That's Emptiness

“Gone Gone REALLY gone Into the cool O MAMA!

...Philip might never have found work in the mountains: sitting in that same Telegraph Hill apartment in the hot summer of 1952, Whalen read one of Gary’s regular letters, this one from a Forest Service lookout on Crater Mountain in the North Cascades of Washington State. Provoked by it, and by working (“bad anytime, but especially nasty in summer in the city”), Whalen wrote back to declare, “By God, next summer, I’m going to have a mountain of my own!”

This he did; then got another mountain the following year, and spent a third summer as a forest lookout the year after that, making this by far his steadiest, most satisfying job until many years later, when he became a “professional” man of the cloth—that is, a Zen priest. Whalen would never have read in the historic Six Gallery reading had not Snyder put Philip’s name and poems literally in front of Allen Ginsberg’s face. Philip certainly would have floundered longer with unemployment and flirted more dangerously with outright homelessness had Gary not taken care of him whenever the two were in the same town at the same time.

They roomed together in San Francisco off and on from 1952 to 1954 in a flat on Montgomery Street, above the city’s North Beach district, to which they descended together nearly nightly for beer at Vesuvio and other drinking establishments. Thus Philip and Gary came to know the writers, players, merchants, philosophers, painters, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars circling around the Bay Area in the gestation phase of the San Francisco Renaissance.

During this same period, Snyder and Whalen began going together to the American Academy of Asian Studies (now the California Institute of Integral Studies), where they heard and met Alan Watts, and later also D. T. Suzuki. From among the audiences there, they got to know Claude (Ananda) Dahlenberg, who cofounded the East-West House and later became an ordained Zen priest under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. And from connections there, they began attending the regular Friday evening literary gatherings held at his home by the poet Kenneth Rexroth.

Other Friday evenings found Whalen and Snyder in Berkeley for the study group with Rev. Kanmo Imamura and Jane Imamura at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. Together the Imamuras were descended from the most important old families of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, yet they welcomed the young men, going so far in the subsequent years as to turn their little church publication — the Berkeley Bussei—over to the artist Will Petersen for a time. Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all published early poems in its pages. The benevolent Imamura family gave both Snyder and Whalen their first contact with people actually practicing Buddhism instead of purely discussing its philosophies and traditions.

Whalen might have made his way out to the Academy or over to the study group without Snyder’s impetus, but Philip was much given, even then, to the sedentary life. As long as he could, he spent hours each day reading, writing, drawing, playing music, doodling, staring into space—wondering from time to time where and how he could find a job that wouldn’t drive him crazy. He ventured out when he needed to—for cigarettes or food or for fresh air—but he had nothing like the get-up-and-go Gary had. It is, in fact, difficult to think of anyone with the drive and sense of adventure the young Snyder had.

These qualities propelled him up mountains, up trees, down the hole of tankers, out into deserts, back into libraries, into universities, into monasteries, across the country, out of the country, across oceans; they armored him against the many outer and inner obstacles an un-moneyed young man might encounter in such travels; they sustained him as he went where he needed to go, saw what he wanted to see, studied what, and with whom, he needed to study, worked as he had to, and cut loose when he could."

~ Philip Glenn Whalen was born in Portland, Oregon, in 1923. His parents raised him in a town called The Dalles, where the Columbia River narrows through a tight rocky chute. He devoured books, spent time outdoors, avoided sports. Norman Rockwell could have painted his boyhood...

Snyder recalls that Whalen was the first practicing poet he’d met. The three young men met William Carlos Williams when the older poet visited Reed. They investigated the Modernist works of Pound and Gertrude Stein, devoured Chinese poetry in translation, found the Upanishads, and then, like discovering a lode of hidden ore, happened on books by D. T. Suzuki. Each of the three in his own way became a resolute adherent of Zen. They each developed a Western calligraphy style, one of the formal trainings available at Reed. Whalen became lifelong friends with Lloyd Reynolds, the professor who taught classical Western pen techniques (as well as William Blake’s poetry).

Few love affairs; not much travel; no crowds vaulting fences to hear his poetry. I do remember a Grateful Dead record with a photo of a crowd on Haight Street: a lonely marquee overhead holds the name Philip Whalen. It could be announcing a little-known Irish welterweight.

In 1987, at the Santa Fe zendo—though the proceedings kept getting delayed—Phillip Whalen finally received transmission from Richard Baker. With transmission came the title Roshi. “When the title ‘Roshi’ is given,” Baker wrote, “it means this realization has matured and flowered in practice.” The event, Schneider says, is “an ultimately inexplicable meeting of minds.”

It’s that inexplicable meeting of minds that lends to Zen those thousands of phrases that get under your skin. Is it all wild fox slobber? How can Dogen insist that mountains walk? Why does Hakuin title a book Poison Blossoms from a Thicket of Thorn?

What about Whalen, at a Buddhism and poetry gathering at Green Gulch in 1987, saying, “I’m quite willing to talk to people and explain things to people if they have a question or a problem. Or sit doltishly looking out a window. So you’re going to have to, if you want something from me, try to get it. Because I’m not about to offer anything. I don’t have anything to offer. I’m sorry. That’s the emptiness part.”

Lots of people who no longer love each
     other
Keep on loving me
& I
I make myself rarely available.”

~ Crowded by Beauty: The Life and Zen of Poet Philip Whalen by David Schneider