Interview with Emily Rivera, Giant Steps Press, May 11th 2021, about Poet’s Apprentice

Published in the Uncategorized

Video link: https://youtu.be/evkFWb956Ks

Emily Rivera: Hello, everyone, welcome back to Giant Steps Press Goes Zoom. My name is Emily Rivera, and today we have with us Randy Roark, the author of Poet’s Apprentice. Later, we’ll have a reading from this book by Randy himself along with an interview. Thank you for joining us today, Randy.

Randy Roark: Thank you.

ER: We’re going to jump right in. So if you could start by explaining the relationship of the Poetic Apprentice book you’re publishing with Giant Steps with your longer nonfiction work for us.

RR: Poet’s Apprentice is the beginning of a much longer story. [The book] begins on the day that I met Allen Ginsberg on January 6, 1980, and continues through the apprenticeship, which ended about mid-March of nineteen-eighty. So that’s the time frame [of this first book in the series] and I’ve chosen to begin there. The story begins a decade earlier in Connecticut, but this first book focuses on the period of time that I could give people some information about what that experience was like and also for that period of time. It was my first semester at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics in Boulder, Colorado, which was part of the Naropa Institute and is now part of Naropa University.

What I’ve also done is try to recreate and preserve as much of what I was taught that first semester as possible, based on my notes and writings. Allen’s classes themselves were recorded. So this first book focuses on the period of time when I was working with Allen every week as an apprentice and studying at the Naropa Institute for a BFA in Poetics.

That first semester I took a class with Allen called Basic Poetics. This was the first in a series of [Basic Poetics] classes that he taught. He went to the beginning of the Norton Anthology of English Poetry and taught the anonymous poems and the ballads. And then [continuing] through the early days of poetry, right up until the end of the 16th century or about 1610 or so. Marlowe, Ralegh, that crowd.

When Allen was alive, I was a transcriptionist for him. I transcribed all of his lectures from 1974 to 1983, a decade, so I have transcriptions of all those classes that he taught in nineteen-eighty. What I’ve done is distil what those classes taught. There’s a lot of highly technical information in [the class recordings] related to poetry and writing poetry and meter and stress and breathing and such, and I’ve summarized that in a summary of every class, so you know what he taught.

Then below that are my notes and also reconstructions of conversations and things he said in the class that I think are more generally interesting about his time with Dylan or Kerouac or personal stories.

He also did some side lectures in that semester that were really interesting. He took his own early poems—Gates of Wrath and Empty Mirror, which were the poems he wrote before “Howl”—and he showed where those poems were influenced by the poetry we were studying in class. Students were reacting to studying old timey British poetry. “I don’t care about this. Why are you teaching me Campion? I like Kerouac and Neal Cassady,” and he would show that his early poetry was both inspired by and reflections of this elder poetry that we’re reading and writing as well, to sort of justify or explain how he went about teaching poetry to himself.

He gave a class on how Kerouac composed Mexico City Blues, which became a model for me for almost all of my writing that followed. Kerouac was in living in Mexico, staying with a friend and living on top of a building on the roof, and he had a little home set up there. He’d wake up in the morning, he’d open up his sleeping bag and air it out. He’d go downstairs, make a cup of coffee and he rolled a big joint. He’d go to the bathroom, get set for the day, sit in the chair, smoke the joint, drink the coffee, and have a pocket notebook in his lap. And he wouldn’t have anything [necessarily] to say, he was writing a daily record of mind, pictures of who he was and what he saw and collected over three hundred, four hundred pages a page a day. It becomes a document much like what I’m trying to recreate in this larger sense of the mind that moves through time, that’s influenced by and influences his environment and how that process actually works. So Mexico City Blues became a model for almost my entire writing career.

Another class he taught [was] blues composition, how do you improvise blues [lyrics]? He got us all able to improvise in 3-, 4- or 12-bar blues. And then another class he gave on Shakespeare’s songs in all of his plays. Another class was looking at Shakespeare and his sonnets, the whole sonnet sequence, and Allen retells the story behind the sonnets in this kind of gangster patois.

In another class, Bunting, an important poet friend of Pound and Yeats, gave a history of poetry from before language to at the time 1970, when he was lecturing. So we have Allen Ginsberg commenting on Basil Bunting’s history of English prosody.

The whole class was rife with a variety of materials that I found useful as a poet. I’m trying to recreate that.

In addition, that semester I took a class with Stanley Freeman called Plato to Eliot. What we learned was the standard Western white male literary tradition: Plato, Aristotle, Sidney, Shelley, the Johnsons—Ben and Samuel—Pope and Eliot. That class wasn’t taught with lectures, so I don’t have notes, but for those classes we were taught via Socratic dialogue, which is where you come to class having done the reading and then you have a response [to it]. Hopefully I remember to talk a little bit about responses [in this interview] because that was one of the foundations of Naropa Institute. You would come in with your personal reflections on what you read. I used to be in debating [in high school] and I used to love creating opening statements and closing statements which summarize the case, and then you respond to it. What I have [as evidence from that class] are summaries of what I was taught and my responses.

