Sketches from Kentucky: a Tribute to Sam Shepard
“The most beautiful order of the world is still a random gathering of things insignificant in themselves.”
— Heraclitus
(translated by Guy Davenport)
1.
I find myself a couple of years ago in the cool of an April evening, with a few drinks in me after sundown, on my back & looking up as I am engaged in activity, something akin to contemplating the stars above me & what’s beyond and between of what I can see of those stars, outside the big house on Sam Shepard’s farm. A litter of puppies spring-loaded with new-born energy spirals about me (besides the Milky Way spiraling about me), along with the presence of their protective, somewhat overwhelmed mother (mother of the pups, that is — I can’t speak to any protective, somewhat overwhelmed presence of the mother or mothers of the galaxy or galaxies).
You might find yourself asking just what this reporter/this cartoonist (among many other things I am and/or might not be) born and raised as a humble hillbilly (among many other things I am and/or might not be) in rural, eastern Kentucky was doing finding himself on a farm and among puppies belonging to Sam Shepard/his dog beneath/within the Milky Way. I would not blame you for the asking in & among the findings.
Sam Shepard was/is known for winning the Pulitzer prize for his play Buried Child in 1979 & for his acting chops in moving pictures, which procured for him a nomination for the Oscar as Best Actor in a Supporting Role in 1984 for The Right Stuff (for a quick glance at all his other voluminous worldly laurels in the arts & letters racket go: here). But he was also known as a man/writer/actor/public figure (a “celebrity,” if any among us want to cheapen the Language) who was especially protective of his privacy.
Anyways, as Charles Olson once wrote, “If there are no walls there are no names,” and as the cessation of one solar year becomes the inception of another & as I, in/on/with my own turnings go from 41 solar revolutions since I’ve been obviously/bodily on the surface of our planet to 42 of them, writing about Sam Shepard seems to me as a strange proposition because it appears to me that I don’t have anything of substance to say about him.
But if I regard Sam Shepard as The Substance, as something akin to the stone upon which to philosophize, the prospect arises in my consciousness that in having nothing to say, I might have everything (not just anything) to say. With all this Everything or Anything or even Nothing or Who Knows What All, I’m talking more about SPACE (Milky Way, slight return; Sun Ra wasn’t lying when he proclaimed “Space Is The Place”).
And by space, I’m here talking space as inhabited by living in the place where reality, acute in its specificity, begets myth. Inhabiting the time-space-place where examination of the myths birthed of a life lived in & among all the revolutions begets, in turn: Revelation.
2.
If I look through the surface of the Magic Mirror to look at the Place of Lexington, KY in the nineteen-hundred-and-nineties, I see most clearly an apartment in a building tucked away back from and in between the corners of East High and South Ashland & East High and Lafayette, and then I see someone I recognize at least partially as myself (my Self) within it. Objectively I (or someone or a collection of someones not unlike me) was there in that apartment (and other apartments and in various versions of Lexington) to be a student at the University of Kentucky.
While I do recall specific classes under specific mentors (such as studying with the late James Baker Hall), I don’t recall much of being a college (it rhymes with knowledge) student so much as I recall listening to music (even broadcasting sounds out into the the air as a disc jockey live on the electric radio at the university station, WRFL 88.1 FM), reading books, watching movies, in VHS-form or projected up on the screen down at the historic Kentucky Theater.
There were assortments of part-time employment. The aforementioned Jim Hall got a kick out of the fact while I was in one of the three classes I took with him that my folding money was coming in from a gig working at a store that sold and rented videos of a pornographic persuasion, as well as sold books, magazines & toys of the both the novelty/serious, or seriously novel, varieties. But that’s another story.
Less prurient jobs included a season working for a family-owned greenhouse. The family (I would discover over the course of the months from May to October that I worked for them) were Jehovah’s Witnesses. They didn’t try to convert me (maybe I was considered a lost cause(?)) & I enjoyed the company of some of the Mexicans (I assumed (of Mexican or other South American extraction), undocumented; I never asked) who these cultists also employed. Especially a worker named Noe who had taught himself English over his years in the U.S. & with whom I shared many a good conversation while working together, more than I enjoyed the company and/or conversation of the family/witnesses to whatever Jehovah had been cooking.
