Albert Saijo's Poems of the Climate

When I think of weather in poetry, I think of Wallace Stevens's poems on clouds, snow, winter. The best weather was simple, cold. But, because cold is not enough, the poet desires "so much more than that." Here is the first stanza of "Poems of Our Climate": "nothing more than carnations" is all that a human being needs, and not enough.

Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

Lisa Robertson has more recently made the weather into the subject of an epic. In an essay quoted by Sina Queyres, she frames weather as a sincere rhetoric: "But I’m interested in weather also because cultural displacement has shown me that weather is a rhetoric. Furthermore, it is the rhetoric of sincerity, falling in a soothing, familial vernacular. It’s expressed between friendly strangers. I speak it to you. A beautiful morning. You speak it back. The fog has lifted."

Because she doubts sincerity, she concludes her book with this: “Sincerity says that identity is moral. I need it to be a tent, not a cave, a rhetoric, not a value. There’s also the fact that my sex is a problem with sincerity. I want to move on. I want a viable climate. I’ll make it in description." But Robertson, like Stevens, uses the weather to mean something other than the weather. Perhaps she's only commenting on the fact that this has happened, but she pursues the weather's rhetoric with her own inside-out metaphoricity.

Doubtless there are books on this subject, but weather as human desire or rhetoric is not my theme. Rather, I want to think about some of Albert Saijo's very last notebooks, written when he was clearly quite weak. In the early 2000s, he'd still been writing at length on his obsessions: against CIV, for animal nature, in praise of weed and the simple life. By 2010 (approximately), he devoted himself to a single subject, the weather. He produced pages full of reports on the weather in Volcano, on the Big Island in Hawai`i. Here are some of his pages.

Day after day, he notes whether is it day or night, windy or not, rainy or not, whether the sky is clear and has stars in it. There's the water guy, who needs to be called, but again there is the out of doors, the moon. One note of commentary/critique is a sentence or two about white people: "THE ONLY HUMANS ARE WHITE," he notes acerbically. And then the weather starts up again.

At first, these notebooks read as diminishment. The poet, who once had so many thoughts, is now reduced to local weatherman. But what a faithfulness to the world these pages represent! Day by day, sometimes hour by hour, he notes a state of being that will inevitably change. Saijo's weather notebooks refuse even the haiku's oblique lessons, except for "quite beautiful," "still beautiful." He writes what he sees, and leaves it at that. No punch lines or comic strips, no rants or aphorisms.

This poetry of witness, if I may call it that, is pure meditation on that most basic of the world's conditions, the weather. It is one man, outside himself, taking notes. This is not a poetry of desire that comes out of poverty, nor is it a poetry that considers weather to be a form of rhetoric. There is only the wish to record--not in conversation, but in solitude. These notebooks are not conversation, but homage to the world outside the window, and the self.

Notes:

Sina Queyres on Lisa Robertson, here.

Blog post #3 on the notebooks can be found here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/aphorism-adage-epigram-maxim-one-liner.html

Blog post #2 on Saijo's notebooks can be found here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/i-think-i-could-turn-and-live-with.html 

Blog post #1 on the notebooks here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/on-finding-typo-is-it-in-woodrat-flat.html

Albert Saijo's new Tinfish Press book, WOODRAT FLAT.

"I think I could turn and live with animals": Albert Saijo's wild/life

The quotation is from Whitman. Whitman's animals are perfect Buddhists; not attached to material goods or to ideologies, they are not "respectable" or hierarchical. Animals are. As I write this, my 20-year old cat cries from the other room. He's deaf, lives for sun, laps, and food. When we do not attend to him, he yells. Whether or not this refutes Whitman I can't say. But it does strike me that Saijo's animal poems, unlike his poems about human beings, are about being. (Can writing be about being, without being it?) They present situations without commentary or judgment, in ways that many of his other poems do not. When he repeatedly advises himself to "go Tilopa," we see him trying hard to live with the animal-self and perhaps not succeeding. But when he looks to see a mole, a rat. a flicker, a dead bush bunny, he simply sees what is there. He is much more John Clare than Percy Byssche Shelley, at least in his contemplation of the natural world.

