Fire  Sermon

Gautama Buddha (Shakyamuni) at age 41

All things, O priests, are on fire.

And what, O priests, are all these things which are on fire?

The eye, O priests, is on fire; forms are on fire; eye-consciousness is on fire;

impressions received by the eye are on fire; and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent,

originates in dependence on impressions received by the eye, that also is on fire.

The ear is on fire; sounds are on fire; the nose is on fire; odors are on fire; the tongue is on fire;

tastes are on fire; the body is on fire; things tangible are on fire; the mind is on fire;

ideas are on fire; mind-consciousness is on fire; impressions received by the mind are on fire;

and whatever sensation, pleasant, unpleasant, or indifferent,

originates in dependence on impressions received by the mind, that also is on fire.

Peter  Coyote

The  Rainman's  Third  Cure

Counterpoint  Press

A few excerpts — Gary Snyder as a Mentor

By luck, a frequent visitor to Olema was the poet Lew Welch, a true member of the Beat inner circle and an old friend of Gary Snyder’s. When he suggested introducing me to Gary one day, the nascent healthy part of me leapt at his offer. By grace, that introduction turned out to be to the person who initiated my next important development.

I had read Gary Snyder’s poems since my mid-teens, when curiosity about bohemians brought me into contact with Jack Kerouac and the Beat writers. Snyder, the Beat poet and ordained Zen priest, was legendary in those circles. He had lived in a Japanese monastery for ten years; had introduced Jack Kerouac to Zen and been the model for Kerouac’s protagonist, Japhy Ryder, in the novel The Dharma Bums. Gary had a reputation as a sage and had been shaped in my imagination as a highly evolved human being. By this time too, his essays on politics, environmental sanity, and wilderness were being reprinted and widely distributed in the counterculture, granting him iconic stature.

A number of Gary’s contemporaries had disappeared or died early but Gary’s duration and successes on many levels inspired me to hope that if I could meet him I might be able to absorb a working model that balanced the competing rigors of sobriety and ecstasy in a healthier manner than I was managing.

     

The meeting Lew arranged turned out to be nothing like the event I had anticipated. Gary and I ate peanut butter on crackers in the back of his new (and in my eyes, bourgeois) VW camper chatting blandly. The meeting was insignificant, except just before leaving, Gary regarded me with such undisguised directness as if he were making up his mind about who I really was. His perusal was so penetrating and transparent as to its intention that the moment became unsettling, like being called upon to speak in class when you were unprepared.

After Gary drove off, I had to admit to myself that I had been insecure in his presence and that my characteristic fluency (or glibness) had deserted me. He had managed to deflect every opportunity I attempted to wax philosophical and had edged me out onto the thin ice of being unable to define myself. This had always been potentially dangerous terrain for me because my parents habitually informed me as to what kind of person I was or what my motives must have been for doing something, citing my unconscious as evidence—an entity I could not understand but they could. It was crazy-making, but now, subtle wisps of my own competitiveness, jealousy, curiosity, and personal doubts began to tint my impressions of our meeting, making me unable to decide what had actually transpired.

Our small convoy of four old Chevys and GMCs cruised east on Highway 80, past Sacramento into Gold Country, gaining altitude in the foothills. Pine and fir trees rooted in rust-red soil there replaced the sere khaki grasslands and the contorted live oaks of lower elevations, and the air became sweeter. The last hour of our journey traversed progressively smaller and more remote county and finally dirt roads, until we nosed down a dim parallel track in the woods, terminating at a small gravel clearing, parking before an open shed sheltering a battered old Jeep wagon. We located the footpath through the woods to Snyder’s house and entered the forest.

The skinny trail along the flank of a moderate slope was cooled and shaded by second-growth pines, occasional live oaks, and sensuous smooth-skinned madrones. The air was thick with the scent of witch hazel from the small native kitkitdizze shrubs for which Gary’s homestead had been named. Except for our feet rustling the leaves underfoot, and the chitter and whistle of small birds, the day was totally silent.

By the time we reached the clearing containing Gary’s house and outbuildings, the nervous acceleration of our trip had dissipated and I was actually and undistractedly there. Perhaps it was the silent interlude of the quarter-mile between the car-park and the house, but I arrived with an internal stillness that allowed me to “see” Gary’s house clearly. What I saw made a deep impression on me.

