"Too Many Words"

What I learned from Phil Whalen about writing.

It's a matter of some reassurance

That we are physically indistinguishable from other men.

When introspection shows us

That we have different degrees of intelligence

Varying capacities for knowing morality

We lose something of our complacency

    --Scenes of Life at the Capital

This morning the Google algorithm decided that I needed to hear James Dalessandro, bestselling novelist, journalist and filmmaker, tell me about ”The Beat Poets and the Summer of Love.” Or to do justice to the algorithm’s intrinsic value, I was to pay 25 dollars to listen to Mr. Dalessandro’s wise words. When I read the blurb, he told me that Lawrence and Allen and Jack would spill light on the short lived revolution. 

1966-67 was the year that Phil would have been in Kyoto so it is possible that he had returned to San Francisco when the Summer of Love erupted, but I think it highly unlikely that he would have shared his friend Allen’s enthusiasm for a revolution. Phil’s hedonism was more restrained. Very much more actually, but that didn’t stop him from loving Allen, nor does it dislodge him from a pre-eminent place among the Beats.

Still I find it abhorrent that the Road Scholar Scholar didn’t include Phil; perhaps the platform insists that their experts focus on hot money makers. 25 bucks is 25 bucks.

I lived with Phil for about 4 years after he’d received dharma transmission from his teacher. I sat with him in a sparse zendo, recorded his talks, got yelled at, went to sesshin, sewed a rakusu and took lay precepts under him. 

Buddhist Phil could be incredibly dull. He once taught a class on the Heart Sutra, and my head didn’t burst with astounding insight into the interplay of form and no-form, full and empty, thinking and the end of thinking. I had to fight off sleep and the end of sleep. Phil preferred his Buddhism boring. He could be as doctrinaire as any squawking human being, and then some. Today however, as the clouds drift down from the mountains, and internally I begin to count between the thunder and the faint flash to locate where it has struck, I am reading his verse with joy and gratitude. He was a true genius. 

Morning is fading and the clouds have completely covered Moon Peak. I can only see as far as my closest neighbor, a small Indian hotel called “Heaven’s View,” 25 meters to the East. Monsoon is closing in. When I knew Phil, his eyesight had failed to the point where, if I can weigh his words and match them with what I can recall of his gait and gaze, he could only see vague cloud-like formations. That was all that was left. Misdiagnosed glaucoma took away the joy of seeing words dance on the page. He was not resentful, or if he was, he didn’t show it. The more immediate concern was how words, which had been the center of his life, the real source of his joy, would continue to nourish a voracious appetite for clarity. It was also an inventive appetite, so we experimented. I was enlisted into a small army of amanuenses. 

We would read to him every day. I could see him concentration latch onto a passage and hang there. Sometimes there would be a request to return to the beginning of a passage. We could not stop until instructed, or we heard the Han for zazen. 

Once in while there would be a request from some recondite journal which Phil would never turn down. It usually meant reworking an older prose piece. There would be no more poems. He would find a short piece that came from years back--one that I remember was about dancing around a bonfire on the beach near Bolinas. I read it once. Phil had me shift the order of a few clauses, then read it again. We put some back to where they had been. I read the passage again. And then again. Finally in what sounded almost like a sigh he said softly, “Too many words. Too many words.” That was the point where work began in earnest.