Transcripts

text | pdf |

---

ROBERT BLY: I will arise and go now and go to Innesfree

And a small cabin build there of clay and wattles made.

Nine bean rows will I have there.

And a hive for the honey bee.

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there,

For peace comes dropping slow.

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings.

Where midnight's all a glimmer and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now,

For always night and day.

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore.

When I stand on the roadway

Or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

See how different that is from speaking it? The more your gut has to come in. More of your feelings. It's possible that our feelings, in fact, lie in the vowels. O's, E's, I's. And the masculine part of us lies in the consonants. So whenever you find a man who talks very fast, You know he doesn't give a damn about his feelings. I talk pretty fast myself.

[LAUGHTER]

Well, that's what Yates is like. He's like that sometimes. Marvelous, marvelous, marvelous for him. But you don't get him unless you memorize him. And then you can feel it go down into your body. Because those vowels live down in the gut. And they come back up again. You understand me, what I say? It's better to memorize one poem than it is to read 40 of them. Because the one poem-- it's strange what we say. We say we learn it by heart. You could also say learn it by your gut. Goes down into the body. And when you need it, it'll come back up.

The trouble with the spiritual life in the West, the reason it is so weak, is not Satan. It's daydreaming. It's nothing dramatic like Satan. The fact is that everybody in the West daydreams too much. So one of the things he says is that what daydreams happen is that they start going through your head. And they are passive. They pass through.

And all of them usually have emotional scenes of some kind. So they pass through your unconscious, like a little stream going through. And they pick up energy all the time from your unconscious. After an hour of daydreaming, well, sleep for seven hours. Then get to wake up and daydream for an hour. You'll be more tired than when you went to bed.

Americans do very little work. But at 5:00 in the afternoon, they're totally exhausted. I have to have a few martinis to keep going. Understand how weird that is? So the Americans, it's perfect for America, really. Because he didn't know television. But television perfectly exhausted the American, daydreaming all day. At night, sits in his room. And listens to the stupid television.

You know what that is? It's a telly. It's a daydream of some creep in New York. His daydream is probably worse than yours. It's much worse. He's lying. He's daydreaming for money. Lying for it. Well, do you understand what happens? I mean, it's an interesting problem. So there's almost no time during the day in which the American is free from daydreaming.

So I've been thinking about that. I only met the idea month or so ago, and I've been thinking about it in relation to poetry. I've been thinking about it in relation to works of art. It's possible they are two completely different things. For example, the typical thing that you see on the television, the serial, is not a work of art, it's a daydream. So what's the difference between a work of art and daydream?

I don't know the answer myself. I just been thinking about it. If television is a capitalist product of a capitalist country, why do they want you to daydream? We'll come back to the other question in a minute. It helps your passivity, doesn't it? What advantage is that in a capitalist country that you'd be passive? Because if you're in a perfectly passive state, you can listen to idiots like Rockefeller and everyone knows it. Or Nixon. Everybody listened to Nixon for a long time. Sounded terrific.

I'm thinking, too, of the ideas of capitalism. The things that we do in a capitalist country. Why is it an advantage for capitalists to encourage you to daydream? That the whole idea of daydreaming is a passive activity. And the more you daydream, the more passive you become. Finally, you become passive enough so that you actually believe that happiness will come from something not there. Like another car. Like a new refrigerator.

And it's absolutely true. When I listen to television and I listen to-- I heard one last night. We don't have a television set, but occasionally I go over and visit, my parents have one. And there, I heard a woman. It was an on-the-spot camera thing, hidden camera. And they asked her about Crisco. And--

[LAUGHTER]

And she spoke with such sincerity about Crisco. It was perfectly clear that it had some real part in her life. I mean, in her mind. She said, I always use Crisco. And it was like someone talking about Jesus.

[LAUGHTER]

So therefore, in some way, she really thinks that her life is happier if she uses Crisco as opposed to one of the other brands. They've got her boy. They just pick up that sincerity in her voice and they know they've got her. Johnny Cash, what did Johnny Cash represent? Among other things, he reserves daydreams. All those things he represents are daydreams. That's why there's all that 19th century and hokey stuff in it.

