After a long morning chain-sawing for the trail at Prefumo Creek helped by four students at Pacific Beach High School getting Community Service Credit, I attended a workshop at the farm this afternoon.

https://www.universe.com/events/winter-crafting-skills-series-poetry-workshop-tickets-XZ0FNH

Caroline has been a part-time staff member for a couple of years—a reserved sylphlike presence who’s shown interest in dried flowers, sheep, tanning hides, and making teas.  I learned recently she was a birth doula, nanny for Shane’s baby, extensive traveller.

She wouldn’t take the offered payment from me.

The event resonated with my recent activity to prepare a script for a ten-minute performance of the start of Shakespeare’s Sheep Shearing Shindig in Act4 Scene 4 of The Winter’s Tale  that I’ll propose as part of the program for City Farm’s Sheep Shearing Shindig coming up in May.

Six others attended the two hour session, 5 women and a man, ages mid-twenties to mid-thirties. All gave evidence of commitment to introspection, journaling, reading and writing poetry, probably greater than mine.

Caroline let us know that she’d been to college and graduate school and wrote and published.

At the start, as we sat at tables under the Pergola, she served tea and fresh bread she’d baked and described the workshop’s format: she’d provide prompts, and time for us to write in response at different sites on the farm along with invitations to read poems we’d brought.

I’d printed out Wendell Berry’s, “The Man Born to Farming,” from his  Farming A Handbook  a collection which influenced our decision to move from New York City to an old homestead we bought at the end of the road in British Columbia in 1970, where Jan and I stayed for nine years.

The Man Born to Farming

The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout
to him the soil is a divine drug.  He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing.  He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
That the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
Like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
Descending in the dark?

I was eager to read it to the group and to affirm the continuing truth of his prophetic  pastoral vision, manifested here at City Farm.

When Caroline asked each of us our connection to this place and what motivated our attendance at the workshop, I tried to keep it short, but my veteran involvement with the Farm and its link to my lifelong personal and professional literary engagements wouldn’t let me.

I’d printed a set of four pictures of the sheep that Caroline and three other staff members had slaughtered yesterday, my favorite of the flock, imagining it would inspire me to write during the workshop,

but there was no opportunity to take it out of my pack.

Caroline’s first prompt was to write without lifting your pen about last night’s sleep or a dream. It struck a note:

Sinking into the topper on my hard mattress, grateful for the fatigue and its support that floats me away, and when thoughts about the past day and the morrow crop up demanding attention, counting breaths passing in and out across the anapana spot—what’s left of my abandoned meditation practice—and knowing that by number eight I’ll be gone, and again after the midnight pee, greeting that trusty ritual, this time only up to four, grateful that this is all that’s left, no forcing or aspiration, but only an embrace of what’s not here and what is.

Next prompt involved walking to The Lookout—a location I’d selected and built up years ago, now rarely used except by shitting blackbirds– and to write inspired by its open view of land and sky.

Two mountain ranges surround us,
two watersheds converge in the creek
that fills and drains our life-rich home,
the brooks and springs marked indelible
by green explosions interlacing out and up.

The next prompt was to look at the sheep in the pen nearby and write of your connection.  I used up most of the brief time to get a sweatshirt from my car.  I observed only

Two flocks exchange stares.

Then we went to Plot 1, the immaculate regenerative vegetable garden, to look at a single plant  or creature

January peach blossom two months too early
to meet its welcoming Spring,
petals as pink, pistils and stamens
as swollen as if it had a fruitful life ahead
despite the canker that leaves last season’s
dessicated twigs and flowers on the branch.

Back at the Pergola, Caroline read a poem by her professor and mentor who died young. It started with “Write a question: Yes.”  Write a question was the prompt.

How Long Still?

Richard Stiehl in France I learned last night, died at 97.
Marilyn across the street last week at 93.
Rick in Lund at 75.
Beethoven 57, Shakespeare and Napoleon 52, Mozart 34.
Wendell Berry alive today at 90. I at 82.

An Address to the White Heron Sangha
February 5, 2023

Good evening fellow White Heron Sangha members and visitors. Thank you for once again inviting me to give a Sunday night Dharma Talk.In some previous ones I’ve explored ways that American literary writers I admire, specifically, Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac and Leonard Cohen, were influenced by Buddhist texts and incorporated them into their own unorthodox experiences and writings.

Tonight, I want to examine ways that the works of William Shakespeare connect with my understanding of Buddhist principles. There’s no evidence that this sixteenth and seventeenth century British writer had any exposure to Buddhist teachings. Nevertheless, I find in his works many ideas in common with what’s called “the Dharma,” identifiable with what Joseph Campbell called The Perennial Philosophy.

In the immense body of Shakespeare literary criticism since 1948, I’ve found only two items, both quite recent, that treat this subject: The Buddha and the Bard by Lauren Shufran (May 2022) and Shakespeare Meets the Buddha by Edward Dickey (October 2021).

My own interest in the subject arises from an academic career that included teaching, directing and writing about Shakespeare—including a book which argued that Shakespeare read the Bible as literature and construed its varied depictions of God as personifications of the theatrical roles of author, director and actor.

In this talk I will align six Buddhist doctrines with recurrent Shakespearean themes

1 Emptiness and Form, Prajnaparamita –The World as Stage
2 The First Noble Truth, Dukkha–Tragic Suffering
3 Dependent Co-arising, Ptratityasamutpada–Motivation and Causality
4 Impermanence, Anicca–Time
5 Delusion, Avidya–Error
6 No-self, Anatta–The Person as Actor

Separating, labelling and numbering these ideas is somewhat misleading, since they often overlap or blend. However, this kind of schematic analysis is typical both in Buddhist texts and in literary criticism because it opens new ways of understanding. (more…)

Hi Alexander

I came across your film as accidentally as you came across my Shakespeare at Swanton website.

