"Too Many Words"

 

What I learned from Phil Whalen about writing.

It's a matter of some reassurance

That we are physically indistinguishable from other men.

When introspection shows us

That we have different degrees of intelligence

Varying capacities for knowing morality

We lose something of our complacency

    --Scenes of Life at the Capital

One morning in July of 2022, Google’s algorithm decided that I needed to hear James Dalessandro, bestselling novelist, journalist and filmmaker, tell me about ”The Beat Poets and the Summer of Love.” Or to do justice to the algorithm’s intrinsic value, I was to pay 25 dollars to listen to Mr. Dalessandro’s wise words. When I read the blurb, he told me that Lawrence and Allen and Jack would spill light on the short lived revolution. 

In 1967 more than 100,000 young people descended into the Haight-Ashbury, donned tye-dyed tee shirts or just stripped off their clothes, took lots of drugs, had lots of sex and proclaimed a new age. The Summer of Love was also the end of Phil's sojourn in Kyoto, so it is possible that he had returned to San Francisco. But Jack had already departed the scene, renounced a lot of the Beat philosophy which he thought just gave people permission to be spiteful. I think it highly unlikely that Phil would have shared his friend Allen’s enthusiasm for a revolution. Phil’s hedonism was more restrained. Very much more actually but that didn’t stop him from loving Allen. 

Still I find it abhorrent that the Road Scholar Scholar didn’t include Phil; perhaps the platform insists that their experts focus on hot money makers. 25 bucks is 25 bucks.

I lived with Phil for about 4 years after he’d received dharma transmission from his teacher. I sat with him in sparse zendo, recorded his talks, got yelled at, went to sesshin, sewed a rakusu, listened to his gab, went with him to Walgreens and took lay precepts under him. I was as close to Phil as most of zen friends, except for the very few he really allowed into his life, Allen for one, and I know that he was in love with Lew Welsh, but aside from that, Phil was a lone wolf. We could be friends, but when I got to a place where real intimacy might have been possible, he ended it abruptly. I know others who had the same experience. He wrote “When introspection shows us/ That we have different degrees of intelligence,” and he thought of himself on the high end of that scale.

And despite his remarkable intelligence and way with words, Buddhist Phil could be incredibly dull. He once taught a class on the Heart Sutra and my head didn’t burst with the astounding insight into the interplay of form and no-form, full and empty, thinking and the end of thinking. I had to fight off sleep. Phil preferred his Buddhism boring. He could be as doctrinaire as any squawking human being, and then some. Today however, as the clouds drift down from the mountains, and internally I begin to count between the thunder and the faint flash to locate where it has struck, I am reading his verse with joy and gratitude. He was a genius. 

Morning is fading and the clouds have covered Moon Peak. I can only see as far as my closest neighbor, a small Indian hotel called “Heaven’s View,” 25 meters to the East. Monsoon is closing in. When I knew Phil and was his student, his eyesight had failed to the point where, if I can weigh his words and match it with what I can recall of his gait and gaze, he could only see vague cloud-like formations, and that had to be enough. Misdiagnosed glaucoma would take away the joy of seeing words dance on the page. He was not resentful, or if he was, he didn’t show it. The more immediate concern was how words, which had been the center of his life, the real source of his joy, would continue to nourish a voracious appetite for clarity. It was also an inventive appetite, so we experimented. I was enlisted into a small army of amanuenses. 

We would read to him. I could see him concentration latch onto a passage and hang there. Sometimes there would be a request to return to the beginning of a passage. We could not stop until instructed or we heard the han for zazen. 

Once in while there would be a request from some recondite journal which Phil could never turn down. It usually meant reworking an older prose piece. There would be no more poems. He would find a short piece that came from years back--one that I remember was about dancing around a bonfire on the beach near Bolinas. I read it once. Phil had me shift the order a few clauses, then I read it again. We put some back into their original order. I read the passage again. And then again. Finally in what sounded almost like a sigh, “Too many words. Too many words.” That was the point where work began in earnest. 

 

Issan’s Drinking Buddies Find all 108 Beads of his Mala

There are 108 beads on a Buddhist mala. Count them, all of them

There was a small bar just around the corner from the Hartford Street Zen Center on 18th close to Castro. It was next to a laundromat, and had sawdust on the floor. A real neighborhood watering hole called “Uncle’s.” 

