Citation
Able, Vanessa. “Surviving Intact - Norman Fischer on Zen, Language and Growing Old.” The Dewdrop, 15 June 2021, https://thedewdrop.org/2021/06/15/norman-fischer-interview/.
Quotes
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Collations
Writing is a meeting
When I say relationship, I don’t mean only what we usually mean by relationship, you know, interpersonal relationships, colleagues, friends, lovers, spouses and so on—I’m also referring to reality as being radically interactive. There is no independent entity anywhere; all things that arise, arise together, constantly. That’s the essence of the emptiness teachings, which are foundational to Mahayana Buddhism, and certainly to Zen. So, the more I practice, and the more I practice with people, I realize that this is all about our meeting. Every moment and in every moment, we’re always meeting something or someone, even if it’s a thought, in our own mind, it’s a kind of relationship. It’s a meeting.
In Zen, the emphasis is on practicing together. It’s a radical together practice. Zen literature, instead of being the discourses of an enlightened person, is rather records of interactions between people in which the Dharma arises in the course of their interaction.
But then there are moments when we really, really connect beyond ourselves and we call each other out to be more than we are. My understanding of the Buddhist tradition is that it extends that idea beyond relating to other human beings to relating to a thought in the mind, a perception in any moment of time. Consciousness is a meeting moment.
A religious life is about relationship
the religious life isn’t about truth as much as it is about relationship. Or that, perhaps, truth and relationship are one and the same.
Zen explicitly denies literary endeavor but also engages with it
Zen has a whole discourse about being beyond words and letters and being beyond intellectual understanding. At the same time, we note that there’s a vast Zen literature, the vast majority of which is not translated into English.
So there’s a sort of explicit denial of literary endeavor in Zen, and at the same time, a lot of engagement in it.
Note: The same is true with Jōdo Shinshū. Jōdo Shinshū recognizes the importance of unlettered followers, even encourages this form of faith. But it also has a rich literature.
Zen and language philosophy
the Zen understanding is actually in the same ballpark as contemporary language philosophy starting with Wittgenstein, Heidegger and other writers who have talked about language.
Zen’s distrust of language
There’s a legitimate mistrust of language at the heart of Zen practice, and silence is our practice; to sit in zazen is to sit in silence, even though mostly we’re not silent in our minds, even so, we’re sitting in the direction of silence as a horizon.
Language could both be confining and liberative
My take on Dogen’s understanding of language is that it radically imprisons us in the self, yet it can also liberate us if we understand it in the proper way.
I’m highly aware of the prison house of language, how language is not going to explain to us who we are and what we are; it’s not going to explain reality to us. And yet at the same time, language is being human. And so we’re going to exercise our language-making capacities; we’re never going to transcend that. But can we exercise it in a way that’s deliberative, rather than being confining?
Language is always ironic
To me, language is always ironic and every word I say is wrong. Even as I want it to be true, it’s untrue, and so I have to find truth within that medium. And so that’s what I’m doing.
Norman Fischer’s poetry composition process
Mostly my poems are improvised. Sometimes I have a vague idea of something that’s on my mind, but on purpose, I don’t work it out or think it through; I improvise and see what happens. I have a sense of poetic form that allows me to include all kinds of things in a way that is not necessarily logically distributed, but by feel, or by a hidden analogy, of one part to the next. So that, hopefully, there’s a sense of these things, following one after the other, but not necessarily in any way that you would anticipate. I’m trusting my mind, which I don’t conceive of as me or mine. My mind is like intersections: like, you go down to town, and there’s a red light there, and there’s an intersection where four roads come together. And then at that intersection, various cars are going by that you can take a picture of at any moment and always have a different image of that intersection. My mind is like that intersection, and all kinds of things are coming through. A poem is a photograph, taken in an instant of what’s passing through that intersection.