As a young man, sure: there seemed to be something to do with falling in & out of & over & under & passing out around something/some things akin to love in its and in my own various guises chasing a few women around, when it seemed like chasing was the appropriate action, or set of actions. I was busy fucking up and doing something like living life & creating and experimenting in various forms of the arts. All these activities in & around much boozing connected and disconnected to events/gatherings having to do with the aforementioned so-called forms of the so-called arts. Not least of all among these doings were the dawning days of dealing with the arthritic condition that shaped my body and life in that body/experience of body, from then to as of this writing. But that’s also another story.
One could say I was walking if not stumbling along the trails of trials & errors of how to be an artist if one were being generous, and if unkind then I was just a walking/talking a damage-case who ultimately survived (despite at the very least once getting stabbed with a knife) stumbling around rather than imploding (at least not totally) on the sidewalk. Regardless of kindness or unkindness, artist or not, I am reminded of the words of W.B. Yeats in a letter to Ezra Pound from July 15th, 1918: “After all one’s art is not the chief end of life but an accident of one’s search for reality or rather perhaps one’s method of search.”
3.
I can’t point to a particular film in which Shepard performed in a role that then sparked me to attach a name to an image/persona up on the moving picture screen, or when exactly I learned that he was a man of letters. I don’t regard myself as a scholar of his works, but I do in clarity remember two specific books by Sam Shepard that I picked up in used bookstores that I habituated back in the days of the 90s just delineated…
The first was the edition from City Lights of Shepard’s play Fool for Love with a cover featuring a cropped version of Alfred Wertheimer’s photograph, “The Kiss,” with Elvis Presley as subject, captured backstage at the Mosque Theater in Richmond, Virginia in 1956 at the precise aspect of touching tongues with a woman (Barbara Gray — although the identity of the woman in this photograph was a mystery for decades, not revealed in public for certain until a 2013 article in Vanity Fair).
The second, also from publisher City Lights, a copy of Motel Chronicles. Another photograph on the cover (I assume by Shepard’s friend Johnny Dark, considering his credit for providing the photos that illustrate the book as a whole). Shepard stands, sporting a cowboy hat and baggy clothes, a Coca-Cola bottle in hand, in some undisclosed burnt-out western and/or rural town. A (perhaps) dilapidated building behind him in the background, an old car with Texas plates behind but closer and to the side: difficult to discern if the photo was taken in 1940 or 1980 if one didn’t know the figure in it was indeed Shepard/the author himself.
I have access to memory: the experience of reading the books as physical artifacts that I held in my hands, with their respective covers what enticed me to pick them up: the mythic young Elvis but in the form of photograph(y) that debunks some of the myth in capturing the reality of a blatantly salacious Presley (more salacious anyway than his image-wranglers would soon allow for public-myth consumption). Then Shepard himself captured in snapshot what puts him outside of time, in some obscure (?) place & is the image of his own myth of, if not himself, then his Self.
The sensation lingers of books, absorbed. As if the words became aspects of my person, as part of my body, my being. Or if they didn’t become part of me, they became part of the search for me, which, Hell Pilgrim, I consider to be the same thing. I didn’t put any frames around the experience of reading Shepard’s writing, never put that experience upon any organized, quantified shelf. And now that I do; I don’t. If not exactly kicking analysis to the curb here, I’m kicking the tires of experience, memory of experience, wondering if this old clunker of a life of this reporter that’s been lived inside & outside letters is still road-worthy. Perhaps I’ll be able to drive us somewhere, not just Nowhere, together.
4.
There are not that many movies as good as Paris, Texas is a good movie. It’s one of the great American films as directed by, of course, a German (Wim Wenders), with a screenplay credited to Sam Shepard (along with L.M. Kit Carson’s screen-credit of: “Adaptation”)
After discussions between Wenders and Shepard about building a narrative to shape into a film based on material from Motel Chronicles, (as I understand it:) Shepard started a screenplay that was not in final-form before he was obliged to remove himself from working on the script to take another gig timely, and then: Wenders working with Carson, further developed the screenplay into what ultimately became the base alloy for the finished film, a collaboration between all, with Shepard’s writing (the world and characters he wrote about as in Motel Chronicles & elsewhere) as the spring water that fed the whole metallurgic pond of Paris, Texas.
