Running concurrent to the outward journey in The Snow Leopard is an equally torturous inward journey, and the two are balanced to the extent that neither overwhelms the other. Matthiessen for the first time becomes utterly candid about his life, though without the strenuous psychological hygienics of the confessional. He describes early experiments with hallucinogens (mostly lysergic acid) which were attempts at a shortcut to the visionary; his apprenticeship in Zen under Eido Roshi and Maezumi Roshi; and most poignantly, the death from cancer of his wife Deborah some six months before the trip.
There is something in the ineffable nature of Zen that nonetheless makes men try to write about it. It is most commonly misunderstood as another glyph for survival available to modern man, a device of comprehension. Beyond the level of flirtation it is not particularly popular because it is so totally nonsupportive. There is nowhere to turn in the unfolding of one's true nature except to the Roshi who only redirects the pain of discovery. To the student, Zen is the ocean and he is the fish; properly understood, it is consciousness itself, unmediated by opinions, hope, or gods, with few and naked precepts. Usually “dogma” is of value only to the convert or adept, i.e., it is a philosophical shorthand for the experiential. In The Snow Leopard Matthiessen makes the best run I've ever read at explicating Buddhist and Tantric terminology and hagiography. It is his curious novelistic talent to clarify and dismiss the aura of the secretive and arcane. The burden of the Zen man is ultimate claritas, and the occultist urge for the misnomer of mystery is only another excuse for the unlived life. In Zen you give a cup of tea to your demons and disarm them, whether they own interior schizoid colors or the very real apparel of a Himalayan gorge. The life to be lived is in the unintervened moment, where rock, bird, man and beast may be perceived as they are, in league with the universe, captives of time.
Beyond my own clumsily and tentatively stated framework Matthiessen has written a magnificent book: open, vulnerable with his own frailties; thick and lush, a kind of lunar paradigm and map of the sacred for any man's journey, where the snow leopard itself sits grail-like at the edge of consciousness, an infinitely stubborn koan in beast's clothing. Toward the end of the book when Matthiessen's Sherpa guide and mentor, perhaps ally, named Tutken disappears, we return again to the vertigo of the modern. But there is a sense, however slight and fleeting, that the book has transcended the usual limits of language and has given us a glimpse of a world that is not less “there” for the fact that we will never see it.
1978
Fording and Dread
It's always awkward to identify a pattern in life when the language does not seem to reflect the thousand-faceted character of the experience itself. That's why we have novelists, in fact. There's something almost eery, tremendously uncomfortable about the will to change, because we're never quite sure what precipitated it, let alone what might become of us in the process. As an instance I have spent four months, most of it in a cabin alone, trying to understand the nature of the character I have invented. Other than a pile of notes, I have written nothing. It is clear that certain therapeutic notions are inimical to art, but then one reaches a point, a transitional mode between past and future, where art becomes at least temporarily unimportant. Also, it has become apparent that perhaps the character I'm inventing is the one I wish to become. I'm not sure.
I admit I saw the whole process coming over a year ago. I wanted to live but as equally wanted the life I was living to stop. It was as if the force that drove me through forty-four years, five novels, six books of poems, had itself run out of fuel, lost energy and interest. The “inactivity” of summer reflected this refusal to use the same system, the same mnemonic devices to be productive. I wanted something new and stalked new ways, which though they haven't worked, have at least showed some new possibilities. Needless to say none of this was structured as geometrically as I am outlining here.
But where am I now, September 5, 1982? Even the tiredest soul can wail for freedom. Today is cold and rainy and I don't particularly long for a clear sunlit silence because that will come in a few days. The other thing is another matter. I want freedom from dread, alcohol, gluttony, habits of all sorts: “set” ways of thinking, set ways of travel, money anxiety, sexual anxiety, over-sleeping, poor physical condition, questionable marriage, not freedom from marriage but the bad aspects of marriage. That's for starters. Of course I wouldn't know this if I hadn't already made certain inroads, but the inroads must explode because I want it faster. It must happen before my heart breaks, to be frank. I don't know right now how to make it happen faster. This might sound desperate because it is. Of course I know that desperation is the wrong spirit unless tightly controlled.
