by Jim Harrison
white, cumulus whorls of terra red—our heads were
startlingly clear, tireless, ranging at ease, happy, the
good world cast in cool civil light, magnified in the quietest
way: We smelled the chiles roasting miles to the north,
heard the cattle far from town, felt their heat, and long
after midnight, giving up on sleep, walked out, under
the box elder, tireless: calm skies, a moon like sugar
in the mouth.
I read this poem in the steamy lassitude of mid-July and immediately set about making a pot of Anasazi beans despite the inappropriate weather. Beans and pork brought our country’s people west, usually salt pork as wagon trains were short of refrigerators. I use ground Chimayo, a high-altitude chile from New Mexico, arguably the most flavorful. The best beer for beans is either Pacifico or Negra Modelo, the best music Linda Ronstadt singing Mexican songs. You have to be careful as on a recent car trip to Nebraska I was listening to Leonard Cohen while eating a small bag of Fritos and began to choke on my emotions. For the same reason I can’t listen to Aretha Franklin or the blues singer Robert Johnson while driving, let alone eating. The advantage of a pot of beans for a devout liberal is that they may be eaten without guilt, which is not true of the five-thousand-dollar dinner I once ate in Paris with some show business acquaintances (Francis Ford Coppola, Danny DeVito, Russell Crowe, and a few others), or the twelve-hour lunch of thirty-seven courses but only nineteen wines I enjoyed with friends in Burgundy. As a poet I didn’t pick up the tab for either. Metaphorically the poet is in a cage high above the cultural disco with the crowd below him chanting, “Dance, fool, dance.” Baudelaire claimed that the poet couldn’t walk so borne down was he by his giant wings—Ses ailes de géant l’empêchent de marcher—which earlier in my career I used as an excuse for bad behavior. Success in bad behavior is guaranteed.
Over the years I have made an extensive but informal survey among the young, inquiring as to why they listen to tens of thousands of hours of loud rock, particularly of the heavy metal variety. My conclusions proved obvious; to wit, such music is an effective anesthetic for drowning out reality. It goes with fast food, which is akin to shoving the gas nozzle in your mouth for a quick fill-up. It might be a stretch to also conclude that bad music is destructive to the palate but the evidence is there. I am unable, however, to connect a particular type of musician to certain cultural phenomena such as the implanting of huge breasts in recent decades or the tendency of men to bench-press until they develop freakishly large breasts. And in the past few years eating contests have become popular, hot dogs being the most frequent item, with the winner downing sixty-eight. This is beyond my ken, as one has always been enough for me. I have never attended one of these contests but have been told that the music is usually the triumphant theme from Rocky. According to Gourmet magazine a man recently ate eight chickens at a Rhode Island restaurant that specializes, not surprisingly, in chicken. No mention was made of the mood music for the feat, but it was likely a clone of Sonia playing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” on the Wurlitzer with flotsam strains as if a patch of hollyhocks could groan.
I am assuming that our bad national news has crossed the border to the land of the maple leaf. Our country is in dire straits and everywhere we hear the keening and howling of the unemployed. Seniors who have seen a severe drop in their retirement incomes have been turned out of managed-care facilities and stand on the curbs waving their arms at the silent heavens, their little potbellies shrinking from lack of applesauce and cottage cheese, their historical staples. One can only pray that their collective curses will doom the financial community to the hell it has blatantly earned.
As I write this, Michael Jackson is still dead. He continues to die daily on CNN for forty days now, the examination of his bad habits revealed in a relentlessly racist display of our dim view of black people. Today at dawn when I arose to make a chalupa, a generic border dish, then walked the dogs, I found myself wishing that I could prance across the pasture like M. J. did the stage instead of my bleak and burly shuffle. Incidentally, if you wish to restore your health, take out your largest iron pot and put in two pounds of pintos, ten pounds of pork shoulder, serrano and pasilla (fresh chiles), onions, cumin, lots of garlic, ground Chimayo chile, chopped cilantro, and water. Bring to heat on stove, then put it in the oven at 300°F for four hours, after which you jerk the pork and remove the bones. Serve on tortilla chips or Fritos with condiments of chopped onions, cilantro, and grated cheese. Eat a lot and then nap.
