Sunday February 2, 2020

Here I am, new to parenting, preparing a talk on pedagogy. What do I take as lessons from the one for the other? Both involve sound and space and movement. I dance around the room, whether it be the classroom or the living room, encouraging recognition of conditions of experience held in common, resummoning along the way history as an epic poem recited anew at every moment. In the classroom, there’s some of what Gregory Bateson discusses in Steps To an Ecology of Mind (though it’s there, too, perhaps, in my work as a parent). Spread across the early pages of Bateson’s book are a series of “metalogues”: metaphysical dialogues between a daughter and her father. Bateson defined the metalogue as “a conversation about some problematic subject” (1), though he stipulates that the conversation reflect as well on itself and its structure, hence the “meta.” That, I think, is akin to what I do as a teacher. It’s akin, as well, to what M.C. Richards does in her book Centering. Like Bateson, Richards introduces Centering as “interdisciplinary” — though Bateson says his book earns this description not just by exchanging information between and across pairs of disciplines “but in discovering patterns common to many.” The worlds rendered by the disciplines fall short of the one known by holists like Richards and Bateson.

Saturday February 1, 2020

I meet with former students for fun earnest honest conversation over drafts of beer. I trust and believe in them to do what is right. I sense them growing and awakening, having taught them several semesters prior. They are fellows, I think, in a shared story of transformation: what M.C. Richards calls “education as lived life” (Centering, p. 5). We build bridges to pick up from where last left off. We recognize each other as kindred spirits, shared in our plight despite differences of circumstance. Land, money-power — how to enter into right relations with the former amid the latter. Back home I feel sort of useless, unable to help parent due to a head cold, drowsiness and sinus pain, alas and alack. What is one to do? Too cold to walk the streets but for a few minutes spent gazing at the stars, the half moon above my head.

Friday January 31, 2020

Evenings are sometimes emotionally exhausting, baby crying, wordless work. Hardly an opportune moment for spontaneous prose. The sight of the ceiling fan calms and consoles her. Perhaps the fan functions as an ideogram representing person as many-membered being, poised in the middle of the ceiling, floating there like a lotus-flower atop an upside-down pond. When she falls asleep, I sit around wondering about Hell’s Angels and their place in the counterculture of the 1960s. I scan my shelves for books by Hunter S. Thompson, his book Hell’s Angels somewhere out of reach. Charles Olson interrupts with his essay “Projective Verse.”

Thursday January 30, 2020

Resting on a branch in the air above me, a majestic hawk. It flies between trees as if to accompany me as I walk with my daughter. From an awakened sense of Indigenous history let us renew our course. Where are we? What are we doing here, people? Feeling a bit spread out, hardly able to blow words, chowing down on sesame seeds, life multi-tasked into some as yet unrecognizable new genre. Realtime literary beat poetry spontaneous prose free association folk tale jam fest, alongside critiques of Orientalism and a cardinal there on the wire, dropping in for a visit as I write. Sarah walks by, leans the baby in for a kiss. Next stop, Skip Hop Vibrant Village. Kerouac writes in his book The Dharma Bums about his summer in Washington’s Cascade Mountains, serving as a fire lookout, living in a small, wooden, one room cabin atop Desolation Peak. I hold space for a moment like Kerouac, a sitting Buddha atop Desolation Peak, mountainous there beside the Vibrant Village.

Monday January 27, 2020

Witness from micro and macro perspectives, spiral galaxies of charitable giving. Countless acts of gift and receipt. For these are what make the world go ’round. Gifts appear at all scales of being, to be had and to be given. Food, flowers, books, recommendations, playlists. Words, too, as gifts exchanged among worlds, nations, persons, human and nonhuman relatives and kin. Which, however, are the ones that need saying?

Sunday January 26, 2020

Baby strokes my Adam’s apple as I burp her over my shoulder. I wrap her in my arms and prepare to step outdoors. These are our doings, our joys. We go for a walk. We see the world. Exploration of outer space. How does one respond to one’s country having landed on the moon? What modifications occur to our myths and our cognitive maps? Anne Kent Rush ventured a guess with her 1976 book Moon, Moon, wherein she quotes the old Chinese maxim, “Love everything in the universe, because the Sun and Moon and Earth are but one body.” Let us strive for a state of pure and fearless openness to all things.

Saturday January 25, 2020

Each day we invent new terms of affection for her: Buddha nugget, snuggle bunny, astral glow worm. We march through the neighborhood en masse, forming spontaneously around ourselves a people’s patrol. I picture as our avatars the toughs from Double Dragon. Afterwards I stand outdoors reading Thoreau on wild fruits. I take breaks and dip into Sherry L. Smith’s Hippies, Indians & the Fight for Red Power, a book that references an angry 1978 review-essay by Leslie Marmon Silko accusing Gary Snyder of “cultural imperialism.” Snyder’s book Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. It’s a book I wish to teach alongside the Silko essay the next time I teach American Literature.

Friday January 24, 2020

Breathe, relax, listen around. Ask into a phone, “Who are you, love?” and type, “Bless you!” Seek out “America Needs Indians,” the multimedia show that Stewart Brand performed at the 1966 San Francisco Trips Festival. The show placard for the festival lists “America Needs Indians” as the first part of a double bill on Friday January 21, the first night of the three-day festival. It describes the event as follows: “AMERICA NEEDS INDIANS — Sensorium 9. By Stewart Brand and Zach Stewart. 600 slides, 2 movies, 4 sound tracks, flowers, food, rock ‘n’ roll, Eagle Bone Whistle, Thunderstorm, live Cheyenne Tipi, Chippewas, Sioux, Blackfeet, Tlingit, Makah, Pomo and Miwuk, plus anthropologists.” If ever I happened upon a time machine, the Trips Festival is certainly among the events of the past I’d visit. Charles Perry describes the festival in his history of Haight-Ashbury — though he says no more about “America Needs Indians” than that it was “mournfully out of place in the rackety, echoing space of Longshoremen’s Hall.” Ben Van Meter shot footage at the festival, eventually releasing a short called S.F. Trips Festival, An Opening (1966). Look, too, for a feature film of his called Acid Mantra or Rebirth of a Nation (1968). Wheeler Winston Dixon discusses Van Meter in his book The Exploding Eye: A Re-Visionary History of 1960s American Experimental Cinema.