One Step

 If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there.  Looks like that's what's happened with Ronnie here.

Farewell to Craigie Dhu

 A beautiful song originally composed by fiddler and songwriter Dougie Mclean, arranged here for guitar and performed by Robin Bullock.

Goddess of Mountains and Rivers

 Thirty years ago Gary Snyder published a book entitled, "A Place in Space."  It was a compendium of previous writing done either as independent essays, book reviews, sometimes talks he had given.  In that book I found just such a review of a volume by Edward Schafer entitled, "The Divine Woman: Dragon Ladies and Rain Maidens in T'ang Literature."

After I read Gary's little essay on the text in question, I checked the book out of the library.  Not content with one volume, I also checked out two others: "Hiding the Universe; poems by Wang Wei," and Andrew Schelling's "The India Book: Essays and Translations from Indian Asia."

Of the three, Schelling's is the one that dares poke its head beyond the pall of literary criticism.  Schelling taught for some time at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado, which is about as far left as you can get in American academia without falling into the Pacific Ocean.  Schelling is a fine translator of ancient Indian poetry.  He sticks mostly to somewhat amorous content, but strays at times into Buddhist poetry.  I think his finest work in this volume is his translation of six bhajans (devotional songs) by the destitute and wandering poetress-saint, Mirabai.  Mira's songs were all devoted to Krishna, whom she often addressed as "the Dark One."  Hers was a passionate devotion.  Here's my favorite of the six:

Yogin, don't go --

at your feet a slave girl has fallen.

She lost herself

on the devious path 

of romance and worship, 

no one to guide her.

Now she's built

an incense and sandalwood pyre

and begs you to light it.

Dark One, don't go --

when only cinder remains

rub my ash over your body.

Mira asks, Dark One,

                can flame twist upon flame?

The book of Wang Wei poems is a puzzle.  I quite like Wang Wei as a poet; I've yet to read a volume of his poetry that didn't enchant me.  Yet something about these translations feels flat and two-dimensional.  That seems to have been the translator's intent, as he makes the point that Wang Wei is often absent from his own poems. That in itself is characteristic of the older Taoist and Buddhist poetry from China and is indicative of the blending of the human spirit with nature in a kind of meditative unity.  But the poems in this book seem bereft of that inner luminosity; they feel flat and vacant, which came as a surprise to me.

Lastly, the book Snyder reviews.  Sadly, it's the most academic of the bunch.  By that I mean that the subject matter, the varied background and historical information, which I often find illuminating, here seem, well -- academic and intellectual.  It suffers from that fatal Western flaw: the pretense of objective detachment.  Observing something from the outside and thinking that you can say anything of real value about it is a vacuous core belief of the intellect.

Oddly enough, Snyder himself brings the subject matter alive in a mere six pages.  The lead sentence is perfect, although he fails to entirely flesh it out:

"In the belly of the furnace of creativity is a sexual fire....a dragon-like writhing."

Gary goes on to mention Robert Graves' book, The White Goddess, as a form of our own magical-muse tradition. (Maybe Yeats would agree) And then he duly notes the gradual diminution and devaluing of the feminine within Chinese culture and verse over the passage of time.  Once, perhaps several thousand years ago, there were female shamans in China, called shamankas, who were designated by the term Wu.  But over time the divine feminine was reduced to being what we in the West might call "nature spirits," said to inhabit mountains and streams.  

There is more than a suggestion here.  I believe, and if you inquire into the American Indian experience on this continent, that those spirits still exist; it's just that we lack the sensitivity or sensibility required to encounter them.  They inabit a reality very close to our own.  In more primitive times, the membrane between those two worlds was more permeable and transparent than it is today.

Gary Snyder had studied Chinese under the author, Edward Schafer, at the University of California at Berkeley, way back in 1951, before Gary began his own thirteen year sojourn as a zen monk in Japan.  Hence his desire to survey his former teacher's text.  But I feel I got more out of Gary's six page review than the actual tome in question.