Then my second favorite class at Naropa—other than the apprenticeship—in my whole time there, and I studied there for nine years, was Reggie Ray’s class in 1980 called The Lively Journey. Reggie Ray was an administrator at the school. He was one of Trungpa’s main students and Chogyam Trungpa was the man who started Naropa Institute. [Reggie] created a class that was mandatory for all program students. This class explained the history and tradition and vision of Naropa Institute, including the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. In that class he went through a history of the development of Buddhism from the beginnings through to the present day, the history of the development of the Buddhist ideas about psychology and history and personality, and also their educational philosophy.

What we did [in that class] is learn the intellectual substructure of what it was we were experiencing in [our classes].

For instance, responses were something that was very important in the school. We were taught not to have the answers and not to be arguing about what’s right or wrong but it’s more about turning the attention inward. So, [for instance] when I read Plato talking about how the poet is inspired by the Muse, the focus was on what were my feelings about that [not if he was right or wrong]. Did I agree with it or not? They were focusing your attention on who you were and how you’re interacting with the information, rather than focusing on arguing that you’re right and he’s wrong. So we would discuss these issues in an open environment to be able to discuss how we felt rather than trying to decide who was right.

Other things they did were inspired by Nalanda University, which was [in existence] about 500 to about 1000 CE. [Nalanda] was a Buddhist university started by the Vajrayana [Buddhists], which was what the local group was [here in Boulder/Naropa], Vajrayana. After Buddha was Hinayana, [which] became Mayayana, [which] became Vajrayana, the three stages of Buddhism. That was one connection, Nalanda was Vajrayana, the local group was Vajrayana.

What they did in that school was that courses were taught, but instead of hiring Buddhists to teach them, they would hire the best people in those fields to teach, regardless of their belief system or their religion or their culture or whatever language even. That wasn’t an accident, that was intentional.

With the student body they went further than that. They actually tried to recruit as many people as they could from different philosophies, beliefs, religions so there would be no majority. So you’d never feel like you were in the majority. Everybody was on the spot all the time. So if you’ve got a Hindu and a Buddhist and a Christian and Muslim and there’s no majority you’re all working it out and you’re who you are and what you believe is being tested every moment among people who have other ideas or beliefs. That wasn’t accidental. That was intentional. So that’s something [worthwhile experiencing].

That was carried out in [The Lively Journey class] because this was mandatory for all the program students. I’m sitting next to a scientist and a neuroscientist and a psychiatrist and a dancer, the whole mix. I had to listen to what their concerns were and they mine, and their responses to this information and offer my own as well in an open dialogue.

Now, those classes were lectures and I’m a writer, so I basically just wrote down as much as I could of what Reggie said in every class. I don’t think that class was ever recorded, although it was [mandatory for every program student at least] for several years. So [these notes] may be the best record of Reggie’s class at that time.

Then I had a class in Tai Chi. That was my minor. That’s a movement class, a movement meditation, and the point is that you stop experiencing life as thought and return to a body awareness so there’s only a couple of brief things that I wrote then that I’ve included. Which is too bad because it was one of the most important classes I had as a counter-balance to the thought work I was doing too. Returning to body awareness twice a day became a very important foundation for me as a poet, as well as a twice-daily Transcendental Meditation practice.

Then there was the apprenticeship itself. I met with Allen [Ginsberg] once a week and we would look at my poetry and we would work on how to get me to write better poetry. During the week between those visits, I would do secretarial work for him. I transcribed his journals from ’78-’79, I went to the post office, I went to the library, did research. It was poetry work that he didn’t have the time for. I would do that during the week and study with him in class. Then once a week we would meet and I’d bring him some poetry and we’d talk about it.

You mentioned a reading. I thought I’d read an account of one of the days I spent with Allen. This is the fourth apprenticeship meeting that we had on February 2^nd [1980]. So I’ve been there about a month.

ER: Can’t wait to hear your edited version that you prepared for us today, Randy. So please take it away with your excerpt from Poets Apprentice, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.

RR [reads] I brought my first draft of the poem composed on the typewriter the night before. It’s the only thing I’ve shown him that I didn’t have the time to “finish.” I hadn’t even had a chance to go over most of it except the first stanza, but I’d brought the whole thing, four pages. As I was explaining this, Allen grabbed the pages from my hand.

The typography quickly lost the structure of a poem at the top of page two and spread out in big clumps, with misspellings, missed words, the whole rush of trying to capture what was spiraling out of some distant memory chamber—not writing but watching a movie from the audience and taking notes. That evening was still in there, but when it was happening and until now it was just one of many passing moments erased by the next moment. But like a madeleine, the assignment triggered a part of my brain that held that experience intact. Now it was back, unfinished business, all in a lump. It returned as gushes of language, visual memories associated with emotions via scribbled connections. Even the conversations were remembered as images and there was a light inside it, like a Chinese lampshade, or a movie projector behind the passing film projecting images on a wall. The script was a set of images that were rearranged out of chronology into broad “chords” of feeling underneath even that. That was what was playing back to me, what I tried to capture, a piece of music made of memories.

