Peter Matthiessen and I, Part One

Peter Matthiessen died on April 5, 2014 exactly seventeen years to the day after Allen Ginsberg died on April 5, 1997. Both men played significant roles in my life, one more closely and intimately than the other, but both equally impacting.

As an avid reader in the 5th or 6th grade I acquired, and read, a copy of Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark (1971). I was enthralled. That initiated a period of serious interest in the oceans, in sea creatures, in sharks. My classmate, Clarence West, and I spent hours drawing sharks and undersea divers and reefs and strange ocean life like the mola mola and the manta ray. And that interest in the ocean expanded into an interest in all wild things. Later came the yen to travel and traveling brought me to Peter Matthiessen's wonderful travel narrative, The Tree Where Man Was Born. I read that and fell in love with the idea of traveling overland through Africa (something that, 40 years later, I realize that I will never do).

Though I'm born and raised in New England, my family had relatives in the west and during many summers we would travel to Minnesota and Montana to visit relatives. Not only that but my mother was a lifetime student of the Battle of the Little Bighorn (formerly known as "Custer's Last Stand") so a sense of western-ness and American Indians and the Great Plains was in my being from early on.

I came of age politically in the early 1980s. Nicaragua and anti-nuclear power were my issues of choice. And then there was In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) and the subsequent libel suits against Matthiessen and Viking Press and the book's suppression. I read the book and became obsessed with the case of Leonard Peltier. That is a saga of injustice that continues to this day and I'm sad thinking about Leonard Peltier in his jail cell in Leavenworth, KS thinking about Peter Matthiessen dying, PM his great advocate and defender, now gone.

I met Allen Ginsberg in the early 80s and we became lovers briefly, and good friends before and after, and stayed that way until he died. We traveled together to the Ruben Dario Poetry Festival in Managua, Nicaragua, 1986 (an experience about which I've compiled/written a book, Nicaragua Beat: Allen Ginsberg and the Sandinista Revolution, that remains unpublished). In October of 1986, Peter Matthiessen, and his lawyer, Martin Garbus, gave a talk at the PEN Club in New York about the libel cases brought against Crazy Horse. Allen Ginsberg and I went together, and I recorded the conversation. I still have the transcript of that event, it's never been published.

In the months preceding that event I attempted to meet with Peter Matthiessen and we exchanged letters. Actually, I sent letters and he replied hastily on post cards. I told him I was a journalist who wanted to write about the Crazy Horse case and Leonard Peltier and that I was a friend of Allen Ginsberg's and that I didn't want much of his time, just an hour or two or three.

In the end, we were never able to arrange a time for the two of us to sit down and talk. We did speak face to face after the PEN Club talk on October 8, 1986, and we did exchange subsequent postal communication, but that was the extent of our contact.

Though I typed up the transcript of the PEN talk, I never placed it anywhere and never wrote the long piece I'd intended to. Still, I'm grateful for having met Peter Matthiessen and corresponded with him, albeit briefly. Everything about him struck me as genuine, compassionate, straight forward, empathetic, generous. I've read many of his books since first devouring Blue Meridian. The Snow Leopard, I can honestly say, helped form my world view and my understanding of psychedelics and eastern spirituality in dramatic and everlasting ways. The Snow Leopard opened up for me the idea that a travel book could also be a deeply personal narrative, a journey inward as well as outward, a confession, a marauding questioning of reality, a pure-spirited observation of Now.

So when a close friend emailed me and told me that Peter Matthiessen had died, memories of my brief interaction with him came to mind, and I dug into my archives in search of documents or correspondence related to my attempt to write about him. Below are two postcards from him, replies to letters I sent asking about Leonard Peltier and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and wondering if or when we could meet. To his credit, he treated me with respect and cordiality and replied personally to my missives despite being exceedingly busy with more important matters than my youthful self.

