by Jim Harrison
But then there have been quite enough general assessments of this theory and practice of dread. One nearly envies the bliss-ninnies, the New Agers, proclaiming from mountaintops that help is on the way. How can so many ladies have been Pocahontas or Mary Queen of Scots in a previous life? It seems no one was the serf's child who was fed to the lord's hounds on a whim. On a recent bypass through Santa Fe for a bite to eat (broiled chicken with red chile sauce), I saw a huge crystal for sale for ten thousand dollars. In a time and country when absolutely everything is possible for those with sufficient greed and power, this crystal in the shop window was so wildly awful as to be somehow comic and comforting.
What do I mean by dream as a metaphor of survival, even, in fact, the path toward home? I am certainly not qualified to describe the way the unconscious struggles to heal wounds, and such published descriptions strike one as finite indeed, in that they try to render a magnificent fiction (the dream itself) into an immediate, therapeutic solution. (So what, of course, if it helps?) Part of the struggle of the novelist is to convince the reader that the nature of character is deeply idiosyncratic to a point just short of chaos, that the final mystery is the nature of personality.
In my own, not very extraordinary case the biographical details are explicit: there was a severe eye injury causing blindness at age seven (I had been playing “doctor” with an unkind little girl). My instability was further compounded by the deaths of my father and nineteen-year-old sister in an accident when I was twenty-one. These were the two people closest to me, and in the legal entanglements of the aftermath, I was witless enough to look at the accident photos left on an absent lawyer's desk. Both of the death certificates read “macerated skull.”
These were the main events along with a number of other violent deaths of friends and relatives including seven suicides. The capstone seems to have been the accidental death of my brother's fourteen-year-old daughter about a dozen years ago. There had been a hundred-day vigil while she was in a coma, and a wintry funeral near Long Island Sound. Much later I dedicated a long poem to her called “The Theory & Practice of Rivers,” of which this is a small part:
Near the estuary north of Guilford
my brother recites the Episcopalian
burial service over his dead daughter.
Gloria, as in Gloria in excelsis.
I cannot bear this passion and courage;
my eyes turn toward the swamp
and sea, so blurred they'll never quite
clear themselves again. The inside of the eye,
vitreous humor, is the same pulp found
inside the squid. I can see Gloria
in the snow and in the water. She lives
in the snow and water and in my eyes.
(Only now do I connect the eye material to my wound at seven.)
There was, quite naturally, a cycle of predictably severe depressions, beginning at age fourteen, then nineteen, twenty-three, twenty-seven, thirty-three, thirty-seven, and forty-three. Curiously, this cycle of lows, along with what dogs, cats, horses I owned at the time, is the way I ascribe “chapters” and carve up my life. It is evident to me now that the first of the depressions was caused when my father had to move our family of seven from a rural, heavily wooded area in northern Michigan south to near East Lansing so we could ultimately attend college. I remember that my first reaction to our new quarters was that there were no trout, the rivers were muddy and the lakes were warm, and the pheasants in the field behind the house were no substitute for the herons, turtles, bobcats, deer, coyotes and loons of my early years. And even more poignant for an utterly self-conscious twelve-year-old, a new community would have to adjust itself to my wounded left eye.
This is only the skeleton of a life, albeit a tad melancholy. I should add, before I reach the heart of the matter, that I attacked this life with a great deal of neurotic arrogance and energy (fifteen books, fifty or so articles, twenty screenplays) though I certainly would not have survived without the help of my beloved wife, my daughters, my remaining family, and a group of faithful friends. And (of course) a psychoanalyst in New York, Lawrence Sullivan, whom I began to visit the year before Gloria's death. Coincidental with her passing was the death of my father-in-law, the diagnosis of my mother's colonic cancer, and I, quite pathetically, fractured my foot while chasing my bird dog. In addition, after ten years of averaging twelve grand a year, I noted amid these disasters that I was making exactly as much that year as the president of General Motors. However, my first success had become quite meaningless within the framework of my life, and I added cocaine to an increasing alcohol problem. My sole survival gesture at the time, other than infrequent visits to Sullivan, was to drive north into the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and buy a remote log cabin on a river. Typical of my behavior, I had not bothered going into the cabin before I wrote the check.
It has dawned on me that we appear to make certain specific decisions on a subconscious level far before we realize them, then simultaneously war against these decisions on a conscious level. This is only to say that pigs love their mud, and unless one is sufficiently desperate one continues to fritter away at the perimeters, recreating the problems of the neglected core on a daily cycle that is shot full of self-drama. As an instance, after five years of visiting Sullivan in New York, I took back to the hotel our extensive correspondence and was appalled to discover that I had created a serial repetition of complaint, a “Volga Boatman” dirge of whining about the same things: drinking, drugs, the loss of my loved ones, life as a continuum of defeat despite my apparent worldly success. Compulsive, ritualistic behavior tends to hold back chaos no matter how self-destructive. At the time I cherished a quote from Yeats, “Those men who in their writings are most wise, own nothing but their blind, stupefied hearts,” conveniently neglecting another Yeatsian question, “What portion of the world can the artist have, who has awakened from the common dream, but dissipation and despair?”