As part of general downsizing efforts, a couple of weeks ago my wife, Jan, sent a beautiful Afghan dress she acquired in 1972, when we homesteaded in the woods of British Columbia, to a friend born and still living there, who took a photo of it, worn by her daughter riding a ropeswing on the property their family leases from us.

Seeing it reminded me of another woodland use of the dress in 1999 at Swanton Ranch. So I googled the old website to download a picture of it worn by  a student playing Hermia in scenes from A Midsummernight’s Dream that the class filmed there.

I was amazed to find the link to your “Shakespeare at Swanton” video and astounded to watch it.

I’m still pulsing with the world wide web of connections it activated. Parallel surprises of happening upon a relic in the course of searching for lost treasure—lost through fire and aging and through the digital loss of “bitrot” and software updates.

And parallel grief for the losses of Time: 1960’s back-to-the-land hippies turning 80, ’90’s English majors now in their ’40’s, a 2021 forestry student graduated and out in the world.

And the transformation of it all, through memory and art, via the alchemy of Shakespeare.
___________________

March 2024 Postscript: A further variation on the theme of Alex’ video and this post.  Shortly after this entry was written, Cal Poly University erased the whole website which included “Shakespeare at Swanton” from its server. Almost two years later, the site was resurrected from its 404 grave on a different server with a new URL–smarxpoly.net–which allowed for the link here to be reactivated. Thank you, Ty Griffin, for all the work you did to make this happen.

A couple of days before the conference in Jerusalem for which this paper was written, I woke up before dawn to avoid the crowds and went down to the Old City to visit the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Under a dark and cavernous rotunda, before the shrine covering the tomb from which Jesus is said to have been resurrected, priests in splendid vestments swung censers, sang prayers and placed communion wafers in the mouths of the few worshippers in attendance. During the performance of that ceremony I sensed the tangible power of their faith. Though I didn’t share it, I was alerted to the gravity of the subject of my upcoming talk. (more…)

Introduction

My talk today follows in the tracks of fellow sangha members who’ve given us presentations on the convergence of scientific inquiry and the insights of traditional Buddhist precepts in the area of neurobiology and brain science. I want to explore the ways the theory of evolution that has provided a framework for all biological research during the last 150 years illuminates and is illuminated by my experience of meditation and my rudimentary understanding of Buddhist doctrine. (more…)

[published in Renaisssance Quarterly, Fall 2014]

This book begins with the assertion that “no one has yet published a full-length critical study of Shakespeare’s practice of biblical allusion and the implications of biblical allusion for our understanding of the plays.” Its author is eminently qualified to remedy what he calls this “deficiency,” having published several books on aspects of biblical culture in Early Modern England and co-curated an exhibition celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Impressive in its learning and packed with original discoveries of biblical and extra-biblical Shakespearean references, the book is written in concise, lucid and lively prose. Its “argument” is incontrovertible: the Bible is a pervasive source and object of reference in Shakespeare’s plays. The recognition and contextual reframing of hundreds of biblical allusions was part of the experience of earlier audiences, whose familiarity with the Bible was guaranteed by their cultural environment. The book’s task is to restore such experience to the modern reader lacking this familiarity.

Part I, titled ” Shakespeare’s Allusive Practice and its Cultural and Historical Background” opens with a vast array of evidence for the saturation of Shakespeare’s culture with Biblical narratives, characters and language. Chapter 2 traces discourse about the Bible and Shakespeare from early editorial glosses through 19th century elevation as paired pillars of British Civilization to recent debates about Shakespeare’s religious beliefs. (more…)

A talk to the White Heron Sangha, October 6, 2013

I was introduced to the writings of Jack Kerouac by a trumpet-player friend in high school who gave me a copy of On the Road just after it came out in 1957.  But though I’d already done some hitchhiking around New England and hung out in Greenwich Village on Friday nights, I was put off by the book’s frenetic style and its praise of aimless, restless travel.  Twelve years later, in 1969, I encountered The Dharma Bums, Kerouac’s second most popular book, while selecting works to place on the syllabus of a class at Columbia University I called “Pastoral and Utopia, Visionary Conceptions of the Good Life.” This book’s triumphant celebration of free love, wilderness adventures, bohemian companionship, and Buddhist meditation made a perfect fit.  Forty four years later, while looking for a topic for a Sangha talk to follow up on the one about Thoreau’s Buddhism I offered last Spring, I picked The Dharma Bums in order to consider how my perspective on the novel and its Buddhist themes might have changed in the meantime. (more…)

A presentation to the White Heron Sangha June 23 2013

Henry David Thoreau was born July 12, 1817 and died at 45 years of age on May 6, 1862. His name is a household word, especially among those of us who grew up during the 1960’s, when his two most famous works, Walden and “Civil Disobedience” offered compelling guides to non-conformity, self-reliance, appreciation of nature, reduction of one’s environmental footprint, opposition to war and injustice and spiritual quest.

Although not widely appreciated during his life, since the late 19^th century Thoreau’s works have become classics, admired by later writers, assigned in schools, and the subject of a burgeoning scholarly industry. He produced more than 20 volumes in a dense and quirky literary style, at times pompous and bombastic, at others intimate and funny. (more…)