I'm glad you could come tonight, and I
hope you can stay after the reading
to meet Mr. Matthiessen.
Have some refreshments in the hall, just outside.
Our next reading will be one week from tonight,
visiting poet Denise Levertov.
And two weeks from tonight, our final visiting poet
for the year, Henry Carlyle.
Both of those readings will be in this room.
I promised Mr. Matthiessen I would not give his entire life
history, and I'm not going to read
the names of all of his books.
He has published five novels, among them Far Tortuga
and At Play in the Fields of the Lord,
and 11 books of nonfiction.
The most recent one, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
was not admired by everyone.
He has $49 million in lawsuits pending.
[LAUGHTER]
The Snow Leopard, which in 1979 won the National Book Award,
and his most recent book will appear next month.
It's called Indian Country.
It's being published by Viking Press.
Dee Brown, the author of Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,
in a review in this month's Natural History magazine
says, "if Indian Country reaches the audience that it merits,
it could have an impact comparable to that
of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring 20 years ago."
It's my great pleasure to introduce Peter Matthiessen.
[APPLAUSE]
Kind of embarrassing to go around
with a big bag full of your own books,
but can't be helped tonight.
First, I wanted to thank Lois for a very
generous introduction, and thank you all for being here tonight.
It's kind of hot.
Have you all seen my jacket?
[LAUGHTER]
Various people wanted to hear from various books,
and I decided on three.
I'm going to read first from a book called The Snow
Leopard, and then from the new book Indian Country,
both rather briefly.
And then I'm going to try an experiment which may not work,
and I reserve the option of abandoning that in mid-flight,
and retreating to something safer.
It's an hallucination scene, and I'll talked a little bit more
about that before I start.
Very briefly, The Snow Leopard is about a trip
to a place called the Crystal Monastery,
and on the Tibetan Plateau and a very remote place where
the animals were protected.
Where this biologist George Schaller
and I had hopes of seeing animals
behaving and interacting in a totally natural way.
Is this mic clear in the back of the room.
Can you all hear?
OK And because the lama, the Tibetan Buddhist lama
of this region, of the Crystal Monastery
had forbidden all killing in the area.
So these animals were apparently-- by report,
were behaving in a totally natural way.
And we had to-- unfortunately, we
had to walk 250 miles to get there.
It was across the Himalayan, way up onto the border of Tibet,
but it was a wonderful and beautiful walk.
I had a few problems of narrow mountain ledges and things,
but it was great.
And this is just a passage from the very beginning, when
we're setting off from a town called Pokhara,
in west-central Nepal.
"We are glad to go.
These edges of Pokhara might be tropical outskirts
anywhere-- vacant children, listless adults, bent dogs
and thin chickens in a litter of sagging shacks
and rubble, mud, weeds, stagnant ditches, bad sweet smells,
vivid bright broken plastic bits, and dirty fruit peelings
awaiting the carrion pig.
For want of better fare, both pigs and dogs
consume the human excrement that lies everywhere
along the paths.
In fair weather, all this flux is tolerable, but now
at the dreg end of the rainy season, the mire of life
seems leached into the sallow skins
of these thin beings, who squat and soak themselves and wring
their clothes each morning in the rain puddles.
Brown eyes observe us as we pass.
Confronted with the pain of Asia,
one cannot look and cannot turn away.
In India, human misery seems so pervasive
that one takes in only stray details--
a warped leg or a dead eye, a sick pariah dog
eating withered grass, an ancient woman
lifting her sari to move her shrunken bowels by the road.
Yet in Varanasi there is hope of life
that has been abandoned in such cities
as Calcutta, which seems resigned to the dead
and dying in its gutters.
Shiva dances in the spicy foods, in the exhilarated bells
of the swarming bicycles, the angry bus horns,
the chatter of the temple monkeys, the vermilion tikka
dot on the women's foreheads, even
in the scent of charred human flesh that pervades the ghats.
The people smile-- that is the greatest miracle of all.
In the heat and stench of shriek of Varanasi,
where in fiery sunrise swallows fly like departing spirits
over the vast silent river, one delights
in the smile of a blind girl being led, of a Hindu gentleman
in white turban gazing benignly at the bus driver who reviles
him, of a flute-playing beggar boy,
of a slow old woman pouring holy water from Ganga, the River,
onto a stone elephant in daubed red.
Near the burning ghats, and the industry of death,
a river palace has been painted with huge candy-striped tigers.
No doubt Varanasi is the destination
of this ancient Hindu at the outskirts of Pokhara,
propped up on a basket born on poles
across the shoulders of forest servants-- off,
it appears, on his last pilgrimage to the Mother
Ganges, to the dark temples that surround
the ghats, to those hostels where the pilgrim waits
his turn to join the company of white-shrouded cadavers
by the river edge, waits again to be laid
upon the stacks of fired wood.
The attendants will push this yellow foot,
that shriveled elbow, back into the fire, and rake his remains
off the burning platform into the swift river.
And still enough scraps will remain to sustain life
in the long-headed cadaverous dogs that haunt the ashes,
while sacred kine--
huge white silent things--
devour the straw thongs that had bound this worn-out body
to its stretcher.
The old man has been ravened from within.
That blind and greedy stare of his,
that caved-in look, and the mouth working,
reveal who now inhabits him, who now stares out.
I nod to Death in passing, where the sound of my own feet
upon my path.
The ancient is lost in a shadow world, and gives no sign."
We walked along for several weeks,
westward and then were starting northward over the Himalaya,
and we came to a middle ages town called Tarakot.
Tarakot in the kingdom of Tichu-Rong, wonderful old
kingdom there called Tichu-Rong.
We arrived there in the middle of the afternoon.
"Tarakot is in twilight shadow by midafternoon,
while the mountainside across the Bheri, facing south,
lies in full sunshine.
In a strong dusk, the women gather up
the grain in homespun sacks to store inside.
Now the snow peaks take on color,
and whistling boys bring kine and sheep and goats
from the high pasture.
A rooster and a barking dog, the sting
of sticks on the hard flanks of the cattle,
the cry of the village termagant,
unceasing, is the voice of autumn twilight
in every peasant village across time.
For a while on the roof I watched
the coming of the night.
A bat chitters and stars loom, and somewhere
on the far side of this earth, the sun is burning.
Soon Mars appears over the dark split in the northern mountains
where the Tarap River comes down from the Land of Dolpo,
and in the snug warmth of my sleeping bag,
I float under the round bowl of the heavens.
Above is the glistening galaxy of childhood, now hidden
in the Western world by air pollution
and the glare of artificial light.
For my children's children, the power, peace, and healing
of the night will be obliterated.
Every little while I wake and watch
the spiral of the heavens.
Orion rises, and the Pleiades.
