1
Rachelle Katz Lerner, PhD, is an independent scholar, editor, and poet. Forthcoming from U of Michigan Press is her biography of Kenneth Rexroth, “A Rage to Order.” Excerpts have been previewed at MLA, ALA and Louisville conferences, in Jacket Magazine and The Antigonish Review. The manuscript is in the final stage of revision.
. . . from Chapter 16: The “Holy Heap . . . of Dust”
Rachelle K. Lerner
In April 1967, Rexroth rented an apartment in Kyoto for Carol, Mary, and himself for the next several weeks in a ryoken, a Japanese style inn with a t atami (“ straw mat”) floor and a low table. Its location in a district of weavers, woodcutters, and quarrymen figures importantly in
The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart, the philosophical elegy he was about to compose: “All the way down to Kyoto, / And high above me on all / The ridges are temples full of / Buddhas.
This village of stone / Carvers and woodcutters is / Its own illimitable Buddha world.”1
The Daitokuji Temple and its gardens, woods, hot springs, and waterfalls offered Rexroth the sanctuary and solitude he needed for the great creative burst he felt ready for. Day after day, he made his way to the temple and drafted out his fifth long poem. Much on his mind was his age: “There are more years behind me / Than years ahead, and have been / For a very long time.
What / Remains in either pan of / The unstable balances of time?”2 His sixty-one years made him acutely aware of his mortality. Writing out The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart was to help him cope with the inevitable passage of time and permit him to find consolation in the recurrent rhythms of organic processes. 2
The poem spans two months in Japan during which two purification festivals take place:
Boys’ Day, on May 5th, and Clear Bright, in July.i In the first, observers celebrate children by setting banners bearing images of carp afloat in the sky. The second honors the spirits of family ancestors, which involves cleaning up and re-mounding their graves, and putting out ceremonial food and flowers for them. These festivals, for the young and the long dead, evoke the ever- turning wheel of life. On the eve of “Clear Bright,” Rexroth anticipates the freshness that a rainfall will bring: “One more / Clear bright day in this floating life.”3
He returns in this meditative poem to visionary themes he had explored in earlier poems, but in a new manner. He sustains a contemplative detachment throughout the ten-part reverie in contrast to most of his earlier poetry of mixed modes and dialectical tensions that resolve in a momentary illumination. Noticeably gone are his satire, rage, outlandish humor, and philosophy.
At the same time, he maintains, as he had in the past, that true community requires reforming people’s interactions by “breaking down rigid ideologies.”4 Upholding that “the only Absolute is the Community of Love,” he reasserts his definition of activism as the provision of contemplative channels in poetry.5
The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart illuminates the microcosmic-macrocosmic flow and mirroring of the universe, existence shuttling back and forth and balancing between the poles of being and nonbeing, and the reflected worlds, which are the ordinary and sacred dimensions of experience. The reciprocal title announces mutual reflection as the primary principle of reality. “The Heart’s Garden” suggests the cultivation of a person’s deepest nature, the soul or spirit from which all else grows. “The Garden’s Heart” suggests the deepest core of
i Rexroth uses the Chinese name for the Japanese Obon festival, one of the many cultural fusions in the poem. The Chinese Clear Bright is in mid-August. The Japanese holiday formerly occurred on the fifteenth day of the seventh month in the lunar calendar. Now, the holiday’s dates vary by region, from July through August. 3 the world we experience. The contemplative reflects the cosmic garden, which in turn reflects the act of contemplation.
Rexroth portrays visionary experience as living “without grasping” and “always in experience / Of the immediate as the / Ultimate.”6 Because it has the fluidity of water and the instantaneous penetration of light, the movement into illumination is effortless: “Water / Flows around and over all / Obstacles, always seeking / The lowest place. Equal and / Opposite, action and reaction, / An invisible light swarms / Upward without effort. . . . / . . . Blazing infinitesimals
— / Up and out — a radiation / Into the empty darkness / Between the stars.”7
Illumination unites outward and inward experience, which Rexroth figures as the rainbow and the pearl-like droplets of the waterfall. The pearl, produced naturally when a mollusk transforms mere grit into a gem with a lustrous, finely colored surface, is a compelling image of the holiness that Rexroth insists “is the heap of dust,” the sacred immanent in ordinary experience.8 The organic process that creates a pearl is a metaphor of compassion. Suffering precipitates compassion. The “Heart’s Garden” presents compassion as the binding energy of community.
