In the past year or so I’ve lost my brother, my dog, my cabin, and my health. These things happen to people. Permit me to mix some husky metaphors. A novelist is a cartographer of an imaginary country that he willy-nilly populates and in which he constructs a landscape. He strip-mines his soul. His mental incontinence leaks all over the place. (Yes, I have wept when I’ve killed off one of my characters.) Emotions tend to fly around in his brain like birds wired on crystal meth.
That said, let’s go on to matters that might interest the average Jill and Joe. How feebly the arts compete with the idea of what we are going to eat next. How vainly have I struggled to create a poem as interesting as a recipe, or as a naughty photo for that matter. The dark power of food haunts us. Naturally, I remember my deceased Mom but deep in the North American night I’m more likely to ponder a caribou roast I had last year at Sarah MacLachlan’s house in Toronto, or the tagliatelle Mario Batali suffocated in white truffles at our home last fall. Historians have said that pork fueled the westward movement of empire in the United States. Apparently in Canada it was beaver jerky or something else on that order. Even as we speak, a faux gasoline known as ethanol is being made out of field corn. Cows and cars feed at the same trough in this bifurcated world.
All living creatures live by the credo “Eat or die.” United Nations nutritionists recently pointed out that of all species, humans, pigs, dung beetles, and Labrador dogs are the most susceptible to overeating. In my own case overeating plus the confused substitution of wine for water caused type 2 diabetes, plus duodenitis and esophagitis, as well as gastritis, which tagged along when I decided I could be my own doctor (which is somewhat like a mass murderer deciding that he doesn’t need a lawyer).
I’m telling you all of this to help you de-banalize your lives. I want to help and all I’m asking in return is that you put all of your stray pennies into an old sock that has no twin and send them to this magazine so that it, too, can survive.
It is deceptively easy to think we’re normal when we’re not. I know a vaunted Canadian writer who misplaced his car for several weeks. Normal people don’t lose their cars. When I wrote for The New Yorker about a lovely thirteen-hour, thirty-seven-course lunch I had eaten in France, I was startled by the number of readers who questioned my sanity. To my hero Balzac this meal would have been piffle. Rather than having a new wine with each course we strictly limited ourselves to nineteen wines, though in retrospect a glass of each did add up. I can see clearly now that such behavior may have contributed to my eventual infirmity.
I said recently in a poem called “Jimmy Lite,” “There’s nothing so silly as wisdom I can’t apply when I get on a plane. The rest is the sediment of despair, the ice cream cone dropped on the sidewalk in 1948.” And I won’t bore you with all of my recovery nostrums and routines: the endless wilderness night-walking, the injections of coyote blood; the sexual marathons in Veracruz; the failure to meet Penélope Cruz in Spain; the very cold swim with a pod of killer whales off the Queen Charlotte Islands; the doomed attempt to reforest Haiti; the orgies of rice, yogurt, and oatmeal, that torpid Irish exudate.
In May, after denying myself all of life’s pleasures, losing thirty-five pounds, and becoming the world’s most boring person, I went to France to test myself against the Enemy (gluttony and alcohol). Since my life had already migrated to another country I had the feeling at Charles de Gaulle that I was possibly carrying a Paraguayan passport. Curiously, I had no doubts about my strength to win this battle. As the world well knows, Americans have a touching belief that they are always doing the right thing whether it’s banning consensual sex between Native adults or invading Iraq. Especially of late mine is a nation fraught with acute mental dysentery.
The ostensible reason for the trip to France was to find the lost poems of Antonio Machado. Since Machado is one of my top ten poets in the history of civilization it’s unthinkable, however true, that a valise of his poems was lost when he ended up carrying his mother from Spain to France to escape the craven Franco. Naturally, you remember your mother when you’re carrying her. This was in 1939, within a month of my own birth, a thoroughly irrelevant detail. I couldn’t accept that the probable grand poems were permanently lost. In the arena of natural history it was similar to the moment that the last auk died. Like Dante, Machado early in his life had fallen in love with a thirteen-year-old girl. He waited until she was a proper sixteen to marry her, but then she died at eighteen of TB. In the girl’s last months the poet would push her in her wheelchair through the umber hills of Castile. Machado died in Collioure and I hoped to locate his manuscripts in an attic or woodshed. Machado was one of the very few poets who could fill in the missing lines of the ancient manuscript of Earth. Of course my mission was as unlikely as walking to the moon. Simply enough I was obligated. Machado discovered me in my illness last winter and gave me courage to survive. I didn’t discover him, he tripped over my cot in a spare, cold room and told me in my profound discomfort to at least take the dogs for a walk in the morning. Life is the small pieces.
