January 15, 1996

 

Ken Sawyer

38 Grandview Avenue

Felton, CA 95018

 

Dear Ken…

 

      High, rocky land.

      Places to scramble up

      and look out from.

      Places to look at, from far off.

      Split a rock here and cut into the glistening

                                            white

      of a seashell.

 

from River Dream

 

      Okay, that’s what these letters are. And the scrambling up? Well, the operative word is scrambling. I was reading in my Acco-fastened collection of these current letters pulled out from others to be this “context” book. And I found a poem of mine with some words left out of a line. I forget which letter, which poem. But I trust I marked it in red on paper. I intend to copy read these and fix typos. So later readers will be impressed with the accurate landings of my flyin’ fingers… . Uhmm. That’s assuming that the copy for the photocopied edition gets made from disk copies where corrections c’n be made. A few of the earliest letters aren’t on disk. I “retyped” one of those and will, I trust, do the others.

 

      Anyway, I’ve got to put out a note about the part ii of my last letter to Paul. Alas, there’s a mistyped line of a poem there…and it’s not my poem. That’s bad enough that I don’t want un­corrected copies of the letter “on the wind,” …but it damages my use of the lines. I don’t know if any reader, ever, can be expected to figure out why I’ve put some scrap of poetry in front of a section of letter and not some other scrap there or that scrap elsewhere. But it contributes to my keeping going.

 

Cycles: How many?

Ten million years and more

brightness running along the edge

defines a bird’s ascending

…

 

is how Mort’s lines should have read. Note the “s” dropped from “edge.” I’m not a touch typist and the book (a 1966 Manhattan Review) won’t stay open. Sigh! With “edges” you get a simple visual thing, the bird’s shape limned by back-lighting or something. And beyond the ellipsis, in the poem and in the letter, …well, nothing imminent. But brightness running along the edge…of what? The ten million years, the “cutting edge”? Or the “edge” of perception? Or…? Some­thing in the listener…or listening reader… .

 

      Mort and I on the phone before his morning walk down the Noe side of the hill to Java n More. A quick check of the aging (color turning?) pocketbook size magazine. And…Mort caught me in another, too. In my reference to Gaudier’s Ezra head, I labeled it “hierarchic” not “hieratic.”  You c’n understand that one, what with all my “structured programming” letters and “object oriented” concerns. Uhmm. Well, I’ve even found a couple typos in the newly retyped early letter to Paul…October 17, 92, I think. I think back to that three million words done on old manuals with a shudder. I c’n only hope that if the collection ever heads toward print Paul will find kind and “beyond the call of duty” typesetters… .

 

                                                                              n         n

 

The conditions of a solitary bird are five:

The first, that it flies to the highest point;

the second, that it does not suffer for company,

        not even of its own kind;

the third, that it aims its beak to the skies;

the fourth, that it does not have a definite color;

the fifth, that it sings very softly.

 

                                                             —  San Juan de la Cruz, Dichos de Luz y Amor

 

      Carlos Castaneda uses the above as an epigraph to Tales of Power. He doesn’t mention a translator. Perhaps he translated it. Or de la Cruz may be a fictional poet. Anyway, I was reading in his The Fire from Within, don Juan’s teaching for the left hand, and looked back to see some­thing, …and this epigraph caught the corner of my eye.

 