“Heartbreak” is summoned up at the outset: “When will the heartbreak stop? / . . . When will the heartbreak go?”9 Love and its loss, like life and death, are put forward by Rexroth as inherent to the human condition. Among the plethora of hurts to the heart addressed in “The
Heart’s Garden” is the specific one that he was recovering from – the absence of domestic erotic love from his daily life for more than seven years, a time permeated by his sense of aging.
Embracing both Buddhist and Taoist principles, the “Three Jewels” referred to in the second part of the poem, Rexroth writes from newly gained tranquility about the hurts he has suffered and inflicted on others.10 The concept – also known as the “Three Treasures” and the 4
“Triple Gem” – is fundamental to one of the major practices of mental reflection in Buddhism, the reflection on the true qualities of the Buddha (Buddha nature, or compassion), Dharma
(Buddha’s teachings), and Sangha (the community of enlightened ones who guide practicing
Buddhists).ii11 These qualities are called the Mirror of the Dharma in the Mahaparinibbana Sutta, and help practitioners achieve the true “mind like a mirror.” In Taoism, the first of the “Three
Jewels” is compassion, which leads to courageous attempts to ease others’ suffering.12 The second is moderation, which enables generous attention to others. The third is humility, which involves aspiring to an unassuming manner of exemplary living.
A pervasive presence in the poem is “the Buddha of healing:” Kannon (観音). The divinity’s Sino-Japanese name means “watchful listening,” and is often translated as “the one who sees/hears all” to mark Kannon’s role of witnessing and saving those in difficulty. Rexroth walks up and down the long hall of Sanjusangendo, another temple in Kyoto, to scrutinize the centrally placed eleven-foot statue of Kannon and “the thousand / Kannons.”13 The thirty-three ii The concept of these three refuges is central to Buddhism, and predates the Taoist usage. Given Rexroth’s thematic and structural principle of conflating various cultural, legendary, mythic, and religious notions and motifs in the poem, his reference is to both the Buddhist and Taoist traditions. The crucial point is the idea of reflection or contemplation as the attainment of “mind like mirror.” The Mahayana Chinese/Korean/Japanese version of the Three Treasures: 自皈依佛，當願眾生，體解大道，發 無上心。
I take refuge in the Buddha, wishing for all sentient beings to understand the great Way profoundly and make the greatest resolve.
自皈依法，當願眾生，深入經藏，智慧如海。
I take refuge in the Dharma, wishing for all sentient beings to delve deeply into the Sutra Pitaka, causing their wisdom to be as broad as the sea.
自皈依僧，當願眾生，統理大眾，一切無礙。
I take refuge in the Sangha, wishing all sentient beings to lead the congregation in harmony, entirely without obstruction. (“Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels.”) The Taoist Three Treasures can also be translated as “love,” “frugality” or “simplicity,” and “humility” or “modesty.” 5 bays of the temple hold 1,000 five-and-a-half-foot statues of Kannon, carved in wood and leafed in gold. He realizes that “each one looks different,” and the “Gesture of the blessing hands” is
“never exactly the same.” The uniqueness of each implies the infinite scope of the Buddha’s healing power: “He who hears the world’s cry. / Thirty-three thousand thirty-three / Heads, each with a hundred arms / And eleven faces.” Each multi-armed Buddha carries a coil of rope to lasso straying and suffering creatures, and lead them to salvation. The Bodhisattvas’ male and female forms indicate a supreme reciprocity in gender. Rexroth also invokes another savior,
Marichi, the Indian goddess and patroness of prostitutes and samurai.
Key to “The Heart’s Garden” is Rexroth’s modification of his earlier conception of sacramental marriage into the expansive notion of erotic companionship. He also acknowledges that the sexual expression of relationship is only one manifestation of love that is the primal creator, mover, and connector of all things. Love exists among family members and friends, between lovers, and in solicitude toward all things. In writing of “knowledge . . . as an act of love” preceding experience, Rexroth means that to know another is analogous to the erotic act of lovers reflecting each other.14 He refines the sexual act into a pure form of intimacy – communion between two compassionate persons.
