorns, ghost panthers, ghost marmots, ghost owls, swirling and gathering, sweeping down in the power of a song. Then the white man will be gone. Butterflies on slopes of grass and aspen, thunderheads, the deep blue of Krishna, rise on rainbows, and falling, shining rain, each drop, tiny people gliding, slanting down, a little Buddha seated in each raindrop pearl, enjoying the million waving grassy Buddhas on the ground. Ah, what am I carrying? What's this load? Who's that out there in the dust, sleeping on the ground with a black hat and a feather stuck in his sleeve? It's old Jack Wilson, Wovoka, the prophet.

[62:40]

Black coyote said he saw the whole world in Wovoka's empty hat, the bottomless sky, the night of starlight lying on our sides, the ocean slanting higher. All manner of beings may swim in my sea, echoing up conch spiral corridors. The mirror, countless ages back, dressing or laughing. What world today? Pearl, crystal, jewel, taming and teaching the dragon in the spine. Spiral, wheel, or breath of mind, desert sheep with curly horns. The ringing in your ears is the cricket in the stars. Up in the mountains that edge the great basin,

[63:45]

it was whispered to me, by the oldest of trees, by the oldest of beings, the oldest of trees, bristlecone pine, and all night long sung on by a young throng of pinyon pine. As I say in the program notes there, Sean Tsang is given credit for having brought back the text of the Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra from India, the Heart Sutra, lots of other sutras, and it may be certainly that he wasn't the only Chinese pilgrim to have brought it back, but he gets the first credit for it. This next poem is a liturgic chant

[64:54]

in Sino-Japanese, the Heart Sutra. If you know it, chant along. MAKA HANYA HARAMITA SHINGYO KANJI SAEBO SATSUGYO JIN HANYO HARAMITA JI SHOKEN GOUN KAIKU DOSHI SAIKU YAKU SHARI SHI SHIKI BUIKU KUKU ISHIKI SHIKUSOKU ZEIKU KUSOKU ZEISHIKI JUSOKU GYOSHIKI YAKU BUNYOZE SHARI SHI ZEISHO HOKU SOFU SHOFU METSUBU KUKU JOKUZEN ZEIKO KUCHU MUISHIKIMU JUSOKU GYOSHIKIMU GEN NI BI ZESHIN NI MUISHIKI SHOKU MISOKU HOMU GENKAI NANSHI MUISHIKI KAE MU MU MYO YAKU MU MU MYO JIN NAISHI MU RO SHI YAKU MU RO SHI JIN MU OKU SHU METSU DO MU CHI YAKU MU TOKU IMU SHOTOKO BOUDAI SATA E HANYA HARAMITA KOSHIN MU KEGE MU KEGE

[65:55]

KOMU UKU FUANRI ISSAI TENDO MU SOKU YONE HAN SANSEI SHOBUTSU E HANYA HARAMITA KOTOKO WA NOKUTARA SANMYAKO SANBOUDAI KOCHI HANYA HARAMITA ZEIDAI JINSHU ZEIDAI MYOSHU ZEIMU JOSHU ZEIMU TODOSHU NOJO ESSAIKU SHINJUTSU FUKUOKO SETSU HANYA HARAMITA SHUSOKU SETSU SHUWATSU GYATE GYATE HARA GYATE HARASO GYATE BOJI SOAKA HANYA SHINYO Good. Thank you. Hey, no, no, no. Hey, I didn't write that. It's one of the world's older texts, though. The Circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais.

[66:58]

The enactment of this poem, or the reenactment of it, will take place on Saturday the 11th around Mount Tamalpais. This is a poem which fits like a glove to activity in the real world. We did this with some students from Davis a couple of years ago after studying the poem, if it's a poem, and one of the students said, hey, I never read a poem before that made me go for a hike. But, you know, this is, this kind of literature is like tantra. Tantra is like guide to ritual and behavior, as well as art. And so, the Circumambulation of Mount Tamalpais. Walking up and around the long ridge of Tamalpais, Bay Mountain, circling and climbing, chanting, to show respect and to clarify myself. Phillip Whalen, Alan Ginsberg, and I

[68:04]

learned this practice in Asia. So we opened a route around Tam. It takes a day. Stage one. You go down to Muir Woods and stand on the bed, right by the bed of Redwood Creek, just where the Dipsy Trail crosses it. Even in the driest season of this year, some running water. Mountains make springs. Chant the Prajnaparamita Hridaya Sutra, which we just did. The Dharani for removing disasters, which we might do. The four vows. Splash across the creek and head up the Dipsy Trail, the steep wooded slope, and into the meadows. Gold dry grass. Cows. A huge cow pissing, her ears out, looking around with big eyes, mottled nose. We laugh. Then we say, excuse us for laughing at you. Hazy day. Butterflies tan as grass that sit on silver weathered fence posts.

[69:08]

A gang of crows. I can smell fried chicken, Alan Ginsberg says, but it's only the simmering California laurel leaves. The trail winds, crossed and intertwining with a jeep road. Stage two. A small twisted ancient interior live oak that splits a rock outcrop an hour up the trail. The Dharani for removing disasters. The heap mantra. Dharani for removing disasters, briefly. Namo Samantabodho Namo Harajipura Shasono Nantojito Nyangyangyakinyaki Unnunjipura Jipura Harajipura Harajipura Jishusa Jishusa Shushiri Shushiri Sohaja Sohaja Sejinyashiriye Somokho A tiny Chorten, a little pile of rocks, before this tree, and into the woods. A maze fence gate. Young Douglas fir, redwood, a new state of being. Sun on Madrone, to the bare meadow knoll.

