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Traveling in the Dark
David Jenkins Traveling in the dark a white flutter gusts from the sage at the edge of the road and blows beneath the truck rusted with age, our night’s killing loaded in the bed. We stop and shudder: paper should not thump, flutters should not bang the undercarriage. The empty desert, the cool air, the spray of stars offer aught but silence on this calm night. Headlights ghost coyotes’ eyes, varying hares heaped in back, their eyes no longer ghosts bright with desire but dulled by yahoos and cheap .22s shot with easy accuracy. Leap and bend, land and breathe: all stilled by light, all killed by velocity’s pierce of brain and lung—friends’ guilt upended by science, the hard-won thrill of evolution’s trajectory exposed in print and reprint. Dead Lepus dissected and unmoved by human ghosts who have their own grand desires, turning leaps into graphs to prove a point of theory that cannot match our weary surprise at the night’s crumpled paper: a small white dog panting in the road, dark eyes blurry, trembling between ghost and heart’s mauled tremor. It cannot move. It pants and growls in pain. Was it abandoned in this vast desert? Left to feed coyotes or hawks? A night owl’s feast, perhaps, its imagined fate. Now, dirt- covered, filled with blood, taut to the touch, the flutter lies on my lap. I can feel its heat, its heart, each beat faint against my rough fingertips. Dead hares, dying dog, rusted beat- up truck on an empty highway, the night sky offers silence as we quiet our own blasphemy. |
David Jenkins, Ph.D., formerly the Assistant Director for Resources and Planning, Bureau of Land Management, with responsibilities for Range, Riparian, and Forest Management, Fish and Wildlife Conservation, Wild Horse and Burro Management, and Environmental Quality, he now leads the Education, Archaeology, and Paleontology programs. Prior to joining the BLM, he served as Acting Assistant Station Director for Research, Pacific Southwest Research Station, and as the Regional Director for Recreation, Wilderness, Heritage, and Volunteer Resources, Eastern Region, both with the USDA Forest Service. He also spent nearly five years working for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska, in the Office of Subsistence Management. He has a broad research and teaching background in anthropology and in coupled human and natural systems, working across local, regional and international scales in Peru, India, China, Japan, Canada, and sites throughout the United States. His research publications span a range of topics, including myth, social organization, kinship, exchange networks, museums, ethnographic photography, environmental values, endangered species, resource exploitation, subsistence fisheries, autobiography, and the use of mathematical models in anthropology. He has taught at MIT, Bates College, and the University of Southern Maine, and worked in the Bureau of Applied Research in Anthropology at the University of Arizona. His books include Nature and Bureaucracy: the wildness of managed landscapes, the novels Love Me (2017), and Chthonia (in preparation), which he publishes as DB Jenkins, and the collection of poems, Open Mic (2020). He is an active mountaineer, rock climber, ice climber, backcountry skier, and whitewater kayaker. Dr. Jenkins can be reached at [email protected].
Ravn's Sea Shanty soundcloud.com/user-855957911/the-azores
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North ridge of Steeple Peak, Wind River Mountains, August 16, 2022. Smoot, two Carriers, and I climbed this route, and descended in a rain/hail/lightning storm, a bit too exciting. The photo on the right is me in the upper chimney, which cuts through the top of the peak, a cool feature. I first climbed this route forty years ago. This time, we hired a wrangler and horses to schlep in our climbing gear, which lets the old goats climb more and carry heavy loads less. The only injury of the trip was the wrangler, whose horse spooked and knocked him off, cracking a rib. Dave Carrier's photo.
Below are a few essays and a couple of poems, my own whispering, which stand alone or are part of larger works-in-progress. Scroll down to read. Enjoy.
It Did Not Last The Paper Thief Antelope Loss Once Again The Wall A Note on Tobacco Aging East of the Dead Sea Abattoir Scrimshaw A Meditation on Memory (for my mother on her ninetieth birthday) Febrile Poiesis Hushed Never Write a Poem About Your Grandmother Some Funerial Thoughts Aunt Minnie and the Alligator The Black Ice |
Small neighborhood shrine, Kumbakonam, India
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Kalakshetra Foundation, Chennai, India
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Descending Haystack in the Wind River Mountains after climbing the Minor Dihedral with Smoot and Carrier, July 25, 2020. I first climbed the Minor Dihedral with Jim Dockery in the early 80s.
For my daughter, Ravn, on her graduation with a degree in physics, College of William and Mary, class of 2019. This poem is both obscure and fundamental, so much so I added an explanatory footnote.
It Did Not Last
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
It did not last, the Devil howling “Ho!
Let Einstein Be!” restored the status quo.
God and Devil jealously lament: Lakshmi sent
Maxwell’s demon, thermodynamically exigent,
while Heisenberg, no less a foe, forsook certainty,
and Schrödinger’s cat, apropos, sang of entropy.
What next to know? Forces unleashed, fluttering
breeze of truth carried aloft its burden, muttering
kings blinded to the blazing hearth. Ancient Odin,
one-eyed wisdom’s god, gathered singed ravens
flung from scudding clouds: far-wandering birds
speaking of human misery as Thor thundered
immortal Lord Krishna’s primordial curse--
I am become Death—destroyer of the universe.
It did not last.
Galaxies purled and darkness swayed and heavenly
Aditi swirled stars through a boundless sky; earthly
Kali swallowed demons whole: drops of blood
like spinning suns splashed upon dark wet mud;
Einstein’s dreams condensed lux to tenebrous,
and the wondrous Hau coldly stopped Mercurius
passing between worlds—the gods applauded
near absolute frozen light, cooled then thawed--
and thought followed thought. Weak forces collided,
Wu unhanded parity and the gods, amused, abided
symmetry’s quantum loss, while celestial beings
and those earthly-mired stopped their quarrelling
over pulsating small spinning radio stars. God’s
particle—misnamed, unspun, excitable—drove odd
deities to entomb their curséd brotherly blunder--
gloomy daft Hades—and left humans to softly wonder:
Which gods to choose?
Which gods indeed. Divine Andromeda’s spiral edge
and center moved all wrong and (the gods alleged)
prolonged Newton’s devotion. And Tinsley dissed
and then dismissed the elderly universe-as-pufferfish
with a spark of youthful novelty: there is no end
to Pisces’ puffery. Gods complained and defended
their telluric grasp of souls with a canonical sleight-
of-hand: Let there be light…and there was light!
Yet still thy breath, holy chatterers, cease thy patter;
alas, beware: Rubin proved that darkness matters.
It Did Not Last
Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.
It did not last, the Devil howling “Ho!
Let Einstein Be!” restored the status quo.
God and Devil jealously lament: Lakshmi sent
Maxwell’s demon, thermodynamically exigent,
while Heisenberg, no less a foe, forsook certainty,
and Schrödinger’s cat, apropos, sang of entropy.
What next to know? Forces unleashed, fluttering
breeze of truth carried aloft its burden, muttering
kings blinded to the blazing hearth. Ancient Odin,
one-eyed wisdom’s god, gathered singed ravens
flung from scudding clouds: far-wandering birds
speaking of human misery as Thor thundered
immortal Lord Krishna’s primordial curse--
I am become Death—destroyer of the universe.
It did not last.
Galaxies purled and darkness swayed and heavenly
Aditi swirled stars through a boundless sky; earthly
Kali swallowed demons whole: drops of blood
like spinning suns splashed upon dark wet mud;
Einstein’s dreams condensed lux to tenebrous,
and the wondrous Hau coldly stopped Mercurius
passing between worlds—the gods applauded
near absolute frozen light, cooled then thawed--
and thought followed thought. Weak forces collided,
Wu unhanded parity and the gods, amused, abided
symmetry’s quantum loss, while celestial beings
and those earthly-mired stopped their quarrelling
over pulsating small spinning radio stars. God’s
particle—misnamed, unspun, excitable—drove odd
deities to entomb their curséd brotherly blunder--
gloomy daft Hades—and left humans to softly wonder:
Which gods to choose?
Which gods indeed. Divine Andromeda’s spiral edge
and center moved all wrong and (the gods alleged)
prolonged Newton’s devotion. And Tinsley dissed
and then dismissed the elderly universe-as-pufferfish
with a spark of youthful novelty: there is no end
to Pisces’ puffery. Gods complained and defended
their telluric grasp of souls with a canonical sleight-
of-hand: Let there be light…and there was light!
Yet still thy breath, holy chatterers, cease thy patter;
alas, beware: Rubin proved that darkness matters.
Note: The first couplet is Alexander Pope’s (1688-1774), “Epitaph for Sir Isaac Newton.” The second is J.C. Squire’s (1884-1958) rejoinder, “In Continuation of Pope on Newton,” Poems (1926). In Hindu tradition, the goddess of light, Lakshmi, consort to the god Vishnu, is depicted with four hands, one of which represents liberation from the cycle of birth and death. James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), with his demon, proposed a thought experiment questioning the second law of thermodynamics. Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976) argued that for quantum mechanics there is a limit to precise measurement of both position and momentum of particles. Erwin Schrödinger (1887-1961) offered an alive-and-dead-cat thought experiment as a critique of the so-called Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. J. Robert Oppenheimer (1904-1967), often called the “father of the atomic bomb,” remarked that the Bhagavad Gita came to mind after the first atomic detonation in 1945: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” The Hindu goddess Aditi, whose name means “infinite heavens,” or “boundless sky,” is the mother of everything. The goddess Kali has many wonderful, contradictory attributes—ferocious and fearsome goddess of darkness and time, and tender, devoted mother, for example. She killed the demon Raktabija, who through his spilled blood produced more demons, drop by drop. Kali chopped off his head and drank his blood, spilling none, avoiding demonic chaos. I can’t help but wonder which demon in which cultural tradition Maxwell had in mind for his thought experiment. Lene Hau (1959- ) in a series of experiments slowed light to a crawl and then stopped it entirely, using Bose-Einstein condensate, a vacuum and lasers. Chien-Shiung Wu (1912-1997) was an experimental physicist; she worked on the Manhattan Project and also conducted experiments that contradicted the “law” of conservation of parity. As a graduate student, astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell (1943- ) discovered in 1967 the first radio pulsar. Higgs Boson, named after physicist Peter Higgs (1929- ), and sometimes called “the God particle,” was discovered by use of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012 and helped clarify fundamental theoretical questions in particle physics. Beatrice Tinsley (1941-1979) challenged conventional astronomical wisdom. She argued that the universe is expanding without limit and, as it turns out, she was right. The Big Bang will not be followed by the Big Crunch. Her studies of distant galaxies marked a significant shift in thinking about the fate of the universe, which is to continue to spread itself apart, forever. In Greek mythology, Zeus turned Eros and Aphrodite into fish to escape Typhon, and then Athena placed them in the heavens, where they became the constellation Pisces. Astronomer Vera Florence Cooper Rubin (1928-2016) and colleague Kent Ford (with Fritz Zwicky, who coined the term “dark matter” in 1933 in the background), worked on rotational velocities of galaxies, showing that unexpected measurements could be explained by the existence of dark matter.
The Paper Thief copyright 2017 David Jenkins
Some time ago I was noodling around the Internet when something caught my eye. I had typed into the search engine “anthropology mathematics,” a conjoining of my research interests. I scrolled through a few pages hoping to be surprised with fresh ideas and came across an obscure paper on the applications of graph theory in anthropology published in Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics.
Well, I thought, that should be interesting. I’m fairly well-versed on the topic with a few of my own publications, and I looked forward to learning something new from a couple of fine scholars from India, computer scientists or mathematicians whose beautifully long names contained many syllables and consonants in unfamiliar orders.
I opened the paper and began to read. The first sentence looked promising. The next, well written and engaging, looked even better. I continued to read and began to wonder why the prose sounded as familiar as my own. How could this be, I said to myself, I don't live in India, I am neither of these authors, and I am an anthropologist—this is all very dislocating. I must be mistaken.
But looking at the next few sentences and the next and the next I had the same strange feeling, oh my, oh my, oh my, down the full first page and again in the body of the paper. I began to anticipate quotation marks, the friendly wave of a citation to the real effort and the long expanse of hours it took to compose the article I had written and was now reading. And the ending of the paper! Such a finale! Alas, that too was mine, all of it.
A quick glance at the references confirmed what I knew. My work had been lifted with nary a nod to the author. At least the paper thieves made the effort to change personal pronouns from “I” to “we”—indicating that the theft was indeed intentional and thorough.
So I emailed the managing editor of Electronic Notes in Discrete Mathematics, who told me it was not his problem and to contact the editors of the specific issue. His journal publishes conference proceedings and the issue’s editors and authors were those responsible for the content, not the managing editor. “You have the right to publish a note revealing the fact of plagiarism,” he told me, “in which you have to provide irrebuttable [sic] arguments proving this fact.” Simply removing the offending paper from the electronic journal, he said, would not be an easy task. Contact the publisher for further information.
Then I emailed one of the editors of the conference proceedings. He was clearly unhappy that a stolen paper appeared under his editorship, and immediately passed on my complaint to one of the "authors." This scholar turns out to be the advisor of the Ph.D. student who swiped my work and claimed it as her own. The student had presented it to at least one live audience at an International Graph Theory Conference before publishing it under her own name and that of her advisor. In his email of regret, the advisor and co-author claimed ignorance.
The issue editor, in Finland for a year on a research fellowship, said he would ensure that the “author” never publishes the paper again, nor use it in her dissertation. He promised she’d write an apology. I imagined him wagging his finger at her across the continent.
Please, he emailed me, don't go any further in pursuing this matter, and kindly forgive this misguided student, Ms. x.
I call her “Ms. x,” after the mathematical symbol for an unknown quantity.
Meanwhile, her advisor had an extraordinary idea: would I be interested in appending my name as a third co-author to my pilfered work? He himself had no objection to the addition. That would certainly solve their problem, but would create one of my own: I would thereby engage in an act of self-plagiarism.
Many ironies linger around this tale of a stolen paper. My article, to which Ms. x liberally helped herself, was an overview and celebration of the work of anthropologist Per Hage and mathematician Frank Harary. http://mathematicalanthropology.org/toc.html
As most of the participants at the International Graph Theory Conference would have known, Harary was one of the preeminent graph theoreticians in the 20th century. He authored and co-authored well over 700 papers and eight books. He also edited ten books, founded two very influential journals, and lectured throughout the world. Harary received five honorary doctorates in acknowledgement of his mathematical contributions.
Ms. x’s theft from a work in part a tribute to such an eminent mathematician was not merely naïve plagiarism. It was an act completely unaware of the larger scholarly context. Where, I wondered, was her teacher and co-author in all of this?
The theft of my work may have appeared minor to the co-authors, as untraceable perhaps as a pack of gum slipped into a delinquent’s coat pocket.
I eventually received an email apology from Ms. x, forwarded by the editor with whom I’d been corresponding. Here it is in full.
Dear Professor,
I feel very sorry for what has happened so far. We do not have the intention of copying other people’s work. I just casually done some literature survey regarding application of graph theory concepts to anthropology. I have attempted to write a survey paper. The paper we wrote is not a research paper. It is really my mistake. It is definitely not deliberate but out of my oversight error and carelessness. Anyway my guide has instructed me not to write this paper in my thesis work. I hereby give you an assurance that I will not use this paper for any purpose. I regret and apologize for what has happened. Sorry for the inconvenience caused to you. Kindly do not initiate any further action regarding this and that will affect my academic career.