I learned all that later. When I first watched the movie, I just watched it. Starring Harry Dean Stanton (in his first lead role), with the landscape of his face juxtaposed with the landscape of the Western Lands, somewhere down around the Border: we meet the character of Travis as a Man stunned into, lost to: a state of silence.
Possessed with obsessive (“A man obsessed / is a man possessed / by a demon,” as the late Hubert Selby, Jr. once wrote/liked to say) drive to walk forward: toward the horizon and away from the past/what’s behind him (in the grips of a busted zen-state, a kinda mindful mindlessness). Travis has forgotten himself in walking away from his Self, by force of will and/or by Wake of Previous Calamity. He has Nothing to say. He has only Forward. Mute. Motion.
Heraclitus keeps coming back around to me when using Sam Shepard as a prism by which to clarify/focus Vision. As it is Heraclitus who is attributed with proclaiming the idea, the phrase — “Ethos anthropoi daimon” — commonly uttered in English as: “Character is Destiny.”
From the wreckage, Character emerges, whatever It Is (for like the Buddhist concept of suffering: do the particulars even matter?). We know by virtue of Stanton’s performance that whatever there is to Know about him, from him, Travis, if not Elvis, has left the building. The Psyche is missing: only an Automaton as Place-Holder (for Travis) remains.
If Travis destined him/self to disappear, then the destiny becomes to reappear, or at least become rediscovered: the only balance to the extreme of the disappearing. The essential mystery of who that reappeared Character might or might not be and how he got that way is essentially revealed through other characters: his brother, who comes to retrieve the lost Travis after Travis has become found/washed up on the shore of doctor’s office after passing out along the Border’s uncompromising sun & heat. And then, as he brings his vacant sibling back from his wandering wilderness, and back with him to California, Travis is revealed further by: his brother’s wife & through his abandoned son who is cared for, by them.
Travis begins to transform back from his wasteland. A man who can use language again, a character who is not escaping/in flight, but moves instead toward not away from the waste of broken relationships, rectifying what can be rectified, to heal what can become healed. He seeks selflessness, finally, as his Character/his Destiny, his Rectification: becomes to find the mother of the child whom he cast away (as he Cast his Self away) & to reunite her with their son. His attempt to come in from the wilderness & Mend What Was/Is Broken.
More than any other particular scene, it’s the so-called “Bridge Scene” what has popped over & over again into my imagination & memory such that I will retrieve/recreate (have retrieved/recreated) for the screen of my Mind’s Eye, as I, myself, have walked over years through the landscapes of my wanderings, walking in/to/from Kentucky from/to Parts Unknown.
I felt the bridge scene within me while walking around White River Junction, Vermont in the second decade of the 21st century, crossing the bridge over the White River as it flows into the Connecticut River, a fact of landscape that serves human society as marking the border between Vermont and New Hampshire. I was fond of saying to my pal Elston who often as not accompanied me on my Walkabouts to eat food at the Four Aces diner (always the “early bird” breakfast special) and/or Mule some beer back across state lines (mostly, we set out on foot for the beer), as we crossed the White River, with my mock-tour guide mode, a serious-sweep (accompanying) of the (mocking-bird, in) hand:
“D.W. Griffith took a piss on this rock in Nineteen-hundurt & Nineteen.”
(Griffith filmed the famous ice floe sequences with Lillian Gish of his 1920 film WAY DOWN EAST in White River Junction)
Meanwhile, back in Texas: Travis encounters a man on the bridge who in his ranting, consumed on a hinge within the narrative of the piece upon where Travis is about to reveal to his brother & to us (the audience) his decision to rise above his own rage, to-not-be-consumed. Travis there with his mustache, a pair of binoculars around his neck & attempt to return from his exile/vow of silence and cross the border back to the Land of the Living. As if it’s all an idea about being a tourist of the landscape: seeing it again anew rather than only the ability to perceive interior landscape, crossing both an actual and metaphoric bridge on foot above multiple if not apocalyptic and/or nightmarish lanes of traffic.