First postcard from Peter Matthiessen to me, 23 May, 1986

Text of May 23, 1986 card

Text transcribed:

Dear Patrick Warner

Thank you for your
kind letter. I'm afraid
I'm too far behind
schedule to answer these
questions properly in a
letter, but perhaps we
could meet in the fall.
I'll be teaching at Yale,
but still be in NYC
once in a while
         Sincerely
         Peter Matthiessen

Second Postcard from Peter Matthiessen,
September 26, 1986

Text of card from Peter Matthiessen, Sept 26, 1986

Text Transcribed:

Dear Patrick - I'm afraid I
arrive at Yale Tues noon and
depart Wed afternoon, with 2
long seminars, ..?.. papers, +
student interviews - I have
very little time, as you suspected.
Might be better to arrange a date
in Dec in NYC, sorry - Best
Peter M

Viku Zen and Dark Star Howl

The crack of doom on the hydrogen juke box. Eyeball kicks. This is the Howl for the 21st century, a meandering back track of Tangerian bone grindings with the thick diction'd text of brilliance chanting into eternity.

Viku Zen's Howl

What reading of Howl is this? Late Howl. Ginsberg is adamant! Certain. Full of the poem. Fully realized. A masterpiece delivery. The soundtrack's atmospheric sketches compliment instead of overlay the text. The whole forceful incantation fully audible.

Resting briefly in catatonia

Contrast that with this wholly different collaboration, one across time. Howl, an early reading, certainly the 1950s, back by an ethereal "Dark Star" by the Grateful Dead from February 24, 1974.

We are all great writers on the same dreadful typewriter.

Vladislav Surkov on Allen Ginsberg

Russian businessman Vladislav Surkov's response to Western sanctions being imposed against him as a result of Russia's annexation of Crimea.

I see the decision by the administration in Washington as an acknowledgment of my service to Russia. It's a big honor for me. I don't have accounts abroad. The only things that interest me in the U.S. are Tupac Shakur, Allen Ginsberg, and Jackson Pollock. I don't need a visa to access their work. I lose nothing.

I'm not sure how Allen would take such a comment, were he alive today. He'd be wryly amused, probably.

But Allen's memory of Russia ran as deep as the 20th century. He cultivated a relentless disdain for Joseph Stalin and would, at the least prompting, recite a litany of Stalin's crimes and the crimes of the Soviet state against the likes of Osip Mandelstam, Joseph Brodsky, Anna Ahkmatova, Eugenia Ginzburg, and many others.

Allen Ginsberg was a tireless voice on behalf of many persecuted artists in the former Soviet Union. He would harbor no illusions about present-day Russia, about Vladimir Putin, or about the fate of free speech in today's glowering Russian nation.

David Sibley on Using Photography in Bird Guides

Christopher Leahy conducted a conversation with David Allen Sibley, author and illustrator of the well-renown bird guides to North America, on stage at the Brattle Theater in Cambridge Friday night, March 14th. The occasion was the publication of the 2nd edition of The Sibley Guide to Birds.

Sibley is particularly noted for his fine illustrations, all of which are paintings that begin as field sketches. When asked whether he found photography useful in the field as a means of capturing an image for later use in the studio, he confessed that it was not very helpful. He recalled that, when digital cameras became widely available, he'd purchased one with a good zoom lens and took it with him for that very reason, to record images to which he could later refer. The problem, he confided, was that he spent too much time concentrating on the camera - framing the shot, getting the light correct - and ended up not really seeing the bird. So he abandoned the camera.

Instead, he relies on sketching the bird. Often, he'll sketch parts of the bird - the beak, the tail, the feet - in order to record the detailed particularities of whatever he's observing. The sketching, he says, is a form of "interviewing" the bird, getting at those things that distinguish it from other kinds.

Asked about the actual use of photographs in bird guides, he suggested that they weren't as valuable as one might suppose. The problem is that a photograph captures a bird in a particular pose and in a specific setting (trees, marsh, seaside dunes, cliff, etc.) and this very likely contrasts with the circumstances under which a birdwatcher sees the bird. It can unduly influence you and provide context that might run counter to your experience. That is why his illustrations are all fairly uniform (the birds all face in the same direction, for example) and why he leaves out all depictions of habitat.

I could relate to his experience with the camera. Just last week while on a long bike ride I came upon a flock of turkeys on one side of the road. There may have been thirty or more and as I approached, they began crossing the road in front of me. Instead of focusing my full observational attention on them and really seeing them, I fumbled around with the small camera I carry with me trying to take their picture. I got a picture but not a very good one, and in the doing I sacrificed the chance of experiencing them on a deeper level.