      In a sense, …this could be the shaman who takes that step out onto the steppes, into reality. It’s not intended to be. No reference to harshness. Just the fellow who might encounter it…and bring something back from it. Carlos’ terror has little to do with the harshness of landscapes. It’s all the childhood fear of the unknown. The dangerous animals and people are psychologically dangerous. Childhood fears slouch toward Carlos. Out in the desert, buried under some “potent” leaves, Carlos fears bushes that can become wounded horses (as in Picasso’s Guernica) , not, say scorpions or snakes or… . There’s discomfort, but not night temperatures with wind-chill taking them down to, say, forty below. And you could say that this solitary bird, too, has to do with “inner” domains…but all that’s caught is the sight of him here. The journey was seen as a climb or flight to some “highest” point. The mountain, or the moon, as image. Make it the “farthest” point, though, the vanishing point…and the mountain c’n give way to steppes. You get both in the ziggurat. Aiming its beak to the skies? Well, shamans are seen doing that. Probably sniffing out the coming weather. Among the old sea people, they looked down, …into the depths. They’re always looking outward. They see high places, scramble up, and look farther out and down. And they look up for new highest points, too. We’ve still got flat Earth modeling. And…when they come back? Well,

 

Hunkered down flatfooted and holding

onto my knees in an unfurnished room

no different

from a stone age man

and still seeing things

I can’t make sense of

can’t handle in any way

but to bring back in song

against a time

they’ll be useful.

 

Soft singing? No, but then I’m still out there in the poem. And, given a listener, maybe I am crooning softly, for all the fiercely anguished realization I’m singing… . That comes of going out there as I write, not writing steps out there taken earlier…though when I wrote I in fact lived in an apartment, not a room, and one with furniture in it. That landscape is always there, of course. Everywhere is the steppes. And a poem is soft singing compared, say, to running screaming in the streets or standing in front of houses banging on the doors. Uncertain “color”? Or “flavor.” Or “tone.” A little strange, mainly. Awkward in any or all of the categories. It’s the fakes that’ll “tell it like it is.” The solitary bird doesn’t know how it is? The Shaman doesn’t know. Korzybsky pointed out that whatever you figure “it” is, it isn’t. When you think you’ve gotten to the essence (is-ness) of something and c’n expose it…you’re in trouble. A shaman could likely tell you something about what happened to him, what he did, but asked to make sense of it, he’ll scratch his head. “Like it is” refers to categorization. Description implies knowledge of the working context. The steppes sort of defy that. Snowdrifts, frostbite, sunburn, drought, baking heat and burning cold, dry ice and wet fire. Sometimes, maybe most times, of course, the steppes just looks like it looks every day. The inhabitants say the same things to you that your neighbors are always saying to you. A drag. The thing to do…look out for the hungry burrito. Avoid it’s snapping jaws and try to get back. If somebody asks you to teach ’em something? …tell them all you c’n tell them is one way to, perhaps, get there. By just sitting, perhaps.

 

      What I like about Castaneda, as you’ve likely guessed, is the vocabulary he slaps together and then works the hell out of. He doesn’t build any words. He uses words that are around and slang phrases. And he claims that Juan and Carlos are talking in Spanish, their only shared language, so there is an implied “extra layer” there…with God knows what Juan might be thinking in his own Yaqui (?) language. Anyway, Castaneda avoids terms others use when writing about this sort of thing and uses words generally not associated with these topics. Sure, he’s generating confusion. That’s standard practice. But he’s disciplined. You c’n dig sense of it and not by throwing out some of it. It all coheres. In fact, almost every book has Juan using different models, different terms. Sometimes he stays in touch with existing literatures by interchanging images and terms. No auras…but live people as “luminous eggs.” But where an aura is just a visual thing, his “egg” is made of “fibers”…and that’s your i/o, your input/output. In The fire from Within a new level of general dealing with that comes in…emanations. And a whole science of “aligning” emanations is rolled out…or unraveled…in more comic animated murals.

 

      Which, of course, is all beside my point, here. I just felt like using the “solitary bird” lines and I don’t exactly remember what I was going to launch into after my pair of square bullets above. And putting in that preface to get Mort’s line fixed in drifting copies had already distracted me. In short, I’m scrambling up the side of this letter… .

 

      In the Introduction to his The Power of Silence Castaneda tells about don Juan’s attempts to name his knowledge for Carlos’ benefit. “He felt the most appropriate name was nagualism, but that the term was too obscure. Calling it simply ‘knowledge’ made it too vague, and to call it ‘witchcraft’ was debasing. … Finally, because he was unable to find a more appropriate name, he called it ‘sorcery, although he admitted it was not really accurate.”