The stream of consciousness ranting of the lone individual Travis encounters on the bridge, above the cacophony of traffic noise; the ranting louder mixed with the traffic sound: as Travis walks closer to the sound of the bellowing. Travis is the silent walker, who pauses to place his hand on the ranter, a moment of kindness as he expands away from rage/damage, back to arriving at becoming a being of empathy. He is encountering a version, variation, a mirror-image of his previous Self in the persona of that raging prophet. He places his hand on him/himself/the past/the echo of his previous Self & continues on, leaving rage & ranting (mute or otherwise) on the bridge, walking now towards Destiny.
5.
Regular ritual: get drunk. And/or otherwise bent. To get to a state of grace and if not grace then get to something like normalcy. That’s operating from a foundation of damage that one walks out the door already beyond repair. The good times roll away to reveal the moss of something else beneath under the stone. But what the hey-hey-ha-ha.
I was about to use those lines to set up a description of many of my friends, myself, and our ways in Lexington, but then that reminds me of another anecdote: when Sam Shepard was popped for operating heavy machinery after indulging in just a few more adult beverages than the law of the land would allow back in 2009 in Normal, Illinois (speaking of normalcy; I mean, come on).
{Digression: After the Big Flood, an excess of divine rage waters, and God so made his covenant (not to, ya know: do it again), Noah planted a vineyard to make wine and said, fuck it: I’m gettin’ drunk & nekkid…
(with his sons left to cover up for him…one of whom was named Ham…there’s a joke in there somewhere about Ham being the father not of/not only of Canaan but of Hamm’s beer and its Land of the Sky Blue Waters, but I’m not funny enough to get to that joke…)
…this cruel wrathful jealous patriarchal sumbuck mono-God (thrice-faced, if you ask the Christians) of the Hebrews be damned (he was sick of it). Oblivion. Putting things back together after drinking/flooding them apart. Maybe it’s all just a ritual to reenact the events at the end of the Last Great Ice Age. What?
The difference between the water under the boat & the water on your brain & the water of life (it’s a slim margin with shifting sands to delineate the coastlines between lands & seas & floods & droughts): sláinte.}
Back to Normal (Illinois, that is): the tap on Shepard for DUI hit the “celebrity” gossip/news outlets and even more than the the spectacle of the transgression itself, there was more heat surrounding chatter about just what kind of world it was it that a Pulitzer/Oscar winner would be listed as a resident of and be driving a truck registered in the obscure town of Midway in po-dunk-Ken-tuck.
It’s here we may linger to consider famed/influential photographer, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, who moved to Lexington, KY in 1950, where he lived and worked as an optometrist until his death in 1972. He was not born in Kentucky, however. His birthplace was, in fact: Normal, Illinois.
Regardless of Meatyard/Normal, Shepard’s Kentucky residence/resident/truck-status was no shock nor puzzle to be solved for me by that time, but I also don’t really remember when/where/how with precision what I came to be aware that Sam Shepard lived on his farm outside of Lexington, when not standing in the spotlight, not working the spook racket of the business of show. It certainly was sometime after buying/reading Fool for Love, Motel Chronicles, or seeing Paris, Texas.
I began absorbing at some juncture in Lexington, KY in the 1990s the rumbling, the tittle-tattle concerning his presence in the landscape, a Celebrity in Our Midst. Bartenders I knew who claimed to serve him. The event of him appearing over-served in public was reported to be observed often enough for that siting not to be regarded as a rarity. People talking the Way People Talk concerning the practice of his ways with women to an appreciative local audience. Who Knows or knew?
He did/he didn’t/she did/she didn’t: tittle tattle is always a continuing babble, a river that flows floating bullshit as well as truths, partial or otherwise. Tittle tattle & gossip-mongering aside, it did all spring from one Verifiable Fact of his hanging around.
So to turn back the clock even further back than 2009 to the mid to late 1990s (again), yes: I had many friends that walked the same kind of tightropes as I did, often falling/falling off together in our individual and collective searches for grace, inebriation, normalcy. It seemed to be our shared religion. We would hang out and speak to each other at length in something resembling human language, in ritualistic tones.