From the vantage point of the hill, his home radiated a sense of order, timeless solidity, and dignity. The clay tiled roof of his house rested on thick hand-hewn lintels and posts. Between these, hand-daubed adobe walls had been fitted with two doors of numerous small-paned windows, lightening the massive feeling of the house’s construction. The structure felt fastened in place, as if the trees supporting it had simply been peeled and pressed into service where they stood. It was a house that felt exactly “right”; no bigger or smaller than necessary, practical, impeccably constructed, and very much better made and finished than any of our overcrowded communal shacks and homes.

Built onto the house’s near corner, sheltering the kitchen door and facing the hill, a small, roofed cubicle with an open front offered a convenient, sheltered spot to store boots, firefighting tools, and rain gear out of the weather. A sink for washing up was built into the shared wall next to a sliding door, which, I soon learned, opened wide enough to admit a wheelbarrow load of firewood into the kitchen.

Parallel to the house and separated by a narrow gravel corridor, a slender rectangular structure had been divided into a toolshed and a wood-fired sauna. Built in board-and-batten style, the general impression was of simplicity, durability, and fitness. An upright red hand cranked water pump stood beside the sauna. Each guest to Kitkitdizze was tithed 100 strokes on it, the energy required to send their daily ration of water uphill to the holding tank from which it would return to the house by gravity.

Gary’s house intrigued me because its form and function were so married and well thought through. It appeared to be comfortable and sufficient for his needs, but did not appear to have required much wealth to construct. If it was a statement of Gary’s “philosophy,” it was well-said and without an excess syllable. I could imagine myself content in such a house and owning it without internal conflicts about it being too “rich” or showy.

I continued my scrutiny after we were invited in. The flagstone-floored kitchen was cool and shaded. It contained a large wood-fired range and a glass-fronted cabinet stocked with simple black ceramic Japanese dishes and cups; a well-crafted oak table with two benches sat before the windowed doors I’d noticed from the hill. Everything seemed poised in its task, floating in the limpid interior, as tranquil as sleeping cats.

Adjacent to the kitchen, a single step admitted me to a wood-floored living room. In the center, four massive posts surrounded an octagonal fire pit edged in stone and supported a log rectangle upon which vegas (slender timber rafters) rested. They, by radiating out to the house’s perimeter and resting on its walls, supported the roof. The spaces between the walls defining the living room and the house’s outside walls were organized as a pantry, a children’s room, a library, and a master bedroom—900 square feet in all. In that space Gary and his wife Masa raised two children and arranged their full and productive life.

Over the fire pit a small hanging log was suspended threaded through parallel loops suspended from a roof beam. Anchored to that floating log was an adjustable iron device of obvious Japanese origin, which allowed one to adjust a large iron water kettle over the flames. Above the pit, a small windowed cupola completed the roof and (theoretically) served as a vent for the smoke. The logs were blackened by pitch and might as easily have been the interior of a Japanese farm or an Indian longhouse. The interior smelled of smoke, leather, juniper, incense, tobacco, whiskey, and oiled wood. It felt timeless.

These elements—stone, wood, iron, and fire—had been melded and elegantly integrated by an observant, pragmatic, and sophisticated eye; fashioned with obvious respect for the various traditions the house had borrowed from. This was what I imagined “reinhabitation” might look like—only Gary’s expression of it was more refined and meticulously organized then anything I had conceived. The house easily contained contradictions—a small ghetto blaster sound system, a Winchester rifle, a banjo, Japanese pillows, a Buddhist altar, and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s resting on the kitchen table. It was not the product of theories, but of a life; of thoughtful, patient work that made even my meander through it feel frivolous.

My reaction to his house forced me to reevaluate Gary, who at the moment of our arrival was stark naked, save for cheap plastic thong sandals, throwing a boomerang with his young children. At his feet lay a small pile of yokes cut from forked madrone branches and used to hang pots over the outdoor fire pit that served as their summer kitchen. Gary’s Japanese wife, Masa, was squatting on her haunches before the fire, wearing only a skirt, looking as if she might have evolved there. Next to the fire pit was a modest, pole-framed ramada roofed with bamboo matting, which sheltered shelves, counters, and a refrigerator that I later learned ran on kerosene.

I spent the better part of that day trying to untangle what it was about Gary’s home that was simultaneously moving and challenging. Every time I asked myself what Gary was “about,” the answer appeared self-evident—he was about his life and everything this house implied: a civilized, practical, elegant, comfortable, and efficient space, meticulously designed and carefully constructed as a canvas on which to express his family’s existence. Its design and construction had been tumbled smooth in Gary’s mind over years of meditation until each detail had rubbed every other into a smooth, nearly seamless fit like those stone foundations in Peru that will not admit a knife blade between the carefully hewn blocks.