We're going back fast now. Bobby Dylan, when he went to Nashville and started doing that crap around the Nashville sound, that's all daydreaming. Because he knows he's not in that life. He knows very well he almost killed himself on a motorcycle and drugs in the 20th century. What is he doing giving us this crap about--

Do you understand the idea? That a daydream is not only a solitary activity that you undertake inside your own head. But at the end of a half an hour or 3/4 of an hour daydreaming, you are more separated from everyone in humanity than you were before. We all sense that is true. We know it when we come out of a daydream. I was at Ann Arbor, and I happened to be-- it was a couple weeks ago, and I was talking. There was a man next to me who came up. And I asked him to sing an Indian song. He'd been translating. He'd been an Indian until he was 16 or 17 or something like this in Northern California. And he was now doing some songs of that tribe, which was isolated. You have to walk a week to get to them.

And he was describing what the songs were like that they sung. And among other things, they sang songs about going South. You going South, you're going to see the beaver. And you go farther South, you're going to see they named all the animals. And the farther South you went, they knew that every 15 miles, you'd hit another animal. So this is the songs that they sang.

And what happened in the course of his singing, it was that we all went out into the beaver and into the animal. We were very interested in these animals that you meet every 15 miles as you go farther South. So then there was a student who said, well, he named a popular rock song, and it had something like, "I got marbles in my heart," or something like that.

[LAUGHTER]

And we immediately noticed the word "I" entered for the first time. You see that point? When the white boy's song was sung, it always had the word "I" and "my heart" and things in it. Whereas when the Eskimo or the Indian sang his song, it was a beaver and everything he was interested in. I thought it was very interesting. It just came up in a flash like that.

So therefore, in someone like Bach, you have a person so great that the I is gone just as it is in the Indian. And he's interested in states of consciousness, which everyone shares high states of consciousness and unites everyone in the room in a fraction of a second when the Bach thing is played. Beethoven, too, I think mostly. And Mozart and all.

But then when you get to rock music, you don't know exactly what's happening. Oftentimes in rock music, you'll have a heavy beat. But it's a heartbeat, as in the womb, which unites everyone in the room. But actually, the lyrics will separate them. The lyrics are daydreams. About how my girl was mean to me, and but I'm going to find another one and I'm going to go to Canada. I'm going to go on a commune, and it's going to be wonderful. All those are daydreams. Just daydreams.

So in rock music, you have these two separate things. And notice that the union is not coming as it is with the Eskimo in rock music and a rock concert. It's not coming through the union of the soul with the animal. On the contrary, it's coming through a heavy animal beat.

[GRUNTS]

I mean, I love the Stones. I love to listen to them. But man, you're being united on a very low level there. And it's no joke that the Stones call themselves the Stones, because there is some kind of stone in there. And they would have been great at the Nazi rallies, huh? They know that. Ever heard that one song that Mick sings? Anybody know my name? I used to be around a lot in the old days. Anybody know my name? They used to see me in Germany in 1930s. I bet you can't guess my name. Go ahead, try to guess my name.

That's ominous. Ominous. I mean, he's great, and seeing that in himself, Mick Jagger. Extremely demonic. Extremely demonic. But he sees this and writes about it. Walking North toward the pointer, coming to a dead seal. From a few feet away, he looks like a bound log. He's lying on his back, dead only a few hours. I stand and look at him. There's a quiver in the dead flesh. My god, he's still alive.

And a shock goes through me as if a wall of my room had fallen away. He's lying on his back. The small eyes closed. The whiskers sometimes rise and fall. He is dying. This is the oil. Here on its back is the oil that heats our houses so efficiently. Wind blows fine sand back toward the ocean. The flipper near me lies folded over the stomach, looking like an unfinished arm. Lightly glazed with sand at the edges.

The other flipper lies half underneath. And the seal skin looks like an old overcoat scratched here and there by sharp muscle shells maybe. So I reach out and touch him. Suddenly, he turns over, rears up, gives three cries.

[BARKS]

Like the cries from Christmas toys. And he lunges toward me. I'm terrified and leap back. Although I know there can be no teeth in that jaw. He starts flopping toward the sea, where he falls over on his face. He does not want to go back to the sea. He looks up at the sky. And he looks like an old lady who has lost her hair. He puts his chin back down in the sand, rearranges his flippers, and waits for me to go. I go.

