"I am not one who was born in the custody of wisdom. I am one who is fond of olden times and intense in quest of the sacred knowing of the ancients." Gustave Courbet

05 December 2018

Intact.


From Jim Fergus' interview of Jim Harrison in Paris Review ...

INTERVIEWER

Does the metaphor of dance translate to play?

HARRISON

I used to have second thoughts about my sporting life until my wife pointed out to me that where I really get into trouble is when I lose my sense of play. In one of Rilke's poems, he talks about this overdeveloped sense of heaviness that an artist acquires. It's what I put under the heading of "lugubrious masochism." You walk around and you feel like you're literally so heavy that you might fall through the crust of the earth. For this reason I've always been a fan of Peter Matthiessen's, in a peculiar, spiritual sense. He and Gary Snyder are writers who seem to live outside the whole framework of literary reputation and ambition. When I've run into them they seemed to have an air of being content with what they were doing that other writers don't have. Reputation is volatile and a writer will despair if he thinks he is, at any given time, a consensus of what the media thinks he is, because if the media's not thinking about him at all then he disappears. Surely you need some encouragement as the years go by, but if you look too far outside yourself you're going to forget what the original dream was when you were nineteen.

INTERVIEWER

Can you really preserve that dream?

HARRISON

I think you can. You can preserve it by recreating the circumstances in which the dream was possible, which I can do at my cabin. If I couldn't recreate the dream, I would simply die. You asked about my eye injury; I'm sure that some of my need for isolation comes from that. I used to make a hole in the haymow of the barn to hide out in. Maybe my cabin is my haymow. I'm still writing from the haymow. 

INTERVIEWER

And what is that original dream?

HARRISON

Just of being an artist—in the old sense of the word. More a painterly notion of an artist, or a poet, than what we think of as a novelist. My first passion was to be a painter, but I was without talent.

INTERVIEWER

A question of maintaining a sense of purity?

HARRISON

Yes, the integrity of the total mission. It's a "calling" in religious terms. You feel called to be an artist, and the worst thing is the refusal of the call.

INTERVIEWER

It would seem that that almost childlike integrity is constantly assaulted in an artist's life, especially in this age. How can you maintain it?

HARRISON

That's why you keep yourself apart. The reason I have my cabin is that it's easier to suffocate now in this culture than it's ever been, in terms of sheer, continuous bombardment, and you're not supposed to suffocate if you're an artist.

INTERVIEWER

Isn't there a danger of being too separate, too isolated?

HARRISON

Absolutely. What is it that Rilke said? (And it's the truest thing I remember about being an artist.) I think he said, "It's only in the rat race of the arena that the heart learns to beat."

INTERVIEWER

So it's necessary to enter into that world and then be able to get out of it unscathed?

HARRISON

Intact. It's the Zen metaphor of the ox—the ten stages of the ox—to finally have no fences and to be able to return to the city. The whole point is not to need any strictures and to still maintain balance and grace, and if you can't the danger is a life-and-death thing.

INTERVIEWER

Metaphorically as an artist, or literally?

HARRISON

Both. There are lots of ways of being killed. One of the main ways a person is killed as an artist is when he becomes mechanistic and repeats himself. Then he's dead. It's killed him as a human being and as an artist.

INTERVIEWER

Isn't that something that all artists must eventually face, as there is a limit to one's experiences and capabilities?

HARRISON

There's a limit to one's resourcefulness, but how do you know the limit? You have to push out and not do anything you've ever done before. It comes to that. The notion of change in fiction is that a train has to stay on its tracks, and animals, even more than we, are creatures of specific habits, which is why, once you learn their habits, they are quite easy to hunt. But a man can stop his car, get out; he can dive in a lake and swim across, and then climb a tree. So don't tell me you can't change your fiction. Habit is what destroys art. I've always been struck by those Cheyenne who did everything backwards when they were bored. There's a longing, a craving to know more than we get to know, sort of a Faustian notion that you want a lot of interesting things to occur before you die; and it strikes you that rather than wait around for them to occur, you're going to have to arrange most of them.

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