If you want to be a poet,
first you must become a bear.
Get wild and furry and big.
Trade your hands for paws;
your choices for actions.
Give up work for life;
words for moments.
Sense each moment fully, intimately, directly.
Eat everything.
Live in solitude.
Rest and wait.
And wait.
And when the time has come, you must die.
1)
I posed for the picture when I was a young bear. Some kid with a camera pointed and shot. And ran. I’ve always had that effect on people - the approach-avoidance thing. I guess it goes with the species. Anyway, that photo got around. I like to think it had something to do with my dark, mysterious eyes, but I know it was one of those shit-happens kind of processes - somebody knows somebody who knows somebody, and ages and ages later, my face shows up on the front cover of a book of poetry by Billy Collins erstwhile poet laureate of America..
I’m an oil painting now. Rrnhr. Hanging in some Seattle gallery it says on the dustjacket. Behind the canvas me, translucent fluffy golden clouds replace the boarded up back window of the Enco station where the photo was taken. It used to mark the western edge of Las Vegas, New Mexico. Time was, the best tamales in Northern New Mexico were sold out of that gas station. Gas was twenty, thirty cents a gallon.
That’s the trouble with the whole human race - cheap gas. It’s not just that you got it in the first place- overpopulation, pollution, instant gratification, rush hour, and the smell – Ngrrh! - the smell alone cancels out whatever benefit you might have gotten from it! There’s no way to get that smell out of your fur by the way. Grrnrh. It’s not just that you got it - cheap gas just killed poetry, you know - it’s that once you got it you thought you had to have it. And when humans think they have to have something it’s Katy bar the door. Katy bar the freaking door! Nrrh.
I know it’s me in the picture. I hate that smarmy school photo smile. It’s so unnatural. I don’t think I ever smiled like that when there was no camera around. The cubs and grandcubs do it, too. My mother used to avert her eyes and tuck her snout down in front of a camera. Sometimes she’d put a paw over her mouth.
“Mother,” I used to say, “all bears have menacing teeth! What do you want to hide them for?”
But that was when I was older. As a younger bear, I smiled that beautiful smarmy smile you can see on the cover of Billy Collins’ book.
You can also see Grandaddy Bear’s golden eyebrows in the painting, his gift and curse to me. I can’t tell you how many times in my post-existential lifetime a bear I never met before has come up to me and said, “You have the most beautiful eyebrows.”
“Where’s the curse in that?” you ask.
They aren’t mine! I did nothing to develop, nurture, discover, or reveal them. I did not choose them. I did nothing to deserve them. I take no credit for them. They belong to my grandfather and probably his. I’m just wearing them. My cubs have them. And one of the grandcubs, too. He’ll understand in a few years. Nobody sees me. They see beautiful golden eyebrows.
Hello! There’s a bear inside!
Of course, I myself only discovered the Bear Within after many years of bear life. The inner life is something that humans take for granted just as completely as bears take the momentous life that way. But then, even the ideas of “for granted” and “take” don’t get bears. Bears don’t take anything; that’s a human concept. It comes with the hands.
You think that you always have to take things in hand, grasp them, get a handle on them, take charge, get a grip, hold on. Nnrrrn! Opposable thumb talking! Your lives are so consumed with consuming and so done in by doing that you neglect to live them. Get a life? You already have one. Live it. Buying and selling you lay waste your powers. Little you see in nature that is yours unless you take it for yourself. Rrhg! I didn’t mean to go all Wordsworth on you. (Good name for a poet though, eh?) I’m not talking about consumerism here. Well, yes I am. Grrn rhg. What I’m not talking about is your stupid ideas about ownership and possessions. I’m talking about your living as though nothing happens unless you do something. Or someone else does.
It’s not that you live in a world of action alone. That’s a laugh! You never met an action you couldn’t put off, avoid, or get somebody else to do. Rrrrgh, rrrr... This is hard. It’s not the doing, not the action, that so limits you... Rhrrn, rrrhg... It’s your agency! Grrhng! Words are absolutely nothing like paws! “Agency” works, but... rrgh, rrn... Instrumentality! It’s your effing sense of instrumentality! You see yourselves as instrumental in everything! If you don’t do it (see it, think it, make it, invent it, imagine it, build it) it won’t get done. If you build it, they will come. If not, nothing. Your science may claim that every action has an equal and opposite reaction (or whatever that law is!), but your lives claim that every action has an instrument or agent that initiates it. Even thinking, your proudest ability.