One of them was my buddy Joseph, a published poet and professional waiter, a drinker of martinis, an imbiber of drugs not approved by law for consumption of civilians sans guidance of a medical doctor (which is no condemnation, as, even if I skipped most of the items on the narcotics shelf, I, too, at the time drank more than most drinkers who drink, as has been established). Joe was the conduit for delivering an anecdote that transcended the tittle-tattle of local gnats & approached verisimilitude.
His gainful employment as a waiter at a restaurant — on one hand too pricey for me to afford to patronize myself, yet on the other hand employed many of my friends — placed Joe in position one evening when some regulars seated at the bar waved him over to say hello. Seated next to them was a figure slouched at the end of the bar, over-indulged, to whom they introduced to Joe as, “our friend, Sam.”
Not thinking too much of being introduced to a satisfied customer at the end of the bar near the end of his shift, as Joe provided some modicum of courtesy by way of focus on the figure to whom he was being introduced, he received a in sharpening focus a sudden flash of realization:
“Sam…
Shepard?”
Not so much a question to confirm celebrity as it was to confirm, for Joe, he was speaking to the Sam Shepard who was the author of a particular book he’d read, re-read, and carried with/within him as a holy relic, one of his sacred books & if he’d indeed found himself speaking to & shaking the hand of its author, he’d indeed be also finding himself shitting his trousers proverbial & just was smacked in the gob of being granted an opportunity to say so to said author.
The drinker was Sam Shepard, but unfortunately the drinker had been drinking & said drinker/said author was not capable of and/or willing to respond, beyond a kind of abstract grunt. No engagement there to be found in a conversation about his identity as author of any book or books.
When I asked Joe just what was the book/personal holy relic of letters in his personal totemic geometry he was so hot (and doomed) to directly express to its author the prevalence placed upon it/held for it by Joe, then, even if Joe and I had never spoken about the book or ever shared our esteem for it (much less ever previously talked about Sam Shepard), I could almost sense ahead-of-the-beat his answer: Motel Chronicles. Sacred books in common with Joe notwithstanding, I continued to hear or not hear of Sam Shepard in and around Lexington and I remained friends with Joe (most recently, we both found ourselves living in New England at the same time).
I remember already when the movie Simpatico, based on his play of the same name, arrived to screens in 1999, it made sense to me what with all this Kentucky when it came to Sam Shepard, he would be a scribe behind a narrative with the horse racket surrounding Lexington, KY out among her blue-grasses as its setting. Shepard and his phantom/physical presence in Lexington became an element of living there, like the other element of the just-mentioned horse industry, like the element of limestone water that goes into the mix of the noble product we call bourbon what gets distilled to its quintessence in Kentucky.
6.
“My own experience has been that the tools I need for my trade are paper, tobacco, food, and a little whiskey,” William Faulkner once said, in an interview; Paris Review, Spring 1956.
Sam Shepard always hit me since I first encountered him as a writer concerned with knowing, or at least confronting, unknowable trauma. His works seem to contain the Spirit of the Western Frontier, but after the fact; when the mirage of the endless land just there for the white man to take has faded back into the dreamscape of dysfunction from which it emerged.
And all that’s left is to maybe take whatever it is or was about the American Western Spirit (that part of its better angels anyway which does not manifest as obsessed/addicted/foreordained to shoot itself in its own foot — be wary of just what flavor of Destiny one manifests for oneself), trading in the physical frontier for the frontier of the landscape interior, manifesting of actual, Unvarnished Spirit.
Shepard was born into the world the son of a combat veteran. A generation of WWII combat veterans become fathers, along with a generation of women/mothers, raising children together (or not), all living with the damage inflicted by virtue of the wake of combat upon the men with the waves crashing against/within the framework of the family. What we’d call in parlance contemporary: PTSD.
Shepard said of this dynamic, this generation: “There was a trauma that was mysterious and the women didn’t understand it, and the men didn’t understand it…the medicine was…for the most part: booze.”
Sins of fathers passing on to sons. Wounded hometown fisher kings yodeling ballads into the moonshine of bright midnights. Songs of the men who may not ever speak directly about love & their hearts’ pains in an unvarnished manner in conversation, but in hymns sung for the alcohol-soaked congregations within the cathedrals of America’s honky-tonks: there are voices.