Here are two manuscript pages from his notebooks; these poems are included in Tinfish Press's WOODRAT FLAT. This first poem, about a chickadee, seems an after-thought "show" on a page of "telling." Preacher Albert cedes to zen observer Albert. He sees the chickadee: the first layer of the manuscript page simply presents that observation. Another later layer comments on the rarity of this moment: "BUT A LONE CHESTNUT-BACKED CHICKADEE FEEDING ON THE GROUND IS MORE UNUSUAL STILL"[.] Then back to statement (the chickadee is alone on the ground), with a final trilling by the poet: "CHICKADEEDEE." The opening, "UNUSUAL TO SEE" only implies an "I/eye": the poem is nearly all chickadee. This is John Clare's nightingale, not John Keats'; while Clare participates in the bird's surround, he stays at its periphery. Keats's bird is but diving board for the poet's imaginative flutterings.


The poem about a mole has more of the poet in it. He's watching the mole steal his lettuce. But Saijo forgives in animals what he so distrusts about humans and their communities; he tells the story without judgment, then turns the usual narrative fable about saving an animal into one about saving lettuce for dinner. He's whimsical without being mawkish. In "Flicker Fact," he tells the story of a bird that hobbles on the ground, seemingly nursing a broken wing. He follows the flicker. After going 20 paces, the flicker flies off, "PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT." The poem ends: "DIDN'T KNOW FLICKERS DO THIS." The flicker is wily coyote, or trickster monkey, at once dishonest and playful. But Saijo does not hold the animal world to a human standard of ethics, one all too easily broken; the animal offers him permission to watch, unattached.

These observations are easy to let go. They are, as Saijo would say, "FUN." But his poem about a dead bush bunny somehow maintains this wit, while examining the aftermath of a violent act, the killing of the bunny. This is a poem I love and can't find in my many photographs of the notebooks. So here is the script in the Tinfish book. As usual, you can enlarge by clicking on the image.

As he often does, Saijo starts with the Latin name for the rabbit. If Latin is dead, then so too this bunny. Saijo's emphasis on its perfection (the word "PERFECT" occurs four times in this very short poem) sets us up for the trickster nature of nature. The rabbit is perfect, except he's been eaten at the top. Saijo's description of the rabbit is loving--it's soft, its features all inventoried--but he is hardly horrified by the bunny's death. If animals give him access to being, they also open up non-being without the fear and grasping of human "nature," as indeed of Saijo's more angry poems.

If animals are let be, plants are somehow more like human beings in Saijo's cosmology. There is the "SMART PLANT" that can reproduce itself in a pinch. I need hardly add--to any reader of Saijo's work--that this intelligent plant is marijuana. Much of WOODRAT FLAT is about Saijo's life as a marijuana grower in northern California. The book alternately praises the plant and attacks the police and the feds who are going after his crop. Unlike the animal, which is, the plant is sacramental; to attempt to destroy the poet's way of making a living is not simply an act of economic violence. It is also anti-spiritual, destructive on a higher plane, as well as the ordinary one. Hence, in "SACRAMENTAL," Saijo writes in Blakean fashion of the plant that, "CONVERTS US TO INNOCENCE MAKES US LAUGH & TEACHES US WHERE OUR FEARS LIE--IT OPENS THE EYE--IT MAKES THE EAR HEAR THE ONE TUNE--HOSANNAH--IT MAKES THE BODY EMBODIED MIND & IT RELEASES US FROM REASON--IT STRIPS US TO ANIMAL & MAKES US FEEL INSTINCT"[.] So the gift of the plant is to make us animal, but not in the sense Puritans or other religions frame "animal." Instead, we see clearly only under its influence.

If Saijo were to be fit into a neat box, it would likely not be BEAT or ASIAN AMERICAN, but late late ROMANTIC poet. But Romantic in the school of John Clare, one who abhors the human pest and his imperial imagination, who tries to see nature as is, rather than as the language that mirrors our desires. In the next post, I'll get to his more abstract and aphoristic work, where he does the human more completely! Because, as close and faithful an observer of nature as he was, he was also an inveterate thinker, prone to abstraction, judgment, and preacherliness. Complex creatures we. So leave the box open, for god's sake!