Well, I usually write afterwards. I look at it, I see something and then I eliminate or add. And then mostly, I just forget about it. I set it aside for a lengthy period of time until I’m thinking about something completely different and I’ve totally forgotten about what it was that was going on at the time I originally wrote the poem. Then I go back and see if it’s interesting to me, if it has any life. I think what is important for me in a poem is the energy and the life force.
Integrate bad writing into your pieces
There is a place for bad writing too, and that’s all right. I leave the bad parts in sometimes, because they need to be there. Just like life, right? There’s parts that are not so interesting, but you can’t get from today to the next day without this in-between day.
None of my works are perfect; they’re funky in a lot of ways, and I’m okay with that. That’s part of my aesthetic.
When I first started writing, I was studying whatever I could find of Zen poems and also brush painting. I realized that compared to other brush painting, the Zen brush painting was done rapidly, and almost carelessly, on purpose. I adapted that for my poetry.
Not writing for an audience but for a community
my poetry books are more or less obscure. I have my own little poetry universe that I’ve been occupying for my whole life as a poet. And within that universe, I’m probably read a little bit, but I’m off to the side. In my mind, I’m not really writing for an audience, I’m writing in a community. So I’m aware that I’m writing as part of a community and that community has aesthetic commitments and values.
Serve a writing community
I need that community. I usually advise younger writers to do that, to find your community and value it and support it. And that means supporting other writers, reading their books, buying their books, setting up a reading space, going to readings, reading the magazines, commenting on other people’s works, writing blurbs; to me, all that stuff is my duty. And also, it’s self-serving in the sense that I depend on the community and so I serve the community that I depend on. And I think that we all need that.
Readership should not be that important if writing is seen as a religious practice
It doesn’t matter to me how many readers I have—I’m writing for the poem itself. In the beginning I thought to myself, as a priest, how could I have a career as a poet, and be worried about that, about advancing my career? So why and what am I doing here? And I thought to myself, well, what I’m doing is I’m expressing the Dharma through this art form. And that’s part of Dharma culture, and I’m given to that.
Language poetry is centered on language not writer
Innovative poetry would be the opposite of a poet like Mary Oliver; whereas Mary Oliver has a poem which centers around the character called Mary Oliver who is experiencing a moment in her life and reflections about her life and things she’s seeing and feeling and hearing, innovative poetry is usually very language centered. That’s why they call it language poetry, because it was centered on the phenomenon of language.
Language poetry is connected with Zen
I was very influenced by those poets and still am because of the relationship to Zen and the Dharma: when you’re writing and you’re paying attention to the present moment, you notice that that’s what’s going on. And what’s going on is not the thing that I think I’m writing about; what’s going on is the writing of words and the mind occupied with the writing of words. That’s actually the primary experience that is happening when you’re writing poetry. So, I’m quite aware of that experience as I’m writing. And that is more an immediate experience than something I think I’m writing about.
When you’re writing and you’re paying attention to the present moment, you notice that that’s what’s going on. And what’s going on is not the thing that I think I’m writing about; what’s going on is the writing of words and the mind occupied with the writing of words. That’s actually the primary experience that is happening when you’re writing poetry.
Fischer’s connection with language poetry
Well, I think nowadays, they use the term Innovative Poetry. It’s a different term from Experimental Poetry. When I was young, there was a very robust movement that created a lot of disturbance and trouble called Language Poetry. Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Rae Armantrout, Kitt Robinson, Steve Benson; all these people were close friends of mine when I was first starting out as a writer, and remain close friends of mine. That movement had a very powerful influence on poetry of at the end of the 20th century, and was very controversial, because it rejected and even attacked the conventional personal poem.
Writing is existential
I think my favorite Zen poem is Issa’s famous Haiku. He wrote on the death of his two-year-old daughter. ‘The world of dew is the world of dew/And yet, and yet…’ Yeah, that’s a poem about everything, right? That could be a poem about writing—the words we use are meaningless, and they blow away in the wind. And yet, and yet, we keep writing. We keep living, you know; we’re going to die in a minute—and yet, and yet, we keep living and it means something, anyway.
