16

For if you know yourself, or God, or the World, you must of necessity enjoy it. It! If the short prayer pierces heaven, the short word calls it. To be called, to call out, we cull the words until they line up like cards in a catalogue. Archives dissolve: their dust tactile, like skin. It smells of mold and rot. Outside, a battalion of ants tried to push a dead centipede into their nest. The gap between stair and house too narrow, they bore its body for days, up and down a stair. If ants were cartoonists, would they execute them for nasty? It is pronoun for a corpse. It was the cop on the street, body blurred (the second time) so we could not see him shot. An archive of repetition: they run to their car over and again. Always there is the sneaker under the right front door. What happened to it?

--8 January 2015

Aphorism, Adage, Epigram, Maxim, One Liner: Albert Saijo's notebooks (#3)

 2. Any principle or precept expressed in few words; a short pithy sentence containing a truth of general import; a maxim.

a1593   Marlowe Tragicall Hist. Faustus (1604) sig. A2^v,   Is not thy common talke sound Aphorismes?

1642   J. Howell Instr. Forreine Travell vi. 85   'Tis an old Aphorisme, Oderunt omnes, quem metuunt.

1655   H. More Antidote against Atheism (ed. 2) App. iv. 316   That sensible Aphorism of Solomon, Better is a living Dog than a dead Lyon.

1750   Johnson Rambler No. 68. ⁋10   Oppression, according to Harrington's aphorism, will be felt by those that cannot see it.

1880   G. Smith in Atlantic Monthly No. 268. 201   The suggestive aphorism, ‘The want of belief is a defect that ought to be concealed when it cannot be overcome.’

The first quotation is from Albert Saijo's journal, probably one from the early 2000s. The second is from the Oxford English Dictionary. Aphorism is statement, principle, certainty. This form is very different from the one I wrote about yesterday, namely short narratives about animals that allowed Saijo to let go his taut ethical stance. While animals permitted him to detach, human beings brought out the aphoristic in him. He had a real vein of certainty; the aphorism was its perfect vehicle. It was the economy car to the limousines Saijo drove in his longer rants (the anti-ecological metaphor makes me shiver a bit, or is it the cold spell we're having in Hawai`i?).

The centerpiece of the new Tinfish Press book, WOODRAT FLAT, a "book of days," "GOING NATIVE," consists of a series of aphorisms culled by Jerry Martien from Saijo's notebooks of the late 1980s and early 1990s. On the third page of this selection I find this: "I AM THINKING & DREAMING OF THE SHAPE OF A PROSE I'M NOT YET ABLE TO WRITE--SPRINGING RESILIENT REVELATORY." While the capital letters offer a kind of maximalism--sound as certainty--the brief length of the aphorism offers something different, a minimalism that--at its best--explodes into meaning. A different mode of certainty from that found on the pages of his books or the notebooks, where poem can hardly be distinguished from passing thought from phone numbers or brief memorials to the dead. 

Many of the aphoristic sentences in "GOING NATIVE" are observations:

--EUTAMIAS TOWNSENDII (as Martien says in the introduction, this means that Saijo saw a chipmunk)

--EARLY APRIL--SWALLOWS BACK--PAIR HIGH IN SKY FLUTTERING TOGETHER THEN SWOOPING AWAY TOGETHER

--SWEET SPRING CALLS OF SONG SPARROW

and so on.

Others make their arguments in the form of rhetorical question, without punctuation:

--WHAT WOULD BE VIEW OF NATURE THAT IS NEITHER EVOLUTIONIST OR CREATIONIST

--IS EARTH LIFE SHORT BURST OF QUAIL FLIGHT

Many of them are curt rants; these are MAINLY included in the sections "NEW POLITY," VOTER BOYCOTT," and "MAJORITY RULE SNOOP."

--THE QUEST FOR ENLIGHTENMENT IS A SICKNESS THAT WANTS TO BE RELIEVED

--GOVT SPOILS OUR LIVES

--WATCH OUT FOR TROGLODYTE IN FAST LANE

--IT'S TOO LATE TO BE CLEVER

Here are more aphorisms from the notebooks:

[click to enlarge]

Many of these aphorisms are about the form in which they are composed, or about literature itself: Saijo is sick of literature, but he writes anyway; when he couldn't read other people, he began to write himself. But if, as he writes, "WE HAVE CHANGED HISTORY INTO ENTERTAINMENT," then his aphorisms are pithy truth-messages that are entertaining, to boot. As I turn to my twitter feed on break I find this aphorism:

Australian Poetry retweeted

Jon Winokur ‏@AdviceToWriters 5h5 hours ago

Any fool can take a bad line out of a poem; it takes a real pro to throw out a good line. THEODORE ROETHKE

What made Saijo so remarkable a poet--among so many of his qualities--was his willingness to throw out the good lines. Toward the end, he refused to be published. While he did not throw out his notebooks, he kept them to himself, withheld them from the "CIV" he so disdained. But "to throw out a good line" is also to be a good fisherman. When the notebooks become available to a larger public, if only a small band of literary critics and poets, they will be hooked (line and sinker) by his work. (If "work" is done only for the worker, is it still work?") I'll leave that for someone else to figure out. 

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

15

Souls are God's jewels, every one of which is worth many worlds. Sick of the word “soul,” we try on others: politics, history, nation. These, we feel, are less abstract. Soul has no banner we can see. We cannot chant, “go Soul!” as if it were a team. We cannot give soul a 15-yard penalty with loss of down. The puns have lost their punch. “She's made of rubber,” Bryant says of our daughter, and someone hears that straight. A pencil dies in Paris. The pencil is made of graphite, but its strokes are ghosts. So are hands that pushed it into figures. Videos contain graphic violence, a policeman shot on the street. Soul looks from a window high above. Soul holds her cell phone and shoots. This is evidence, this is archive. But soul has lost hers. There is no forgiveness here. Forgiveness is an abstract word.

For Jaimie Nagle

--6 January 2015

"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

14

When things are ours in their proper places, nothing is needful but prizing to enjoy them. Critique the poetry of praise, its aimless blurts. To walk does not alter earth, unless you stomp by Kilauea's seismograph. Watch its needle skitter, palsied. It's not a political poetry he wants, but a resistant one. Who can resist this earth, its fertile rock? Lavafall at Pahoa's transfer station; someone lays red petals on its black. To transfer is not to transcend, but distribute. The man does not become a deer but he changes paths, lacking antlers. Shipwreck, mind wrack: to tend is to resist. Dove, shama thrush, traffic on Kahekili. I am not buying a damn thing.

For Maged Zaher

--6 January 2015

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

13

We are like Him when our minds are in frame. Not to know meditative from non-meditative state. Frame narrows as it loses focus. The word in Japanese for “great” meant “tired” in plantation lingo. They knew she was Okinawan, because her hands were covered in tattoos. Women disfigured themselves so soldiers would not rape them. Focus is not frame but launch pad. When I closed my eyes I saw his block print behind the lids; they closed over my eye like a screen. I couldn't read the words, but that seemed not to matter. It was pattern, the stink of dust and mold, imprint of light until the notebook closed like an eye. What we do not see is sometimes not a crime. What we hear is our boots on volcanic ash, sickled koa leaves. To lose focus is to see more: snow on the mountain, observatories like white pustules at the top. Selfsame land blemished, bleached as the tree tripped by lava flow. Sangha found a white tag with the number five scrawled on it, among the dead trees.

for Kevin & Miho in Volcano

--5 January 2015