See blog post #1 on Saijo here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/on-finding-typo-is-it-in-woodrat-flat.html

On finding a typo (is it?) in WOODRAT FLAT by Albert Saijo (Tinfish Press, 2015)

This is most of the Albert Saijo archive. I spent several days on the Big Island going through these two tubs of notebooks and miscellaneous bits of paper, two calendars, a posthumous certificate from Barack Obama to thank him for his military service (he would have hated that), and other items. The updraft of dust and mold kept me high, which was only appropriate, as Saijo was a marijuana farmer and advocate, among his many (a)vocations. Some of the notebooks are very large; many were "Utility Notebooks." Such was their utility that Saijo filled them with his block print meditations. Others were small hardcovers, sketch pads with ring bindings, tiny notebooks. There are single pages, large and small, covered in penciled writing. Very few of the meditations came out in linear fashion; most pages are covered with emendations, some with print at myriad angles. Others are unreadable, but visually stunning. They all enact his process of thinking. Mostly forward, but occasionally back, or on top of, or below, or sideways. Few are his central subjects: his hatred of civilization (or "CIV" as he terms it); the appeal of "IV" (which I take to be the opposite of CIV, though I don't know for sure); time; space; love; fasting; marijuana. Much of his work is abstract, taking on big concepts. It's the sort of work that goes terribly wrong in the hand of a lesser thinker or poet. Other of the work is incredibly tangible, both in language (he uses Latin as if it were still spoken, at least by lovers of nature) and in image. Not image, exactly, because in his state of constant meditation--he writes somewhere that he no longer knows the difference between meditative and non-meditative states--he observed precisely what was in front of him. At the end, he wrote only about the weather, keeping track almost by the hour in fragile hand, but always he was looking out the window or through the grass and seeing animals, birds, plants, human beings--not as elevated creatures, but as one among the mix. He writes about piss and shit, and he writes about love, sex. He writes angry and he writes contemplative. He rants, he lets go. He quotes, over and again, the Baudelaire line about "luxe, calme, et volupté," and he repeats an admonition to himself about Tilopa. Read Tilopa's advice to Naropa, and you'll know why: 

Cut the root of the vine that chokes the tree,
and its clinging tendrils wither away entirely.
Sever the conventionally grasping mind,
and all bondage and desperation dissolve.

Much of Saijo's thinking is violent in this way: he "cuts," "severs," he interrupts. But alongside this violence is the calm and voluptuousness of Baudelaire's "L'invitation au voyage," a love poem about ease, about pleasure.  

I found the originals for WOODRAT FLAT (Tinfish Press, 2015) in two of the notebooks, one utility size, the other just a bit smaller. The notebooks are taller than the published book, and the handwriting less consistent, by far, than the block print we used. That said, our all-caps rendition of Saijo's texts is less dark than the Bamboo Ridge versions; I found those too in-your-face. The less bold version echoes Albert's voice, which was calm and slow and considered. Or so I hope. One of the poems from the book, ably edited by Jerry Martien, who re-ordered the poems to make them more book than note-book, is called "Chuang Tze Update." Here are three photographs of the text. The first has the book seated on top of the notebook; the second and third are the notebook version of the poem. 

[Click to enlarge images]

As an editor, I have a good eye for typos, especially after the book has been published. So I notice that toward the beginning of the poem, Saijo has written, "THESE 2 TREES SURVIVED BECAUSE THEY WERE TOO ODD TO LOG," while at the end, the Tinfish version replaces "ODD" with "OLD": "CHUANG TZE YOU'RE RIGHT BE TOO OLD TO LOG." The editor has taken out some of the writing that wanders above and below the final lines. Did he change "ODD" to "OLD"? Did our scanner do it? Did we do it? The mysteriousness of the mistake is appropriate to any consideration of editing, especially when the manuscript is by someone so prone to over-writing, to self-editing, to making the reader's life at once pleasurable and difficult. The replacement does not ruin the poem: Chuang Tzu is, after all, quite old. Too old to log, one might add, except that Saijo has taken a cutting from him in writing about the tree. I find a biography of Chuang Tzu that gives no dates for him. And then I find one that does. This one notes that he may not have existed. Go figure.

