Just Before Dark

by Jim Harrison

  When I learned this I began to understand that the period of zazen that lays the foundation of the day is meant to grow until it swallows both the day and night. Time viewed as periods of practice and nonpractice is as fanciful a duality as the notion that Zen is Oriental. The kapok in the zafu beneath your ass is without nationality. The Bodhidharma and Dogen saw each other across an ocean river that is without sex, color, time or form. What is between Arcturus and Aldebaran?

  I was wondering the other day about this body that wakes up to a cold rain from an instructive dream, takes its coffee out to the granary to sit on a red cushion. The body sees the totems of consolation hanging around the room: animal skins, a heron wing, malformed antlers, crow and peregrine feathers, a Sioux-painted coyote skull, a grizzly turd, a sea-lion's caudal bone, a wild-turkey foot, favored stones, a brass Bureau of Indian Affairs body tag from Wyoming Territory, a bear claw, a prehistoric grizzly tooth. These are familiar, beloved objects of earth, but the day is not familiar because it is a new one. The bird that passes across the window is a reminder of the shortness of life, but it is mostly a bird flying past the window.

  “The days are stacked against what we think we are,” I wrote in a poem. The point here, albeit blunt, is that when you forget what you are, you truly “see” the day. The man who howls in anger on the phone, because he has been crossed, an hour later is a comic figure dog-paddling in a sump of pride. He isn't conscious enough at the moment to realize that there is evil afloat in the land, within and without. This condition can be called “self-sunken.” A little later, when he takes a walk on the shores of the lake, he does himself a favor by becoming nothing. He forgets being “right” or “wrong” which enables him to watch time herself flickering across the water. This is a delightful illusion.

  The hardest thing for me to accept was that my life was what it was every day. This seemed to negate notions of grandeur necessary for an interest in survival. The turnaround came when an interviewer asked me about the discipline that I use to be productive. It occurred to me at that moment that discipline was what you are every day, how conscious you are willing to be. In the Tao te Ching (in the splendid new Stephen Mitchell translation) it says “Act without doing; work without effort.” So you write to express your true nature, part of which is an aesthetic sense that reflects the intricacies of life rather than the short-circuits devised by the ego. Assuming the technique of the art has been learned, it can then arrive out of silence rather than by the self-administered cattle prod to the temples that is post-modernism.

  After this body eats a tad too much for lunch it returns to the granary, stokes the fire, and takes a nap with its beloved dog who, at eleven, is in the winter of her life. A distinct lump of sorrow forms which, on being observed, reminds the body of the Protestant hymn, “Fly, Fly Away,” and we are returned to the fragility of birds. The sense of transience is then embraced. When the dead sister reappears in dreams she is always a bird.

  On waking with a start, because it is the dog's nature to bark on occasion at nothing in particular, the work is resumed. There has been an exhausting effort in recent years through the form of poetry and novels to understand native cultures. The study of native cultures tends to lead you far afield from all you have learned, including much that you have perceived and assumed was reality. At first this is disconcerting, but there are many benefits to letting the world fall apart. I find that I have to spend a great deal of time alone in the natural world to be of use to anyone else. Above my desk there is a wonderfully comic reproduction of Hokusai's blind men leading each other across a stream.

  Whatever I have learned I owe largely to others. It was back in 1967 that I met Peter Matthiessen and Deborah Love, then Gary Snyder, though in both cases I had read the work. But in these formative stages of practice the sangha is especially important. George Quasha introduced me to the work of Trungpa—Cutting through Spiritual Materialism is an improbably vital book. Shortly thereafter I met Bob Watkins, a true Zen man, who had studied with Suzuki Roshi and Kobun Chino Sensei. The work of Lucien Stryk has been critical to me though I have never met him. Then, through Dan Gerber, I met Kobun himself, who has revived me a number of times. Through all of this I had the steadying companionship of Dan Gerber who is presently my teacher. Without this succession (or modest lineage!) I'd be dead as a doornail since I have been a man, at times, of intemperate habits. I'm still amazed how the world, with my cooperation, can knock me off Achala's log back into the fire. There is something here of the child who, upon waking, thinks he can fly, even though he failed badly the day before.

