Off to the Side: A Memoir

by Jim Harrison

  There are comic aspects to reading religious texts, especially to a writer addicted to the sensuosities of language. Ostensibly sacred texts are almost invariably stilted to the degree that they resemble legal language. You wonder if this is so because the priestly and administrative classes in organized religion wish us to trip and fall without their help. Lucidity is undervalued and one is reminded of sentimental sex scenes where the orgasmic woman falls back on great waves of nothingness. If the great message is there, why is the language purposefully inept? Why the hushed, funereal tones to announce joy? I recall those sodden semimartial hymns of my childhood, so lugubrious your ass deadened against the pew in minutes. It was utterly startling to parishioners when a black choir was invited to my mother’s church. This was a “joyful noise unto the Lord.” Buddhist texts are often equal snoozers with notable exceptions of contemporary translators like Thomas Cleary, the roshi Nelson Foster, or Burton Watson. The diction of Zen students is sometimes quite silly, speaking as they do in the pidgin manner of a Japanese trying to learn English. All of which is to say the seeker must sweat blood, not necessarily for the answers but for the questions. Is there a God? What will happen to me when I die? Of course in the next few pages these questions will be answered.

  In the past few years I’ve experienced the resurgence of the small after a lifetime of pursing the Big, including big novels, big fish, big animals, big country, big trips, big money, in short a big life. I can’t specify the time and experiences that turned me to the small and indeed it was a gradual process, helped by reading E. O. Wilson, Harold Edleman’s Neural Darwinism, the works of science writers David Quammen, Timothy Ferris, Gary Nabhan, and other texts, mostly clumsily digested, on botany, the human genome, and agriculture. I appear not to have the brain size I had assumed because this material was hard to understand, comically so as I would master details one day and mastery would vaporize by the next. In any event I began to write small poems, the genre of poetry having led me by the nose through my lifetime and opening the door to the novel, the essay, the screenplay.

  A lot of bluster went out of my life during a mental crackup a recent winter over the death of Ana Claudia Villa Herrera, age nineteen and a hapless migrant who died of thirst after crossing the border of Mexico into Arizona. Her death was the nexus of an investigation I did into our border problems, well enough if it had stopped there but it didn’t. The arc of my life, past and present, developed wobbles and curlicues. I had not only pulled the rug out from under myself, I had also removed the floor and basement. I could walk but I couldn’t hunt for quail in the mountains along the border. If it weren’t for my dog Rose demanding a daily run I would have become immobile. The radical difference between this depression and a number of others scattered through my life is that this one came from the outside rather than the inside. Mentally I was back at eighteen after radical eye surgery reading Dostoyevsky who, after all, had said in Notes from the Underground, “I maintain that to be too acutely conscious is to be diseased.” Added to this was the fact that Ana Claudia was the same age my beloved sister Judith had been when she died at nineteen along with my father in a car wreck caused by a drunk driver, hence especially needless deaths. Ana Claudia and Judith began to wear the same face and though I didn’t know Ana Claudia I began to give her many of Judith’s characteristics. I also began to imagine myself in a dark basement and though the floor was cement it quaked in rhythm with my thoughts. In a curious, almost amusing manner I recognized this nadir as a nadir. I watched a French movie about the gypsies called Latcho Drom and found myself weeping copiously with the unself conscious compassion a child feels for his very sick dog. My personality with its reassuring pretensions had fled and I wasn’t interested in looking for it.

  It’s amazing how ineffective a mind can be when studying itself. The mind keeps trying to tell itself a linear children’s story to cover the life it has watched the body live. The mind keeps trying to be an observer, a spectator, rather than the director. R. D. Laing said that “the mind of which we are unaware is aware of us.” This suggests an extra dimension largely unavailable to us but doubtless vital. When you trek toward this mind country the borders you sense seem impenetrable but nonetheless visible. You see clearly that the linear is a hoax and the last thing the tectonics of consciousness follow is our world of letters and numbers. The bursting of your neurons follows paths that make the grandest computers look like McGuffey’s Readers. This doesn’t make me pessimistic about the usefulness of computers only that they don’t create works equivalent to Shakespeare or Mozart nor are they meant to. Curiously humans have always been more interested in process than subject. A laptop at base is a stick used by a chimpanzee to get the delicious ants out of a hole in a log. Meanwhile the mind soars and plummets for a grace note to heal its inconsolable state. In my own case all of the clues to my plummet had floated around for years. The solace was everywhere, often infinitely small.