So the next day, I come back to say goodbye. He's dead now. But he's not. He's a quarter mile farther up the shore. Today, he's thinner, squatting on his stomach. Head out. The ribs show more. Each vertebrae on the back underneath the coat is now visible, shiny. He breathes in and out. A wave comes in, touches his nose. He turns and looks at me.

The eyes are slanted. The crown of his head looks like a boy's leather jacket. He's taking a long time to die. The whiskers, white as porcupine quills. The forehead slopes. Goodbye, brother. Die in the sound of waves. Forgive us if we have killed you. Long live your race, your inner tube race. So uncomfortable on land. So comfortable in the ocean.

Be comfortable in death in, when the sand will be out of your nostrils and you can swim in long loops through the pure death. Ducking under as assassinations break above you. You don't want to be touched by me. I climb the cliff and go home the other way.

Now do you see the connection between that and daydreaming? We prefer our thermostats at 72 to all the seals in the world. That's called daydreaming. Japan has just refused to go along with a quota for whales. That's called daydreaming. You don't realize it. All the whales are going to be dead.

We realize we killed every pigeon in this country, every passenger pigeon. There was only 10 million of them when the white people came. And even at the end, when there were reports in the newspapers that there was only one flock this year when there were 100,000 flocks the 10 years before, everybody-- nobody got it, do you understand? You're thinking about something up here and you just swat the last one. Dumb, dumb, dumb. These birds were so dumb, they'd land all around you. Just hit them with sticks.

You understand what I mean? Child batterings are increasing in the United States, by the way. Battered children. And of course, if you aren't related to daydreams, all the mother and father are doing at the time they're beating the child is daydreaming. How come I got stuck with this child? How come I did this? How come I'm not happy? How come I'm not balling like the rest of my friends?

The fact that there's a baby right there escapes their attention completely. You understand the idea? It's the one thing I'm saying to you when that happens, because they get married too early. Don't get married early. There's a very interesting little thing in Ann Landers the other day, and it said-- this woman wrote in, and she said, I don't understand what's happened. My husband and I were married at 19. And we loved each other, and we have four children.

The children are truly beautiful. They're really beautiful children. And I've always thought the house was warm and everything. And now we're 30 years old. My husband came to me the other day, and he said, I'm leaving. I want to leave. And he said he wanted to try his wings. And she said, what did I do wrong? Signed, depressed and heartbroken.

Understand that story? She didn't do anything wrong. She sounds terrific. The fact was, they got married too young. And there's a biological need, an evolutionary need, for you to be alone in your early 20s and work on yourself inside, without having children to worry about. So it's a terrible story, isn't it? Happens all over all the time. So this guy will go out. Now he's 30 and he'll try his wings for three or four years, and then he'll come back. Isn't that what'll happen?

She may be married again by that time, and he'll weep and everything and say, they're my children and everything. That what'll happen? The kids will be ruined. They'll feel rejected by one parent completely. That's great. So he'll try and his wings. Wow. Or he'll come back and they'll try to put the egg back together. Try to put an egg back together you dropped on the floor sometime.

So an interesting thing to think about is, what is the difference between true privacy and daydreaming? Like in meditation. Meditation is an attempt to stop daydreaming. Do you follow the idea? And there are many forms of meditation. All of them moved to this end. In transcendental meditation, they'll give you a mantra. And you repeat that mantra. It's just a group of syllables. You repeat that 20 minutes morning and evening. And during the time of your doing that, you are not daydreaming.

You mustn't expect it to bring you near to God. That's not the point of it. The point is that you won't be daydreaming for that time. And it's such a shock for Americans not to be daydreaming that the transcendental meditation people won't let you do it more than 20 minutes, morning and evening. But nevertheless, you notice a tremendous increase in energy. And in other forms of meditation, for example, what you do is allow the thought to come in from your daydream and then you recognize it and dismiss it. This is the way the Tibetans begin.

And you say that you wait for the thought to come in. You say, oh yes, I recognize you. That's a thought about my laundry list. Thank you. We don't need you. See you later. Then the thought comes in. Oh, it's my aunt's birthday. Oh, very interesting. I don't want that, either. Thank you. Goodbye.

