I remember slipping out of the farmhouse and walking three miles across the fields to a small village by a lake, where there was a roller-skating rink, roofed but with sides open to the night air. Girls in dresses as brief as bathing suits would float around and around to improbably beautiful organ music. When the girls stopped for a rest, they would chatter and brush back their damp hair. Standing by the railing, I thought they all looked and smelled very good. I would move as close as courage allowed, exposing the uninjured side of my face and hoping to be noticed. I was always bumping into things, what with missing the whole left side of the world.
My father, as the county agricultural agent, helped run the annual fair. It was basically an exposition and competition of farm animals and produce, with the highlights being a horse pulling contest and a 4-H amateur talent show. Along with the last day of school, after which my failings would no longer be noticed for three months, the fair was the main event of the year. I never managed my behavior very well, then or now. One evening I ate cotton candy, hot dogs, french fries, drank a half dozen pops at a nickel a bottle and smoked a filched cigar. For some reason I became ill and walked off into the dark beyond the parked cars and stock trucks, up a long slope and through a field of oats to an elm tree, where I lay down and puked my heart out. When I recovered and looked back down the hill at the fair, it was a wildly colored and beautiful jewel: the gold, vertical bracelet of the ferris wheel, the smell of the cattle and horse barns, the merry-go-round music, the racked machinery of the tilt-a-whirl, and from a stage in front of the bleachers, a blond girl I favored sang “Candy Kisses,” followed by a man playing “The Old Rugged Cross” on a musical handsaw.
We are more equal at night. At nineteen, in New York City and San Francisco, I admired Ginsberg's “Howl” and wanted to be among the “best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked/dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix.” I wasn't quite sure how to go about it, but I tried, crisscrossing both cities, discovering garlic and Benzedrine, playing the music I loved in my head—Charlie Parker, Stravinsky, Thelonious Monk, George Shearing, Telemann, Sonny Rollins. Later there were night walks in Paris and London, Costa Rica and Ecuador, where I flushed a tree full of vultures on a cliff far above the Pacific swells; Moscow and Leningrad, where I walked the Neva embankment, thinking about my distant cousin, the poet Sergei Yesenin; the beach north of Mombasa, where tiny, finger-size poisonous snakes tried to get in my pant cuffs; Rio, where you can store minuscule bikinis in your cheeks like a Buddha squirrel. Foreign oceans have the aura of countries that cartographers have forgotten to put on maps.
At present I have tried to stop everything, pure and simple, stuffing time and memory into a custom-blown fishbowl from Belgium, but without success. At my cabin, miles from the nearest neighbor in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, I walk at night when the moon isn't shrouded by the fog or the cold rain that dominates the area—weather that seems to suit my temperament. I hear coyotes, whippoorwills and loons, bears wallowing off through swamps, and once I heard and saw a timber wolf. If you are bored, strained, lacerated, enervated by the way we live now, I suggest a night walk as far as you can get from a trace of civilization. This form of walking is a dance, and the ghost that follows you, your moon-cast shadow, is your true, androgynous parent, bearing within its distinct outline the child who has always directed your every move.
1987
From the Dalva Notebooks, 1985-87
The thirteen-year-old girl walks out into the damp moonlight. It's after midnight and I'm trying to imagine the freshness of her emotions.
Only when I'm fatigued do I worry about being vindicated.
I explained to Ms. _____ that life was a vastly mysterious process to which our culture inures us so we won't become useless citizens.
I'm inventing a country song, “Gettin’ Too Old to Run Away.” In the middle of these sloppy ironies I remembered the tremendous silence of the midday eclipse last summer. Nature was confused & the birds roosted early. I was full of uncontrollable anger because I had to leave for L.A. in a few days for a screenplay conference. No one liked my idea of the life of Edward Curtis except me.
In a dream a ranch foreman named Samuel Creekmouth appeared to me and told me how to behave. I became irritable but in the morning had a lush & jubilant vision of what the novel was to be.
