A Kind of Madness

It is a form of madness to see everything in simple terms of cause and effect. A strict or hard determinism is a form of madness. There is no room in these persons for associative movement. In the disordered tangle of this world they reduce all things to an ordered march. They are a slave to denotative reasoning, and unable to pursue associative leaps or connotative thought that synthesize seeming randomness.

In the political arena they tend toward fascism and tribalism — whatever promises a world of absolutes. They are dead to connotative associational patterns, as in poetry, art, and music. This is often the realm of the religious terrorist and the mad dog atheist. This is why the Islamic State terrorists destroy ancient works of art — art that is of their own cultural heritage. It is foreign and strange. An oddity. Quite beyond their truncated  powers of reasoning. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” KS

Jim Harrison: a brief recollection

Jim Harrison, author of 21 volumes of fiction,  14 books of poetry, a couple books of essays, a memoir, and a children’s book, died recently at the age of 78. I was fortunate to meet him twice. This is a recollection of one meeting. Forgive this rambling recollection. Death always sneaks up on us, an invisible wave in the night.

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Jim Harrison is hands down my favorite poet. Like lightning he conducts a charge generated by the differing poles of earth and sky. He soars with his feet planted firmly on the ground. My kind of poet.

I imagine that in some ways being a fellow Michigander has something to do with my admiration for his work, yet I know this explanation will not do. On a more basic level there is something elemental in our shared experience, a love of the natural world of snakes, rivers, mountains, thickets, and all manor of wild life.

I became acquainted with his work entirely by accident browsing a bookstore in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I picked up his novella Legends of the Fall, loved it, and moved on to other fiction and poetry. Reading his fiction or poetry, always created a conception of what might be possible in my own writing. I found an example of how a writer could construct a narrative all the while indulging his own discursive rambling trains. He trusted his impulse as a writer. For me at the time I wasn’t able to trust in much, especially own writerly instincts. 

I met Harrison while working as an assistant to a U.S. congressional candidate. The campaign would eventually lose the election but the experience traveling around the upper half of the lower peninsula and the entire upper peninsula of my native Michigan taught me a lot about rural politics and human nature. I suggested a meeting between my candidate and Harrison. Perhaps he would contribute to our liberal cause. The meeting was on. The contribution never materialized. It was also naive and presumptuous of me to entertain the notion since I did not know the author personally, and only conjectured what his sympathies, if any, to politics, local politics at that, could be.

This was a dry stop in terms of monetary campaign support but it energized us just the same. The three of us who visited Jim on that day were all moved in a different way by his cordial and warm reception. There was plenty of wine, and wild speculations on art and culture and the natural world. We came away know that we were in the presence of a poet. As Emily Dickinson said of authentic poetry, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” We all felt this strange pull as if he had lured us back into our bodies and the limitless souls we all inhabit.

We met at his cabin near Grand Marais in the fall of 1983. I was surprised by its small size and rustic condition. I thought an author of his stature would have more comfortable digs. I thought of him as a giant from reading his fiction and poetry. I did not yet know most American poets skirt the poverty level for some and sometimes all their lives. This was I believe on the cusp of his wide spread success, which came when his epic novella, Legends of the Fall, gained critical praise and was later made into a successful movie of the same name, staring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, Julia Ormond and Karina Lombard.

Harrison is a man whose imagination flowed in great curling leaps. I hear the rain drops on my dark window tonight and think what good fodder Harrison would have made of them in a poem. So much of his poetry features water imagery: streams, rivers, lakes, swamps, clouds –the sky’s oceans, our own watery bodies, and the patient tapping of the fingers of our watery fate. (The importance of water cannot be overestimated in his poetry or in our lives. Eventually, we all die of dehydration, a lack of water.) He inspires us to think back and forth across our short, little, self-important lives for the earth-bound transformational epiphanies seemingly but not out of reach in the natural world. Harrison offered no sugar coat on our existence, yet a kind of hope in a full life in step with the natural world as it infiltrates our souls when we are open to it.

We met him as the sun was beginning to cut the cool air of the morning. We sat at a picnic table outside his spartan cabin. The three of us in the campaign wore dress shirts. He was wearing a red sleeveless shirt. A gallon bottle of red wine sat on the table from which he poured libations in small glasses. His talk roamed the planet, though he kept returning the conversation to the animals he was keeping an eye out for near the creek that ran nearby.

