The Collected Works of Chögyam Trungpa: Volume Seven (75 page)

Burroughs:
A prose writer is doing a very different thing. Essentially he is creating characters, he is performing the great sacrilege in the Mohammedan religion of creating mind. People ask me, “Would you continue to write if you were on a desert island and no one would ever see it?” Answer: “Yes, for company.” I would be creating characters for my own company, my own amusement. It’s not the same operation as poetry. Also, a prose writer is trying to create a universe which he wants to live in, a whole universe.

Whalen:
In both of the novels I wrote it was creating universes to show why I didn’t want to live there. Why I wanted out.

Burroughs:
If you’re creating a universe in which you don’t want to live, you’re creating one in which you do want to live. It is exactly the same operation.

Rinpoche:
You are still aiming at the audience and what they would like to hear.

Burroughs:
I’m aiming really to a very definite audience. Say if I’m creating a character, I am aiming to the person who would be that character. I want the character that I have made to read this.

Rinpoche:
When I wrote my first autobiography I was aware of the audience as well as telling my own story at the same time.

Whalen:
But the business of creating a character by jimmying what you know, taking pieces of experience and gluing them together to make a character, is very exciting and very interesting. You figure that by the time you get through doing this nobody’s going to recognize all the pieces. They’ll just see the single image or person in the book. And it’s a lot of fun.

Ginsberg:
I think that’s a very important point. You remember it and then you remember you’re a poet so you write it down.

Merwin:
I think there’s another thing in it too. The audience is more a part of the language than it is part of your impulse. Consequently it’s part of your indebtedness because once you start using words you’re using something that’s given to you by other people.

Rinpoche:
That’s it. If you begin to dissect that particular impulse into two parts you’re aware of the audience and you’re aware of yourself. Whenever you use language you always address somebody.

Burroughs:
You don’t think of the audience when you’re writing. You think of perhaps an individual audience. For example, when Conrad wrote
Lord Jim
he had no idea that his hero would be taken up by Fitzgerald and become
The Great Gatsby.
They’re the same person, the same person that can only exist in the prose of the writer. Therefore no movies can be made of
Lord Jim
or of
The Great Gatsby
because they only have this vicarious existence in the prose of the writer.

Rinpoche:
Maybe we should get together some kind of reading. If you could say things about what you have written already and what kind of personal experience you have felt each time. This would be very helpful to people who are going to listen to us. A lot of people who are going to listen to us feel that they need direction, they need inspiration, they’re fascinated by who we are, what we are, what is poetics in any case, what it does to this society.

Ginsberg:
I have a song I would like to sing.

Rinpoche:
Well, maybe you can explain why you sing, then read.

Ginsberg:
Yes. I came back from India in 1963 and was chanting Hare Krishna. Robert Duncan, a poet who is a friend, said, “You use more of your body and more of yourself when you’re singing Hare Krishna than in your poetry these days.” So I began getting more and more pleasure out of singing, and also more and more of my body into it, and more of my breath into it. Then when you and I met seven years later you suggested improvisation and I found it was easiest to improvise while singing. In America that’s the basic way of improvising in blues or in calypso. You can use rhymes, make up spontaneous mind utterances very swiftly if you’re singing and also more feeling comes out.

Rinpoche:
Would you like to compose a spontaneous poem?

Ginsberg: (singing)

Started doing my prostrations sometime February ’75

Began flying as if I were alive

In a long transmission consciousness felt quite good and true

But then I got into a sweat while thinkin’ about you

Fell down with bronchitis, the first illness that came

Pneumonia in the hospital was what they said was the name

Came back to New York, got down again on my knees

But then the cold came back and I began to sneeze

I went to see the doctor, I said, “Doctor, something’s wrong—

Everytime I do my prayers my cold comes along.

Hey Doctor! Look me over, tell me what’s wrong with me.”

He said “Well, I think you’ve got some trouble with your prostate, it might cancer be.

Why don’t you get to a urologist, he’ll stick his finger up your ass.

He’ll tell you if it’s benign or whether it is something that will pass.”

The urologist said “You have to go into a hospital, son.”

I said “Okay, I’ll find out if my race is over and done.”

Went into the hospital, unconscious on the table.

They did their systescopic biopsy scientific as they were able.

When I woke up, they said “Oh, nothing’s wrong with you.

Might as well go home tomorrow, your body is true blue.

Take this antibiotic with you when you go to your house.”

Three days I lay in bed thinkin’, “Well, I didn’t louse

Up my situation too bad, so I’ll take the pills they gave.

Couple days of taking those antibiotics I thought I’d see my grave.

103 was the temperature, I called the doctor please

“Oh!” the nurse said, “The Doctor, he’s out there on vacation taking his ease,

“Why don’t you go into the hospital,” the substitute doctor said.

Thought I’d better do it before I fell down dead.

Went into the hospital, they stuck a needle in my arm.

Poured more antibiotic into me, they thought it’d do no harm.

Pretty soon my face fell down, the virus hit my nerves.