  There is an urge to keep everything secret. But this is what Protestants call the sin of pride, also greed. They have another notion relevant here, that of the “stumbling block” wherein the mature in the faith behave in such a way as to impede the neophyte. There is, sadly, a lot of this among Buddhists, the spiritual materialism that infers that I have lived in this town a long time and you are only a newcomer. This is like shouting at a child that he is only three years old. It is also the kind of terrifying bullshit that has permanently enfeebled Christianity. Disregarding an afterlife, he who would be first will be last.

  We should sit after the fashion of Dogen or Suzuki Roshi: as a river within its banks, the night sky in the heavens, the earth turning easily with her burden. We must practice like John Muir's bears: “Bears are made of the same dust as we and breathe the same winds and drink the same waters, his life not long, not short, knows no beginning, no ending, to him life unstinted, unplanned, is above the accident of time, and his years, markless, boundless, equal eternity.”

  This is all peculiar but quite unremarkable. It is night now and the snow is falling. I go outside and my warm slippers melt a track for a few moments. To the east there is a break in the clouds and I feel attended to by the stars and the blackness above the clouds, the endless blessed night that cushions us.

  1990

  Poetry as Survival

  There have been quite enough exquisite apologias for poetry written over the centuries, from Aristotle to Catullus and Vergil, Wang Wei, Dante, Shakespeare and Dryden, down to Whitman, Yeats, Pound and García Lorca. But then, unlike the sciences, such knowledge is not easily transmittable or cumulative, and an art so seemingly fragile to the masses has its value in continual question by even apparently educated men.

  Frankly, this is not my fault, and I have long since given up concerning myself with the matter. As a poet I am the bird, not the ornithologist, and I am not going to spend my increasingly precious days stuffing leaks in an educational system as perverse and sodden as the mercantile society for which it supplies faithful and ignorant fodder. If you wished to draw attention to poetry in a country where anything not at least peripherally attached to greed is considered nonsense, you would have to immolate a volunteer poet in a 751 BMW. In a Giorgio Armani suit. Wearing a gold Rolex. With the first infant porpoise to wear eye shadow on his lap. That sort of thing.

  In other words, if you have to ask what poetry is good for, it's never going to be any good for you. Poetry came into being before the first club was swapped for an attractive antler, and about the same time Orc traded a lady a wild melon for raising her otter-skin skirt. Poetry, like the grizzly bear, is good for its own magnificent selfness and is not a utilitarian cog to improve someone's life-style. Poetry may very well help you get behind. Your legs might grow downward into the ground in certain locations. You will also turn inside out without warning.

  The most ubiquitous misunderstanding of poetry is that it is heightened and energized daily speech. Martin Heidegger said, “Poetry proper is never merely a higher mode of everyday language. It is rather the reverse: every-day language is a forgotten and therefore used-up poem, from which there hardly resounds a call any longer.” Poetry at its best is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak. Poets are folks who know they are going to die someday and feel called upon to make up songs about this death and the indefinite
reprieve they are traveling through. Rarely a philosopher, the poet hopes to celebrate life on life's terms, even though he works within the skeleton of a myth to which there is no longer a public celebration. As Gerald Vizenor (the astounding Native American author of Griever: An American Monkey King in China) would have it, “He holds cold reason on a lunge line while he imagines the world.”

  Of course, such temperaments are capable of grand absurdities, and the presumption of the comic is a more graceful modus operandi than a longish face, or waving your heart around by its bloody strings; like the ministry, poetry is thought to be a calling, but unlike specifically religious vocations, poetry can't cut off the horse's legs to get him into a stall. In order for Shakespeare to create the character of Hamlet he must also be capable of creating Falstaff, and A Midsummer Night's Dream.

  But to return to earth: Americans seem to wish to live within situation comedies and unquestionably elect their officials on this basis. Yet there is a wild spiritual longing in the landscape that surfaces in dozens of odd forms: Jimmy Swaggart, est, channeling and other New Age nostrums, body-Nazi fitness mystics, drug obsessives, music goofies, even the nether forms of the ecological movement where Smokey the Bear seems to want to mate Saint Teresa.

