The Summer He Didn't Die by Jim Harrison
Like places the books owned the sweet-and-sour residue of the life to be lived. He doubted he had given up anything to be an artist, an ill-conceived but popular notion. Even the worst of the garret times were better than an assembly line. And most of the places he lived and visited had been aesthetic decisions. We are wherever we’ve been, among other things. He remembered Rilke’s line “Beware, O wanderer, the road is walking, too.” The mind ground of being as it is also suggested nonbeing, the end of the journey. Some of his books would last or not. He’d never know, and deep in the night with My Book House on his lap it wasn’t an interesting question.
Author’s Note
on Tracking
I THINK IT MUST HAVE BEEN OVER THIRTY YEARS AGO WHEN I read that our mind ground is being as it is. This statement had an insufferable nagging element so that my brain kept returning to it when I devoutly wished it wouldn’t. I tried mightily to reduce it to the idea that since we are mammalian we are primarily overwhelmed by place, the physicality of where we find ourselves, a capacity that diminishes with age and the presumption that we are safe where we are. The five senses plus the organizing brain can rest in a living room in a house with well-locked doors. When I was nineteen and first lived in New York City and visited a co-worker from a bookstore I was amazed at the assortment of locks on the heavy metal door of his apartment. At the time back home we didn’t lock our doors at night.
The mind ground is being as it is. Is this what we are at base? Why has this been so difficult for me to deal with? Is this at odds with my lifelong effort to “culture” myself with the best of world literature and art, and lesser efforts in the direction of botany, history, and biology, not to speak overmuch with philosophy and theology which are better at stirring the pot than clarifying the contents. The curious mind from an early age exfoliates in a thousand directions.
As a novelist and poet I’ve often thought that I carry a window in order to look at what I wish, that my calling is to become this window and offer a possibly unique and aesthetically pleasing view no matter how dire the human landscape.
Our mind ground in its deepest sense is being as it is. I’m old enough not to care about appearing naive. I had a lovely, elegant English setter, a far-ranging woman dog, who was always able to return to me in uncharted country by backtracking her own scent. By predilection nearly all of my life has been spent in the country where I can walk, usually with dogs, before I get ready to write, and walk again later to recover from writing. Often I track wild creatures if it has rained recently and the tracks are fresh, or when there’s at least a thin skin of snow. Unlike some I was never particularly good at it. When I briefly taught English as a foreign language I met a young man from North Africa whose father was a snake tracker who made a living collecting species for naturalists and zoos. In the Upper Peninsula of Michigan there are tens of thousands of miles of old logging roads that animals walk on for the same reason I do: they’re easier. When you find an interesting track it’s a toss-up to check out where the animal has been or where it’s going. Once in a vast area of dunes bordering Lake Superior it was easy to track a mother bear and two cubs until it suddenly came to me that this was unwise. If you’re in a location often enough in the spring you can even track hawks or other birds to their nests.
Several years ago I wrote a memoir called Off to the Side (my favored place to be) and after it was published I began to question how much of the true texture of life it contained. We are born babies and what are these hundreds of layers of clothes? The sheer haphazard and accidental nature of life overwhelmed me from the lucky meeting of the girl I married to the fact that if my father and sister had begun their fatal trip a second later they wouldn’t have died in a collision. All of this can become the stuff of insanity or a greater mystery, as if the crisp scissors clip of the umbilical cord begins a journey into chaos.
With age you are free to resume lightness again, a child’s lightness at that. You know your own plot, as Margaret Atwood said, and when you are overly familiar with the crapshoot of literary history it is rather easy to discard self-importance and do as you wish.
The total human sensorium is inclined toward the safety of habit. This is the mind ground of what you wish life to be rather than being as it is. A few years ago I became fascinated with a relatively new scholarly discipline called human geography which, in absurdly short form, deals with why we are where we are in the world. With age the window loses interest in its windowness. The tracker forgets himself in favor of the prey, the vagaries of life itself, the haunting correspondences of all lives, and the life processes in a world we hopelessly keep describing to a degree equal with herself.
Since childhood with so many visiting old relatives, and wherever we visited there were more, I’ve liked talking to very old people, who were quick to tell me that life passes like a dream. Is a dream fiction or that bruised and sorry word “reality,” a condition we think we should chase, then trip ourselves in the pursuit?
Jim Harrison, The Summer He Didn't Die