Yours Sincerely,
Ms. x
I would have been frankly happier had she simply said “I took your work and presented it as my own. I knew it was wrong. I’m sorry.” Instead, she offered excuses (this was not a research paper) and a clear misdirection of culpability (the theft was not deliberate).
I’m not interested in affecting her academic career. That is up to her advisor and university and her own future actions. But it is hard to forget that my work is on the Internet under another’s name. I wonder how many authors have been similarly maligned in this age of easy information transfer. I also wonder if Ms. x and her co-author will cite this publication in their c.v.s—but that’s another matter.
As I thought about what would motivate someone to steal another’s work, I recalled a conference in London many years ago at which I first met Frank Harary. One evening I went out for beer with Frank and several colleagues. Something he mentioned stays with me. “If a mathematician points out an error in one of your proofs,” he said, “the only possible response is ‘thank you.’”
The paper thief’s error was not nearly as interesting as a mathematical proof. But I suppose it is unrealistic to expect a “thank you” from Ms. x, which nonetheless strikes me as the second best response for pointing out a potentially calamitous error of judgment so early in her career. “I apologize,” is the first. At least she managed that.
Vintage prototype snowmobile, Chisana, Alaska, in the Wrangell Mountains, as large and remote a wilderness as any in North America. A truck engine was to sit in the center of the wood frame, and would provide the power to turn via belts the two 55 gallon drums that would drive the machine. It never worked. (2011) |
After I read Fox's Participant Observer, I sent him a small poem in response. I was delighted when he chose this poem for the dedication to The Character of Human Institutions: Robin Fox and the Rise of Biosocial Science. I reproduce it here. I also contributed an essay to that volume about the autobiographies of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Margaret Mead, Loren Eiseley, and Robin Fox . https://www.routledge.com/The-Character-of-Human-Institutions-Robin-Fox-and-the-Rise-of-Biosocial/Egan/p/book/9781412865548 |
On Reading ‘Participant Observer’* Antelope Defies chronology as a master trope Weaves tapestries of twisted rope And bits of bone and air And travels light. Crooked warp, angled weft, Antelope Breathes no noisome complaint Nor ruined lament Nor tale of otherworldly firmament. Instead he puzzles through The randomness of animals Who, despite all odds surpass their kind Invent language and divine The meaning of their fate. Antelope braids Mystery from human sociability. With prolixity Antelope wends No dance nor skate nor yeasty brew Nor chart and skew of kinship terms Beyond their ability to convey Connections primordial and fey. Still, without weave or trace Or dreaded count of shuttled thread, Without Trickster’s antlered mask, His girls provide the point at last. Note *Antelope (man) (kütstiwa) was the name the Indians of Cochiti Pueblo in New Mexico gave to Robin Fox, because of his springy walk, they said. |
South face of the Great White Throne, Zion National Park, Utah
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The south face of the Great White Throne with Francisco and the Smoot brothers, October 2019, old goats on the rocks. Rick Wyatt and I climbed the Becky Route on the northwest face, some 17 pitches, in one day in 1977, and spent a joyous (and physically miserable) night on the summit. Forty-two years later, the south face makes a fine bookend. https://www.mountainproject.com/route/107408953/northwest-face |
Striding hominid. Zion National Park, Utah. Granitic Footprint, Wind River Mountains, Wyoming
Here is an essay about tragic loss, three of my friends who killed themselves. I wrote it some years ago. I’ve changed the names except Lynn. Lynn remains Lynn. copyright 2017 David Jenkins
Loss
My friend Jennifer killed herself more than thirty years ago. It took her several tries, botched attempts leading to extend hospital stays. She once described how she stood on a roof, twelve stories high, swaying on the edge and summoning the will to let go. A cool late-summer night, bright stars, dry desert air, city lights below, and a young woman high above the parking lot. She wavered, changed her mind, and came down. A few weeks later, with cyanide stolen from the lab where she worked, Jennifer irrevocably stopped the respiration deep in her cells. She died alone, suffocating at the cellular level.
Another friend, Lynn, killed himself fifteen years ago after a difficult life, at once filled with hope and troubled by erratic depression and persistent poverty. He was smart and skilled and an accomplished rock climber. But with a profound stutter, a sparse vocabulary, extreme shyness, and no real sociability, he was difficult to know. I liked him. We got along, and spent many pleasurable days climbing in the Tetons, the Wind River Range, and on sandstone spires in southern Utah. Climbing, fortunately, requires long spans of nonverbal companionability. In the mountains, Lynn was in his element. One late winter night he parked in a canyon above Salt Lake City and waited to disappear. He ran a hose from the exhaust into his ancient Subaru. I see him still inside that car, swaying alone in the winter dark.
Last year, my friend Anzelm ended his life. A Polish immigrant from a well-off family, he was an exuberant man whose mentally ill wife make knowing them a difficult task. Obsessive-compulsive, often distracted to the point of disassociation, and unable to hold a job, she provided no relief from their difficulties and was rather the source of some of them. For many years, Anzelm drove mid-week from New York City to Maine to see his wife, and then drove back again to his job. She had returned home to care for her ill father, who suffered from dementia. A few years ago, Anzelm moved permanently to Maine, where he sold cars for a living, a fine job for a happily garrulous man, but for Anzelm is was hellish. “I love it,” he told me with his Polish-inflected accent, the irony difficult to avoid, “someone new to talk to every day.” He was at rock-bottom. One night, with a gun to his head, he asked his wife “Is this okay?” and then shot himself. They had been arguing. Distracted, disassociated, unable to recognize or respond to the emergency, she left the room and returned to sprinkle her husband with holy water before calling 911. Meanwhile, Anzelm lay dying, blood soaking their bed and leaking onto the carpet.
I was angry with all of them. I still am, I suppose. Each death was a loss, each life unique. I’ve long since given up the idea I could have helped any of them. Jennifer was determined. Lynn was ready to go. Anzelm, well, Anzelm was desperate, unable to see a way out, broke and in debt, and driven to self-destruction in part by the incessant chatter, day and night, of his troubled wife. He said otherwise, but perhaps he was tired of the United States as well and could no longer recall earlier, happier times, before he moved to New York, to Maine, to his own demise, and to his final, sad ablution.
II
Suicide statistics, bloodless numbers, show that more men than women kill themselves, but more women than men try to kill themselves. For every four male suicides, there is one female suicide. For every three female attempts, one male tries to kill himself. The most recent numbers I’ve found are from 2005, a year in which a reported 32,637 people committed suicide in the U.S. Men prefer a violent death, with firearms a common method. Women prefer poisons. This presents a clear gender difference: rapid external versus slower internal forms of dying. Death by suffocation occupies a statistically intermediate position. It is intermediate in form and effect as well. Suffocation requires an external force (hanging, for example), and is slower and less violent than a gun but faster and more violent than an overdose.
In the U.S., every 40 seconds or so someone tries to do themselves in; every day, about 88 succeed. Suicideologists (a real term and field of study—talk about a dismal science) estimate about 5 million living persons in the U.S. have tried to kill themselves. The highest successful suicide rates are in the western states, the lowest are in the northern states. The national rate stands at around eleven suicides for every 100,000 persons. Each death is contains a story, a tale of a complicated life eclipsed by an act of self-destruction. Most of those stories remain untold, the details too painful for those close at hand to express or recall. The old taboo of speaking about a suicide is thus perpetuated by the silence of the living.
I am unmoved by that taboo. Because I was not directly privy to all of the circumstances leading to my friends’ suicides, I may not have the emotional defenses of those closer to their day-to-day lives, and so feel freer to write about them. Perhaps my marginal involvement provides both emotional distance and greater objectivity. Still, being out of center, a sidelong observer, I have been affected by their deaths more than I initially thought, as I remember and write about a few fragments of their lives.
III
I knew Jennifer when we were students at the University of Utah. She studied biology, I studied anthropology. My girlfriend at the time was her best friend. We all had a common circle of friends who spent a great deal of time in the mountains and deserts, climbing, skiing, exploring. Risk-taking was the norm. Not simply for physiological effect—a narcissistic adrenaline rush or endorphin fix—but because we recognized how ephemeral life was. Intensity, arousal, heightened focus, prolonged concentration, athleticism: these experiences were part of our daily lives; we sought them out. We took pleasure from one another’s accomplishments: a dangerous ski descent, a big wall climbed in record time, a solitary sojourn deep into the desert. Highly competitive, we never admitted any overt signs of competition. Some of us, driven by self-interest, pushed individual athletic boundaries above all other concerns. Others, intellectually curious and ambitious in our desire to visit other, distant, extreme parts of the planet, travelled to the Amazon Basin, the Himalayas, Patagonia, the high arctic. Most of us loved the natural world. When asked, I described myself with the pretension of a twenty-two year old as exocentric, as an exovert. For the most part we stood outside of the rather oppressive Mormon-dominated local culture, but, often through gentle mockery, learned to live alongside it.
I discovered Jennifer was suicidal after she overdosed on valium. She spent a couple of days in the hospital, moved back to her parents’ home to recover, and complained about being there. She looked awful. Puffy and listless, her skin as pale as late-afternoon snow, her dark hair unkempt. But she seemed to rally and soon enough returned to her studies and the lab in which she worked. She moved into an apartment near the university, about a block away from where I lived. She received treatment, and her mood and bearing improved.
Later that year, a group of us spent a week in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. One of our favorite areas was in the southern end of the range, the Cirque of the Towers, a long day’s walk from the nearest trailhead. Several of us spent our time rock climbing on fine, steep granite walls. Others, Jennifer among them, preferred to walk up a high pass to look into the next valley, or to take a less difficult route to the top of one of the many circling peaks. Still others in our small group preferred to sit in the warmth of the valley watching the sky and passing clouds, perhaps entertaining the skittish, chirping pikas, writing in journals, napping in the sun. There is an unmistakable serenity to high alpine valleys in mid-summer. In such places, the world makes sense. We all camped together, ate our evening meals together, and, tired from long days and plenty of shared whisky, slept early, woke early in the pre-dawn cold, and started another similar day.
At the end of our trip, I walked out of the mountains with Jennifer. We didn’t talk much. I learned from a good friend of hers that she would rather not talk about her suicide attempt, and I never brought it up. We simply walked, following glacial moraines and a small stream, working our way toward the parking area twelve miles distant. At one point she stopped to wait for others of our friends, who were strung out along the trial. I kept walking. Despite thirty years passing, I still clearly see her sitting on a log over the stream, shoes off, feet sunk in the cold water, light and shadow playing across the scene. She seemed happy but withdrawn, hard to read. Such are the visions with which we remember our lost friends. The stream was loud, conversation difficult, the parked cars at the trailhead still a long way off. I continue down the trail, slapping at mosquitoes and horseflies the size of quarters that would bite at the back of the knees.
We liked and were attracted to one another, but were never lovers. One late summer night, Jennifer appeared at my window. I lived alone in a small apartment, on the first floor, and slept next to an open window. There she was, saying hello, could she come in, spend the night. Quite drunk, walking home from some party, two, three in the morning. We talked for a while through the open window, her elbows on the windowsill while I stayed in bed. Perhaps embarrassed at her boldness, or her drunkenness, or the odd intimacy of the moment, which had the potential to undermine many relationships, she decided to go home. I watched her walk through the yard and lie down on the sidewalk. I could barely see her form under the moonless sky. She was shivering. I dressed, walked her home, rooted around in her refrigerator, make a pot of tea and an omelet, and, after eating and talking for a while, put her to bed, touched her forehead, and said sleep well. I stayed for a time, sitting at the kitchen table in her small efficiency apartment, wondering how she was, whether there was anything I could do, until she fell asleep. It was nearly dawn. I knew she was troubled, but I was too inexperienced, too unsure of myself, to offer anything beyond a pot of tea. We saw each other many times afterwards, at the university, with mutual friends, at this or that party; we may have walked together in the foothills above the city or in the large nearby cemetery, a favorite haunt—it is hard now to recall, my memories are scattered. But we never talked about that night. Until much later, I never told anyone, including her best friend, my girlfriend, not wishing to stir up any problems between them. We thus tacitly conspired to maintain a private connection, unshared by others, or so I assumed. In truth, I never knew if Jennifer described that evening to anyone else.
A few months later, in the late fall or perhaps it was early spring, she was dead. Only then did I learn of her multiple suicide attempts; only then did her friends begin to talk among themselves about what they knew individually but not collectively. About her difficult family life, her doomed relationships, her despair. I still sigh at our failure, my naïve silence. She deeply disliked her parents; I never knew why. She longed for a stable relationship, but dated men she found ridiculous, incompatible, unloving. And she lived day to day with a despair she ultimately could no longer face. It was hard to know why we, her friends, could not, did not, help.
I now understand that night she stopped by my place not as a cry for help, as the cliché goes, but, foreshadowing her death, as a more complex, nuanced, and far sadder cry: remember me, she was saying, remember me. Whether I am right, I have no way of knowing. But, over the gulf of so many years, this is the interpretation I’ve come to prefer.
IV
Around this time, in the late seventies or early eighties, I read Stanley Kauffman’s “An Album of Suicides,” published in the American Scholar (Summer 1979). Writing my own album, I recalled the first sentences of his essay: “I’ve known three women who attempted suicide, two of whom were eventually successful. All were beautiful.” I remember being struck by the lives of these women and their painful trajectories. I’ve recently reread this essay, wondering if memory serves or obscures. I had remembered the basic stories, the pathos, the period details. Now I saw that in describing these women, Kauffman indulged in a kind of plein air description with just enough murky emotional baggage to keep his stories alive. He did not linger on this friends’ deaths, or their own lives, or on any larger context of meaning. Instead, in cinematic prose he described his personal experience with them. Along the way he complained about a dislikeable husband, about being called late at night for help, about his own tedium at work.
Kauffman was clearly attracted to, and repelled by, these women. I puzzled over his tone, his lack of empathy, his failure to ask questions about his friends’ interior experience. I had read his essay as a form of expiation, exorcizing the demons of his own guilt. Now, rereading his piece, I realized that his vignettes were not about his friends—Nan and Betty and Jean—but about Kauffman. They provided the occasion to talk about himself, his essay a medium of self-indulgence—a self-indulgence, writing about my own friends, I find impossible to entirely avoid.
V
A few years after Jennifer’s suicide, Lynn and I spent ten days climbing some of the harder rock walls in the Cirque of the Towers. One afternoon on Warbonnet, a striking, steep mountain with long, sustained climbing routes, we watched a helicopter fly up the valley. We were on a route called "Black Elk," for many years the hardest route in the Winds. I’d climbed extensively in the Wind River Mountains, perhaps twenty or more trips, and had never seen or heard a helicopter in that wilderness range. It flew below our perch high on an eastern cliff and continued up the valley out of sight. We could hear it circling and then landing. An hour later it took off and flew back out the valley. We continued to the top. In the late afternoon we walked down Warbonnet’s southern slopes, scrambling through loose scree and car-sized boulders, still wondering about the strange, intrusive appearance of the noisy flying machine, whose thumping reverberated off the tall granite walls of the Cirque.