Shepard once discussed Samuel Beckett by framing him as writing about the banishment of the individual, about that individual’s experience of that exile, while yet still writing about the individual somehow taking part — to play some kind of part — in the world. Banishment. Exile. Taking part.
How does one know one’s mother, one’s father, all of one’s ancestors & one’s self? One knows the experience of people of place of things: contradictions, the enigma. If the only knowing is the acknowledgement of the enigma, one writes, one signifies the enigma. But embracing the enigma, fearlessly, the contradictions don’t so much contradict anymore: that which is fractured starts to become whole…whole/holy…holy/healed.
And then there’s just the simple but sage rhetorical advice Shepard gave in a 1986 interview with Rolling Stone magazine:
“Hide out.”
7.
In February of 2011, I am involved with an opening reception at Institute 193 for the exhibition and book publication of Spud Crazy (in collaboration with writer Nick Tosches) concurrent with the same weekend as the first Harry Dean Stanton film festival in Lexington, KY (Harry Dean being a native of West Irvine, KY). Tom Thurman’s documentary, Crossing Mulholland, which I was able to catch while taking a break from the hanging of Spud on the Friday night before my Saturday opening, was the only aspect of the festival I was able to attend.
The founder/organizer of the Harry Dean fest had the notion to bring Hunter Carson into the reception for the Spud show to expose him to some local wildlife in its natural habitat at Institute 193, on their way down to the Kentucky Theater before the screening of Paris, Texas on that Saturday. Hunter stepped into, yes, a “community” event, but a community that was importing by proxy writers from New York and San Francisco — besides New Yorker/son of Newark, collaborator Nick Tosches & author Bob Levin, native of Philadelphia and long-time resident of the Bay Area, who had provided an essay as foreword to accompany the publication, as well as an introduction by Richard Hell — known as a New Yorker but he himself a native of Lexington, KY. And in stepped the kid who played Harry Dean’s kid in Paris, Texas into this community/“community.”
My friends Justin Eslinger, Brian Manley, and a theremin player from Tennessee whose name I remember as Cody (Justin’s friend, he’d imported Cody in with him for the night) were there to perform at intervals during the reception a variation on the soundtrack music we had recorded as the one-off band Spud Imperials (included as disc with the Spud Crazy book). Plus Cody and minus Robert Beatty, who performed on and edited the music on the soundtrack disc. Musician Ben Sollee who lived around the block was in attendance & also served as pinch-hitter by going back to his house & grabbing a boom box and schlepping it in for us, when we needed stronger speakers than the Institute’s director had on deck in-house with his computer’s speakers to play the soundtrack disc on a loop during the reception when the musicians weren’t playing live.
That was the scene. There was beer & Ale-8 to go along with the sounds and the people & Hunter jumped right on in with us. Rather than stick around to watch the film featuring his childhood-acting chops, he came back from the theater to malinger with us at the reception before heading back in time for the Q&A following the film. And this hanging out begat a friendship with Hunter that continues to this day which in turn begat a few collaborative endeavors.
There’s a weird echo here, as digressionary bookend shuffled among these loose shelves (or at least the loose organization upon these shelves). When I was talking to cartoonist Steve Bissette about Harry Dean Stanton, the documentary The American Dreamer (co-directed by L.M. Kit Carson) & how I’d met Hunter, Steve revealed that he had met Kit in White River Junction, Vermont & that they had befriended each other & that meeting/frienship begat collaborative projects together (sadly, unrealized before the elder Carson’s death). And the weird echo is that Steve had met Kit as I’d met Hunter, running into each other at an art gallery opening reception local to White River Junction. To say that we don’t/ignore the fact that we live in a strange universe chock-full of wavelengths connecting as we all broadcast within all the vibrant variations of living life: is to speak about the strange universe (& all her vibrant variations we all radiate within), falsely.
8.
Sam Shepard spoke on the record to the importance of one’s ancestors. It’s the Jungian in him (well one of the things that was him/within him/had to come out, besides the fact that Shepard had just / got to boogie), I say, to acknowledge that within each individual therein is contained the collective all of what came before.
I walked the world in the same time-space as Shepard, but he’s an ancestor, of the variety once concurrent and now moved beyond the mortal. And I can’t help what but seek to honor in some fashion Shepard in these meditations/sketches of memory.