  I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s “Everything we are taught is false” became my modus operandi partly because Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against. I was on the run among New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Michigan by thumb, or Greyhound bus if I was flush. My baggage was of enormous consequence, a change of clothes but mostly anthologies of Russian and Chinese poetry, volumes of Rimbaud and Apollinaire, William Blake, copies of poems of John Clare and Christopher Smart, and a few Dostoyevsky novels. Only recently have I realized the degree to which these books were my religious texts and their unavowed intent was to teach me the secrets of reality, in short to explain the meaning of life. In honor of the hesitant admission that there might be a world outside my head I’d unsuccessfully take courses in economics, anthropology, and forestry when I’d return to college after forays east and west. But it is poetry that has stuck with me as a solution to the impulse. Poetry is free from the predominance of profit and the best of it offers up no lies.

  “Ruin has taught me thus to ruminate,” Shakespeare wrote in a sonnet. Years ago I was surprised at the mail I got after saying in a food column that it was easier for me to believe in the Resurrection than in the existence of the Republican Party. You might remember that earlier I mentioned I would explain the existence of God and what happens after we die. Perhaps I should have asked first for each of you to send me a nickel in soft money to aid in my search. After all, I’m giving you an indication of a private religion. If a forsaken Native American can say, “Take courage, the earth is all that lasts,” we must all come up with something better than the “In God We Trust” on that nickel I’ve decided not to ask you to send.

  My own answers might not do you any more good than spending a night in your basement freezer. I’ve been very lucky in writing poems for nearly fifty years as this practice does not discount visionary experiences. When a voice in a dream told me simply to be thankful that I had a chance to exist this gave me the freedom not to make a special case for myself. That my answers might appear intellectually embarrassing is utterly irrelevant.

  Last spring while struggling to emerge from my logical depression over Ana Claudia I sat on our patio overlooking a creek dense with surrounding underbrush. I saw the cellular life of everything around me seething with activity and inside the cells the DNA that indicated the nature of their existences. It was during the upcoming night that I had the dream of the figure of God before time started hurling trillions and billions of handfuls of specks into the void that would eventually determine the nature of the universe and its inhabitants.

  It is consoling indeed to wake up from this dream. I had returned to the small and was again the boy who prayed leaning against a huge stump far out in the woods, praying for all whom I loved but also errantly wondering what the grand tree had looked like. Down on the border we don’t have much ambient light so the stars can become dense and almost milky. I have thought while looking at them of Gandhi’s notion that it’s pleasant t
hat there will be no religions in heaven. I’m certainly not going to allow my blank wall of incomprehension to temper my reverence for nature and the universe. Lately astronomers have upped the number of galaxies from 12 billion to 90 billion. That makes fifteen apiece for everyone on earth. You’re free to name your own. I have this belief that we’ll continue to exist in one of those invisible but infinitely large specks that make up our being. I said once in a poem that we will see God but not with our eyes. That’s fine by me. Naturally I could go on forever but I won’t. I’m shining the tiniest, nearly invisible penlight on the matter just as I did on the death by thirst of Ana Claudia, or my sister so long ago.