Shooting stars arc in the shimmering void
of the black universe and toward four
the sky is parted by a satellite, mercifully silent,
like a probe from another world, a distant century.
A horse screams.
The moon is up over Tibet, and in the southern mountains,
over Jang, the planet Mars is disappearing.
How much dignity the moon has lost,
now that man has left his disrespectful litter, his cute
golf balls!
But the moon retains its mystery for the dogs of Tichu-Rong,
which howl in awe at its first appearance,
and set one another off the whole night through.
While its fellows rest, the dog next door harangues
the cosmos for an hour.
The mastiffs sleep much of the day
and are let loose at night to deal with wolves and robbers.
In the absence of such, they will make do with strangers.
Not caring to venture out into the streets
when such brutes are abroad, I follow the custom of the town,
standing on the roof edge and urinating into the mud street,
in daybreak light."
We've arrived at the Crystal Mountain
safely, after a number of weeks, and are studying the blue sheep
there, and have found a lot of sign
of snow leopard in the area.
And I've also seen, at very close range, these absolutely
superb wolves which, like the sheep, are very tame,
and just look over their shoulder and walk away,
they don't run when you come up to them.
The place really was as advertised,
it is extraordinary how tame everything was there.
And I'm going out this particular day
to meditate and also to watch for the snow leopard.
"After two hours of hard climbing,"-- our camp
was at 14,000 feet, where we were staying.
And then we would climb up on these higher mountains around
for observation.
"After two hours of hard climbing,
I am higher than Black Pond, and the whole canyon
of the Black River, ascending toward the Kang pass,
lies exposed to view.
Beyond the Kang soars a resplendent wall
of white that dominates the sky to the southwest.
It is the great ice wall of Kanjiroba,
a rampart of crystalline escarpments
and white-winged cornices, well over 20,000 feet in height.
Here there is only a light air from the east,
but the high wind on Kanjiroba is
blowing clouds of a fine snow from points and pinnacles that
turn into transparency against the blue.
These days are luminous, as in those far October
days in Tichu-Rong.
There is no wisp of cloud--
clear, clear, clear, clear.
Although the shade is very cold throughout the day,
and wind persists, the sun is hot--
imagine a striped and shiny lizard above 15,000 feet,
in deep November!
For the first time in my life, I apprehend the pure heat
of our star, piercing the frigid atmospheres of so many million
miles of outer space.
Rock, and snow peaks all around, the sky, and great
birds and black rivers--
what words are there to seize such ringing splendor?
But again something arises in this ringing that is not
quite bearable, a poised terror, as
in the diamond ice that cracks the stone.
The brain veers, the sun glints like a weapon.
Then Black Canyon writhes and twists,
and the Crystal Mountain looms as a castle of dread,
and all the universe reverberates with horror.
My head is the sorcerer's skull cup full of blood,
and were I to turn, my eyes would see straight
to the heart of chaos, the mutilation, bloody gore,
and pain that is seen darkly in the bright eye of this lizard.
Then lunacy is gone, leaving an echo.
The lizard is still there, one with its rock,
flanks pulsing in the star heat that brings
warmth to our common skin.
Eternity is not remote, it is here beside us.
I grow into these mountains like a moss.
I am bewitched.
The blinding snow peaks and the clarion air,
the sound of earth and heaven in the silence, the requiem birds,
the mythic beasts, the flags, great horns,
and old carved stones, the rough hewn Tartars
in their braids and homespun boots,
the silver ice in the black river,
the Kang, the Crystal Mountain.
Also I love the common miracles--
the murmur of my friends at evening,
the clay fires of smudgy juniper, the coarse dull food,
the hardship and simplicity, the contentment
of doing one thing at a time--
when I take my blue tin cup into my hand, that is all I do.
We have had no news of modern times since late September,
and will have none until December,
and gradually my mind has cleared itself,
and wind and sun pour through my head, as through a bell.
Though we talk little here, I am never lonely.
I am returned into myself.
Having got here at last, I do not
wish to leave the Crystal Mountain.
I am in pain about it, truly, so much so that I have to smile,
or I might weep.
In another life--
This isn't what I know, but how I feel--
these mountains were my home.
There is a rising of forgotten knowledge,
like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth.
To glimpse one's own true nature as a kind of homegoing,
to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon--
the homegoing that needs no home,
like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad
that turns to mist before touching the earth
and rises once again into the sky.
Now we've been there for most of the month,
and I'm getting ready to leave there.
I left without shelter, I went out with two Sherpas on my own,
and went by a different route.
And I did a kind of a queer thing
which offended my partner that--
we had sent a few Sherpas away, about halfway through the trip,
because we were running out of food, and we had to conserve.
So we sent them back to the nearest settlement
where there was some hope of getting some mail,
and indeed they brought some mail back, to our astonishment.
And I had an instinct not to open my mail,
even though I was feeling very guilty about having left
my kids at home, and my wife had just died,
and I was a little bit uneasy about it.
At the same time, I knew I couldn't leave there
until a certain time.
I didn't want to intrude upon that experience with bad news
from home which would worry me, since I couldn't do anything
about it, anyway.
So I simply put my letters away, and Schaller
was quite surprised by that.
He still talks about it
"And so I, too, prepare to go, though I try hard to remain.
The part of me that is bothered by the unopened letters
in my rucksack, that longs to see my children,
to drink wine, make love, be clean and comfortable again--
that part is already facing south, over the mountains.
This makes me sad, and so I stare about me,
trying to etch into this journal the sense of Shey that
is so precious, aware that all such effort is in vain.
The beauty of this place must be cheerfully abandoned,
like the wild rocks and the bright water of its streams.
Frustration of the paltriness of words drives me to write,
but there is more of Shey in a single sheep hair,
in one withered sprig of everlasting,
than all these notes.
To strive for permanence in what I think I have perceived
is to miss the point.
Near my lookout, I find a place to meditate,
out of the wind, a hollow on the ridge where snow has melted.
My brain soon clears in the cold mountain air,
and I feel better.
Wind, blowing grasses, sun--
the dying grass, the notes of southbound birds
in the mountain sky are no more fleeting than the rock itself,
no more so and no less--
all is the same.
The mountain withdraws into its stillness, my body dissolves
into the sunlight, tears fall that
have nothing to do with "I."
What it is that brings them on, I do not know.
In other days, I understood mountains differently,
seeing in them something that abides.
Even when approached respectfully
they appalled me with their permanence,
with that awful and irrefutable rock-ness
that seemed to intensify my sense of my own transience.
Perhaps this dread of transience explains our greed
for the few gobbets of raw experience
in modern life, why violence is libidinous,
why lust devours us, why soldiers choose not
to forget their days of horror.
We cling to such extreme moments, in which we
seem to die, yet are reborn.
In sexual abandon as in danger we
are impelled, however briefly, into that vital present
in which we do not stand apart from life, we are life,
our being fills us.
