Trout Fishing in America, and other forms of meditation

Apropos of my constant bragging about my nascent zazen practice, the great 20th century poet Kenneth Rexroth had this to say:

Life in the city in the winter seems too full of distractions and busy work. Who said poetry was emotion recollected in tranquility? I don’t know about others, but I find most tranquility Camped by a mountain lake at timber line. There whatever past emotion and experience I choose to recollect and write down, take on most depth and meaning.

Dry fly fishing has the same effect on me. It seems to me it is a kind of higher mathematics, practically embodied, of the study of the free flow of water. It combines all the virtues and none of the strains and responsibilities of both art and mysticism. Besides, you catch fish. You don’t have to read books on Zen and Taoism and do funny gymnastics with your breathing and put your legs in painful contortions.

Fly fishing is Taoism in simple and fascinating action. If you let it, it produces, and by much more natural methods, the same results, the crystal clear calm of heart that so many people seek by so much more difficult ways. Maybe if Lao Tse and Bodhidharma had just known about it, they would have been fishermen and not mystics. Of course, you can’t use it, like Zen, to impress gullible chicks in espresso bars. Or can you? I’ve never tried. Maybe I should.

That's from one of the San Francisco Examiner columns by Rexroth collected at The Bureau of Public Secrets. Writing in 1960 as public interest in Beat literature and lifestyle -- and its concommitant obsessions mountain hiking and zen meditation -- was peaking, Rexroth was sending a shot across the bow of Gary Snyder and others.

But Rexroth's riff also anticipates one of the transitional works between the Beat and the Hippie eras: Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America. That novel is commonly associated with San Francisco of the hippie era of the mid- and late 60s, but Brautigan wrote it no later than 1961, placing him definitely within the Beat era. And he appears in the classic photograph of all the beat generation writers gathered outside City Lights Books.

Brautigan was one of my first, and strongest, influences. His work is easy to imitate, and I copied his voice in my first efforts at fiction. Furthermore, "Trout Fishing" contains a chapter that counts as the first erotica I ever read. I'm due to write an essay about that for my friend Marilyn's "Erotic Muse" column. Still doing research. Brautigan was a fascinating figure, extremely hard to pin down, it seems. But he epitomized the California experience for me and so many other people who grew up in the 1960s.