But why the poem about the tree, with a punch line about Chuang Tzu, a punch-line that seems to have turned into a title? (Kevin Dimyanitz tells me that Laura Saijo said Albert did not fight in World War II in the 442nd, but became a stand-up comic; he had them rolling in the aisles, he said.) Google "Chuang Tzu and trees" and you get this, by way of Thomas Merton. It's a parable about usefulness, that uses a tree as its central image. The tree, like Chuang Tzu's teachings, one says, is "useless." Then, by way of a wildcat, a mouse, and a yak, the writer of the parable gets to his punchline, which is also a warning. "So for your big tree, no use?" The teacher advises his interlocutor to plant the useless tree in a waste land, and to walk around it, meditating. No one will ever cut the tree down. "Useless? You should worry!" concludes the teaching.

Saijo's 2 old Douglas firs, the ones that survived "ANIMAL WHO IS BIOTIC SCOURGE" are different. One sways in the wind like a young tree, losing branches; the other does not. They are perhaps two ways of looking at the world "oddly": the first involves bending, the other involves remaining still. Their oddness saved them. Saijo was himself an able carpenter. Many of his notebooks contain conceptual and more detailed drawings of houses and furniture, including his own house and chair. He knew use value. But he was also someone who knew non-value, the art of sitting around in front of the fire, sketching out his thoughts as they flickered by. One of the funniest poems in WOODRAT FLAT is called "FLICKER FACT." It's about a flicker who seems to have a hurt wing and leads the poet for twenty or so paces. "AFTER LEADING ME ON THIS WAY FOR TWENTY PACES OR SO IT FLEW OFF DOWN CANYON PERFECTLY ALL RIGHT -- DIDN'T KNOW FLICKERS DO THIS"[.]

What is a typo but the most un-useful of mistakes, leading the reader astray without (in this case, because one word has become another word) his or her realizing it? The typo is the most useless feature of an otherwise useless art, that of poetry. It signifies danger, one reason Albert may not have wanted his work published (though that's a stretch, I suspect). But it also signifies the fertility generated by standing or sitting still. Luxe, calme et volupté. Or, as Tilopa advised Naropa in his own in-utility notebook:

Renounce arbitrary, habitual views.
Go forth courageously to meditate
in the real mountain wilderness,
the wide open Mahamudra.
Transcend boundaries of kinship
by embracing all living beings
as one family of consciousness.
Remain without any compulsion
in the landscape of natural freedom:
spontaneous, generous, joyful.

See blog post #2 on Saijo here: http://tinfisheditor.blogspot.com/2015/01/i-think-i-could-turn-and-live-with.html

Meditation: On Honors 491: Memory & Forgetting

We're reading Daniel Schacter's The Seven Sins of Memory in my honors class. Many of memory's sins have to do with its lack, others with its false, or incomplete fulness. One of my students said he finds the book "disturbing." "It's like we're just a mechanism," he said, adding that "the NSA already knows what we're thinking and now people know why we're thinking it!" Another student fears her tendency toward "cryptomnesia," a word I could not remember in class, which means "unintentional plagiarism." Cryptomnesiacs are visual thinkers. They set up their days according to images of it. At day's end, they believe these images true, whether or not they acted on them.

Because of this course, I seem to have become a mother confessor of memory loss. In the elevator a colleague with whom I don't usually talk much asks me about the course (some of the index cards I used to advertise it ended up in the elevator for a while, mysteriously). The second time she sees me asks about being over 40, about why she can't remember names. I remember Schacter's diagram sketching out why we so easily forget names, that the the line in the diagram denoting a name sticks out by itself in the top left. Like the oddball in a family, this branch of the tree sits alone, lacking stories, lacking detail, without any way for us to remember its arbitrary beauty. I start to describe the diagram for her as I walk out of the elevator. I've gotten to the outer stick when the door starts to close. "There's a reason!" I call out, as she disappears behind the elevator's trap.


In class, we rehearse our forgetting: keys, cars, alarm clocks. It's like an Elizabeth Bishop poem, our litany of losses. We're spending a lot of time remembering our forgetting. I remember forgetting a student's M.A. thesis defense. I'd been on a trip to England; I'd had a hard time recovering from jet lag. I was sitting on the cream colored couch (before it was reupholstered in another version of the same color) when the phone rang. The committee was in a small room about to launch the defense and where was I? I was where I could not drive in quickly enough, so I appeared via speaker phone. I remember we talked about his unexpected use of a form John Ashbery used in April Galleons. The form was one of repetition with a difference; see the Kalevala. And then I made another mistake of forgetting with that same student. Remember all those directed readings I did for free? Remember the publications? I want to say, but of course those do not count in the face of my unprofessional forgetting.