But the writing was without any sense of style, there was no one at the helm—it was just language about emotions triggered by memories that others couldn’t share. Plus it was written in a kind of shorthand where most of the references were too personal to be understood by others, like showing someone a photograph of a soldier, without telling them it’s a photo of your father who never returned from the war. It doesn’t communicate. It was the raw material of a poem, but I would need to create a story or some style to hold it all together before it became a real poem. That’s what I wanted Allen to help with. That’s why I wanted him to stop at the end of the first stanza, to see if I was going about transforming the raw data into a poem in the right way.

But Allen didn’t stop where things got messy. He went through the pages with his head down, reading it with more interest than anything I’d ever brought him. Every once in a while, he’d look up and ask a quick, clarifying question—“Was he in love with you?” “What do you mean, he overdosed on L.S.D? That’s impossible!” “Did his parents really get back together after his suicide?” “Where did you get that image of the father sitting alone in the kitchen in the dark? Well, that must be some kind of archetypal image because that’s an image I have of my own father, stumbling in on him in a dark kitchen, everyone asleep, silent and alone, like a Sphinx.” And then he’d be back to reading before I’d finished answering.

“Well, I think you have pay dirt here,” he said, writing the two words at the top of the last page and underlining them three times. But I continued to insist it wasn’t a poem … yet. “Think of all your questions! There’s lots of stuff in there that no one other than me could understand. It’s not poetry. Yet.”

“But it’s clear,” he said and began explaining events and fleshing them out with secret longings and unacknowledged feelings that at first I thought were Allen’s crazy projections, but over the next couple of days I slowly realized were absolutely true. That’s why those moments were so charged. At the time, I was too close and looked away because that’s the way I am. But what caused me to look away was still in there, like an image burned into my retina. And I was still looking away from it. My conscious mind could not have written the poem because it didn’t have enough information. Or it didn’t have the right information. The real story was hidden from my conscious mind but still present in what I remembered because what I remembered was significant enough that I remembered it. If I had tried to massage the poem into shape, the real message would have been edited out because it wasn’t the story I was aware of telling.

I want to explore this practice further, write poems and stories I don’t understand that are created from actual memories, the way they come up unexpected. I want to use those moments to instigate writing by letting my memory write, like a waking dream journal, recounting everything I can remember about an encounter, no matter how out-of-sequence or seemingly random. But not automatic writing. I want to focus on what actually happened, what I’ve seen and heard. And to write about the present in this way too and notice what I notice when I notice and write it down. Or whatever I remember about a day at the end of it—what people said that made me take note, what I saw that stands out, what I heard that’s memorable, what I felt when I felt and why. Mix it up.

I have to find a way to write like this or I’ll stop writing. I don’t have word skills or interests. I don’t have a musical sense of language. I don’t have ambitions in that way. But this is something I can do, something I’m excited about, something I want to learn, exploring something, not repeating my opinions and reinforcing them. I don’t have many intense experiences to remember, but who knows? I had forgotten that one before the assignment. It’s clear I remember things that have intense meaning for me that I do not understand. Maybe these memories remain dormant until I’m ready to understand them, like crumbs in a forest, on my way to a gingerbread house.

This is not just an intellectual exercise or a career move. Allen revealed important things about my life that were invisible to me through something I had written. What else is in there to be rediscovered?

The process seems to be to remember what I remember in the order in which it is remembered. Because who cares if a story from ten years ago is in perfect chronological order? Even if someone could prove that some of my memories and impressions are misremembered or wrongly re-imagined, what could I replace them with? A blank? Someone else’s memories? [End of reading.]

So that’s the kind of things that would happen in those meetings, things that wouldn’t happen in a classroom. If I handed that poem in to Allen [in his class], he would have made some comments and handed it back to the guy in row A, seat four. But with the apprenticeship, it doesn’t get to be like that. He asked me a question and tried to find what was underneath that to try to understand why I wrote it this way and what it was that he should be telling me to make me write more interesting poems.

ER: In your reading, there is a transition from this mindset of your work not being good enough to accepting Allen’s view of how you actually clearly captured an unconscious moment. Where do you think this feeling of your work not being good enough came from?

RR: Well, feedback. And not inappropriate feedback either. I want to show you the poem that I brought him that day, that first stanza that I thought was a real poem. Can you see that at all? A little bit? Well, I’ll read it to you. The point is there’s one, two, three, four, five, six, seven lines [in the poem] and there’s like 40 lines Allen’s written around it.

This is the poem that I brought about this intense emotional experience and now I’ve refined it into a real poem.

Sky crouched above our heads,
roads slowly filled with snow.

Shadows in the streetlight
caught in comic conversation
pledge a drunken guarantee.

                                  dreams of floating faces,
                                bright coals against the dark.

[Long pause.]

So that’s what I brought him. I don’t know what anyone can make of that. It’s so abstracted from the actual experience to be like, nonsensical. I’ll show you what the [first draft looks like].

You probably can’t see this either, but this is the first page of that poem. [It’s a full page] and Allen’s made a one-[word] addition, [a one-word] subtraction, corrected a misspelling, took out a preposition and added a word because [laughs] I didn’t know what the psychiatric hospital in New York was and he did. Bellevue.

