The Best and Worst of Times
60's to 20teens Asleep At The Wheel
by Paul Manski
Introduction:
20 years ago(now 30), Cora Wyoming 82925.
This was written in 1989 while living near the Cora Y, I found it in the form of a typed document, typed on a manual typewriter. I was going through some boxes recently (2009) that i was allowed to keep after being dumped in St George then Phoenix, and decided to elaborate on the themes it discussed.
I lived on Herman Genetti's property just south of the “Y”, at the broad flat plains below the Wind River mountains, in the upper Colorado basin watershed, east of the Green river, one of the major tributaries of the Colorado.
Mr Genetti was an amazing man, 7th day Adventist and followed the old ways doing the real work. He worked because that was what he did, with or without pay as an expression of his nature. He was also a writer and deep thinker he could go on for hours about nearly anything to do with the Wind Rivers, Pinedale history and ranch life. He wrote and published a book, “Herman'sHowlings”, which incidentally was not based on the book Howl by Allen Ginsburg.
He cut cedar and lodgepole pine up in the mountains in and around Pinedale and brought them back in a pickup truck and trailer. He also had some draft horses and used them to skid the timber. He then peeled the poles and sold them to ranchers for fence posts. He also cut firewood and sold it. I lived at the Y in an trailer house with a lady who I'll call Marlene who was pregnant with my son. Marlene is not her real name but approximates the feel and sound of her name. Previous to that we were both seasonal Forest Service employees.
The gist of the piece I found had to do with a sense that the world is a living, thinking, feeling being. What appears as rocks, mountains, monoclines, forests, deserts, lakes and watersheds are in fact parts of the living thinking, sensing being that we participate with and can not separate ourselves from. We too engage with our human friends, relatives, lovers, enemies, strangers as part of this process. The drama that unfolds is unfolding us according to some plan or pattern. Our highest duty is to engage in the drama with relish and passion and uphold our uniqueness at the same time developing a knowledge and familiarity with our ecosphere, bioregion to develop an authentic sense of place.
Further ruminations on this theme have showed me intimations that this maybe a unique part of the American experience. Americans are for the most part unlike many rooted cultures longstanding and persevering in a specific place. We come from other places then in in intricate seduction become enthralled with our surroundings. The seduction is ongoing and goes in fits and stops, sometimes generational other times as individuals. This piece talks or attempts to talk about the 60's and the generational acceptance and seduction by place that occurred for many young people who went back to the land and attempted to re-connect with place, rediscover place and in the process found meaning and purpose for their journey. All this lovey dovey seduction going on in the atmosphere of a decade long bizarre failed war, Vietnam: Conducted by other forces in American society just as deeply rooted and authentic in their expression. Authentic but potently separated from the ultimate destiny of America. America will become American in spite of its actions and ambitions because a more powerful force is at work here, and that's the force and spirit, personality of the living breathing earth herself pressing claims and making amorous ultimately undeniable overtures throughout its psychic web. Just as a man may be preoccupied with his life he can only resist temporarily the lures and charms of a potent female. Eventually he is charmed seduced and engages with the would be lover, a child of some kind is born and he may resume his neurotic preoccupation with self but the process of birth has occurred he may deny it or not even be aware of it but the process will unfold with or without his consent, knowledge or approval.
The Best of the 60's:Asleep at the Wheel
An authentic “history of the 60's” would have to include 4-billion people's statements in hundreds of languages. However to even call that authentic is stretching the meaning of authenticity. What about statements from birds? Reptiles, rivers, oceans, seas, lakes? Mammals, mountains, and insects? There is no fixed truth of things. History is rewritten on a daily basis moment to moment. History is continual distortion.
The rewriting of history is not a random act. It is clever conspiracy. Its perpetrators are ruthless scoundrels. Their hideous nature derives not from evil intent but from fragmented consciousness...They meet the world warped, jaundiced, split, labeled neurotic point of view and destroy the possibility of healing through the misrepresentations of historical events.
One writer who meant a great deal to me, a writer who flourished throughout the 60's and is still creating and influencing people today is Gary Snyder.
In the thought of social scientists, behavioral psychologists, Marxist revolutionaries in Afghanistan, Cuba and Nicaragua-there is common admission that the present generation is 'lost' to the revolution---but if we can get the children then the revolution will grow. If this is a universal truth then the thought of Snyder is dead. The current education system of children eliminates contact with a Gary Snyder. The television monopolies never mention Snyder or a whole generation of people for which Snyder was role model and spokesman.
