The Gateless Gate
by Edward Picot
Born in Brooklyn, Joel Weishaus
was a Junior Executive on Madison Avenue while still a teenager.
He resigned soon after his 21st birthday and flew to California,
where he began the peripatetic lifestyle of a writer. In 1971,
Weishaus edited the Bolinas anthology, On the Mesa, for City
Lights Books. The same year, Cranium Press published his book
Oxherding: Reworking of the Zen Text. In the early 1980s, he
moved to Albuquerque, becoming an adjunct curator at the University
of New Mexico’s Art Museum and a photography critic for
Artspace Magazine. In 2004, his book The Healing Spirit of
Haiku, co-authored with David Rosen, was published by North
Atlantic Books.
Joel Weishaus: The title of
this project refers to the Mumonkan [No-Gate-Barrier], an ancient
collection of Zen koans—questions that can only be answered
by expressing one’s self directly, without the barrier
of the ego’s orientation. I’ve been studying various
translations of this text for more than half my life, and decided
to use it now, at least thematically, because, in view of the
hypocrisy and superficiality many political, religious, and business
leaders exhibit in their neurotic quest for power, it may be
that the “crazy wisdom” the Mumonkan teaches is about
as revolutionary a path that a contemporary artist can explore. EP: In your introduction, you use the word "palimpsest" to describe the way you construct your photographic images. Can I ask you to describe your working method—where you get your source images from, what software you use, and so forth? JW: Although I’ve written
photography critique, I didn’t take my own pictures until
a few years ago, when I was able to afford a digital camera.
My first pictures were “straight shots,” such as
those in “Interdependency” and a few other projects.
By the time I began “The Gateless Gate,” in February
2009, my interest, stemming from years of studies of the Upper
Paleolithic painted caves in France and Spain, had turned to
palimpsests. Most of the source images are from around the city
of Portland, Oregon, to which I added transparencies, usually
from pictures found on the Internet. Sometimes the superimposed
images quickly made a picture I felt on a visceral level. Other
times, I had to work for days before a picture that “dreams” appeared. EP: It's interesting that you say you're trying to achieve a picture that “dreams.” Anyone who has looked at your work at all will have realized that dreams and the unconscious are enormously important to you. Can you say why this is, and how your interest in dreams has influenced both your writing and your pictures? JW: We spend much of our lives
dreaming, so how can one not be interested in dreams! Thus, my
autobiography is titled “Reality Dreams.” There are
different types of dreams, and different schools of psychology
to elaborate them. Most psychotherapists are mainly interested
in dreams that signify one’s daily life; they are paid
well to help people adjust to the mundaneity of their existence.
Jungians are more interested in “big dreams”—these
have archetypal significance that connects us to mythologies
our culture doesn’t propagate. This interests me, as it
did the Surrealists, and some of the Abstract Expressionists. EP: Apart from your philosophical interest in dreams, it strikes me that there's a dreamlike quality in your style, both in your pictures and your writing—lots of things happening at once, one thing merging into another, associative transitions, and so on. And your writing, rather than taking us on a narrative journey leading toward a climax, feels more like waves lapping on a beach, with a gradual cumulative effect. I wonder if you'd like to comment on this? JW: One of my favorite teaching
stories is about a cart Picasso painted with all kinds of seemingly
unrelated things in it. Someone asked him why he painted all
those diverse objects into one cart. He replied, “So they
can learn how to live together!” That story, which I’m
probably misquoting, must have stayed in the back of my mind
as my work developed over the years. So that, for example, if
I want to do a project based on an archaeological subject, first
I’ll read all the scholarly texts. Then I’ll research
fields that indirectly deepen, enrich, and expand the subject:
poetry, mythology, geology, philosophy, literary criticism, etc.
I’ll take lots of notes, and begin writing between these
notes—that is, between the thoughts of others. EP: That brings us nicely to the subject of “invagination,” which is one of the most characteristic techniques in your written work. For those who aren't familiar with the term, it basically means that from time to time you “interrupt” your own writing with a snippet from another writer. Can you describe when and why you first started to use this technique, and what purpose you think it serves in your work? JW: My trope of invagination
surfaced during the mid-1980s, from reading Derrida, Deleuze,
Ulmer, Jabès, and others. The original idea was to interrupt
a sentence by placing quote within quote, each one smaller and
printed lighter, until they completely disappeared . . . then
slowly emerged again, until the original sentence was able to
continue. However, as you can imagine, that proved awkward. Yet
the trope continued to be viable as single interruptions, or
intrusions, within a paragraph. EP: It's also a technique for allowing other voices besides your own into the text. In one way it follows the modernist tendency to use fragmentation as a stylistic device, but in another way I feel inclined to relate it to your Buddhist beliefs, and your desire to get beyond your own ego. There are plenty of direct references to Buddhism in your writing, but I think it's also present at a deeper level, influencing the structure of your work. When did you first get interested in Eastern philosophy, and how do you think it has influenced your development as an artist? JW: One evening in the early
1960s, after having read Alan Watts’s book on Zen and some
of D.T. Suzuki’s books, I went with a friend, who is now
a prominent psychologist, to a basement apartment in downtown
New York, where we attended a talk by a Japanese Zen monk. What
we found were folding chairs and an altar with flowers on it.