You can see what I was bringing him. He was trying to steer me away from this [lifts up the revised poem] and this is what he wanted [the first draft]. 

In other words, I took that and turned it into “the sky crouched above our heads.” You know what I mean? I’m … I’ve taken this memory that’s pure sensuousness and [because] I think poetry is abstracted, I’ve abstracted it into a poem and then abstracted it again.

I do want to say something in my defense. In a poetry school, you’re around students, not all of whom are very skilled in how to give feedback constructively. Some people choose to pour their heart out. I felt [from experience] that if I poured my heart out, I’d be vulnerable to who knows what response. I think part of my abstraction process is basically self-protection, not only there, but elsewhere in my life as well.

So the idea of where did I get the idea that my poetry wasn’t any good, Allen never made me feel like I didn’t have it. He made me feel like I wasn’t focused properly. He always told me it’s in there, like “We’ve got to get it out.” He read this [holds up first draft]. He knows it’s in there. I have a real life. He doesn’t know what this is [I’m bringing him]. “What is this? I don’t know what this is.”

The most common thing he said to me was that when you talk about your poetry, you’re really interesting. “I love to hear you talk about it, but your poetry is not interesting.” So that’s what he is trying to do, is try and steer me. That’s what a teacher does. They see what your skills are and what your potentials are. And it’s like a son, you know, that [a father] wants to draw you over here to where they think you’ll be happier and you’re stuck over here because your mind is hemmed in and he’s trying to break your mind open. He never made me feel like I was never going to be a good poet. It was just a matter of like, how do we get you to be you and write a poem?

ER: Taking all of your praise about Allen and in your work that you just shared with us, you said Allen “revealed important things about my life that were invisible to me through something I had written. What else is in there to be rediscovered?” So it is easy to say Allen Ginsberg being a mentor for you helped with this transformation. So, how does the book capture that? 

RR: Well, not only being the story of that process—because it is that in a way, because I’ve relied solely on material written at the time. There’s three stories going on in this. My emotional development as a person and my life, going through it. There’s [also] what I was studying in class, trying to collect as much of that information as possible to [document] what I was being influenced by. Then there’s the writing itself, because it’s written at the time. As time goes on, the influence of what I was being taught becomes evident in my writing and elsewhere. I’m lucky that Allen was the first class I had there because it was a good root and foundation to go in there and start smacking things around rather than [only] in a classroom, more or less anonymous. You know, you can have conversations, you hand in poems [in a classroom]. But I feel very insulated in a classroom. I could be in the back of the class and hand in my assignments and you can stay protected that way. [During] the apprenticeship, for hours I’m sitting there and he’s asking me questions. One of the most important things about what I learned from Allen and no one else would have ever done is that he asked me questions that I could only answer from in here [pounds on his chest]. Not ideas but responses. The answer isn’t hard or anything, but it’s not in my head. I couldn’t answer [and remain] in my head. I could only answer how I felt and who I was. I kept answering out of that place for hours at a time until he gave me myself. He taught me how to talk about myself to other people as well. He helped me to explore those feelings by asking me questions, not giving me answers, not telling me what to think, but asking me questions that I had to [respond by saying] okay, I don’t like that, but why not? Then I had to explore why. Or why don’t you do that? Well, I don’t. But why don’t you? That stuff happens. The difference is, he’s actually going in there and like, you know, breaking legs to reset them and stuff. He’s doing serious work.

The apprenticeship is the only place that I would possibly be able to do that and it taught me how to apprentice with the other teachers. But nobody was like Allen. Allen was the full menu. He was fully awake and he was not going to stop until he was exhausted. I would wear out from the attention, but he was still going strong. Can I go home, please? You know, this a lot of [emotional] work for me. And I have a certain personality. It’s very sheltered and protective and doesn’t feel safe exposing itself. And [the apprenticeship] is all about being exposed. It’s all about manifesting who you are, the only time you can manifest it, which is right here, right now, all the time, whatever the circumstances. If not you lose, not Allen.

ER: In your book you said that you did two pilgrimages a year from 2005 to 2015 and then listed some of your travel experience. What is something you learned from your travels that found its way into your book? 

RR: I think it’s actually the reverse of that because the traveling didn’t happen until much later when I could afford it. The first time I travel [alone] was in 1990. The traveling became important once I’d learned how to travel alone. But the real effect I see is the reverse. I can see all these ideas that I was introduced to in this first semester of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and how that became my whole life. I lived out so many of these ideas. So for me, the ideas that inform my travels come from my education and these early days. But the traveling didn’t … wasn’t an application of this until much later. The first time I went to Europe [in 1990] was after I graduated with my MFA from Naropa, so the traveling is the graduation part when I take this show on the road.

ER: Will that be expected in your next books that are focused on this journey?

RR: There’s going to be quite a few books. [The first draft] is 29,000 pages long.  I wrote [most days] for 39 years. I’m just going to be working on this material going forward. The traveling starts in 1990 and once I graduate it’s what I’m doing for the rest of my life. I’m not focused on my life in this one, I’m focused on Naropa and the Jack Kerouac School because this is what I was taught. But all of the other books are about my life and how I used all this stuff in my life and what I learned and what I did with it.