On the walk there were two small beaver, a huge black snake, a great blue heron feathering into a southwest wind, sand dunes caving into a furious sea on a rare hot day in late April.
Hard to keep the usual interior balance when the dream life is kicking the shit out of you during, as usual, the waxing moon. In the same place I saw an actual wolf last year, I found a female wolf in a dream, her back broken.
I went to her, knelt down and gathered her up, and she disappeared into me. This experience was frightening.
That peculiar but very beautiful girl I saw in a dress shop in Key West ten years ago reappeared. She told me you can't give up Eros. Then, as with most of my dream women, she turned into a bird (this time a mourning dove), and flew away.
Awoke in the middle of the night and wrote down that it is important not to accept life as a brutal approximation. This was followed by a day of feeling quite hopelessly incapable of writing my “vision” of the novel which I haven't begun to compose.
In New York City staying with my agent Bob Dattila over by the river on East 72nd. We are trying to make business deals on the phone, and play gin rummy though we can't quite remember the rules of the game. Bob asked me what was even deeper than the bedrock in the huge excavation next door. I told him watery grottos full of blind, albino dolphins. Then in the night, in a dream, I climbed out of the excavation in the form of a monster: my eyes were lakes, my hair trees, my cheek was a meadow across which a river ran like a rippling scar. In the morning it was a comfort to walk the dog up to Ray's for a breakfast slice of pizza. Since I have three at home it is a considerable solace to have a dog friend in NYC, and when I come to town Bob's dog knows she can count on me for a slice of pizza. In short, we make each other happy.
What I don't want for myself is called a “long ending” with the vital signs not altogether there. This thought occurred to me after reading a biography by John Dos Passos.
Upset that this novel is going to make me too “irrational” to earn a living. In my background it is inconceivable for a man not to offer the full support for his family. A half-dozen years ago I made a great deal of money but didn't have the character appropriate to holding on to any of it. This must take training. Now the accretion of beloved objects & images in my life and dreams has become more totemistic & shamanistic: grizzly-bear turd & tooth, coyote skull, crow and heron wings, a pine cone from the forest where García Lorca was executed. Probably nothing to worry about as it began when I was half-blinded as a child, and for comfort wandered around the forest and lake and you don't find any trinkets there.
Always surprised on these days when the mind makes her shotgun, metaphoric leaps for reasons I've never been able to trace. Remembered that Wang Wei said a thousand years ago, “Who knows what causes the opening and closing of the door?”
Alliance: Nebraska reminds me of what America was supposed to look like before it became something else. Along Rte. 20 the almost unpardonable beauty of desolation. I could live along a creek in the Sandhills. I've established no strengths outside the field of the imagination, which is a fancy way of saying I'm hungover from an American Legion barn dance a waitress invited me to. She disappeared with a cowpoke who could wrestle a truck. Woke at first light laughing. Stepped on a steak bone.
Re: the banality of behavioral and emotional weather reports. My life is still killing me but I am offering less cooperation. I want to know what you do, rather than what you quit doing.
Up at my cabin more attacks of irrationality. Been here too long in solitude. Blurred peripheries so I “am” the bitch coyote that killed the rabbit i
n the yard. My longest & strongest literary relationship is with McGuane—twenty years of letters and we don't even see each other once a year.
Rode an enormous crow, flying down to the Manistee River to drink from a sandbar. Used a martingale. Easier to stay on than a horse and a better view! James Hillman says that dream animals are soul doctors. Bet I'm the only one around here who reads Cioran & Kierkegaard after working his bird dogs.
Disturbed that I am creating this heroine because I'm lonely and wish to have someone I can utterly love. Relieved of sanity fears by reading Angus Fletcher on the subject of the borders of consciousness.
There are many hidden, unnumbered floors in the apartment buildings in NYC, or so I have thought.
My coffin was made of glass and she ran out of the woods and shattered it! She is E. Hopper's girl at the window.