I couldn’t drink my water without the drops would swerve

And fall down from my lips. I couldn’t move my eyebrows,

Couldn’t sneeze for several weeks, I didn’t even know how

To wrinkle my nose or smile on the right side of my face.

Till I found it was the same herpes simplex that John Baker had a case.

In other words I’d been better off if I’d not gone to that doctor man

As it was I had four weeks of a great big blank quite bland.

Couldn’t do no prostrations, couldn’t even visualize my face,

But the one thing I could remember was only you, dear Mr. Grace.

Rinpoche:
Very Jewish. So, Merwin, you want to read us something?

Ginsberg:
Have you written any poems since you’ve been here in Boulder?

Merwin:
Yes.

Ginsberg:
Do you write every day?

Merwin:
I try to write every day. Usually mornings. There’s a very short one I wrote after sitting today. I remember it. It’s part of a series.

Blanket flower has opened.

I have imagined a heart that lit up the whole sky.

Burroughs:
Have you ever written prose as I mean it?

Rinpoche:
I think I have, but I don’t have it with me. . . .

Say something.

Whalen:
Frightened chrysanthemums.

Burroughs:
What frightened them?

Whalen:
I have no idea. What do I want to say?

Rinpoche:
That’s not the point. Just say it.

Ginsberg:
What’s going on in your head?

Whalen:
I’d seen the crick with the bridge over it that I was walking across today. That’s all, just the water running under the bridge, and there’s a lot of it.

Ginsberg:
What’s on the side of the water?

Whalen:
Grass. Then I went and sat in the park and looked at the light in the trees. I was on my way to see Chögyam Trungpa and I was too early and so I was sitting and I was looking at the light in the trees and the sun was going down and it came straight across into all the leaves and you could see each one of them and the water was going by. There were two little boys who came along and played in the drinking fountain, trying to scoop the water out of the basin of the fountain. Then they got into putting their thumbs on top of the water spout and spraying water all over everything. They had a good time. On the way back there were some girls wearing some kind of club sweaters. The sweaters had a big
L
that went down into a V shape, but the word that was written on them had
L
’s in it so that’s why I knew it was an
L
and not a
V.
They were standing outside of Tico’s dining room and the wind blew. What more? I don’t have that kind of head.

Ginsberg:
Actually, it sounded like one of your poems. You have the whole city going in your mind, plus the river going through it.

Burroughs:
May I ask you now a spiritual question? Is it true that when you see something absolutely it disappears? I remember reading in one of your books about this bodhisattva or enlightened one who comes back to his room and finds all the demons there. They say, “We will not go away until you see us.”

Rinpoche:
That’s true, I think, very much so.

Waldman:
Is that true of writing?

Burroughs:
No, this has nothing to do with writing, exactly. You simply have to see a demon and he disappears.

Rinpoche:
Well, it depends on how you see. Unless you see them completely they don’t disappear.

Burroughs:
What do you think about death? Do you think that it’s possible to experience death consciously so that you die consciously or is there always the blackout?

Rinpoche:
I think that it’s possible to die consciously, definitely.

Burroughs:
I agree with you. And how many people can accomplish this?

Rinpoche:
Very few.

Burroughs:
Yes, as I’ve always said, if someone’s not afraid of dying, they will never die.

Rinpoche:
Well, they will die, but . . .

Burroughs:
It’s the fear, it’s the fear that makes the blackout. Let me just ask one more question. Isn’t the basic fear that everyone has and carries through their life the fear of their own death which they know is going to happen? Like in
Anna Karenina
where the woman had this continual dream of her own death.

Rinpoche:
I think that it’s certain death of the world that you experience when you die. It’s not only you who’s dying but your world’s going to collapse and not exist anymore.

Poetics

Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche:
We’ve been talking a lot about the notion of threefold logic . . . The notion of what’s called threefold logic applies to one’s general state of mind, how we experience our phenomenal world. And obviously poetry comes from an expression of one’s phenomenal world, in the written form. It could be prose or poetry form. It’s not so much, from a Buddhist point of view, that you write good poetry, particularly, but how your thought patterns become elegant; that you see the phenomenal world as a process, stages, as a view, from our own state of mind. So threefold logic is: first, we have what’s known as the “ground,” which is our perception and is a general sense of idea of how things work. Like “bright.” Having seen the brightness, then we begin to have some idea it is “sunshine.” So, because of the sense of brightness, then we experience the sense of “sunshine.” Having experienced that second stage, then we have a conclusion, which is “dispels darkness.”

So that is what’s known as threefold logic, which actually does play very much in the haiku approach. There’s an idea, and then there’s a complementary remark with the idea, and then the final ending. Sometimes the end is punctuated by humor, or by opinion, or it could be just open-ended. So this seems to be an interesting kind of training, seeing how you think when you look at your world, and then you just write that down. By doing this a person begins to become aware, methodical, and so nothing is jumpy, and everything’s somewhat organized in your mind. Therefore it creates further chain reactions, probably in the readers of your poetry as well. The thought patterns of those who read your work begin to have a systematic situation around them, rather than just things jumbled together. In turn, the theory is that, having such approach, you’re helping in the world to destroy chaos. And you create order in the universe.