by Jim Harrison
The most difficult thing about pain is that it’s so domineering you can’t get out of reach of its relentless body blows. Fly-fishing is diverting enough to lighten the load doubled with being in a beautiful place. Hunting less so, as you can’t forget that you’re trying to blast a supposedly lesser creature into eternity, where it is apparent their speedy attempts at escape they don’t want to go. Visiting foreign countries is also helpful. Your imagination is captivated enough that you’re not feeling the infirmity. Soon enough I hope to go to Arles, France, and simply sit in the empty coliseum built at the time of Julius Caesar. It would be nice to also listen to Arlésien bullfight music without the bullfight. It would also be pleasant if pretty girls would chase one another around the arena but I’ve not yet seen this phenomenon. After the sitting has exhausted me I’ll return to my hotel room which is huge, rare for France. I’m told that both Dominguin and Picasso always stayed in this room. Before lunch Picasso would sit on the balcony and search the village square for girls to invite up for a bite to eat. What a kind fellow! I am not quite short enough to get away with this behavior. Picasso was too short to join our Marines. After a nap and coffee I’ll take a brutally long walk and then have dinner and several bottles of wine at Le Galoubet, and perhaps a nightcap in my room. Early to bed, early to rise. I’m up usually at five A.M., admittedly a stupid habit. I took my Joycean vows as a writer at age fourteen and sixty years later I’m still doing it every day. Is this wrong? No, merely the path of an obsessive. Of course there was the occasional day off for illness or fishing, nothing dire certainly.
There has been the odd suggestion that shingles can be precipitated by psychic exhaustion as long as you had chicken pox as a child, the home of the virus that can hide half a century before it reveals itself like Babe Ruth swinging a bat. Most get over it in a month or two while with an unlucky few, less than 1 percent, it develops into post-herpetic neuralgia and the sores on the flesh retain their vigor.
I haven’t mentioned the largest weapon in the pathetic arsenal against shingles. Not certainly the dozen lotions that were purportedly surefire and I was the gullible boy that spread them wincing with each stroke. The biggest gun is, pure and simple, the brain. Soon after the onset you accept the simplest of facts: the disease is random and your suffering quite meaningless. This is definitely against the texture of the popular culture of our time and its bizarre mavens who try to skew all of the traceries of our lives into something consequential. This is the back wall and the answer is no. Man’s hardest work is hope and belief. Some of us who have done a lot of reading are hard to convince. The meaning of the great suffering of Mandelstam is the incredible poems it produced. What is the exact feeling when you are being escorted to your execution? What was the nature of Anne Frank’s last day on earth? Read her and you can imagine even if you can’t bear her forgiving nature. Remember that you’re pissed off back in Toronto on your sofa.
I can’t tell you why the idea of the logic of birds and fishes diverted me. It’s the whole person led this way and that by its brain. I have spent as many as thirty days in a row in extreme heat, fishing and observing sea life in the Florida Keys with emphasis on the latter, and ninety days in a row trout fishing on a lovely river in northern Michigan. There, landscapes utterly engage the imagination so that pain becomes muted. If you can’t go anywhere you can resort to what Ouspensky and third world shamans called flying or traveling. I have slowly walked the floors of remote oceans and softly flown through the Himalayas and across Africa. You won’t leave this pain behind but you’ll considerably lessen its intensity.
All you want is for the pain to go away when you first pick up one of at least a dozen of supposedly miraculous salves or lotions. Today’s variety is called Swedish Bitters which I’m trying because I’m half Swede and still have a sense of humor. My wife applied it at breakfast. It works a little though under the skin there’s still a kind of pulsing or thumping. It also comes in the form of a mud poultice which I’ve ordered. Having read a lot of silly historical novels in my youth I’ve always wanted my own poultice and then to recover and take up with the general’s winsome daughter. We’ll swim nude in a river and then who knows what will happen? It’s tattooed on her back that she’s 100 percent protein.
