Off to the Side

by Jim Harrison

  Meanwhile, on the river I saw rafts of ducks, hundreds of snipe, bald and golden eagles, the majesty of the river herself and the trout she held and nurtured. On two of the days I caught a half-dozen brown trout of around three pounds each and lost two grand fish whose power I could feel in my rib cage and spine. All anglers seem to have their species preferences but with each brown trout (banal name!) I remember the first one I held in my hand on the banks of the Pine River, the red and gold iridescent spots which held a fascination to a seven-year-old that would be equaled only far later by his first naked lady.

  The last week of fishing was grand indeed except for the thousands of moments of consciousness when the world intruded its bloody fist, and at the end of the day when you stepped off the Mackenzie drift boat onto the shore and the consciousness of what had happened blossomed with the charm of the mushroom cloud we had all memorized as children. I was helplessly drawn back to my brooding over my uncles in the South Pacific at age twelve while I caught a brown trout in northern Michigan.

  * * *

  Back to my cabin and the early weeks of bird season with the wind off Lake Superior at over forty knots during a three-day blow, an autumnal torment that usually doesn’t happen until mid-October. Though my dog Rose is nearly eight years old she doesn’t recognize the meaning of bad weather. She watched me pack my hunting clothes and shotguns and after the five-hour drive to the cabin the rain that was sweeping horizontally across the cabin clearing meant nothing to her. I refused her pleas, drank a bottle of wine while making dinner, went to bed listening to the cabin shudder. Twice in the night Rose got off her couch, presumably to check if I was alive and would take her hunting in the morning. Desire and intensity mean a lot in bird dogs and with them come no recognizable limits. In the morning we hunted in a gale and I couldn’t have become more wet if I had drowned but Rose was very happy with a completeness I deeply envied.

  PRIVATE RELIGION

  The first prayer went:

  Now I lay me

  down to sleep.

  I pray the Lord

  my soul to keep.

  If I should die

  before I wake

  I pray the Lord

  my soul to take.

  Naturally when it was uttered every evening the prayer occasionally became rote or gibberish. During World War III recall, “Bless all the children throughout the world especially those who are cold, sick, and hungry” was added. As kids we prayed for ourselves and for other kids, our own kind as it were, and these prayers became as familiar to us as those childhood paths by which we found our way around our neighborhoods whether rural or urban. If we had a dog we could still see its butt wagging before us through the thicket to an alley behind Mrs. Carlson’s, her daughter tortured by paralysis, past Bozells, Goodrich’s, the woodlot behind the hospital where I lost an eye, across the street and through the Kilmers’ hedge to their back door where their son David beat on a porch railing with a ball bat.

  These paths located us in our young world. Much later prayer became asking the inconceivable from the improbable, whether clawing the rug in L.A. while drunk or drugged and trying to remember the Lord’s Prayer, or reciting it on an airliner with a burning portside engine above the Sahara Desert. And the web of beloved paths began to stretch around the world, Cheyney Walk in London, counterclockwise around the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, beside the Yellowstone River in Montana, South American port cities, between your agent’s apartment and your mind doctor or Elaine’s in New York City, mountain paths near the Mexican border, the paths near the cabin and farm so familiar that you don’t notice them.

  I have supposed that the quality of wonder, or awe, as such, is curiosity magnified and exalted. Childhood, and perhaps adult prayers for some, allay fear, a word path to become less lost. Wonder gives direction to prayer. A child gradually is curious about who made the trees, sun, or moon. It certainly wasn’t his parents. Humility is already there because he can’t be much smaller than he already is. The question day by day is how to navigate the incomprehensible world he has been thrust into. He has been taught prayer and has learned his own first paths with tips from brothers, sisters, and friends. Paths and prayers don’t so much become confused with each other but are interwoven, arising as they do at the apex of our youthful vulnerability. Later on paths are followed for years without more than nominal attention to prayer except in dire emergency, or the deaths of any of those we love, or when uncontrollable fears boil over in addiction or divorce, other pathetic events soaked in invisible blood.

