The Awakening of Compassion

Gary Snyder’s works in his book A Place in Space all relate to the environment and how we can become reacquainted with the natural world we sometimes forget to keep in touch with. His work “A Village Council of All Beings” in particular discusses the connection between spirituality and nature. Snyder mentions a few religions that acknowledge nature but ultimately decides that none of them adequately embrace it. In fact, he argues that “the last two hundred years of scientific and social materialism, with some exceptions, have declared our universe to be without soul and without value except as given value by human activities” (Snyder 77). Snyder proposes that we find our religion in the nature around us, instead of becoming distracted by the insignificant details of our every day lives.

In one of my other classes this quarter, Psych and Religion, we are learning about the horizontal and vertical planes. The horizontal is our everyday life, our careers, our relationships, our daily activities, etc. On the other hand, the vertical plane consists of our spiritual experiences, and the alternative states of mind that open us up to see the knowledge that is only available outside our usual realm of occurrences. Some of the ways we can reach the vertical plane is through solitude and our encounters with nature, and by opening our minds to the unknown. The combination of these two very powerful forces—religion and nature—can provide someone with unlimited spirituality. I think that Snyder would agree with all these insights as ways of connecting spirituality and the outdoors, and finding one’s religion in the natural world.

He Learned About Life At Sixteen

Though I find Brautigan’s work to be too abstract for anything more than general analysis, his poetry is some of the most original and refreshing work I have read in years. His ability to tell a story, no matter how emblematic and metaphorical, never ceases to entertain me. The storyline in the work “Sea, Sea Rider” takes place in less than an hour, but every detail adds to both the book keeper’s eccentric perspective of the events and the boy’s more realistic viewpoint.

The bizzare, almost psychedelic inspired words of Brautigan give the characters a very distinct, vivid personality. By using only a sentence or two, he quickly and clearly paints a vivid image of each character portrayed in this piece. In the opening scene, Brautigan depicts the bookstore owner with the epic passage,

“He was, of course, a Jew, a retired merchant seaman who had been torpedoed in the North Atlantic and floated there day after day until death did not want him. He had a young wife, a heart attack, a Volkswagen and a home in Marin County. He liked the works of George Orwell, Richard Aldington and Edmund Wilson…He learned about life at sixteen, first from Dostoevsky and then from the whores of New Orleans” (22).

Immediately the reader is able to imagine a man shaped in his youth by fantasy and experience, and as he aged, gradually learned from the hardships of life and his near escapes from death. The owner of a bookstore, he obviously appreciates the quieter side of life, and by reading the adventures of others, lives vicariously first through the novels and then through narrator of the tale.

Brautigan introduces a new character after establishing the role of the narrator and bookkeeper. Stating that “the girl was very pretty and her body was like a clear mountain river of skin and muscle flowing over rocks of bone and hidden nerves,” Brautigan presents the girl by emphasizing her only function in this work: sexual fulfillment (23).

In the rest of the work, Brautigan delves into the mind of the bookkeeper to relay a fantastical plot that takes place between the narrator and his lovers. Through this eccentric description of the brief sexual affair, Brautigan teaches the reader that (though the actual events may not be so abstract and unrealistic) an entire lifetime of emotions and unvoiced expressions can exist in just a few fleeting moments with a stranger.

Star Hole, Boo Forever, and the Chinese Checker Players

Several of Richard Brautigan’s stories have themes of coping with lost love and loneliness. “The Chinese Checker Players” tells the story of an old woman who mourns the death of her husband seventy years after his demise. The poem relates the simple pleasures in life that distract the bereft woman (or anyone in her position), and the comfort that an innocent boy can give. Since the reader does not discover the woman’s grievance until the last lines, the poem ends on a more depressing note. On the other hand, in “Star Hole,” Brautigan speaks hopefully of finding light at the end of the tunnel. Set outside of the earth, Brautigan uses surreal imagery to illustrate how darkness can be illuminated by peering into the distance.

Yet despite the faith and optimism written in the closing lines of “Star Hole,” Brautigan’s life ended in a tragic suicide. Concluding The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster with the poem “Boo, Forever,” he writes to a lost love:

“Spinning like a ghost

on the bottom of a

top,

I’m haunted by all

the space that I

will live without

you” (108).

Brautigan’s ending to this book could be seen as an apt end of his life/start of his afterlife as well. As Brautigan himself once said, "all of us have a place in history. Mine is clouds" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Brautigan). Though these three poems all exemplify different reactions to his feelings of distance and isolation, Brautigan’s heart bears a heavy burden that gives his reader a glimpse of how he feels trapped in that faraway hole within his mind.

"He not busy being born is busy dying."--Bob Dylan

With a sense of urgency and lost time, Ferlinghetti’s “The Old Italians Dying” vividly depicts Italian men and women near the end of their lives, watching those around them “dying and dying day by day” (44). Ferlinghetti portrays all the characters with enormous veneration, and a reality that commands respect and empathy from the reader. For instance, calling the widows “madre di terra” (mother of land) and “madre di mare” (mother of sea), and describing them as “the matriarchs outliving everyone,” the women take on a strength and spirit unlike that of any other character in San Francisco Poems (46-47).

Born and raised on the east coast, I don’t have half of the San Francisco experiences of everyone in this class. However, the sentiments expressed in this poem by the women in fishnet veils and the old men tanning and listening to the church bells accurately fits most people belonging to that WWII generation. For as long as I can remember, during every trip to visit my grandparents in northern Pennsylvania, I heard about death and funerals, black dresses and grieving friends. My grandparents, along with their siblings and close friends (who are family in every way except by blood), seemed to talk about death and all its tragic effects incessantly. As a child I found this aggravating and depressing, and would leave the room every time the inevitable conversation began. However, as I grew up and (unfortunately) became more experienced with death—as everyone does—I realized that similar to “the old men who are still alive” who “sit sunning themselves in a row” outside of the church, my grandparents too were surrounded by death, stagnant in their place on earth, but watching it circle around them (44). Of course they were affected by death (who isn’t?), but they kept their faces turned up to the sky. They never spoke of their own demise, but instead talked of a future filled with great-grandchildren, leisure time, and of course, old love. And like the men sunning themselves, they are still staying positive about their present, and really living, instead of dying.