Returning to our camp we met another party of climbers who were leaving the area and learned their story. The day before, a small group had climbed Wolf’s Head, a peak with a knife-edge traverse, vertical cliffs falling away to either side. This is a dramatic spot, high above the valley, but not especially difficult in good conditions. One of the climbers slipped and fell fifty feet or so and was injured, dangling at the end of his rope. A large rock, perhaps dislodged by his friends above, dropped down the cliff and struck him on the head, killing him. His friends could not retrieve the body. It was impossible to simply haul up such a weight, and the cliff was too high to lower their friend to the bottom. Night was falling. They secured the rope and in the gloaming made their way back to camp, a long series of rappels to the ground. That night a storm blew through, with a little rain, booming thunder, and lightning strikes to the surrounding mountains that briefly illuminated the valley. Returning the next morning, they discovered their friend, high in his lonely aerie, had been struck by lightening, which had followed the wet rope to its weighted end. It was difficult, they said, to gather enough gear from other climbers in the Cirque to lower his body to a place he could be carried down. Now they were leaving the mountains, their unfortunate friend and his wife had flown out, and all they had left was the painful walk ahead of them. They said they would never return.
Lynn and I talked about this climber’s death, about how we would handle similar circumstances. We felt sorry for his companions. We walked along the same trail Jennifer and I had walked a few years earlier, next to a noisy snow-fed stream, with slanting late afternoon sun, buzzing flies, another storm approaching. I think of that unknown man now and then. His life ended as he pursued something he loved to do. I have known a few such climbers, killed by a random rock skipping down the face of a cliff, or swept away by a massive avalanche, or, unroped on a glacier, stepping into a hidden crevasse never to be seen again, leaving footsteps in the snow, a hole, and nothingness. Climbers take calculated risks, balancing their skill and knowledge of extreme environments against random elements, bad weather, a misstep, a moment of inattention. Many climbers become addicted to the experience. Nothing else seems to match. Death under such circumstances is mourned, and sometimes climbers scale back their ambitions as a result, preferring to lessen the risk just a little. Lynn’s death, by contrast, still seems so sadly mundane for one accustomed to moving so gracefully through a vertical world. I see him slapping at horseflies, hear his stuttered curse, as we make our way back to camp.
Loss
My friend Jennifer killed herself more than thirty years ago. It took her several tries, botched attempts leading to extend hospital stays. She once described how she stood on a roof, twelve stories high, swaying on the edge and summoning the will to let go. A cool late-summer night, bright stars, dry desert air, city lights below, and a young woman high above the parking lot. She wavered, changed her mind, and came down. A few weeks later, with cyanide stolen from the lab where she worked, Jennifer irrevocably stopped the respiration deep in her cells. She died alone, suffocating at the cellular level.
Another friend, Lynn, killed himself fifteen years ago after a difficult life, at once filled with hope and troubled by erratic depression and persistent poverty. He was smart and skilled and an accomplished rock climber. But with a profound stutter, a sparse vocabulary, extreme shyness, and no real sociability, he was difficult to know. I liked him. We got along, and spent many pleasurable days climbing in the Tetons, the Wind River Range, and on sandstone spires in southern Utah. Climbing, fortunately, requires long spans of nonverbal companionability. In the mountains, Lynn was in his element. One late winter night he parked in a canyon above Salt Lake City and waited to disappear. He ran a hose from the exhaust into his ancient Subaru. I see him still inside that car, swaying alone in the winter dark.
Last year, my friend Anzelm ended his life. A Polish immigrant from a well-off family, he was an exuberant man whose mentally ill wife make knowing them a difficult task. Obsessive-compulsive, often distracted to the point of disassociation, and unable to hold a job, she provided no relief from their difficulties and was rather the source of some of them. For many years, Anzelm drove mid-week from New York City to Maine to see his wife, and then drove back again to his job. She had returned home to care for her ill father, who suffered from dementia. A few years ago, Anzelm moved permanently to Maine, where he sold cars for a living, a fine job for a happily garrulous man, but for Anzelm is was hellish. “I love it,” he told me with his Polish-inflected accent, the irony difficult to avoid, “someone new to talk to every day.” He was at rock-bottom. One night, with a gun to his head, he asked his wife “Is this okay?” and then shot himself. They had been arguing. Distracted, disassociated, unable to recognize or respond to the emergency, she left the room and returned to sprinkle her husband with holy water before calling 911. Meanwhile, Anzelm lay dying, blood soaking their bed and leaking onto the carpet.
I was angry with all of them. I still am, I suppose. Each death was a loss, each life unique. I’ve long since given up the idea I could have helped any of them. Jennifer was determined. Lynn was ready to go. Anzelm, well, Anzelm was desperate, unable to see a way out, broke and in debt, and driven to self-destruction in part by the incessant chatter, day and night, of his troubled wife. He said otherwise, but perhaps he was tired of the United States as well and could no longer recall earlier, happier times, before he moved to New York, to Maine, to his own demise, and to his final, sad ablution.
II
Suicide statistics, bloodless numbers, show that more men than women kill themselves, but more women than men try to kill themselves. For every four male suicides, there is one female suicide. For every three female attempts, one male tries to kill himself. The most recent numbers I’ve found are from 2005, a year in which a reported 32,637 people committed suicide in the U.S. Men prefer a violent death, with firearms a common method. Women prefer poisons. This presents a clear gender difference: rapid external versus slower internal forms of dying. Death by suffocation occupies a statistically intermediate position. It is intermediate in form and effect as well. Suffocation requires an external force (hanging, for example), and is slower and less violent than a gun but faster and more violent than an overdose.
In the U.S., every 40 seconds or so someone tries to do themselves in; every day, about 88 succeed. Suicideologists (a real term and field of study—talk about a dismal science) estimate about 5 million living persons in the U.S. have tried to kill themselves. The highest successful suicide rates are in the western states, the lowest are in the northern states. The national rate stands at around eleven suicides for every 100,000 persons. Each death is contains a story, a tale of a complicated life eclipsed by an act of self-destruction. Most of those stories remain untold, the details too painful for those close at hand to express or recall. The old taboo of speaking about a suicide is thus perpetuated by the silence of the living.
I am unmoved by that taboo. Because I was not directly privy to all of the circumstances leading to my friends’ suicides, I may not have the emotional defenses of those closer to their day-to-day lives, and so feel freer to write about them. Perhaps my marginal involvement provides both emotional distance and greater objectivity. Still, being out of center, a sidelong observer, I have been affected by their deaths more than I initially thought, as I remember and write about a few fragments of their lives.
III
I knew Jennifer when we were students at the University of Utah. She studied biology, I studied anthropology. My girlfriend at the time was her best friend. We all had a common circle of friends who spent a great deal of time in the mountains and deserts, climbing, skiing, exploring. Risk-taking was the norm. Not simply for physiological effect—a narcissistic adrenaline rush or endorphin fix—but because we recognized how ephemeral life was. Intensity, arousal, heightened focus, prolonged concentration, athleticism: these experiences were part of our daily lives; we sought them out. We took pleasure from one another’s accomplishments: a dangerous ski descent, a big wall climbed in record time, a solitary sojourn deep into the desert. Highly competitive, we never admitted any overt signs of competition. Some of us, driven by self-interest, pushed individual athletic boundaries above all other concerns. Others, intellectually curious and ambitious in our desire to visit other, distant, extreme parts of the planet, travelled to the Amazon Basin, the Himalayas, Patagonia, the high arctic. Most of us loved the natural world. When asked, I described myself with the pretension of a twenty-two year old as exocentric, as an exovert. For the most part we stood outside of the rather oppressive Mormon-dominated local culture, but, often through gentle mockery, learned to live alongside it.
I discovered Jennifer was suicidal after she overdosed on valium. She spent a couple of days in the hospital, moved back to her parents’ home to recover, and complained about being there. She looked awful. Puffy and listless, her skin as pale as late-afternoon snow, her dark hair unkempt. But she seemed to rally and soon enough returned to her studies and the lab in which she worked. She moved into an apartment near the university, about a block away from where I lived. She received treatment, and her mood and bearing improved.
Later that year, a group of us spent a week in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. One of our favorite areas was in the southern end of the range, the Cirque of the Towers, a long day’s walk from the nearest trailhead. Several of us spent our time rock climbing on fine, steep granite walls. Others, Jennifer among them, preferred to walk up a high pass to look into the next valley, or to take a less difficult route to the top of one of the many circling peaks. Still others in our small group preferred to sit in the warmth of the valley watching the sky and passing clouds, perhaps entertaining the skittish, chirping pikas, writing in journals, napping in the sun. There is an unmistakable serenity to high alpine valleys in mid-summer. In such places, the world makes sense. We all camped together, ate our evening meals together, and, tired from long days and plenty of shared whisky, slept early, woke early in the pre-dawn cold, and started another similar day.
At the end of our trip, I walked out of the mountains with Jennifer. We didn’t talk much. I learned from a good friend of hers that she would rather not talk about her suicide attempt, and I never brought it up. We simply walked, following glacial moraines and a small stream, working our way toward the parking area twelve miles distant. At one point she stopped to wait for others of our friends, who were strung out along the trial. I kept walking. Despite thirty years passing, I still clearly see her sitting on a log over the stream, shoes off, feet sunk in the cold water, light and shadow playing across the scene. She seemed happy but withdrawn, hard to read. Such are the visions with which we remember our lost friends. The stream was loud, conversation difficult, the parked cars at the trailhead still a long way off. I continue down the trail, slapping at mosquitoes and horseflies the size of quarters that would bite at the back of the knees.
We liked and were attracted to one another, but were never lovers. One late summer night, Jennifer appeared at my window. I lived alone in a small apartment, on the first floor, and slept next to an open window. There she was, saying hello, could she come in, spend the night. Quite drunk, walking home from some party, two, three in the morning. We talked for a while through the open window, her elbows on the windowsill while I stayed in bed. Perhaps embarrassed at her boldness, or her drunkenness, or the odd intimacy of the moment, which had the potential to undermine many relationships, she decided to go home. I watched her walk through the yard and lie down on the sidewalk. I could barely see her form under the moonless sky. She was shivering. I dressed, walked her home, rooted around in her refrigerator, make a pot of tea and an omelet, and, after eating and talking for a while, put her to bed, touched her forehead, and said sleep well. I stayed for a time, sitting at the kitchen table in her small efficiency apartment, wondering how she was, whether there was anything I could do, until she fell asleep. It was nearly dawn. I knew she was troubled, but I was too inexperienced, too unsure of myself, to offer anything beyond a pot of tea. We saw each other many times afterwards, at the university, with mutual friends, at this or that party; we may have walked together in the foothills above the city or in the large nearby cemetery, a favorite haunt—it is hard now to recall, my memories are scattered. But we never talked about that night. Until much later, I never told anyone, including her best friend, my girlfriend, not wishing to stir up any problems between them. We thus tacitly conspired to maintain a private connection, unshared by others, or so I assumed. In truth, I never knew if Jennifer described that evening to anyone else.
A few months later, in the late fall or perhaps it was early spring, she was dead. Only then did I learn of her multiple suicide attempts; only then did her friends begin to talk among themselves about what they knew individually but not collectively. About her difficult family life, her doomed relationships, her despair. I still sigh at our failure, my naïve silence. She deeply disliked her parents; I never knew why. She longed for a stable relationship, but dated men she found ridiculous, incompatible, unloving. And she lived day to day with a despair she ultimately could no longer face. It was hard to know why we, her friends, could not, did not, help.
I now understand that night she stopped by my place not as a cry for help, as the cliché goes, but, foreshadowing her death, as a more complex, nuanced, and far sadder cry: remember me, she was saying, remember me. Whether I am right, I have no way of knowing. But, over the gulf of so many years, this is the interpretation I’ve come to prefer.
IV
Around this time, in the late seventies or early eighties, I read Stanley Kauffman’s “An Album of Suicides,” published in the American Scholar (Summer 1979). Writing my own album, I recalled the first sentences of his essay: “I’ve known three women who attempted suicide, two of whom were eventually successful. All were beautiful.” I remember being struck by the lives of these women and their painful trajectories. I’ve recently reread this essay, wondering if memory serves or obscures. I had remembered the basic stories, the pathos, the period details. Now I saw that in describing these women, Kauffman indulged in a kind of plein air description with just enough murky emotional baggage to keep his stories alive. He did not linger on this friends’ deaths, or their own lives, or on any larger context of meaning. Instead, in cinematic prose he described his personal experience with them. Along the way he complained about a dislikeable husband, about being called late at night for help, about his own tedium at work.
Kauffman was clearly attracted to, and repelled by, these women. I puzzled over his tone, his lack of empathy, his failure to ask questions about his friends’ interior experience. I had read his essay as a form of expiation, exorcizing the demons of his own guilt. Now, rereading his piece, I realized that his vignettes were not about his friends—Nan and Betty and Jean—but about Kauffman. They provided the occasion to talk about himself, his essay a medium of self-indulgence—a self-indulgence, writing about my own friends, I find impossible to entirely avoid.
V
A few years after Jennifer’s suicide, Lynn and I spent ten days climbing some of the harder rock walls in the Cirque of the Towers. One afternoon on Warbonnet, a striking, steep mountain with long, sustained climbing routes, we watched a helicopter fly up the valley. We were on a route called "Black Elk," for many years the hardest route in the Winds. I’d climbed extensively in the Wind River Mountains, perhaps twenty or more trips, and had never seen or heard a helicopter in that wilderness range. It flew below our perch high on an eastern cliff and continued up the valley out of sight. We could hear it circling and then landing. An hour later it took off and flew back out the valley. We continued to the top. In the late afternoon we walked down Warbonnet’s southern slopes, scrambling through loose scree and car-sized boulders, still wondering about the strange, intrusive appearance of the noisy flying machine, whose thumping reverberated off the tall granite walls of the Cirque.
Returning to our camp we met another party of climbers who were leaving the area and learned their story. The day before, a small group had climbed Wolf’s Head, a peak with a knife-edge traverse, vertical cliffs falling away to either side. This is a dramatic spot, high above the valley, but not especially difficult in good conditions. One of the climbers slipped and fell fifty feet or so and was injured, dangling at the end of his rope. A large rock, perhaps dislodged by his friends above, dropped down the cliff and struck him on the head, killing him. His friends could not retrieve the body. It was impossible to simply haul up such a weight, and the cliff was too high to lower their friend to the bottom. Night was falling. They secured the rope and in the gloaming made their way back to camp, a long series of rappels to the ground. That night a storm blew through, with a little rain, booming thunder, and lightning strikes to the surrounding mountains that briefly illuminated the valley. Returning the next morning, they discovered their friend, high in his lonely aerie, had been struck by lightening, which had followed the wet rope to its weighted end. It was difficult, they said, to gather enough gear from other climbers in the Cirque to lower his body to a place he could be carried down. Now they were leaving the mountains, their unfortunate friend and his wife had flown out, and all they had left was the painful walk ahead of them. They said they would never return.
Lynn and I talked about this climber’s death, about how we would handle similar circumstances. We felt sorry for his companions. We walked along the same trail Jennifer and I had walked a few years earlier, next to a noisy snow-fed stream, with slanting late afternoon sun, buzzing flies, another storm approaching. I think of that unknown man now and then. His life ended as he pursued something he loved to do. I have known a few such climbers, killed by a random rock skipping down the face of a cliff, or swept away by a massive avalanche, or, unroped on a glacier, stepping into a hidden crevasse never to be seen again, leaving footsteps in the snow, a hole, and nothingness. Climbers take calculated risks, balancing their skill and knowledge of extreme environments against random elements, bad weather, a misstep, a moment of inattention. Many climbers become addicted to the experience. Nothing else seems to match. Death under such circumstances is mourned, and sometimes climbers scale back their ambitions as a result, preferring to lessen the risk just a little. Lynn’s death, by contrast, still seems so sadly mundane for one accustomed to moving so gracefully through a vertical world. I see him slapping at horseflies, hear his stuttered curse, as we make our way back to camp.