  I never found myself in a dark woods in the middle of life’s journey. I’ve been there all along for professional reasons. For a novelist and poet it is the “negative capability” that is to be valued, the willingness to hold before the mind the thousands of questions flesh is heir to without forcing an answer more questionable than the question. This position for a writer can easily become a posture so that rather than a lifelong dance with the multifoliate questions, one is a geezer who continues to mutter a sequence of no’s that in themselves have become quite fashionable. The negatives are easily as mildewed as a museum cloakroom on a rainy day. Whitman thought that poets should “move wild laughter in the throat of death.” And Yeats questioned, “What portion of the world can the artist have who has awakened from the common dream but dissipation and despair?”

  Of course no one appears to have the definitive clue as to what happens to us after we die, the singular dominant answer the religions of the world deal with in terms that aren’t altogether reassuring. I had old Northridge in my novel Dalva say, “If nothing happens we won’t know it,” which in itself is a fatalistic shaggy-dog joke. Few chins are held high when thinking of death within the very indefinite reprieve we are given.

  Deaths we witness at remove can seem starkly individual. Not since the Civil and Indian wars have we collectively witnessed thousands ground into red library paste instanter than we saw in the World Trade Center. The only conceivable response was a howl as long as the breath could hold it, then to begin again and lapse into prayer.

  We may live together but we usually die alone. I have tried to imagine the way Mozart rose up in his bed that evening trying to sing the alto part while others in the room rehearsed his Requiem. He died in the morning at age thirty-five but leaving us his immeasurable gift, his profound and antic spirit testing the limits of the beauty the ear could perceive. So few attended his thunderstorm burial we cannot be certain where in the earth his body rests. The Zennists say that “ashes don’t return to wood,” a lucid slap for everyone’s vain face.

  Curiously, our intelligentsia (of which I hesitantly number myself) tends to treat religion as if it were trying to keep the canned cat food off its hands. Not the least of the causes of this aversion is the profoundly bad behavior of the world’s religions in historical terms, especially when they tie themselves to notions of ethnic virtue. This is no newer than the oldest shoe in the world, about 14,000 years old to be exact. Sheer repulsion in the ranks of the intelligent but literalminded is a simple enough antimagnet. I have noticed, however, with certain surprise that within the history of the quasi-Modernist movement from 1870 onward that many of the grandest intellects, from Kierkegaard to Einstein, have had no problem evincing a certain faith. Of course a hundred of the largest minds on earth discussing God, chaos, and the cosmos are still utter heathens in the minds of fundamentalists who somehow believe that the gays and feminists contributed to the demise of the World Trade Center. This kind of imbecility is essentially comic and reminds me of the kind of southern preachers created by novelists Flannery O’Connor, Harry Crews, and Barry Hannah. I must add that northern preachers aren’t immune to these rabid postures.

  When I was around fourteen and became a Bible-thumping fundamentalist for a year or so it was my curiosity that stole my faith. A Baptist minister told me that I shouldn’t be reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and that Beethoven and Mozart were the devil’s music. I imagined that this inclu
ded the Berlioz and Grieg that my sister and I loved to listen to on my twenty-five-dollar record player. I must have read the New Testament a dozen times and found it quite devoid of my minister’s attitudes toward culture. Nearly fifty years later I was further consoled reading Stephen Mitchell’s splendid The Gospel According to Jesus where the actual proven words of Jesus, about a dozen pages in total, are as crisp and encompassing as a moonlit winter night and as directly intimate as our breath.

