Vajra Poetics: ‘Word’ From A Veteran Expat

Once you’re a veteran expat languages replace national identity. You realize the need to belong to a country is just more bigotry—in fact, ‘chauvinism.’ Whether you’re formally a Vajrayanaist or not, the intensification and increased centrality of language ripens you into ways of the vaka (voice) vajra with its powers of dematerialization and discriminating wisdom. Metaphor, hermeneutics, mantric transformation readily replace grosser ‘my, me, mine’ fixations so that one, being a ‘national’ attached to a flag pole, doesn’t also have to be a tethered ball batted around during an over-the-fence tête-à-tête with a ‘turncoat’ neighbor. Freed from that hell, internal energies may just finally arrest one’s attention. The body, its feelings, phenomena and finally ‘Mind’ emerge. Then, “what’s this new heat?” you might exclaim. “Sex, or something more extraordinarily self-related?” Ontological investigation ensues. All this because a national identity with its cocoon of customs and cultural prefaces bolstering one’s existential insecurities has been left at D.H. Lawrence’s altar of the phallus. You begin to write about it and end up exactly here, where you belonged the whole time—in the mysterious embrace of language. This is what it means, or formerly meant, to be an expat. Think Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Orwell, OK—Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and especially Henry Miller and William Burroughs, who faced impossible odds of just mentally surviving the linguistic/imagistic shocks from “the hell inside her Jewish Cunt” and the auto hangings of Ibogaine addicts sprouting mandrakes beneath the crotches of their dangling bodies “all across the  wounded universe.” But it it doesn’t end there, or here, as an entire uncouth school of drugged  laureates took to the road. While at first preoccupied by endless daisy chains, cocks and balls, they later prophesied the present day child Moloch feeding monsters of the Citizen’s United, AIPAC atrocities. Most of these malcontents, raised in the  American grain, were mentored by America’s ur epistemic and phenomenologist poet, Doc ‘WCW’ Williams, while he simultaneously sat yab-yum with Hiawatha under the Paterson Falls. It’s then a personally chaste Trungpa Rinpoche came along just in time and, holding a tiger by the tail, gave a siddha’s pan-refuge, resuscitating many Beats by distinguishing ordinary madness and Crazy Wisdom as such: “Ordinary craziness is driven by ego, confusion, hidden traumas, and reacting wildly to hope and fear. Whereas Crazy Wisdom is totally empty of ego, operating out of absolute accuracy, and utilizing spontaneous, provocative behavior strictly to shock others out of conceptual trances.”