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Number
284
February March 2000
Arrows in
Mid-Air
JACK FOLEY
Copyright
© 2000 Poetry Flash
AMERICAN ZEN BONES: MAEZUMI ROSHI STORIES, by
Philomene Long, Beyond Baroque Books, Los Angeles,
1999, 108 pages, $10.00 paper. Available from Small
Press Distribution, Berkeley,
www.spdbooks.org.
The old Chinese Zen masters were steeped in
Taoism. They saw nature in its total
interrelatedness, and saw that every creature and
every experience is in accord with the Tao of
nature just as it is. This enabled them to accept
themselves as they were, moment by moment, with the
least need to justify anything.
---Alan Watts, "Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen"
(1958)
"When you do something, you should burn yourself
completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace
of yourself."
---Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind
(1970)
There was Noth Beach in San Francisco, Greenwich
Village in New York, and Venice Beach in Southern
California.
Of the three, Venice Beach has been studied
least. It was the subject of Lawrence Lipton's
sensationally successful The Holy
Barbarians, published in 1959. More recently,
John Arthur Maynard produced Venice West: The
Beat Generation in Southern California
(Rutgers, 1991). "Venice, California, has seldom
been an entirely respectable place," writes
Maynard. "If there are no plaques dedicated to the
poets and artists who made it famous as an enclave
of the Beat Generation in the late fifties…it
is because if they were still around in force,
respectable people would undoubtedly be making
plans to chase them away":
[The artists'] contempt for middle-class
people and their values was the equal of any New
York intellectual's and they cheerfully paid a
higher price for it---complete and voluntary
obscurity. By their own transmuted version of the
Puritan ethic, a fully realized human being was one
who lived for art, friendship, love, and candor,
and whose devotion was expressed through
undistracted, unrelenting, and unrewarded
work…[T]he [Greenwich] Village
rebels really expected to transform American
civilization; the Venice beats did not…Most of
them remain unknown because they refused to cash in
on themselves.…
Tony Scibella, one of the poets Maynard
interviewed, described "the powerful 'drive for
nonrecognition' among Venice poets and
artists.…"
The central figure of the Venice poetry scene
was Stuart Z. Perkoff, a brilliant writer whose
work has finally been collected by the National
Poetry Foundation. Voices of the Lady: Collected
Poems appeared in 1998. Perkoff was also a
marvelous reader: I have some very rare tapes, and
they are stunning.
Philomene Long was with Perkoff when he died in
1974. When she met him, says Maynard, she was
"thirty-three, dark, mercurial, and very, very
Irish." An "artist, a poet, film-maker,…and a
former nun," she was to be Perkoff's "friend,
soulmate, and principal flesh-and-blood 'lady' for
the remainder of his life."
Long was the daughter of a naval officer. She
grew up in San Diego, went to Catholic schools, and
graduated from Our Lady of Peace Academy. Her
vocation as a nun came at age seven, and she
entered the convent "as a rather wild teenager."
She became, Maynard says, "a rather wild nun." A
friend in the convent told Long about Venice and
told her as well that she was a "beatnik." When
Long asked why, her friend replied, "Because you
spend so many hours looking at the sky." After a
failed marriage, Maynard goes on, "she moved to
Venice to write poetry, shoot film, and live
exactly as she chose." She became "a regular
feature of the Ocean Front in her tennis shoes,
black thrift-shop dresses, long, straight hair,
alarm-clock pendant, and heavy silver cross." She
met Perkoff in 1973. After his death she continued
to live in Venice---and, twenty-five years later,
she is "still around in force."
Over the years Long has published many books of
poetry, including two collaborations with her
husband, poet John Thomas: The Book of Sleep
and The Ghosts of Venice West. She has also
made films: The Beats: An Existential
Comedy, with Allen Ginsberg, and The
California Missions, with Martin Sheen. Her
interest in Zen began in 1968. In 1974 she began to
study with Maezumi Roshi and continued with him
until Maezumi's death in 1995. This book arises out
of that relationship. "Two major pioneers of Zen in
the West," Long writes, "were Suzuki Roshi, who
came to San Francisco, and Maezumi Roshi, who came
to Los Angeles":
America was fertile ground for them. There was a
reaction here to post-World-War- Two materialism.
Old structures and thought patterns were splitting
at the seams, coming apart.
In the 1940s and '50s, when America's youth
looked to the sky, we saw not only a blue expanse.
We saw a bomb. Another kind of cloud. With small
expectations from a world that could explode at any
time, our response was to live from moment to
moment. This young American gaze met Japanese Zen.
Two arrows meeting in mid-air.
Zen: living in NOW. The smile of direct
experience.
