by Jim Harrison
An old Chippewa I know carries a folded-up garbage bag in his pocket. He claims it is his portable home, keeping him warm and dry if he gets lost or tired. He finds coyote dens by scent, and whittles the heads of canes into renditions of his “dream birds.” His favorite drink is a double martini. He asked me to check for a phone number of a “love” he had lost in 1931. He was somewhat disturbed, he told me, when it occurred to him that people didn't know that every single tree was different from every other tree. He is making me a cane to repel bears and to attract wolves and women. I will hang this cane on the cabin wail, being genetically too Calvinist to have any interest in sorcery.
It seems I will never be reviewed by Edmund Wilson or Randall Jarrell or Kenneth Burke, something I aspired to at nineteen in the jungle of Grove Street. For years I've wanted to take a walk with E. M. Cioran. I've rid myself of the usual fantasies about money, actresses, models, food, fishing, hunting, travel, by enacting them, though the money evaporated at startling speed through what accountants refer to as “spending habits.” Cioran's mind is unique, the modernist temperament at an antipode not reached by novelists. I would get us mildly lost on the walk, which might amuse him. The name of Wittgenstein will not be mentioned. I want to ask Cioran to what degree the perception of reality is consensual. The answer will help me account for all of my bad reviews! Many of us apparently live in different worlds. Do we see the same sky as Crazy Horse? Think of Anne Frank's comprehension of the closet.
I know a pyramidal hill at least fifteen miles from the nearest dwelling. On this hill three small river systems have their beginnings, each of them a hundred or so miles long. I'm not giving out any directions to this place. The first two times I tried to go there I got turned around, succeeding on the third trip. My yellow Labrador was frightened on this hill, which in turn served to disturb me. The dog, however, is frightened of bears, coyotes, thunder, northern lights, the moon. I only stayed a few minutes.
Rilke said something on the order of “With all of its eyes the creature world beholds the open . . .” (Everyone should buy the astonishing new translation of Sonnets to Orpheus by Stephen Mitchell.) Unfavorable comparisons to animals are contraindicated. I confess I've talked at length to ravens, porcupines, crows, coyotes, infant porpoises, and particularly beautiful heads of garlic, but then others talk back at the television. It is natural for a child to imagine what a bird sees. “How do we know but that every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight closed to our senses five?” We don't. We should encourage ourselves to be a whale, a woman, a plant or planet, a lake, the night sky. There was a Cheyenne warrior named One Who Sees As A Bird: the tops of trees are ovoids bending away from the wind.
I'm a poor naturalist. A bird evokes the other times I've seen the bird, a delicious continuity, not a wish to run to my collection of bird books. I'm not against the idea of my work being forgotten if I can be an old geezer in a cabin smelling of wood smoke, kerosene, a bordeaux stain on my T-shirt, cooking a not-so-simple salmi of woodcock. It has only lately occurred to me that many of my concerns are anachronistic. Walking in the forest at night can be a cocaine substitute in addition to simply walking in the forest at night. Kokopele owned the best of all spirits for an artist. He led Picasso to do a gavotte at the age of eighty. He made Henry Miller a ping-pong champion.
Last August when I was turned around in a swamp I sat on a hummock and had a vision of death as a suck-hole in the universe, an interior plug, out of which we all go with a gurgle. I gurgled in the swamp. Frogs and birds answered. This is the sensuality of death, not the less beautiful for being terminal.
1986
Revenge
Everyone wants revenge, but scarcely anyone does anything about it. This is probably a good thing; in fact, this “good thing” is thought of as the social contract, wherein there is an implicit agreement by all to behave themselves, and incidents of misbehavior are to be dealt with by specifically designated authorities.
Unfortunately, nearly all of life is lived between the lines. An ungovernable passion in us that is capped by the sheer tonnage of law will squeeze out somewhere. On a certain, albeit low, level many of us regard the idea of capital punishment with mixed pleasure, but pleasure nevertheless. Some of us actually cheer outside the prison walls. In terms of gross receipts, Clint Eastwood has made a lot of people feel good. True, the mass has always loved the easy or childish stroke; only a nation in the most otiose moral stupor would turn out in droves for the profound silliness of Rambo. It's the kind of thinking that makes South Africa not all that bad but Nicaragua truly evil.
But before I get too high-minded, I should add that I'd like to see Stallone-Rambo sneak into Lebanon and deal with those crazed shitsuckers who beat, then shot, the young Navy man, Stethem, to death on the civilian American Airlines flight last June. The word civilian is important here. When an acquaintance of mine had his head, arms and legs chopped off as the result of a dope deal gone awry, I was upset—but then, business is business, as we are so fond of saying. It was the equivalent of war, and he was a soldier. Stethem, however, was flying home with a planeload of tourists when he was jumped on the face so relentlessly that his mom couldn't recognize him. More recently, a group of terrorists shanghaied a Mediterranean cruise ship, shot an old Jewish tourist named Klinghoffer and pitched him overboard in his wheelchair. The readily imagined visual is not pretty—the body would float for a while, but the chair would sink immediately. If I were to stop writing at this moment, walk into the bathroom and connect myself to a digital blood-pressure machine, the results would not be pleasant.
