Poet's work
    
Grandfather
  advised me:
    Learn a trade
  
I learned
  to sit at desk
    and condense
  
No layoff
  from this
    condensery

Lorine Niedecker

"The work is all that's there" says Joe Massey in a one line post on his blog.
It is the sort of insight people are meant to have this time of year.

What will be borne through
the stillness
and the emptiness?

Through the bourne?

"All Wise"

Footprint and eye fringe
Shake off snow -
All wise
Flinging.

Pupil and fingers
Draw the bow -
All wise
Singing.

Heartbeat and feathers
Sow birds so -
All wise
Ringing.


Louis Zukofsky

Only emotion endures.
Ezra Pound

Relaxation

John just told me about the time he stayed in the YMCA in Boston whilst studying with Liang in the early 70's. He made friends with a black guy from the South who was ultra relaxed and sweet-natured and always had a different beautiful white girl on his arm. John, being interested in relaxation, asked him how he was so relaxed. His friend thought for a while and then said, "Well Jahn, I just ain't got nuthin in mah head."

I remember hearing an interview with James Lovelock years ago. He did research during WWII on the treatment of burns. His work required him to develop salves and then test them on burnt skin. To obtain a sample of burnt skin he was told to take a Bunsun burner to a live rabbit which he did, once – he didn't have the stomach to inflict such suffering twice. So instead he burnt his own arm and tested the salves on that. “Didn't it hurt?” asked the incredulous interviewer. “Only the first time,” he cheerfully replied. There's heart for you.

Torque

Fighting spirit and community spirit. We clearly need both so yet again we have to strike a balance – an equilibrium, or what my teacher would call torque. By torque he means a state of power produced by the interaction of two twisting forces with opposite turning moments. The opposing turns don't cancel each other out, instead they twine around each other and squeeze and capture energy producing a charged and vibrant state. In a sense any living or lively situation is torqued – it manages to maintain a controlled high energy level without exploding or combusting, through a balance struck by the interaction of at least two different forces. In Tai Chi turning the waist to the right tends to produce clockwise twists in the limbs and turning the waist to the left produces counter-clockwise twists. It is possible for a limb to contain both twisting moments if the waist is working with left and right turns either simultaneously or in rapid succession (simultaneous should be a very quick alternation otherwise it becomes a grinding opposition, losing vibrancy and life). To turn the waist rapidly left right left right can be quite exhausting so instead of thinking in terms of using the waist to generate an energized state, think instead of using it to capture that state. The image of life, especially on this planet, is all around so if you tune into this vibrancy then the waist will want to do what it needs to do to make you similarly lively. To open to such possibilities requires heart and a real interest in something beyond yourself. Fighting spirit and community spirit don't oppose each other, they inform each other. You cannot be an effective and enduring fighter if your heart isn't big enough to contain the community from which you spring, and the community will not flourish or even survive if its members cannot or will not fight. The Mahayana don't insist on the bodhisattva vow because it's a worthy idea but because they have found from experience that it makes them better warriors. The environment in which you work needs to be open, vastly so, otherwise the heart will not fill with awe and wonder the way it should each time you enter your Tai Chi.

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover . . . those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
Albert Camus

Tempering the Spirit

Relaxation is the freeing of your energy from worthless activity. Such activity may be worry, anger, fear, etc. My teacher is always at pains to point out that energy needs to be abstracted from activity. If not then it'll always be locked up and its purity and essential nature cannot be investigated. The activities of Tai Chi – the Forms, the Pushing, the Uprooting, the Firing, etc – are simply vehicles for the energy and the means for generating and developing the energy. There should come a point where the energy wants to break free of such structural shackles and start to simply be.

Spirit directs the energy. We've all met people with terrific spirit. They generally have terrific energy as well. And they're often heart-attacks waiting to happen. If the spirit is given too much of a free rein it'll damage the body, particularly the heart. The heart has to soften, contain, and keep in check the spirit – temper it. The heart is like a broad morality that pervades your being – something about it steps outside the closed system of self and sees and feels the broader picture which always contains the physical, emotional and energetic world you dwell in. When the heart contains and tempers the spirit then spirit can be expressed in the gentlest and subtlest of actions – it can be brought into everything you do and not just saved up for those dramatic occasions when you need to suddenly let out a large burst of energy (lose your temper).

Heart also directs the spirit – makes sure it's connected so that the energy it carries can be effective. Strong spirit without heart is just a bit aimless and pointless. Rather like a toddler's tantrums – impressive in their strength and intensity but laughable in their disconnectedness and self-absorption. When you control others with spirit you keep them in a dispirited state – a state of fear and trepidation – you effectively enslave them and you'll never receive their best energy. When you involve others with heart you encourage them and they'll be far more inclined to join with you and give you their best and take the two of you to places you could never have foreseen.

Great ideas originate in the muscles.
Thomas Edison

Heartful Spirit

Bringing energy to bear is a matter of intent or spirit. The idea of a Tai Chi posture is that spirit and waist combine forces to corral the incoming energy and the energy generated by our own movements and involvement, through a yielding action into the tightening and intensifying spiral of the attack. The yielding action gathers energy, not just from the imaginary opponent but from all around – from the environment, external and internal, from your own past, recent and ancestral, and from energetic realms you may never become aware of, and funnels this energy into the final attack of each posture. As the energy passes down the funnel of your spirit it speeds up both in velocity and rotation, as would water spiralling down a plastic funnel. Because of the way our body is constructed (limbs can't twist indefinitely in one direction – the spirals must always return), and probably also because of natural laws (of compassion) that haven't been elaborated yet, the spirals are themselves generated by figures of eight. This is a crucial fact and is responsible for the emotions stirred up by Tai Chi (and especially heartwork). The figure of eight is the action of the heart – it is the action of bringing together and unifying without combining or fusing – combustion is only ever partial, at least until death. Each entity joins and communicates yet retains its identity and integrity. It is crucial that your motivation comes from the heart – that it breathes and beats with the heart of life. If it doesn't then it'll either be idle – habitual action – or it'll come from the mind. This is why both Tai Chi and Heartwork are such physical disciplines – there is far more natural wisdom in the body and its actions than there is in the mind; and the body, when it is loose, relaxed and interacting, is far more of the heart than the mind. It is the mind that pulls us away from the natural order and the natural process; it is the heart that brings us back. Courage is of the heart. Fear is of the mind. The work is emotional and the strength is in the affection – in the tears that well up but are never shed. “Nothing matters but the quality / of the affection – / in the end – that has carved the / trace in the mind . . .” (Ezra Pound).

