Matthew McLaughlin
Watching the Water Flow: Buddhist Reflections & Blue Ecocritical Insights from Welch’s Wobbly Rock
Polish Journal for American Studies, vol. 19 (2025), pp. 29-39.

Abstract: Lew Welch’s first published book, Wobbly Rock is a six-part poetic contemplation upon Muir Beach, a site of spiritual meditation for the vanished Beat poet. In addition to the three “principal characters” outlined by Welch in his collected poems, the Man, the Mountain and the City, there indeed appears to be a fourth preoccupation within Welch’s poetry: the Sea. This essay adopts a bifocal approach: it combines the two fields of blue ecocriticism and Buddhist studies, with a particular focus on Dōgen’s seminal work, The Mountains and Waters Sutra. Within the field of blue ecocriticism, a relatively new sub-field within ecocriticism, Dobrin writes of “the need to examine oceanic metaphors as a manner of examining the positioning of ocean in language and literature” (8). The research will explore certain tensions within the poem, such as how Welch reflects upon the sea’s ability to transform the non-human objects that it touches (“I have been in many shapes before I attained congenial form”) (Wobbly Rock 3), while at the same time representing something illusory to the Beat poet who had embraced Buddhism at this stage of his life (“If you / take away the sea / Tell me what it is”). More specifically, Welch’s poem is an extended meditation upon Dōgen’s Buddhist maxim, “when most human beings see water they only see that it flows unceasingly. This is a limited human view” (Dōgen 103). Welch is a poet trying to reach beyond such “limited human view[s]. This bifocal approach allows us to contextualize Wobbly Rock, in terms of what Dobrin calls our “submersive epistemologies” (12) for understanding a sense of the whole.

Keywords: blue ecocriticism, karesansui, manifestation & liberation, hypersea theory, impermanence.

DOI: 10.7311/PJAS.19/2025.03

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