Slowly, and mostly in my imagination, I had begun to swim in waters that sensible folks would readily drown in, mostly in the area of consensual reality. The therapy began to take effect and my outward life gradually became more and more absorbed in hunting and fishing, and walks in the undifferentiated wilderness of the U.P. that began as short, lazy jaunts, and which lengthened with the years to ten miles or so. There were quite wonderful comic aspects of a brown, burly man fighting crotch chafe plunging through swamps, thickets, over steep hills, down a gully holding a startled bear. I rewarded these exertions by preparing enormous, complicated dinners. Concurrently my work began to revolve around more “feminine” subjects, the acquiring of new voices, and away from a concern with the “men at loose ends” that tends to characterize the fiction of most male writers.
It was in the arena of mortal play that is the dream that these changes had their source and increased in volume. One's dream life has always struck me as curiously Buddhist as the dream points toward the feeling that “the path is the way,” rather than Western geometric constructs vis-à-vis ladders, steps, guideposts, the Ten (not eleven) Commandments. I became absolutely convinced that barring unfortunate circumstances we all are, in totality, what we wish to be, and if something were quite wrong, the “wrongness” came from a radically skewed and wounded core that had to be approached.
I'm a little hesitant to admit that the majority of the striking dreams occurred in the last few days of the waxing moon and at the cabin rather than my home, hesitant as the notion of any relation between dreaming and the moon is too daffy and hopefully accidental. Perhaps I am closer to a dream life in the wilderness. The time span involved is about twelve years in this sampling.
There were slides of glass in my spine preventing the free flow of whatever flows up and down the spine. This is too obvious to comment on, other than the way an “Ur” dream may release the possibility of others. I knew nothing of Kundalini yoga at the time.
For the first time I saw the faces of my father and sister, not as torn
or macerated, but normal, except they had the bodies of mourning doves. They were serene.
A comic one but not at the time. An enormous, glistening-faced wild boar appeared at the foot of my bed in the cabin loft and told me in a radio baritone to “change your life.” I began doing so by starting the generator and turning on the lights.
I went into a room which was full of a dozen rather soiled and sweating women, some lean but most really chunky. My dick was sticking out of my trousers and I was embarrassed. They put me at ease and mentioned with laughter that it was a hard life being immigrants. We wallowed, sucked and screwed for hours and I awoke exhausted and happy. Since I have a fantasy penchant for austere “ice queens” this was a little puzzling. Versions of this dream reappeared and years later it occurred to me that our culture tends to treat older women as immigrants.
I was out in a wilderness of extreme cliffs and sharp-edged boulders. I leapt off a cliff with the manuscript of my new novel (Sundog) in my arms. I was injured horribly but survived, crawling around to pick up the pages. I looked up at the cliff edge far above me and was rather pleased with myself. I wondered why my dread of publication took itself into the wilderness.
At dusk one rainy autumn evening I saw a timber wolf near my cabin after hearing her howl several evenings. A few days later I dreamt I found her out near the road, her back broken by a passing car. I knelt beside her and she flowed into my mouth until I held within myself her entire body. I remember idly thinking in the dream that I had tried so hard to lose weight and now I was pregnant with a female wolf.
My father and sister are being driven down the middle of a river in a soundless car by two Native Americans. The four of them are quite happy. The driver pulls up to the shore and tells me flat out that I was never supposed to be a chief in the first place, but a medicine man. I interpreted this to mean that though I was a miserable failure at life I was doing quite well in my art, and if I pursued my art strongly enough I could heal myself and might help heal others. Soon after I began to write a long poem called “The Theory & Practice of Rivers.”
A very disturbing dream. I was with two medicine men who were dressed in leather and furs. One was mortally wounded and embraced me, asking me to take his place. Again, I interpreted this as a message to bear down on my art. I've long been a student of Native Americans since my childhood but would not dream of trying to “become” one. As Charles Olson inferred, a poet must not “traffick” in any but his own sign.
I was surrounded by a crowd of people who were trying to kill me. My skin began to ache and I crouched there with feathers shooting painfully out of me. I became a bird and flew away. This reminded me of the “ego” as an accretion of defenses that no longer functions. When we are alive, we are always ahead of it.
I was staying in New York City with my agent. Both of us were having a difficult time. One afternoon we decided to play gin rummy though we were unsure of the rules. While playing cards we watched the progression of a massive excavation next door. My agent asked what was even farther below the five-story excavation. I told him there were watery grottos full of blind albino dolphins. He is accustomed to such explanations from me. That night I dreamed that we were playing cards and a monster came out of the excavation and broke through the window of the ground-floor apartment. It was towering above us but we continued playing cards because the monster was only me. My eyes were lakes, my hair trees, my cheek was a meadow with a river (I first thought it was a scar) flowing across it. In any event, I had become the landscape I most loved.