ER: Would you say you were successful at your goal of living an interesting life?

RR: Well, that’s a tough question. I went to the St. Louis Art Museum one time with a girlfriend and her siblings, and it was a huge art museum and there was a traveling exhibit and we walked in together and then we went off in our different ways. I went into the first room and it’s about the size of a basketball court. I was about halfway through and I was at a Van Gogh painting, and I could see it so close that I realized he had [put] yellow paint and green paint on either side of the brush. It wasn’t flat painting but impasto. He was building up layers. It had peaks and valleys and there was a sort of black in the shadows and then yellow on one side and green on the other [of the paint stroke]. If you moved a little bit, it would flicker. And then I felt a tap on my shoulder. It’s my girlfriend. She said, “We’re all in the gift shop, if you’re ready to go.”

So to say I had an interesting life is kind of a not very useful term because it’s interesting to whom? But I think that “interested life” would be a better way of putting it. I wanted to live a vibrant life. I wanted to be fully aware that I was alive [for as much of this life as I could]. I wanted to max out this experience of being alive. I wanted to do everything I wanted to do. So my life was my artwork, my life was what I focused on. The writing was a reflection of that and becomes its own thing. But it’s really about living my life. What I chose to do and how it turned out.

ER: Can you explain your top three moments of your life or transformative moments that you’ve had or moments you’ve enjoyed?

RR: There are three moments I’ve had traveling that have been really important in my life. Transformative, literally, in that there is a before and after.

The first one was in 1990. It was my first trip abroad, like I said, first time I had a passport. I went abroad to get my last three credits for my Masters at Brunnenberg Castle, which is where Ezra Pound’s daughter and his library and a lot of artifacts and his grandson and Olga Rudge, his girlfriend, Mary’s mother, were there. I went there and studied with John Gery in the University of New Orleans program and a bunch of scholars and poets and Pound freaks. And after that, it was the first time I traveled abroad by myself, so [laughs] I thought I’d take a seven-month leave of absence from the hospital [where] I worked in the emergency room. I would just celebrate and do everything that I wanted to do in Europe. I’m dyslexic and my brain is kind of funny and I get lost really easy and I don’t travel well, so it’s a bit of a nightmare for me when I travel alone, especially in 14 countries and only two of which spoke English. I’m a monoglot.

The moment I thought was transformative was about two months in. I’d gone to Lisbon—Lisboa [locally]—where I was writing my paper for my last three credits. When that was finished, I went to England to do a tour of England, Scotland, and Wales with Nancy Covey, who was Richard Thompson the guitarist’s wife. We traveled with British folk musicians Fairport Convention, Robin Williamson, Richard, and Dougie MacLean and learned British folk music from the real people.

I had to get from Lisbon up to London, and there was a train that did that, a night train. I thought I’d sleep on the train, but I got on and it was a party train and a little cabin and people were drinking and partying. I didn’t sleep. We got to Paris and they let us off at the south station and I had to get to the north station, which was an adventure. I haven’t been asleep for like 30 hours at this point. Then it was a train to the coast, Calais, I think, and then a ferry overnight. I thought I’d sleep on the overnight crossing, but it’s one of those, you know [imitates the boat lurching up and down] night crossings and I throw up and couldn’t sleep and I’m on the bow of the boat in the morning. It’s still dark out. I’m just standing there and I watch the world sort of lighten up. Then I can see land and it’s England, oh, my God, you know, we’ve been in the water for so long, it’s like, oh, that’s it, we’re there and I’m feeling pretty good, feeling better.

Then the morning boats, the fishing boats start coming out. We’re going into the channel for the Thames and we’re on the right they’re on the left. The first boat comes out and there’s the little white puffs of smoke coming out of the back and it’s slowing down and wants to avoid us. Then when it gets past, it goes on and the stern sinks and the bow goes up and it takes off and the gulls are flying behind them, all cawing. Then there’s another one, chug chug chug. They’re smoking cigarettes and they’re waving and then waving to one boat after another. Then we got in[to the Thames] and it was the morning and everything was dewy and everything was sparkling and everything was alive. And for the first time in that trip, it was enough that it was just me to see it and experience it. Because I was living with a woman and I really loved this woman. For two months, every time I had a beautiful moment or experience it was worse because it wasn’t shared. I felt it was almost like it was worse than if it didn’t exist, like it wasn’t real if I didn’t share it. Every time I saw something that was beautiful, I felt something missing, an absence of sharing it with somebody. But this moment, it was enough that I saw it. In fact, it was better than enough. It was the best “enough” ever. It was better than if it was shared with somebody because I could go all the way into it. That ruined me in many ways for the rest of my life. I wanted to marry that woman when I came home. We broke up and I’ve never lived with another woman. All my traveling is done solo.

