For me, because of Dick Baker and Frank O'Hara, teachers of a different order, and then our friends of the NY School of poems there is this sense of personalness, which I'd call intimacy but that I feel it is a term too much used and when used often lacking the specificity of its momentary eternal instant of realization totally monkeying with time and space. The experience of the painter communicating directly and our response in another time and place somehow still though direct: a speaking in the same place, agreement or not it little matters. This place is always here.
O'Hara called his version Personism: this keen awareness that we are people working independently and together, responding to one another and what is and then for it to yield the portraits and the poetry and the people doing it, a sort of sharing and inviting into the creative conversation of each of our little lives wilderness: grains of sand, Ganges...All this while on lunch break, doing an errand, smiling at a stranger in the elevator, at the checkout counter in the grocery store: a personalness, a connectedness, a creativity; the sand box or petrie dish of life. What’s going to happen?
Each of us this one grain, a person meeting life rising: nothing and everything, serious and yet ironic, humorous, light and all there is.
And then of course realizing this in the living presence of all those, an ever widening circle including gratitude for those we do not even know have made it possible for us to recognize and consciously share in this feast.
For me on one level it would be people like Heraclitus, Blake, Rubens…Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Heidegger, Barthes, Merleau Ponty…on another level Shakyamuni, Bodhidharma, Dong Shan, Dogen, Ikkyu, Suzuki Roshi, Dick Baker, Philip Whalen and through him Gary Snyder and Allen Ginsberg and so many more including, Mom, Jesa, Aunt Dorothea, Chogyam Trungpa and Sakyong Mipham all this strung together by Buddhism: wonder, discovery, sharing and passing on some way to hold and allow it all to...self lumen: a personalness beyond you and me.
How is it all strung together for you? If you don’t know, just find one thread and follow it all the way.