When you’re most thoroughly human is when you sense that something must be done. And what do you do? You think! Humans who want to have richer, deeper, more meaningful lives always seem to turn inward. Contemplating their navels, nurturing their inner child, discovering who they really are. Hrrn-rrh-hr. (By the way, you’ve never seen a bear’s navel, have you? It’s there under all the fur where you can’t see it. But it’s there.) You humans always think you can think your way into new ways of living. Most of the time, you can’t even think yourselves into new ways of thinking! It’s the thinking that separates you from life. From living. That’s what life is for – living! Not grasping, grabbing, getting, or taking. Not analyzing, reflecting, theorizing, observing, describing, testing, and all those things you so love to do.
I love that story you tell about imagining the ship in a bottle and then imagining how to get it out without breaking it. However it goes! The punch line is that you just imagine – there, it’s out. You imagined it in; you just imagine it out. Hr-hrn-hrr-rr. That’s so human! Even when you recognize and reveal your laughable instrumentality, you have to do something about it. You are so trapped in your ideas and perceptions and conclusions. What do you call those who are not likewise trapped? Out of their minds! Hrrnh! That’s exactly where you need to go!
2)
“Out of sight; out of mind,” you say, meaning that if you can’t see it you forget it. That is so human! Bears never forget. Neither do elephants or cicadas or any of the other non-speaking species. They never try to remember anything either. All mnemonic devices are the invention of speaking beings. Forgetting and remembering assume that it is words alone that can store experience. Even if something is in sight (in touch, in earshot) if it is not also in mind, if you can’t quite put it into words, you think you don’t quite have it. You have to pay attention, take notice, give heed to, and if you don’t, you refuse to acknowledge the existence of things that are right there in front of you. It’s more like “out of mind, out of sight”! If you can’t name it, you can’t even see it!
You know that thing you do with “it’s right on the tip of my tongue”? Ridiculous! Whatever “it” is, your being able to put it into words does not establish its existence. Rrrnh. Your life experience is utterly, hopelessly driven by your perception that what’s on the tip of your tongue or at the tip of your fingers can only be known by you if you can use breath from your lungs to move it from the tip of your tongue through your teeth and lips to become speech. Verbocentric! Nnrhn! That’s what you are! And now that I have named it for you, you think it exists. Or could conceivably exist. Rrrr. My neologism is not an act of creation; it is an act of – what shall I call it? – identification? signification? encapsulation?
Whatever else it is, my putting something into words or into a single word is inescapably an act of limitation! Whatever is meant by “verbocentric” is more than the word itself, more than the many words I could say about it. Because you humans rely so heavily on words, the breadth and depth of your life experience is about a bottlecap’s worth of water poured out on the westward lanes of I-25 at noon on the Fourth of July and flattened by a 1983 Chevy Impala just south of Romeroville, New Mexico, in 1999. Burning cheap gas. Nnrhn rrrhn rr.
For what it’s worth, I witnessed that very thing happen to a horned lizard. It was so hot that day! I felt like I was wearing a fur coat! Rrrh-rrh-rrh-rr. “But it’s a dry heat,” you’re always saying, “And it really cools down at night in the mountains.” Right. Just like a sauna. Wrap yourself up in a couple of blankets and spend your day in there! Rrnhnn! Now that I think about it, I don’t know why we don’t hibernate in the summer. I’ve been cold enough before and after to know, and there is nothing cold enough to match the daytime heat in northern New Mexico in July. Nnh rrn nrrhn! Where’s the cosmic suggestion box when you need it?
About that horned lizard... I know you will find it somewhat offputing that I do not call it a horned frog or a horny toad, but there is some misinformed ignorant American English vernacular that even a bear writing a memoir can’t swallow! That day in 1999, I was lying in the deep shade inside a split in the pink granite face of a wannabe mountain not too far north of the interstate. There were ponderosa pines up top and a couple of fat cedars covering the bottom. I was lying there, bone weary and feeling the first stages of thirst, flat out on the ground with my head up near the uphill cedar’s trunk. (You know what’s the difference between a cedar and a juniper? Me either. Rrr rn, rhrg) That little varmint just zipped out there and squish.
You talking types think that reptiles and other nonverbals who venture onto your highways are just plain stupid and deserve to die. That’s your instrumentality talking. I’m still working on my math skills, but consider this: say two lanes of interstate highway are about 24 ft. wide, and the width or a horned lizard is 3 inches. If the lizard runs more of less straight across the highway, his total area of vulnerability is 6 square feet. And it takes him -what? - 20 seconds to cross. So six square feet of death zone for 20 seconds on a coast to coast interstate highway. Seems like pretty good odds to me. Not that any horned lizard ever did the calculations. It's just not as stupid as you people think.