Love means connection. Rexroth’s images of knotting and untying, bridging and unlinking, and weaving and unweaving suggest that illuminated experience yields a profound view of the interdependence of all things, as denoted by the Net of Indra. Its nodes of intersecting rope are knotted with pearls or gems that reflect each other’s uniqueness ad infinitum. And, at each node is a Buddha and every Buddha in each node of the net is also mirrored in it. Likewise, they are mirrored in each of the nodes. Everything reflects everything else, and is, in turn, reflected in everything. 6
The motifs of connection signify the constancy of process, which subsumes the ephemeral nature of existence that Rexroth depicts as unweaving or the failure of bridges. Early on, he imagines that “Somewhere in some topology / The knots untie themselves, / The bridges are all connected,” which plays with the doubled meaning of “knots” as both problems or dilemmas blocking enlightenment and as components of revealed connection.15
Rexroth asks “Is that true? How do you know?” to prepare for communicating the insight that the big questions about life and states of existence and perception cannot be answered – only recognized as attesting to the cardinal mystery of the universe and its dynamic forces. He responds later in the poem: “The solution / Of the problem of knowing / And being is ethical. /
Epistemology is moral.16 Once the understanding is reached that all forms of existence are inextricably linked, all actions undertaken have ethical and moral repercussions: harm to another harms oneself.
Through the weaving motif, Rexroth conjoins three Eastern and Western myths of lovers:
“the weaving girl” (Vega) and “the cowboy” (Altair), Tsure and Shite, and Homer’s Odysseus,
“the wanderer / Of many devices” who returns to his faithful wife.iii Penelope forestalls her unwelcome suitors by promising to give them an answer once she has finished weaving her tapestry, which she covertly unravels each night.
Demonstrating reciprocal links is a central movement of “The Heart’s Garden.” Rexroth enumerates waterfalls that he has visited in the West and in the East to point out water’s universality; it “speaks the same language.”17 He focuses on the interrelations between the microscopic and the gigantic, the ordinary world and its mirrored sacred world. He again refers to St. John of the Cross’s ruling out of the desire for revelatory experience as “The sin of
iii “Cowboy” is Rexroth’s term; the correct reference is “herd-boy.” 7 gluttony” because “visions are / The measure of the defect of / Vision.” Rather, “If belief and anxiety, / Covetousness and grasping, / Be banished from experience / Of any object whatever, /
Only its essence remains, / Only its ultimate being.”
The overall theme is right contemplation, which absorbs all particular and universal dimensions of experience, the unstable nature of existence, and the steadiness of love that sustains the cosmos. The waterfall illustrates these two poles of reality: “The smoke / And mist of the waterfall / Shifts and billows. The double / Rainbow remains constant.”18
“Heart’s Garden” concludes with some further deliberate cultural conflations, using two of the three brightest summer stars: Altair in Aquila (the Eagle) and Vega, the pendant to Lyra
(the Lyre).iv Rexroth associates the Chinese and Japanese mythic characters of the Cowboy and the Weaving Girl of the Tanabata, the annual one-night reunion on the seventh night of the seventh month, with the movement of the Altair and Vega stars through the sky. He also conflates the stars with another East Asian myth of the peasant boy, Tsure, who is permitted once a year to cross the river of Heaven to unite with his lover, Princess Shite, who weaves a new obi for the occasion, and with the return of Ulysses to Penelope.
In creating “The Heart’s Garden,” Rexroth solved two artistic problems: how to keep a steady contemplative perspective and how to make an extended imitation of visionary experience. His goal was an organic mystical poetry in which form and content are inextricably woven together. He achieves this union in “The Heart’s Garden” by presenting visionary experience without reducing it to mundane terms and yet showing its roots in the ordinary world.