 

      I had my greatest fun digging through his language and imagery with the University of California Press edition of his first book in my own efforts to “place” the…well, call it knowledge if you want to. And “sorcery” was, for me a starting place. Remember, he talked of sorcerers, but also of “men of knowledge.” And the hallucinogens played an important part along with other manipulative handlings of poor Carlos’ “awareness.” Lots of Ericksonian pushes and pulls. It was obvious that don Juan’s sorcerers were source-erers. The source, remember, is the “aleph” point (Borges), …or where we put it all together. In Waking the Poet (Sixth hour) I call it the day­dreaming place. Of course, that’s only an aspect that’s a “door” through which we c’n step to work purposefully and have a measure of conscious handling of our purposes. Roughly, it’s our “making sense” place. Castaneda in later books calls it the “assemblage” point. Look at it this way, when you bang into a table walking to the bathroom in the dark, …you’ve made the “sensing” of a table. Bishop Berkeley’s “stone” is…sense he’s made. I’m not “trivializing” anything.

 

      Castaneda’s first book, The Teachings of  Don Juan, was remarkably playful and if he later worked a bit hard to tangle up some imagery, here he had a lot to draw on. The Jimson weed root that he had Juan use was handled like the Mandrake root. But the way he used it was playful, a Mexican muralist’s grotesque animation. I can’t go back and reconstruct my reading or even remember much detail about either his presentation or my “arrangement”  of the piece. But, his “root” of the weed was our interior “upside down bush.” So…the nervous system(s). The “root” is the brain, of course. And the sections of root used that are farther out toward the tip are used for functions rising up toward the “cortical” domains…where, ultimately, vision flight is the function. His sorcerer, in Spanish, was brujo. What’s the damned island off the coast of Spain. Oh, Majorca. See my sagging old gray cells fail. I might even be wrong about the location. Anyway, that’d be pronounced, there, as brusho. Just something I’d picked up somewhere. And “witches” in any language, having domestic powers, “rode’ brooms, or brushes, in their witch’s flight… .

 

      Someday, foraging in my three million plus words of letters, maybe Paul will find some of my more detailed accounts. Of all that. Anyway, I got to my upside down bush from that. The witch’s broom was both the woman’s tool…and phallic, the inside-out vagina, of course, and the pubic hair projected from the body. But that inside-out reading only hinting at the deeper one. The up­side-down “weed.” The wild, hallucinatory, potentially toxic human “weed,” our nervous system.

 

      As I said, I’m not going to reenter all that or even skim, again, the operations undertaken with the different chunks of root. But the “exercise” is defined here, now, for any future reader of these letters who might find that sort of explorative thinking a worthwhile use of an existing book. When the whole business of whether or not Castaneda’s accounts are “truth” or “fiction” is put aside and even the apparent (or apparently hidden) lessons, as such, have given up what they have to offer, then…these “technological” investigations c’n be played with. You know, anything that seems to have any “depth” or “resonance” to it…c’n be read this way. It’s m’ “fourth” job of the poet, seen from the other side, …and it’s definitely reading into the “making sense” processes that led to the material at hand.

 

      I used the term “playful’ because Castaneda used it. The quality, like “knowledge,” needs another name. But you c’n contrast Castaneda to, say, Merrell-Wolff or any of the Vedantists or Theosophers or…, Merrell-Wolff “assembled” is…well, he calls it an “experience” but it’s more just an attitude…and it’s just a sense of bein’ spread out through the universe and, hence im­mortal. It’s only a jacked up assumption. And only for the purpose of denying an end. It’s all right to find continuity by identifying with the “human” rather than the “personal.” But what you do or don’t identify with doesn’t matter much when you tumble into living. It’s only useful as a training device while you, or your mentors, attempt to set habits in place that’ll “fire” during the living. Even as a training device it seems…well, boring as hell. And that’s a characteristic of all even slightly organized religion. It’s why all organized religions equate entertainment with sin. Only the truly fearful remain in their audiences buying their tickets.

