~1~

"Of all that is written, I love only
what man has written with his blood."
                                                                     --Nietzsche

             There are many dances and there are dancers for them all. But the music? That is something different. Tat Tvam asi. There is only one song: universal and particular, elusive and pervasive, peaceful and violent, sublime and vulgar, mysterious and familiar; and ever calling with sacred, inconceivable beauty.
            It is the music heard in the silences and distances of wind, thunder, moonlight.
            It is the music that casts its rhythm in the spiraled patterns of the changing seasons and impregnate tides.
            It is the music of life, and death . . . of their unity.
            It is here now, comforting and challenging a tired dancer, and it was there then, waiting without expectation. To be heard. By him:

             Nagashana eased back into the clawfoot tub, momentarily lost in the swirling clouds of vapor formed as the stoveheated water met the earlyApril, lateevening, misttinted, midMichigan air. Long thinning strands of dark hair meandered past bony shoulders and out across the surface of the water like separate snakes looking to turn somebody to stone. That water snake eating a sunfish a vision of the coming darkness, terror, yet it is in darkness that the sacred stories are unfolded, only emberslight to see faraway eyes.
            The opening kitchen door scattered the obscuring steam and the image of Nagashana became clear: celebrating his going away party with this bath on the flat roof of the dilapidated, deleriumscape apartment. Matt Kuwapi, bear-like in name and heart, stepped from the simmer of the party inside calling, "Last beer, we'll share it."
            Thinking there's no such thing as the last beer, Nagashana took the bottle and drank deep, heeding Pope's advice. Thanks, brother, he said between drinks. They were not related by blood; much closer. Matt was one of the handful of people who Nagashana knew he would truly miss when he left.
            "Tomorrow it is then," said Matt, taking back the offered bottle.
            "Yeah, a 9:00 a.m. bus to Chicago. Ever been there?"
            Matt shook his head, lowering the bottle and passing it.
            "Me either, said Nagashana. I hear its windy."
            Quiet laughter, quickly swallowed by the night sky.
            "And where to after?"
            "A train, somewhere . . . South Dakota or maybe Colorado. I feel like I should be nervous, or at least excited, but it just seems so natural that I would be leaving school, quitting my job, taking what little money I've managed to scrounge you know, I had thirty seven dollars in pennies molding away in wine jugs and setting out on the road to unknown locations, meeting unknown people, seeing unknown sights."
            "I envy you, my brother, said Matt, for being able to go like this."
            "And I envy you . . . for not needing to."
            The bottle emptied, the words spoken, Matt went back inside to the waning party.
            Nagashana nestled his head into the porcelain's shoulder and drank in the fullness of the night: the mist becoming a playful rain on his face and neck; scraps of grey cloud erasing stars, one by one, from the sky; the haunting melody of his going away party echoing through the night sounding lonely and sad and once again, he found himself within the Poem.
            Stepping free of the mad spinning: shadows are cast off and the true Form is brought into focus. Yes and again yes: it fills me.
            What?
            Not This/Not That.
            Yes. 

            Let me at this moment declare and swear on this bottle that there is no greater state or realm or world than that of the Poem. It is Moksha, it is Nirvana, it is ecstasy: (exhistanai), and as always, it is fleeting. The recognition of THE Poem as it is occurring as A poem, is a glimpse of the eternal Tao. It is Joyce's epiphany and William's "Now the music volleys through as in a lonely moment I hear it."
            Nagashana closed his eyes, trying to hold this sensation in his chest, the pit of his stomach anywhere but his head. He knew that once his damned brain sunk its teeth into it, that would be the end of it. But it was hopeless; like trying to hold the wind.
            The words always came: A new poem! Mine for the writing mine to destroy; like touching the wings of the newly-emerged butterfly and rendering it flightless. This then was his struggle: when faced with the Poem, with the overpowering presence of the Music, his obsession to record it stopped it short. He stepped outside of Self and Moment and viewed reality, which the Poem had brought into direct clarity, through the mirror of a poem. As if sensing that the birth of the Buddha means the death of the poet, the poet kills him at the point of conception.
            For some time now, he felt more and more torn by this division. He longed for a life of the spiritual yet constantly wallowed in the mire of the physical. These two conflicting powers would manifest themselves daily: The seeker understood the sacredness of tobacco, knew its proper use. The writer smoked cheap cigarettes while pecking away at the typewriter. The seeker was patient and silent; knew that words were fruitless. The writer thrived on them impulsively and loudly worshiped their dissonance, reveled in their misery, savored their seduction. He knew he couldn't live with this split. Neither aspect, partially followed, would be worth a damn. It was an all or nothing scenario. 