Why all this brooding and seething on both a personal and a national level? Despite the mood swings of a nation in disarray, probably no one is going to bring a living POW back from the jungles. And to get out of the level of comic-book mythology, it is doubtful that any recourse can be had in Stethem's death, nor any offered by our government, which is so lame and ineffectual in such matters. The fact that the Egyptian plane carrying Klinghoffer's murderers was escorted to Italy, only to have the ringleader set free, illustrates our bungling. It is obvious that we should be commissioning all the hot items to the Israelis on a piecework basis. Teddy Roosevelt launched a number of warships to secure the freedom of a single, solitary American citizen named Perdicaris, captured by a Moroccan sultan. “We want Perdicaris alive or Raisuli dead,” said Teddy. But then, this is no longer a rough-riding world, and if you can't hear a computer whirring in the background or don't watch the news, you are blessedly infantile.
Revenge, frankly, can't be understood on a political level. The news of the most striking horror conceivable can enter Washington at midnight and be extruded the next morning in the studied inanities of a press conference. Revenge is human. Moving back in time, literally as far from a press conference as one can travel, after Bighorn, some Cheyenne squaws drove awls into Custer's very dead ears so he might be more attentive in the afterlife. Custer had been warned before his folly. This is getting closer. Our hearts are territorial, and the things closest to our hearts—our love for another, the deepest of friendships, our sense of our own dignity and even our sense of justice—are so hopelessly fragile that some of us strike out wildly in defense.
But Americans have never made an art of revenge as have the Sicilians, Corsicans or Mexicans. We shuffle and blunder, wanting to be largehearted in victory. We want to be simpleminded frontiersmen who get the job done.
The first revenge story we are likely to hear concerns the fabled dick in a jar. Apocryphal or not, this story is ubiquitous. I recently heard it in bars and service stations in Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin. I first heard it in Reed City, Michigan, probably in 1948 or 1949. A group of boys from ten to twelve would hang around a gas station on their Schwinn balloon-tire bikes, listening to advice from a not-very-bright World War II veteran. Coca-Cola was a nickel a bottle, and there was the chance we would see Rochester from the Jack Benny radio show pass through town on his way t
o Idlewild, a black resort, in his huge limousine. Anyway, the pump jockey might show us his “kraut booty,” as he called it, including a bayonet with dried blood on it, the blood of an American boy. Mingled with the usual stories of Nazi girls’ fucking for chocolate bars was a horrifying tale.
“This buddy of mine over in Luther a few years ago was screwing this rich doctor's wife. She was a spitfire, and no man could handle this crazy bitch. The doctor found out about his wife's cheating. The doctor was sad, because there is no medicine to control a woman hungry for dick. The doctor started drinking and became mad as hell. He tracked his wife and my buddy to their love nest, a deer camp over near Leroy, south of Rose Lake. The doctor peeked in the cabin window and saw that the two lovers were all fucked out and asleep. He snuck in and chloroformed the both of them. He took a surgery knife and lopped off my buddy's cock and balls, then sewed up the hole in his crotch. He put the cock and balls in a jar of vinegar so they could be preserved, like pork tongues or dill pickles. He left the jar on the night table and went on home. So hours later, my buddy and the woman wake up feeling like they been operated on, but a woman, as you might know, has nothing to cut off. She sees the jar and the jig is up.”
“Did the guy die?” we asked.
“ ‘Course not. My buddy had to move to Detroit, because everybody knew. The nuts and bolts of the story is, he is now a girl. He sits down to pee and has taken up religion, because the simple fact is, the boy will never fuck again.”
“What happened to the jar?” someone asked inappropriately.
“Got me by the balls. Might still be there in the cabin.”
This fruitcake, peculiarly American tale served to make me forever wary of doctors’ wives. The most beautiful of them may as well be wearing a fright wig and an Elmer Fudd mask. Perhaps in the safety of a submarine. . . .
Of course, our banal story of rube or bumpkin revenge is a mere skeleton of classic revenge. Much of our mental makeup is a stream of rehearsals of threats, real or imagined, an inventory of resentments that we moderate or else become psychotic. Classical revenge demands a purity of hatred against a backdrop of a specific code of honor usually found only in cultures that have not lost their traditional underpinnings—Sicilians, Corsicans, Mexicans again come to mind. In the United States, such notions are usually limited to rural areas of the South and West and to cities with large ethnic populations. In Detroit a few years back, there was a shoot-out between a group of Albanian cousins and brothers over a question of honor that left the police and the criminal element gasping. With the exception of the Belushi brothers, Albanians win the inscrutability contest over the Chinese.
Revenge doesn't thrive on situational ethics. You can scarcely kill your wife for unfaithfulness if you belong to a swap club. Moral waffling doesn't lend itself to the kind of sharply delineated code of ethics that is the breeding ground of righteous anger. Any wrong committed against you where your first impulse is to call the police or a lawyer is not fit material for revenge. The anger has to be a blow to the solar plexus or the groin: one has to stew, brood, agonize. As Faulkner might have it, the grief must grieve on universal bones.