I liked being there. There was no city filth and roil to contend with, no revolutionary posturing or ideological justifications required; no weak joint into which I could insert a wedge of radical-chic criticism. His family was joyful and healthy, having a good time in the sun in a manner that implied minimal reliance on late 20th-century capitalism. Their skin was sun-browned and squeaky clean—hair, eyes, teeth, bright and shiny—(in unavoidable contrast to my own grimy, hepatic pallor.) The house and grounds were shipshape. Gary laughed easily, and he and Masa teased one another affectionately.

It was an unexpected shock when, later that day, what had been scratching insistently passed through the door of my consciousness and I realized that I was challenged by Gary’s house. It was a more concrete, beautiful, and practical imagining of the future the Diggers sought, a superior work, and it exposed a seam of laziness, a lack of commitment, and a measure of indulgence in our shacks, overcrowded communal homes, feverish conversations, drug binges, and endlessly rebuilt trucks. Gary’s house began with a healthy self-respect at its core and established a standard of living for himself and his family based on that respect.

From that revelation onwards, my glorious visions of free food, expanding communal networks, national trade routes, and depots of junkyards to service our fleets of pre-1950 vehicles palled. I had excused many of my own and our collective failures of execution, shoddy work and making-do (along with my use of methedrine and heroin) as necessary for mocking up a pre-rehearsal prototype of our imagined future. It would be the “set” as we do in the theater: taping out the dimensions of structures not yet built upon the stage floor so that rehearsals could begin with a sense of how the finished reality would operate. Now, I was no longer certain that the temporary would not be forever. A clearing had opened in my mind, and a path was visible leading somewhere unknown that I definitely wanted to explore.

That first night we camped near Gary’s on the stone flats above the Yuba River, under stars winking in a black sky. I tried to order my thoughts. What would it mean to my Digger relationships and community, what strains would it impart on our collective life if I respected my personal standards and fashioned a life that reflected them? What would it do to our communal structures and harmony if I insisted on order, beauty, and utility in my environment? Would I be perceived as a snob? Would my friends condemn me as bourgeois? Would I be rejected from this new and precious family?

The fresh air, the soughing whispers of trees and breeze made me too drowsy to answer my own questions. My last thought as I surrendered to sleep was resolving to answer them and to one day live as I had imagined men might the day I first met Buddy Jones, Al Cohn, Zoot Sims, and Dave McKenna—the jazzmen. I wanted some feeling of freedom and joy like that in my life but to craft that life without requiring wealth or power over others to support it. It occurred to me that Gary might be an appropriate guide to help me on that quest, but would he be interested in that?

In the morning, I rose early and alone and slipped down the trail to Kitkitdizze. En route, it occurred to me that I had, by now, run as far from Morris’s home and influence as I possibly could. Finally established (sort of) at the antipodes of the continent, I was forced to admit that there were aspects of Morris’s civilized life and high standards that were worth imitating and preserving. Compared to Gary’s deeply rooted Ridge community, the Diggers were gypsies. Consequently, we inherited the ancient suspicions that all landed people hold for the rootless.

The morning was clear and bracing, and the air tangy with autumn. At the far end of Gary’s pond two deer were drinking placidly, undisturbed by my presence or the mist rising around their slender hooves. The house engaged my attention again, as if I were obliged to consider it so that I would not forget it. The tool shop and sauna, the outdoor kitchen and laundry room were all in good order. The rustic architecture was elegant in an unaffected way, and other than a child’s pink sandal, nothing was out of place. The trunks of the fruit trees were painted white to repel pests, and each tree was carefully surrounded by wire fencing to deter the deer. The portable fire extinguishers, shovels, and hoe-dads for clearing fire-lines were in place on their racks and ready for work, each handle stenciled with the word Kitkitdizze. The aesthetic was strictly utilitarian and more pleasant for that.

By the end of my morning’s review I had concluded that only a fool would ignore the opportunity to study a man who could and would build such a house. While I may have been a fool the first time we met, I resolved that I was not going to remain one.

     

The San Juan Ridge community (of which Gary and Masa were high-status members) was not keen on our trade-route idea because they feared an influx of travelers. They were nice enough, warm even, but they had their own work—thank you very much—and their own work involved assuming responsibility for the place where they lived and the health of their community. They had little time or inclination to spare time for ours.