I am mindful of late of the notion of health. The late Anthony Burgess said that writing is the most unhealthy of professions. In truth you can wake up feeling fine, and writing all day turns you into a pile of dog doo-doo. It’s not only the coffee, the cigarettes, the faux elixir of vodka, and the bottles of wine, but the unnaturalness of the act of writing shared with no other species. Led by birds many species sing, but writing is as suspect as collecting doughnut holes or using cell phones.
My corned tongues turned out well and I must salute Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. If Michael Jackson had only taken a few hours a day cooking his own food he might still be with us like B. B. King or Buddy Guy. My corned tongue is getting me over a long-held prejudice against the Saxons that I acquired thirty years ago while living in London in Jack Nicholson’s household while he was filming Kubrick’s The Shining. The chinless, sputtering upper-crust visitors were absolutely certain I was the bodyguard and hence I was invisible. I still hold a wan hope that they will translate my American novels into English. Meanwhile during this financial collapse I am surviving due to the generosity of the French. We all need to eat well in order to dig the graves of stockbrokers.
The Arts Versus Food
and Birds
Of late I’ve had the feeling that I may have lived too long, a state of mind the nature of which is impossible to determine. For financial reasons we keep our thermostat at fifty degrees (ten Celsius). This has the side effect of decreasing the number of visitors to our home. My Swede grandpa never wore a coat out to the barn unless it was below zero. He was made hot and strong by a diet of pork fat and herring and bowls of Wheaties with heavy cream. We’ve recently invested our savings in various lotteries to give God a chance to help us. We so hope that the Big Guy in the sky comes through for us so that we can afford complicated and expensive medical procedures as I’m having problems with my head, lungs, stomach, and right leg. My wife is fine except for severe asthma and crippling arthritis. I have abandoned my Art who is a cruel mistress, a seven-hundred-pound dominatrix with rhino feet and hair of ten thousand thin, virulently poisonous black snakes. I’ve been doing backflips and somersaults for this old cow for fifty years and want to seek other opportunities in the private sector.
Forgive me this mordant prelude that is not quite true. I admit I paid $246 for our prime roast for Christmas dinner and also drank twenty-year-old Domaine du Vieux Télégraphe Châteauneuf du Pape and Domaine Tempier Bandol La Tourtine, not exactly budget liquids. And recently before we left Montana we finished a dinner prepared by Mario Batali with an 1850 Madeira, said to be Abraham Lincoln’s favorite though when he called out for it on his deathbed none was available. It would anyway have leaked out of his bullet wounds.
It seems that I’m a fact of limited nature. Since I emerged from a long lineage of peasantry I most often feel poor even though my J. P. Morgan broker says that this is not true. My empathy abounds. On my last trip to Toronto I wondered why that immense Harbourfront complex couldn’t be turned into a giant, budget sausage restaurant for the Canadian peasantry.
Is it any wonder why I drifted away from Art to the world of food and birds? Food and birds are in Technicolor while writing is in anemic black-and-white. I had written ten books in ten years before a specific collapse occurred in mid-October. I couldn’t walk out to the mailbox, drive anywhere, fish or hunt—do anything—without cont
inually making up sentences, often very involved, about what I was doing. This was maddening indeed and I sought professional help from my mind doctor in New York City by phone and letter. As the weeks passed it became apparent that I was incurable except for a brief period while watching birds or eating, with neither activity lending itself toward our livelihood. I couldn’t very well watch birds or eat every waking hour or could I?