 

Issan loved his Friday night cocktail ritual. That is why Hartford Street did the usual Saturday sitting and lecture on Sundays. Between 9 and 10 on Friday nights, Issan would put on his pressed t-shirt, zennie fatigues and head out to Uncle's, usually alone. He liked to talk with the regulars, ordinary gay men who lived in the neighborhood. Despite his blue Japanese costume, he was also considered a regular. He told me that the bartender there made a fabulous Gin martini, not the new fashionable vodka kind that they drank in the cruising bars, but real Bombay Sapphire Gin with the blue label and just the right amount of vermouth. He would limit himself, try to be home for bed in time to sleep and get up early for zazen.

One night he was chatting away, playing with his mala. It broke and all the beads slipped off the string and scattered into the saw dust, under all the stools and between turned over barrels along the walls. Everyone stopped, the music was shut off and everyone began picking up beads. They found all 108 of them, not a one missing. I’m sure that Issan counted them several times.

He was one of the crowd on Friday nights; they knew who he was, just an ordinary guy who dressed up, and he knew them. It was love.

No more, no less.

“Love is shown more in deeds than in words.” Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Philip Asks Me the Big Question

 Was Phil as confused as he pretended to be? Or was he just being a wily old fox?

Mumonkan Case 2 

Hyakujô and the Fox 

Whenever master Hyakujô delivered a sermon, an old man was always there listening with the monks. When they left, he left too. One day, however, he remained behind. 

The master asked him, “What man are you, standing in front of me?” 

The man replied, “Indeed, I am not a man. In the past, in the time of Kashyapa Buddha, I lived on this mountain as a priest. On one occasion a monk asked me, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' Because of this answer (For this answer evidencing a clinging to absoluteness), I fell into the state of a fox for 500 lives. Now, I beg you, Master, please say a turning word on my behalf and release me from the body of a fox.” 

Then he asked, “Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?” 

The master answered, “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” Upon hearing this, the old man immediately became deeply enlightened

It was Saturday morning. Only a few minutes remained until the last period of meditation ended. Zenshin was set to descend the stairs to the zendo and begin the ritual of opening the dharma. He was legally blind. It all required a lot of effort and planning. He was going to give a talk on this koan, Hyakujô and the Fox.

I was being his jisha and carried the incense. When we paused at the top of the stairs, he suddenly decided that he needed to check the exact wording of the old man’s question. Phil, another old man, could not make a mistake. He asked out loud, “Does a man of enlightenment fall under the yoke of causation or not?  What was his answer, yea or nay? What did it say exactly? Is the man free from Cause and Effect, or is he still trapped?” 

Then he asked me, “Check it out in the Mumonkan, will you?” But the tone of his voice sounded more like a command. He appeared agitated. He seemed to expect that I should have had some ability to find a particular case. “It’s very famous, he said. “It's in the Mumonkan. It must be on the shelf in the living room somewhere. It’s a very important case.” 

I have described his ability to find page, paragraph and sentence of an author he loved in his meticulously arranged library, but that morning, standing in the living room at Hartford Street, the books on the shelves were a total disorganized mess.

With the koans, or at least at that particular moment, my ability completely disappeared. When I eventually located the Mumonkan, he said he could not remember the case number, and he seemed to be blaming me for not supplying the missing information. Eventually, making us only a few minutes late, I read, 'Does a perfectly enlightened person fall under the law of cause and effect or not?' I answered, 'He does not.' 

Phil said, “Good. His first answer is no. Thank you.” Now he was prepared to open the dharma. I remember nothing about his talk. Questions tumbled over and over in my mind--not just is the enlightened man free from the law and cause and effect, but what exactly are we trying to free ourselves from anyway? What part of my life did I need to unyoke to be happy

A few years later I sat with this koan for days in the damp woods of Camp Meeker. When the sun came up till the day darkened, I thought of Phil, his blindness and his generosity. The wily old fox had given me a koan filled with indecision, red herrings, witchcraft and a few wrong answers, probably just traps or misdirections laid out with skill.  He told me that he thought he remembered it correctly, but he wanted to double check it. What was this puzzle that he had to get right? 

Philip was a man whose life, almost all of his waking life not occupied with meditation, was devoted to language and the written word. I can attest that words were his lovers, and he returned the favor. Now he couldn’t read at all anymore. He was almost completely blind and the reason was simply misdiagnosed glaucoma which would have been easily treatable. What a tragedy. If only a doctor had been able to give him the correct word for his blindness and not assigned some rare disease that only one a thousand get. Or if he had only gotten a second opinion when the highly recommended quack told him to kiss his sight goodbye. Maybe not as bad as 500 lives as a fox, but close.

Sometimes the law of cause and effect seems filled with random errors. Perhaps the law is quirky and poorly administered?  The koan says “The law of cause and effect cannot be obscured.” 