Lately I’ve taken to visiting an MD who is also a hypnotist. He has successfully banished the pain albeit temporarily and is trying to teach me how to hypnotize myself. I recall as a teenager wanting to learn this art to get girls. I bought a couple of books through men’s magazines. One brash young woman seated in my 1947 Plymouth said, “What the fuck are you trying to do, Jimmy?” She was one in a long line of failures. My single success was false in that a cousin had also tried to hypnotize her for sex so she was hip to what was going on. She was amused and took off her clothes in a trice. The car was dusty and she had a sneezing fit. She said afterward that she was “horny as a toad” and was just pretending to be in a trance. She did look slightly like a toad but at that age I wasn’t too critical. We relieved each other’s pain for several months until she found a boy who was less “silly” than me.
Surely language is a frivolous way to spend a life. Almost as bad as being a general in Afghanistan. I spent a couple of spring months at age nineteen studying Finnegans Wake and the damage was irreparable. I still hear parts in my dreams. My last birthday I was concerned that I was one hundred and seventy-four. My wife was driven batty by this and finally convinced me to knock off a hundred so I was only the age of the grief-stricken Goethe when he couldn’t convince the eighteen-year-old neighbor girl to marry him. It would be fun, or so he apparently thought. Yummy! Older writers are those about whom it is written “There’s no fool like an old fool.”
Back to pain. It works poorly as a focus for life. You’re certainly not going to write yourself out of it. Most of the doctors I’ve seen, a dozen or so, maximize the aspects of psychic exhaustion as a contributor to the disease. Why am I writing more than a book a year? Beyond my frivolities they advise a sabbatical but then I can’t afford it. The big grants go to the academics. I should have saved more from the salad days but I didn’t. I do know that in the entirety of human history pain is by far the biggest question mark. We humans sit in a beleaguered circle rotating toward our ends knowing that whatever pain we’ve had we’re likely to get more toward the end. We are protein for the gods and are devoured by the wholeness of earth. The specifics are always unthinkable. During a recent illness of my wife I visited her in intensive care for sixty days. The feeling in this ward is one of total incomprehension. My shingles became not much more than raindrops until I went outside and saw pain descending like a thousand firebirds. Once on the way back home to care for the dogs, one an old cripple, I stopped by a huge river, got naked, and threw myself in but then I’m too good a swimmer to go this way. Besides, the dogs would become depressed by their hunger as they do.
Courage and Survival
I’m simply not the sort of guy who throws himself on a live grenade to save the lives of his buddies. Think of the tombstone inscription: “His guts were blown out so that others may live.” A few months later a medal would be sent from the Pentagon in Washington to my home lauding me for “extraordinary courage.”
Courage is an antique word, more suitable to the nineteenth century, and does not apply to killing the enemy with drones. And I’m not talking about the plenitude of male courage of the cheesy variety. At my cabin during bird-hunting season a friend said, “It takes balls to drink three bottles of wine before dinner, then eat two whole chickens with more wine, and still go to the tavern for a couple of nightcaps.” He awoke hollering from suffocation later that evening. He had spilled the bottle of wine he took to bed and was now purple and his three English setters were sleeping on top of him. True, he walked as many as ten miles in a day of hunting, but our admiration for sheer consumption is limited. A petite girl at a bar in Rockford, Michigan, ate thirty-two hot dogs one day, but that certainly do
esn’t mean I want to marry her even if she ate ten pounds of foie gras at a sitting.
My sense of courage is to continue struggling against unassailable odds. Say the last few months of Anne Frank, or Lorca standing there on the mountainside waiting for the bullets. Or Mandelstam wandering in winter in Russia with the Stalinists giving chase in order to kill him. He felt lucky to have a bulky, warm overcoat and was able to sleep in ditches, invisible because he was covered with snow. He would peek out from the drifts. This is a far cry from an American poet on a grant in Europe, wishing he had the money for a fancier hotel. There is a new and wonderful edition of Mandelstam’s poetry translated and edited by Christian Wiman. Of course Mandelstam is a heartbreaker who some hockey fans can’t handle. On a recent morning I awoke at first light, around 4:30 A.M., with the notion that poets were anthropologists of the soul.