Oh, yes. A picture of my old girlfriend. No, thank you. Don't need that thought. You dismiss them one after another. And in the beginning, you'll be dismissing your thoughts 30 to 40 times, 50 times in the course of 30 minutes. And when I took some instructions from them, they said, you will fail maybe 20 to 30 times in the course of a single half an hour. And I said, what do you mean by fail? Fail means when you don't even notice a thought coming in.

And you wake up five minutes later, and woohoo. Why don't you understand? You don't know what's happened to you. You're somewhere else. And the daydream has come in from the left and caught you and taken you away with it. So therefore, a monk, for example, a Buddhist monk or anyone who's meditating wants solitude. Solitude is the absence of daydreaming and aloneness. But most of us have a few minutes of loneliness, which we fill with daydreaming.

And so it can be said that loneliness and solitude are exactly in total opposites. True solitude would have no daydreaming in it. Anyway, Tomas Tranströmer says that he has to have real solitude for 10 minutes every morning and evening, otherwise he can't do his work. He is a psychologist in a boys' prison for a while, and now he is an advisor for juvenile delinquents and cerebral palsy people and so on in a town about 40 miles west of Stockholm.

I'll read you this little one, Allegro. I'll read this little Haydn poem first. Here he comes back from doing his heavy, heavy, hard work during the day. Hard work. Hard work. When you advise him. He's got a piano upstairs. That's about all he has. He doesn't make much money as a Swede. And he plays Haydn.

"After a bad day, I play Haydn and feel a little warmth in my hands. The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall. The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence. The sound says that freedom exists. And someone pays no tax to Caesar." Paying tax to Caesar is a form of daydreaming, isn't it? "And someone pays no tax to Caesar.

I shove my hands in my Haydn pockets and act like a man who's calm about it all. I raise my Haydn flag. The signal is we do not surrender but want peace. The house of music--" he's not talking about rock music now, but Haydn. "The music is a house of glass standing on the slope. Rocks are rolling. Rocks are flying. The rocks roll straight through the house. But every pane of glass is still whole."

Whereas if you watch television for two hours, you'll notice that every pane of glass in your house is broken and you'll go to bed exhausted from the broken glass lying inside your head. Right here, I was nearly killed one night in February. My car slewed in the ice sideways into the other lane. The oncoming cars, their headlights came nearer. My name, my daughters, my job slipped free and fell back silently, farther and farther back.

I was anonymous, like a schoolboy in a lot surrounded by enemies. The approaching traffic had powerful lights. They shone on me while I turned and turned a wheel in a transparent sphere that moved like egg white." Oh, that's a good image. "The seconds lengthened out, making more room. They grew long as hospital buildings."

Isn't that terrific? Everyone has that sensation just before a wreck, like a man who's being killed with a firing squad, has a feeling that this last second was-- man, it was like five years. I still got five seconds left. That's a long time. The sections lengthened out, making more room. They grew long as hospital buildings. It felt as if you could just take it easy and loaf a bit before the smash came.

"Then firm land appeared, a helping sand grain or a marvelous gust of wind. And the car took hold and fishtailed back across the road. A signpost snapped off. A ringing sound tossed into the dark. Came all quiet. I sat there in my seatbelt and watched someone tramp through the blowing snow to see what had become of me." That touched him, that moment of community.

What was that, Kitty Genovese in New York stabbed in a parking lot while 40 people from apartment houses watched her scream for a half an hour and not one of them went out. Why not? As they said, it sounded like television to me. Here's the second part. There's a poem. It's called Solitude Part Two.

"I have been walking a while in the frozen Swedish fields, and I have seen no one. In other parts of the world, people are born, live, and die in a constant human crush. To be visible all the time, to live in a swarm of eyes. Surely that leaves his mark on the face, features overlaid with clay. The low voices rise and fall as they divide up heaven, shadows, grains of sand.

I have to be by myself 10 minutes every morning, 10 minutes every evening, and nothing to be done. I couldn't translate that line well. It just means totally open time. No schedule, nothing to think about. Just intense silence. We all line up to ask each other for help. Millions? One.