Avishai Margalit writes about ways in which forgetting can be unethical. Something about an Israeli officer forgetting an atrocity. When I go to amazon to look for his book because I cannot find my own, I see he makes a distinction between "thick" memory and "thin" memory, the memory that binds us together and that which does not. That I had forgotten my student's important dates, twice, bordered on the unethical, was also due to a conflict between us in classes (and yet I was the boss, yes, and hence more ethically challenged). No atrocity that--the student is thankfully now a tenure-track professor in another department--the sense that the sins of absent-mindedness and transience could be interpreted--by him and me--as unethical is a lesson I cannot forget.

But if an army officer acts unethically when he forgets a war crime, what of nations, governments, that insist remembering theirs? The archives of Hitler's Germany and Pol Pot's Cambodia are full of faces. Almost all of us remember faces, even when we cannot bear to look at them. Children, parents, people with suitcases and those in pajamas without. Tourism develops around genocide. See Emma Willis's work on "dark tourists." (And there are tourisms that ignore others.) Genocide is not only destruction on an enormous scale; it is also the forced manufacture of memories. Bad ones, vivid ones. Their faces are like suns. We need to witness them obliquely. I cannot look directly at this small girl from the S-21 website because she is sad, because she resembles--at least racially--one of my family members. I cannot look at her because I know this to have been one of her last acts as a living being, that of staring into the camera at those of us who cannot save her.

Memories are like the humidity in Cambodia; they stick to everyone's skin. We traveled with Khmer Rouge survivors. Each one, at some unexpected moment, usually while we eating another large meal, opened up. There were stories about having no shoes, stories about lost family members, stories about walking to Thailand. There were the stories that were only hinted at (something happened in the camps). There were stories that filtered down to their children and to the rest of us. We held those stories as if they were mercury, not knowing how to embrace their poison without wounding ourselves. The wound, we knew, was a gift (in German the false friend for gift is "poison"). But it was a gift we wanted to accept and then to contain, to corral, to put into a box to cool.

Our semantic memory (for facts) is best when we repeat information over time, when we enact the way in which it first came into being. Episodic memories remain because we experienced an event. If you are under 80, try remembering Pearl Harbor, and then turn to your memories of 9/11.  The first set of memories will be textbook, the second set involve waking up in your own bed (in Hawai`i) to the news ("airplanes flew into the Twin Towers and they came down") that we all shared (thick memories) because of our televisions. But the repetition of something forgotten makes for odd memory, indeed. I remember my own episodes of forgetting; they are litanies of something that did not happen, all the more painful because it did not. An odd watered down inversion of PTSD, the persistent memory of something that did happen.

My mother never had an especially good memory. As a young woman, she recalled, she'd heard about mnemonics, had given it a try. She was introduced to a woman whose name also signified a cow, maybe a Jersey. The next time she saw this woman she called her "Mrs. Hereford," and that was the end of her memory experiment. As a child I suffered from loss. Loss of stuffed animal, loss of person, loss of whatever I had misplaced, even at a very young age. Loss triggers memory, but memory triggered what in me proved to be depression. I've read that depressives have over-active memories, and I believe it. Memories clustered when I was depressed, like sequins on fancy dress. They shone like pins. As an adult I experienced my mother's painful loss of her own memories. Whose pain was it? It's its own kind of loss, this loss not of a thing but of memory itself. When memory loss ends, for it is process-bound, emotions associated with loss drain away. For now, an emotion provokes my memory; in that future I cannot know because I cannot remember it, forgetfulness might drain emotion from me. It's part of the mechanism. "Meet Mason on Monday," said my student, when I asked them to write a memorable sentence.




"The Last Modernist," a prose piece I wrote about the ethics of forgetting can be heard here.  The poem originally appeared in Boston Review; Oct/Nov2004, Vol. 29 Issue 5, p 26.