After the previous post here I was thinking how lucky I’ve been to have, at a few points in my life, counsel from my own sort of superheroes. From people I looked up to and who meant the world to me.
A lot of those connections started with a fan letter. I wrote the great essayist and writer Jenny Diski a letter when I was living in Vietnam, feeling terribly alone and alienated — and reading again and again her great books Skating to Antartica and Stranger on a Train, among others — to tell her what her work meant to me. She wrote back, and then I wrote back, and we continued on, through her later years and the cancer, through her heroic diary writing — a process that gave me a kind of second hand education. If I could see and hear from Jenny as she was going through all of that, if I could see her move and write with such incredible humor and clarity (I think she would’ve hated if I’d said bravery there), maybe I could imitate that when my time came.
My regular communiques with Jim Harrison started in much the same way. And, as in many of these types of situations, it was probably very clear to him from the start that I was writing out of a kind of desperation, eager for guidance, for reassurance. In our first chat, and in every single one thereafter — particularly when I would call, frantic about my “career,” about my lack of money in the bank, about my various failures — he told me that I had to think about becoming an artist the way monks think about joining the priesthood, that I had to again and again renew my vows of poverty and commitment. That art wasn’t a career but a calling, and all that other shit was for civilians. High minded stuff that really appealed to me, then as now, I guess.
Toward the end of his life, while I had a square gig and wasn’t so frantic about being on the lam from my debtors, we talked a lot more about him. About legacy, and the like. We talked about what all of his work and life had been about — just a long walk in the woods, he said, looking for a nice log to sit on. And when I asked him how he would like to be remembered, he said, “as a man who got his work done.” Of course when he died, he was writing. God I miss him and that voice.
Around the time that we lost Harrison, there was a rash of my heroes leaving, including Umberto Eco and Sam Shepard. Both of whom I had queried under the guise of work, doing press on them or their projects, the better to ask them for some life advice, and who overdelivered.
And to take just those two as examples, the counsel I was seeking was wildly varied. I can’t remember now who said that we ask advice from someone because we know what they will say, wanting only to confirm our own suspicions or inclinations. But why was I then, why have I always sought guidance from these sorts of father (and mother) figures, from people as disparate as the urbane Milanese scholar and the ruffian American id? From the midwestern decadent poet and a powerfully thoughtful Londoner with a rasping laugh?
And to which father figure do you turn when they have all gone and the advice you need is about your own, literal father? Well, lucky for me, my greatest adviser and guru is still very much alive, still teaching me about life by example and dropping the most incredible coins of wisdom into my cup. During some fairly challenging days recently, this friend was practically on call — and having gone through a similar situation with his mother not long ago, fairly well attuned to my state of mind — and would, unprompted send just the right notes of consolation, and thought provoking bits of comfort, much of which is far too close to me and too precious at the moment for me to put here.
But so when I moaned a bit in my previous letter that there is no clearinghouse of aggregated experience and knowledge about life (or about the end of life), maybe I was being a bit disingenuous. I have been phenomenally lucky to have people I could ask about this whole mess — life and work and death and money and everything else. And maybe if there is one thing I have learned and can share about all of that it is to ask, to seek counsel from those who you most admire. In fact Harrison used to jokingly attribute his own thoughts and witticisms to hoary old ancient sages, so that they wore a bit of prestige, and made the listener appreciate them more. Because it is true, that if you get the good words from people you look up to, you will heed them more closely. And besides, they are only confirming that which you already know.