By Bill Marx

As cultural critique, Curtis White’s Transcendent comes across as a modest if chilly yip of Zen resignation.

Transcendent: Art and Dharma in a Time of Collapse by Curtis White. Melville House, 224 pages, $17.99.

I turn 70 next year, and lately I have been hearing some of the males in my generation singing what I call the Boomer Blues. The tune goes something like this: not only is the world going to hell — war, materialism, climate change, identity politics — but we are finally starting to feel our age. Physical debility and extinction hover on the horizon. What’s left for geriatric upwardly mobile achievers to desire? They have a dream: that they have enough time and energy to go for one last big score, a final triumph before the lights go out and the young are left to clean up the stupendous mess they helped make. The lyrics are inspired by the fear that there is not enough left in the tank for the push.

Compared to these full-throttled laments, the 70-year-old Curtis White’s Transcendent comes across as a modest if chilly yip of Zen resignation. Not only is the tank empty — there never was a tank. The novelist and social critic calls for a mindful withdrawal from the crises around us, plunking for a religiously powered resignation from the world’s woes. White’s separate peace is inspired by what he sees as the wisdom of ’60s counterculture — found in the meditative distance of Buddhism rather than the era’s drugged-out, love-in hedonism or its political activism. The ’60s were at their best when they were about disenchantment, rejecting illusions of power and pleasure, freeing your soul by accepting the utter impermanence of existence. Illumination through contact with the transcendent ensures the adherents of Buddhism the option of rising above the suffering in themselves and the society around them. It is a state of gloomy contentment that appeals to those looking for escape on the spiritual sidelines from the chaos around them.

For White, the way to enlightenment is not only expounded via Buddhism’s sages, but through an appreciation of the right kind of art. “When the work of art transcends itself,” he writes, it “becomes an expression of the spirit’s freedom.” And that freedom is freedom from accepting reality as commonly perceived: “Through art we see and know things are they really are — not fixed to a specimen board with a pin, not reified, but fluid, changing, and dying beautifully moment by moment.” Art is the salve for what ails us, our agonizing belief in the permanence of the things and people in this world. The most potentially fascinating aspect of Transcendent is White’s interest in exploring an American variation on Zen that includes Walt Whitman, Jack Kerouac, psychedelics, and the Mamas and the Papas. “The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted,” wrote D.H. Lawrence. White suggests an alternative American soulfulness — fluid rather than granite.

The problem is that Transcendent is a collection of essays that flicker about, so it only lightly touches on our homegrown brand of Buddhism. Surprisingly, there’s no mention of the American Transcendentalists. Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller are touched on, but none of the other black-humorists of the period, such as John Hawkes or Robert Coover, make the cut. We get a smattering of the Romantics. What knits the pieces together, including an essay that goes over well-trod ground in the Wagner, Mahler, and Nietzsche nexus, is an argument for Buddhism against the corrupt, delusional, and materialistic forces arrayed against it. It is not a difficult contest to win, especially if you have no qualms praising a life lived comfortably beyond conventional notions of “good and evil” and then exhort the enlightened to forget their fear and cry out against injustice. White never specifies which injustices he thinks need to be battled against. All of them? Some Russian Buddhists may well be crying out against the unjust war waged by the Ukrainians. There are pages and pages on Wagner and on our culture’s pernicious appetite for the fastest and most superficial (… the global cognoscenti are convinced that technology is the future of all global and regional technologies …). What should an enlightened Buddhist be agitating for? And how? White is mostly silent.

Readers yearning for a more incisive look at Buddhism and political action should turn to David Loy’s excellent Ecodharma: Buddhist Teachings for the Ecological Crisis (Wisdom Publications), which covers some of the same ground and makes an admirable choice: the climate crisis means the radical degradation of nature and civilization, so it is placed on the top of the list. Ironically, White falls prey to what Loy sees as an American preference for a narcissistic understanding of Buddhism. We cling to the prerogatives of individualism, the self working at its own spiritual self-contentment so it can mentally sail above the permanent/impermanent chaos. Drawing on a wide range of Zen thinkers and others, Loy asserts that there is a strong tradition of Buddhism that links the enlightenment of the self with the duty to alleviate the suffering of others. You suffer less when you help others suffer less. Enlightenment is about taking moral/political action.

White’s all-star writers are the usual great males: Rilke, Yeats, Hopkins, and Stevens. At this point in time, his chorus line of poets is lazy, insular, and surprisingly patriarchal, reinforcing my suspicion that White’s ideal Buddhist community, “a spiritual subdivision outside of the City of Money,” may not be all that enlightened. Let me suggest a vision of art that might be of more use — pragmatically and spiritually — given the global climate emergency. In her 1915 novel Song of the Lark, Willa Cather observes that all of the customs and religious ceremonies of the Native Americans of the Southwest went back to water, one of the primal elements of life. Pottery was made to hold and protect that precious substance. In this scene, the book’s protagonist, singer Thea Kronborg, is contemplating the value of art for these Indigenous people during “her bath at the bottom of the canyon”:

One morning, as she was standing upright in the pool, splashing water between her shoulder-blades with a big sponge, something flashed through her mind that made her draw herself up and stand still until the water had quite dried upon her flushed skin. The stream and the broken pottery: what was any art but an effort to make a sheath, a mould in which to imprison for a moment the shining, elusive element which is life itself — life hurrying past us and running away, too strong to stop, too sweet to lose? The Indian women had held it in their jars. In the sculpture she had seen in the Art Institute, it had been caught in a flash of arrested motion. In singing, one made a vessel of one’s throat and nostrils and held it on one’s breath, caught the stream in a scale of natural intervals.

There is something very American in rooting the essences of life and art in physical existence, creativity as a means of containing and treasuring life as it hurries past us and runs away, “too strong to stop, too sweet to lose.” Cather’s vision of beauty and survival (water=life) links art and the everyday world. It is a welcome alternative to White’s hermetically sealed version of the transcendent.

Bill Marx is the editor-in-chief of the Arts Fuse. For four decades, he has written about arts and culture for print, broadcast, and online. He has regularly reviewed theater for National Public Radio Station WBUR and the Boston Globe. He created and edited WBUR Online Arts, a cultural webzine that in 2004 won an Online Journalism Award for Specialty Journalism. In 2007 he created the Arts Fuse, an online magazine dedicated to covering arts and culture in Boston and throughout New England.