I recently came upon a book by a sixteenth-century Japanese swordsman, Musashi, where he speaks of fording, of the opportune time to make a critical move—the metaphor of crossing water at the right time and place. I used to enjoy reading about how the pioneers and settlers managed to cross these enormous rivers. Musashi on the surface is involved with warrior strategy, adding “You must research this well.”
How does one regenerate? Especially when one's soul or spirit, mind if you wish, is full of snares, knots, goblins, the backward march of the dead, the bridges that end halfway and still hang in the air, those who do not love you, those who irreparably harmed you, intentionally or not, and even those you hurt badly and who live on encapsulated in your regret. The past never seems to lose its energy, reduced as it is to the essence of all we have met.
But this isn't particularly helpful. Where is the best place in the river to get across? Who have been your guides, dead and living, and are they true or false? This stumped me to the extent that I stopped making these notes for two days and read the galleys of the new James Hillman book. According to Hillman our main guide is the story we have already collected and written for ourselves. We may stop and look the story over in a period of unrest but we stick to it out of convenience. When depressed we might hammer at our psyches as if they were tract houses, but we tend to fall back into the same tale. The cave might be genuinely ugly but it is a familiar ugliness from which to peek out at the world, wrapping ourselves in the detritus of dreams, memories, actualities.
Last night something odd happened. I walked out of the cabin after ten to go have my customary drinks. I had turned off the generator and was looking skyward to check for northern lights when I heard a howl from an area down and across the river in a delta; a real scalp-tingler, long, full and wavering, the pulse accelerating. My dog flattened to the ground in immediate submission. We headed for the bright lights of town. Just now it occurred to me I should have howled back. It is warm after a hard breeze and a wind from the south has strewn rose petals and yellow birch leaves on the grass with an early autumn lushness of color. Flies are active and I hear bats and mice scratching above the ceiling. My present alarm is because I have entered the autumn of my life. What is the fright, as if I had heard Eros in an androgynous contralto reminding me of all that I have forgotten or never knew? Why have I been up here alone for so long? It is certainly unexampled in my life which is typified by a remote sluggishness, alternating with periods of frenzied work every two years. Maybe I am looking for the other beneath the fiction I have created that is my life. Hillman asks, “What have we done with the twin that was given us when we were given our soul?” What is the topography of dread? Why are alcohol and drugs in any quantity brakes for the soul? What is beyond dread? These months have been a refusal to reenter the same cycle. One is reminded of those wells in the Southwest that have lowered the aquifer to such an extent that new immense pumps have been installed. There is a sense of a different reality, a chance to overhaul perceptions. It is a gamble. Walking backwards down the steps to the river at night. To tap arrogant Neuman, what is the origin and history of your own consciousness? Unloose the door from its jambs, as if one lay in a mold and let the sediment of one's life calcify around body, brain and soul, frozen, unmoving.
The part
iculars and specifics are disarming. Much of life is not disappointing, much of life is really nothing at all, just sort of big open spaces in one's history, a simulacrum of the sparsely inhabited places on maps. There is a deep silliness in psychologisms which treat one as an improperly maintained garden. But there's no point in making light of fads and systems when I've had a go at many and come up short. I've managed a recent humor about success which I treated badly with the attitude of my father which involved deep pessimism, the maudlin, a sense of “this too is martyrdom.” This promoted an urge to squander a lot in a daffy retreat back toward the beleaguered, anonymous writer. It's probably a little too late to be anonymous. Being recognizable is certainly the most disabling accoutrement of success but I'm now sure it doesn't have to be. This Japanese cabin in the U.P. where the world is neither known or understood helps a great deal. The concern here is for survival à la Van Gogh's potato eaters.
I was just thinking of the therapeutic process and the fly-fishing method called dredging where you repeatedly cast a deep sinking line in a river, lake, or channel where there are none of the obvious hints of prey you find in other sorts of fishing. A novelist and poet creates realities that he doesn't fully comprehend. It was years before I recognized my Letters to Yesenin was a victorious suicide note. There is a banality in the antithetical thinking that says one doesn't deserve to be quite happy quite often. Leopards don't sing arias except their own and toads are poor dancers. The limitless ambition of the young writer, whose vast, starry, nineteen-year-old nights must come down to the middle-aged man in the northern night listening for more howls, trying to learn what he is with neither comparison nor self-laceration, treasuring that autumnal sensuality of one who has given his life's blood to train his soul, brain and senses to the utmost.