It’s the same common-source impulse what sparked me to place dedications in each of the three volumes of my DESPAIR series to the aforementioned James Baker Hall, aforementioned Hubert Selby, Jr. & to Hasil Adkins. The latent structure of dedicating each of the three volumes to the memory of a single individual was to point to my mentors, or if not mentors in the strict sense, then certainly masters in their own rights with whom I walked & talked, shared in their wisdom in conversational forms, and as friends. Artists whom I’d met and worked with on some level. And also had lost to death. Whatever grief I’d experienced in the losing, I wanted to transmute grief to tribute, to summoning, to a respecting of their spirits.
Family members of blood-relation I’ve lost are legion — being from the kind of rural/farming eastern Kentucky family, at least on my mom’s side, in which I know not only aunts, uncles and first cousins but second third and even fourth cousins as well as all the great aunts & uncles, great grandparents, etc. — but that’s another kind of homage to proffer tribute to those of them known to me whom have died within the frame of my time of life.
Artists whom I’ve admired, whether I walked & talked with them or not, whether they lived a hundred years ago or thousands of years ago, certainly in my cosmogony they are added to the totem of influence (what I call this concept in my dreaming/working life), as friends/ancestors (even family) by virtue of their works which become incorporated into, if not my own works, then just my concept of work/works. Ancestors-in-spirit are just as crucial as blood-kin in my profession (or would that be my lack of profession).
I think of Sam Shepard writing about bringing ice to Nina Simone at the Village Gate where he worked as a busboy, as a sketch of tribute to Simone in Motel Chronicles. It’s all an homage to be paid, to be written in the night-sky.
And when it comes to blood-kin and a crossing-over roads of artist-ancestors, there’s my younger cousin, Luke Coffey. He came to Sam Shepard by virtue of his own path. Who knows how many moments we’ve shared over some ceremonial Kentucky Creekwater in our rituals and discussed Shepard & Our Paths To How We Got to Him. And, alternately, Luke’s own wisdom unique to him and, adjunct to that wisdom, his scholarship in Chinese history, language & literature has instructed me regarding my own investigation of same.
In the same year of 2017 that Sam Shepard dies, Harry Dean Stanton dies, less than two months between the deaths of he & Harry Dean.
Fats Domino died, too. How many times, when consumed of the less dignified states of nostalgic being have I heard in my head — while wanting to walk impossible distances at impossible odds across impossible bridges when wanting to get back to somewhere, to something, that I know I cannot walk back towards — Fats singing “Walking to New Orleans”?
If we return back to Lexington, KY as a hub for all this jumping on & jumping off, of physical/spirit orbit of life & of the arts, the synchronicity is not lost on me that in in the year just past, I & we all lost another artist with whom I walked & talked: Louis Bickett, aka Louis Zoeller Bickett II.
Louis was a pal. He was sometimes a prickly-pear of a pal, but, either way: I was instructed by his example of living life as process also of making art. He collected my work, paid attention to it, as I made a study of his works/processes; we engaged in good conversation, or, as I might say: we traded fours. I sold him the one and only sketchbook I’ve ever sold to a buyer, knowing that the purchase of my sketchbook would cause that sketchbook to become more than just an artifact purchased in exchanged for gelt, but cause that sketchbook of mine to become as aspect in the mosaic of processes that were his art/his life/life’s work.
Louis died in October of 2017. He died from Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (or ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), the same disease that fell Sam Shepard in the same year. Rather than elaborate upon Louis further, I’ll send those interested to a fine portrait of him (in words and images by Laura Relyea & Guy Mendes), from Oxford American.
Since I met the aforementioned Hunter Carson, both his parents (L.M. Kit Carson & Karen Black) have died. Our heroes die. Our family dies. People die. Human beings are born into the world ultimately to give up our ghosts and then exit the stage. This seems like something approaching fact, a law of nature. Yet nature and her laws teaches us nothing also if not that one form always becomes another; dispersion is the raw material of renewal.
When it comes to facts, I’d rather hang out in William Blake’s world with its capacity for cosmic Vision (“the vegetable glass of nature,” as we might put, and Blake did put it) than hang out in the Newtonian rationalist, mechanical materialistic universe. Modern/contemporary quantum theory reveals that I might not to be so stupid in that preference/desire. And Newton himself was more complicated than I’m giving him credit.