In ecstasy with another being, loneliness
falls away into eternity.
But in other days, such union was
attainable through simple awe.
My foot slips on a narrow ledge--
in that split second, as needles of fear pierce
heart and temples, eternity intersects with present time.
Thought and action are not different, and stone, air, ice,
sun, fear and self are one.
What is exhilarating is to extend this acute awareness
into ordinary moments, in the moment-by-moment experiencing
of the lammergeier and the wolf, which,
finding themselves at the center of things,
have no need for any secret of true being.
In this very breath that we take now
lies the secret that all great teachers try to tell us,
what one lama refers to as "the precision and openness
and intelligence of the present."
The purpose of meditation practice is not enlightenment,
it is to pay attention even at unextraordinary times,
to be of the present, nothing-but-the-present,
to bear this mindfulness of now into each event of ordinary
life.
When I watch blue sheep, I must watch blue sheep,
not be thinking about sex, danger, or the present,
for this present-- even while I think of it--
is gone."
That's probably enough for The Snow Leopard.
I'm sorry I seem to have chosen rather serious passages there,
and actually we had a lot of fun on the trip too.
The selection kind of winnowed down in a way, I wouldn't--
have to remember that.
This is the galley proofs of Indian Country, which
is coming out in about a month.
And it's been called a sequel to my Indian book that
came out last year, called In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.
It's not really a sequel, it was really
mostly written before In the Spirit of Crazy Horse,
beginning about 1975.
And parts of it have appeared in a number
of magazines and Sunday newspapers around the country.
I'll read first from a--
this is one of the few success stories of about 12 chapters
in this book.
Most of them ended badly.
In almost all cases, the Indian land
was encroached upon and finally taken
and/or spoiled by corporate interests,
or the federal bureaucracy working
with corporate interests, but in this particular case,
we seem to have won at least a temporary victory.
It's a thing called a go road, in northern California.
Some of you may know about it, and it goes from Orleans
on Klamath, river to Gasquet, a little bit further north.
It's a great big superhighway that parallels the coast road,
over these high dry ridges.
It's hidden at both ends.
The Forest Service went in about four or five miles at one end,
and seven miles on the other end,
before starting the highway, apparently
to disguise it from the public, who
are going to be paying for it.
There's no reason for this road at all.
It's not a tourist area, it goes right
across the sacred area of three different Indian groups--
plows right through there.
At least it's trying to, and we're
trying to stop it-- this one unfinished section about seven
and 1/2 miles that, so far, has been held up in court.
And it now looks like it's going to be held up semi-permanently.
The only reason for this road, as one Indian says,
it's a glorified logging road to save yet
more money for the big corporations
that don't need that money.
But, anyway, so, before this happened
before we knew this victory had happened,
I wanted to see the sacred area and approach it
the way it had been approached by traditional people who
are in medicine training, who climb up this wonderful Blue
Creek drainage, and then up these ridges
to what's called Doctor Rock, where they
went for medicine training.
And they had a kind of a four day vision quest,
fasting arrangement there, rather like a Great Plains
vision quest, but not quite-- it was a little bit more complex
than that.
And I had two Indian friends, a young Yurok guy,
and his stepfather who was a Cherokee, John Trull.
And we just camped on the Blue Creek drainage
and then climbed up to this place,
and this is just a passage from that chapter.
We'd gone up there in a very mysterious way,
because we hadn't made proper preparations.
We couldn't get near the rock, even
though it was right there in plain sight,
we couldn't approach it.
There's always a gully in the way,
and suddenly we were past it, and I'd had--
I'd been told this would happen up there
and, in fact, I'd been up there the year
before with other Indian friends,
and same thing had happened.
The space was holding us off like a magnet.
It was very mysterious, and kind of great,
but we were exhausted.
We climbed up all day long and we couldn't beat the system
up there, we were just--
So we went back to where our camp was
in this very pretty meadow, and a lot of bears, and stuff.
It's an extraordinary area, this is the Siskiyou Mountains.
A great many rare plants there, it
seems to be botanically connected
to Asia in some strange way.
There are many plant groups that are actually Asian in origin,
and many strange conifers that occur nowhere else, and also
quite a few rare creatures.
Creatures which are rare everywhere,
like the spotted owl, and the wolverine, and cougar,
and things like that
"Long before dark in the endless summer evening,
we were fast asleep, and we slept hard until first light.
Even then, after ten hours' rest,
it was difficult to bring John back to life.
'Come on grandfather,' Dick said in his gentle voice.
It was important to leave before the sun was high in order
to bushwhack down through that hard scrub
to the cool forest on the ridge.
We set off at daybreak, without breakfast,
and once underway, we made good time, rounding the mountain
and traversing the steep barren slopes that led down
into the thick undergrowth, pausing
just once to gaze at the lovely sunrise worlds below.
During the night, the ocean fogs had rolled into the Klamath
gorge, pushing thick white tentacles
into the canyons of Blue Creek, leaving the ridges all around
like green islands in a sea of clouds.
This silent world lay far below the rock
where we sat perched like three unshaven angels.
And seeing the White River flowing in
from the white ocean, I understood
much better the Yurok concept of the world as a kind of disk
bisected by the Klamath, rising and falling minutely
on the surrounding sea.
John Trull frowned and cleared his throat.
'You're very close to heaven here,' he muttered.
He glared at us, as if daring us to laugh.
Then he spoke about a time, up in the mountains,
when he had found himself quite suddenly
in a beautiful, strange place where he had never
been before and yet which seem somehow familiar,
as if remembered from another life.
He had walked along as if entranced, weeping and laughing
simultaneously, as if on the point of remembering something
that would bring him instantly and for ever
a profound understanding of the world, of life and death.
Bewildered and uncomfortable, he stopped speaking,
and for a little while we sat in silence on the mountain side.
And it occurred to me that what John had described
was the world which the aspirant Indians of other days who
had come up these Steps into the High Country
had wished to enter.
In the words of an old Indian lady down at Requa,
where the Klamath rolls out between huge sandbars, rocks,
and cliffs into the sea, 'You come upon a place
you've never seen before, and it has awesome beauty, everything
about you, above you, below you, around you is so pure.
That is the beauty we call merwerksergerh,
and the pure person is also merwerksergerh.'
John Trull was embarrassed by the suggestion
that what he had had was a mystical experience.
Such experience, he had always thought,
was strong evidence of a weak mind.
Sighing, he stood up and set his pack,
wondering aloud if his old shoes would get him home.
We moved rapidly downhill into Blue Creek,
swinging easily along through the old forest
and arriving at the rivers edge well before noon.
At camp we made a scavenger's meal
of what had been left behind--
bran flakes, raw potato, chunks of jarred venison--
and kept on going, pausing to swim
in a deep hole at the first bend,
fording, refording, and fording again, pausing
to gather a mouthful of wild strawberries, going on.