I must admit I couldn’t keep up with the lines of his thought. His rangy references from philosophers to scientists to oriental landscape painters were, as they say, out of my pay grade. Yet all through the conversation he returned again and again to the animals — a bear and a coyote, in particular. Every time our candidate attempted to bring up political issues, Jim would slyly turn the conversation around and up and over to his obsessions with the coming and goings of animals. Leaving that day, I was left with the impression he was verbalizing parts of poems he was working on. I remember he said, though I cannot recall his exact his words, something to the effect, ‘That bitch coyote came by last night. I don’t know what she wants but she lives not far from here.’  Perhaps his muse of the day or week.

He led us on a two hour journey of the heart and soul. When we left I realized I never met a man so inspired, so big-hearted, so radically honest with himself and others. It was humbling to met someone so brilliant; gratified to meet one so gracious. He didn’t know us or owe us anything, and treated us as a fellow human beings. I am certain we must have appeared as members of a different tribe than his, yet he seemed interested in us regardless of affiliation.

That day resounds like a bell in my memory. Though his literary references were off the charts of my newly minted bachelor of arts education, I saw in him the fruits of intense listening in the world inside and outside our own heads. Learning to see without reserve takes guts and has costs. He drove me deeper into this world. For that I’m am forever grateful.

He struck me that day, and at a subsequent chance meeting at a bar in Marquette a few weeks later, as a man deeply witnessing the foibles and profound depths of his own being. The experience lead me to remain fixed on the task to remain an authentic witness to all personal experience. We are taught titanic deceptions in school, in churches, and the workplace. Jim Harrison was a great poet who recognized early on that our imagination is our greatest weapon in combating what is unthinkingly accepted as true.

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Larson’s Holstein Bull
by Jim Harrison

Death waits inside us for a door to open.
Death is patient as a dead cat.
Death is a doorknob made of flesh.
Death is that angelic farm girl
gored by the bull on her way home
from school, crossing the pasture
for a shortcut. In the seventh grade
she couldn’t read or write. She wasn’t a virgin.
She was “simpleminded,” we all said.
It was May, a time of lilacs and shooting stars.
She’s lived in my memory for sixty years.
Death steals everything except our stories.

Good Friday Meditation

The elements of the Christian cross being both horizontal and vertical exist on a simple flat plane — lines intersecting along specific points on an x-y axis. As symbol it is incomplete, lacking a third dimension, imperfect.

 

Ruben’s Crucified Christ

This is not blasphemy or deficient Christology but rather a spiritual observation that human completeness, even that brought by the divine, requires something visible and invisible, an incarnation if you will, and the recognition that even God cannot save without the help of the numb solider who follows human orders obediently — “Crucify him”– and the perfect act of faith obedient to the divine will.

The cross represents the intersection of vertical and the horizontal, heaven and earth respectively. The man on it is intercessor, God and man — the necessary third dimension. A mystery necessary to inject the profane with eternal value. Even violence is tricked into playing into the hands of a glorious act that brings peace.

Reading to strangers: part IV

A while back, poet J.lynn Sheridan asked on her blog, Writing On The Sun, if poets did anything positive with our poetry in the past year. One of the things I did the past two years was participate in public poetry readings. Part four of five tells of some experiences that influenced me and the poetry I read and write.

So now comes the rest of the telling of how I came to write poetry and read to strangers in public.

Poetry occupies three sides in my life. There is the side of my life where reading and writing poetry happens. There is also the shadow side where there is little or no sharing, save with close friends and a few relatives. Then there is the sharing in public to strangers.

I’ve tried to show in this five part series some of the influences on my life that have made me who I am and how I feel and how I relate to poetry.

Seeing this is a short version of a longer telling I must say that there is a difference between having life changing experiences and living by those changes. And there is the importance of a mentor. In college I had two but after that none and so I let life get in the way of reading and writing poetry. I had no one to point out that poetry was my first real love and loves cannot be set aside though they can be ignored. I went on reading and scribbling when I had a quiet moment but never set aside blocks of  time to sit and make writing happen. This is what happens when you do not have money or think about  the little money you do have which is not enough to afford the time you need to write. This is the struggle everyone knows.