Perhaps there is something identifiable in our history that makes us clumsy at our revenge in comparison with the Latins. The Romance languages suppurate with blood and intrigue, from the peasantry to the highest Church levels, while English (as spoken in America) has given the world explicit notions of the frontier, the gunfight and the quick-draw artist. Anyone in southern Europe knows it's smarter to shoot your enemy, good or bad, in the back. If you are right, why endanger yourself? The following little story from France is a wonderful example. (This and the other anecdotes are true, with situations and locations changed for obvious reasons—the legal profession has so trivialized human concourse that it can best be understood as a nationwide smear of Krazy Glue preventing freedom of movement. Much of future revenge will center on the legal profession.)
An old man in France told me this one evening over a goblet of calvados. “During the occupation of France, there was a reasonably successful farmer near a small village in Normandy. This farmer did his best to ignore the Germans, had a wife and two teenaged daughters and a son away at war. The farmer raised pigs and fed them primarily on beets and beet greens. Scarcely anyone knew that he and his family provided a safe house for members of the Resistance and for Jews trying to escape from the country. There was an envious couple in town and, as an aside, the husband had been thrashed by the farmer for trying to molest one of his daughters when she was a child. The couple, Vichy types, caught wind of the farmer's Resistance activities and reported them to the Germans. The Germans raided the farm and found two Jewish children, whom they summarily bayoneted. The farmer and his wife were forced to watch while their pigs were killed, their daughters raped and strangled. The Germans then held a barbecue.
“When the son returned from the war, he heard the story but was wise enough to delay his revenge, allowing the couple to think they had gotten away with their betrayal. In 1947, the son and two of his friends bound and kidnapped the couple. They took them to an abandoned quarry where a large cave had been partially filled with a ton or so of beets and a dozen pigs. The son and his friends returned in a few weeks with a dozen villagers. They all toasted the well-gnawed bones of the couple and had a fine pig roast there in the quarry. I cherish the moment the pigs finished the beets and began chewing on those swine. May they be eaten in hell forever.”
This is a wonderful piece of classic revenge for not altogether obvious reasons: The son waited in order to give the couple a sense of prosperous grace—revenge, as they say in Palermo, is a dish best served cold—and, more important, the punishment precisely suited the complexion of the crime. There on the dark floor caked with pig shit, you can feel the first bite. Bullets would have been peaceful and unearned bee stings in such a case.
Of course, revenge is frequently captious and childish. A man shoots a recalcitrant cigarette machine. A drunk with a cleft palate was teased and mimicked by snowmobilers in a bar I occasionally visit. He demolished a dozen of their machines with his three-quarter-ton pickup. A friend in San Francisco was justifiably enraged by his landlord. He bored a hole in the roof and gave the landlord's apartment a several-thousand-gallon hosing that, unfortunately, streamed through the floor into his own apartment.
And at a certain point, there is a baffling stupidity to anger. Years ago, when I learned that my sister's first husband had slugged her, I made inquiries to find out how I could get him murdered; but I was on a Guggenheim grant and could scarcely handle the seven-grand fee. I settled for a phone threat. Years before that, I set out to murder the drunken driver who had killed my father and sister; but he, too, had been killed in the accident. I suspect that affairs of the blood and those of love bring us closest to the flash point.
Another acquaintance is a commercial fisherman from Seattle: “I came home from two months at sea. It was barely after dawn when I got to the house. I was too young to know that it's only good etiquette to warn your wife that you're coming home. I took off my boots and tiptoed up the stairs, horny as could be.
“Well, she wasn't alone, and you know who was with her? My best friend! Well, I slipped my .38 out of the dresser drawer and looked down at them through the sights, wondering which one to kill first. I heard my three-year-old daughter cough in the next room. My wife looked beautiful, and I thought of all the good times I had had with my friend Bob. I knew this kind of thing could happen with friends on both sides of the fence, though I didn't know why. Just proximity, I guess. So I was standing there and I suddenly pressed down on his neck with my free hand until his eyes were popping. I jammed the .38 in his mouth up to the cylinder and cocked the pistol. My wife woke up, but she knew enough not to say anything. She was rigid as ice. I lifted the barrel up hard against his palate and ripped the pistol out, with his teeth coming out with the sight. I can say he will never forget me. I walked out of the room, kissed my daughter good-by
e, and now I'm here in Corpus Christi.”
There are certain people whom one does not advise to seek professional help, a marriage counselor or a minister. They are neither better nor worse than the rest of us, but they are there. To say that such people have atavistic notions of justice is mostly to provide fodder for the modern-living pages of newspapers, where not much can be lost because there was never much at stake. I tried to persuade this man to go back to Seattle and make amends with his wife, and all he did was break into tears and walk out of the bar—and this was ten years after the event.
Naturally, the origin of the taboo of adultery is that the social contract in small communities demands it in the name of order. Modern urban life weakens the taboo a great deal, but many men and women remain distinctly unmodern. I remember telling a feminist that a traveler in the eighteenth century had noted that an Indian tribe in the upper Midwest punished a squaw for adultery by letting everyone ceremonially fuck her in public. If she lived through it, fine. Before the feminist could go for my throat, I added that the guilty man was executed immediately.