16 Definitions Constructed From Memory

for Lee Ann, Bernadette, and Brian

As a small south american squirrel
inhabiting mostly mountainous regions
would feed on lizards half-way between
poles of the tropics, I too would fall
heartbreaked in the settlement of feuds
or the fields of kentucky.

When the moss grows high between the
perennials and disordered mimmocks weep,
these dainty fastidious gestating mammals
break for leavened bread and sup between
the rows of trees, lifting like friars
some heavy books in sunlight's morning
windows where the mollusks row in scion's
quadragesimal phyla.

Lisa Jarnot

Levitation

Lisa Jarnot - another mad American with a big heart - writes about levitation today. Apparently Yang Chien-hou, Yang Cheng-fu's dad, when he heard of the death of his daughter was so grief stricken that he rose from the ground and hit the ceiling with his head. My teacher also told me once of an Italian monk who, whenever he heard the name Jesus, would rise gently from the ground - his friends would have to hold him down. I'm sure such things are possible, but to be so capable one's energy would have to be pretty good and so well focused: it would require a single-minded, undistracted, pure and total obsession with the work. It would have to be everything to you. No clinging vestige of self - all energy.

My teacher also once told me about some Tibetan mystics, I can't remember whether they were Buddhist or Bonpo, who would know when their death was impending and would ask a student to tie them up in a large sack, in a seated meditation posture, then to leave them and come back in a week or so. On returning only the hair, nails and teeth would remain in the sack. The living matter would have become so suffused with spirit through the years of correct meditation that it would transform into that realm on death. Strange what people get up to.

Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
Kahlil Gibran

"To Work Is to Contradict Contradictions,
to Do Violence to Natural Violence . . ."

To consummate
the inconsummate, and make of it

the unending. Work,
work, work.

Six days of the week you shall work,
on the seventh you shall think about it.

'Mary, pass the potatoes' becomes
division of subject & object.

Work, work, work.
Get them yourself.

Thought is a process of work,
joy is an issue of work.


Robert Creeley

Softness and Spirit

I was struck by the thought that came out of the writing process the other night (Teaching below) – stimulated no doubt by the softness of the sleeping cat I was cradling in my left arm (forcing a one-handed deliberation to the typing) – that attributes and abilities such as intelligence, talent, softness, application, can all be developed if that is what the student really wants. We all have energy – the ability to get things done – so if we don't do the work, or if we do it wrong, then it's because somewhere along the line we've made a conscious decision that our way is best – certainly superior to the teacher's. Of course this decision is being made all the time – it's called not listening, or not connecting – and it expresses itself in a multitude of different ways which agglutinate into what we call self. The marvel of human beings is their shear inventiveness – the seemingly infinite number of ways they've found of getting it wrong. It's the problem with Tai Chi, Heartwork, or any other teaching, that unless the student is correctly motivated – moving from the correct place and towards the correct place – they'll find a way of getting it wrong, that is their work will entrench them more firmly in the mire of self rather than working towards liberation. A correctly motivated person will tend to get things right – they have that secret pliant drift towards reality. So what is correct motivation? It's moving with the thrust of our basic humanity towards connectedness, and away from isolated selfishness. There are two qualities absolutely imperative: softness and spirit, the female and the male. Spirit, or focus, is the ability to husband your energies and bring them to bear solely on the task at hand – it tends to drift towards hardness, and softness is stripping yourself bare so that you have at least a chance of connecting to what's there rather than ignorantly and coarsely besmirching everything with you – it tends to drift towards dissipation. Softness and spirit stimulate and regulate each other – they need each other – and in a sense your work should be a healthy and garrulous conversation between the two. This is what I mean by dynamic equilibrium – the lively balance that's struck between male and female. When these interact then there is no end to the softening or enlivening process – the softer we become the stronger the spirit, and our vitality – our essential energy – is measured by the strength of each – the space between these two extremes. To progress correctly the student must bring these two qualities to bear and must become consumed by an interest in each and in their consequence – connectedness. Real progress will only happen when this interest consumes their own self-interest. It's like striving for an ideal – the image of the gallant knight battling the dragon (his own demons) to win the hand of the unimaginably soft maiden. Or perhaps a more interesting interpretation would be the gallant knight using the dragon (his energetic body) and his softness (the purity at his core) to attain the holy grail – divine connexion.

Prayer

For the past 2 or 3 months my teacher has been writing a prayer. “When it's finished it'll contain everything I know.” A beautiful idea – everything he knows in one fell swoop. There is one image in the present version which I particularly like – the work as febrifuge:

Sweep my courage down the face and fever-front of fear, its mourning for a facile dynasty, a ministry that turns aside, avoiding care.

And another:

connexions secret pliant drift towards reality

I remember he once told me that if your words come from the heart then each thing you say contains everything – has that feeling of completeness.

      SNOW FALL IN FOG
 
 
      hard
      to
      see
      either
  
             through
             both

John Phillips