  You particularly notice this on long first-class, expense-account flights when your seatmate invariably asks, “What do you do?” When you say “Poet” you get either a quiet ride or the sort of weirdly fascinating conversation I imagine you might receive if you admitted you were a psychiatrist. What emerges, à la those fictive Russian train rides of the nineteenth century, is the secret life, the unlived life, the immense weight of longing, the puzzlement of mortality, the concealed idiosyncratic religion everyone carries around like a bulletproof (one hopes) vest. It is important to keep the conversation visceral, so you insist that a poet is only “the pulse of a wound that probes to the opposite side” (García Lorca). You tell your seatmate that when he looks in the mirror he might say, “Jeezo-peezo, I'm getting old,” while Shakespeare said, “Devouring time, blunt thou thy lion's paws,” and the latter scans better. You tell him that when he sees a lovely naked woman on a bed he might say “Wow,” while García Lorca said:

  Your belly is a battle of roots,

  your lips a blurred dawn,

  under the tepid roses of the bed

  the dead moan, waiting their turn.

  If my fellow passenger is involved with computers or becomes irritable, I like to use Vizenor to remind him that “we remember dreams, not data, at the wild end.” Of course it is important to remain light, loose and friendly through all of this. The average highly placed executive is more macho than a Mexican assassin, what with the executive's insistence on playing hardball around the clock. In return for my modest bon mots I receive insider stock tips, although I am too mistrustful to indulge myself in these.

  Who shall revoke jubilance?” Rilke asked, rather innocently, to which we could answer, “Everyone and everything.” Joseph Campbell pointed out that in mythological terms the “rejection of the call” walls the Hero up in boredom and dread. A poet is supposed to be a hero of consciousness, and the most destructive force in his or her life is liable to be the unwritten poem. There is a touch of the schizoid to the practice of any art, and the poet becomes an outsider to maintain the integrity of what he writes. During not infrequent depressions (an occupational hazard) I wonder how black and Native American poets survive at all, for they are enveloped in a double schizoid bind, the Indians perhaps more than the blacks because they are our most thoroughly ignored minority.

  Perhaps I've rejected too loudly certain utilitarian aspects of poetry, if only because we are capable of turning everything—from a simple rock to a guitar to violent death—into a nostrum, another of those self-help missions we use to hammer ourselves as if we were tract houses. D.H. Lawrence insisted that the only aristocracy was consciousness, if we consider all the other limitations within and without our lives. If this notion is valid, and I suspect it is, then poetry could be the primary aid if you wish to be more conscious, a somewhat singular ambition when you take a sideward glance at popular culture.

  The flip side comes from that grandiose, rather romantic philosopher Fricdnch Nietzsche, who once said, “I'd rather be a satyr than a saint,” when he, in fact, was a tertiary-syphilitic hunchback. But he also said, “Stare into the abyss long enough, and it will stare back into thee.” It has become apparent to many that the ultimate disease, the abyss of post-modernism in art and literature, is subjectivity, and that the disease is both sociopathic and terminal. In other words, if the poet or aficionado of consciousness does not own a coequal passion for life herself, the social contract, he better be wary about the abyss he chooses. The obvious traps are the two halves of the brain in incestuous embrace, neurotic noodling, and ordinary spiritual adventurism of the most claustrophobic sort.

  I remember that in my weakest moments I have regretted the problems I've caused my family and myself for refusing to be a poet-teacher: the shuddering economic elevator of the self-employed to whom the words boom and bust are euphemisms; the writer as farm laborer, block layer, journalist, novelist, screenwriter, but still thinking of himself as a poet. At times when I actually needed a battery of psychiatrists the alternatives were fishing, bird hunting, and drinking. I suspect this intimacy with the natural world has been a substitute for religion, or a religion of another sort. I remember as a young bohemian discovering garlic in New York City in 1957 when a Barnard girl made me listen to Richard Tucker sing something from Jewish liturgy. I was swept away by beauty, also jealousy, as the music was so powerful and unlike the sodden Protestant hymns of my youth. I felt the same thing years later in St. Basil's Cathedral in Leningrad, where I was told that in the Russian Orthodox Church one does not talk to God, one sings.