[70:12]

Last spring there was a bit of wild iris about here, and this time, too, I saw a lazuli bunting. Stage three. A ring of outcropped rocks. A natural little dolmen circle right where the dipsea trail crests on the ridge. Looking down a canyon to the sea, not far. The Dharani for removing disasters. And Hari Om Namo Shiva. Hari Om Namo Shiva [...] Learned that in India. And on to Pantole, across the road, up the old mine trail. A doe, a fawn, silvery gray, more crows. Stage four. Rock springs. There's a trickle of water even now.

[71:14]

Do the Saraswati mantra, and the Dharani for removing disasters. Om benzo waniya, benzo bero tsa niya, hong hong hong, pe pe pe swaha. Om benzo waniya, benzo bero tsa niya, hong hong hong, pe pe pe swaha. Saraswati. In the shade of a big oak, spreading out the map on a pick. In the shade of a big oak, spreading out the map on a picnic table. Then up Bernstein trail to rifle camp, old food cache boxes hanging from wires. And a bit north, into the oak woods and rocks, find a neat little sadhu hut. Built of dry, natural bits of wood and parts of old crates. Roofed with shakes and black plastic. And there's a book called Harmony left there. A sadhu. That would be, in India we would say a sadhu. In Marin County we would say a hippie. Lunch by the stream. Too tiny a trickle, we drink water from our bota.

[72:16]

And the food offerings are Swiss cheese, sandwiches, sweet bread with liverwurst, salami, olives, gomoku no moto from a can, grapes, panettone, apple currant jelly, sweet butter, oranges, and Greek walnuts in grape juice paste. Lunch in the shade at Rifle Creek. Stage five. A notable serpentine outcropping not far after rifle camp. Om three Maitreya and Dharani for removing disasters. Stage six. At Collier Springs, in a redwood grove, there is water trickling out of pipe. The Dharani of the Great Compassionate One. The Daiheed Shim Dharani. California nutmeg, golden chinquapin, the fruit with burrs, the chaparral. Now following the North Side Trail. Stage seven. Inspiration point. The Dharani for removing disasters. The mantra for Tara.

[73:19]

Om Tare Tut Tare Ture Swaha Tare Tare Tare. Om Tare Tut Tare Ture Swaha Tare Tare Tare. Om Tare Tut Tare Ture Swaha Tare Tare Tare for Tara. Looking down on Lagunitas. The gleam of water storage in the brushy hills and all that smog. And Mount St. Helena, faintly in the north. The houses of San Anselmo and San Rafael. Once they were large estates. Picot Gap Country Club. And the rocky brush climb up the North Ridge Trail. Stage eight. The summer. The summit of Mount Tamalpais. There's a ring of rock pinnacles all around the lookout. And there we do the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra. The Dharani for removing disasters. The Dharani of the Great Compassionate One. The Hare Krishna mantra. The Om Sri Maitreya. And the Hare Om Namo Sivaya. All about. The bay. The smog. The heat.

[74:21]

May the whole planet not get like this. Start the descent down the Throckmorton Hogback Trail. Stage nine. The parking lot of Mountain Home. Cars whiz by. Sun glare from the west. Do the Dharani for removing disasters. And the Gopala mantra. Then, across from the California Alpine Club, the Ocean View Trail angles down. Yellow broom flowers, a few still out. The long descending trail into shadowy giant redwood trees. Two. Stage ten. The bed of Redwood Creek again. Do the Prajna Paramita Hridaya Sutra. The Dharani for removing disasters. The Hare Om Namo Sivaya. The Hare Krishna mantra. And the four vows. Beings are numberless. I vow to enlighten them. Obstacles are countless. I vow to cut them down. Dharma gates are limitless.

[75:23]

I vow to master them. The Buddha way is endless. I vow to follow through. Standing in our little circle, blowing the conch, shaking the staff rings, right there in the parking lot. That was the circumambulation of Mount Tamil Pais. A short one. Under the hills near the Morava River, She lay there amidst mammoth, reindeer, and wolf bones. A diadem of fox teeth round her brow. Ochre under her hips. 26,640 plus or minus 110 years before now.

[76:29]

Now, burnt reindeer pelvis, bone bits in her mouth. The bones of two men lying by her. One each side. Dianne de Prima, when she heard me read that poem last year, said, Ah, Kali of the Paleolithic. Kali, the goddess of death. New moon tongue. Faint new moon arc. Curl, again in the west. Blue eve. Deer moving dusk. Purple shade in a plant realm. A million years of sniffs, licks, lip, and reaching tongue.

[77:31]

The bear mother. She veils herself to speak of eating salmon. Teases me with, what do you know of my ways? And kisses me through the mountain. Through and under its layers. Its gullies. Its folds. Her mouth full of blueberries. We share. Now we are going to take a ten minute break. And then we'll continue. Thank you.

[78:18]

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