Seeking the Cave. James P. Lenfestey
TWENTY-SIX Beginning-to-Believe Peak
TWENTY-SEVEN The Floating World of Poet-Engineers
TWENTY-EIGHT “Six” and the Single Traveler
TWENTY-NINE Cold Mountain: Whose Story Is It?
THIRTY The Hermit of Cold Mountain
THIRTY-ONE “The Birds and Their Chatter”
THIRTY-TWO The Nun’s Priest’s Tale
THIRTY-THREE One New God
THIRTY-FOUR Meanwhile, Back in the Ka-ching
EPILOGUE:
Christmas Morning
POSTSCRIPT:
Finding My Own True Name
Endnotes
Coda
Permissions
List of Sources
Acknowledgments
Then do folk long to go on pilgrimage,
And palmers to go seeking out strange strands,
To distant shrines well known in sundry lands.
CHAUCER, PROLOGUE,
THE CANTERBURY TALES
There is only one way to travel and that is inward.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Han-Shan Haibun
It is of the highest urgency for the creative artist to be honestly attentive to the sources of his inspiration and to the obligation those sources impose.
FRED GOSS AND JAMES BOGAN
SPARKS OF FIRE: BLAKE IN A NEW AGE
In the fall of 2006 I traveled to Japan and China seeking the cave of Han-shan, Cold Mountain, a recluse whose poems I have loved for more than thirty years, who took his final name from the place where he lived. I returned with notebooks filled with impressions and poems. Simple enough, I thought, to add back the skeleton and musculature of narration over the beating heart of the poems. In practice, the haibun process pushed me to immerse myself not only in my journals but also in additional studies of Chinese poetry and poets, the Japanese haibun form itself, and, to my surprise, memory.
Beginning in my mid-fifties, a new feeling began to grow inside me, a surprisingly powerful urge I came to term “seeking the cave.” I felt an increasing pull toward quietude if not solitude, toward the stillness of dawn and away from evening enthusiasms, toward contemplation and away from engagement. My pilgrimage to Cold Mountain cave, raucous as it sometimes was through the noisy, neon-lit frame of modern China—what we quickly dubbed the “Ka-ching Dynasty” for its obsession with the gleam and rattle of money—pays homage to that pull I eventually could not resist. My pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, the poet and the place, is its metaphor.
I present myself as no expert on any of this—neither China nor Chinese poetry nor translation nor pilgrimage nor haibun. I am only a man trying to find the best means to tell the story of an American life that mysteriously resonates with the poems and poetic style of a poet who lived, if he lived at all and isn’t a literary fiction, in a cave somewhere in the Tientai Mountains of China 1,200 years ago. In seeking the actual cave to which the poet Cold Mountain is believed to have retired, and from which he wrote his poems and took his final name, I was seeking—it’s clear to me now—my own true name. Perhaps these scribblings from the notebooks of my travels, some refined into poems—all refined after acute critical readings by Gary Snyder, John Rosenwald, Eric Utne, Thomas R. Smith, J. P. White, traveling companions Mike Hazard, Margaret Telfer and Ed McConaghay, and editor Daniel Slager—will resonate with the reader’s own voyages external and internal. Perhaps you too will learn your own true name for how to live within the wonderings of the last decades of a life. Special thanks to the Anderson Center for residencies that allowed me the time to complete this manuscript.
JAMES P. LENFESTEY
Mackinac Island, Michigan, after finishing at dawn
The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Other Travel Sketches
by Matsuo Bashō, translated by Nobuyuki Yuasa.
A NOTE ON SPELLING
Chinese characters have been transliterated into the Roman alphabet using many different systems. Until recently the Wade-Giles system was most prominent, through which many English readers came to know Li Po, Tu Fu, Po Chü-i, and Su T’ung-p’o, for example. The latest writing system, called Pinyin, seems more closely to approximate modern Mandarin pronunciation, e.g., Li Bai, Du Fu, Bai Juyi, and Su Dongpo, and is the spelling system I have generally employed. In China if I mentioned Li Po or Tu Fu I got no reaction, but if I said Li Bai or Du Fu faces brightened, like meeting old friends. Few brightened at the mention of Han-shan, little read in China and not taught in school. One spelling exception is the name of the mountain region Han-shan called home: “Tiantai” in Pinyin. I missed the sound of the soft e, the way I imagined the sound of “Tientai,” so I have maintained that spelling.
Do you remember that cliff
We once imagined—hundreds of swallow holes,
And an old Chinese poem rolled up inside
Each hole! We can’t unroll them here. We have
To climb inside.
ROBERT BLY, “LETTER TO JAMES WRIGHT”
In 1974 Charlie Miller, proprietor of the World Eye Bookshop in Greenfield, Massachusetts, placed into my hand Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by T’ang Poet Han-shan, translated by Burton Watson. “Try these,” he said, like a doctor prescribing medicine to a patient.
At the time I was director of a nearby alternative high school that spilled its special brand of chaos over the Connecticut River Valley nearby. I often came to his bookstore, a source of delight and solace for me. A poet himself, and friend of Auden, Charlie had become a good enough friend of mine that he could sense what I needed.
I read Cold Mountain no. 10:
Here we languish, a bunch of poor scholars,
Battered by extremes of hunger and cold.
Out of work, our only joy is poetry:
Scribble, scribble, we wear out our brains.
Who will read the works of such men?
On that point you can save your sighs.
We could inscribe our poems on biscuits
And the homeless dogs wouldn’t deign to nibble.
For the first time in my life, I laughed out loud at a poem! What a joyful relief to hear expressed the mad futility of poets who scribbled out poems night after night as I did. Soon enough I swallowed Han-shan’s other short poems like aspirin. His commonplace