I began a largely incoherent journal that reminded me of trying to screw a maple floor without a hard-on. The novel I had just completed was a deranged act of hubris in which I had fictively tried to figure out the connection between religion, sex, and money, only to conclude that the three composed a metaphoric bowling ball that could not be disassembled for clarity. No wonder I became a gibberer. In fact I didn’t recognize the first indication of deliverance when it arrived in the form of Mario Batali and two other chefs, Loretta Keller of San Francisco and Michael Schlow of Boston. I had finished drafting the novel that Saturday at 10:17 A.M. and by mid-afternoon I was eating fennel salami and sipping from a sixteen-ounce glass of La Mozza Aragone, a current favorite. Meanwhile a friend from Seattle, the author and restaurateur Peter Lewis, was concerned that I was speaking in elaborately constructed paragraphs. For reasons of modesty I won’t talk about what we ate for three days but will add the menu as a postscript. Who would want to hear about someone else’s weighty bag of white truffles while they’re eating bratwurst and kraut at Harbourfront?
The road back was tortuous and occasionally silly. A signal event happened at the Calgary Zoo. I had begun planning a return trip to Italy for our anniversary, but my wife decided we should drive to Calgary from our home in southern Montana. This meant savings of $25,000, as I like to be comfortable when I travel to Europe. We found Calgary to be an intensely agreeable place, with four days of fine restaurants and a cozy suite at the Fairmont Palliser. It was, however, too warm for me to try out the enormous ski jump built for a previous Olympics. The signal event and satori came at the zoo. A very young female giraffe was standing near the fence and I spent a long time looking at her eyelashes, which were the grandest eyelashes in creation. I actually shuddered at her otherness. I walked toward the howler monkeys I could hear in the distance, wondering about what I had been doing since I had last seen giraffes in Kenya and Tanzania in 1972 other than writing thirty-two books. Not much. The shattering din of the howler monkeys meant that they were obviously transmogrified writers. For reasons of humility every writer on earth should visit a cage of howler monkeys. The only disadvantage of the Calgary trip was the nine hundred miles of wheat we drove through on the round trip. This made me boycott bread for a couple of days.
Liberation comes in particulars. After the fact I noticed all sorts of cues in my notebook. When we reached our casita on the Mexican border in November, I was lucky enough to see an indigo bunting and blue grosbeak staring at each other as I had done with the giraffe. Not far away was a green-tailed towhee. Was there any language for what they were talking about? The natural versions of my favorite colors were overwhelming. I had been studying the sacramental miscellanies of Canadian writer Graeme Gibson, which had put my mind in the proper state of vulnerability to this otherness. Gibson is a mage of birds and beasts, combining modern science with ancient sensibilities.
Of course I backslid. One morning I couldn’t help myself and wrote, “They found her in a bathtub full of blood the color of water.” Not a bad first sentence but I immediately abandoned it and made a simple soup out of seven pounds of short ribs, a large head of garlic, cabbage, barley, and rutabaga, all of them the fruits of earth rather than the dithering mind.
Your carelessly kept journals will often tell you things but mostly in retrospect. “We often feel that part of us is in another place, that’s because it is.” Of course! Even the characters I was inventing were getting a little tired of me. They kept behaving against my intentions for them. I began to think that my slack short circuits were due to my age and immediately started a project with my mind doctor of thirty-seven years, Lawrence Sullivan, who has saved me from divorce, drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide among other things. We’re going to discuss at length the nature of what we have decided to call The Last Act. What are the precise mental changes that occur with advanced aging?
Frankly, many of our concerns vaporize. Ambition drifts away like a floating casket in a severe flood. The contents and scheduling of meals become far more important than bad reviews. The literati are slow to admit that what their god Kafka really wanted to do was to start a restaurant. His mistress was a fine cook and he was excited about being a waiter rather than a beetle with an apple stuck in its back. You publish a novel then sit around naked and unarmed waiting for what I call “the attack of the air guitarists,” those who flail you with metal ships and burn your house down. It reminds one of that science fiction movie where New Zealand is under attack by genetically altered sheep. Of course I have to keep writing poetry. Poets are star-crossed lovers of themselves and their language. You can’t fall out of love with poetry just because like Thomas Hardy you binged on writing too much fiction. Hardy made a lot of money and further consoled himself by writing only poetry and chasing a young woman hither and yon, an activity for which I have no time. Of late my main adulterous activity since I don’t care for pornography is reading Anne Carson’s (translation of) Sappho, which makes me shiver with delicate lust. In a footnote Carson talks about the Greek word beudos, which is the same as kimberikon, which means a short, transparent dress. A fine idea that should be obligatory summer wear.