So there I was driving south from Lyon, having recovered from a few days in Paris by eating a Lyonnaise specialty called “Saint Cochon,” which is an attractive pile of offal, blood sausage, ears, cheeks, tongues, that sort of haute cuisine, followed a few hours later by a classic tête de veau in order to achieve a balance between pork and beef. I climbed the three thousand steps to the cathedral on the hill to burn up the wine needed to cut through the animal fats that had collected in my tummy’s sink trap. I had figured out with my doctor in Tucson, Carol Howe (who recently quit the medical profession for moral reasons to become a librarian), that it takes about two hours of walking to burn off a bottle of wine. One day in Paris thus required five hours of walking but there was the added boon in the menagerie of the Jardin des Plantes of seeing an infant kangaroo crawling out of his mom’s pouch. All poets of worth remember Apollinaire’s line “fermez la poche du kangourou.” My traveling companion, the noted writer and gourmand Peter Lewis, joined me on those strenuous walks because with cholesterol over four hundred he had recently received a heart stent to help flush his torso.
The search for Machado’s poems was, of course, exhausting partly because this country in the extremest southwest France is mountainous with only goat trails rather than roads. I rifled through the rooms of a twelfth-century nunnery where I sensed masturbatory practices though the Germans had naturally bombed the place. My Armani suit was filthy and my fingers were bloody from lifting stone slabs and lowering myself into cisterns with rope, kicking away vipers in my handmade Calabrian brogans, yet no valise of poems.
Luckily, to keep up my strength the Collioure area has French food with a punch. This is the anchovy capital of France and these tiny fish eaten in a state of decay in sufficient quantities offer optimal energy though they also give me gout. The splendid wines of the area made by Domaine La Tour Vieille killed the pain of gout and assuaged the heartsickness of not finding the valise of Machado’s poems. I actually knelt by his grave in the cold rain and told him I was doing my best. The grave was laden with fresh flowers and poems with the rain blurring the ink so that the poems sank into the ground in a liquid state, perhaps reaching the bones of the poet buried beneath. Kneeling there and shivering in the twilight I naturally thought of dinner and wine, the food Christine Campadieu had so brilliantly cooked, the tiny squid with the poetic ink staining the rice, the langoustines, the fresh favas with blood sausage, the rabbits browned with pork fat in a tomato sauce, and the food just over the bruised lip of the future, the four-kilo loup de mer buried in gros sel, the eel stew, all a marriage of the Basque and Catalan and not to be found elsewhere.
At this very moment in Montana, having just dispatched a Republican rattlesnake with a scythe, I have decided to offer a ten-thousand-euro reward for the return of the verified poems of Machado. It’s time for others to take up the search and earn a weekend in Paris or Paraguay. I don’t have the money at present but I can always sell my renowned sexual favors to an actress for that amount. Life herself resists meaningful decisions but this reward idea is brilliant.
I don’t want to die as another grumpy, exhausted old writer. It’s time to plunge on leading with the heart and chin, the feet, consuming the necessary wine. The human sensorium is geared to safety but this lacks appropriate boldness for poets, those thieves of fire, but mostly academic Bic lighters. Yesterday while I was standing in a turbulent river trout-fishing it occurred to me that there’s good and bad exhaustion. Whether men or women, we’re publishers’ boy toys. Have I ever had a publisher in my minimalist career who didn’t push steroids in my direction? They want stronger, bigger, and faster novels, but then publishers have always been corporate nymphos craving new meat.
The idea of course is not to survive but to prevail and rice and yogurt don’t do the job. The Gandhi diet is for bliss-ninnies, or the body-Nazis who take their garlic in capsules. I recently read the book Pig Perfect—it is a compass pointing to the correct route for a poet’s diet. In this book there’s a recipe for a cocido Extremadura-style that includes a ham bone, pig’s knuckles, veal neck, back ribs, pig’s jowl, a pork loin, chorizo and morcilla sausage, and veal and pork meatballs. What poet could ask for more?
Next March I will return to Collioure to try again. Everything has got to be somewhere. I frankly can imagine Americans discarding a valise of poems but not the French. There’s the option of organizing ten thousand volunteers but this is a project that requires purity of heart and body. A possible clue came in a recent dream where I saw the valise of poems deep in a mountain cave guarded by giant red-eyed goats with sharp teeth. We’ll see in March if this is true.