It is a testament to captiousness to see how blundering and simpleminded the fiction I created as my own story is, compared to the fiction I give to others. I remember what Rilke said: “Every angel is terrible/still though, alas, I invoke thee/almost deadly birds of the soul.” The angel in this case is the anima, the mirror of the figure we wish to stay in the state of becoming. Dread and all her improbabilities are an inevitability we must make our lover. It is singularly stupid not to make yourself ready for anything that could happen. In my own memory, time has never stopped.
1982
Passacaglia on Getting Lost
The most immediate sensation when totally and unfathomably lost is that you might die. I live in a world where I still very much regret the deaths of Romeo and Juliet; even the fate of Petrouchka moistens my single eye—the blind left eye weeps only underwater or when I'm asleep and the dreams are harrowing. The first time I got lost in the winter I think I was about fourteen. I worked my way inside an enormous hollow white-pine stump, the remnant of an 1897 forest fire in an area of northern Michigan. It was quite comfortable in there and it saddened me to start the stump on fire in order to be found.
It is particularly stupid to get lost in the winter because, barring a blizzard, you can retrace your steps. But I hate this in life the same as I do in poems and novels. It is a little painful to keep saying hello. The baked bean and onion sandwich was partially frozen in my coat pocket. The sun was covered with a dense cloud mass. The fire burned orange and balsamic, pitchy, melting the snow in a circle around the stump. I was a little goofy from hypothermia and thought of Cyd Charisse, and what all three of the McGuire sisters would look like bare naked. To retrace your steps; it is not in my nature to want to repeat a single day of my life. Maybe a portion of a day that involved lovemaking or a meal—a sauté of truffles and foie gras at Faugeron's in Paris ruined by jet lag, or a girl that disappeared into heaven in a Chevrolet after a single, brief encounter. I would repeat an hour with the cotton, lilac skirt; the white sleeveless blouse, the grass stain on her elbow. I could breathe through the back of her knee.
I am not going to talk about the well-equipped Republican clones you see marching like Hitler Youth up and down the spine of the Rockies or in any of the national parks, national forests, wilderness areas in America. On the tops of mountains I've seen their cocaine wrappers and fluorescent shoestrings. At five thousand feet in the Smokies there were tiny red piss-ants crowding around a discarded Dalkon shield.
Hikers, like Midwestern drivers, are bent on telling you how “far” they've hiked. “I did twenty-three miles carrying fifty-one pounds.” I usually advise more lateral or circular movement. A trail, other than an animal trail, is an insult to the perceptions. It is the hike as an extension of the encounter group. Over in the Rainy River area a big Cree once portaged eighteen miles carrying 500 pounds in a single day. His sister carried 320.
There is clearly not enough wilderness left for the rising number of people who say they desire it. It's not wilderness anyway if it only exists by our permission and stewardship. The famous Thoreau quote says “wildness,” not “wilderness.” We have become Europe and each, with a sense of privacy and tact, must secure his or her own wildness.
It strikes me that Peter Matthiessen has the best public understanding of the natural world; I say “public” because there might be someone out there who can still walk on water. It is the generalists who have the grace that translates; the specialist, like those tiny novels that emerge from the academy, want to be correct above all else. The specialist is part of a doubtless useful collective enterprise. We are fortunate to have generalists who make leaps for those of us who are too clumsy or lazy, or who have adjusted to the fact that we can't do everything: Hoagland, Abbey, Nabhan, Lopez, Schulteis, Peacock and his grizzlies, among others, but these come to mind.
Getting lost is to sense the “animus” of nature. James Hillman said that animals we see in dreams are often “soul doctors.” When you first sense you are lost there is a goofy, tingling sensation. The mouth tends to dry up, the flesh becomes spongy. This can occur when you disbelieve your compass. Made in Germany, indeed! Post-Nazi terrorists dooming the poet to a night in the woods. But then the compass was only wrong on one occasion—a cheapish Taiwanese compass.