So I asked him what he wanted in that land line. We all line up to ask each other for help. Actually, what it says in Swedish is, "We all stand in a queue to each other." But a queue in Sweden is quite different. You always stand in a queue at the welfare office and get your license plates and everything. So I said to him, I said, this is what you want to do. You want to imagine one person lined up in an office. He's trying to get to the window.

Then the second person has a queue coming off of him. Then the third person here has another queue coming off of him, and another queue coming off this one and this one and this one and this one and this one, this one. Brilliant image, isn't it? Fantastic. And all I could do with it is we all line up to ask each other for help.

And when he has a deep sense of the community, just a fantastic sense of the community. And you can feel the concentration in those lines when he starts to talk about the sections lengthening out like hospital buildings. What we'd say is that, well, I don't know, I got the strangest feeling of cars coming towards you. I mean, I didn't know what to do. I mean, you understand? It's called our exact modern American language.

[LAUGHTER]

Question of how to read poetry is a deep problem. And the Russians do not agree with our way of reading poetry, which is just to read it. And Mayakovsky was a great Russian reader of 50 years ago, and they have a stronger tradition than we do. When Voznesensky reads, he read to 10,000 in the sports stadium in Moscow a few years ago. In Russia, they don't have the split we do between science and art, either. He reads in technical colleges, and all the engineers are there to listen. Whereas if you read in a technical college now, he says, I don't have anything to do with that. I'm just my slide rule, and you can have the emotion. And the English Department type says, I never read biology. I'm pure.

[LAUGHTER]

Poem has images on it like a mortar's going in like beaks of birds. And a woman being hung by the Nazis whose body is swaying like this. Something like this, go here! I am. Goya! Strip. The aggressors be driving in. Eye sockets open. I am sorrow! I am the whirling war tongue. The remains of cities scattered on the snow in 1941, Hungary. I am a woman's throat. My body, a bell. Yawing over trees. No one! No one! Goya! Howls of anger fruit. I drove the invader back and smashed our nails into the brooding sky. I am Goya!

That's how they read.

[LAUGHTER]

He ordinarily reads for four hours. Now that's a very poor imitation, because his voice is much farther down in here. But it has that same quality. If you want to feel, stop daydreaming and feel. So after you've been at a Vosnesensky reading for an hour, you come to an inescapable conclusion. Either he is crazy, or I don't feel. Only two possibilities. He's insane. Or I don't really feel. What is this feeling? Is this feeling I have?

I think I might find a girl, and she might be pretty good and we might have a couple of standard kids. I hope so. You call that feeling? And I like things pretty well. I mean, I like St. John's pretty good. And I like St. Cloud all right. You know. My teachers are OK, you know what I mean?

My sentiment is, you call that feeling? Just check it in. Just check it in. Forget it. That's not human life. It's the way the Lutherans live.

[LAUGHTER]

I know, I am one. We live in a little town called Madison, Minnesota. If you want to see daydreaming, go to the church sometime on Sunday. Everybody sits down in their pews with their back straight daydreaming. And the ministers got a daydream, and he delivers.

What's another mark of the daydream? The body is never involved. In ancient times, they did not worship sitting still like this, listening to daydreams coming out of another man's head. They worshiped with their body, dancing. All ancient ritual always involved dancing and a lot of ecstasy, constantly during the church, constantly. Constant movement of your body. You can't stop daydreaming if your body's silent unless you've had instruction in doing it.

And another thing, of course, in the course, as soon as you get the partisans, they start cutting out the ritual. A ritual is also a form of stopping daydreaming. Because during the course of it, if you keep your attention on that ritual, you will not be daydreaming. In fact, some fantastic common work of art, that's an example of that. A work of art, who hasn't mentioned that? A work of art that finally-- I mean a daydream that finally becomes common to everyone. And then becomes a work of art.

And a great ceremony would be like that. We know that the wedding ceremony is some kind of work of art. I weep every time I go to one. I don't know why. Just tears come in the middle of it. I can't stop them. And it's like weeping in a great work of art. I read a great poem, I weep. But what I thought I would do is read you a poem about Voznesensky reading. Shall I do that?