Zen made writing enjoyable for Fischer
I was writing before I was studying Zen. And I probably, started studying Zen because of writing, because I was really struggling as a writer, as writers often are. And practicing Zen really liberated me to a great extent from the struggle. Now, writing for me is a joy. It’s not a struggle, ever. And I think that it’s because of Zen practice that that transformation happened.
Fischer converged Zen and writing in his life
In the beginning of my writing, I didn’t really speak about Zen explicitly, or with my poetry community. Although, of course, everybody knew that I was involved in it. And vice versa: I wasn’t talking about poetry or sharing poetry in my Zen world, although there were a few people in the Zen center, notably, Philip Whalen, who was also a poet, and we and we did share that in common.
I saw them as separate, then after 25 years or so, I realized they’re really not so separate. And guess what, there are lots of people practicing Zen, who, like me, have this interest in an innovative, experimental kind of poetry. Even though the average quoted poem in a Dharma talk is not that kind of poetry, there’s a minority of people in the Zen movement who are interested in this kind of poetry. So, a lot of my readers are Zen practitioners who are interested in the art of literature rather than the message.
Fischer’s poetry is mainly about making an American Zen poetry and American Buddhist poetry
Although I’ve been to Japan and had encounters with Japanese teachers, all my main teachers were Americans, and all my practice happened in the United States. So, I’ve been concerned with making an American Zen poetry and American Buddhist poetry. And that means that although I can be influenced by Asian Buddhist poetry, to make an American poetry modeled on Asian Buddhist poetry doesn’t make sense as much as it does to make an American poetry that comes from the tradition of poetry in English. I feel like my whole work has been that effort.
The whole shape of my poetry comes from my Buddhist practice and I’ve been very conscious of creating a western, Buddhist, poetic, cultural artifact and form so that my work will be understood on that basis.
instead of taking Buddhist forms, I’m using Western forms and shaping them to Buddhist ones.
There are people who write Haiku in English, and there are people who write Japanese-style or Chinese poems in English, more or less. And you can do that, it’s not that it’s not authentic. It’s just that that’s not what was given for me to do. I wanted to be influenced by my contemporaries. I wanted to find a different way of writing in the continuity of the English language tradition.
Fischer’s doesn’t always mention Buddhist terms in his Buddhist poetry
The generation before me, the Beat writers, several of whom were serious Buddhist practitioners, including Phil Whalen and Alan Ginsburg were, in the first generation, writing by explicitly mentioning Buddhist terms and themes. I don’t do that very much; I do it on the inside.
Survival is success per Fischer
Can you survive as an intact human being? Period. Nothing more is necessary, but it turns out that’s not easy to do, than to survive as an intact human being with an intact heart, and an intact imagination, and an intact spirit, a whole life long. That’s to me is what success is. I think it’s much easier to become famous, or make a lot of money, or have a lot of power than it is to have that kind of success. I don’t know that I’ve achieved it, but that’s what I’ve been working toward. And that’s been my effort all along.
I don’t have to do anything anymore. Every book that I don’t publish is a book that someone else will who is younger and needs to do it. And every Dharma talk that I don’t give is a Dharma talk that someone else will give who’s younger and who needs to do it. Everything that I need to say, it’s already there. There’s so much that I’ve said that is available already that I don’t need to say another word. I feel like it’s pretty complete and all I’m doing is living another day with my eyes open, I hope.
My life is much easier now than it used to be. On the other hand, if during your life you haven’t paid attention to keeping your heart open and your eyes open and your soul intact, then old age can be very, very bad because after all, it’s a disaster being old, right?
The combination of poetry and Buddhism to survive
This is where I’m very, very grateful to Dharma practice and poetry practice, too. When the two of them go together, it really gives you a support for keeping your mind and your heart and your imagination open. And I think if you’ve been able to do that all along, then it’s much easier to do it in old age. Because by the time you’re old, whatever you needed to do and build in your life, including a family, you’ve already done. So now all you have to do is be alive and open your eyes and look at the world. It doesn’t take anything more than that to just be okay.