 

My one LSD trip, just before acid became illegal, before I’d gotten around to reading Castaneda, maybe before he wrote, though I was a long time getting around to checking him out, was characterized by deliberate play…which I was told was not what most people do. They have good trips or bad. I’d see a wall “wave” a bit and, then, I’d see if I could wave it. I answered the door and the postman needed something signed and handed me…well, a small snake. So I experimented with stiffening the snake and using it as a pencil. Worked. My “guide” (also high) left and went back to the Blue Unicorn. I went on alone. In mid afternoon (after a ten ay em start), I felt more or less normal except not normal at all. Hilary and the “wild dogs” from Utah, Gino Clays and [another name gone] publishers of Wild Dog who shared the flat we had and Bob Parker and maybe others were going out for a Peroshki dinner. I wanted to go and would just as soon have this behind me for dinner. But…I couldn’t throw it off. So I got to playing with my reticular region. Running various systems through their paces. Thinking back, that might have been a bit dangerous. Or it might not have been. Anyway, I did get “grounded” enough to go to dinner, talk about the day though still experiencing it. But from the beginning through the heights and the wind-down…I experimented always and from within.

 

      [A few days later.] When Castaneda’s don Juan gets around to talking about a “source,” he moves from the aleph point, the assemblage point in his collection of terms, …and talks about intent. Sure, Husserl’s “intention” hovers there. A similar twist in the felt defining. But simple human “intending” is the main core. Then, his sorcerers, or men of knowledge, talk about it as a force and as something more or less “out there” blowing you about, pushing you and pulling you. That’s both traditional and in keeping with your deep-seated “child” sense of things. Even when you seem able to apply it, common language talks of “will power” or “won’t power.” Mostly, we don’t know a whole lot more about what we intended when we acted than we know about what somebody else intended when acting unexpectedly.

 

      All these “sortings” of what we’re doing into modelable structures are problematic, of course. But it’s the only way to get a sense (a made sense) of what’s going on. Sorting out our “making sense” from “intending” or vice versa is…well, vague. The same thing with Gurdjieff’s modeling. He had thinking, emoting, and moving centers. Interestingly, he didn’t get a verb form for his three names. Just two. He had an “emotional” center to go with the “thinking” and “moving” centers. That reflects how we experience things. We’re very conscious of thinking though most of our thinking is pretty automatic. Gurdjieff stuck in a sort-of-center, the formatory apparatus, and placed most of our thinking, or interior talking, as well as most actual talking, to that apparatus. That took care of the “automatic” thinking. And the moving was mostly automatic, the more or less “reflex” activity trained in early in live as a boxer’s response “combinations” are trained in more deliberate­ly later in life. Yet, again, we think of these movements as movements we make. But, we do think of “emotional” responses as happening, though we regard them as our own feelings, moods, …conditionals. We reserve the production, the emotings, as you will, as a special skill of actors and as an “acting out” even in the hysterics we see as doing this “off-stage.” In fact, we speak of actors emoting only as a put down and only when they aren’t doing an acceptable job.

 

      Gurdjieff had two higher centers. Higher thinking and higher emoting centers. (All right, he’d say “higher emotional,” but you’re stuck with my corrections here.) Interestingly, he didn’t talk about a “higher moving” center. I generally map one in. Gurdjieff and the producers of the Gurd­jieff literature, all the “teachers,” …have never provided any really useful descriptions of what they’d assign to, say, lower and higher versions of a center. Varying sketches have been tried. People are left to think is has to do with some sort of “approval,” perhaps religious, or an eval­uation of content. So we’d have “higher thoughts.” It makes more sense to differentiate on the basis different operations…but related so that a shared base name for the centers makes some sort of sense. Well, I’ve done that sort of mapping. And this letter isn’t a frame for my musings on Gurdjieff’s materials and my updating  (if not upgrading) of them. I just wanted to remind you of the Gurdjieff centers map to refer to  an unmapped center.