What happened is that I was in California with my wife and Ferlinghetti called up one day and he said, Voznesensky's reading up in Vancouver. And the Americans won't let him in this country. But he said, would you want to go up and see him? And I said, yeah, I'd like to. So I asked my wife, what do you think I should do? And she says, jump in the airplane.

So I did. And so Ferlinghetti and I flew up there, and we found him in a little hotel room. And there he was. And we went in, and Voznesensky. And Ferlinghetti met him before we went in there. And we talked a little while, and he brought out a bottle of vodka. I bought him a bottle of whiskey, which he gave back to me two days later as I left. Because they drink vodka, period. He said, thank you very much. Would you like to take this home with you?

[LAUGHTER]

And so then we were in there a little while. And all of a sudden, in the door comes two guys. And they're both in double-breasted raincoats. And they're right out of a spy movie. And they are, both of them. One is the NKVD man attached to-- and his name was Viktor. And I say, what do you do, Viktor? Oh, I travel with Andrei. Well, I mean, what do you do? Well, I just travel with Andrei when he's in Canada.

And the other guy was a Pravda man. Both an ominous looking pair of characters as you ever saw in your life. And later, we had a very funny talk. Because afterwards, Voznesensky wanted to go somewhere. And these two guys got quite friendly eventually. And one of them decided the difference between one of them-- Viktor had never smoked pot. And he'd hoped when he was in Vancouver that Voznesensky would go down to some hippie place and he'd get a chance to smoke pot, you know.

And he kept on saying, what's it like? Oh, wow. Viktor was free. And so then the other guy, who was a big, heavy Pravda man, very ominous looking, but he was from Georgia. And he described how they smoked pot in Georgia. Turns out what they do is that eight or nine of them get in a room. And they try to choose a room with a very low ceiling, like this high. And small.

Then they heat it a lot. And they all get in and start smoking like mad, inhaling each other's smoke. And that's a kind of communal smoking. And pretty soon, the thing is heavy in there. You don't have to smoke anymore. And it's rather crude, you know. But that was the other guy's method.

But also, there's a great difference. There's great connection between pot and daydreaming. Pot is just an encouragement to daydreaming. And after that, you'll notice during the course of the pot, in the middle of it, you might notice some community. Or you think you giggle a lot. You think that's community. But at the end of it, you'll be more isolated to smoking for 10 years. Man, you won't even know there is a community.

I knew that Voznesensky has a curious look like a wood animal. These first lines I picked up in a hotel. He has a curious look like a wood animal, one that often lives not far from marshes, near places where the deer sink in up to their knees. Waiting to read while a translation is being spoken, he sits with utterly expressionless face, like a pool unstirred by wind. The hair falling over the pale forehead is a little like birch branches swaying over the water.

His shoes are elegant Italian cowboy shoes. Patent leather. Black trousers and a blue shirt with a folded silk tie always to protect the throat. And he walks toward the microphone. His hands put in his slit front pockets. He walks up like this, with the fingers pointing towards each other. And as he begins to read, his knees bend. His right hand swings back and forward, like a Neanderthal man complimenting himself on having thrown the first stone.

[LAUGHTER]

He looks straight forward, bending over slightly. And a fantastic and resonant voice booms out like enormous dynamos. Like immense waterfalls falling. Like tremendous winds in the west, sweeping up swirling winds, carrying bits of chairs, barn doors, dust from chicken house floors, fragments of wooden grave markers set up by carnation condensed milk drinking trappers. And the whirlwind veers off the gravel road and onto the stubble field.

Sometimes a deep voice starts with a jolt, brought forward by the hand swung up from below. At other times, it drops suddenly into the most matter-of-fact tone, muttering emotionless. The face as much mother quality. His poems are mother quality on fire. He is saying his voice is tenderness in flames. His voice is rushing water on flames. He is saying it's OK to be on fire. It's OK for water. It's OK even for socialist concrete.

He's like Sonia in Crime and Punishment, only with a masculine soul. And she has her yellow ticket raving, feverish. The voice is coming from deep in his chest that's bent forward like a javelin about to be thrown. And it's the voice of some deep-throated woman. I finally thought in the course of the reading, it's not a man, it's a woman.