This balanced perspective, which is both intense and serene, came from his having fused his
“conceptualizing mind” and his “experiencing sensibility,” as Woodcock was to discern.19
iv Along with Deneb, the brightest star in Cygnus (the Swan), Altair and Vega form the summer triangle. 8
Rexroth calmly surveys the worst and best aspects of experience. He finds that the refuse of an ESSO “tire tracked gas station yard” is the “greatest gravel / Garden” and just as enlightening as – or even more so than –the Shinto sand and Zen gravel gardens.20 His contemplative composure is unbroken, not even by the clamor of “Forty million school children /
Sightseeing. Forty thousand / Old ladies praying. The prayer /Gong never stops ringing,” a comic exaggeration indicating his equanimity and the immense activity in the garden of experience.21
His contemplative ease arises from the taking it easy of Taoism where water flows to its natural level. He positions himself floating in water between the “twin peaks of plus / And minus” and raptly engaged with his surroundings. He personifies slipping into transcendent clarity as an actual entity, a mysterious “Something” or “It” that climbs waterfalls, hills, and mountains.22
Rexroth begins the visionary sequence with the “Cedar and cypresses” on the hillsides appearing to climb upward. Then: “Something else climbs. / Something moves reciprocally / To the tumbling water.” The ascent into illumination is both invisible and palpable: “You cannot see it or feel it. / But if you sit by the pool / Below the waterfall, full / Of calling voices all chanting /
In a turmoil of peace, / It communicates itself. / It speaks in the molecules / Of your blood, in the pauses / Between your breathing.”23
From the meditative perspective of calm withdrawal, against the backdrop of a three thousand year-old religious tradition that Rexroth had studied lifelong and had been rapidly assimilating again during his Kyoto visit, he was now taking the world in just as it presented itself to him – both in his customary sensual, scientific, literary, religious, naturalistic, and philosophical terms, but also all transformed into metaphorical terms for understanding the processes of nature and culture. At the same time, he apprehends in all this outward display, 9 points of tangency and convergence, and parallels to his own condition – his sorrows, defeats, pride, striving, accomplishment, loves, and losses.
This kind of contemplative reserve enabled Rexroth to watch without being impelled to act. He resists touching the pretty girls who come and go in the poem. He does not fume at the red and yellow film box trashed on sacred ground. As he continues in this unruffled state, he begins to suffer his losses less. The specters of aging, deaths of beloved family, friends, and achievers, being lovelorn, and his worries about his orientation in the world – all fade away.
Taking their place are serene warmth of heart and an abiding sense of being supported in balance by the mysterious order of the cosmos.
The chief insight of “Heart’s Garden” is that the processes working out in the world are uniform throughout the universe and identical to the processes working in all people. In this primary sense, all things reflect one another. Furthermore, all things can be met with composure.
This kind of acceptance of things as they are gives rise to comprehending how things are before leaping to the question of why they are as they are or how they might be different. Rexroth had gained an older person’s outlook and philosophy that allows for slowing things down. In the space opened up by not reacting impulsively, calmness, charity, compassion, and generosity can flourish.
This benevolence is the habitude of illumination. The more frequently one enters the state of detachment, non-action, compassion, and receptiveness, the more effortless entering it becomes and the more its virtues permeate one’s way in the world and increase one’s tending to being magnanimous, which can sometimes mean being a ferocious actor on behalf of the good.
This illumination is a kind of habitude in another sense. “Heart’s Garden” is a poem of the middle way. There is so little drama in it. The reverie rises and falls like the waves of a calm 10 sea coming gently to the shore. And, in the sound of the surf, we hear the Quaker voice of
George Fox imploring us to follow the inner light in the same key and register as the voice of the
Buddha imploring us to strive and the voice of the Tao imploring us to take it easy.
Rexroth was jubilant about having recovered his poetic strength and having mastered the contemplative mode. He was confident that more work would come. In the interim, he spent his final week in Japan exploring the modern face of its culture in Tokyo. In the jumbled, frenetic metropolis, people rushed pell-mell through the streets, which resounded incessantly with cars honking and bicycle bells ringing. Cooking smells and clouds of cigarette smoke clung to the humid air. The cacophony was jolting, though here and there in the warrens Rexroth chanced upon a shrine or a temple in which he could repose. . . . 1 CP: The Heart’s Garden, The Garden’s Heart, 661. 2 CP: The Heart's Garden, The Garden's Heart, 660. 3 671. 4 David.Meltzer, ed. “Kenneth Rexroth,” San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2001. Print. 235 5 Introduction, The Collected Longer Poems. New York: New Directions, 1968. Print. viii. 6 HGGH, 574. 7 674. 8 Introduction to The Collected Longer Poems, ix. 9 HGGH, 659. 10 663. 11 “Taking Refuge in the Three Jewels.” N.a., N.p., N.d.