I could not argue with their reticence. I had my own complaints and reservations about our Digger life. For all its celebration and festivity, the incandescent visions of what-could-be and the wild comedy of courageous, indulgent, and imaginative people compressed into over-crowded, emotionally pressurized spaces. The truth was that we were always contending with insufficient space and insufficient resources for our numbers. The shadow side of our leaderless anarchy was often chaos and usually marked by a lack of aesthetic finish and beauty.

Next to the stolid, skilled and practical Ridge people, the Free Family members appeared wild and raw—with all the attendant virtues and faults of those qualities. To imagine living at fifty as I currently lived at 28 invoked exhaustion.

           

Each important male adult in my life was an attempt to find the loving, nurturing father I needed. Except Gary Snyder. Gary was a mystery and it was unclear how our relationship would develop. He was cool and a tad distant. He moved through the world in a unique way. He was famous and lauded but he somehow did not leave footprints as he passed. He offered nothing to grab onto. Any relationship with him would be an uncharacteristic one for me. Besides, none of my paternal surrogates were ever adequate substitutes for [my father] Morris. They were never the flesh of which I was made. None had inspired or deformed me to the degree he had. The dominant shaping force of my existence was dead and we had never healed the wounds between us.

As if the gods had decided to generate invidious comparisons, Gary Snyder came to visit us. He had had a speaking engagement somewhere on the East Coast and dropped in to spend the night. We made a sweat in his honor and had a party with lots of drinking and music and went to bed very late. I arose before sunrise to clean up and was startled to see Gary sitting zazen meditation in the living room before the still-red coals in fireplace. He looked as if he were made of stone. His back was erect and a compelling force field of concentra­tion surrounded him. I wish now that I had taken advantage of that moment. He had, once again, without a word indicated a path to me, but I had farther to fall before I would be able to clamber up on it. I wanted to live an exemplary life, but my examples were political and not personal. I wanted, no, I needed to make my life shine like his appeared to, but that morning at Turkey Ridge, other than rereading his poems after he left, I did not know how to take the first step in that direction.

No longer addicted, but unfit for human company, and intending to get healthy by finally killing off my deranged invisible twin, I took myself off for a ten-day solo wilderness hike through Desolation Valley (appropriate name, Pete) that ended with a visit to Gary Snyder’s place in the Sierras.

During that visit, for the first time I noticed the Buddhist paraphernalia tucked around Gary’s house. Every morning Gary disappeared to meditate or run through his Buddhist chants. The connection between the qualities I admired in him and these artifacts and practices finally coalesced as understanding and by the end of that visit I had resolved to learn something about Buddhism.

I began to make the four-hour drive from San Francisco to Gary’s home in the Sierra foothills with some regularity. Farmwork had trained me to be useful and Gary readily accepted my company as an able hand. My relationship with Gary was new to me and without anxiety. He was neither a father figure nor would he stand still to be regarded as a teacher. In the absence of such projections I was able to see and hear him without too much psychic interference. It made things easy between us.

It was around this time too, in 1974, that I finally committed to protecting my health and permanently ending my use of drugs. I located a psychiatrist who agreed to work with me on a sliding scale and committed myself to three sessions a week with him. After two years of work together he died, and I began the process again with a new doctor.

      

Previously, all my attempts at liberation had been sought through altered states of mind, employing, besides heroin and methedrine, LSD, STP, San Pedro cactus, magic mushrooms, peyote, and DMT. Except for the higher Tryptamine series—(DET and DPT)—which made me feel like my retinal cells were crisping, all these experiences reinforced Jim Clancy’s early assertions that the entire universe was a single organism. The problem with my experiments was a) that they ended (you “came down” and returned to your habitual “self”), b) they sapped the body’s strength and energy, and finally, c) what does one do with such experiences? After you “return,” a gap remains between the drug- induced insights and the moment-to-moment demands and stressors of daily life. That life is always compounded by one’s habits, indulgences, fears, and delusions and I never found find that life after a drug trip was easier or more illuminated than it was before. Neither did I ever consider drug highs as the highest possibilities of consciousness. They were certainly not what my readings in Zen Buddhism, shamanic literature, and Carlos Castaneda’s books had suggested. So I resolved to discover whatever enlightenment was in a drug-free manner