This must be a novel written from the cushion—silence, out of water, the first light, twilight, the night sky, the farthest point in the forest, from the bottom of a lake, the bottom of the river, northern lights, from the clouds and loam, also the city past midnight, Los Angeles at dawn when the ocean seems less tired having slept in private, from the undisturbed prairie, from attics and root cellars, the girl hiding in the thicket for no reason, the boy looking in the wrong direction for the rising moon.
At the cabin the fog is so dense you can hear it. A rabbit near woodpile, fly sound, crackle of fire in the hush. Can't drink much or my heroine escapes, evades me. The voice just beyond hearing.
Hot tip from Taisen Deshimaru on the writing of this book. “You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.” Reminded me again of the injurious aspects of protestantism for an artist—one's life as inevitable, or predestined, causing a looseness in the joints, the vast difference between Calvin (and John Bunyan). You must transfer these banal energies toward self-improvement to your work.
The post-modern novel suffocates from ethical mandarinism. It is almost totally white middle class, a product of writer's schools, the National Endowment, foundations, academia. The fact that this doesn't matter one little bit is interesting. Who could possibly give a fuck during this diaspora. The literary world is one of those unintentionally comic movies they used to make about voodoo and zombies.
Who said, “You can't do something you don't know if you keep doing what you do know"? Drinking prevents vertigo and that's why I can't get her voice if I drink. A trip to NYC restored my vertigo. If you enter a bookstore or a publisher's office your life again becomes incomprehensible. Fear refreshes. Luckily you can head immediately for a good restaurant.
Back home the troubling dream image of myself emerging like the “Thing” from a block of ice full of sticks and leaves.
In another dream she ran backward nakedly into history which was an improbable maze. Another night an unpleasant visit with Herman Melville who didn't look well.
Went up to my winter retreat at a hotel in Escanaba to edit Paris Review interview. Can't get beyond first page by the second day because I'm not currently interested in anything I've ever said, what with a hot eyeball from being two-thirds done. Zero degrees and a five-hour walk in the woods because I got lost, followed by rigatoni & Italian sausage, and two bottles of red wine. Next day I walked miles out onto the frozen harbor ice—a marvelous polar landscape of glittering sun & ice as far as you can see. Fishermen have driven their pickup trucks out on the ice and are pulling nets where the ice was divided by a fuel oil tanker. They are Chippewas and offer me a partially frozen beer that thunks in the bottle.
A strange March walk: broke, can't write, sick from new blood-pressure medicine, out in an area of juniper, dunes, pine culverts out of the wind. Thoughts about the degree to which I'm a slave or lowly employee of the system I've created: cigarettes smoke me, food eats me, alcohol drinks me, house swallows me, car drives me, etc.
“She” comes and goes. I had to talk to Hollywood today (to say why I was fired from the last project) and she fled top speed. An utterly enervating & fatal game of pursuit.
It seems that severe emotional problems, neuroses, are born, thrive, multiply in areas where language never enters. The writer thinks that if he can solve these problems his quality of language will vastly improve. This is the fallacy of writing as therapy. Dostoyevski maintained that to be acutely conscious is to be diseased. One could imagine a novel that murders the writer. You don't want to discover a secret your persona can't bear up under. But then you can't rid yourself of the hubris of wanting to create a hero or heroine of consciousness.
Completely flipped from nervous exhaustion on page 430. Take my wife and daughter to Key West, a place I had feared returning to after so much “disorder and early sorrow” from a dozen previous trips. Turned out pleasantly. Good chats with Brinnin, mostly on how to determine pathology when everything is pathological. Studied the giant ocean river, the Gulf Stream, where Duane committed suicide on his buckskin horse. We forget we have blood in us until it starts coming out.
All your aggression is directed toward discovering new perceptions, and consequently against yourself when you fail to come up with anything new. But then I “made her up” knowing very well we will abandon each other.
Bernard Fontana warned me about getting the “Indian disease.” It takes a great deal of discipline not to shatter into fragments. The wonders of negative capability & allowing her to decide what she's going to do next. What Fontana meant is the intense anxiety I felt at the Umbanda session seventy miles outside of Rio de Janeiro when the ladies went into their whirling trance to heal the black drummer who was a drunk. If you've seen and lived the supposed best the white world has to offer it's “harmless” to check out the rest of the world. We are all in the Blue Angel in that respect. The actual world is Dietrich's thighs.