VI
After climbing with Lynn in the Winds, I went to graduate school at the University of Michigan, but always returned in the summers to climb. I finally quit school without my degree, a mountaineer in the flatlands of Ann Arbor, unable to make a permanent transition to academia. I moved back to Salt Lake City, where I rebuilt my grandparents’ home, which had been gutted by fire. The house was leased to four or five graduate students in biology, who had been growing marijuana in a closet beneath the stairs. Contented people, they were oddly inept. They had run an extension cord to a grow light, the cord held in place with small nails driven through it into exposed studs. The nails, conducting electricity, grew hot, ignited the studs, and the house quickly burned, to the surprise and embarrassment of these nascent scientists. Lynn helped rebuild the structure, which was not quite a total loss. He was a skilled cabinet-maker, and built the new kitchen cabinets. I enjoyed working with him. Building, like mountain climbing, requires minimal verbal involvement. One cool fall day as we framed the roof, he |
asked me to hold a few hundred dollars for him. He had met a young woman, a drug user and, Lynn implied, a former prostitute, who was staying at his trailer. In his halting way, Lynn told me he gave her all of his money; she simply had to ask. Now he wanted me to safeguard a few hundred dollars. She eventually moved away, I returned his money, and we completed rebuilding the house.
On weekends we often climbed with our friends on local granite and quartzite crags, or drove to southern Utah to climb one of the spectacular sandstone cliffs at Indian Creek or Zion National Park, or we climbed in the Tetons. Lynn occasionally drove to Denver to attend what he described as a spiritual gathering. He spoke cryptically about these trips, and sometimes expressed embarrassment about them. Laconic comment was the best he could muster.
Lynn did tell my wife, however, a few details of his spiritual existence, which he never talked about with me; or if he did, I’ve forgotten our conversations. She recently reminded me of those details. For nearly a decade, Lynn had belonged to a core group of mystics whose leader founded Transcendental Meditation in the U.S. Then he abruptly left the group. He never said why. “Something happened,” he told her. There was an element of his interior life I never had access to; perhaps no one did. Or perhaps he simply abandoned that experience along with his cohort of mystics, and started afresh. Many mountaineers have a patina of mysticism about them, which I’ve always (sometimes barely) tolerated as a wash of New Age clap-trap. But Lynn didn’t. Or at least his inarticulateness kept it hidden from me. Our companionship was not reflective or contemplative. It was direct and experiential, founded on the physical challenge of a difficult climb or building a house, and the related pleasure of communicating about a complex task with few words. Whatever spiritual life he had was not something we shared. We thus established the discursive limits of our friendship.
Lynn’s suicide came as a shock. I had not seen him for several years. I’d moved to the east coast to complete a Ph.D., and had a temporary teaching post at MIT. One late spring, when my wife and I arrived in Salt Lake City to spend the summer, we learned of Lynn’s death, more than a year after the fact. I was angry at Lynn, at myself for having lost touch, at our mutual friends for not telling me earlier, and at the cavalier response from some of them, who said they had long expected Lynn to kill himself. He had his own peculiarities, but I never counted self-destruction among them.
When I think about Lynn’s life I remember the woman I never met, his request to hold money, his small single-wide trailer set among other similar homes, his poverty, his stutter. And our climbs. I clearly remember our climbs, which, for mountaineers, seem to a central means to organize memory, to guard against loss. I have many hundreds of boxes of photographic slides from this time, images of wilderness, of youth, of exuberance. I rarely look through them. Perhaps by keeping them unseen I hold at bay the passage of time and pretend to myself that my memory is keener, my images of the past clearer, than in fact they are. I have a deep ambivalence about photography, born from many years taking photographs. Realism, and a simultaneous distortion of the real, characterizes the medium. Like memory, I now think. Like loss.
On weekends we often climbed with our friends on local granite and quartzite crags, or drove to southern Utah to climb one of the spectacular sandstone cliffs at Indian Creek or Zion National Park, or we climbed in the Tetons. Lynn occasionally drove to Denver to attend what he described as a spiritual gathering. He spoke cryptically about these trips, and sometimes expressed embarrassment about them. Laconic comment was the best he could muster.
Lynn did tell my wife, however, a few details of his spiritual existence, which he never talked about with me; or if he did, I’ve forgotten our conversations. She recently reminded me of those details. For nearly a decade, Lynn had belonged to a core group of mystics whose leader founded Transcendental Meditation in the U.S. Then he abruptly left the group. He never said why. “Something happened,” he told her. There was an element of his interior life I never had access to; perhaps no one did. Or perhaps he simply abandoned that experience along with his cohort of mystics, and started afresh. Many mountaineers have a patina of mysticism about them, which I’ve always (sometimes barely) tolerated as a wash of New Age clap-trap. But Lynn didn’t. Or at least his inarticulateness kept it hidden from me. Our companionship was not reflective or contemplative. It was direct and experiential, founded on the physical challenge of a difficult climb or building a house, and the related pleasure of communicating about a complex task with few words. Whatever spiritual life he had was not something we shared. We thus established the discursive limits of our friendship.
Lynn’s suicide came as a shock. I had not seen him for several years. I’d moved to the east coast to complete a Ph.D., and had a temporary teaching post at MIT. One late spring, when my wife and I arrived in Salt Lake City to spend the summer, we learned of Lynn’s death, more than a year after the fact. I was angry at Lynn, at myself for having lost touch, at our mutual friends for not telling me earlier, and at the cavalier response from some of them, who said they had long expected Lynn to kill himself. He had his own peculiarities, but I never counted self-destruction among them.
When I think about Lynn’s life I remember the woman I never met, his request to hold money, his small single-wide trailer set among other similar homes, his poverty, his stutter. And our climbs. I clearly remember our climbs, which, for mountaineers, seem to a central means to organize memory, to guard against loss. I have many hundreds of boxes of photographic slides from this time, images of wilderness, of youth, of exuberance. I rarely look through them. Perhaps by keeping them unseen I hold at bay the passage of time and pretend to myself that my memory is keener, my images of the past clearer, than in fact they are. I have a deep ambivalence about photography, born from many years taking photographs. Realism, and a simultaneous distortion of the real, characterizes the medium. Like memory, I now think. Like loss.
VII
Americans tend to interpret suicide in psychological terms. Anxiety, chronic depression, loneliness, feelings of worthlessness—these are commonly cited psychological problems that may prompt a person to end their life. Suicide is the provenance of the individual, psychopathology its root cause. Cultural factors—at least in common representations of suicide—are rarely given a prominent role. This orientation explains why Americans with our individualist culture find suicide terrorists so inexplicable, as anthropologist Scott Atran points out in his 2004 study “Trends in Suicide Terrorism.” How can anyone kill themselves to support a cause that kills innocents? The general point is that for Americans suicide makes limited sense only if tied to a mental defect or deep psychological distress. It makes no sense if it is thought to be an act of social change or defiance. Or even an act of final self-determination: witness the prolonged legal fights over physician-assisted suicide in the U.S.
As I read the scholarly literature on suicide I found historian Alexander Murray’s Suicide in the Middle Ages especially compelling (Oxford University Press, two volumes, a third planned). Murray notes that suicide has universal significance. As an extreme and characteristically private act—opposed, say, to other extremes such as bliss or enrapture—it embodies “the strongest negative impulses from life: loss, incapacity, failure, and pain.” Such impulses are within the bounds of everyone’s experience, but the private nature of most suicides renders psychological interpretation difficult. Hence the universal significance: suicide illuminates an extreme of human experience, but requires careful interpretation from at least two vantages—one focused on the motives and experience of the individual, the other focused on the larger social effects, which both contextualize the individual act and give it meaning. The presumptively private act turns out to be entirely public.
As a public, therefore cultural, act, suicide, an extreme expression of unhappiness, evokes an emotional reaction from the living—pity, for example, or fear, disgust, shame, or, in my experience, anger. Law and ethics also have a say, as does religion, but because the victim is also the perpetrator the cultural meanings are often equivocal. Since there is no one left alive to question or blame, the “impotence of reason” to fathom the mysteries of self-death, as Murray has it, “gives a bigger role than usual to custom and intuition,” as the living come to terms with the act and the historian comes to terms with the past.
Murray’s European examples still evoke an emotional response, even removed in time by several centuries. Medieval folk threw themselves into wells to drown, stabbed or hanged themselves, dashed their heads against stone walls, typically in private. The town chronicle in Metz, Germany, recorded a number of suicides; the successful ones were subject to the posthumous punishment of burning or were thrown into a river, public retribution for the felonious act. Unsuccessful attempts were also subject to punishment.
According to the Metz chronicler:
On Wednesday after Candlemas in the same year [3 February 1485] another dragoon hanged himself in Metz. He was called Jean Ruxay, and the cause of his deed is said to have been the intemperate love he had for a young woman he had living with him. Some fellow-dragoons had ventured to invite her out. He was caught in the act, given help at once, and cut down unstrangled. As soon as the judicial authorities were told, they had him arrested and whipped.
The Nuremberg town chronicler also described suicides:
On the following Saturday [4 March 1469] the wife of the sacristan at the new hospital, a notable flagellant, hanged herself. People said she had lent Nicholas Muffel 200 gilders and that sorrow at the loss of them may have been her motive. She was burned.
During the year 1477 a goose thief hanged himself in the Nuremberg prison. He was burned in the ditch.
During the year [1478] a Nuremberg schoolmaster deliberately stabbed himself to death on the Bamberger Weg. He was not burned. It is said that he had given the bishop four gilders to be buried at St Martin’s in Bamberg.
Ritual mistreatment of a suicide’s corpse may have been an attempt to ward off further calamities. Bad weather resulted from suicide, good weather from the reverential handling and placement of saint’s relics. Avoiding bad weather and maintaining good weather required proper ritual comportment (or a few guilders to the right person; some things never change).
An Augsburg chronicler noted the following for 25 April 1300, St Mark’s Day:
A wretch called Straussmair died by hanging himself, and the same day came a thunderstorm and struck three women in a goatstall, vegetables rotted in the fields, and the same day a man drowned in the lake. So St Mark’s day is appointed as a day of fasting so that God should protect us from suicide by hanging.
The town chronicler of Basle made the following observations:
On 4 June [1439] a respectable Basle woman called Mrs Beringer went off her head, around midnight, got up [from bed], got on to the roof and jumped off to her death. She was buried at St Leonard’s. And it rained continuously for nearly a week, and people said it was because her body was in consecrated ground. So the Basle city council decided that she be dug up and thrown into the Rhine. This decision taken, on the 9 June then rain let up a little. Then it began again and continued for another day and a night.
The English invented the office of coroner, charged with inspecting corpses and judging whether death, suspected as unnatural, was homicide or suicide. Created in or near 1194, the coroner brought together twelve villagers with whom to form an opinion about a suspicious death. Regardless of whether a death was judged a homicide or suicide, a felony was committed. The weapon used in a suicide, or its equivalent value, was consequently forfeit to the Crown. Coroner’s records thus always mention the method of death, to ensure the King got his appropriate due: for an unfortunate who killed himself by hanging, “the beam was appraised at 3 pence and the cord at 2 pence”; for another who drowned himself, “the water is worth 6d yearly so it is ordered that the water be seized into the king’s hand and the said four vills are charged with the value of the water, that is, for 6d.”
For the French an economic element also characterized the results of suicide, along with ritual corpse punishment. Motive was of little moment, at least in medieval French records. Dragging the corpse behind a horse and transferring the dead person’s property to the holder of the local jurisdiction were central concerns. The private act thus became a public spectacle, which compelled many kinsmen to hide a family member’s suicide, protecting their reputations and purses.
Medieval theological discussions of suicide appear to be a response to local practices and not their origins. A brief example: Pope John XXII, a strong promoter of the views of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, became pope at 72 years old, and remained in that capacity from 1316 to 1334. Citing Aristotle’s Ethics, John emphasized that a suicide diminished his community, “because a part derives its being from membership of a whole.” Community provided for John a kind of definition of humanity: “Every man is part of a community and is human for that reason.” Consequently, “in killing himself, a man does injury to the community.” The social response is understandable, founded on preserving the integrity of the community: “According to Aristotle, Ethics 5, because a suicide does an injustice and injury to his city, as said above, the city punishes him by confiscation of his goods and dishonor to his corpse, for sometimes it has the corpse dragged or refuses it proper burial.” The divine response, as John has it, is even harsher:
But according to diving law a suicide is punished by eternal pain, for by killing himself he acts against natural law, against charity, and against the Lord’s commandant. Hence he is in mortal sin and dies in it, as did Judas, who was damned because he despaired of pardon and hanged himself, et cetera.
The medieval examples, gathered from Murray’s richly detailed discussion, clearly contrast with contemporary views on the proper public reaction to a suicide. I recite them here simply to show, by concrete example, one small human corner of the diversity of responses to the act of self-violence. Still, it is a mistake to think that contemporary reactions have dispensed with prior notions, that a modern focus on psychopathology, which locates the motives for suicide within a person’s troubled mind, solves all the mysteries of self-inflicted death. The living still react to such deaths. How can we not? Those reactions contextualize our friends’ deaths, and animate the search for meaning in the aftermath. The old ideas have not entirely disappeared. Ancient ideas linger, codified in law and passed on through interweaving strands of theological discourse. Suicide remains unlawful in many states, and results in eternal pain and damnation in some religious traditions, and family shame in others, although a suicide’s wealth no longer flows to the King.
Nor does public punishment of a suicide’s corpse typify contemporary practices. We no longer burn in a ditch or drag behind a horse or stuff into a barrel a suicide's body and toss it into a nearby river. We no longer remove suicides from their houses through a window or a hole knocked in the wall, so the threshold remains unpolluted by the passage of the offending body. In medieval thought and practice, the curse of self-murder was total: body, soul, property, memory—all were subject to loss. Today, the curse is partial, with traces of older traditions still visible.
VIII
Anzelm moved to New York City from Poland about twenty years ago. Tall and affable, he managed a restaurant and was well liked by his coworkers. A few years ago he moved to Maine and worked first managing a restaurant and then selling cars. Of my friends who killed themselves, I knew Anzelm least. Yet his death troubles me the most: the gun to the head, the holy water, his ill spouse. Unlike the usual pattern of solitary death, Anzelm chose to end his life in the company of his wife. Her initial reaction—to delay calling for help until she made, for her, a potent symbolic gesture—seems to me backward, but I don’t blame her for it. Everyone acts differently in extremis.
Her reaction, however, was not simply idiosyncratic. It was informed by her mental illness, which motivated her response, and by her Catholicism, which gave it meaning. She spent her days reading about and contemplating the lives of saints. She attended Mass at every opportunity. Although I never asked her about it, I now think the ritual sprinkling of holy water was an attempt to keep her husband’s soul from becoming eternally polluted by his self-murder. The long history of cardinal sins, of which suicide is prominent, forms a kind of pressure wave for some believers, impelling certain kinds of responses to certain kinds of acts. Her response was to consecrate her husband, still breathing, soon dead. Perhaps they agreed to this procedure in advance, but I have my doubts: he was secure in his disbelief and recognized the implausibility of any religious explanations for human existence. His wife, however, was equally secure in her belief. And she got to choose.