Now, not only is it enough that I experience everything by myself, it’s only real if I experience it alone. I travel with other folks and these are social occasions and I have fun and it’s what I’m doing. I saw a perfect example of this in a film the other day. It’s a series of films about these two actors and friends that go to Greece and Spain, and they’re friends and actors in real life, but they’re in a movie as well. At one point they’re in Italy and they’re walking in a corridor in a museum. The ceiling is beautiful, on both sides of the walls there’s all these paintings. They’re surrounded by beauty. And the whole scene is them walking down the hallway, looking at their feet, talking about their personal lives back in England. That, for me, is an image of what, you know, traveling is like with people as opposed to traveling by yourself. Because when you’re by yourself, you do everything you want to do for as long as you want to do it, when you want to go to sleep you go to sleep. My whole life is really built up like that now.

So that was the first one that was a really important change. The second one is a little bit more complicated to explain, but I’ll try.

In 2016, I’m 62 and I walk the Camino to Santiago de Compostela, the Camino to the cathedral in Spain. You walk across the country of Spain, from east to west. I started on this side of the Pyrenees, I didn’t do the whole thing from France.

Like I said, I get lost really easy. My brain jumbles up information. This was a 37-day hike and the first day, within half an hour or forty-five minutes, I got lost and I walked two hours in the wrong direction. And 90 minutes of that was arguing with me about whether I had taken a wrong turn or not. Then, finally when you realize what you’ve done wrong, you’ve not only walked two hours out of your way but you have to walk two hours back to get to the point where you began—and the whole time you’re yelling at yourself and miserable—and then you still have the full day’s hike in front of you. On the first day, which is the big day, the first day, the only day you’ve done this, the first of 37, to add on to that the difficulty that I’ve already walked a very stressful and frustrating 12 miles before I began the 14 or 16 miles of the first day. That’s where I began and I was ready to quit right then. It was the beginning of a very difficult experience. Oh, my God, I was looking for a cab, but there’s no cabs. It’s cross country.

Anyway, as I went along, I continued to get lost, but it would be less and less every day, and I started to notice something. I’d get this feeling in my body, this kind of awkward, anxious feeling, kind of unnerved feeling, and that would gradually get worse. I wouldn’t know what caused it, but I started to associate it with getting lost. When I started paying attention to my anxiety I started realizing that feeling was always right [about me being lost]. So I began to trust it earlier when I had that feeling and I’d have to go back.

The last day that it happened was three days before the end and I was walking and I lifted my foot up just like a million times before, but I felt kind of funny and I put it down and that was a really funny feeling. Then I lifted the other and halfway the feeling was overwhelming and I looked to my left and there was the scallop shell directing me to the left that I had missed. It had been ivy overgrown.

Those are combined with two other experiences I had. The first day my body just took over. I’m usually intellectually present and I’m usually experiencing things through my intellect, but it was as if my intellect shut down, powered down, and I was just my body and my body knew what to do. My body put me in bed and I went right to sleep. I woke up in the morning before the alarm. I didn’t, like, gradually wake up. I woke up and then watched myself get out of bed because the faster you start the faster you get there. All of my body needs were taken care of and everything just happened and then I was out and [hiking] and I began to realize that my body is who I am. In essence, my body was taking that hike after my body realized after that first day, “You’re not the guy that I want in control of this. You’re not making the right decisions. So I’m taking over.” My body was aware, just like in that poem [that Allen understood better than I did]. Some part of me was aware of something that Randy wasn’t aware of. My body knew that I had left the trail. It was convincing my head that I had left the trail that was the issue because I think I know where I’m going and I know where I’m at, I’m on the right trail. So usually my body is arguing for control with my head.

So I had this funny visual idea of who I am. The answer is I was my body. My body is doing everything, my body is experiencing everything that my head has told it to do. And my brain is interpreting my body’s signals. So, for instance, I also know when I get hungry, I feel something like a twinge. Then I keep walking because I’m thinking and then it has to return three times until I go, oh, I’m hungry. And then “I” start directing my body like, OK, well, let’s look for a restaurant.

So this is the image I had. My body is living my life. I’m really my body. Actually, the only thing essential is my body because when my body dies, “I” die. And then my awareness is [tied to my shoulder] like a helium balloon, one of those birthday balloons, bobbing along, you know, like, “Oh, look at the birds.” And I look at the boats coming out of the Thames. So my awareness is like a helium balloon attached to my body, but it’s really easily distracted.

Then [there’s] my thoughts, which if you’re walking alone for 37 days, you’re really sick of your thoughts. They were like black smoke coming out of the back of my head.

So I had this vision of myself [as] a body walking with a balloon with my awareness, kind of a goofy balloon attached, thinking that it’s the boss, but it’s like an appendage or something. And then the smoke pouring out the back of my head as I motor my way to Santiago.

That idea about being a body is something I can call back, that experience of feeling that I am my body. Like right now. Or getting ready for this conversation. I sat in my chair for a minute or so and said, OK, body, how are you doing, body? So I can actually use that information. If I don’t like my thoughts, I can use that information. If I don’t like what’s in my awareness I can always return to my body. That was a really important one for me as well.

The last one is actually the end of the book, the 39-year book. I hadn’t known how to end the book. I began to think it’s going to be like in Anais Nin’s diaries, it ends when you die. How could you end the book any other way than that because it’s basically the story [itself] that’s continuing the story. I’d tried to end it a couple of times before but I kept writing and it seemed important writing, not like add-ons. It seemed like I was taking the story further.

