After Panicking I Watch a Buddhist Documentary

http://eng.longquanzs.org/Annimation.htm
A few years back, one of my colleagues hosted a group of monks from the Beijing Longquan Temple. They were traveling and speaking to try to build awareness of their principles, and they had been working on a documentary film that illustrated their alignment with the natural world. I loved the film, with its stop-action animated illustrations of environmental disorders and sometimes incorrect English-over-English subtitles. It felt very earnest and innocent, and it reached me at a time when I was feeling more or less disordered as a creature, as I often do--life often feels baffling to me, not in an inaccurate way--I mean, a quote-unquote accurate perception of life often feels like a perception of confusion, to me. Anyway, I'd had a moderate episode of freaking out that very afternoon about something I don't remember now, and I was very happy to attend the presentation and kind of sink into a message that was calmly mystified about the world. During the film, I was able to allow the narration to just replace the voice of my inner consciousness, and I found this very reassuring and also a little funny and poignant. At the end of the session, I stayed behind and wrote the first two drafts of this poem in the empty lecture hall. The poem was later published in a magazine called JuJuBes, from GOSS 183. Some recent searching shows that that mag's gone out of print, and I'm fond of the poem, so I'm putting it here.
After Panicking, I Watch a Buddhist Documentary

and breathe and breathe and allow
my stream of consciousness to sync
with the English captions on the English language film
                                              I explain
the Serpent Bridge’s decay    
the gray-haired god vanishes I say
in the truck of a tree         not sure why
monks are making clay
-mation stop-action action movies
for English-on-English translation
but I announce that they’re webcasting
the monastery bell
                                            I narrate
over the silent meal
and when the visiting dignitary steals
a pastry from the chef’s rolling tray
I laugh five times in brackets
and imagine myself healed

personality             arbitrary
memory                   I began many
depressing thought experiments
lost golf balls embedded in a hillside
dissolve in ivy more slowly
than species              love
                          real
and experienced once       dreaming
during a nap on a weekday
afternoon before the court
appearance where you surrender

I believe these monks
want to share a planetary feeling:
Earth will miss its failing clay
bee spiraling into the forest
remembering nothing
of attraction                              broken
                                          and why
do I remember the captain
of the girl’s golf team
guiding my fingers       pressing
                                                       breath
accelerating into pleasure
                                            outside her
                parents’ house         driveway 
                                      fairway
   river and sky expanding
                                           I’m afraid
                                   I wanted this
    living like a child wants

        every form of sugar

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beautiful Doom: Heizer's "City" and Scott's "Blade Runner"

Image
There’s a striking similarity between Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott’s pyramidal design for the “Tyrell Corporation” headquarters in Blade Runner (1982) and the photos I’ve seen of Michael Heizer’s monumental plaza, Complex City , which has been under construction in Garden Valley, Nevada since 1972.  I’ve not seen any evidence that Trumbull & Scott would’ve been influenced by Heizer. I think the resemblance is probably nothing more than some shared archaeological interests. Still, I love the fact of the resemblance, because it really opens up a web of thinking about art and architecture’s relationship to the future. Both works explicitly and implicitly imagine futures, and both works have monumental properties:  they commemorate the present for a viewer in distant time. I want to start by outlining the web of connections, here: Both City  and Tyrell Corporation are obviously pyramid st ructures, and the structures really are similar—it’s as if Heizer’s massive scul
Read more

Layli Long Soldier's "38"

I'm reading Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier, and in the poem "38," linked here , I learned some history about the Dakota 38 and the "Sioux Uprising" of 1862, also known as "The Dakota War of 1862" (as an aside, this is the same historical event involved in the controversy at the Walker Art Center over the sculpture, "Scaffold." Long Soldier's poem was published by Graywolf, out of Minneapolis. It wouldn't surprise me if the poem was part of what catalyzed the Walker's awareness of the issue, but... that's just me speculating). I learned many things in the poem: I learned about the 38 men who were executed. I learned about Lincoln's presidency and the historical record of his presidency. I learned about the commemorative horseback ride each winter, preserving the memory of the events and of the 38 who were executed. And I learned of Andrew Myrick, who was killed in that conflict. When asked about the condition of the
Read more

Michael Heizer Sightings

Image
I recently watched the documentary, Black White & Gray , about Sam Wagstaff, the New York curator, collector, and photographer who was Robert Mapplethorpe’s partner in a variety of ways.  It’s a really compelling study of a complex human being.  It's insightful, vivid and smart, and really honors Wagstaff's life and legacy without oversimplifying it.  It streams on Netflix.  In addition to all the ways that I really enjoyed the film and respect it as an excellent documentary profile, I was delighted and surprised to learn that Wagstaff had represented Michael Heizer during the (short?) phase of his life when he worked and made a splash on the east coast (later, Heizer would say, “I’d been to the east, and didn’t like what I saw.  It looked like it was degenerating.”).   Wagstaff put Heizer’s works in his shows, and set up a famous earthwork exhibition at the Detroit Art Institute, where Heizer was to drag a heavy mass across the lawn, causing the mass to s
Read more