3)
It’s not just your thinking too much that hampers you people. It’s the kind of thinking you do. You are always generalizing.
Bears are not given to generalizing, and often lately I find myself looking for some stereotype to maul. Even so, I’m going to say this: people nowadays think all bears look alike. Rrnrh. I know perfectly well that there are plenty of exceptions to that unbearly generalization, and I imagine that you may be one yourself. But give me this for now. Not for all time. Not as some immutable truth about the human race. Just for now, let it slip past your proud defenses: humans nowadays think all bears look alike.
Oops! Sorry. I didn’t mean to remind you of the race thing! I forgot. Everything is an allusion to you. You’re always connecting. You can’t read this sentence without connecting it to other sentences. I am not alluding to that human meanness about race or races. You people get really defensive about that these days, and I’m glad about that. I’m not alluding to that old all-Blacks-look-alike-to-me business; seen one, seen ‘em all, whatever it is you say. I did not intend to remind you of that. I know you’re getting past it. Rrrh – about damn time. But, listen, that is so human! You live by generalizations. Think about it: your whole freaking worldview is based on them. Your language! Without generalizations it’s nothing. Growls, grunts, roars, sighs, snorts, huffs, puffs. Without generalization the whole human house blows down! Rhr-hr.
The basis of your human language is generalization. You see one of my kind, and you make the sound “bear.” Other people hear that sound and see “bear.” But there is no such thing as “bear.” There are only bears: me, my golden-eyebrowed grandfather, the grandcub whose mother died, my own snaggle-toothed mother. Life comes to all of us in absolutely unique moments, not one the same as another. By your very humanness - your great gift and your curse - you group those moments with others you see to be like them. You separate them from each other and from yourselves and reconfigure them according to similarities you perceive/conceive/imagine. Instead of moments, to you guys they’re objects, subjects, ideas, words, nouns, truths. It is your humanness that empowers this genius of yours (though it is no more your own than my golden eyebrows are mine). It is what you do, and others, especially humans, find it beautiful. And rightfully so. But there is more inside.
All humans do not look alike to bears. You cannot imagine how insanely twisted, how utterly bearlessly, painfully uncomfortable it is for me to say that. Rrrgr. My brain actually hurts.
You know that game you play where you converse in questions? Each one must reply to the other with a question and if you make a declarative response you lose?
You want to play?
Play what?
Don’t you know?
Do you?
Do I what?
Are we playing already?
Did you want to?
Wasn’t it you who wanted to?
Wasn’t it I who wanted to do what?
Wasn’t it you who asked if I wanted to play this brain fucking head game?
Was it really I?
How can you muster such innocence?
Mustard? Did you say “mustard”?
Is that what you heard?
Why else would I ask you?
Could you be trying to win the game?
What game?
You know how you can physically feel the strain it puts on your brain the longer you play? Thinking - well, thinking and then saying - that sentence causes me that same kind of physical pain. In the brain. All humans do not look alike to bears. Grrrr.
It is so wrong in so many ways. The same one human does not look alike to a bear in the next moment. Bears do not look at humans - we sense you. With the usual five and others you don’t understand. We do not comprehend you; we apprehend you. We don’t even apprehend you; we prehend you. Hell, we don’t prehend you, we just flat out hend you. Rhr… We don’t hend you; we h – just kidding. Rhrhr-r-hr.
Bears live by moments; humans by generalizations. I know it makes us seem dull to you. “Trapped in the shallow present,” you would write. But here’s the truth of the thing: bears are poets. We live poetry. Every moment is a poem.
Human poets write all the time about capturing moments in words. Capturing moments! Hnrrnff! As if… Moments capture bears! Without the experience of being captured by an absolutely unique, unconnected, unrefined, unexamined, unexplained moment, what do you think you are going to capture?
4)
Hands are overrated. You people are as enamored with your opposable thumb as you are with your great generalizing brain. They’re a nice combination I grant you, and they complement each other quite well, but there is so much that just doesn’t get you.
For my money, the best thing about hands has to be writing. If I knew what I know now and I had hands, that would be golden. I know you’re thinking: why don’t you just go out and hire some hands? Sounds easy enough, but really, holding a pen between your celebrated opposable thumb and those other nimble fingers of yours or pecking away at your keyboards like you do, that’s not it… hrrh. It’s not just the hands; it’s what they do. Duh! How can I say this?
