How we go on
Thursday, May 8th, was Gary Snyder’s 95th birthday, and I want to thank Parnel for alerting me to the video available now from the Library of Congress on Vimeo that is a wonderful set of readings and interviews with Gary and many of those of his generation: Ginsburg, McClure, Peter Coyote, contemporary poet Jane Hirshfield. I really recommend it to all of you if you have a chance to see it. I gather it was put together from footage filmed maybe back in the mid-90s, so people are still in their prime. It’s wonderful to hear him talk about his life and work, and I don’t think we can ever over-estimate the influence his life and his poetry, his example, has made for Zen in America.
I think there’s a way in which if we all had our own individual lineage charts about what brought us to Zen and what Zen meant to us, particularly in my generation, growing up in the 60s, Snyder would be right in the middle of those lineage charts as the person who showed us that it was possible not just to read about Zen, but to practice, and not just to practice it in some monastic setting, but to bring it back here, and to have it manifest the way we live and the way we think about our values, our lives, and to express it in our work, our poetry.
When I hear him speak and read, I’m just so deeply impressed and so deeply grateful for his example. I’d like to read one of his poems called Axe Handles, which is a poem about transmission.
One afternoon the last week in April
Showing Kai how to throw a hatchet
One-half turn and it sticks in a stump.
He recalls the hatchet-head
Without a handle, in the shop
And go gets it, and wants it for his own.
A broken-off axe handle behind the door
Is long enough for a hatchet,
We cut it to length and take it
With the hatchet head
And working hatchet, to the wood block.
There I begin to shape the old handle
With the hatchet, and the phrase
First learned from Ezra Pound
Rings in my ears!
"When making an axe handle
the pattern is not far off."
And I say this to Kai
"Look: We'll shape the handle
By checking the handle
Of the axe we cut with—"
And he sees. And I hear it again:
It's in Lu Ji's Wên Fu, fourth century
A.D. "Essay on Literature"-—in the
Preface: "In making the handle
Of an axe
By cutting wood with an axe
The model is indeed near at hand."
My teacher Shih-hsiang Chen
Translated that and taught it years ago
And I see: Pound was an axe,
Chen was an axe, I am an axe
And my son a handle, soon
To be shaping again, model
And tool, craft of culture,
How we go on.
I think that’s a lovely picture of how very literally craft and knowledge is transmitted, father to son, one generation to the next. And yet it’s also a very idealized picture. What’s handed on, father to son, is not always so smoothly crafted. Sons don’t always want to become just like their fathers.
Ezra Pound, whom he quotes, wanted to bring what was valuable from previous cultures, both classical Western and Chinese, into the living stream of modern poetry. But his motto was also “Make it new.” Whether he was translating Homer at the beginning of Canto I or old Chinese poetry in Cathay, or Latin in homage to Sextus Propertius, he wasn’t just copying what had gone before. He was making it new, turning it into something that the makers of the original might not even recognize, and which might not even always count as a translation, but rather an improvisation, or even a parody.
This business of transmission from one generation to the next is never a matter of simple replication. The axe handle is the model. It needs to be made a certain way to be able to function in the axe, but no doubt there are many ways to do it, ways to keep it simple, ways to decorate it, ways that are very different from the one that you originally hold in your hand. I think that as a teacher, for a long time it felt that one of Joko’s great virtues was that she did not try to clone herself in her dharma successors. The crop that followed were all distinctive in their own ways, maybe eventually to a point that she became uneasy with. That’s always an intergenerational danger. The parent wants the child to grow up and go their own way, but maybe not too much their own way, maybe not wander too far. It’s always a challenge to see what the next generation makes of what we leave to them.
I’m still 20 years short of where Gary Snyder is, turning 75, and I hope that I will have as productive or even remotely close to as productive the next 20 years as he has had. In the meantime, practice is being passed on. I’m handing over things to Chris in ways we’ll talk about more in our sangha meeting, and we’ll see what he does with it. Maybe it will be a little bit more like what Pound did with Propertius than what Kai did with making a hatchet. We’ll have to see.