Startled to read in Jung that violently colorful dreams & physic events occur to people in psychic flux who need more consciousness.
At the cabin just saw a chipmunk leap off the picnic table & tear the throat out of a mouse, lapping vigorously at the blood. I am chock-full of conclusions. Must write Quammen to find out what's going on here. Lopez told me the only way to feed ravens is to gather road kills, a rather smelly business. Peacock has studied bears so long he has become one, not entirely a happy situation. Dalva is probably my twin sister who was taken away at birth.
Nearly finished. It's like going outside to estimate the storm damage. Want to avoid stepping into a thousand-story elevator shaft. As a ninth grader I was very upset to discover that Ross Lockridge committed suicide when he finished Raintree County.
My friend _____ thought that all of his concessions, like the Eucharist, were rites of passage. He forgot how easy it is to earn the contempt of your fellow writers.
Was amused to realize that the mess I am always trying to extricate myself from is actually my life. The other night I played ranchero music & thought how different the music is in areas of fruit, hot peppers, garlic, hot sun, giant moths, & butterflies. An old woman in Brazil had a worn photo of a group of men ice fishing in Minnesota which she thought was amusing. We drank rum and I tried to explain away the lugubrious masochism of life in the upper Midwest.
For almost ten minutes I looked forward to the second volume when Northridge's voice will become mangled & intolerable, a prairie Lear.
Finishing any large piece of work makes one dense and irascible. I cooked the fucking brook trout too long! I demand more of myself and life than it is suited to offer. I look for the wrong form the reward is to come in—thus it is a full year before I realize how good a certain meal was: during bird season we stopped by a river, started our portable grill and watched four English setters and a Lab swim lazily in an eddy in the October sunlight. We grilled woodcock and grouse over split maple, had a clumsy salad, bread, and a magnum of wine, napped on the grass surrounded by wet dogs.
Nearly done at the cabin, a specific giddiness. Last night wild pale-green northern lights above scud
ding thunderheads. On the way home from the tavern I saw a very large bear on the two-track to the cabin, thus hesitated to take a midnight stroll, possibly disturbing both of us. He was not my friend, but a great bear, a Beowulf, trundling across the path & swiveling for a look at me, his head higher than mine was in the car.
Hard to develop the silence and humility necessary for creating good art if you are always yelling “look at me” like a three-year-old who has just shit in the sandbox.
Postscript. Finished the novel in July and have since driven 27,000 miles to get over it. Perhaps it is easier to write a novel than survive it. Driving is a modest solution as the ego dissipates in the immensity of the landscape, slips out into the road behind you. Watched an Indian, Jonathan Windyboy, dance seven hours in a row in New Mexico. That might work but as a poet I work within the skeleton of a myth for which there is no public celebration. Publication parties aren't quite the same thing. I can imagine the kiva late at night under a summery full moon; the announcer asks the drum group from the Standing Rock Sioux to play a round from the Grass Dance for Jim's beloved Dalva! But perhaps our rituals as singers are as old as theirs. Cadged my epigraph from Loren Eiseley's tombstone: “We loved the earth but could not stay.”
1988
Everyday Life: The Question of Zen
I often think that because I am quite remote up here in northern Michigan from others who practice, and am intensely stubborn, I learn so slowly that I will be dead before I understand very much.
But “Who dies?” is a koan I posed for myself several years ago. To know the self, of course, is hopefully to forget the self. The especially banal wine of illusion is to hold on tightly to all the resonances of what we see in the mirror, inside and out. In our practice the self is not pushed away, it drifts away. When you are a poet there is a residual fear that if you lose the self you will lose your art. Gradually, however, (for me it took fifteen years!) you discover that what you thought was the self had little to do with your own true nature. Or your art, for that matter.