About twenty of us were served tea—hot water with a leaf
floating in it—and an almond cookie. We listened to a brief,
incomprehensible, talk by the shaven-headed monk, then left,
laughing. EP: You mention Gary Snyder, and you also regularly mention Basho in your writings. Who would you count as your literary influences, and in what ways do you think they've helped to shape your work? JW: Homer’s Odyssey was
the first book I remember in school that drove me to the public
library to read the whole thing. Serious literature that was
moving! This is where my journey in search of creativity began.
Then there was Henry Miller, who brilliantly combined Eros and
Logos with Pathos. There was also the imaginative drive, if not
heroism, of Kenneth Patchen’s love and anti-war poems,
and the cool linguistic experiments of e.e. cummings. When I
moved to the West Coast, Gary Snyder’s work had a deep
influence, at least until around 1968, when he returned to settle
in California and began writing to attract a larger audience
for his public readings. EP: It's interesting that you
declare a preference for written poetry, rather than poetry designed
to be read aloud, and that your current influences are “iconic
scholars” and people whose vision goes beyond their own
field. Those remarks tally with some of the most characteristic
aspects of your own work—it's often quite scholarly in
tone, and it's always very “written”—yet at
the same time it's very observational, especially of the natural
world, and it moves very freely from one genre to another, in
a quite unscholarly, perhaps even subversive way. JW: During the mid-1980s, I
was an Adjunct Curator at the University of New Mexico Art Museum.
My expertise was Video Art, and this opened me to media work
that was going on at the time. A stepchild of film and television,
Video Art was the harbinger of something new that was developing
on the horizon. Meanwhile, I was writing feature pieces on photography
for Artspace, a quarterly magazine of Southwest Contemporary
Art based in Albuquerque. Using a typewriter, I’d cut,
paste, then photocopy sections of the manuscript, repeating this
process many times. For the paragraphs were demanding to exchange
places, realigning the sequence of ideas on the page. EP: I get a sense from that reply that your interest in digital literature has taken the form not so much of a deliberate transition from one genre to another as a natural expansion, a growth process which has allowed you to penetrate new areas without losing touch with the old ones—and I know that you've continued to publish in print as well as online. I suppose this begs a question about audiences, however. Do you think the same people read your online work and your work in print, or do you think people still tend to fall on either one side or the other of the divide? JW: Well, let’s take for
example Rain Taxi, as it is published in both paper and online
editions. Fascinatingly, the content of each edition is unique.
So when I write reviews for it, I consider in which medium I’d
prefer it to appear, even though it’s the publisher’s
decision. The Literary World, which includes universities and
foundations, still gives more authenticity to paper publishing
than to digital. However, online projects are cheaper to produce,
and easier to distribute, especially worldwide. In addition,
they are archived by search engines. But I don’t know if
a study has been done as to how many readers Rain Taxi’s
discrete editions ultimately reach. EP: This takes us back to a remark you made right at the beginning of the interview, where you said that you wanted “The Gateless Gate” to be “a traditional book, but one made to be viewed on a monitor . . . a book designed in HTML code.” One of the interesting things about “The Gateless Gate” is that it's emphatically booklike, and the fact that it's booklike works surprisingly well on-screen, but at the same time we might ask what's this doing on a monitor? Wouldn't it be better on a printed page? Or, if you look at it the other way round, it seems to be posing a challenge to other writers of digital literature—do you really need all that gimmickry? Shouldn't you just be concentrating on the writing? So, what do you think there is about “The Gateless Gate” which makes it belong more naturally on a screen than it would on a printed page, and how has the (technological) simplicity of this project affected your own feelings about digital literature? JW: To simulate the pages of
a book on a monitor, amidst all the hubbub about how the Internet
threatens to replace books, is a visual pun. Indeed, “The
Gateless Gate” is a digital version of a handmade book. EP: Can I finish by asking you about your plans for future work? Have you already started a new project, or are you still thinking things over, or simply intending to take a rest for a while? JW: The great Hokusai reportedly
said on his deathbed, "If only I had another ten years,
I could become a real artist." He was 89. So I’m planning
another large Digital Literary Art project, which is now in the
preliminary, notebook stage.
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