I’ve been resting with this for a long time, and it’s not as unified as you would like. When our cubs are born, we do not have to teach them anything, show them anything, do anything for them. No words to teach. No stimulating environment to build around them. No books to read to them.
You would say, without really grasping the complexity of your own meaning, that when they needed their mother’s teat they found it, that they walked and rolled and climbed and scraped and fought on their own. You would call the way we bears grasp the world “instinct,” but, without realizing it, you’d be talking with your hands.
Bears do no grasp life; life grasps us. When you have hands, they become your metaphor for everything. You don’t experience the moment; you take hold of it. You seize the day instead of living it. You seek and find and reach. You only connect with that which you connect to. Rrrrrrh. You even try to get hold of yourself! Rrr-rr-rrr This is so hard to explain.
If bears had words, there would be no word for “concentrate”. That’s the thing, though, bears don’t have words. Don’t need ‘em. Words are just the hands you use to grasp what’s already grasped you and moved on. With hands comes the great human metaphor- grasping, and with grasping comes the Great Human Dominion Project. And the great human failure.
Look at Orion. How many centuries have he and his dogs been up there hunting bears? Ursa Major is right there next to him in the sky, but he never catches her. Or the little one either. And he never will. He’s so human. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that!)
Seinfeld. Rrrrrrh. There was some poetry! Every time Kramer exploded into Jerry’s apartment was a moment. Always a surprise. Always happening right now. It was a TV show in the 90s. They always said it was a show about nothing. Bearish idea. Life is a show about nothing? It doesn’t sound so good in words. Rrrrrhhh. Anyway, if you’re reading this in a world that’s even remotely similar to the one I’m in, there is a Seinfeld episode airing in syndication right now on a television near you. That’s it! Tele-freaking-vision. Television is hands.
TV is the embodiment of the great human metaphor! I can explain this. Marshall Macluhan, it’s about time you got in touch again! The story of humankind is the story of television:
In the beginning, with your opposable thumb in your brain as much as at the end of your arm, you saw life and the world as things to be grasped. And you created ideas and words, generalizing, connecting. You made words as tools to extend your grasp, to extend and connect your moments one to another. You named things: bobolink, manatee, doorknob, tuna steak, ecology, basement, Fred. When everything had a name, you could grasp it! So what happened then? You didn’t belong in the same garden spot as us avocals.
Then there was the Great Flood thing. Noah, Gilgamesh, whoever. It was like the Universe’s last unified attempt to grasp you before you all floated away on your sea of words. What survived? Only what you could grasp. The Ark was the first television. It was your first big technological grasping tool for rounding up and tying down experience so it was easy to grasp. It took you a long, long time to cut it down from forty days and forty nights to thirty minutes with commercials, but you were on your way.
Remember when you build that giant ziggurat in the Old Testament? The original TV studio. You broadcast Babel a show about everything and everyone in the same language. You got everybody on the same channel. Hrrh hr. Right where you could grasp everything. But you were afraid you were missing something. (The main reason you don’t commit suicide!)
So, you invented multiple channels. An Ace Hardware store of grasping tools. Different strokes for different folks. Something for everyone. Cable. But the more you tried to get a hold of everything, the less anything still got you. What you got was the Ed Sullivan Show. Entertainment. Memory. History. Fiction. Books. You have used them all like television – first to grasp moments; then to manufacture them. Meanwhile, the real moments are just moving along, being momentous.
Television is the box you build to get a hold on life and the world on your own terms. You take handfuls of life, form them into manageable units and carry them home in your box. And you feel really good about all those channels. “This is no ziggurat,” you think, “this is diversity!” “A thousand channels.” And you bring home movies and you get TiVo and you grab control of everything. Everything you want at your fingertips. That’s what hands get you.
That and distance.
5)
The bear you see before you now is visibly different from that youngster on Billy Collins’ cover. Older, of course, with silver threads among the gold in my eyebrows. I think I look a bit… hrrr… craggier. I’m heavier, too. That has more to do with the time of year than the years. That photo was taken in early spring, so I wasn’t just adolescent thin I was just waking up from a long winter’s fast. And, you would think, hungry as a bear. But hunger doesn’t get bears. It’s a hard thing to explain.