A person is like a country with ambassadors and advisers and neighbors and competing interests. A poet is a bridge builder with words. The bridge is never quite complete and need not be because our words take the reader the rest of the way. We are incomplete beings but our words suggest continual revision — this is a picture of a life.

When I would lounge and lull to write there was the intruding thought and the drum of distraction like some war machine on the horizon. In a low thunder it would murmur You’re not doing enough. Of course in time you understand you can never do enough and most often do too much and end up not writing at all. Some people know this sooner than others. It took me a while because that army over the hill was quite a threat. Everyone who works and does have an interest in writing seldom understand the idleness necessary for writing. They think a person who sits for a day or a week or months on end must be a looking for a free lunch when really they are not. What they are doing is making a way for writing to come and come and come until you are good at it and there is so much of it you can sell it and buy everyone lunch and dinner and even breakfast if you want. This is a way of sharing too but it must come after a lot of sitting and seeing the words come out and knowing what sparks are created when words commingle. Not journalism mind you but poetry and art and writing that results in a sea change. Emily Dickinson said I dwell in Possibility. That’s what writers do. We see what is possible. Most Americans understand this with material things but not with words. Some do but they are far and few.

Anyway America is a free country until you do not do what everyone else does. When you take the time to write everyone tries their best to change you or ignore you or chide you like a school boy bully. They do not want you to live in your own self completely as you must to write. In this way America is communistic and violent. No one can stand apart. No one would ever say this but if you ever are different than the rest you will come to know all the others do not like it except the people who like to share what it means to be different. America is learning yet not quite there yet letting people be transparent and leaving people alone inside themselves where they can live and share what it means to be alive.

To be alive means you can read before a room full of strangers. Once this was impossible. Now it is quite exceptional if you think about how long it took and how far someone has to travel before you see strangers as fellow travelers. Others are strangers only when there are no words between them. There must be words between people not competing in order to be sharing and poetry. Debates are arguments over an already dead carcass. Debates are word competitions to see winners and losers. This is a terrible way to pick a president or educate the young. Leaders who strive to win will create a world in which most people are losers. This is the world we have now. This is why poetry is so important. It shows another way.

In January I read on William Stafford’s Birthday at the Hugi-Lewis Gallery in Anchorage. Four others read too. There were a few who watched but did not read. Two shared anecdotes from William Stafford’s life. Two of us also shared poems of our own and another shared a letter Stafford wrote to her. A rich and sweet letter. He shared what share-able writing was like and how you practice your writing everyday.  Stafford said many times you must be as true as you can be to whatever is coming up from yourself and then the writing of worth has a chance to live and breath in the world. The letter showed Stafford’g genius and his love of helping other writers. Jim Hanlen a sweet man hosted the event. We talked before the event which was like talking to a brother you did not know you had. Lovely men like him are so rare. They are national treasures. I think there should be statues in every town square of a lovely man from the town’s past. This would be a reminder to little boys and young men of what men should aspire to be. Gentleness. Winsomeness. And truthfulness. All people aspire to this though it is easy to be distracted. There will always be enough people willing to be violent and busy and foolish. There is no need to encourage them. Those willing to work and live fully alive lives are the ones who change the world.

This then is how I came to share my words. I wrote in my day book the book that I write in every day.  Do you not think the words that come from you are the same unexplainable unfolding that stretched out the stars and galaxies? You must let them go so others may see new stars. Control is an abandoned well. Dry and lifeless. Jump from water falls, each droplet a star, an entire universe parting for you. 

I wrote other things like this and they always make the connection between the larger universe, the unfolding creator and the perceived smaller you which is in no way small and so much a part of everything. Your body is the universe to a cell. You are a cell to the universe. You have a task. You know you must open and close when you are ready.

Stars shine and cannot help sharing their light. We shine by sharing what we write. You can see the stars why can’t we see the stars that are ourselves and the stars that are everyone else. The answer is we decided and each has their reasons that what we have is not what others can value. Now it is true that many people do not listen. They are blunted or stunted or in such a hurry they cannot hear. This is not your concern as a poet or writer. From the very beginning you were made to make an offering. This is your destiny and from it comes forth the life that is in you. This is why anyone can and should read in public to strangers and after you read you will find friends. This is the end of the short telling of how I came to read to strangers in public.