  Recently one night in the southwest I dreamt of a man who went into the nearby mountains and saw a dancing god. While still half asleep at daylight I imagined the end of the story. The man comes back from the mountains and tells a disbelieving friend whom he takes back up the mountain to see the dancing god. Now the word gets out and the man needs to replace his normal livelihood and begins charging people for their dancing-god tour. Fearing loss of power the man strenuously preaches the lesson that the dancing god can’t be seen without his intercession. A temple is built at the gateway canyon to the mountain. And so on. There is no vision so holy that it escapes its susceptibility to defilement. The earth is soaked with the blood of religious entropy. A few years ago a friend visited a rather threadbare sheikh in Saudi Arabia who was still quite irritated about the Crusades so many centuries before. Part of the impulse of the Methodist missionaries in getting the Lakota to wear trousers was that the Lakota would then work to get money to put in their trouser pockets, replacing their love of hunting, dancing, lovemaking, and fighting.

  Nonetheless, how I prayed as a young Christian for the salvation of the world, with only the slightest filament of doubt that the prayers failed to penetrate the ceiling of my little attic room. My parents who were polite Congregationalists endured and indulged my silly pronuncimientos on the nature of sin though my dad teased that his own father had been saved at a Billy Sunday revival but the cleansing had lasted only “a couple of days.” There were a lot of books and classical music in our home and that spelled doom for my earnest intolerance. I didn’t stop listening to the opera on the radio on Saturday afternoons with my mother. I didn’t stop reading Steinbeck, Cather, the naughty Erskine Caldwell, and William Faulkner. I could not stop the way that visuals of women’s naked bodies would errantly pass before me while I prayed, or the way the intensity with which I tried to dismiss these visions made them even more lurid. I’d be praying for the salvation of my parents, brothers, and sisters, and there would suddenly appear an image of a red-haired girl from Bible club pulling down her white panties. The grief and confusion would disappear only when I was lost in a good book, say Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire where everyone seemed to drink too much wine and carry on, or better yet, Caldwell’s God’s Little Acre where women acted out my unwilling fantasies. (Many years later as an arrogant, neophyte Zen student I had no more luck with controlling my mind, and where once during prolonged sitting mediation a partially clothed Lauren Hutton emerged from a nail head in a pine board across the room.) It became apparent, though, by the time I was sixteen that I was not called to a holy profession as I had previously thought. “Many are called but few are chosen,” the Bible says. I experienced a minor resurgence of devotion as a senior in high school when I discovered Dostoyevsky, who swallowed me whole. If I couldn’t become a regular Christian I could at least follow the lunatic versions of the Great Russian, not the best path for mental health I learned. There can’t be an author in the history of Western literature who more thoroughly abrades the nerve ends, bursts the neurons, than Dostoyevsky.

  The intellectual or “learned man” can feel trapped by his doubt, his cynicism not only about angelic spheres but about the very notion of a religion itself. It would be especially difficult for an anthropologist to whom the primitive skeletal structures can be seen in most of our cultural manifestations. To whom may a brainy anthropologist turn in dire straits? He can repeat a hundred names for God from a hundred cultures, utter dozens of liturgical glyphs, picture the ancient friezes, tablets, scrolls with which the cultures try to frame reality in an acceptable manner. At this point it might not be helpful for our anthropologist to turn to our own historically peculiar culture in which the most public manifestation of devotion appears to be money. On our long way back from Montana to Michigan after the September II tragedy we saw many motel marquees that read “In God We Trust,” a message that is also on our money. We would have preferred something on the order of “We pray that this doesn’t happen again.”

  I daily wonder if the bedrock of my own private religion is fear and incomprehension. Some degree of courage is in order if you wish to fully admit your life. You have to take a draught of ego poison to accept the full dimensions of your banality, your sheer cominess and ordinariness, the monstrous silliness of private ambitions and sexual fantasies, your loutish peacockery, your spates of sloth, all of which is to say that you were specifically not destined for the spiritual big time. The coup de grâce, the grand trump card in this little exercise in self-knowledge, is when you comprehend the extent and full nature of your secret, your private religion.