It's a shout of some deep throated woman shouting at last, her voice rattling the dishes. Men covering their ears in the basement or turning back from the kitchen and going back to the barn. Shouting at last how good it feels, how good it feels to shout at last, to shout about the pit chicken killed by men when you were a girl. How good it feels to shout about the doll you painted with roses and given to the other girl. How good it feels to shout at last.

How good it feels for the birch swamps to shout at last, driven over by so many drunks in wagons. Cut down over so many centuries by greedy landlords. Made love on by so many Slavic girls with birds embroidered on their blouses. Japanese poet Issa. And these are little hikers, and they're wonderful little things. And here's the most famous of them. Issa gets in bed with a cricket. I mean, it's cricket in bed with him. And--

[LAUGHTER]

He writes this little poem, Cricket, be careful. I'm rolling over. That's all. Cricket, be careful. I'm rolling over. What would the daydream version of that poem be?

[LAUGHTER]

Right? That's it. Here's another one of his little poems. Don't kill the fly. Don't you see him there wringing his hands, wringing his feet? Now that's a Buddhist. But actually, all the fly is doing is washing his face or whatever he's doing with his hands, huh? But isn't it strange that 10,000 Christian poets have seen a fly do that and it didn't occur to one of them that fly might be asking for mercy?

Strange. Doesn't mean Buddhism's better than Christianity, nothing like that. It just says it's weird that the Westerners-- I mean, we always have big flyswatters when we're translating the Bible. Looking at a dead wren in my hand. What happened is I was doing this again is an exercise in picking up things and looking at them. And a young Ford was visiting me, and he bought me a dead bird he'd found in the road. And the young Fords are always doing that. Bringing them in.

[LAUGHTER]

Looking at a dead wren in my hand. So what do you think of when you look at a dead wren? If I were a scientist, I would immediately begin to daydream about his species. And write down. You understand me? You could describe it that way. But that would be a daydream. It wasn't a daydream for the man who first did it. All right, forget it. Looking at a dead wren in my hand.

Forgive the hours spent listening to radios. And the words of gratitude. I did not say to teachers. I love your tiny rice-like legs. Like bars of music played in an empty church. And the feminine tale where no worms of empire have ever slept. And the intense yellow chest that makes tears come. Your tail feathers open like a picket fence. And your bill is brown with the sorrow of an old Jew whose daughter has married an athlete.

The black spot on your head is your own mourning cap. Every day, I want so much to see the true teacher. I look for him each time I go out to empty the teapot. When I'm in the middle of a book, I suddenly think I know where he is. West of us in the forest. Or perhaps I am the one who is out in the night. The path barely lit up by moonlight, shining in the sides of the pine trees. The sea far off glittering. The forest sand wet under my feet. And he is the one who is at home.

He sits in my chair calmly. He reads and prays all night. He loves to feel his own body around him. He does not leave his house. Here's a little love poem. The Viking ship sails into the full harbor. The body meets its wife far out at sea. Its lamp remains lit the whole moisty night. Water pours down. Faint flute notes in the sound of the water.

The Viking ship sails into the full harbor. The body meets its wife far out at sea. Its lamp remains lit the whole moisty night. Water pours down. Faint flute notes in the sound of the water. Seeing the ropes of seaweed lying in the sand, I rise into the dream. I am in a submarine. Rolling, whale-like. Beneath an immense rock sheath of the whole world. And I'm not frightened.

Then I went lightly across a rope bridge. I am the female tiger running. My wife, a heavier male tiger following. I hear the love roar as she started after me. For my foot pads fell there to call her. And once together, she patted my hair, and we were human again.

[LAUGHTER]

So what happened in the dream is that her paw actually came up and touched my hair and we turned back into human beings. These are poems by an Indian poet of the 16th century named Kabir. There's a lovely story about him. He went to this great Ramananda, who was a greater spiritual man than we have in the country. A great man, spiritual man at that time.

Ramananda, he went to Ramananda and asked to be initiated when he was 16. Ramananda says, no, you're a Muslim. So he knew when Ramananda went up to pray every night in the temple at 5:00 in the morning or so. So he prayed for an hour and a half or so. And then when he came out, it was still dark. So Kabir lay down on the steps. In the dark.