The fate of Judas, eternally damned, weighs heavily on some believers, whose family members also commit the sin of suicide. That fate is indeed frightening, the more so because the perils of Hell are precisely those that were inflicted on the living as the punishment for various crimes. The illustrative story of St. Brendan, a sixth-century Irish monk, comes to mind. His visit to Hell became widely recounted and well-known by the early twelfth century. St. Brendan traveled to Hell and witnessed the tortures of Judas, who was subject to the wheel on Monday, impaled on Tuesday, roasted over a fire on Wednesday, isolated in an icy valley on Thursday, flayed on Friday, and forced to drink molten metal on Saturday. Sunday stands outside the litany of tortures, but would be the most frightening day of all, as Judas contemplates the week to come. As Murray notes, “On Sunday—as befits a Hell appropriate to a well-disciplined twelfth-century Church—Judas is allowed to rest, so that he can start all over again the following week, refreshed.”
Anzelm may have been saved from that fate. At least the living can choose to think so. Others may think he is eternally damned. For me, neither of these options obtain: he is dead, that is all. But this does not mean that one’s response also ends with the finality of a friend’s demise. Anzelm’s Polish family, who flew to the U.S. for his funeral, reacted understandably, with great sorrow and anger, which they directed at his widow, which was less understandable. She was to blame. His death was her fault. Her hurt was thus compounded, a different sort of hell. She continues to live in the house where Anzelm killed himself—yet another sort—his dying body having crossed the threshold of their home on an EMT’s gurney. A window or a hole in the wall may not have been inapposite, providing symbolic counterpoint to the holy water splashed on the dying man.
One secular response to Anzelm’s suicide strikes me as more bizarre than ancient musings over cardinal sins, and less forgivable than his family’s misdirected anger. The automobile dealership where he worked sold him a new car soon after his hire. As the economy soured, and car sales dwindled, Anzelm sold fewer cars. He finally reached a point where his commissions did not cover his own car payments, and he became a kind of indentured servant, each month in greater debt to his employer. A few days after Anzelm killed himself, the manager of the dealership, who worked part-time as a local small-town cop, appeared on his doorstep, in uniform. Anzelm’s wife invited him in. The manager/cop told her he needed to take back Anzelm’s car. He also insisted that she give him all the paperwork associated with the car, which detailed Anzelm’s slow fall into indebtedness. She complied. A suicide’s property thus flowed back to the King, in the guise of a constable, raising once again the specter of this old custom, long vanished.
IX
Suicide, as Murray points out, is simultaneously a cultural and an individual act. A peculiarity of modern Western culture locates that act within the individual and, in effect, leaves it there. “Psychopathology” becomes the convenient label of both locus and cause. Yet other and older cultural traditions aren’t so tidy. Aristotle insisted that an individual’s identity is shared, unavoidably social, a point emphasized over the last century by innumerable anthropologists with examples from societies across the planet. Identify requires relationships to others. An individual is never an isolate, despite the insistence to the contrary in modern Western thought, in which self-interest is often the paramount virtue. In his The Western Illusion of Human Nature, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, citing Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and a diversitiy of ethnographers, describes relations of kinship, and societies founded on kinship, all of which entail “a mutual relationship of being.” Sahlins explains:
Clearly the self in these societies is not synonymous with the bounded, unitary and autonomous individual as we know him—him in particular, as in our social theory if not in our kinship practice. Rather, the individual person is the locus of multiple relations of being; even as, for the same reason, any person’s self is more or less widely distributed.
A mutual relationship of being, in which oneself, and an understanding of one’s self, is distributed among others: in such societies, a person’s death—by suicide or some other means—is thus everyone’s death, more or less widely felt. Hence the public punishment of a suicide’s corpse in medieval practice: by killing himself, a suicide damages everyone, and deserves public retribution and banishment—tossed into a river or burned in a ditch. Hence, conversely, the comparative silence surrounding suicide in modern Western culture: by killing herself, a suicide provides evidence of an interior imbalance, unshared by others, and for that reason cannot be adequately represented to the larger social world.
Jennifer, Lynn and Anzelm, my friends with imbalanced interior lives, were also persons within social worlds whose stability and meaning were partially their own creations. Their loss was shared, not simply because a friend or colleague or family member died, but because their identities were part of our identities. Societies founded on kinship relations—which constitute the majority of human societies—emphasize mutual relations of being as the foundation of identity; Western societies, founded on other principles, do not. But even here the split is not absolute, and the sharing of identities continues, an unavoidably common feature of humans everywhere. At least this is how I’ve come to understand the loss of my friends: with each of their deaths a part of my identity slipped away as well.
Americans tend to interpret suicide in psychological terms. Anxiety, chronic depression, loneliness, feelings of worthlessness—these are commonly cited psychological problems that may prompt a person to end their life. Suicide is the provenance of the individual, psychopathology its root cause. Cultural factors—at least in common representations of suicide—are rarely given a prominent role. This orientation explains why Americans with our individualist culture find suicide terrorists so inexplicable, as anthropologist Scott Atran points out in his 2004 study “Trends in Suicide Terrorism.” How can anyone kill themselves to support a cause that kills innocents? The general point is that for Americans suicide makes limited sense only if tied to a mental defect or deep psychological distress. It makes no sense if it is thought to be an act of social change or defiance. Or even an act of final self-determination: witness the prolonged legal fights over physician-assisted suicide in the U.S.
As I read the scholarly literature on suicide I found historian Alexander Murray’s Suicide in the Middle Ages especially compelling (Oxford University Press, two volumes, a third planned). Murray notes that suicide has universal significance. As an extreme and characteristically private act—opposed, say, to other extremes such as bliss or enrapture—it embodies “the strongest negative impulses from life: loss, incapacity, failure, and pain.” Such impulses are within the bounds of everyone’s experience, but the private nature of most suicides renders psychological interpretation difficult. Hence the universal significance: suicide illuminates an extreme of human experience, but requires careful interpretation from at least two vantages—one focused on the motives and experience of the individual, the other focused on the larger social effects, which both contextualize the individual act and give it meaning. The presumptively private act turns out to be entirely public.
As a public, therefore cultural, act, suicide, an extreme expression of unhappiness, evokes an emotional reaction from the living—pity, for example, or fear, disgust, shame, or, in my experience, anger. Law and ethics also have a say, as does religion, but because the victim is also the perpetrator the cultural meanings are often equivocal. Since there is no one left alive to question or blame, the “impotence of reason” to fathom the mysteries of self-death, as Murray has it, “gives a bigger role than usual to custom and intuition,” as the living come to terms with the act and the historian comes to terms with the past.
Murray’s European examples still evoke an emotional response, even removed in time by several centuries. Medieval folk threw themselves into wells to drown, stabbed or hanged themselves, dashed their heads against stone walls, typically in private. The town chronicle in Metz, Germany, recorded a number of suicides; the successful ones were subject to the posthumous punishment of burning or were thrown into a river, public retribution for the felonious act. Unsuccessful attempts were also subject to punishment.
According to the Metz chronicler:
On Wednesday after Candlemas in the same year [3 February 1485] another dragoon hanged himself in Metz. He was called Jean Ruxay, and the cause of his deed is said to have been the intemperate love he had for a young woman he had living with him. Some fellow-dragoons had ventured to invite her out. He was caught in the act, given help at once, and cut down unstrangled. As soon as the judicial authorities were told, they had him arrested and whipped.
The Nuremberg town chronicler also described suicides:
On the following Saturday [4 March 1469] the wife of the sacristan at the new hospital, a notable flagellant, hanged herself. People said she had lent Nicholas Muffel 200 gilders and that sorrow at the loss of them may have been her motive. She was burned.
During the year 1477 a goose thief hanged himself in the Nuremberg prison. He was burned in the ditch.
During the year [1478] a Nuremberg schoolmaster deliberately stabbed himself to death on the Bamberger Weg. He was not burned. It is said that he had given the bishop four gilders to be buried at St Martin’s in Bamberg.
Ritual mistreatment of a suicide’s corpse may have been an attempt to ward off further calamities. Bad weather resulted from suicide, good weather from the reverential handling and placement of saint’s relics. Avoiding bad weather and maintaining good weather required proper ritual comportment (or a few guilders to the right person; some things never change).
An Augsburg chronicler noted the following for 25 April 1300, St Mark’s Day:
A wretch called Straussmair died by hanging himself, and the same day came a thunderstorm and struck three women in a goatstall, vegetables rotted in the fields, and the same day a man drowned in the lake. So St Mark’s day is appointed as a day of fasting so that God should protect us from suicide by hanging.
The town chronicler of Basle made the following observations:
On 4 June [1439] a respectable Basle woman called Mrs Beringer went off her head, around midnight, got up [from bed], got on to the roof and jumped off to her death. She was buried at St Leonard’s. And it rained continuously for nearly a week, and people said it was because her body was in consecrated ground. So the Basle city council decided that she be dug up and thrown into the Rhine. This decision taken, on the 9 June then rain let up a little. Then it began again and continued for another day and a night.
The English invented the office of coroner, charged with inspecting corpses and judging whether death, suspected as unnatural, was homicide or suicide. Created in or near 1194, the coroner brought together twelve villagers with whom to form an opinion about a suspicious death. Regardless of whether a death was judged a homicide or suicide, a felony was committed. The weapon used in a suicide, or its equivalent value, was consequently forfeit to the Crown. Coroner’s records thus always mention the method of death, to ensure the King got his appropriate due: for an unfortunate who killed himself by hanging, “the beam was appraised at 3 pence and the cord at 2 pence”; for another who drowned himself, “the water is worth 6d yearly so it is ordered that the water be seized into the king’s hand and the said four vills are charged with the value of the water, that is, for 6d.”
For the French an economic element also characterized the results of suicide, along with ritual corpse punishment. Motive was of little moment, at least in medieval French records. Dragging the corpse behind a horse and transferring the dead person’s property to the holder of the local jurisdiction were central concerns. The private act thus became a public spectacle, which compelled many kinsmen to hide a family member’s suicide, protecting their reputations and purses.
Medieval theological discussions of suicide appear to be a response to local practices and not their origins. A brief example: Pope John XXII, a strong promoter of the views of St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, became pope at 72 years old, and remained in that capacity from 1316 to 1334. Citing Aristotle’s Ethics, John emphasized that a suicide diminished his community, “because a part derives its being from membership of a whole.” Community provided for John a kind of definition of humanity: “Every man is part of a community and is human for that reason.” Consequently, “in killing himself, a man does injury to the community.” The social response is understandable, founded on preserving the integrity of the community: “According to Aristotle, Ethics 5, because a suicide does an injustice and injury to his city, as said above, the city punishes him by confiscation of his goods and dishonor to his corpse, for sometimes it has the corpse dragged or refuses it proper burial.” The divine response, as John has it, is even harsher:
But according to diving law a suicide is punished by eternal pain, for by killing himself he acts against natural law, against charity, and against the Lord’s commandant. Hence he is in mortal sin and dies in it, as did Judas, who was damned because he despaired of pardon and hanged himself, et cetera.
The medieval examples, gathered from Murray’s richly detailed discussion, clearly contrast with contemporary views on the proper public reaction to a suicide. I recite them here simply to show, by concrete example, one small human corner of the diversity of responses to the act of self-violence. Still, it is a mistake to think that contemporary reactions have dispensed with prior notions, that a modern focus on psychopathology, which locates the motives for suicide within a person’s troubled mind, solves all the mysteries of self-inflicted death. The living still react to such deaths. How can we not? Those reactions contextualize our friends’ deaths, and animate the search for meaning in the aftermath. The old ideas have not entirely disappeared. Ancient ideas linger, codified in law and passed on through interweaving strands of theological discourse. Suicide remains unlawful in many states, and results in eternal pain and damnation in some religious traditions, and family shame in others, although a suicide’s wealth no longer flows to the King.
Nor does public punishment of a suicide’s corpse typify contemporary practices. We no longer burn in a ditch or drag behind a horse or stuff into a barrel a suicide's body and toss it into a nearby river. We no longer remove suicides from their houses through a window or a hole knocked in the wall, so the threshold remains unpolluted by the passage of the offending body. In medieval thought and practice, the curse of self-murder was total: body, soul, property, memory—all were subject to loss. Today, the curse is partial, with traces of older traditions still visible.
VIII
Anzelm moved to New York City from Poland about twenty years ago. Tall and affable, he managed a restaurant and was well liked by his coworkers. A few years ago he moved to Maine and worked first managing a restaurant and then selling cars. Of my friends who killed themselves, I knew Anzelm least. Yet his death troubles me the most: the gun to the head, the holy water, his ill spouse. Unlike the usual pattern of solitary death, Anzelm chose to end his life in the company of his wife. Her initial reaction—to delay calling for help until she made, for her, a potent symbolic gesture—seems to me backward, but I don’t blame her for it. Everyone acts differently in extremis.
Her reaction, however, was not simply idiosyncratic. It was informed by her mental illness, which motivated her response, and by her Catholicism, which gave it meaning. She spent her days reading about and contemplating the lives of saints. She attended Mass at every opportunity. Although I never asked her about it, I now think the ritual sprinkling of holy water was an attempt to keep her husband’s soul from becoming eternally polluted by his self-murder. The long history of cardinal sins, of which suicide is prominent, forms a kind of pressure wave for some believers, impelling certain kinds of responses to certain kinds of acts. Her response was to consecrate her husband, still breathing, soon dead. Perhaps they agreed to this procedure in advance, but I have my doubts: he was secure in his disbelief and recognized the implausibility of any religious explanations for human existence. His wife, however, was equally secure in her belief. And she got to choose.
The fate of Judas, eternally damned, weighs heavily on some believers, whose family members also commit the sin of suicide. That fate is indeed frightening, the more so because the perils of Hell are precisely those that were inflicted on the living as the punishment for various crimes. The illustrative story of St. Brendan, a sixth-century Irish monk, comes to mind. His visit to Hell became widely recounted and well-known by the early twelfth century. St. Brendan traveled to Hell and witnessed the tortures of Judas, who was subject to the wheel on Monday, impaled on Tuesday, roasted over a fire on Wednesday, isolated in an icy valley on Thursday, flayed on Friday, and forced to drink molten metal on Saturday. Sunday stands outside the litany of tortures, but would be the most frightening day of all, as Judas contemplates the week to come. As Murray notes, “On Sunday—as befits a Hell appropriate to a well-disciplined twelfth-century Church—Judas is allowed to rest, so that he can start all over again the following week, refreshed.”
Anzelm may have been saved from that fate. At least the living can choose to think so. Others may think he is eternally damned. For me, neither of these options obtain: he is dead, that is all. But this does not mean that one’s response also ends with the finality of a friend’s demise. Anzelm’s Polish family, who flew to the U.S. for his funeral, reacted understandably, with great sorrow and anger, which they directed at his widow, which was less understandable. She was to blame. His death was her fault. Her hurt was thus compounded, a different sort of hell. She continues to live in the house where Anzelm killed himself—yet another sort—his dying body having crossed the threshold of their home on an EMT’s gurney. A window or a hole in the wall may not have been inapposite, providing symbolic counterpoint to the holy water splashed on the dying man.
One secular response to Anzelm’s suicide strikes me as more bizarre than ancient musings over cardinal sins, and less forgivable than his family’s misdirected anger. The automobile dealership where he worked sold him a new car soon after his hire. As the economy soured, and car sales dwindled, Anzelm sold fewer cars. He finally reached a point where his commissions did not cover his own car payments, and he became a kind of indentured servant, each month in greater debt to his employer. A few days after Anzelm killed himself, the manager of the dealership, who worked part-time as a local small-town cop, appeared on his doorstep, in uniform. Anzelm’s wife invited him in. The manager/cop told her he needed to take back Anzelm’s car. He also insisted that she give him all the paperwork associated with the car, which detailed Anzelm’s slow fall into indebtedness. She complied. A suicide’s property thus flowed back to the King, in the guise of a constable, raising once again the specter of this old custom, long vanished.
