The Zen of John Ashbery

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Alone with our madness and favorite flower
We see that there really is nothing left to write about.
Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things
In the same way, repeating the same things over and over
For love to continue and be gradually different.

In that first stanza of his poem “Late Echo,” John Ashbery seems to reverse the familiar definition of insanity—that is, doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. When it comes to the solitary act of writing, it’s not only not crazy to repeat “the same things over and over,” it’s actually necessary, the speaker in the poem suggests.

By sitting alone with the madness and beauty of our thoughts, engaged in a repetitive activity and observing the nothingness of existence, we allow love to continue and gradually change: It could serve as a succinct definition of a form of Zen Buddhism.

In Zazen sessions, students are instructed to sit quietly in a certain posture repeatedly during the day. Such “returning to the cushion” is a way of returning “home.” Home, in this case, is a place of “natural awareness,” where fleeting thoughts, feelings, and sensations pass through the mind of the practitioner, who ideally becomes detached from them. 

In that state of mind, the sitter may experience moments of temporary enlightenment, a condition perhaps impossible to define in words, but certainly one outside the realm of conscious thought. Once someone is in that contemplative state, she might start to experience a love outside herself and observe the constant changes in that emotion—how it becomes “gradually different,” in the words of Ashbery’s poem.

Now I am by no means attributing didactic motives to a poet who’s as far from asserting life lessons as any poet I am aware of. It’s funny to think of Ashbery as a Zen Master, head shaved and wandering the countryside with a beggar’s bowl in hand. And yet there’s a certain bemused detachment in the work of our late poetic master that makes you sense that the apparent world might well be an illusion.

To be sure, Ashbery’s frequently unsettling syntax doesn’t seem an exact match for such Zen Koans as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Yet his abrupt non-sequiturs do have a way of lightly shocking the mind out of conventional patterns of thought. The opening of his early poem “Measles,” in The Tennis Court Oath, has always affected me that way. The austere, philosophical language of the first line, “There was no longer any need for the world to be divided,” immediately downshifts in the second line to “Into bunny, when he had chased the hare,” echoing the vocabulary of Lewis Carroll and Beatrix Potter. What’s more, the verb “divided” introduces a nonsensical relationship between the discordant realms of lines 1 and 2. I have always been reduced to helpless laughter by these lines, which, I see now, can be distilled into a koan: “How can the world be divided into bunny?”

Another aspect of what might be called “the Zen of Ashbery” is the poet’s uncanny ability to slow down time in his poems. At the same time “Late Echo” shows how his poems can themselves instruct readers in how to read them—slowly and with an intense focus on the smallest details. Here’s the second stanza of “Late Echo”:

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally
And the color of the day put in
Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter
For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic
Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

In other words, for a work of art to be authentic, it must be slowed down to the pace at which the artist can control the most minute details and put in “the color of the day” being depicted hundreds of times, as in the work of a film editor, for instance, a Pointillist painter, or a dancer moving through the slow stately steps of a Saraband.

In their focus on living in the present moment, Zen practitioners similarly seek to slow down their breathing and mental processes in order to be able to perceive what’s happening in the briefest unit of time. The most illuminated masters are said to be able to sense the passing of a kṣaṇa, the smallest unit of time. “In the one moment in which a young and strong man snaps his finger, there are sixty-five kṣaṇas,” taught Dōgen, a founder of Zen in Japan.

In the final stanza of “Late Echo,” we find a phrase that might well have cropped up in the teachings of the stern Dōgen: “the chronic inattention/Of our lives”:

Only then can the chronic inattention
Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory
And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows
That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge
Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

The obvious way to read the phrase is to think of “inattention” as a “chronic condition” of being human, a long-term and unavoidable malady. But, reading it with a Zen-like awareness and the understanding that “chronic” derives from the Greek word khronos, meaning “time,” we might also think of “chronic inattention” as the inability to attend to the passage of time.

Another crucial phrase, if we are considering the poem in light of the Zen of Ashbery, is “our unprepared knowledge/Of ourselves.” If we want to, we can, with Plato via Socrates, put a negative spin on “unprepared knowledge” and declare that the unexamined life is not worth living. But it may be better, I think, to interpret it in Buddhist terms—to view “unprepared knowledge” as raw material for the pursuit of a self-awareness that goes beyond rational thought.

I think Keats was expressing such intimations of the virtues of intuitive thought when he defined “negative capability,” a term he had coined in a letter to his brothers praising Shakespeare, as the state in which “a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason [.]” There has been quite a lot of resistance to Ashbery’s work among readers—many of them poets—who may be irritably reaching for the rational meaning of his poems. I believe a good way to read him is to slow down, read him line by line, and suspend the habitual straining after gists and piths. Then such readers might learn to enjoy his verse as a way of knowing how the mind works in its minute, unprepared, and often hilarious ways. Not for nothing did “Late Echo” appear in a 1979 collection of Ashbery’s titled As We Know.