I know. Talking about the difference between me and the cover bear…there’s an elephant in the room. The scar. I haven’t said too much about the dark side of the momentousness of bear life. When every moment bursts into your life like Kramer into Jerry’s apartment, there’s a richness that doesn’t get you guys. Living the bear’s life is tasting the concentrate from which they make orange juice concentrate. It’s life undiluted by memory or anticipation or comparison. Raw life. Life that gives you a bear hug. Life orgasmic! Rrrrh!
When I was tearing through that black plastic trash bag, October ’76 or ’77, I was in the middle of black and crinkle, slippery and sticky, wet and sweet, Aunt Jemima syrup three days outside, bee pollen, ant shit, ants, and plastic, and tuna- metal can, green foil-like wrapper, red letters, Bumble Bee Tuna in oil, rat piss, hand-powered can opener, metal echoes, sharpness. Pain!
There are not enough blasphemies in all your human languages- arrrrrrh- to measure that pain. Pain alone. Momentous pain. I chomped down hard on the jagged lid of that tuna can and took an inch of it up into my jaw- top and bottom at once. Slicing between teeth. Oh the pain.
An orgasm of pure pain as big as a bear.
There are stories you people tell that when you tell them, the pain comes back. You call your first grade teacher “Mom”, and everyone laughs. You shit your pants in class in the third grade. You tell your grandmother on her hospital bed that you’ll see her tomorrow “if you’re still here,” You report to work at Central Freight Lines and ask for your new boss, Mr. Tuff. The man you ask says, “I’m Ben Ruff.” We bears don’t experience that kind of recalled pain. But the pain we feel is like all those repeated, remembered pains rolled into one moment. And then, just as unexpectedly, just as horribly there it is again. Kramer with a chainsaw. You have no idea. Hell, we have no idea, just this enormous, concentrated, five senses and more, pain.
Indecision, anxiety, shock, fear, all those other things you humans get, don’t get bears. Not as separable elements anyway. I did not have to grasp what was going on and decide what to do next. Look, Ma! No hands. The pain grabbed me, shook my head, pawed at the lid - almost sliced off the last claw on my right paw digging at the thing. The pain rubbed my face against the side of the house. The pain dragged my shaggy ass to the hibernating cave and put me down a month early. The pain kept opening my mouth but never wide enough to release the lid. The pain split the end of my tongue trying to push it out. The pain knocked me out at last, and when spring woke me up in late February it was gone. Along with the lid.
I don’t know. If I were not talking to you, it would not occur to me to ask. Say it was elves.
The craggy, asymmetrical visage you see before you now is the mark of that pain. The scar divides my mouth and snout like the pain divides my life. There are no moments without some element of pain now. Not that there really were before. The scar is in me in all my moments now. It is me. And it is mine in ways my silver highlighted golden eyebrows are not.
Billy Collins is right about the trouble with poetry. It does get a hold of you. You write one poem; you want to write more. We bears don’t choose to live poetry. We chomp down on every moment like there’s no tomorrow because, for us, there isn’t. Any. Tomorrow. But you people who have to grasp moments, you have to choose. (Or at least it feels like you do.) And the question you have to answer over and over again is this: if poetry extends and deepens and intensifies your moments, for good and ill, is it worth the pain?
Even the noblest superhero poets cannot use their powers only for good.
6)
Omnivorous is a relative term. There are some things a bear will not eat.
Anything that smells like gasoline, for instance. If you want to keep me out of your trash cans, pour a little of your cheap gas over the trash. Nrrnh! I hate that smell! It blurs everything. Whatever gas touches – or even gets close to – it robs of its own native aroma and replaces it with its that overpowering gas stink.
At the old Esso station, I used to hold my breath going for the leftover tamales. You could smell the rubber of the old tires out back for miles around, but the gas smell didn’t just run in the air. It got into the ground, the rocks, the trees, the water. Rrrnhr. But those tamales were worth it! Hrrr… I’d shower in gas for those tamales.
There are lots of words that work like gas. Hell, all words work like gas. They make things that are richly unique into blurry sameness. And that stinks! You humans think that what connects you with each other is your sameness. “We all make mistakes. We all put our pants on one leg at a time. We’re all sinners. Everybody loves the circus. Nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee.” You love that stuff! But when everything smells the same, well, everything smells the same. There’s no connection to be made; it’s already there. Conclusions are not connections.
You grind your minds looking for great, unifying principles, analyzing life instead of living it. Grasping, naming, ordering, cataloguing, identifying, defining. Nnnrnh! That’s not the way to connect. That’s the way to ignore the need for connection, to make connecting superfluous. When everything smells like gas, what other smells can you sniff for?
It could be the name of a prehistoric beast