A more didactic dream, like the wild boar, beginning with a voiceless lecture to the effect that there were three worlds and I only knew two of them. I remain unsure of this. Then the dream downshifted into a hyper-reality where alternately a cobra and a coyote entered into my chest cavity, taking the place of my spine and skull. In my youth I enjoyed snakes, but then was frightened of them for a long time. After this dream they didn't bother me. I remembered that in my childhood I was somewhat confused over the difference between people and farm and wild animals. Once while we were fishing I asked my father and he said, “People live inside and animals live outside.” I accepted this explanation as adequate.
A wonderfully obvious dream. I am in New York City in the form of an ordinary red-tailed hawk, the most common hawk in the northern Midwest. I am trapped in a narrow opening between buildings where I have been investigating the evident fact that there are secret, unrecorded floors in New York apartment buildings. I thrashed my wings, tearing feathers and spraining a pinion. Sullivan discovers me and draws me out of the wedge. He holds me as a falconer would smoothing my feathers and allowing me to fly off.
I am in a clear glass coffin, dead amid soil, moss, vines and flowers, being looked at by a crowd. A slender, brown youth breaks through the crowd and breaks the coffin open with a club and I jump out. At first I thought the brown youth was me, but on a closer look I saw it was my fifteen-year-old daughter, whose recent problems had brought me quite painfully back to life.
I was in L.A. working on a movie project and felt quite literally peeled in body and mind. I dreamt of a crow I had stared at for a long time at my grandfather's farm as a child. The crow grew larger and I noticed that there was belled harness around its neck. I got on and we flew to a sandbar in the Manistee River where we fished and bathed. The crow did not fly me back to L.A., so I had to get on a plane.
One night I thought I was awake but wasn't. I heard someone crying and discovered it was a weeping boy lodged behind my organs and against my spine. When I awoke I immediately realized that this weeping boy, retained from post-trauma times, had caused me a lot of problems and I set about getting rid of him.
This is a recurrent dream, though only once was Judith there, and only once was the dream resplendent. The hillside continues to reappear. My dead sister Judith was in a gown on a hillside, bare except for a dense thicket which was virtually throbbing with life. She beckoned me to this thicket so I might be restored.
A comic, literary incident. I was in an estuarine area near the seashore. A combination crypt, vault, septic tank floated up. I was urged to put all literary jealousies, ambitions, anger in it. I did so and nudged it seaward. Far from shore it stuck itself on a sandbar along with others and I wondered who else had done the same thing.
Last winter I suffered a period of extreme exhaustion from writing two novellas, plus six versions of two screenplays, within a year. On April Fool's Day I began a month's car trip with no specific destinations, highlighted by wandering through the canyon country of southern Utah. But when I opened the cabin in early May I was still exhausted in spirit and body. I dreamt several nights in a row that I should walk the “edges,” the fertile area in terms of flora and fauna between the darker forest and the open country. There was also the suggestion in the dream that the birds of North America are largely misnamed. I took off on foot, rediscovering again that the surest cure for mental exhaustion is physical exhaustion, though only if you keep it “light.” Dream advice must not be taken as another sodden nostrum.
I was way back in terra incognita with a friend. At the edge of a black-spruce bog in a thicket we found a moss-covered cement slab with iron rings. We were fearful. We questioned, what's under it—hell, a snake pit, the repository of nightmares? My friend indicates it's up to me, I mean the contents. We lift the slab aside. The pit is full of brilliant blue sky.
A huge Italian miner from the western Upper Peninsula is sitting at a laden table with his family. He points to a large glass of red wine and pronounces “Anything more than this is an emotional hoax.” I found this recent dream quite disturbing as I like a before-dinner whiskey or two, though on occasion it makes me unhappy with its stun-gun effect. Wine, by comparison, is gentle.
At home I have insomnia, falling asleep finally an hour before dawn. I am jolted back awake by a dream where I am whirling on the bed, shedding and sloughing layers of skin in a blur. Now I am much smaller and painted half bright yellow, ha
lf pitch-black. Out the window above me I can see far into space to thousands of multicolored galaxies far beyond the Milky Way. I feel totally at home in this universe.
The above represents about one-third of what I think of as the key dreams since I first visited Sullivan. They seem curiously simpleminded, like surreal children's stories. But within a socio-historical framework it is the primitive aspects of psychoanalysis that appeal to me. There never was a culture in fifty thousand years that ignored dreams (except our own) or wherein, as Foucault puts it, a healthy mind did not offer wisdom and succor to a weak and sick one.
Of course it is difficult to avoid trying to screw the lid on too tight, to find closure where there are maybe only loose ends. I see the evident attempt of my dream life to relocate me, to protect me from an apparent fragility I tried to overcome with drugs and alcohol, the overdominance in my life of “manly” pursuits. I no longer try to “guts out” anything.
Ultimately, in Zen terms, “to study the self is to forget the self.” We wish, ultimately, to understand everything and belong everywhere. I have learned, at least to a modest degree, that I must spend several months a year, mostly alone, in the woods and the desert in order to cope with contemporary life, to function in the place in culture I have chosen. In the woods it is still 1945, and there is the same rain on the roof that soothed my burning eye, the same wind blowing across freshwater. The presence of the coyotes, loons, bear, deer, bobcats, crows, ravens, heron and other birds that helped heal me then, are still with me now.