  A SHORT TOUR DE FRANCE

  There were certain countries that I visited that I thought I loved but to which I never returned—Russia, Kenya and Tanzania, and Brazil, among others, despite thinking on my visits that I’d like to live awhile in these places. In Russia it was purely St. Petersburg, the presence of which was added to immeasurably by all the Russian literature I had read so that the streets, especially Nevsky Prospect, were utterly fabled. Hotel Europa was wonderful and I drank tea out of a glass, absurdly enough, like my heroes Dostoyevsky and Yesenin. However, this was in 1972 and I couldn’t get used to the machine guns thousands of uniformed men were wearing as fashionable accoutrements. The illusion of Russia was fully popped when I finally landed at Bourget in sunny Paris in late October and actually knelt and kissed the ground. These were the same machine guns I later saw in Ecuador and Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania. Even though I’ve never been in the military machine guns, as opposed to sporting weaponry, are there for the sole reason of making bloody holes in the bodies of malcontents, a group of which I’ve always been a member.

  You don’t see all that many machine guns in Mexico, which is a scant fifteen miles from our winter home and which makes it not far enough away for the “otherness” I seek unless I go as deeply as Veracruz in the east or the Seri Indian country in the west. For some reason I seem to need the somewhat unsettling experience of flying across the ocean seven miles up in the air during which there are the remote thoughts of how well I swim, though I know it’s the dive in the plane that matters most.

  Of course it is easy enough to say that Mexico, or France for that matter, is “just” another country, but this idea is the nexus of the xenophobic trance that most of us live and die within, our “geopiety.” We all know there are distinct similarities in countries, the moon and sun glow down, people eat, drink, and die, their separate stock markets are invariably up or down. Most have trees that become visible at ground level and are joined by flowers and shrubs. Some people farm and some “buy cheap and sell dear,” an ancient definition of business, but inside the relatively new academic discipline of human geography our sameness is diminished by our differentness. Beyond our field of vision, and the vision of all the separate media on earth, which in themselves form illusionary “melting pots” because of laziness, greed, and stupidity, constructing us all as like-minded members of the family of man, there is a world of amazing difference that must be mildly sought out. In the lobby at my hotel in Paris while waiting for someone I read in a puffy and slick magazine with a truly extraordinary photo of a young woman’s tummy that “lingerie is the theater of our intimacy.”

  I’m simply not aware of anyone in the United States, and I must have met and read hundreds of our writers, who would say such a thing. It is, as we used to say, a “far cry” from making love to a woman bent over a front fender of a Chevy pickup on a warm summer night. You might later take a dip in a lake and even afterwards you don’t recall if any underpants were involved. She wore Levis and a T-shirt, as a matter of fact. A bit of beach sand was involved in the second go-around and also a pint of cheap, odorous whiskey and warmish beer. The stars and a fingernail clipping of a new moon seemed much closer to earth than usual. That night lingerie was definitely not the theater of our intimacy but later in life there was less a tendency to discount it. After all, there was a memorable childhood rhyme chanted in the school yard:

  I see London

  I see France

  I see somebody’s

  underpants.

  * * *

  Back in Paris on a rainy October night, I’m willing to admit I don’t have a true affinity for this country but I like it here. In a dozen or more trips, and despite having taken college French, I can’t handle the language. Maybe being attuned to American English enough to write exhausted the language region of my brain. I’m astounded now when I meet the child of Americans living here for a scant six months and the little round boy is already fluent. I have this idea that even in private moments local dogs speak French in a pleasant world from which I am excluded. Maybe the birds in the garden next to the hotel also. I create and memorize French sentences that seem to make the listener immediately melancholy. They look like they wish they were spelunking in the Pyrenees. I feel as foreign as Geronimo at the New York World’s Fair at the turn of the century. I get by because of the kindness of strangers. In restaurants the staff seem pleased when I eat two servings of têtes de veau (a mélange made of a calf’s head) and drink a full bottle of wine or so, my meal a pick-me-up as soon as possible after I land here, though gout has slowed this habit but not to a stop. If you’re tired of hamburger go to France and eat what our hot dogs are doubtless made of which is everything after the good cuts are extracted from a carcass. My dad, who judged cattle at county fairs, told me when I was a child that hot dogs are made of “tits, tails, and assholes” of cows and pigs. When I return to America after a trip to France, landing in the grand city of Chicago, I do not hesitate to eat a hot dog or two at O’Hare Airport. My midwestern roots plunge as deep as the barnyard and slaughterhouse. “Vache folle,” mad cow disease, doesn’t seem to be a poignant threat these days. I feel as exempted as a girl in a French television movie I watched parts of one evening. She was a lion tamer at the circus and strutted around a cage chock-full of recalcitrant lions. Appropriately enough, she wore an outfit as scanty as a bikini, and at the conclusion of her performance she stretched out on a low dais with her parts no doubt pulsing in the humid air of the tent. A male lion with his tawny jaws dropped a red rose on her barely concealed pubis. The crowd was delighted. So was I, though there was the tremor of the movie critic hidden in my soul. This was France and I must suspend my disbelief over such emotional hyperbole. After all, life seems mysterious because it is.