This next passage is about a man named Chief Buster McCurdy, who
in the 60s was a very, very well known Indian leader, a very
brave man who's now, like many of these leaders at that time,
has been kind of isolated and cut off and is out of touch
with--
even with his own people, who have
been kind of co-opted by the tribal
councils, and Bureau of Indian Affairs.
And he lives alone on a beautiful farm,
actually, that he's built for his sister.
He no longer has a wife.
This guy I was traveling with had
worked with Buster and many other people.
We made a kind of a trip, all around the back country,
and the back roads the Great Basin,
and northern California, and down into New Mexico,
and Arizona too.
And he was looking up these people
to see how many were left and who was still, as they say,
standing on the land, in other words,
holding to traditional way of life.
"At the Utah border, a road head South along the west edge
of the Great Salt Desert, a waste of white alkali flats
and old dead lakes, stretching away
between far small archipelagos of dry mountains.
At each turnoff, the road diminishes,
tending east into the remote Ibapah Valley
where good water comes down from the steep ridges of the Deep
Creek Range into an ancient territory of the Gosi Ute.
Near the south end of the valley, where the land is green
and there is forest on the steep valley walls,
a dirt lane turns off past a well-made garden,
meandering uphill to a large farmhouse set
about with weathered sheds built out of logs.
Craig said he had enemies on this reservation.
Not sure of the reception we might get,
he told me to park the truck for a quick getaway.
While I listened to the bells of the home-coming sheep
and the howls of a retarded Indian boy
who was wandering here and there behind the farmhouse,
Craig got out and talked for a long time in the cool spring
twilight with a stocky, guarded man in khaki shirt
and coveralls who came out to meet him.
Eventually they came over to the truck, and because it was cold,
we sat in the front seat like churchgoers,
gazing northward up the valley toward high Pilot Peak.
'This is Chief Buster McCurdy,' Craig said, after a while.
'Chief,' Buster McCurdy exclaimed,
still a little bewildered by our visit.
Like most of the people we had gone to,
he had not seen Craig since 1969.
As if not sure what we might want,
he sat motionless and quiet for a while,
thick heavy hands square on his knees, a surprised expression
on his face.
Ute is the real name of his people--
their own name, that is, for the Indians, the People--
and Ute-ah or Utah, he explained,
'just means Them Indians Over There.'
Gosi Ute, or Goshute--
'that's Dusty Ute,' he said, 'because we'd be goin' along
all covered with desert dust on the way to the meeting grounds
over in Provo Valley, where we wintered sometimes with Paiute
and Shoshone.'
These days the few hundred Gosi Ute
were divided between this band and another
across the mountains in Skull Valley.
'Ute and Paiute understand each other pretty good,' Buster
said, 'but we don't understand much Shoshone language,
just a few words to get by.
The books say we're all the same bunch, but we ain't.'
Buster McCurdy was raised here in Ibapah,
but he married a Ute woman from the High Uintahs
and lived over in the east part of the state for many years
as a hardworking, and very successful mechanic.
In the late fifties and early sixties
his auto-repair work had supported the journeys
on Indian business made by his wife Etta
McCurdy and other traditional spokesmen.
Buster himself won respect is a courageous and outspoken
leader, and was jailed more than once for his beliefs.
'Among real Indians," Craig told me,
'Buster McCurdy was a hero from coast to coast.'
Most of the traditionals here in the Ibapah Valley
have died out, and Buster McCurdy
has been threatened more than once by armed B.I.A. Indians.
'There's nobody on our side, we got nobody to turn to.'
A girl he had mentioned as his potential successor as a leader
here had 'died from too much liquor.'
--they discussed the Northern Utes up in Uintah,
one fourth of whom died from alcohol-related diseases
or accidents in the year after liquor sales to Indians
were legalized in 1952, as part of the termination program.
'And those Gosi Utes over in Skull Valley,' he said,
'those poor people are shot.
That Tribal Council guy they have
has driven them right down the drain.
They're going to have their piñon trees,
their deer-hunting grounds, all taken away from them
because all they can see is dollar signs.
Liquor is the main trouble here, too,
and it's going to be a dead place pretty soon.
I told 'em that, but they won't listen.'
He sighed.
'I kind of give up now.
Just flare up once in a while, is all.'
The night before, Buster had led us to a hill pasture
beyond his sister's house where one of the two streams coveted
by the white ranchers comes down the steep mountainside
from the high evergreen in a ribbon
of poplar, willow and red birch.
At daybreak he came to sit on his heels at our campfire,
and we spent a long, slow, peaceful morning in the sun
while Craig cooked us up some of his mush.
'I never thought I would see Craig again,' he told me when
Craig had gone up to the stream to wash.
'We had some fun, all right, in those days.'
Recently, McCurdy had a dream that
'didn't feel like any dream, it was a vision.
I saw Salt Lake City, all of them nice buildings,
smoke was coming out, and some were ruined,
and there were no people--
there was nobody around.
The man with me said it must have been an earthquake,
but I didn't think so.
It was something else.'
Before leaving, we filled our bottles
with good mountain water and complimented Buster
on how well the farm looked.
We offered him a lift back down the hillside to the farm,
and he shook his head.
'Might as well walk,' he said.
'I'll see you again,' Craig said, taking his hand.
Buster McCurdy held Craig's hand for a long time,
looking him over.
'I don't know when,' he said at last.
And looking back at the still figure on the mountainside
as the truck rolled down the slope in the spring ruts,
I remembered a moment the afternoon before,
when Craig had asked him how many people here at Ibapah
were still standing on the land.
Chief Buster McCurdy, saying nothing,
had raised up a solitary finger."
OK, I better-- If I'm going to do it,
At Play in the Fields of the Lord, I better get to it.
At Play in the Fields of the Lord is a novel,
and its hero is a mixed blood Cheyenne Indian
guy called Lewis Moon.
He's a rather-- well, I don't know how to describe him,
an interesting figure, I guess, I hope.
And he has kind of run away from his past,
he's run away from the reservation,
he's won a scholarship to college,
and he blows it through drinking, getting in fights.
He's-- the alumni don't want an Indian in this college,
so they come to him, and they try to bribe him to get drunk,
and create a scene on the campus, and so forth.
And he agrees to do it, out of, really,
sort of cynicism and drunkenness,
and then beats these two guys up and steals their car.
And then he heads east because, you got to leave the state.
And so he's now-- in this book, he's
begun a long life of wandering.
I didn't want to get you much into Moon's background.
First, because I can't claim I'm qualified
to speak about it that much.
And second, because the novel takes place in South America,
where he has now ended up after many years of wandering,
as a kind of a soldier of fortune.