So in 2018, I’m 64, I [laughs] walked and bussed and took a train and took a cab, but I traveled the southwest coastal path of England, which is something, I forget, about [55] days. And it was [630] miles or something like that. And it was terrible. It was one of my worst experiences of my life and I’ll never do that again. It was just horrible and I won’t go into why but it was horrible and the last day was the worst. First of all, it started raining [the last ten days of the hike], and when I got in the night before the last day, it started to really pour. I heard it raining all night long. I couldn’t sleep. It was just thundering down rain and it didn’t lessen. And I woke up … or got up early in the morning and I was just going to push my way through this experience.

[Parts of] the coastal path are literally constructed out of a mountainside. So you have a mountain slope that goes like this [about a 90-degree angle]. Then somewhere in there, a corps of engineers came in and they hammered out a wall and the floor. So you’re walking along the mountain that rises next to you and beside you is the mountain continuing down to the ocean. The path is maybe three feet [wide], something like that. You can pass people. You have a pack on your back, too, but you can pass people—I always stop and turn sideways facing the mountain to let them pass. But you don’t pass people, though, because everyone’s walking in one direction, more or less.

Anyway, I’m walking and it’s raining so hard that my visor is down. I’m looking at my feet and all I can see is my feet and it’s all wet and there’s leaves and it’s slippery and there’s a fall to the ocean and it’s still pouring. And I came around [a corner] and looked up and the whole path was gone. There had been a rockslide and it was now in the ocean and there’s no way to keep going. I’m about an hour and a half out at this point, which means after three hours I’ll be back where I started the morning. As I go back, I run into people and suddenly realize, oh my God, I was the first one because there’s nobody in front of me and I could have been on that when it fell unless … and I go, oh, my God, what if people had been on it they could have fallen into the sea? Now I’m scared because it’s seven of us and what if we weigh too much and I start thinking, I wonder what I should do if we fall, picturing it over and over as the group got larger and larger.  

Then we got back to the beginning. We had to leave somebody there and go get someone to close off the trail. So four hours late I’m starting the day’s hike and it’s been pouring rain this whole time. I am miserable. I hate this. I’m no longer on the trail. I don’t know where I am or where I’m going other than I’m walking NE which will get me to Poole. But I’m on back roads and English back roads are barely wide enough for one car, much less two. And they have hedges on either side of the road. They have hedges that are like eight feet tall that are filled with water this morning, and you back into them every time you see a car.

I’m walking facing traffic on a road and then the road is winding, so you don’t want to be on a corner when a car comes around. You’ve got to repeatedly look behind you for a chance to cross, and then by crossing the road back and forth you’re adding miles and miles and miles. And because the rain is so intense, I’m looking at my feet splashing hour after hour. And I ask myself, What are you doing? Like, What are you doing? This is crazy. This is insane. You’re not enjoying any of this. This is a horrible experience. From then on it was only “You’re going to make it. You’re going to make it.” Then at the end, there’s a post with a sign on it that says this is the end of the [South West Coastal Path].

With Santiago, you’re walking toward the cathedral. Then, after 37 days in my case, you catch a glimpse of the spire above the trees about four hours out. And every time you lose it when it comes back it’s a little bit bigger. But you never see the cathedral until you’re almost in front of it because you’re walking down this hill and for hours it’s buildings on either side. So for four hours you’re like, oh, the spire! Then at the very end it’s like a chute and you’re [shot out into a] giant courtyard and there’s the cathedral there like suddenly you’re there.

There’s this tradition where when you reach the cathedral, you put your hand on it. I thought, well, that’s kind of an interesting idea. But suddenly I get it. For hours you’re walking downhill. You’ve really got some momentum going down this hill, plus you’re in sight of the end of the whole trip, so you’re rolling, and then you come out, you’re just shattered. Suddenly it’s like, oh, my God, the cathedral and you’re psychologically shattered and all that. And it’s all this open space and then you’re like, oh, I got to touch the cathedral and you’re still walking at that pace and you’re like, bam! And you hit that cathedral and something happens. I don’t know what it is, but it’s just wow and then you’re stopping physically and you’re stopping emotionally and stopping psychologically and you’re there and you finally made it to the end. Thirty-seven days.

This is a sign on a concrete pier in Poole. Then you have to get on a ferry and it’s cars honking and exhausts and people are yelling and you’re going across this bay and then you have to get in a bus and it’s crowded. Well, first you have to wait for the bus. Then you get on the bus and they let you off at the bus station which is where the heroin kids and the meth kids are hanging out playing soccer. I went on a walk because I got there before my bed and breakfast was open. Eventually I got lost. I won’t go into that part. But the part I want to get to is at the end of that adventure.

