Lew Welch’s Lost Legacy: A Haunting Lesson on Accepting Life

The Mysterious Disappearance of Lew Welch

In early summer 1971, the poet Lew Welch walked out the door with a .22 into the mountains of California, his body has never been found.

He is a poet who was associated with the Beat movement, but unlike his friends, poets Gary Synder and Phillip Whalen, he never really achieved the fame that came with being associated with that literary movement.

All three of them had met when they studied at the private liberal arts college, Reed, which sparked in each of them a lifelong interest in Asian culture, religion, and art.

Whalen went on to become a notable practitioner of Zen Buddhism and Gary Synder is still alive in the mountains of Northern California where he hosts meditation retreats.

Welch had a different path. A successful copy writer and alcoholic who supposedly came up with the “Raid Kills Bugs Dead,” advertising line, he left it all to devote himself to writing poetry.

When money got tight he would work as a cab driver, he has a few great poems about it.

From Beat Poetry to Haiku: The Depth of Welch’s Work

As with many in his generation on the West Coast he too was deeply influenced by Eastern thought, going on his own little meditation retreats as a fire watch in the California hills.

And it is in this influence as well as these meditation practices that formed the foundation for his most penetrating poems.

He is an almost forgotten figure now. I hardly ever see any mention of him or see any of his collections in used bookstores even though a new edition of his collected was released maybe a decade ago.

I haven’t read any of his work since my early twenties but one of his poems I repeatedly return to.

Year after year the poem still holds the radical embrace of my first experience with it. “I Saw Myself” like his best work is a highly condensed and crystalline moment, heavily influenced by the haiku tradition.

It is a single sentence utilizing heavily enjambed line breaks to create the stillness and mystery of the Japanese koan. Enjambment is when a line breaks in a poem in the middle of a sentence away from a punctuation mark.

Unpacking ‘I Saw Myself’: A Poem’s Radical Vow to Life

A lesson. A presence. A commitment.

In that vow the speaker is accepting everything in life.

Like the meditation practitioner who isn’t fighting or fleeing any thought which arises, no matter how immoral or holy, how joyful or sorrowful, how fantastic or mundane, each thought is noticed in awareness, acknowledged with dignity, given full measure in humility without more or less importance than any other, and then released into the never ending stream of thoughts.

The speaker’s non-attachment to the good or the bad experience of life isn’t the concern of the vow, he isn’t seeking only the happy times of life, he recognizes that the deal of this vow, of this commitment is to accept all that life has to give, so that, he can receive more of it.

By not closing himself off to the bad or negative experiences in life he is able to open himself up to more of it.

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The Pain of Closing Off: How Trauma Limits Our Potential

We’ve all had those relationships, or at least I have which is why I see a therapist, where our partner no matter how much we love them cannot experience it in the way we give it to them.

Its almost as if because they view themselves as not being good enough or unworthy of love they will eventually gather enough evidence from your actions to justify this belief.

I remember having long talks with a woman whom I deeply loved and cared for, discussions revealing all our deep flaws and insecurities, those things inside of us which we hope never see the light of day.

We both felt accepting and accepted. She had told me how she had never felt good enough to receive love and that she had never been treated kindly by a partner, that when she was treated with kindness she felt like she couldn’t receive it.

In my delusion, I heard what she said but felt like I was different, that my love would be able to change her. I was not accepting. Sadly it did not.

She could see what she was doing and how she was behaving but because she had closed herself off to that vulnerable state from being wounded in the past she was unable to receive.

When we close ourselves off in life to some experience because of our past hurts, we aren’t just diminishing that experience but the totality of life.

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Lessons from Phenomenology: Living Fully Despite Insecurity

I remember years ago learning about Edmund Husserl phenomenological method as a foundation for studying Continental philosophy.

My professor used the example of a ballerina dancing across the stage to a full audience, how the actual experience of it was for the ballerina, the feeling of the flow state where the dancer is one with the dance, the feeling of her body radiating with the beauty and perfection of a peak athlete and the exhilaration of holding the crowd in rapt attention.

He contrasted that with the same set up and scene but the ballerina is now a hunchback.

It is the same environment but the experience of moving across the stage is now completely different, gone are the moments of the sublime to be replaced by a devouring terror.

Now, do you think the hunchback would ever make it to the big stage for dancing or do you think her early experiences of her body would lead her to shy away from dancing or even any physical activity?

This is what happens with a deep seated insecurity, or some deep seated trauma from the past.

Not only does trying to protect ourselves from this insecurity lead us to avoid situations which showcase it, it also robs us from the full experience of that life trajectory, of living fully in that life offers us in our potential.

It is by not accepting that we lose.

We see it all the time, and I know I’ve felt it, and have been accused of it before, of not living up to one’s potential.

Now that could manifest as laziness but it also manifests as the student who gets caught cheating on the test and loses the scholarship or the man caught cheating which leads to a divorce or even the person afraid to pursue their dreams of entrepreneurship because they need to pay the bills.

Welch’s Final Note: A Tragic Reminder to Stay Open

The vow the speaker is making in this poem is to put away this fear, to renounce shying away from life, it is accepting, so that he can have it in more abundance.

It is not to lock up from insecurity or past trauma and open yourself up to vulnerability.

It is to accept with equanimity both the good and the bad as each is a full experience of life.

It is to be open to everything in order for more to come in.

Lew Welch left a suicide note the day he left which read “I had great visions but never could bring them together with reality. I used it all up. It’s all gone.”

If only he could have taken the lesson from his own poem and lived it.

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