IX
Suicide, as Murray points out, is simultaneously a cultural and an individual act. A peculiarity of modern Western culture locates that act within the individual and, in effect, leaves it there. “Psychopathology” becomes the convenient label of both locus and cause. Yet other and older cultural traditions aren’t so tidy. Aristotle insisted that an individual’s identity is shared, unavoidably social, a point emphasized over the last century by innumerable anthropologists with examples from societies across the planet. Identify requires relationships to others. An individual is never an isolate, despite the insistence to the contrary in modern Western thought, in which self-interest is often the paramount virtue. In his The Western Illusion of Human Nature, anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, citing Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics and a diversitiy of ethnographers, describes relations of kinship, and societies founded on kinship, all of which entail “a mutual relationship of being.” Sahlins explains:
Clearly the self in these societies is not synonymous with the bounded, unitary and autonomous individual as we know him—him in particular, as in our social theory if not in our kinship practice. Rather, the individual person is the locus of multiple relations of being; even as, for the same reason, any person’s self is more or less widely distributed.
A mutual relationship of being, in which oneself, and an understanding of one’s self, is distributed among others: in such societies, a person’s death—by suicide or some other means—is thus everyone’s death, more or less widely felt. Hence the public punishment of a suicide’s corpse in medieval practice: by killing himself, a suicide damages everyone, and deserves public retribution and banishment—tossed into a river or burned in a ditch. Hence, conversely, the comparative silence surrounding suicide in modern Western culture: by killing herself, a suicide provides evidence of an interior imbalance, unshared by others, and for that reason cannot be adequately represented to the larger social world.
Jennifer, Lynn and Anzelm, my friends with imbalanced interior lives, were also persons within social worlds whose stability and meaning were partially their own creations. Their loss was shared, not simply because a friend or colleague or family member died, but because their identities were part of our identities. Societies founded on kinship relations—which constitute the majority of human societies—emphasize mutual relations of being as the foundation of identity; Western societies, founded on other principles, do not. But even here the split is not absolute, and the sharing of identities continues, an unavoidably common feature of humans everywhere. At least this is how I’ve come to understand the loss of my friends: with each of their deaths a part of my identity slipped away as well.
X I sometimes wake in the middle of the night with thoughts of my own impending death. A strange, unsettling way to awake. I lie there wrestling with these thoughts, trying to shake loose from their grip, not sure where they come from or how they flash me awake. I get up, make coffee, and set to work on this or that writing project, my wife and daughter blissfully asleep. I am not suicidal. Bored, certainly, in my present job, and nostalgic for the intensity of my younger life. I’ve grown weary of the mundane character of my second half-century on the planet. I am open to novelty, which seems, nonetheless, to escape my grasp. I have bouts of anxiety and depression—fairly common experiences, judging from the self-help industry, sales of mood-altering drugs, and psychiatric reports. But I can’t imaging not seeing my daughter grow up, her daily presence such a profound joy. I can’t imagine conjoining absolute nothingness to my own meager consciousness, in which both are obliterated. And I would never intentionally undermine the familial and social worlds in which I live. |
At such times I think of my friends who chose to end their own lives. I wonder about the quality of their daily experiences, about what brought them to the end, about how a mind can be the context of its own destruction, and how social worlds fail these people. I wonder about the trajectory of human evolution, and about how our evolved consciousness may entail, for some, a strong desire for self-annihilation. At such times in the night, awakened by thoughts of my own peril, I take solace not from religion or philosophy or mood-altering chemicals, but from the unlikely history of humanity.
About 130,000 years ago, 10,000 or so Homo sapiens existed on our planet. Our species teetered on the edge of extinction. A small push—a disease, a negligible environmental change, strong competition from another species—would have knocked us over the edge. From that population in Africa, humans scattered across the planet. From an estimated population of about one to three million hunter-gatherers some 20,000 years ago, humans rapidly increased their numbers. By 6,000 years ago, there were approximately 86 million humans on the planet. By 1750 A.D., there were nearly 730 million. In 1950, the figure stood at two billion 400 million. Today, there are seven and a half billion. By the year 2050, estimates put the human population at over ten billion 200 million. I am only one among billions, but ultimately related to all. And we humans, all of us, are equally unlikely. Somehow, in ways I do not fully understand, this thought of relatedness and randomness, of kinship and the necessity of chance, continues to give me hope.
About 130,000 years ago, 10,000 or so Homo sapiens existed on our planet. Our species teetered on the edge of extinction. A small push—a disease, a negligible environmental change, strong competition from another species—would have knocked us over the edge. From that population in Africa, humans scattered across the planet. From an estimated population of about one to three million hunter-gatherers some 20,000 years ago, humans rapidly increased their numbers. By 6,000 years ago, there were approximately 86 million humans on the planet. By 1750 A.D., there were nearly 730 million. In 1950, the figure stood at two billion 400 million. Today, there are seven and a half billion. By the year 2050, estimates put the human population at over ten billion 200 million. I am only one among billions, but ultimately related to all. And we humans, all of us, are equally unlikely. Somehow, in ways I do not fully understand, this thought of relatedness and randomness, of kinship and the necessity of chance, continues to give me hope.
Maine coast.
|
|
Once Again
Once again my dog, all fur and bark and bite,
Foolish creature that he was,
Quivered in pain and leaned knee-height
Against my knees, tongue and nose and paws
Quilled by an animal half his size--
What could I do? Pliers in hand, I prised
Each quill free, leaving his tongue tattered;
Held tight, poor dog, with each tug and twist
More pain, more blood. Innocent of such matters
My young daughter clenched tight her fists
And lost her small voice, the dog’s rolling eyes
Giving away her daddy’s straightforward lies.
The dog panting in pain, the dog panting in pain,
Across the floor loosened quills, sharp and hooked--
What could I do? Free-roaming, without a chain,
And now I, with my daughter’s concern, spooked
By how dangerous a summer’s night transformed
A chance encounter. We have all been warned
Of such circumstances. The quill, the dog, the child
Have all been warned. Yet there we were, finding
The late night’s alarm, the animal’s distress, a field
Of shared experience: And in such random binding
We seek to recall, exhausted, exuberant, how we all squirmed,
As father and daughter years later confirmed.
Once again my dog, all fur and bark and bite,
Foolish creature that he was,
Quivered in pain and leaned knee-height
Against my knees, tongue and nose and paws
Quilled by an animal half his size--
What could I do? Pliers in hand, I prised
Each quill free, leaving his tongue tattered;
Held tight, poor dog, with each tug and twist
More pain, more blood. Innocent of such matters
My young daughter clenched tight her fists
And lost her small voice, the dog’s rolling eyes
Giving away her daddy’s straightforward lies.
The dog panting in pain, the dog panting in pain,
Across the floor loosened quills, sharp and hooked--
What could I do? Free-roaming, without a chain,
And now I, with my daughter’s concern, spooked
By how dangerous a summer’s night transformed
A chance encounter. We have all been warned
Of such circumstances. The quill, the dog, the child
Have all been warned. Yet there we were, finding
The late night’s alarm, the animal’s distress, a field
Of shared experience: And in such random binding
We seek to recall, exhausted, exuberant, how we all squirmed,
As father and daughter years later confirmed.
The Wall
Stone on stone I reassemble an old
wall that runs through a pine forest.
The work is hard. I am exuberant,
lifting and grunting at the edge
of my strength. Bloody knuckles,
sore back, dirt-covered, I stink of
mold and effort. Crows for company,
they dance and elevate and offer their
opinions of my skill, as I hoist yet
another ragged stone in place. The
forest floor is laced with sunlight.
My young daughter, wise with delight,
watches as a crow. Too small to lift
such stones, she flits off to build
fairy houses against the trunks of
trees, twigs and bark and moss
assembled and left in peace. We
each are builders in our forest
home. I admire her efforts more
than my own, her imaginings
more lasting than stone on stone.
Stone on stone our wall marks
nothing but itself and abandoned
farms and forgotten oxen-powered
skidders piled with stones and dead
farmers who edged their fields in
stones, which grew like crops out
of the cleared soil. Oh, they hated
that work, hard and loathsome. I
find empty bottles corked and intact,
secreted in the wall’s keep, in which,
young crow claims, forest fairies sleep.
I am a druid of sorts, wary of faith’s
certainty, of my human kind who refuse
the muck and slime and bubbling
effervescence of a vernal pool, who
cannot speak to stones, the hard
kiss on their fingers—a yelp, a cuss--
as all walls require. My daughter is
wiser than I. The wisdom of crows
shines in her eyes. She knows a wall by
its purpose is known as she hops along
my new-built wall stone-by-stone.
Stone on stone I reassemble an old
wall that runs through a pine forest.
The work is hard. I am exuberant,
lifting and grunting at the edge
of my strength. Bloody knuckles,
sore back, dirt-covered, I stink of
mold and effort. Crows for company,
they dance and elevate and offer their
opinions of my skill, as I hoist yet
another ragged stone in place. The
forest floor is laced with sunlight.
My young daughter, wise with delight,
watches as a crow. Too small to lift
such stones, she flits off to build
fairy houses against the trunks of
trees, twigs and bark and moss
assembled and left in peace. We
each are builders in our forest
home. I admire her efforts more
than my own, her imaginings
more lasting than stone on stone.
Stone on stone our wall marks
nothing but itself and abandoned
farms and forgotten oxen-powered
skidders piled with stones and dead
farmers who edged their fields in
stones, which grew like crops out
of the cleared soil. Oh, they hated
that work, hard and loathsome. I
find empty bottles corked and intact,
secreted in the wall’s keep, in which,
young crow claims, forest fairies sleep.
I am a druid of sorts, wary of faith’s
certainty, of my human kind who refuse
the muck and slime and bubbling
effervescence of a vernal pool, who
cannot speak to stones, the hard
kiss on their fingers—a yelp, a cuss--
as all walls require. My daughter is
wiser than I. The wisdom of crows
shines in her eyes. She knows a wall by
its purpose is known as she hops along
my new-built wall stone-by-stone.
A Note on Tobacco
Tobacco, a plant native to the Americas, had to travel over the Atlantic Ocean and across Eurasia before it arrived in Alaska, where it was quickly adopted by local peoples as a trade item and for their own use. The process, however, took 250 years. Among the first exchange items offered to Christopher Columbus in the New World were some “dry leaves,” probably tobacco. Over the ensuing decades, as the Spanish developed colonies and solidified control in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and the Andes, they began to use tobacco—smoked, chewed, and inhaled as snuff, following local custom. As Marcy Norton shows in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures (2008), the pervasive use of tobacco in Mesoamerica was ritualistic and quotidian, divine and commonplace, and could not be ignored by the newcomers.
Norton traces the history of tobacco and chocolate as these were adopted by Spanish in the Americas and spread to European and other countries. The adoption was not without cultural dissonance. Early European accounts describe tobacco and chocolate as disgusting, and their users as morally debased. “Once synonymous with the alien qualities of Amerindian culture,” Norton tell us, by the end of the sixteenth century tobacco and chocolate were “reimagined as outstanding members of the European apothecary." Still, by the early seventeenth century, both had established “a firm social and commercial foothold” on the Iberian peninsula, which far outpaced any presumed medicinal purposes. And not only in Iberia, since French, Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders sought tobacco from Caribbean natives for illegal trade and were instrumental in its worldwide dispersal. The adoption and distribution of tobacco carried with it local meanings—tobacco use represented sharing and friendship, for example—and these too became part of the allure of an exotic plant from distant lands.
Culture and nature, symbolism and psychotropic effect, combined to push tobacco out of the Americas and into the mouths and lungs and nostrils of other humans scattered across the planet, eventually reaching Alaska.
In 1741, nearly a century and a half after tobacco entered the practices and consciousness of Europeans, Russian explorers with the Bering expedition offered Chinese tobacco and Chinese pipes to Aleuts as gifts. One wonders how they were first received. Initial Russian reports described Aleut behavior, which was mostly one of indifference or mild curiosity. But we know little of what the Aleuts themselves thought of these strangers bringing objects from other places. The use of tobacco, however, apparently spread rapidly among Aleuts. By Captain Cook’s third voyage in 1778, people on the island of Unalaska “perfectly understood the use of tobacco, which they asked for by that name; and when it was given to them, immediately put it in their mouths; some likewise made signs of taking snuff.” This description, from William Ellis, a surgeon’s mate on Cook’s voyage, is interesting for two reasons.
First, not only the plant but the name for the plant circulated around the planet. The word “tobacco” probably originated in Taino, a language spoken in the Caribbean by those people Columbus first encountered in the New World.
Second, the immediate consumption of tobacco is intriguing. From Ellis’s description, we do not know the Aleut meanings associated with tobacco, nor its social uses, nor why someone would instantly consume it. The presumption is that people adopted tobacco for its pharmacological properties, but this doesn’t account for why Aleuts preferred tobacco above “all other things,” as Cook’s Lieutenant King recorded. The question is how tobacco was incorporated into local cultural schemes of meaning and reference, as it became a prominent item of trade over the following century and was adopted by people in remote regions of interior Alaska. Nor was the route of transmission simply from European to native. By around 1750, existing native trade networks between Siberia and Alaska also began to incorporate tobacco. This tobacco came from Circassia, Poland, or Sweden, was traded across Siberia, and eventually landed in the hands of Chukchi middlemen who exchanged it with their Alaskan counterparts across the Bering Sea for furs and other things.
This presents a large and intriguing research question, the approach to which would necessarily involve many scholarly disciplines, from archaeology to cultural anthropology to history to pharmacology.
Tobacco, a plant native to the Americas, had to travel over the Atlantic Ocean and across Eurasia before it arrived in Alaska, where it was quickly adopted by local peoples as a trade item and for their own use. The process, however, took 250 years. Among the first exchange items offered to Christopher Columbus in the New World were some “dry leaves,” probably tobacco. Over the ensuing decades, as the Spanish developed colonies and solidified control in the Caribbean, Mesoamerica and the Andes, they began to use tobacco—smoked, chewed, and inhaled as snuff, following local custom. As Marcy Norton shows in Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures (2008), the pervasive use of tobacco in Mesoamerica was ritualistic and quotidian, divine and commonplace, and could not be ignored by the newcomers.
Norton traces the history of tobacco and chocolate as these were adopted by Spanish in the Americas and spread to European and other countries. The adoption was not without cultural dissonance. Early European accounts describe tobacco and chocolate as disgusting, and their users as morally debased. “Once synonymous with the alien qualities of Amerindian culture,” Norton tell us, by the end of the sixteenth century tobacco and chocolate were “reimagined as outstanding members of the European apothecary." Still, by the early seventeenth century, both had established “a firm social and commercial foothold” on the Iberian peninsula, which far outpaced any presumed medicinal purposes. And not only in Iberia, since French, Dutch, English, and Portuguese traders sought tobacco from Caribbean natives for illegal trade and were instrumental in its worldwide dispersal. The adoption and distribution of tobacco carried with it local meanings—tobacco use represented sharing and friendship, for example—and these too became part of the allure of an exotic plant from distant lands.
Culture and nature, symbolism and psychotropic effect, combined to push tobacco out of the Americas and into the mouths and lungs and nostrils of other humans scattered across the planet, eventually reaching Alaska.
