Scattered Elegy/Eulogy for Philip Whalen
To zap the demons of attachment
you told your premature mourners
to place your corpse on a table
strewn with frozen raspberries
*
Today is July 18, 2002,
and the last time I sat in Boulder
was summer 1975--
you arrived, and I was
reading your novels & poems
and saw no more need to
sit at the knee
than with Trungpa--
while inwardly
the connection was
clear as the sun,
consciousness,
another day--
the mystery of Dasein
*
the Poetry Wars had ended
just before my bus arrived
from Oregon, Sept. '74
and though I had written
Martin Fritter : Karmadzong :
from the Dalles or Hood River
homestead where friends
put me up between
sticker picker shifts
at Cascade Locks Lumber
there was a much quieter mode of
whatever: meeting:
than the farewells
of my Oregon friends--
e.g., the first night in town
Country came down the hall
with a couple of monks
and laughed: Lost Horizon
is playing! we walked
to the movie theatre,
call it The Rialto, I dunno
*
Sitting on the hill
mulling over
the visitor's suggestion:
to divest everything
& head for a San Francisco zendo together
my apparatus must have remembered
the guest's announcement
down in the dining hall
that her breasts were growing
suddenly, inexplicably large--
Upstairs--in Pullahari,
was it? red carpet--
sitting there beside her
anyhow, on the hill--
my thingee must
have failed to conceal
my interest--
I wanted those tits!
*
Was it a lesson in nonattachment?
When she did not cotton to
my overt interest in
those tits--
I realized we were all nuts.
That logic would not avail.
That J.H. was right
up at the site near
Red Feather Lakes--
"we're all fuckin' neurotics."
That I was not supposed to
go to San Francisco with her
pretending nonattachment,
a craven, minklike, otterlike
dharma critter in the night.
The logos was not a prefab
pattern, as it were.
We were responsible
--like an improv company
of actors, variously
comic, tragic, pathetic--
for making it up.
But, Phil, that goes without saying.
Right?
*
I'm bigger than you now,
my girth exceeds all
rime & reason
this morning I tried a quieter
voice, the appraisor
arrived
from Peoria, I left him
with my mother
in the aluminum shack
I hope to see
amortized
or whatever.
The dada-
dicticism?
No goal. We must
love the chaos.
If all issues
were resolved--
what dreams, what
guilt-quilts,
what cosmic loneliness
would come
flooding in?
In other words,
when the I
thinks of Boulder
1974-75
it is not
Jim McCurry
any more than
say, Frog #456679
popping a bubble
of some
unlabeled
whatsis
in the swamp
outside
jmccurry@sandburg.edu
which, by
the way,
is my new
signature,
I'm told,
Adios--
#
jim mc curry, b. 10-3-43 in hawthorne (los angeles) california,
has taught at carl sandburg college since 1980, in poetry & philosophy;
since recently going online, his links include Big City Lit, Cyber Oasis,
Drought, and Snow Monkey—ten poems in all, four of which now
appear at the websites of the first two zines just named.
His philosophical interests center on nonduality: especially maha ati,
dzogchen, or madhyamika. (David Loy's recent study, NONDUALITY,
is a convenient handle.) For example, "the man" includes Huang-po,
Yun-men, Dogen. The trouble with What Is Enlightenment is the
dubious assumption that we can think our way to enlightenment,
or that there is truly conscious evolution, 'progress,' rather than
recovery of primordial innocence/happiness. In this respect,
contrary to some of his best friends, actually, Jim is somewhat
skeptical of Andrew Cohen's work, and Ken Wilbur's—not to say
the work of Eckhart Tolle, let's say. The literary interests include
V. Woolf, B. Cendrars, Lydia Davis, Knut Hamsun, Carlos Drummond
de Andrade, Casares and Borges, Marquez, Neruda, William Carlos
Williams, Jack Collom. I think that's enough indication. O yes, Pessoa.
Jim has a granfalloon of masks, some of whom are becoming
heteronyms, mebbe: Baron Axel Angst, Ramadooly Foofoo, H. Pumphrey
Smogrove, and the most fully realized of all, Dogwag Bummerstead, PhD,
aka Old Dog.
email: jmccurry@csc.cc.il.us