But he's still hung up on this thing,
he's still hung up on Indian way,
on trying to perceive the true Indian traditional resistance.
And in the course of this, he takes--
of this book, he takes a drug called ayahuasca.
Banisteriopsis caapi, it's a very, very strong
pheynl-alkaloid, related to LSD and mescaline,
but a good deal stronger.
I've taken it, it's very powerful, morbid experience.
And this chapter I'm about to read--
I'm not reading at all, but excerpts
from his hallucination.
It was my device as a writer.
I needed a way to evoke Moon's past,
without going into a kind of a long detailed history of where
he came from and who he was.
And so it comes up, in this trip, that I describe here,
is--
there are memories of his college experience
of the sheriff, the local sheriff who
was trying to bait him into making
a mistake, of the episode where he steals the car, and memories
of his mother, Big Irma, and his father, and so forth,
then coming back into the present again.
So you kind of have to bear with me,
there are dreams and references, and just try
to pay attention closely if you can,
and I will make this clear as I can.
He's lying on a bed in a real ratty South American river
hotel, and he's taken he's just taken this--
he's just about to start, here he goes.
"A dog turned in its circle and lay down in the shade
and the vulture swung up and down
in a short arc above the jungle, as if suspended from a string.
In the heat of the siesta, the street
below was hollow as a bone.
He took the cork out of the bottle,
and holding his breath to kill the bitterness,
drank off half the brown fluid in a series of short gulps,
gargling harshly when he was finished
and spitting the residue into the street.
The aftertaste made him gag.
He sat down on the window sill and in a little
while the nausea receded, leaving only a thick woody
taste and a slight vagueness.
A half hour passed.
Maybe the Indian had watered the infusion.
A voice in the saloon below sounded remote to him,
and he nodded--
he was on his way.
A little more ayahuasca, Mr. Moon?
He took up the bottle and drank off another quarter of it,
then set it down very slowly.
You made a bad mistake, he thought.
Already he knew he did not need it.
The effects were coming very suddenly,
and he stood up and stalked the room.
In overdose, he had read somewhere,
the extract of Banisteriopsis caapi is quite poisonous
and may bring on convulsions, shock and even death.
How silent it was-- the whole world was in siesta.
He glanced quickly out the window,
to take time by surprise.
The dog slept soundly, and the vulture still
swung up and down its bit of sky, dark as a pendulum.
From the far end of the street, a solitary figure
was moving toward, him down the center of the street--
the last man on earth.
There you are, he thought, I've been waiting for you
all my life.
Now he was seized with vertigo and apprehension,
his heart began to pound and his breath was short.
He went to his bed and lay down on his back
There was a closure of the throat
and a tension in his chest, a metal bar from chin
to navel to which the skin of his chest was sewn.
Breathing became still more difficult,
and a slight pain in the back of his head
became a general, diffused headache.
He turned cold and his teeth chattered.
The hands pressed to his face were limp and clammy.
I'm flying all apart, he thought, At the same time
his chest constricted ever more tightly.
Let go, he told himself aloud.
Let go.
He rolled over on the side and blinked at the other bed.
Color-- the room billowed with it, the room breathed.
When he closed his, eyes the color dazzled him-- he soared.
But there was trouble in his lungs again,
and his heart thumped so, in heavy spasmodic leaps,
that it must surely stall and die.
He broke into a sweat, and his hands turned cold
as small bags of wet sand.
He sat up, aching, in a foreign room.
He could breathe again, although his heart still hurled itself
unmercifully against his chest.
How thin a man's poor chest was, after all.
It was as thin as paper, surrounding a hollow oval space
of wind and bitterness.
Thump, thump-ump, ump-thump, it would crash through any minute,
and what then?
Do I greet it?
Introduce myself?
How long can a man sit holding his heart in his hands?
Or was that thump coming from elsewhere?
The thump of a bed--
were the missionaries making love?
The male missionary making love to the female missionary?
The Courtship of Missionaries-- the male missionary,
larger and more splendidly plumaged
than his shy dowdy mate, hurls his head back
joyfully and sings "Praise the Lord," upon which he rushes
forth, tail feathers spread and mounting a decorous and even
pious manner, inserts his tongue into her right ear."
[LAUGHTER]
"You are the Lost Tribe of Israel,
and therefore you must pray especially hard,
for the Lost Tribe of Israel is under God's everlasting curse.
Do you understand?
Why don't you answer me?
What is the matter with you children--
do you wish to remain accursed?
Now you answer me, Lewis Moon, or I'm going to beat you.
Lewis!
--his body cavity felt hollowed out as if cold sterile winds
were blowing through it--
loss, loss, loss.
Loss.
Look into the sky and think of nothing,
said Alvin Moon "Joe Redcloud," but do not look into the sun,
for the sun will blind you.
Face east on the first day, south on the second,
west on the third, north on the fourth,
until you are at the center of the circle,
and then you will know the power of the world.
After the first day his stomach hurt
and he felt foolish, all alone on a rock lookout
above a river bend of box elder and cottonwood.
All that night he shivered.
He was not like the old men, nor even like his father.
He spoke American and raised the American flag at school,
he wore blue jeans and looked at magazines and stores
and stood around outside the movie in the town,
searching his pockets as if he had real money.
And he did not believe in visions.
Like all the children, he killed his hunger at the mission house
on Sunday and afterward felt ashamed.
Once he went hungry, telling the missionaries
that Cheyennes never ate on Sundays.
He remained on the rock a second day
and a second night, just out of stubbornness, and because he
was proud of the rifle that Alvin Moon had laid beside him.
No bear nor cougar came--
the animals would not bother him,
his father said, if he sat still--
and on the third morning he did not feel hungry anymore
and sat there motionless, letting the sun and wind
blow through him.
He was as firmly rooted in the ground as a young pine.
By afternoon he was growing weak and became
filled with apprehension.
Something was happening.
The jays and squirrels had lost all fear of him,
flicking over and about him as if he had turned to stone,
and the shrill of insects crystallized in a huge ringing
silence.
The sky was ringing, and the pine trees on the rocks
turned a bright rigid, green, each needle shimmering.
The pines were ringing and beside him a blue lupine
opened, breathing.
Then the river turned to silver and stop flowing.
The jays trembled on the rock, their eyes too bright,
and the squirrel was still, the gold hairs flowing on its tail.
He stared at the enormous sky, and the sky descended
and the earth was rising from below,
and he was soaring toward the center--
Then, in the ringing, far away, rose a flat droning.
The airplane unraveled the high silence as it crossed the sky.
It disappeared without ever appearing,
and when it had gone, the sky no longer rang.
He sat a long time on his rock, but the sky
had risen, leaving him desolate.
Light-headed, he went down to the river, where he drank.
He found mushrooms and fresh-water mussels,
and some berries, and when he had eaten
he laughed at his three-day vigil,
pretending that he did not feel a dreadful sorrow.