Hawk and Habitat
photo by lescaret

George Plimpton and the 1980 Moscow Olympics

George Plimpton Obituary Mail Art (front)

Gratitude to Grantland.com for posting George Plimpton's report from the 1980 Moscow games. The United States boycotted those games in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December, 1979.

Moscow Games by George Plimpton

Plimpton was the perfect journalist for the event. A participatory journalist first and foremost, Plimpton was a sports enthusiast of the highest order. An intelligent and witty observer, fearless in his own inimitable way, Plimpton's observations and commentary eschew the normal re-hash of events and instead pick out the quirky, the humorous, the incongruous from those games.

Ah, the Cold War, what a time it was. And to think of the events that transpired either directly or indirectly from that Soviet incursion. In no time we had the CIA arming the mujahideen (the Islamic anti-Soviet resistance). Of course, some eight years later, once the Soviets had cut their losses and fled that unconquerable country, the "freedom fighters" (thanks, Mr. Reagan) turned their sights on other targets. And voila, Al Queda emerges from the smoking ruins, still armed with stinger missiles and various kinds of destructive hardware courtesy of the USA.

Fast forward to today. Sadly, Mr. Plimpton has departed this corporeal world. Not so sadly, so has Mr. Reagan. But Al Queda remains.

And now we have the 2014 Sochi Winter Games, another bizarre Russian fiasco. Whose idea was it to hold the winter Olympics at a summer resort on the Black Sea? A classic Russian farce. Mikhail Bulgakov would have something to say, no doubt.

George Plimpton Obituary Mail Art (rear)

Allen Ginsberg Photographs to the University of Toronto

A giant collection of some 7,500 Allen Ginsberg photographs have been donated by the Larry and Cookie Rossy Family Foundation to the University of Toronto, which announced the gift in January. They now reside there in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library and some have been made available online.

According to the University's press announcement:

"The Ginsberg prints provide visual insight into New York urban landscape from the 1950s to the 1990s. They also document Ginsberg’s international travels to Canada, France, India, Mexico, Morocco, Nicaragua, the USSR and many other nations."

Here's a photograph that is not in their collection, taken January 21st, 1986 upon arriving at the Sandino International Airport in Managua. Ginsberg, Pedro Pietri and a group of North American writers and artists (myself included) had been invited to participate in an "invasion of poets" for the 1986 Ruben Dario Festival.

Pedro Pietri, Ernesto Cardenal, Allen Ginsberg
Sandino International Airport, Managua
January 21, 1986

Bruegel in Words

As Above, So Below (2002), a novel by Rudy Rucker, gives us a lively if somewhat melodramatic fictional account of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The known details of Bruegel's life are few so Rucker layers his novel with fairly prosaic relationships, almost soap opera-esque, and colors the narrative with known historical detail of the Low Countries under the reign of Charles the V and Phillip the II of Spain. What the novel lacks in prose elegance and style it makes up for by conjuring the sights, sounds, smells, and day-to-day goings-on of life in places like Antwerp, Brussels, Mechelen in the 1500s.

During Bruegel's short life (1525-1569) he no doubt witnessed the atrocities and persecutions perpetrated by the Spanish monarchy against the occupied peoples of the Low Countries. His Massacre of the Innocents, a Biblical theme, has been adapted to portray a village scene in his native country and depicts the depredations unleashed on the citizens by the soldiers and mercenaries of the Spanish Crown. Rucker includes various details and scenes that aptly illustrate life under occupation and weaves these into the imagined narrative of Bruegel's life.

Massacre of the Innocents, 1567

The novel begins with Bruegel as a young man traveling to Rome and encountering real mountains (the Alps) for the first time (a salient detail as Bruegel would become known as one of the greatest landscape artists of all time), and ends with his untimely death of an unspecified stomach condition in 1569. In between, Rucker uses Bruegel's masterpieces as jumping off points for creating the fictional details of his novel. It's a useful method and lends meaning, real or not, to the works themselves while allowing the author to sketch key periods of the artist's life.

For those interested in his research and process, Rucker has posted his notes on the writing of So Above, So Below.

Two other novels in which Bruegel plays a staring role are Bruegel, or A Workshop of Dreams by Claude-Henri Rocquet (1991), and Headlong (1999) by Michael Frayn, both worth reading.