And Ramananda came out and stepped on him. And said, Rama, which means God. And then Kabir leapt up and said, you said the presence of God. You said the name of God in my presence. I'm your student. You initiated me. And so Ramananda said, wow, what a wonderful kid. And he gave him instruction after that.

So here are some poems of his. I don't know what sort of God we've been talking about. The caller calls in a loud voice to the Holy One at dusk. Why? Surely the Holy One is not deaf. He hears the delicate anklets that ring on the feet of an insect as it walks. Go over and over your beads. Paint weird designs on your forehead. Wear your hair matted long and ostentatious. But when inside you, there's a loaded gun. How can you have God?

It's good for Mitchell. And Ford, too. It's pretty good for Ford. Friend, jump into experience while you are alive. Think and think while you are alive. What you call salvation belongs to the time before death. If you don't break your ropes while you're alive, do you think that ghosts will do it after? The idea that the bar, that the soul will join with the ecstatic just because the body is rotten. No, that's all fantasy.

What is found now is found then. If you find nothing now, you will simply end up with an apartment in the city of death. If you make love with the divine now, in the next life, you will have the face of satisfied desire. So jump into the truth. Find out who the teacher is. Believe in the great sound. Kabir says when the guest is being searched for, it is the intensity of the longing for the guest that does all the searching. Look at me. You will see a slave of that intensity.

I'll read one more, which is like that. He says, between the conscious and the unconscious, the mind has put up a swing. We're proud of ourselves for having thought of the unconscious. You know, I say it's wonderful. You're getting along pretty good. But they have a third thing. Between the conscious and the unconscious, a third thing has put up a swing. And all Earth creatures, even the supernovas, sway between these two trees. And it never winds down.

Angels, animals, insects by the million. Humans. Also, the wheeling sun and moon. Ages go by, and it goes on. Everything is swinging. Heaven, earth, water, fire. And the secret one slowly growing a body. I talk to my inner lover. As they say, we have two lovers. We have an outer lover and we have the inner lover. For a man, that's a female side of himself. The feminine on the left side.

Last time, I think we were talking about left and right sides. And that's your inner lover over on this side. That's that feminine side of you that you despise. Because you don't want to be a sissy. It's weak, isn't it? The feminine side of you. And a woman, her inner lover is on this side. It's her male side. That side of her that she despises. Because men are brutal, aren't they? They have ego problems. Who could ever respect their male side?

So then the Orientals say, if you can't do that, then give up hope of spiritual life. It's all over. Don't care how many churches you go to. You'll never have any. It's hopeless. The spiritual life has to do with the union of these two sides. And if you despise one, as the women tend to despise the male, or in our country, the males despise the female side. No matter. Nothing you can do.

I talk to my inner lover and I say, why such rush? We know there's some sort of spirit that loves birds and animals and the ants. Perhaps the same one who gave a radiance to you in your mother's womb. Is it logical you would be walking around entirely orphaned? No. The truth is, I turned away myself and decided to go into the dark alone. And now, I am tangled up in others. And have forgotten what I once knew. And that is why everything I do has some weird failure in it.

May I read you a poem by a Sufi poet, Rumi. The greatest religious poet in the world, in my opinion. I've been doing some translations of him. He's about the same time as Kavya. He wrote in Persian. Here's one of his poems. The Sufis consider themselves the oldest group on the face of the Earth interested in transformation of consciousness. From lower levels to higher levels. Here's a poem of me.

When grapes turned to wine,

They longed for our ability to change.

When the stars go around the North Pole,

They long for our growing consciousness.

Wine got drunk with us, not the other way.

The body developed out of us, not we from it.

We are bees, and the body is a honeycomb.

We made the body.

Cell by cell, we made it.

Notice the confidence in that. Fantastic confidence.

When grapes turn to wine,

They long for our ability to change.

When the stars wheel around the North Pole,

They long for our growing consciousness.

Wine got drunk with us, not the other way.

And the body developed out of us, not we from it.

The body is a honeycomb, and we are the bees.

We made the body.

Cell by cell, we made it.

Have you had enough? Yes. OK, thank you very much. I enjoyed reading to you. Good night.

[APPLAUSE]