  In the Massif Central the weather is quite warm for late October, a reprieve from coming winter. This is fairly high country, nearly five thousand feet, and midwinter often brings blizzards, the photos of which remind me of northern Michigan, where I recall high drifts stacked against our barn in the years before we had sense enough to buy the small casita on the Mexican border for the winter months. The Massif Central barns are made of thick-walled stone and the roofs are thick slabs of stone. To some the area might appear bleak but I immediately love it. From the window of my small hotel with three rooms, appropriately called Les Monts, there is not a single visible light at night except a three-quarter moon. At dawn the fog begins to slowly lift from the deep gorge of the Tarn River. This gorge is an actual gorge of thousands of feet and my heart thumps when we go for a drive. My host senses that Fm vertiginous and offers to call Paris for his helicopter to take me to Arles in Provence in the morning. I weigh my childish fears, helicopters among them, and decide I’d rather walk, an impractical solution.

  Americans are completely unready for the Massif Central. We certainly don’t include France when we think of remote solitude. Our own relatively wild areas exist only with government protection or because they simply aren’t economically viable. Areas such as the Great Plains and especially dismal swamps in both the North and South retain their wild and beautiful character because they resist the possibility of profit. My own home area in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, once it sacrificed its first-, second-, and third-growth trees to successive waves of the timber industry, and all but a
remnant of copper and iron were drawn from the ground, was left alone to entertain hunters and tourists of usually modest means. The same sort of thing seems to be true of the Massif Central, where the highly valued cows are released from their barns in May wearing ritual garlands of roses. The grazing appears as sparse as that in Montana and Wyoming. Hopefully the cows aren’t as vertiginous as I am because much of the country is as rough and precipitous as the border country near Patagonia, Arizona, perhaps more so. Walking out on a peninsula between two gorges with my friend Maxime, who was inspecting a hunting property he wished to buy, I had an urge to sit down so I wouldn’t fall off the earth. Despite the near verticality these canyon walls are fertile with grass and shrubs and support the wild Barbary sheep. I saw a large sanglier (wild pig) near the road and wondered how hard he had to work at eating to become that large. He was without the trough I had been using in restaurants but had attained a daring similarity to myself.

  Why would I rather be in one place instead of another? I admit I accept some of my travel impulses without questioning, recalling that for much of my life I was frozen in one area for economic reasons. This is true of most people and now despite relative economic freedom I’m too obsessed with my work to be the kind of traveler who is habitually called “inveterate.” The other day in Arles, down in Provence, I had lunch with a man I had met socially who admitted that all he did was travel. When lunch was nearly finished I inscribed a French translation of one of my novels for the bistro owner. I certainly don’t carry these around but the proprietor pulled one from his capacious apron. He hoped I wouldn’t be insulted if the dedication was made to his dog? Of course not, I said, and he fetched a very large chocolate Labrador who had obviously been on the same lifelong diet as myself. Before greeting me the dog, appropriately named Lanvin, checked out the empty tables in the bistro for a stray snack, then came over and looked at me hopefully. A crust of anything would be better than a novel. The moment I didn’t deliver, Lanvin slumped to the floor and slept. If you can’t eat, sleep, doubtless is a more functional philosophy than most.