I wrote in my journal, “I am at the command of ten thousand mastodons and at dawn Nebraska will be mine.” What could this mean other than the errant frippery of the mind? It was followed by, “Our best work is always behind us due to the vagaries of time.” Well of course, but why does the mind seek to pinpoint absurdities? “Jungles remind one of the creator’s rather dreary overuse of the color green.” After this sentence I immediately set about making a rather involved oxtail and Spanish chorizo stew and watching two male Gila woodpeckers fight out by the feeder. The other birds, including bridled titmice in close proximity, totally ignored them. The literary content of my mind was reduced to zero as I browned the oxtails and chorizo and started my sofrito in another pan, but then my mind was suddenly nagged by the fact that Flannery O’Connor was only kissed once in her life, while Wilt Chamberlain bragged that he had made love to twenty thousand women on his expensive bedspread made of wolf noses. Yes, wolf noses. As with billions of others it is unlikely that Flannery and Wilt ever met. “I’ve continued my life on the thoroughly careless presumption that when I die all questions will be answered.” I wrote this down at night after dinner when I couldn’t watch birds or eat. The grim content of this pathetic thought was allayed by watching Carlos Saura’s marvelous film on fados, those haunting laments of love. The next evening I wrote, “I’d like to posit that gravy is the most important substance in the world and that toilet paper far exceeds the significance of the computer.” This dead-end flotsam dropped away when I watched the film of Leonard Cohen’s recent London concert. This great bird of night is my favorite troubadour. After the movie I had a bracing three pieces of matjes herring. Here’s a scenario: a pretty girl doesn’t know about the matjes herring you’ve just eaten. She French-kisses you and simultaneously upchucks and does a backflip from the peculiar smell.
“It is altogether possible that every wife in the world is married to the wrong man.” Another promising beginning that I must put aside until my mind is thoroughly healed by food and birds. “I don’t miss the life of the circus, the hoops of fire, the hermaphrodite bears from the Caucasus, the clowns on break reading the Wall Street Journal.” This is too esoteric. The circus is on the wane and is no longer an active metaphor for our hopes and desires.
To say the arts is too much for any mouth to honestly manage. I practically faint from irritation and must run to the refrigerator for a snack or to
the window to see a dickcissel. Even worse is the NEA motto, “A great nation deserves great art.” They got that one backward. This phrase makes me flee outside and walk up a cold creek barefoot looking for a dead fish to chew on to clean my sinuses.
“How well I remember milking the cows when it was thirty below zero, reaching out for those warm teats as if they were owned by a lover. If they were cold and hard it meant the cow was frozen dead upright and would stay that way until spring when she would fall when her joints thawed.” I’ve already covered this sort of material in an early novel called Farmer that sold poorly. Middle-class readers think that the hardship they’ve never experienced is banal. They love their reality which is a video game with the texture of Camembert.
I nearly included sex fantasies to add to the food and birds as a nostrum against the destructiveness of the arts but convincing sex fantasies are hard to create. In the new Sports Illustrated swimsuit calendar the January photo of Jessica at first made me tremble, but eight days into January the simpering Jessica looks down at me as if to say, “Your desuetude repels me.” Short of offering her $10 million, which as a thousandaire I don’t have, I doubt if I could turn the trick, unless maybe we went to the tropics and she became feverish and deranged from malaria.
No, birds and food will have to do and perhaps poetry. I have held fiction at bay for three months but I am weakening in winter’s dim light. I wrote a little verse that works equally well for fiction writers.
Poet Warning
He went to sea
in a thimble of poetry
without sail or oars
or anchor. What chance
do I have, he thought?
Hundreds of thousands
of moons have drowned out here
and there are no gravestones.
Here as an appendix is the recent menu. The artful chef, Mario Batali, said, “My art turns to shit by the next day.”