I spent most of the 60's as an infant, child and son of my father and mother. I met Snyder's writings through an investigation of the 'beat' writers. Snyder was a character in Dharma Bums, a novel by Jack Kerouac. He was Japhy Rider. I did most of this reading when I was 17-18 and a full time student of Swami Vishnu Devananda. That was ten years ago.(now 30 years)
The time spent at the ashram in Val Morin, Quebec allowed me to meet and engage a type of person I had never met before. These people must have been like the first Christians. They saw the end of the world. They were waiting for this new world to come. These people at the ashram prepared themselves through immense personal suffering for a new consciousness and a world in which this new consciousness was welcome, normal and would thrive.
I had my first encounter with a woman there. It was a platonic love affair. She too was something new to me. She was 19 had her own car, a tiny Honda with a stick shift. She was educated at a private school outside of DC, Georgetown University. I can remember Mary Gaffney reading and rereading Emerson and Thoreau. She carried Walden and Emerson his essays on Freedom, Self-sufficiency, Truth...like born again Christians carry the Bible. We would do asanas and pranayama then take long walks in the woods, wash dishes and chop vegetable. Sit at Swami Vishnu's feet and chant, play guitar, fast on lemon juice and lay in the sun of a magic summer in Quebec.
We took a couple of trips and visited a commune on Otter Lake in the bush and I heard a wolf howl at the full moon rising over a cranberry bog for the first time. She was also blonde and fit with a body like a ballet dancer, her skin was creamy and the white and when we swam naked in the ice cold water I saw her small erect breasts and just the slightest of pubic hair in a perfect triangle, reddish blonde. I was going to devote my life to her. But another less platonic girl eight years older than me and willing to spread her legs enraptured me and I had to forget Mary. She died a few months later in a bicycle accident and the news was brought to me by my first real lover, though I never totally believed it I found out recently it was true. I thought it was a story Carolyn made up so I would forget about Mary.
Now looking back Carolyn was a Bodhisattva of compassion and a nymphomaniac. I was continually making love to her every waking hour of the day.....
{back to Asleep at the Wheel}....Snyder himself was part of this milieu, with a difference, that being his practice of zazen and his childhood and youth spent in Oregon and Washington, in the forests and natural places there. I had the chance to spend 100 days in a Zen Buddhist temple. During this time I began to not see the bronze Buddha, the scrolls and gilded images of Bodhisattvas, but instead the mountains, lakes and forest took an equal status as “teaching”.
This idea that natural places are teachers comes to Zen from Shinto which is the natural religion of Japan. It is also the teaching of Dogen the founder of Soto-zen who lived in the 12th century. Dogen wrote the Mountain and Waters Sutra. In this classic which is translated in Moon In A Dew Drop, Dogen writes, “When Sakyamuni Buddha left his father's palace and entered the mountains, his father the king did not resent the mountains...”Dogen goes on to say that Sakyamuni attained realization in the mountains, and the idea is that the mountain itself is a being, alive and flowing. “The green mountains are always walking.”, Dogen says the Zen student must understand this walking of mountains. To further understand this one must know that Dogen located his teaching center in isolated mountains far away from the urban centers of Kyoto and Kamakura. Dogen's teacher told him, “Do not stay in the center of cities and towns. Do not become friendly with rulers and state ministers. Dwell in the deep mountains and valleys to realize the true nature of humanity.”
Dogen further states in Mountain and Rivers Sutra, “From the countless beginning have mountains been the habitat of great sages. Wise ones and holy ones have all made mountains their secret chambers and their bodies and minds; by them mountains are fulfilled.” In fact unknown to pop-Zen writers (everything from motorcycle maintenance to skiiing and interstate driving) Buddhism in Japan has a tradition known as “Shugendo”. A Shugendo practicioner is known as a 'yamabushi'=”one who sleeps in the mountains”. Dogen's first disciples were involved with shugendo as a way of introducing Zazen to common Japanese farmers, hillbillies, and mountain folk. This form of 'mountain-Buddhism' is connected with the concept of “kami no michi”=the way of Shinto , the way of 'kami'
“kami” can not be defined. It is felt, touched, seen by the heart. It can be felt at a glacial lake above the tree line, and in the limpid perspicacity of the blue sky in mid May in the alpine meadows near Down's Mountain, just as bears awaken 'kami' is returning to the Green river watershed.
Gary Snyder raised in Oregon and Washington of the 1930's had a feeling from his childhood for 'kami'. The moment when lightning and thunder arrive in spring and the first winter storm rolling over the cascades again with thunder taking the 'kami' back to its home deep within the sky, deep within the earth, putting bears to sleep then awakening them again. Snyder gravitated toward summer work as a fire look out, Kerouac also influenced by Snyder tried his hand at it but didn't make the grade. He missed the city lights and Cassidy's non-stop driving. He couldn't handle solitude and it chased him down till he succumbed to port wine and vodka in Massachusetts. Like another American writer Edward Abbey, alcohol chased him to Phoenix where he died of liver failure.