            Morning. The shining Greyhound creaked and lumbered from the downtown terminal bound for Chicago, rolling past the tombstone houses of the first ward. Nagashana pulled a worn journal from his canvas satchel and wrote:

From my dustshaded window, I study the boarded windows and sagging roofs, junkyards and sinister looking bars. This is a dying city, but there is a certain beauty and wisdom in its decay. The years that I have spent dancing around its deathbed have given me a quiet ache that I carry in my chest. I warms me and saturates my being like a nostalgic rain. Goodbye Saginaw.

~2~

"Welcome O Life! I go to encounter
for the millionth time the reality
of experience and to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated
conscience of my race."
                                                          --James Joyce

             Immigrants, explorers, travelers, pilgrims; leaving home, coming home, setting off, settling down; expectant, hesitant, anxious, reluctant this is the energy of the bus trip, fuel for the diesel beast; belly rumbling, steel muscles straining, and the low whistle of asthmatic breath.
            Nagashana slumped low, knees wedged into the back of the seat in front of him. This position would be comfortable for a half hour or so, and then he would sit up straight and try to stretch out his legs as much as possible. That might work for twenty minutes, no longer. But if his body was uncomfortable on this tortoiselike trip, his rabbitmind was unsympathetic. The evolving and vibrant scenes that sifted through the streaked and agetinted window did more than entertain him: they slowly, mile by mile, led him into a state of sublime tranquility. The impossibly weathered barns and farmhouses, built by strong hands and wills long turned to bone, dust, and the occasional strains of gravity in some descendant's voice; the fields, huemottled like the watercolors of an old artist who feeds on nothing but memories and earlymorning fog; the echoes of the vagrant wind resounding from dancing willows clinging to a lone hillside and rippling across the ponds of bedsheets hung and left to dry in the sharpedged air: all flowing together into a hypnotic dance of authenticity. Not a presentation or practiced technique, but simple honesty tzu jan: "of itself" unaware of its own art, it becomes True Art, beyond fabrication and factition.
            ("Did you kill that snake for your boots?"
            "No."
            "Then you've got no business wearing them.")
            The music of the nighttime swamp, the dance of migrating geese, the sculpture of three bent and blackened cigarette butts in a tin ashtray these are the enduring works of great genius: the Art that inspires art. But what of poetry? Where is the uncontrived poem; beyond ink and paper?
            Long endenimed legs stretched out across the aisle, bringing the snakeskin boots again into Nagashana's range of vision. He stole a furtive glance at the man wearing them: redcheeked with an attempted mustache, sleeping with head tucked into shoulder like a bird.
            Where is the uncontrived poem?
            This was in one form or another, the question that Nagashana was constantly asking himself. How could a seeker and a writer occupy the same soul? Because, as far as he could see, the two were mutually exclusive: the seeker must live in the immediate moment while the writer lives in the past. Or does he? Perhaps not, but he does hold as essential those concepts that the spiritual path reveal as illusion: time, language, definition, order. "To organize it to destroy." So goes the Taoist proverb. Yet as much as these convictions seemed valid and inescapable to him, Nagashana just couldn't imagine himself not writing. It was in his blood.
            The time for a decision had come. That was what he was doing now. Traveling to Au-pungishimook the western direction with a backpack, a few hundred dollars, and no preconceptions of where or how or what. He only knew the why.
            Ignoring the raspy snores of Mr. Snakeskin across from him, Nagashana began filling more pages in his journal:

            Half of my being seeks to reject this world of Maya, the limitation of language, the illusion of change, the vagueness of metaphor. I feel drawn to caves and solitude, clarity and prayer. To cast off all but the spirit. The other half of my being is dancing on top of the wall that runs between the garden and the alley, recording the passion plays and bawdy dramas witnessed in each.

            This trip will decide if I will dedicate myself to the One True Path or if I will plunge completely into the swamp of expression: to write! To write through all the layers of mundanity, to damn Heaven and Hell both and spill the words of my soul across the waiting, virgin page.

             The bus left the farmlands to their picturesque decay and slid in through the backdoor of Kalamazoo. Entering from the vantage point of the typical bus route, it appeared to be a city of boarded warehouses and the kind of dilapidated churches that, due to their poverty, were still able to retain some sincerity when teaching the message of Jesus. Most American churches are so wrapped up in finance committees and computerized sound systems that they are like an obese camel surrounded by the eyes of a thousand needles.
            With a grunt and a nicotine cough, Snakeskin woke up and looked through windows on both sides of the bus.
            "Where are we?" he asked Nagashana.
            "Kalamazoo, although Id never guess it from this view."
            Snakeskin leaned across the aisle, looking out Nagashana's window at the urban waste. "Yeah, I see what you mean. But shit, man, every city looks like this from a bus."
            This epigram proved true for each subsequent city as they continued to crawl south and swing around the cradle of Lake Michigan, through the smoldering cauldron of Gary and up into the glass and steel explosion of Chicago.
            Nagashana shuffled slowly off the bus, slung his pack over his shoulder, and began to weave his way through the coarse fabric of the crowd. The pilgrim was on his way.