Rachelle Katz Lerner, Phd, Is an Independent Scholar, Editor, and Poet

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.

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