Snyder's experience in the American west, the wild west coupled with his Zen aesthetic education caused to write his 1974 Pulitzer prize book of poems and views, Turtle Island. “On Hopi and Navaho land, at Black Mesa, the whole issue is revolving at this moment. The cancer is eating away at the breast of Mother Earth in the form of strip mining.” To have a vague idea of 'cleaning up the environment' and to experience the sacred power emanating from the land in a specific place are two very different things. One person feels and knows the coming and goings of kami, the first flower of spring, Orion high overhead in winter. Snyder's thinking is radical and subverts environmentalism.
Many of the logical outcomes of environmentalism and Snyder's thought are the same. There is a fundamental difference between the two. A difference that has recently been appreciated by traditional members of the environmental camp.
A book published in 1985 Deep Ecology by Bill Devall and George Sessions is dedicated to Snyder. Snyder is quoted quite often in Deep Ecology yet there is something concerning Snyder at best merely hinted at in Deep Ecology.
Ecological thinking while discussing the natural world is rooted in an urban culture. Its expression goes back to the French Impressionists, the paintings of Monet show the urban upper class elite at play on a spring day having a picnic near the Seine. We are told that use of public lands includes this type of activity, indeed in some ways limited to this type of activity. The environmentalist wants us to visit nature but never stay. It's a vacation mentality, a picnic on a grander scale with the back drop of the Tetons instead of the Seine.
Inherent to this 'preservation' consciousness is a fragmented split, daily life and “off” work, leisure, vacation, family activity apart from the daily grind. The mainstream ecologist accepts the staus quo, that our culture is hazardous to the existence of the natural world. Therefor let's ban human existence from certain areas so that these area may remain pure, pristine. Mainstream ecologist believes with heart and soul that the only definition of man is urban existence, man=destruction, therefore let's set certain areas aside and make human habitation in those areas illegal so that at least a 'part' of the earth is left unmolested from our cancerous, industrial culture.
The mainstream ecologist has inherited the notion of 'original sin' and adapted it to the landscape. For this type of ecologist the liberation of the land entails the banning of greedy, sinful, destructive human hands, “hands off”.
Enter Gary Snyder, for Snyder human existence does not require rape of the land. Just as rape is not so much a crime of sex but of violence towards the powerless, weak and available. For the rapist the female is vulnerable, smaller, weaker and available so he dominates with violence- not from a perspective of sexuality but from fear and self-hatred. We must not ban sex but violence, and remedy fear and self-hatred with love and understanding, compassion. . So our human existence does not require rape of the environment, our living is our sex and just as we are from this very same environment, fundamentally wild ourselves, we can interact in ways that are balanced. Our nature is not sin, we are not from Adam. We are not from God at all. We are tool using social animals as much a part of 'here' as the cougar and the bear. At our core we are wild and free and most significantly intelligent loving and honest. We are capable so so much more and so much less. To say we are social and animals using tools, is not to say we have no spiritual values. Authentic spiritual values come from this thinking breathing earth of which we are a part. The earth informs our spiritual nature. If you need a Christ on a cross look no further than around you.
In The Real Work, Snyder goes into the implications of the poetic numinous experience. Snyder talks of “reinhabiting the land” as the essence of the real work. In the tradition of ancient Greek thinkers like Plato, who spoke of virtue. Our highest virtue and greatest happiness is in this real work.
In his more recent work, Axe Handles Snyder writes:
“I pledge allegiance
to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all”
Dolores LaChapelle in her 1988 publication, Sacred Land, Sacred Sex, goes into the radical implications of reinhabiting the land, of a life in harmony with flow of the land. Not a transcontinental
New York/LA, bi-coastal environmentalism, but a dedication to place, a specific place. To begin in the present moment toengage oneself fully into this 'real work'. For LaChapelle the 'way' must include community festivals of the two solstices and equinoxes, the cycles of the moon and an adoption of children into this 'way'.
Snyder and LaChapelle call us to live aware and awke in a new way. Not merely to maintain status quo and set aside wilderness/hands-off zones. LaChapelle who lives in Silverton, Colorado teaches Tai Chi. She tells humorously of her admonitions to perspective tai chi students, “It will destroy your life.” She tells how tai chi causes divorces and job loss. When the person opens up to the real work of living his of her 'old' self goes through convulsions. The point is well taken. The “total transformation” advised by Snyder in “Four Seasons” in the last section of Turtle Island is a total commitment to change. More than anything else, this total transformation, is the Best of the 60's Asleep At the Wheel.
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