In 1741, nearly a century and a half after tobacco entered the practices and consciousness of Europeans, Russian explorers with the Bering expedition offered Chinese tobacco and Chinese pipes to Aleuts as gifts. One wonders how they were first received. Initial Russian reports described Aleut behavior, which was mostly one of indifference or mild curiosity. But we know little of what the Aleuts themselves thought of these strangers bringing objects from other places. The use of tobacco, however, apparently spread rapidly among Aleuts. By Captain Cook’s third voyage in 1778, people on the island of Unalaska “perfectly understood the use of tobacco, which they asked for by that name; and when it was given to them, immediately put it in their mouths; some likewise made signs of taking snuff.” This description, from William Ellis, a surgeon’s mate on Cook’s voyage, is interesting for two reasons.
First, not only the plant but the name for the plant circulated around the planet. The word “tobacco” probably originated in Taino, a language spoken in the Caribbean by those people Columbus first encountered in the New World.
Second, the immediate consumption of tobacco is intriguing. From Ellis’s description, we do not know the Aleut meanings associated with tobacco, nor its social uses, nor why someone would instantly consume it. The presumption is that people adopted tobacco for its pharmacological properties, but this doesn’t account for why Aleuts preferred tobacco above “all other things,” as Cook’s Lieutenant King recorded. The question is how tobacco was incorporated into local cultural schemes of meaning and reference, as it became a prominent item of trade over the following century and was adopted by people in remote regions of interior Alaska. Nor was the route of transmission simply from European to native. By around 1750, existing native trade networks between Siberia and Alaska also began to incorporate tobacco. This tobacco came from Circassia, Poland, or Sweden, was traded across Siberia, and eventually landed in the hands of Chukchi middlemen who exchanged it with their Alaskan counterparts across the Bering Sea for furs and other things.
This presents a large and intriguing research question, the approach to which would necessarily involve many scholarly disciplines, from archaeology to cultural anthropology to history to pharmacology.
Mumbai, a city of 25 million. At an inner city outdoor laundry that stretched several square blocks, one of many.
Kerala, India. A near life-size statue in a glass box.
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East of the Dead Sea
After a night’s long rain,
my windows open
since its spring,
I could hear a cow
somewhere
calling its distress. Santa
was not adrift on the river, drunk
again. The cow, though.
My western town has
a dinosaur
in the town square
and the Grinch of Christmas appears now and then
stuck in its jaws, placed there, I imagine, by my drunken
neighbors. They need a crane, or a very long ladder.
The dinosaur is quite large.
The day before the rain, I met an old friend in Moab,
once east of the Dead Sea. We met far south of the Great
Salt Lake, which was barely alive and shrinking toward its namesake.
Then it snowed all winter.
We rode mountain bikes—two grey-headed men in shorts.
I was afraid of falling.
I struck a juniper tree and gouged my shoulder.
I cracked a weld on my ancient bike, as if it was a suture on my skull.
My friend disintegrated bearings in a key joint, but, clever on his bike,
avoided trees.
My town has a headless chicken named Mike.
A headless chicken sculpture proves the story,
some chicken living weeks after it was
decapitated. We should all be so bold.
East of Moab, I live in my own Dead Sea,
headless Mike my town’s companion,
a dinosaur calling its distress,
my windows always open
to hear the last of the
long night’s revelry
as I, simple
with age,
continue
to ride.
After a night’s long rain,
my windows open
since its spring,
I could hear a cow
somewhere
calling its distress. Santa
was not adrift on the river, drunk
again. The cow, though.
My western town has
a dinosaur
in the town square
and the Grinch of Christmas appears now and then
stuck in its jaws, placed there, I imagine, by my drunken
neighbors. They need a crane, or a very long ladder.
The dinosaur is quite large.
The day before the rain, I met an old friend in Moab,
once east of the Dead Sea. We met far south of the Great
Salt Lake, which was barely alive and shrinking toward its namesake.
Then it snowed all winter.
We rode mountain bikes—two grey-headed men in shorts.
I was afraid of falling.
I struck a juniper tree and gouged my shoulder.
I cracked a weld on my ancient bike, as if it was a suture on my skull.
My friend disintegrated bearings in a key joint, but, clever on his bike,
avoided trees.
My town has a headless chicken named Mike.
A headless chicken sculpture proves the story,
some chicken living weeks after it was
decapitated. We should all be so bold.
East of Moab, I live in my own Dead Sea,
headless Mike my town’s companion,
a dinosaur calling its distress,
my windows always open
to hear the last of the
long night’s revelry
as I, simple
with age,
continue
to ride.
Nice contradiction between fact and fact
Will make the whole read human and exact.
--Robert Graves, "The Devil's Advice to Story-Tellers"
Above Ogden, Utah
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13th century Hindu temple, Chennai, India
Below are two poems I wrote when working in the Office of Subsistence Management in Alaska. The Office of Subsistence Management is involved with regulations governing hunting and fishing on federal lands, some 60 percent of the state. By federal statute, rural residents are given a priority over sport and commercial hunting and fishing on federal lands in Alaska. The photo to the right is from a weir on the Gisasa River, a tributary of the Yukon River.
Spirit Eye
Scrimshaw
Limned
the stained
and ragged
tusk’s staggered
cracks, ancient
tusk, patiently
resting earth-bound
then found
and blanketed
with fragmented
visions
elisions of lines
revisions of limbs
of flukes and fins--
tusk and whale and hunter
each inhabiting the other.
Small lines
as fine
as needles--
deceitful
scratches scribed
and matched--
a bowhead
dead on the beach.
Dead tusk, dead whale
exuberant enlivened squall
broken strut of a boat
torn skin of a whale
both too fast ashore
to float sure between
floes and hollows
of ice
needled twice
with waiting
sea lions.
Limned
the stained
and ragged
tusk’s staggered
cracks, ancient
tusk, patiently
resting earth-bound
then found
and blanketed
with fragmented
visions
elisions of lines
revisions of limbs
of flukes and fins--
tusk and whale and hunter
each inhabiting the other.
Small lines
as fine
as needles--
deceitful
scratches scribed
and matched--
a bowhead
dead on the beach.
Dead tusk, dead whale
exuberant enlivened squall
broken strut of a boat
torn skin of a whale
both too fast ashore
to float sure between
floes and hollows
of ice
needled twice
with waiting
sea lions.
Abattoir
With ADD I find no mind amuddle,
dank puddle of reheard words,
no flight (nor birds) to send or bend
along scattered diphthongs of sounds
reclaimed from nicknamed—confabulatory--
nay, storied outlaws who gnaw and snarl
the gnarled bones whose vertebral moans
remain entrained in thought.
Abattoir, bourgeois chutzpa:
my office links minx and larynx,
Jackdaw and patois, the flavored
sounds, the noisome grounds
vanished twice. And now what?
To add advice on what next
to vex.
With ADD I find no mind amuddle,
dank puddle of reheard words,
no flight (nor birds) to send or bend
along scattered diphthongs of sounds
reclaimed from nicknamed—confabulatory--
nay, storied outlaws who gnaw and snarl
the gnarled bones whose vertebral moans
remain entrained in thought.
Abattoir, bourgeois chutzpa:
my office links minx and larynx,
Jackdaw and patois, the flavored
sounds, the noisome grounds
vanished twice. And now what?
To add advice on what next
to vex.
Meditation
Kalakshetra Foundation, Chennai, India
A Meditation on Memory
For My Mother on her Ninetieth Birthday |
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I recall—at least I think it is a memory—walking to grade school on my own for the first time. The concrete sidewalk. The blue sky. The heat of an early fall day. Do I recall excitement? Trepidation? Neither are clear in memory. I do recall—again, I think it is a memory—my mom letting me walk on my own. Was it first grade? It must have been first grade. She walked with me part way, and I wanted to be let go (or so I was later told), and I made my way to school. The concrete sidewalk I can still see, the neat squares edged by grass. I seem to remember wearing a shirt my mom had made—I clearly recall fabric and tissue-thin patterns on the kitchen table, the sewing machine along a wall, and my mom carefully stitching seams and collars and cuffs, the snip of scissors, the hum of the machine. I remember watching her at work. I remember trying on shirts at different stages of assembly, a sleeve held along an arm, buttons to the chin. But the blue sky and heat may be inventions of memory, as I now try to recall walking as a six-year-old to school. Was I wearing a mother-made shirt? Probably. I seem to remember wide check patterns, lots of color, short sleeves. It was probably tucked in. A colorful, energetic kid on his way to school (in many ways temperamentally ill-fitted for school) dressed in a homemade shirt—how small I must have been! I do not remember being so small. I remember the concrete sidewalk. I remember letting my mom go—or rather, she let me go on my own. What are such memories? What are conversations about such memories? I remember lots of conversations about that day, and those are now hard to separate from the day itself. But the day is there, if I scratch around through time and circumstance; and talk of the day is there too, if I scratch around some more. What is the relation of one to the other? Mother, concrete, sun, shirt. Talk of mother, concrete, sun, shirt. Yet memory always melts, somehow, and that boy, that mom, that shirt, that day, appear mysterious in memory, fragile, ephemeral, a wavy outline, an invention of image and feeling and talk. What remains? What, in the end, lasts? A faint impression, an oh-so-delicate leaf in the meltwater of memory, a mother with her small boy in a new shirt on his way to school.
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Earlier in the summer, but not too much earlier, I fell off my bicycle—flew right over the handlebars—and landed splat on my face. What a scene. I somehow managed to walk home a block or two, the right side of my face scrapped of its youthful freckles, my front teeth busted, one of which was driven through my upper lip. I was bloody and hysterical and (my younger brother later recalled) I left a front doorknob slick with blood as I tried to return home for help. I have no memory of any of this. My mother’s good friend, Pearl, happened to be visiting, and she took charge, my mother understandably distraught, as I was calmed and bundled up and taken to the hospital. The year was 1962. The crash was prelude, the faceplant characteristic.
I remember lying on the couch with a very fat lip and scabs crusting on my face. Stiches along the rim of my mouth. I can’t recall what I could eat, or if I could eat. I must have been a fright. (Now in my early sixties, I have always had a crooked scar-tissue-fattened smile.) As best I can reconstruct that flying fall, I had hit a pothole and launched. I was on my way to the school at the end of the neighborhood, which had summer programs. In those years in that Mormon neighborhood in Salt Lake City, kids wandered at will. We were fortunate.
Bicycles mattered to me. They still do. Tricycles, too. In my wandering, a year earlier—a five year old!—I walked two or three blocks with several older kids to a nearby stream, and I clearly recall looking at the moving water, my feet probing the edge of earth and river. We threw rocks. The world was intriguing and needed our explorations. It needed our rocks. It is a fleeting image, that moving water, those rocks, my feet, vague in its way, yet oddly clear as well. Clearer still is the consequence. I was confined to our yard—wandering at will has limits for five-year-olds—and I spent hours on my tricycle in the driveway behind a chain link gate, circling, waiting for friends, I suppose, but of that I cannot recall a thing. Just the driveway, the fence, and the three-wheeled red bike. I could not, I knew even then, be contained forever.
How worried my mother must have been! She had three other kids to care for, and a politically ambitious husband off running for this or that, and me, the wanderer. A year, perhaps two years later—second grade? third?—I went with four or five neighborhood boys on a Saturday morning adventure. We left our neighborhood, hopped a fence, ran across a freeway, and then hopped another fence. We were young. We knew how to climb fences. Our goal was the railroad yard and its exciting, forbidden wonders. I was intimidated and felt we had crossed many borders that should not have been crossed, but no matter. We were exploring our world. The world needed us. When the other boys climbed into a caboose, my nerve failed me. I skedaddled and made my way back home, retracing the fence climbing and freeway crossing (cars were slower then, boys faster).
I said nothing about that day until I was forced to. Turns out my older companions thought it wise to lift a few blasting caps from the caboose (why were blasting caps in open containers?), and they were caught with the goods. They also thought it wise to tattle on me. It surprised me—no less a surprise to my lovely mother—when local detectives appeared at our door, following up on the delinquents’ tip about their equally delinquent compatriot. I recall the men in suits in our living room on a day I had decided to skip school, claiming illness, but I do not now know if I was in fact ill or just bored with school. Boredom was chronic with me in school in those days (I was beguiled by books, but only much later did I discover the joys of formal education, and later still I became a professor of anthropology and found—horrors!—the constraints of university bureaucracy rankled; perhaps I never grew up). The men in suits, however, left an impression. They told me, if I was good, my record would be expunged in a year. What was such a record, I remember thinking, and would it forever be my shadow? I was terrified by such a record, and by an early, entirely foreboding visit from powers beyond my ken. I now think they were blowing smoke, but they had an effect. They scared an eight-year-old. I was good for a year, maybe a little longer. (Power, knowledge, and nature all later became topics of interest, the scholar’s revenge, blowing my own smoke.)
Middle school—we called it junior high back then—tested my goodness and my boredom. The school was located in a hilly neighborhood—by then my family had moved to the east side of the city—and we could see the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains from the schools’ windows. I spent a lot of time looking out of those windows. One late fall day three of us, close friends as junior high friends are wont to be, decided to skip school and walk up into the mountains. We prepared for the day, snuck packs and food and boy scout canteens out of our houses, and instead of attending school we simply kept going up through streets and beyond all the houses until we hit a dirt road. We followed that road into the foothills, had a grand day of it, ate our food and drank our canteens dry. We found deer antlers. We walked along a stream bed filled with rocks and damp sand, which we dug through with sticks. I remember the dry scrub oak and being scratched by it as we made our way over a small game trail. We thought we were clever and no one would be the wiser.
Of course, my mom wanted to know, that afternoon on my return home, why I was so sunburned. I tried to bluster my way through, uselessly. She had been in contact with my friends’ moms, and with the school, and we were, naturally, caught. I don’t remember my punishment. It no longer matters. But I do remember the scrub oak and my sunburn, and three boys sitting in the dirt along a small trail playing hooky, pleased as could be, eating apples and peanut butter sandwiches and cackling about the school-bound fate of our foolish chums. I don’t now recall if I was wearing a mother-made shirt. The day was transcendent…
…I am on a bicycle. It is a Peugeot PX10 built from Reynolds 531 double-butted tubing. I am from Utah, my bicycle is from France, and I am riding down a long, winding road in Guatemala. The year is 1976. I am in motion, my bike is in motion, Guatemala, just before a horrific earthquake that knocked around its capital city, seems timeless. That, of course, is illusion. I am nineteen, and over the preceding months I have ridden through most of Mexico, and before that Arizona. We started, my friend and I, from Mexican Hat, Utah, and rode south, and intend to ride as far as we can, until our energy and our money are depleted. We have an abundance of one, and a paucity of the other. We are incredibly happy. We ride bikes rather than attend college. We have both dropped out, to the dismay of our parents but to our own good fortune. We are enthralled and exuberant to be riding through Central America, not knowing what lies ahead, but eager to find out. Mexico is behind us, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama are in front of us, and beyond that, all of South America. But at the moment we are coasting down a narrow road dense with colorfully dressed local folk, some quite drunk, walking home from a celebration. We wave and say hola and continue on our way, the road edged with dark vegetation, the air humid, and, as happens every day, I am forced to stop with yet another flat tire. Kids gather around as I quickly make my repairs, and I'm back on my bike and on my way. The world is in motion, I am in motion, my bike is beneath me, humming along...
Forty-three years later, I am still eager, still exuberant, still wondering what lies around the next bend, and always happy to be surprised by what I find. And my mother, bless her, still welcomes home her errant boy. Happy birthday!
