Marvin was old. He would have turned 90 this January. He’d been in failing health for a while. As he said to me towards the end, I’m running out of juice. He sort of likened himself to an old used car that just kept breaking down and taken to the shop, and put back together for a few more miles but there are just so many times you can get it running again. So in a sense there was no surprise when the end came for him, yet there’s something I think in our human nature, such that death is always a surprise, whether it’s our friend or loved ones or whether we’re facing our own. No matter how much we chant and talk about impermanence, somehow it’s in us to believe that there’s going to be a complete exception in our case, at least one postponement after another. Yet for Marv and for all of us, eventually, the postponements run out.
It’s particularly hard for someone like Marv who seemed like he’d been around forever. It must have been 47 some years that I’ve known Marv. When he first came to me, he was in pretty rough shape, but over the years I think he matured into a wise and generous and devoted friend as well as being one of the original members of this sangha. He had a complicated and unusual life. To meet him he would seem like a very simple guy, and you might not know that he’d done graduate work in physics, and from there he went off to work in the Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest. In his travels he got to meet up with Krishnamurthi who eventually led him to David Shainberg and to me.
Someplace along the line I believe I introduced him to the work of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, and Marv, I think, felt a deep connection with them, both in their love and involvement with nature, but also with their sense of work and taking care of the next thing, and doing things well and carefully, as if everything matters. I think that that kind of attitude and practice grounded him in a really exemplary way through a lot of hardship over a lot of years, and to see him do that, I often felt he taught me as much as I was teaching him.
Even though Marv was one of the original members of this sangha and joined in our Buddhist practice all these decades ago, he never stopped thinking of himself as an old Jew. He was always very connected to his roots in Brooklyn and family. He was full of memories of the old days, going out to Ebbets Field to see the Dodgers, and over the years he remained in contact with Jewish community. I remember him having a particular affection for Rabbi Gelberman, wise old man, and he maintained a contact with that congregation, where, as I understand it, his poems were regularly read as part of the Friday night service.
He would tell me he would recite Jewish prayers in the morning as well as sitting, staying grounded in his own history, his own tradition, not erasing it because of his involvement with Zen. I want to devote most of this time to Marvin’s own words and reading some of his poems.
I think he learned primarily from Berry how to put his everyday experience into simple words that were often very moving in their directness and honesty and feeling. Because even though Marv had a lot of trouble sometimes, a lot of pain in his life, the poems also reflect, I think, a deep capacity to enter into the joy of the moment, the joy of nature, the joy of interacting with people around him in the simplest, most natural ways, and there was a way in which those poems, without much artifice, just captured a capacity to really appreciate the moment in a way that I think we could all learn from.
So I’m going to read some of Marv’s poems and then at the end his brother Jay will read another and say some words as well.
EASE
Reaching over the counter
of the newspaper stand,
two sets of hands meet.
One receives a dollar,
the other gets a quarter.
Then letting go, nodding, smiling.
Day in and day out
the earth spins around itself.
Year in and year out
it rotates around the sun.
A man sits talking to his friend
who, to answer a question,
pulls a book from the shelf.
He opens, reads, nods.
The conversation continues. . .
AFTER WEDNESDAY ZAZEN
I still felt rotten
and walked to Central Park,
going along a short path
on the outside of its inside,
sitting on a bench of thick boughs
and slats on a little rise
above the main path.
A robin sat on the fence for a while,
the air filled with bird sounds
from everywhere, it seemed.
A large elm, strong in his life
stood amid maples, locusts,
grasses and brush.
Nothing happened. I was still the same.
I remembered afterwards
talking with Lucas, then Claire,
smiling at each other,
The rottenness was absent both times.
WINTER PRAYER
Let the winters here become cold again
beset with cold winds and bitter snows.
Let the blustery arctic wind come blowing through
the streets and alleyways, not missing a
nook or corner, and let it chill the hell out of
everything and everyone to the bone, making us all
shiver and stand in awe of its piercing power.
Let the snow cover and blanket everything in the
city, and let the skies be full of slow moving
billowy clouds, so that when night arrives, a steel
blue, speckled with stars, can come peeping
through, making a man look and think of nothing
else but that for awhile.
Let these winters make him think of only
the cold, giving birth to a thankfulness for what he
has: warm clothing, the coziness of a warm house,
family, friends and work.
And then let it snow some more, so that he can
walk along the quiet lamp lit streets amidst the
little houses spewing aromas of burning wood and
among the trees sprouting ice blossoms.
A FRIENDLY ORDINARY HALLELUJAH
As a brisk but comfortable
February dusk approached
with a pleasant easy breeze,
he looked into the soft winter clouds
extending everywhere, sighed
in the brief relief of quiet streets
and said, “What a job You did, Man!”
The next he calls a QUARTET SONATA IN GLUTTONY
One of Marv’s wonderful innovations was to pair his poems with the poems of others, sometimes as duets, this time as a quartet, and I think it was like a jazz combo with the instruments taking their turns doing solos on a common theme. Here we have four little poems, calling it a quartet, one by the Japanese poet, Ryokan, another by a Benedictine sister, Mary Lou Kownacki, one by a Kentucky farmer, Wendell Berry, and as he says, an old Jew, Marvin Blaustein.
First Ryokan:
A GIFT OF SEVEN POMEGRANATES
Splitting them,
Picking them apart,
Breaking them in two:
Eating, eating, eating –
Not letting them out of my mouth!
Mary Lou Kownacki:
CHERRIES FROM A ROADSIDE STAND
Driving on Route 5
With a basket of sweet cherries
At my side.
I pop them into my mouth by the handful.
One by one I spit the pits
Out the window.
Why do philosophers agonize
Over the meaning of life?
Here, taste the first sweet cherry
Of the season.
Wendell Berry:
SEVENFOLD
The cherries turn ripe,
and the birds come: red-headed
and red-bellied woodpeckers,
blue jays, cedar waxwings,
robins – beautiful, hungry, wild
in our domestic tree. I pick
with the birds, gathering the red
cherries alight among the dark
leaves, my hands so sticky
with juice the fruit will hardly
drop from them into the pail.
The birds pick as I pick, all
of us delighted in the weighty heights
– the fruit red ripe, the green leaves,
the blue sky and white clouds,
all tending to flight – making
the most of this sweetness against
the time when there will be none.
Finally, Marv’s own poem:
CHERRIES ON SALE AT THE PRODUCE MARKET
There are red ones and white ones.
I buy a pound of each
and think of the healthy bounty I am taking home.
I drive the short way back, the two
bags by my side and begin to eat, first
a few red then a few white. Though
I tell myself to go easy, I can’t. One,
two, three at a time becoming
more and more addicted to the texture
and sweetness. I sit by the curb
in the parked car, salivating for the next
bunch, though my mouth is full.
Emptying the bags was not by design.
If they call me “Fat Boy” tomorrow – so be it!
Thank you, Marv.