 

      Gurdjieff and some of his gang talked, often, about another center…but didn’t ever put it in the map or talk about it at the same time as talking about the other centers. It was a magnetic center. And it’s here that we see another expression of the coming together of assemblage point and intent coming together to somehow be one thing…that might be called the source-ery. The neat thing about sorcery rather than source is that it is, recognizably, something we practice, a bundle of actions we take up, things we do. while “source” only points to a place, person, or thing from which something emanates. And we were all sorcerer’s apprentices way back, almost to Toltec times in our own childhoods, learning the “practices.”

 

      Don Juan focuses on the intent, talks of a warrior’s unbending intent, and a sorcerer’s study of intent. Gurdjieff talked of aim…which looks out in front of intent toward the thing aimed at. And so, to capture the “force” aspect…he put in the magnetic field, the attractiveness of the end, its “magnetic” pull. Given intent as a force that shapes the sense made, we c’n guess how the “mag­netic” quality gets projected onto or into the sensed “end.” I remember mapping in lower and higher magnetic centers. Or at least lobes on the center. Motive and intent. Lots of talk these about motivating people…to include yourself. And about forming intentions. Hence the higher and lower, the reflex and the deliberate, that which is just movement and that which is…well, at least steered.

 

      I’ve drifted from my musings about Castaneda’s interesting use of words in my setting up for those musings. And with some multiple day breaks in the musing and writing. And I got away from some of the liveliest use in the first book where terms chosen pointed at what he did…with brujo leading to the sense of the Jimson weed and its root as the “upside down” bush, our nervous sys­tem, …so that the uses of different sections of the root pointed to different functions we have at our disposal. Later, he talks of dreaming as distinct from dreaming and talks of an exercise in which Carlos is to look for his hands while dreaming (to establish the dreaming position). You know of my running the parallel…so that I use that same voice shift and talk of experiencing as distinct from experiencing. And you begin to establish the experiencing position by…looking for your com­prehensions while experiencing…which leads directly from the earliest thinking about Castaneda’s writings to the whole business in intent and “assembling” the sense we make of the world’s goings-on, finding our own comprehensions in the assemblage or collage. His quick lesson, in Journey to Ixtlan (or was that Ithaca) on hunting…as learning the “routines” of the game hunted so as to use the anticipatory shot to bring down the game…if that’s what the hunter is going to do… . Then, the comic muralist has don Juan give Carlos a lesson about his own “routines,” suggesting that Carlos is both hunter and hunted.

 

      Of course, when we build words in advance of the speakers of Amerish of, say, 2096 having “assembled” them cumulatively, we can’t use anything as subtle as a voice shift while saying dreaming or experiencing. We can’t use, say, “stalking” to mean taking on a disguise so as to obtain desired responses from another or “intent” to mean… . So I’ve got “invent” whole new sets of prefixes to handle a modern awareness of “response.” Suppose you know you’re facing an intelligent critter…that will select a response from a repertoire to throw back at you. You want terms to think in about that. Multisponse gets at the multiple-response aspect…but not the selec­tion. And even multisponse and multisponder seems far out. But our Amerish speakers will have built new prefixes and, here, it’ll be the x-ray visioning switchsponse and switchsponder… . Sure, it’s stiff as new shoes, probably, for you…but I’ve been using the terms for a couple years in letters to people like Jeff Duntemann (at PC Techniques and Visual Developer Magazine). I can’t use sech in poems…any more than I could use suntake and suncut… , though I set up for them in In the Garden of My Lady iv. A sun cut…by a rearing horizon… .