It is a shimmering hot, glorious Fourth of July, a national holiday in which I do not participate because of crowd fear, and my wife, Linda, just drove me the sixty yards to my studio, my art shack as I call it. I can’t walk that far because I have recently been diagnosed with spondylolisthesis. It’s troublesome to have an infirmity you can’t pronounce. The hardest part about not being able to walk is the melancholy look I get each morning from my dog. My profuse apologies to her are so much blather as she really doesn’t understand English other than a few words. I can no longer run down our gravel road holding a football, but then I have never done so. The gridiron is anathema to me. Don’t worry. I’m not going to write about pain as I have in the last two issues. Since diagnosis I have been sitting and brooding for a month in my studio like an infected mushroom. I’d like to be writing a madrigal but I don’t know how, a sixteenth-century Roman madrigal in honor of the exquisite Italian lamb shank recipe my wife made for me from a Batali book. With it I drank a simple Brouilly, a French light red, a bistro wine designed for summer months. Humble as they are I favor the shanks over the leg because the flavor is more intense.
It is my hope that lying down can be construed as courageous. I nap three times a day and find the prone position very good for thinking. I suspect that consciousness herself requires courage because it is easier and more pleasant just to play dumb but it can get you in a mess. My own physical downfall was partly due to the slump I can fall into after publication. Last fall I published both a novel and a book of poems, after which my head went to sleep and I totally lost my attentiveness to my shingles, not that there was anything to do, or so said the Mayo Pain Clinic, and this back infirmity was creeping up. Now some surgeon will play tiddledywinks with my vertebrae. When you’re older you know your body is going to shitcan but you never see what form it’s coming in.
This morning when I was driven the hundred steps to my studio I saw two baby wrens wrestling like puppies under the apple tree. With wings it’s awkward to wrestle but that’s what they were doing: flapping, flopping, jumping in battle. Not that far away in the honeysuckle bush in the raspberry enclosure there’s a nest of transcendently beautiful yellow warblers. The infants are said to weigh one-twentieth of an ounce, the size of honeybees. In a couple of months when they reach the size of bumblebees they will take off south to Costa Rica or a neighboring country where they, of course, have never been. How they’ll find their way is still somewhat of a mystery. There is an implicit, unconscious courage here. Some will flag and drown in the Gulf. In the spring when we used to fish off Key West, returning warblers would occasionally land on our skiff for a rest. Migrating Australian finches are said to stop for nine-second naps, not nearly enough for me. When I sit in my cheap plastic chair in front of the studio I’m brought to a dazed stop pondering the natural world. Here’s a little poem about sitting in this chair, staring at the garden:
Galactic
Sitting out in my chair near Linda’s garden
a mixture of flowers and vegetables, pink iris,
wild poppies, roses, blue salvia and veronica
among tomatoes, green beans, eggplant and onion.
I think that I sense the far-flung galaxies
and hear a tinge of the solar winds,
maybe not possible but I think it so.
With so many infirmities I await the miraculous.
Galaxies are only grand thickets of stars
in which we may hide forever they say.
Where is my dead brother I want to know?
The universe is wilderness. No one answers the phone
because no one has hands, just minds.
The hands have been forgotten back on earth.
Having been brought so low by my body I’ve been working on a survival plan, a bit absurd like all lists. Imagine Caesar’s:
Trash Egypt.
Conquer Great Britain, including Greenland.
Order a thousand barrels of wine for next year.
Order fifty Tunisian girls. I like their complexions.
That sort of thing. Mine is simply:
Get back your driver’s license. I wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days, but I can’t write Legends of the Yard. I had a reckless driving charge last fall and demanded a jury trial. This spring they dropped the charge. I had to take a written test. They looked at my license and kept it. They wouldn’t give it back. I told them I had driven sixty years and got only one traffic ticket. They seemed not to hear.