The zen Master says he's happy to have saved us all!

Phil’s verse:

HYMNUS AD PATREM SINENSIS

by Philip Whalen

I praise

 those ancient Chinamen

Who left me a few words,

Usually a pointless joke or a silly question

A line of poetry drunkenly scrawled on the margin of a quick

                      splashed picture—bug, leaf,

                      caricature of Teacher

on paper held together now by little more than ink

& their own strength brushed momentarily over it

Their world & several others since

Gone to hell in a handbasket, they knew it—

Cheered as it whizzed by—

& conked out among the busted spring rain cherryblossom winejars

Happy to have saved us all.

(Right. It's blurry.)

Phil, dreaming of gummy bears, sees angels descending.

 The mind is a terrible thing to waste.

Now Phil was dying. Perhaps as long as a year before, he’d reached back for his chair which wasn’t there and fell breaking his assbone. Thus began a slow decline. I was alarmed. It’s hard to say that a Zen Master, especially one that I loved, had given up on life, so I won't. But progressive blindness had stolen the delight of seeing words on a page, physical pain made the formal posture of zazen impossible and now immobility obliterated the comforting routine of meditation, gabbing, study, jokes, and food. Not physical therapy with Baker Roshi’s student Joe Muscles, not Chinese food with taro root, not even gummy bears, could turn the tide. The ever present good cheer, except when it suddenly disappeared, felt concocted. The veneer was wearing thin. I didn’t feel the bitter resignation of a person fed up with life. It was more a sense that he’d just had enough. He invited the dying to begin, and the invitation had been accepted. It would be long and slow.

Some sages claim that this was a good way for a meditator to die, as if waving a long slow goodbye to everything that had been assembled to make you--a precious death. In a way I feel that this is a bit like sticking a smiley face on a Hallmark condolence card. It masks the uncertainty of each piece tumbling into oblivion. Phil was always so kind to those who were helping him, but on the other hand he couldn’t hide the day to day frustrations. 

He would rail at the dying steps prescribed by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, saying "I have to decide if I’m at the bargaining stage or the resignation stage.” But he seemed to be following them exactly, or at least that was the framework that I carried into my conversations with him. I actually felt that he’d only taken baby steps away from the anger stage, but all that is extremely subjective. Perhaps I was still angry with him for ending the Maitri experiment, or screaming at me in the hallway, or harping on that old time religion. 

Zenshin’s mind had always been clear as a bell, much clearer than his vision. His memory for words, phrases, even pages in a book, had been almost photographic. I wonder how much of this was compensatory.

Once when I was entertaining some weird questions about presumed Kundalini energy in meditation, what Phil called the “squigglies,” he said, “Ol’ Luk Luk has something to say about that.  ”Middle case, third shelf, second from the left. (I think it was Charles Luk’s “Secrets of Chinese Meditation, but it might have been “Empty Cloud.”) Page 63, middle paragraph, beginning at the forth sentence. That’s the interesting part. Read back to me. Then he gently told me that focusing on the heart might be good practice rather than chasing swirling whirling wisps of energy all over the place.

Another time when we were reading “Scenes from the Capital,” we got to a part where he talks about Gerald Manley Hopkins. He started to recite “The Windhover” not with his flat voice, not with his whimsical voice, but reverently, almost like plainchant. When he stumbled, he pointed to the first case, second shelf, 12th book from the right, page 43, “Just start reading.” 

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion

Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,

    Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

When I was sitting with him in a bright room of the Zen Center Hospice on Page Street, he asked me, “Do you see them?”

“Who?”

“The angels.

“No actually, I don’t. Where are they?”

“Right there, floating around,” pointing towards the upper corner to the left of his bed.

“No, I still don’t see them.”

“Look, goddamn it.” His voice sounded plaintive, perhaps wistful.

“What do they look like?”

“Just like the ones on the Macy’s gift bags.”

“I can’t see them Phil, what would you like me to do?”

“Call the police, they’re reliable.”

Together we looked. I could see nothing while at the same time I wondered where his mind had gone. The Mind is a terrible thing to waste, he used to joke. What mind? Here we were using what was left to search for angels.

The angels on the Macy’s bag too “Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.”

When he died I arrived late to the crematorium in South City, Baker Roshi read a line from one of his poems about delicious raspberries. Then we filed past, bowed and placed a raspberry in the plain box that held his body. 

Contrary to Zen custom, I visualized dumping buckets of crimson raspberries gashing gold-vermillion. I couldn’t stop myself.