We are Supposed to Write Poetry to keep the Gods Alive
Jim Harrison died 6 years ago today
Shirtless and disheveled, he sits at his writing desk in a dark room in his Montana cabin.
The stench of solitude and ashtray permeate from floor to ceiling. With a harsh, cigarette-soaked voice, Jim Harrison, one of the finest writers of our generation, asks the interviewer from Esquire magazine, "would you like some vodka?" as he pours a stiff one for himself.
It’s 4 pm on a weekday.
Harrison was a hard man, worn ragged by trying times. He was stabbed in the eye as a child. His father and sister were killed in a car accident when he was twenty-one. And the following decade, he and his wife and daughter lived on less than $9,000 a year.
That’s the time when he wrote his renowned novel, Legends of the Fall, which put him on the literary map. “I wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days and when I re-read it, I only had to change one word. There was no revision process. None."
Since then he’s produced 14 books of poetry, 11 novels, 9 novellas, 3 non-fiction works, and one children's book.
But what he wanted to be remembered for most was his poetry. “We are supposed to write poetry to keep the gods alive," he says with a toothless smile.
Jim Harrison died six years ago today.
Here’s a beautiful passage from his magnificent memoir, Off to the Side: A Memoir:
I think that I was nineteen when Rimbaud’s “Everything we are taught is false” became my modus operandi partly because Rimbaud’s defiance of society was vaguely criminal and at nineteen you try to determine what you are by what you are against.
I was on the run among New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Michigan by thumb, or Greyhound bus if I was flush. My baggage was of enormous consequence, a change of clothes but mostly anthologies of Russian and Chinese poetry, volumes of Rimbaud and Apollinaire, William Blake, copies of poems of John Clare and Christopher Smart, and a few Dostoyevsky novels.
Only recently have I realized the degree to which these books were my religious texts and their unavowed intent was to teach me the secrets of reality, in short to explain the meaning of life. In honor of the hesitant admission that there might be a world outside my head I’d unsuccessfully take courses in economics, anthropology, and forestry when I’d return to college after forays east and west. But it is poetry that has stuck with me as a solution to the impulse. Poetry is free from the predominance of profit and the best of it offers up no lies.
Jim's Principles of Moderation have had a marked impact on my life:
Quite some time ago I turned an impressive corner with the emotion of wanting more consciousness. I wrote two pages called the Principles of Moderation, which had a wondrous, albeit slowly evolving, effect on my life.
Drinking causes drinking. Heavy drinking causes heavy drinking. Light drinking causes light drinking.
The ability to check yourself moment by moment has been discussed at length by wise folks from the old Ch’an masters of China all the way down to Ouspenksy. This assumes a willingness to be conscious.
The reason to moderate is to avoid having to quit, thus losing a pleasure that’s been with us forever.
We don’t have much freedom in this life and it is self-cruelty to lose a piece of what we have because we are unable to control our craving.
Measurement is all. A 1½ ounce shot delivers all the benefits of a 3-5 ounce drink. A couple of the latter turns one into a spit dribbler. Spit dribblers frighten children and make everyone else nervous. On any sedative there is a specific, roomy gap between smoothing out and self-destruction. There is no self-destructiveness without the destruction of others. We are not alone.
Naturally there are special occasions. Generally one can’t have more than one a week due to the first paragraph. When you get older like me it’s once a month, if that.
It’s hard to determine pathology in a society where everything is pathological. The main content of our prayers should be for simple consciousness. The most important thing we can do is to find out what ails us and fix it. Often we need outside counsel, for clarity and to speed up the process. (I’ve had over twenty years with my mind doctor.)
In drinking, as in everything else, the path is the way. What you get in life is what you organize for yourself every day. There is an ocean of available wisdom from Lao-tzu to Jung to Rilke. It’s there in preposterous quantity. If you drink way too much it will kill you and the souls of those around you. If you moderate you can have a nice life.
There is another rather manly approach that has been useful, an offshoot of bushido I have drawn from occasionally (in The Man Who Gave Up His Name, etc.). It can sound corny but has been quite relevant for most of the history of human life on earth. The main point is that life is trying to kill you in hundreds of ways. You have to be alert by the millisecond. If it’s not wild animals, it’s your human enemies, your habits and conditioning, your lazy senses.
A lot of overdrinking comes from feeling bad physically. One overdrinks to feel better in physiological terms. This can be avoided by vitamins, exercise, and reasonable diet. Again, it’s a cycle: overdrinking causes overdrinking because you feel bad.
Another source of the problem is the unreasonable expectations we get from others and ourselves. Unreasonable expectations can be removed by thinking it over. They can’t be “downt”, pure and simple. Everyone can’t get to the top or even the middle.
The aim is to remove horrors. This really takes a specific level of attention. Pigs love mud and there is a real streak of muddiness in our psyches. It can be soothing to wallow. We prefer to be stunned rather than overwhelmed. Unfortunately the variations of self-pity are the most injurious emotions we have.
Oddly enough our main weapons in controlling drinking are humour and lightness. The judgment of others and self-judgment (stern) are both contraindicatory. When we fuck up we mentally beat ourselves up. It doesn’t work at all and has to be expunged. The reason to slow down is to feel better and it works real good.
You begin by cutting it all down by a third. After a few weeks you go down to a half. After that your soul will tell you when you listen. It helps to avoid pointlessly cynical camaraderie. Often it is actually a matter of one drink too many.
We need always to separate the problem of virtue from the problem of lack of control There are too many lies in circulation as always. Certain countries, France for example, drink more alcohol but have fewer problems. This is partly due to the predominance of wine which is less of a stun gun of behaviour but also that drinking isn’t connected to virtue or nonvirtue. It is a practical problem. Drinking has to be strictly self-controlled the moment it negatively affects our character and behaviour.
These are relatively mild pointers though the consequences of ignoring them are as fatal as shooting yourself in the head in a curious time warp wherein the bullet takes many years to reach its inevitable target.
Jim Harrison
https://groveatlantic.com/book/off-to-the-side/
I can so relate and understand that sentiment and thought about poetry in the last paragraph.