While Gary and I cut and piled brush or thinned over-dense stands of timber, we would, in the fashion of men who work together, discuss the day, its attendant issues and ideas. I had never spent as much uninterrupted time with a scholar before and the breadth of Gary’s knowledge and recall was impressive. It also gave me a clear idea of how carelessly I had wasted my time at school as boy. He had the broad outlines of global history readily available, detailed and precise knowledge about Asian culture and religions—particularly Buddhism, world poetry, Paleolithic art, indigenous cultures, anthropology, and forestry and wilderness, as well as encyclopedic knowledge of American political history. Our conversations were master-class tutorials in one subject after another and each visit passed too rapidly, leaving me with many more questions to ask and copious notes to organize. Furthermore, because our relationship was not clouded by ghosts of the past, I did not take umbrage at his teaching or resent his authority and expertise. Neither did I expect him to quell my anxieties or pacify my self-doubts. There was definitely something of a master-pupil relationship between us, but a) I was requesting it, and b) Gary was assiduous in his refusal to allow his knowledge to elevate his status. That left only a peer-to-peer model for our relationship despite the doubts I held about our intellectual parity.

Gary and his first wife, Masa, had divorced and Gary’s new wife Carol Koda was an easy, fun-loving woman of great acuity. She loved hiking and the outdoors as much as Gary did, and was a dedicated bird-watcher who participated in annual bird counts, and netting, identifying, and tagging local species. What stood out about her from my point of view was that she appeared to like me, and regard me as a peer of Gary’s. It was hard for me to accept, but she would say, “Oh God, I told Gary that he should talk to you about that,” and absent any irony or pretense, I had to accept that she found some value for her husband in our friendship.

One day as we worked together, Gary’s conversation had touched on eleven centuries of Buddhist history, across India, China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan, Tibet, and Thailand, until I dropped my axe in exasperation and demanded, “Gary, how the fuck do you keep track of all this?”

He grinned broadly and said, “I’ll show you.” Setting aside our tools, we walked into his barn-study and in the center of the room he indicated an industrial-sized wooden card catalog perhaps eight feet square that he had retrieved from an old library. I pulled open a drawer, then another, and another. They were stuffed with meticulously detailed library cards cataloging not only Gary’s entire bibliography of reading and research, but also subdividing the subject matters into distinctively refined categories. Buddhism, for instance, was further categorized into Hinayana and Mahayana, and how those divisions played out culturally and practically in India, Indonesia, Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, etcetera. An equally large number of drawers were dedicated to anthropology, and its own subdivisions: the Paleolithic, Amero-Indian, Okinawans, Ainu, Kan Bushman, and cultures I had never heard of.

Gary pulled out a library card with a series of Roman and cardinal numerals he’d inscribed in black ink, and explained, “These tell me which of my journals elaborate this particular issue.” He indicated a high shelf running around three walls of the room, dense with numbered black notebooks, that he had assembled over the preceding fifty years. Putting the card back in its proper place and closing the drawer, he smiled. “You’re the first person that ever asked me about this.”

Despite the serious intent of our conversations, Gary was quick to laugh, and liked a drink, and (until he developed lung trouble) rolling a smoke at the end of the day. He loved his tools and cared for them well (a characteristic I always mark about workmen).

As I grew more intimate with his life, the connective tissue between his various concerns gradually became visible. One day, we were discussing the notion of the mad and tortured artist and the ways in which even contemporary audiences tend to measure the sincerity of young artists by the degree of self-destruction they’re willing to wreak upon themselves. I had been good friends with Janis Joplin and guitarist Mike Bloomfield, both of whom had died of overdoses. Add to that number Jimi Hendrix, and up to the present, Amy Winehouse—they form a lineage of artists who behaved as if self-destruction were the goal of their explorations. In the conversation I referenced Verlaine and Rimbaud as archetypes of such behavior.

Gary’s response was illuminating. “When Verlaine and Rimbaud were young,” he said, “they were protesting the iron grip that bourgeois rationality had on all aspects of nineteenth-century French culture—the manners, the view of reality, and the exclusion of ‘the wild’ from public life. Rationality in business and society were dominant values. ‘Deranging the senses’ was one strategy artists like Verlaine and Rimbaud employed to break free of that.

“Today,” he continued, “the bourgeoisie is sociopathic, overindulged, distracted, spoiled beyond measure, and unable to restrain its gluttony, even in the face of pending planetary destruction. In the face of such a threat, it has, by necessity, become the responsibility of the artist to model health and sanity.” Oh.

Peter Coyote

www.counterpointpress.com