When we are lost we lose our peripheries. Our thoughts zoom outward and infect the landscape. Years later you can revisit an area and find these thoughts still diseasing the same landscape. It requires a particular kind of behavior to heal the location.
Gullies, hummocks in swamps, swales in the middle of large fields, the small alluvial fan created by feeder creeks, undercut riverbanks, miniature springs, dense thickets on the tops of hills: like Bachelard's attics, seashells, drawers, cellars, these places are a balm to me. Magic (as opposed to the hocus-pocus of miracles) is equated to the quality of attentiveness. Perhaps magic is the quality of attentiveness, the ultimate attentiveness. D. H. Lawrence said that the only aristocracy is that of consciousness. Certain locations seem to demand consciousness. Once I sat still so long I was lucky enough to have a warbler sit on my elbow. Certain of the dead also made brief visits.
Perhaps getting lost temporarily destroys the acquisitive sense. We tend to look at earth as an elaborate system out of which we may draw useful information. We “profit” from nature—that is the taught system. The natural world exists so that we may draw conclusions about it. This is the kind of soul-destroying bullshit that drove young people to lysergic acid in the sixties.
One night last summer I was lucky enough to see “time” herself—the moon shooting across the sky, the constellations adjusting wobbily, the sun rising and setting in seconds. I jumped in the river at daylight to come to my senses. Checked a calendar to make sure. No one really wants to be Hölderlin out in the garden with a foot of snow gathered on top of his head.
It is interesting to see the Nature Establishment and the Nature Anti-Establishment suffocating in the same avalanche of tedium and bitterness. There is insufficient street experience to see how bad the bad guys are. They forget it was greed that discovered the country, greed that propelled the westward movement, greed that shipped the blacks, greed that murdered
the Indians, greed that daily shits on the heads of those who love nature. Why are we shit upon, they wonder.
I prefer places valued by no one else. The Upper Peninsula has many of these places that lack the drama and differentiation favored by the garden-variety nature buff. I have a personal stump back in a forest clearing. Someone, probably a deer hunter, has left a beer bottle beside the stump. I leave the beer bottle there to conceal the value of the stump.
It took me twenty years to see a timber wolf in the wild. I could have foreshortened this time period by going to Isle Royale or Canada but I wanted to see the wolf as part of a day rather than as a novelty. We startled each other. From this single incident I dreamt I found the wolf with her back broken on a logging road. I knelt down and she went inside me, becoming part of my body and skeleton.
The shock of being lost as a metaphor is the discovery that you've never been “found” in any meaningful sense. When you're lost you know who you are. You're the only one out there. One day I was dressed in camouflage and stalking a small group of sandhill cranes which were feeding on frogs in the pine barrens not far from my cabin. I got within a few yards of them after an hour of crawling. I said “good morning,” a phrase they were unfamiliar with; in fact, they were enraged and threatening. I made a little coyote yodel and they flapped skyward, the wind of their immense wings whooshing around my head. I ordered this camouflage outfit from Texas, not a bad place if you ignore the inhabitants and their peculiar urge to mythologize themselves against the evidence. One of the great empty and lovely drives left in the U.S. is from El Paso to San Antonio. Someday I will move to Nebraska for the same reason.
Of course getting lost is not ordinarily a threatening occasion. Two snowmobilers died a few years ago not all that far from my cabin but it was poignantly unnecessary. They could have piled deadfall wood around their machines and dropped matches into the remnants of the gas in the tanks, creating an enormous pyre for the search planes. Euphemisms for getting lost range from “I got a little turned around for a few hours” to “I wasn't lost, I just couldn't find my car until morning.” The enemies are the occasional snowflakes in July, the cold and rain, the blackflies and mosquitoes, drinking swamp or creek water when a spring can always be found. Of course the greatest enemy is panic. The greatest panic I've ever felt was at an Umbanda rite in Brazil when I sensed that the others present weren't actually people. I became ill when a man leapfrogged through a garden on his back, and an old woman rubbed her left eyeball against my own and told me pointedly about my life in northern Michigan.