On the fourth day, waiting for Alvin Moon to come, he hunted.
He killed a wild goose on the river,
and boasted of it to his father.
His father gazed at him.
And where is the goose, his father said.
I could not reach it, the boy said.
It came so close, and then it drifted far away.
He reeled from the bed and drifted to the window,
but the figure coming down the street was gone.
Again he had missed some unknown chance.
The street was void, a void, avoid.
Dog, heat, a vulture, nothing more--
a dog, a vulture, nothing more, and thus we parted,
sang Lenore.
Singing.
Somewhere, somewhere there was singing.
His whole body shimmered with the chords, the fountainhead
of music, overflowing.
You're sleeping your life away, he told the dog.
Do you hear me?
I said, Do you hear me?
Meri-wether, the Sheriff said.
That's some name for red nigger, ain't it?
You're the smart one, ain't you kid?
Ain't you supposed to be the smart Cheyenne?
Done good in the war, and now they
gone to send their little pet Christ-lovin
Cheyenne to college, ain't that right, kid.
Well, kid, if you're a real smart Injun,
you won't even go look at me that way,
you'll keep your Injun nose clean, kid.
Oh, to be an Indian!
Now that spring is here.
Big Irma-- be a good boy, Lewis.
Do not fight so much.
You come back and see us now.
Alas, too late-- the world is dead you sleepyhead.
The Inn of the Dog and the Vulture.
There are voices, you see, then singing voices,
then strange musics, hollowed out,
as if drifted through a wind tunnel,
these followed by a huge void of bleak silence suggesting Death.
The Story Of My Life, by Lewis Moon.
Now-- something has happened, was happening, is happening.
But will not happen.
Do you hear me?
I said, do you hear me?
A softer tone, please.
To begin at the beginning--
my name is Meriwether Lewis Moon.
Or is that the end?
Again-- I was named Meriwether Lewis Moon,
after Meriwether Lewis, who with Lieutenant William Clark
crossed North America without killing a single Indian.
So said my father.
My father is Alvin Moon "Joe Redcloud,"
who lived up on North Mountain.
Alvin Moon still traps and hunts, and in World War I,
when still a despised non-citizen,
exempt from service, joined those 16,999 other Indians as
insane as himself who volunteered
to serve in World War I. Alvin Moon is half-Cheyenne.
He went down South when he came home and took up
with a Creole Choctaw woman named Big Irma
and brought her back up to his mountain.
The worst mistake that Alvin Moon ever made
was to trying to educate himself.
His information about Lewis and Clark
was the only piece of education he ever obtained,
and it was wrong.
He used to joke that he couldn't educate himself
unless he learned to read, and how could he
learn to read if he didn't educate himself?
So he left off hunting and trapping
and came down off his mountain and took
work near the reservation to keep his children
in the mission school, to give them a better chance in life.
I ain't got nothin, said Joe Redcloud,
and I don't know nothin, not a thing.
And the hell of it is, I broke my back, paid out every cent,
to keep them kids into that school,
and now they don't know nothin, neither, only Jesus Christ.
Now ain't that somethin?
They sit around here thinking about Godamighty, I reckon,
while they're waiting on their gover'ment reliefs.
All but Meriwether Lewis.
Again-- my name is Lewis Moon, and I I'm lying on a bed--
Deathbed?
In a strange country, and I hear eerie voices
and a crack is appearing on the wall, wider and wider,
and the bulb in the ceiling is growing more and more bulbous,
and will surely explode--
a crack-- of doom?
Of lightning down the walls.
You listen to me, Meriwether Lewis--
what the hell you sass that Sheriff for?
He mighta kilt you.
You stay clear of whiskey, then--
long as you can't stay out of trouble,
you ain't welcome back.
And don't show your Mam that bad face, neither.
I whupped you plenty of times before,
and I'll whup you again, hero or no hero.
Alvin Moon "Joe Redcloud" said, you're
all your people have got left to count on.
You go get that education, hear me now?
And then you come on home and learn it back to us
as best you can.
Because the way things are goin' here,
there ain't no hope for none of us,
lest we don't get somethin' learned here
to us pretty quick.
I have opened my eyes again, to shut off all that blue.
Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling
like that-- an ant in the kaleidoscope
might sense the problem.
But out here the bed shudders, the chair sneaks,
the bureau budges--
they back and fill--
--plenty times before and I'll whup you again hero or no hero.
Alvin Moon "Joe Redcloud" said, you're
all your people here got left to count on.
You go get that education, hear me now?
And then you come on home and learn it back to us
as best you can.
Because the way things are goin here,
there ain't no hope for none of us,
lest we don't get somethin' learned here
to us pretty quick.
I have opened my eyes again to shut off all that blue.
Color can threaten, overwhelm, whirling
like that-- an ant in a kaleidoscope
might sense the problem.
But out here the bed shudders, the chair sneaks,
the bureau budges--
they back and fill, about to charge.
From above the bulb socket descends like a falling spider,
leaving the bulb behind.
I am cut off, I feel both silly and depressed--
it is the solitude, not solitude but isolation.
Death is the final isolation, but from what, from what?
I am trying to reach out to you, but I do not know who you are,
I cannot see you.
I only feel your presence in this room.
Perhaps, I wonder, are you inside me?
And if so-- now listen carefully.
There is a lost reality, a reality lost long ago.
Are you in touch with it--
can you tell me--
did you see?
Or are you the figure in the center of the street?
So you came here, after all!
Can you hear me?
I said, can you hear me?
He felt like crying but did not.
He had not cried in 20 years--
no, more.
Had he ever cried?
And he did not really feel like crying.
He felt like laughing, but did not.
Stalking Joe Redcloud's shack as twilight came,
he waited to be called back, beaten, and forgiven,
but with a clear prairie darkness came the knowledge
that the call would never come, that the days of tears
and comfort had come and gone before he had
realized they would ever end.
Dry-eyed, enraged, he crouched in the sagebrush
for a little while, and then moved off
like a lean yearling grizzly driven snarling from the cave,
feeling very bad and very good at the same time,
and spoiling for a fight.
He crouched beside the window sill, his back to the world
without and far away you heard them coming,
the marching huge nameless armies coming toward him,
and once again his hands turned cold.
He felt very cold.
On the wall of the room, over the door,
he saw a huge moth with a large white spot on each wing.
It palpitated gently-- he could hear the palpitations,
and the spots were growing.
The dark was rolling from the forest all around,
and the sky was so wild as the sun set that it hurt his eyes.
He reeled and fell, then thrashed to his feet
and fell again, across the bed, and was sucked down
into the darkness as the music burst the walls
and overwhelmed him.
Snow, dawn, black aspens.
The creature rose at the boy's coming
and somersaulted backward, whining and snarling,
the trap clatter muffled in white silences.