American Zen Bones: Maezumi Roshi Stories
is neither a memoir nor a biography. It is
precisely what the subtitle says it is: a
storybook. The title suggests Paul Reps' collection
of Zen and pre-Zen writings, Zen Flesh, Zen
Bones, which also contains many stories:
Not the Wind, Not the Flag
Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said:
"The flag
is moving."
The other said: "The wind is moving."
The sixth patriarch happened to be passing by. He
told them:
"Not the wind, not the flag; mind is moving."
That is exactly the kind of thing we find in
American Zen Bones, except that Long's
stories are all centered in Maezumi Roshi (if they
can be said to be 'centered' in anything: Alan
Watts points out that the Zen master "no longer
feels that he is an ego…He sees that his ego
is his persona or social role, a somewhat arbitrary
selection of experiences with which he has been
taught to identify himself."---"Beat Zen, Square
Zen, and Zen"). Here is a sample from Long's
book:
The Purpose of Zen
Maezumi was asked, "What is the purpose of
Zen?"
He replied, "To be stupid. To be really stupid.
Is Maezumi being rude? Yes, of course he is, but
he is being rude in the best tradition of Zen
masters. Is he saying that the person who asked the
question is stupid? Again, yes, but with some
qualification. The master is sensing a somewhat
self-congratulatory quality in that question. The
person asking it believes himself to be asking an
important question---a question about
purpose. But such a question cannot be answered in
Zen terms. The question implies a sense of the
asker's intelligence: he is asking a serious
question about a serious subject. Maezumi's answer
deliberately pops that bubble. Zen is the
opposite of the implications of such a
question; indeed, in the context of such questions,
practicing Zen is being "really
stupid"---unintelligent. The question is
turned in upon itself and made the subject of the
answer. Beyond this, the questioner is being asked
to make some fundamental changes in his own life.
He thinks he is "intelligent." He must become
"really stupid." Of course he is "really stupid"
already, but not in the right way---if there is a
right way. And how would a "really stupid" person
know whether there were a right way? The
brief exchange suggests that proper intelligence is
stupidity and that proper stupidity is
intelligence. Etceteras. Mind is moving.
It is with such considerations in mind that Long
claims her book "is not about Zen. This book is
Zen." Though the book deals with Maezumi Roshi, who
had a real, historical existence, we cannot quite
trust it to be telling us the exact historical
truth about him. Long says, "I have taken a certain
amount of creative license, in the spirit of
Maezumi Roshi." In the concluding piece she tells
Maezumi that she is putting him in a book. She
asks, "Do you want to know what I have you say?"
His answer is, "Make it up." She does. Maezumi is
the catalyst. It is through him that Long finds
"the moment of transmission between East and West,
the impact, the instant of touch." But the point is
not the catalyst; the point is the
transmission.
But make no mistake about it, American Zen
Bones is not a work of fiction. Despite Long's
"creative license," we get plenty of genuine
information about Maezumi Roshi. We learn that he
was born in 1931, that he came to America in 1956,
and that in 1967 he founded the Zen Center of Los
Angeles. He was a poet and a calligrapher as well
as a teacher, and there are samples of his
calligraphy in the book. The stories are all
dialogues, and Maezumi emerges as witty, evasive,
direct, caring, energizing. At times, speaking of
himself, he is quite moving: "I am always tired. I
am always hurting." Long's stories arise out of the
community of his disciples---she is often quoting
people---and they all bear re-reading. Praising
Maezumi, Peter Matthiessen observes that he "moved
beautifully, leaving no trace." At one point
Maezumi tells one of this pupils (all of whom seem
to have taken Japanese middle names: "Lorraine
Gessho Kumpf," "Robert Joshin Althouse," "Bernard
Tetsugen Glassmen") "an old tale about a man who
had seen through to the inseparable nature of the
Buddha-Dharma." The pupil responds, "Oh, that's a
lovely story, Roshi!" The master answers angrily,
"It's NOT a STORY!!"
The stories in this book are NOT STORIES,
too.
In Zen and Western Thought Masao Abe
writes that "Zen is neither absolute knowledge nor
salvation by God, but Self-Awakening":
In the Self-Awakening of Zen, each individual
existence---whether person, animal, plant or
hing---manifests itself in its particularity as
expressed in the formulation, "Willows are green,
flowers are red," and yet each is interpenetrating
harmoniously as expressed in the formulation, "When
Lee drinks the wine, Chang gets drunk." This is not
an end but the ground on which our being and
activity must be properly based.
It is the purpose of this delightful,
life-changing little book to touch that ground.
Long tells us that "Presently, there are more
Buddhists in the United States than Episcopalians."
Reading American Zen Bones will give you an
idea of why that might be.
Poet Jack Foley is contributing editor to
Poetry Flash. His recent books include
Dead/Requiem, a collaboration by Ivan
Argüelles and Jack Foley. This essay will be
included in O Powerful Western Star, a
forthcoming collection of Jack Foley's critical
writings.
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