Write poetry. This is the only thing that raises my spirits amid the sodden pain I am experiencing. I sit in this studio during our prolonged heat wave feeling lucky that I am not Mandelstam trying to outrun Stalin in the Russian winter or Lorca standing on the hillside waiting for the high-powered 30.06 bullets to hit his back and ass, designed that way because he was known as gay. When in doubt, work on poems, the only thing that levitates your mood. It is your calling. Your money work—novels, etc.—doesn’t reward your soul. The poet is an anthropologist of the soul.
Banish the fantasy of moving back to a remote cabin in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It wouldn’t be helpful to become a faux Canadian, which I already am. I wanted to be born in Churchill and have a baby polar bear as a pet. I could save my money and come down to the wondrous strip clubs of Sault Sainte Marie, get drunk, and embrace the beauteous strippers who come all the way from Montreal with prime French butts.
Pay attention, as Zen master Deshimaru said, “as if you had a fire burning in your hair.” Or as D. H. Lawrence said, “The only aristocracy is that of consciousness.” Sort of “He who notices most lives the most,” a slight vulgarization. Just now I noticed a tiny wren baby crawling through tall grass through the lattice construction of the garden fence. He’s doubtless hungry, the most powerful motive.
Cook more. This is difficult because standing is difficult. However I must humbly follow the example of the baby wren. Crawl, kiddo. You have a high stool near the stove and counter, and it’s not asking too much to crawl across the room to the pantry for ingredients. A wren could do that. Pull down thy vanity, O man. The effect of good cooking on morale is high indeed. I have never been good at humility but occasionally I find it gives you a boost. Despite more than five decades of marriage, if you are both devout cooks, a certain amount of contentiousness arises during cooking. In this case your best sous chef is not your wife. Why is this? The lumps should have been flattened over fifty-two years, but there is something so deeply personal about cooking that the irascible ego easily pops up with a frown. I used to mostly cook late in the evening for the next day. This offered maximum freedom for me to overplay my hand. Yes, I like seven pounds of short ribs and twenty-three cloves of garlic in barley soup. Some will settle for less but they’re not writing barley poems.
Obviously I need courage to deal with my current dysfunctional body. And religion? The Bible says that the kingdom of God is within you. If so, I haven’t noticed it lately. I’m not making light of devotion or a mother praying to bring her baby back to life after it’s been c
ut out of the stomach of an anaconda in Venezuela. Human suffering has to be the largest of all question marks. You must beware of hope, a radically dangerous emotion. Hope can roll over and crush you. I went to a dozen doctors last winter in Tucson for shingles relief and each time I had a wide-eyed midwestern hope and faith that was promptly smeared. Hope is a bourgeois Tinker Bell that can transform into a guard dog of the most vicious nature. You raise your expectations then are gutted like a deer. However, if you need to say a little prayer, go ahead and moisten your lips for the deaf gods, although it’s like fly fishing in a sewer: “Raise your chin, O son of man, your doom is around the next corner on the left.”
These infirmities have been mounting up to a degree that I can’t help thinking I’m close to cashing out. Tomorrow at seven A.M. I get a steroid shot in the spine that might offer some temporary relief, then a booster in August in order to go to Paris. I’m desperate at the idea of missing the Paris trip, though it’s a book tour and I’ll mostly sit on a balcony near the Odeon and do interviews. Interviewers are muttonish but part of the game. Yes, I write longhand with a pen and tablet. This is hard for people to believe but to me the computer is the spawn of Satan. Then again, I’ve always been a Luddite, much saddened by the invention of the auto. Many people think a Ferrari is beautiful but it isn’t if you compare it to a horse.
Of course we are loaned this life, then suddenly one day it’s overdue. This is a little tight and nifty but so was La Rochefoucauld. I fully expect to take a long walk to Virgo to see the clusters of a trillion stars. I wonder how they counted them. I had worried about reaching the year 2000, at which I’ve been successful. All my dark dreams about dying young like so many in my humble trade never happened. Hundreds warned me I was going to die young from smoking and drinking but I disappointed them.