Whiteness, the blood pools colored black,
the tight-sewn cold.
A great head, and yellow eyes too big for Coyote--
the last wolf from the mountains, first and only wolf
the boy had ever seen.
He had no rifle.
The old wolf leaped, to drive him back,
and fell forward on its muzzle, which rose white-tipped
from the snow.
Its tongue fell out.
The icy steel worked tighter on its foreleg,
and the pain confused it, for it looked aside and wagged
his tail a little, shivering.
Then, just once, it howled a real wolf howl,
pure as the black air of the mountain forest.
Then it lay down.
It had been gnawing on its foreleg,
just above where a trap had snapped,
and now it began again, whining and snarling
at its own agony, and stubbornness of its own bone
which held it earthbound.
The mad yellow eyes watched him, the taut muzzle,
the purplish curled gum, red teeth, the jaw.
The scrape of teeth on living bone made him cry out.
The ears flicked forward, but the gnawing did not stop.
When he came close, it sprang sideways--
another such spring might free it.
He drew back, frightened of the mad wild yellow eyes.
The sun rose to low banks of winter clouds,
the day grew cold.
He cut a sapling and carved a spear point, long and white.
Confronting the wolf, he drove the raw white wood
into its chest as it came up at him
and fought to pin it to the ground
and grind the pain out of it.
But still it fought to live, dull heavy thumps
in the white flying powder.
A blood flecked seared his lip--
the wolf was snapping the place where the stake pierced it.
Shaken free, he had fallen within reach of it,
but the stunned creature only raised its bleeding teeth
from its own wounds and stared at him and past him,
blinked once at the dying winter world, in daze,
and lay its head upon its forepaws panting.
This is a proud day for the mission, Lewis, and a proud day
for your people.
We all count on you.
He struggled to free himself, but the stake
held in his heart, the hole in his heart--
even breathing hurt him, even breathing.
He clawed at his own chest to ease it.
If only he could get that pain out,
then his heart would bleed his life away, but gently.
With the music rising in the summer
breeze that came a gay preposterous parade
along the high road--
calliope floodings and fanfare, with bandwagons and floats
and maelstroms of confetti, pouter pigeons
and emerald parakeets, bursting drums and golden tubas,
and gauzy fat-cheeked majorettes in crotch tight sateen suits,
chins bouncing on high squeaking breasts like taut balloons--
oompa, oompa, oompa, oompa.
And an immense blowzy one-man band of a hand-me-down Big
Irma, beer-soaked and high-colored,
all billowing bows and curlicues and furbelows
of hue and texture Look At Her Go, Hurrah Hurrah!
All leer and wink, hiking her skirts
to turn the ankle, pretty still beneath the mass
of tired flesh, and trying in vain
to shake a ball of hair and dog turd from her heel,
squinshing and squashing and squirting along like a banquet
dumped into a bag.
She wore a gigantesque plumed hat,
which she flew like a flag, and as the old tub pushed along,
batting her eyes and swinging her butt,
she leaked and sagged and oozed so woefully at the seams
that rats and crows fought for her leavings,
while in the front and alongside, as trumpets blew
and pennants flew and children snickered and horses nickered,
stores and provisions and water and fuel were crammed aboard.
Varlets hurled up trays of tarts and heaved up
meats and strung up wine flagons and kegs of ale,
while others ran to pump in gasoline and air,
barely able to offset the waste and loss
of the vast outpourings beneath--
Big Irma meanwhile, nothing daunted,
leering and winking to beat hell,
and curtsying prettily as the bands played and hats were
tossed and wild cheers rent the air hip hip hurroo
and winking her blinkers and twinking her pinky
and twirling a tiny parasol, all giggling and goosed and poked,
as if to say, well, sweet Christ knows
I always done my damnedest."
[LAUGHTER]
"Once upon a time, at morning, a small blood-silver river
in the rising plains, the silver undersides
of wind-awakened leaves, the silver spider webs in dew.
A small boy hunting, poised, quick, listening,
in a fine old-smelling boat parting new reeds.
Soft drops falling from an oar, a newborn sun, far bugling,
a swan.
The stalk, the shot, the yell of blackbirds,
the white bird turning a slow circle, head under water.
Feathers floating and wild silence.
That morning his skin tingled, and he laughed aloud
in that sky-high aloneness that was not loneliness,
the strength of a young animal among animals
and the soft summer sunrise.
Horses--
--rodeos, long murky bars and rotten sawdust smell
and high small sandy towns of the Great Basin,
a coyote trapped by hurtling cars where a road cut
through the rock, a lone whiskey bottle
on the shoulder of the road.
Night voices, speed, a dirtied strength, a flight, a maiming,
a lost friend.
Women and bystanders overrun, struck aside
by wheels spun loose from flying axles, flying hooves,
by fenders--
highways, sirens, howling lights, a crash.
Dread silence--
--smoke--
--and twisted metal shards, flayed twisted limbs,
a staring eye, and gasoline spreading like a stain of blood
on the stunned pavement--
hiss of steam, oncoming sirens, sirens,
I-A-R-R-A-O-W-A-O-A-O-W.
Down the road.
The big two-tone auto stank of lotion and cigar
butts, but it moved.
It roared across the land like an apocalypse,
almost to the state line, before the oil gauge flash red.
Then he forced it harder still, grinding his teeth
and driving the gas through it to burn it clean,
until it tires reeked in the body shuddered,
until the fat plastic dashboard bulging with warnings,
until the whole fat contraption of churchgoing
chromium and patriotic plush screeched
and choked on its own heat and burst its block
and screamed to a hissing locked fiery halt with eight
million all-American motorcycles hard behind.
I-A-R-R-A-O-A-O-W. A last swig and he broke the bottle,
then toppled out, rolling laughing,
on the highway shoulder.
Down he went through waving weeds into the swamp,
hailing and cursing the cop silhouettes,
with two thousand dollars and a hand cut by broken teeth,
and nothing and nowhere, but free, by Christ,
how free of their whole Indian game.
He headed eastward to New York.
On a truck radio he heard the charges.
Grand larceny-- an automobile and two thousand dollars--
and felonious assault.
See, Lewis, it ain't gonna work, man.
You find yourself another local.
I don't get it.
You had a fight in here yourself only last week-- you guys
were drunk right on the job.
You don't fight the way we fight.
We fight for fun, Lewis.
Because we like it.
We ain't trying to prove nothin.
So you just find yourself a nice white local where
they fight the way you fight.
White local, huh?
There's more Cheyenne in this blood coming out of my nose
than there is Mohawk in all you bastards put together--
You got shit in your blood too.
We never heard of Cheyennes, hardly, until you come along,
and anyway, we ain't professional Indians like you.
All we know about Indians, bub, is what we seen on television.