I wanted to write down a haiku and I saw this park bench and I sat down in front of Poole Harbour and I write my haiku, I’m writing it. All of a sudden this dog, it’s a Labrador and the woman’s, “Oh, Bosco, no!” “No, it’s cool. I’m cool.” And this guy comes up and he’s got a dog and they’re sniffing each other, like how do you do, and we’re talking and I tell them what I’ve done and that I’m staying for a couple days and they suggested things to do and then disappeared and, oh my God, my whole mood has changed! It stopped raining when I was on the bus. Sun was out. Everyone’s out on their bikes, the prams and throwing their Frisbees. And I’m looking at the bay with what Pound would describe as “sundazzle” and it was sundazzle all over the water. And then these white sails sailing ships are going in and out and then there’s that ferry that I hated and, well, it’s really beautiful. And behind it was a hillock and it was October so all the leaves were on fire.

Suddenly this feeling came over me and it was that all of that stuff that I went through that day [that I was still hanging onto]—the mountain and the loss of the trail and the fear and sharing that crazy experience with those strangers and all those back roads. It’s over. You made it. All those challenges, stuff that happened, it didn’t matter. You made it. It’s over. This day is over. You made it.

So I was feeling good about that when next it was like, whoa, “This whole hike is over.” I haven’t told you but I went through all this crazy stuff that went on for almost two months, August through October. [But] you made it. You’re here. You’re done. You’re done. You’ll never have to do this again. [laughs]

And I thought of something that a friend of mine said on day 53. She had been a friend of mine who knows me really well, and I [wrote to her], “I am the worst traveler. I am terrible at it. I make bad decisions. I make rash decisions. I make intemperate decisions. I make the wrong decisions. I’m stubborn. I’m obstinate. My brain doesn’t cooperate. What am I doing this for? Like, it’s just such a struggle. I feel like such a failure. I’m so embarrassed. I’m embarrassed all day. I’m embarrassed to ask for help, I’m embarrassed not to ask for help. Why am I doing this?” She wrote back and said, “Randy, you are on the 53rd day of your 55-day solo hike. You are where you’re supposed to be when you’re supposed to be there. I think you’re doing OK.”

That feeling now extended to the end of this hike. I am where I’m supposed to be, when I’m supposed to be there. Even after a day like today, I’m early. Suddenly the feeling of being this complete failure at this became, oh, no, I succeeded.

I sat there and somehow knew, this is the end of it. I can go home and my adventuring is done. I don’t need to do any more adventuring. I’ve got this big manuscript at home that I’ll be editing the rest of my life. Till I die. I can go home now.

I’d been [living my life that way] already. I retired at sixty one. So at this point for three years I’ve been working on this manuscript and loving it. It’s the life I always imagined, the writer’s life. I get up in the morning. I don’t have to do anything. I do what I want to do. I answer emails, read newspapers, have breakfast and I open up a document and I’m back in whatever part of my life I’m reliving. And I’m really understanding my life or understanding it for the first time. When I don’t want to do that, I stop and do something else. This is the life that I imagined that a writer had back when I was twelve. I have that now. I can see my whole life played out to the end. Just get up every day and more of this.

Then for a third thing, woosh. You made it. Your life. You won. You are 64 years old sitting on a park bench after [55] days of this big ordeal. You’re healthy. You don’t need to worry about money anymore. You’ve got something to do that you love for the rest of your life. It worked out. You were worried and anxious the whole time, you were afraid. Is it not going to work out? Well, guess what? It worked out. I know, like Solon said to Croesus, Consider no man lucky who’s not yet met his end. I know that something terrible could happen tomorrow, but, you know, I’m 67, I’ve lived the life I wanted to live [for 67 years] and I’m not in a gutter like my parents told me [I’d be]. “You can’t live your life the way you want to. You’ve got to sacrifice what you want for what’s possible.” But I did it and I’m not on the sidewalk asking people for money like they predicted. I wasn’t, you know, crazy or insane or unreasonable. It was a feeling like, oh, I made it. [A feeling that] my whole life has been perfect, really. If you look back, if you want to, it arranged itself on its own to put me at a place where I could realize that at 64, oh, it’s time to go home and become a hermit and to build your hermitage and spend the rest of your life reading and publishing this document of your life that’s already written.

So I got the feeling my life was perfect and that’s another thing that I can call back at any time if I’m having some difficulty, especially recently, if somebody says no to me, like I want to do something and the answer’s no, instead of that being a disappointment and making me angry I say, oh, my God, that’s great. It’s perfect because now I can take that energy from where there was a struggle, to something else I wanted to do. It wasn’t working and I put it in something that was working. That was a feeling that I can call back as well.

That was transformative, that my life really is perfect. It wasn’t me that arranged it like it wasn’t me that wrote that poem that Allen responded to. That’s what I kept after: who is that person? The awareness? Or the body that saw and heard all that stuff? That was a body that took the walk to Santiago. That’s who I am, I’m that body. That body made the decisions that got me to the end of Santiago, got me to the end of Poole Harbor, and got me to that park bench at 64, and knew that it’s time to go home to work on the book. That the book has ended. And it has! I’ve written very little since that day, don’t carry a pocket notebook anymore. It’s a relief, frankly.

Those would be, I’d say, the three most important moments that I had in traveling that have parlayed themselves into literature.

ER: That’s really cool. You sound really impacted, and I’m so happy that you shared that with me today.