  I am reaching toward something here by a circuitous route. At the very least the life I have chosen, although it always lacked a safety net, made up for the lack with pure oxygen. I remember a single year when I went to Europe, the Soviet Union, Africa and South America. I kept recalling Allen Ginsberg's line about “the incredible music of the streets.” Cultures less economically sophisticated than our own began to fascinate me. Gabriel García Márquez's “magical realism” doesn't seem unrealistic in South America, but you don't have to go that far to discover a different way of looking at things.

  Up until half a dozen years ago I had collected a large library on the Native American, but was unremarkably short on firsthand knowledge—unremarkably and typically, as it is far easier to read about a people than to encounter them. I had been to the Blackfeet Reservation in Browning, Montana, on a prolonged drunk with Tom McGuane; we were actually kicked out of a local bar, and that takes some doing in Browning. I had also attended the Crow Fair, a massive gathering and celebration in Crow Agency, Montana, with five to seven thousand Native Americans in attendance. This was more than a decade ago, and there were only a few whites present. I watched the dancing for two days and nights, sleeping sporadically on the Custer Battlefield. It was a spellbinding experience, one of the few of my life, and there was a deep sense of melancholy that there was nothing in my life that owned this cultural validity except, in a minimal sense, my poetry. Thousands of people in traditional costumes dancing together! What the hell's going on here? My bubble of reality had temporarily burst; it was as if I were stoked on peyote on the planet Jupiter.

  The power of the experience passed, although it nagged until a few years ago when I worked on an abortive film project about Edward Curtis, the photographer of Indians. There was research money so I left my books at home and wandered around Indian reservations for several months. I was a quiet observer, quite shy in fact, because I didn't want to be confused with the anthropologists and spiritual shoppers who drive these people crazy.

  On the Navajo reservation up Canyon de Chelly, on the branch called Canyon del Muerto, two very disturbing things happened. A man, ragged and plainly insane, rushed out of
a thicket, skipping across the shallow river, and began beating our truck with a club. His head appeared to turn nearly all the way around in the manner of an owl's head. Our Navajo guide, who was Christian, yelled, “Get out of here, you demon, in the name of Jesus,” explaining as the lunatic fled back into the thicket that what he yelled was the only thing that “worked.” A little later I spent hours helping get a truck loaded with crab apples unstuck from the river. There was a young Navajo man, his wife, and two children, and the children were terribly frightened of me. I found this embarrassing and sorrowful as I worked away half under the truck, glancing up at the Anasazi petroglyphs. If you're from northern Michigan you know how to get a pickup unstuck. I tried everything to charm the children, and the parents attempted to help, but I was plainly a “demon” to them. Later I was told that the terror might have come from my blind left eye, which is foggy and wobbles around with a life of its own.

  What actually began that day was an obsession, fueled less by guilt than by a curiosity that was imperceptibly connected to my poetry. Charles Olson said that a poet “must not traffick in any but his own sign,” but I thought these people might clarify why I had spent over forty years wandering around in the natural world. I hoped the two cultures had more to offer each other than their respective demons.

  This little essay, in fact, was occasioned by absolute exhaustion after a book tour, a retreat to my cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and the reading of the novel Love Medicine by the Native American Louise Erdrich, and then A Yellow Raft in Blue Water by her husband, Michael Dorris, somehow equal and absolutely first-rate books that restored my equilibrium and energies and an intense and nagging curiosity. Then I reread Survival This Way, a series of interviews with American Indian poets by Joseph Bruchac, published by the University of Arizona Press (whose Sun Tracks series seems to lead in the publishing of American Indian writers); Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back, an anthology edited by Bruchac and published by Greenfield Review Press; and the new and comprehensive Harper's Anthology of 20th Century Native American Poetry edited by Duane Niatum.