Sirens, howling lights, another crash, another,
still another-- modern times.
Crash, crash, ca-rash-- that crazy kid is ca-razy--
he began to laugh.
The crashes became gimcrack destruction, a breaking
and tinkling of deafening dimensions,
a mounting heap of slow jalopies hurling themselves together
at a crossroads.
Port--
--scene with rum, tropical colors, high white birds,
the lonely palms of dawn--
a crazy legged Negress dancing nude--
--Wistaria--
--Her flesh--
Because the way things are going,
there ain't no hope for none of us,
lessen we don't get something learned here to us
pretty quick--
Lucidity.
He sighed.
He lay there all laughed out and loose, loose as a dead snake
slung on a rail, lay there drunk with gentleness and pleasure.
Be a good boy, Lewis do not hate so much.
--but this time, even as he laughed, an apprehension came.
He crawled to the corner of the room,
where he crouched low, watching both door and window.
The noises were surrounding him, there
was something happening to him, something happening,
and he felt too tired now to deal with it.
If he could only stop this laughing, but he could not.
His laughter grew louder and louder,
and when he tried to stop he could not close his mouth.
It stretched wider and wider, until he
swallowed the ceiling light, the room, the window and the night.
The world rushed down into the cavernous void inside him,
leaving him alone in space, pin-wheeling wildly
like a jagged fragment spun out from a planet.
A terrific wind blew, and his ears
rang with the bells of blue-black space.
The wind sealed his throat, his flesh turned cold,
his screams were but squeaks snapped out and away
by the passage of night spheres.
Nor could he hear, there was no one to hear,
there was no one where he had gone--
what's happening, what is happening--
He had flung himself away from life,
from the very last realities, had strayed to the cold windy
reaches of insanity.
This perception was so clear and final that he moaned--
he would not find his way back.
You've gone too far this time, you've gone too far.
As he rolled into oblivion, his body cooled and became numb,
inert, like a log seized up and borne out skyward by a cyclone.
He struggled to reach out, catch hold, grasp, grip, hang on,
but he could not.
He could not, he was made of wood,
and there was nothing to hang on to, not even his own thought--
thought shredding, drifting out of reach,
like blowing spider webs.
He was gone, gone, gone, gone--
and around again.
The howling was in his head, and all
about lay depthless silence.
His screaming was ripped away before it had left his mouth,
and the mouth itself was far away,
a huge papered hoop blown through
and tattered by the gales.
The air rushed past, too fast to breathe--
his lungs sucked tight, shrivel like prunes, collapsed.
He died.
Death came as a huge bounteous quiet,
in the bosom of a high white cloud.
The wood of his body softened, the knots loosened.
He opened up, lay back, exhausted,
mouth slack, eyes wide like a bald eyes of a corpse.
He glimpsed a hard light lucid region of his mind
like a lone comet, wandering far out
across the long night of the universe."
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you.
I'd be very happy to answer any questions
about those things I read or anything else that
might occur to you.
How did you decide to write about the Indian--
[INAUDIBLE] it's generally worse but, [INAUDIBLE] Indians.
Mhm.
My very first book, too, has an Indian guy
who's sort of run over and trampled
by the situation in New England where he is.
So it's a long time, kind of, preoccupation.
I think it's an underlying preoccupation of all of us
in this country, really, that--
we talk a lot about Vietnam, now, and our uneasiness
about that war, and that's been debated, as we all know,
many times back and forth.
But I think that, in part, that's kind of-- not a cover
for our preoccupation on Indian people,
I think that this really is, for those of us who feel strongly
about this country, who feel and realize what a great country it
is and could be, cannot live with our treatment
of the Indian people, really.
I think it's the kind of ongoing guilt and dread that we have.
And that they-- anyway, in my life,
I've always been bothered by it, and preoccupied with it,
and I think it began that way, and it keeps popping up
in more than half of my books, there
is something having to do with Indians,
it's not just recent at all.
Is there any positive acceptance of In the Spirit
of Crazy Horse, in state of South Dakota at all?
Oh, yeah.
Sure, there was.
There are a lot of people there that
aren't crazy about Governor Janklow,
and those people liked it a lot, at least up
to the time he sued.
I'm don't want to be funny here.
I think a lot--
I think the feeling among Indian people was very mixed.
It kind of depended where your head was,
and I've had a lot of wonderful letters,
and response from there, and also some negative response.
I think most of the white people in South Dakota
are pretty suspicious of that book,
unless they had a personal dislike for some of the FBI
agents, or the governor, or some of the other people involved.
I don't know, now, at least they're
reading it though, thanks to the fact
that I'm being sued up there by the governor.
A lot of people are, kind of, picking it up and reading it.
And there's quite a lot of editorial discussion.
In fact, it's the biggest news story
in South Dakota in the past year, been a lot of attention
to it.
I said to somebody today, my sales went up from 3 to 30
because of it.
Statewide, you know?
So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but--
How extensive is your experience in the jungles
of South America?
How extensive?
Yeah.
Can you hear me if I get away from this?
[RUSTLING]
[LAUGHTER]
Not very extensive.
[LAUGHTER]
No, I just was--
I had an assignment to go there, and I went down there
for The New Yorker magazine, and I was fascinated by it.
And I've been there, and I've since returned once or twice,
for short periods.
I was there for several months, I guess.
I took-- I began by taking a freighter up the Amazon,
from Belem all the way up to Iquitos, which
is about 1800 miles up the Amazon,
so it's a good, slow, relaxed way to see the Amazon.
And then I got hung up on it, that whole area,
and I heard about this fantastic fossil jawbone that
had been discovered there, and I was out in the jungle,
and got a couple of people together,
and we actually went in canoes, and found the damn thing.
It turned out to be a fossil--
I took pictures of it to the American Museum
of Natural History, and they said
that it was a fossil crocodilian,
unknown to science.
It was not less than 50 feet long.
That's quite a crocodile.
And unfortunately we lugged this damn jaw, it's petrified,
it was a huge stone, it practically sank the canoe.
And we lugged it down the river, it was really,
I guess hundreds of miles, only have the Peruvian authorities
confiscate it at the last minute,
before we got it over the Andes.
And unfortunately, nobody down there
is really qualified to analyze it.
So it's-- as far as I know, it still sits in the police yard
in Pucallpa, Peru.
If any of you ever go to Pucallpa,
please see if it's still there.
[LAUGHTER]
When you're writing, what kind of discipline
do you impose on yourself, such as number of hours per day,
or things like that?
Well, if I get obsessed, I work all day long.
I don't really impose anything, except a sort
of neurotic compulsion, you know.
But I usually work in mornings, and if things are going well,
I'll work into the early afternoon.
And generally speaking, writing about five hours a day,
I guess, and then I do research, and reading, and trying
to pull it all together.