  Here we may talk of contents: in my Dopp kit I have a tiny pink pig my younger daughter gave me at least twenty years ago because I traveled frequently and the pig would keep my plane from crashing. It’s worked wonderfully so far. In my left trouser pocket I carry a small tubular stone that was extracted from a cave in New Mexico and polished. The stone reveals hundreds of slender layers composing millions of years of geological history. It is called a “jish” and is carried to remind you of mortality and that the earth is all that lasts. A jish is usually contained in a small bag made of doe leather but my bird dog Rose ate my bag with its pinch of com pollen. It is consoling to give the jish a squeeze when life becomes especially difficult. I could mention the contents of my granary where I write but the dozens of objects I think of as somewhat “sacred” mostly reveal only my Pleistocene pack-rat nature. I’ve been accumulating and often discarding such objects since childhood, from “magic” marbles and ball bearings, to a sperm-whale tooth, to a brass body tag (“corpse no.” blank) from our Indian Wars, to a clutch of bird feathers.

  Why? I’m unsure. Crows, ravens, and bears mean a great deal to me and they are part of my life for much of the year. My obsession with wolves faded away because my heart was getting too aggressive. I think that all these objects of devotion tend to be from the natural rather than the man-made world for the somewhat accidental reason that I grew up in northern Michigan in contiguity with the natural world. In most respects I’m emotionally not far from the brokenhearted little old lady fingering her rosary beads, though my liturgical words are those of a rarer bird.

  As I’ve said we must add awe to our fear and incomprehension. A bear tooth or raven feather in my hand enlarges my consciousness on an immediate level, sometimes in the manner of a slight electric shock. The imagination flies to deep in the woods and to fields where particular thickets are my functioning churches in several locations throughout the country, and one in Burgundy in France where I stay with a friend. I tend not to pray in these thickets but to let my mind alone until it empties out and I’m simply a human animal sitting in a thicket. When I say my morning prayers in my studio or car, I try to avoid making any sort of special case for myself. I admit I have prayed because droughts, the lack of rain, drive me batty what with having come from farm families way back when, and owning a farm at present, an ancient prayer to be sure. I generally circle around through family and friends, especially those who are mentally and physically ill. Here I am always startled by the sheer numbers with breast and prostate cancer. Sometimes, but more rarely as I grow older, I revert to the plaintive little boy and offer up something from a meager wish list. “I wish I could figure out how to make a living without commuting to Hollywood.” That one was offered up years ago and was successful though I should add that my relationship with the showbiz community had been working toward mutual fatigue.

  I’ve long supposed that this idea of making a spec
ial case for yourself is the biggest moral failing in prayer, and this is especially hard for a poet and novelist who has spent a lifetime making a special case for his vision of the world. We’re getting close to two centuries of living with the artist whether sculptor, poet, writer, painter, composer (maybe the performer) as an isolate, Romantic hero, an outlyer and often outcast, a shaman without portfolio, a person who has with considerable wind, valid or not, blown up the ego to dirigible size in order to buffer himself against the blows of his fellow citizens, real or imagined. This is not the kind of person to admit that we are all “like sheep who have gone astray.” He sees himself with often indisputable evidence as unique, but so is everyone else to an individually specific degree. We will ignore the Ichabod Crane-Don Quixote aspects of the artist because ridicule and irony are no help to us at this peculiar juncture of the twenty-first century.

  And neither is the kind of religion that presupposes a virtue to wealth helpful at this time. Among a certain group religion is used to effectively cleanse money and the Gospels’ admonition to take care of the poor is misinterpreted as “a few of the poor.” How many times have we heard that five million children go to bed hungry every night? Not certainly as many times as we’ve read and seen pieces on the laudatory aspects of great wealth. The top two or three percent of our population has had a decade-long field day that never trickled down to the bottom fifty percent. In my own lifetime I’ve seen the apotheosis of greed as a virtue, and brutal insensitivity become enlightened self interest. We may do as well as all but a few countries but that scarcely makes us a Christian nation except to those who bathe in patriotic gore out of habit and stupidity. Neither the emperor and consorts nor the citizenry is wearing the sacramental clothing it chooses to think it is wearing. A simple, private reading of the Gospels would tell them so.