Globalization
Limulus polyphemus
My intrepid parents, 89 and 91, and my brother's arm, Hemingway on display, Havana
Here are a couple of pandemic poems, from a larger series.
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Febrile
Febrile, dirty, the day consumed, the night undone with my own chugging, such pettiness, a body turned to hot starry hallucinations drenched in lung-by-lung exhalations of tiny structured strands: indiscernible and marvelous: dead replicators of such sophistication we cannot do much but suffer. I try to stand and fail. I’ve soured, my skin stinks, eyes cloudy with heat, I hear songs of blesséd demons, the damned word surcease above my head, floating with dust motes that know no words nor desires of one simple thought. I need that song in my rotten sleepless bed, but I cannot stand. I shout, I wave, ignored until that one simple thought rises, a trout to a fly, aught but a brilliant singularity of hunger. The thought drifts, dies, and I’m left gasping, coursing heatwaves through each staggered heartbeat of a useless body; my heart complies, feathered gills suck wet air and I flop about unable to breathe. |
"Poiesis" first appeared in Sky Island Journal https://www.skyislandjournal.com/issues#/issue-24-spring-2023/ |
Poiesis
My pockets are stuffed. I’ve been stealing flowers from my neighbors. They hide, mouths closed, their sin of hidden reticence I jauntily ignore and time my theft by sprinklers left to flood lawns, raising earth- worms to writhe alone, disinterred and unwilling to drown in sparse leaves of grass. I steal flowers in cool bone shadows beneath ash trees, along hedges, my sour neighbors sheltered in place, each hour lost. Each of their hours lost. How should we move through our days, skittering closed-mouthed ghosts, cleansed, breathless, hands scoured twice, and again. The streets cleared, the bars shuttered, kids sneak out and watch my grizzled neck dip into feared beds. They keep their distance, chant fie and fall, fie and fall, with reasons of their own, and skate off, rattled by my raised fist, my gaunt gaze, stones hefted to throw. I stumble and sigh into my beard, reach and tear loose petals, blossoms, and stuff my pockets. How should we move, our day’s excuse alive with reckless old men, feckless and serene in neighbors’ gardens, refusing refuge, the solitude of death’s inept loneliness no longer held end- less and tight, our poor lives bereft without flowers to steal, and grim without pockets to brim. |
Hushed
Let's all write wordless books and scroll through them page by page marking the age of anxiety blissfully over. Let's all read each other's blank verse and search elusive forbearance in angels disguised as hipsters and crows. Let's all imagine worlds made feverish, galaxies racing away in the night, gods not dead but indifferent as dead whales sinking to the ocean's lightless crushed depths, food for other lightless creatures marvelous in their own thoughtlessness. What remains in this hushed deep? We eat: we are eaten. God’s carcass bristling with worms, toothless hagfish worrying morsels from vertebral moorings, banquets of barnacled flesh made into holy sulfur. Let’s pray a community feast beyond our ken, pray indifferent gods and divine whales, pray wordless corpses sunk in dark oceans, pray the deep, the sightless, ancient scuttling toward fragrant death, pray ripped flesh and bone-bored proclamations of lipid- soaked sediment, a come-hither of such power gods themselves-- craven ratfish, abyssal snot flower-- quietly feed with blesséd creatures who will never know angels and care not for words: Rubyspira, rasping eater of bone dust. Vrijenhoekia, meagre bristle worm. Osedax, excreter of acids, keeper of microscopic males. |
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“Never Write a Poem About Your Grandmother”
My grandmother, she of the piano playing song writing Mormon generation of ancient ones, wrote a jaunty song, "My Home By the Blue Inland Sea." Bessy, to whom on many visits long before I understood promises, I promised an absence of poems, used to sit at her upright and play and sing for her grandchildren who marveled at her age and solid black shoes, her song's thread stretched from sea to inland sea. I see her still in the late evening at her dressing table, taking apart the bun at the back of her head, brushing out her waist-long luxuriant grey hair, a brush, a mirror, as I searched for lost time. I search still. The depression story of taking the last nickel to ride the bus to town, the stenographer’s job landed somehow, tough old bird before she was either, sew- ing fragments into family. Photographs she spread before her grandson, stories I could not understand, her dad, a hard rock miner, struck by a car. He was ninety-four, a Norwegian pilgrim with a broken leg. I hobble along with his history, marred, pocked by an absence of trauma, my hair now grey, wondering what car—a Model T?—crushed that leg and brushed against the grain of whatever future I concocted, my teachers insisting, caught in their leg-crushing poetry, that grandmothers’ lives explain nothing. Fools. Are all teachers fools? Having taught, I think so, yes, we are fools. Bessy explained; I failed to listen. I fail still to listen even as I recall: post-mastectomy, she, bed-ridden, too filled with love to abandon life, found her grey humor and killed us with that humor as only a grandmother could kill: assumed her assembled progeny to remember life is long as she forbade morbidity and all thoughts of reluctance, instead her false bosom, which she pronounced bazooms, plural, and all the grandkids to this day still laugh. Bazooms. Grandmothers. Love. Grey-headed reminder to quiet life’s fury as we all walk toward our own demise, step by fulsome step, hobbled, fearful, buoyed by cars that clipped our legs and grandmothers who filled us, always, with surprise. |
Aunt Minnie and the Alligator
The blue gowns, as thin as ancient
skin of very old men. Translucent blue
gowns and green masks, a patient
bedded by cultured, urine-hued
creatures so old they need no gowns
but those that hover beyond perception.
Clear mutterings of spirits or hallucinations,
a ninety-six-year-old dad’s conversations
with dead Cousin DeRay and equally dead
Aunt Minnie. Within reach. Sort of. Dad’s arm
explores the bedding, his hand widespread
to feel what’s not there, aware of my alarm
at his phone call with the Pope. We joke. Brains
and spirits conspire. An alligator plays on the ceiling.
Blue gowns appear and fuss and finally drain
the line from catheter to bag of pee, appealing
in its clarity, the blue gowns aver, escape from
ICU upended by that damned infection. A train car
full of near-beer rattles along between numb
mind and suddenly bright consciousness, there
in the flesh again, joking again, probing the day’s
intention again with what’s left of his tired bones,
an albatross wing held tight to his chest, frayed
heart murmuring along with its marvelous tone
of defiance.
The blue gowns, as thin as ancient
skin of very old men. Translucent blue
gowns and green masks, a patient
bedded by cultured, urine-hued
creatures so old they need no gowns
but those that hover beyond perception.
Clear mutterings of spirits or hallucinations,
a ninety-six-year-old dad’s conversations
with dead Cousin DeRay and equally dead
Aunt Minnie. Within reach. Sort of. Dad’s arm
explores the bedding, his hand widespread
to feel what’s not there, aware of my alarm
at his phone call with the Pope. We joke. Brains
and spirits conspire. An alligator plays on the ceiling.
Blue gowns appear and fuss and finally drain
the line from catheter to bag of pee, appealing
in its clarity, the blue gowns aver, escape from
ICU upended by that damned infection. A train car
full of near-beer rattles along between numb
mind and suddenly bright consciousness, there
in the flesh again, joking again, probing the day’s
intention again with what’s left of his tired bones,
an albatross wing held tight to his chest, frayed
heart murmuring along with its marvelous tone
of defiance.
Bruce S. Jenkins
Some funerial thoughts from a son about his father
November 13, 2023
David Jenkins
“Are you reading anything worthwhile?”
This is a question my father would ask me whenever we spoke. We’d have a long conversation about what I was reading and why I found it interesting and important. We’d next talk about what he was reading and why he found it interesting and important.
We had different intellectual interests and found great books for one another.
Bruce—his kids, as we got older, often referred to him by his first name—Bruce had a lively mind—lively and engaged and curious right up until his mind closed just last week.
If you had a chance to browse through his expansive library, you’d see just how lively his mind was. If you are from the legal profession, you know how lively his mind was. If you were in his extended family—kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins, in-laws, and partners—you’d know how genuinely interested he was in every single one of us.
He and I had a lot to talk about.
We enjoyed those conversations. I’ll miss them.
In the hospital he described an essay he planned to write. It was about what holds us together as a nation, our shared outlooks and our shared values, a personal response to the divisiveness we see around us. He would lie in his ICU bed and think about this essay and then tell me about it when I arrived with my jokes and my coffee and my enthusiasm for his recovery.
I brought him a book, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, about the nineteenth century origins of imagined national unity. His eyesight was failing, his attention wavered—from engaged attentiveness to sleepy disengagement—so I told him about Anderson’s book and how it might inform his essay. He listened and asked questions and looked forward to reading it “when I get out of this damn place,” as he said more than once, then fell back asleep.
“Are you reading anything worthwhile?”
He also asked what I was writing and often ended our conversations with the admonishment: keep writing!
Around the last time I saw him, I read to him a poem I had written, about seeing him in the hospital. It has references to our relatives, Aunt Minnie and Cousin DeRay, long departed, and to his wavering awareness, and to the sudden flash of his usual self, funny and hopeful and courageous. “Thank you, David,” he said. “I enjoyed it.” He then fell back asleep.
He held out as long as he could.
I want to leave you with his sense of humor, which was a quality I admired.
One day, years ago, leaders of Utah’s democrats—rare birds in Utah!—visited Bruce in his office. They had a proposal and a question.
The proposal was that he give up his judgeship and run for governor. The question, was he interested? They thought he would make a strong candidate and an excellent governor.
He related the story to me a few weeks later. He was flattered. He was intrigued.
He asked for my advice and then looked at me with some playfulness and said, “What if I lose?”
He paused for a beat as a look of horror crossed his face. He said, “What if I win?”
Here’s my last story.
In his mid-eighties, Bruce was hearing a complicated case. Some ne'er-do-well attorney, who didn’t like his rulings, complained that he was a dottering old fool of a judge. That complaint caused Bruce to take action.
He hired a prominent neuropsychologist who studies cognition in older people. She gave him a large range of tests and concluded that he had lost nothing of his intellectual abilities.
In fact, she told him, her profession needed to study people like him, who continued to function at high intellectual capacities well into their later years.
He was relieved, of course. He didn’t want to become a dottering old fool of a judge.
With the neuropsychologist’s determination of his cognitive fitness, he joked, “I am now the only judge in the tenth circuit who is certifiably competent.”
“Are you reading anything worthwhile?” he would ask.
I will miss that question.
Some funerial thoughts from a son about his father
November 13, 2023
David Jenkins
“Are you reading anything worthwhile?”
This is a question my father would ask me whenever we spoke. We’d have a long conversation about what I was reading and why I found it interesting and important. We’d next talk about what he was reading and why he found it interesting and important.
We had different intellectual interests and found great books for one another.
Bruce—his kids, as we got older, often referred to him by his first name—Bruce had a lively mind—lively and engaged and curious right up until his mind closed just last week.
If you had a chance to browse through his expansive library, you’d see just how lively his mind was. If you are from the legal profession, you know how lively his mind was. If you were in his extended family—kids and grandkids and great-grandkids, aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews, cousins, in-laws, and partners—you’d know how genuinely interested he was in every single one of us.
He and I had a lot to talk about.
We enjoyed those conversations. I’ll miss them.
In the hospital he described an essay he planned to write. It was about what holds us together as a nation, our shared outlooks and our shared values, a personal response to the divisiveness we see around us. He would lie in his ICU bed and think about this essay and then tell me about it when I arrived with my jokes and my coffee and my enthusiasm for his recovery.
I brought him a book, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, about the nineteenth century origins of imagined national unity. His eyesight was failing, his attention wavered—from engaged attentiveness to sleepy disengagement—so I told him about Anderson’s book and how it might inform his essay. He listened and asked questions and looked forward to reading it “when I get out of this damn place,” as he said more than once, then fell back asleep.
“Are you reading anything worthwhile?”
He also asked what I was writing and often ended our conversations with the admonishment: keep writing!
Around the last time I saw him, I read to him a poem I had written, about seeing him in the hospital. It has references to our relatives, Aunt Minnie and Cousin DeRay, long departed, and to his wavering awareness, and to the sudden flash of his usual self, funny and hopeful and courageous. “Thank you, David,” he said. “I enjoyed it.” He then fell back asleep.
He held out as long as he could.
I want to leave you with his sense of humor, which was a quality I admired.
One day, years ago, leaders of Utah’s democrats—rare birds in Utah!—visited Bruce in his office. They had a proposal and a question.
The proposal was that he give up his judgeship and run for governor. The question, was he interested? They thought he would make a strong candidate and an excellent governor.
He related the story to me a few weeks later. He was flattered. He was intrigued.
He asked for my advice and then looked at me with some playfulness and said, “What if I lose?”
He paused for a beat as a look of horror crossed his face. He said, “What if I win?”
Here’s my last story.
In his mid-eighties, Bruce was hearing a complicated case. Some ne'er-do-well attorney, who didn’t like his rulings, complained that he was a dottering old fool of a judge. That complaint caused Bruce to take action.
He hired a prominent neuropsychologist who studies cognition in older people. She gave him a large range of tests and concluded that he had lost nothing of his intellectual abilities.
In fact, she told him, her profession needed to study people like him, who continued to function at high intellectual capacities well into their later years.
He was relieved, of course. He didn’t want to become a dottering old fool of a judge.
With the neuropsychologist’s determination of his cognitive fitness, he joked, “I am now the only judge in the tenth circuit who is certifiably competent.”
“Are you reading anything worthwhile?” he would ask.
I will miss that question.
Rick Wyatt in our early climbing days, negotiating a roof. Late seventies. Rick Wyatt over the roof, first ascent. Taken by David Jenkins and posted with his permission. (mountainproject.com)
Rick and I climbed the southeast face of Alpamayo in Peru, establishing a variation of the Yugoslavian route, in 1976.
AAC Publications - South America, Peru—Cordillera Blanca, Alpamayo, Southeast Face, 1976 (americanalpineclub.org)
Rick and I climbed the southeast face of Alpamayo in Peru, establishing a variation of the Yugoslavian route, in 1976.
AAC Publications - South America, Peru—Cordillera Blanca, Alpamayo, Southeast Face, 1976 (americanalpineclub.org)
The Black Ice
Oh, the Black Ice is a pretty route, we’ll sing as we climb, We think we can do it in record time. We’ll start from the valley and go ‘round the clock, Unless of course Jenkins gets hit by a rock. Oh, this climb is too difficult for Ricky and me Too steep and too smooth in the dark I can’t see. We’ve been on this trail two hours or three. It looks like we’re stopping for a cup of coffee. We pull out the Jim Beam, a pack of cigars, And have a good smoke while we’re watching the stars. Oh, the wind she is rising, such trouble today, We’ll struggle and whimper, for our hubris we’ll pay. Now Ricky’s above me, I shout up some verse. Ricky doesn’t like Greek poetry and I hear him curse. He pays out the rope then to make the poet quite sick. On the subject of poetry he says “puke or spit quick.”* Oh, Ricky’s a climber, a real mountaineer, Just look at the companies that send him free gear. They say too much time he is spending up there. He should be in Denver promoting skiwear. *Puke or Spit Quick is the name of a chewing tobacco, once available in Jackson Hole, WY. |
Rick on the West Face/Black Ice route on the Grand Teton. We started from the valley at two a.m. and climbed in a continuous push, ending back in the valley some 20 hours later. Mona and I composed this song, as we walked up to the low saddle. It is sung to the tune of "The Dove, She's a Pretty Bird." Early 80s.
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