Either which a-way, I pause here to consider the words of Ovid: “All things change, nothing is extinguished. . . There is nothing in the whole world which is permanent. Everything flows onward; all things are brought into being with a changing nature; the ages themselves glide by in constant movement.”
Formlessness evolves form, form returns to the source from which all is born. I’m not interested in piling myself up under bones, burying myself under the burden of grief in a tomb without Vision enough to see beyond the tomb. That’s not honoring ancestors.
Often when I’m drawing in india ink on illustration paper, I get the Vision of the drawing having always been there, whatever craft I’ve attained is bringing it out or merely allows me to bring out what was already there, sure, but: I can see the drawing even at the moment of creating as already fading, the ink disappearing, the paper ultimately/eventually crumbling to dust (I should probably be image/mark-making in stone, but my hands are too shot from arthritis and I’ve spent too long on the craft of ink-on-paper to turn back now, but if any stone-masons are reading this & want to collaborate: drop me a line). That’s not a bummer. That’s a challenge and a gift of Vision. If I can see, maybe you can see what I’m seeing & we can all see together.
Our nearest & dearest star what we call The Sun shall turn into a Red Dwarf some day and swallow our home planet we call The Earth. Just as the Andromeda and Milky Way pull towards one another to become ultimately one body, one reality, consuming, mutually, for then that each set of realities obliterates but yet becomes a new reality which contains all previous sets of realities.
To see yourself and all that ever was as part of the fabric of a continuum that flows before, through, and beyond (both within Time and without it) the you, the I, the ego: that’s the Vision I aspire to conjure from any grief, from despair. As I like to say, “Never half-ass hitching yourself to Eternity,” and/or, to quote the 8th century poet, as translated by David Hinton, Wang Wei, “If you want to elude the old-age disease, there’s only one way: study unborn life.”
9.
On a front porch on a shotgun-style small rental house tucked away on a modest street within whatever passes for city limits of the sleepy little town of Midway, KY where my friend “Racey” (whom we will just call Racey) resides with her boyfriend, “Darn,” (whom we will just call Darn) & whom she’s imported from California, I find myself sitting on this porch with Darn, while Racey is off for a few hour’s work over in some other man’s yard, while watching what we can see of the world going by…
It’s summer.
I’m smoking tobacco; he’s smoking a bizarre tobacco substitute. I’m drinking a Big Orange. He remarks, upon the subject of the differences in weather of California and the Kentucky we see before us.
“It’s perfectly still and sunny,” he says, adding, “If not unbearably hot, a kind of heavy humid heat that I’m not accustomed.” He pauses.
“The clouds will build up, as if from nowhere. And the thunder will boom, lightning will flash, the rain will come, the air will change. Then the storm that came from nowhere is gone and returns to whatever nowhere that it came. Might happen a few times in a day.”
He breathes in & out, off his tobacco substitute.
Says, after letting the words hang in the air for a few moments as he observes the sky above the ground, “It’s really kind of beautiful.”
10.
Within this landscape and its atmospheric phenomena as regarded/observed by Darn, my old friend Racey (in fact, I met her in the apartment described, previously, but that’s, yes: another story), before she imported said Darn, after a decade of exile across one of them Great Ponds over yonder in the Old World in Greater Britannia returning prodigal to her Old Kentucky Home, she also befriends Mr. Shepard within the landscape, becoming something of an employee besides a pal, with duties from around-the-house duties of cooking to the typing of his manuscripts & providing editorial input, since Shepard, like me, had good taste in right-hand-women, what that Racey was/is our mutual friend & ally.
Snapshots of memory flood back to me of the relatively recent lives & times of visiting Racey when she was living in greater Midway and in he vicinity of Mr. Shepard (this recently new reality we all lived that has itself now become a memory):
Pages printed out from Shepard’s manuscript drafts in progress fluttering out of trunks & across backseats, in her car, as I’m driven around by Racey & Darn, me squinting in the sunlight, catching phrases of Shepard’s texts-in-progress between sunbeams and chit-chat day drinky with light & magic & reflection: good company. I’m hanging out with Racey in her living room; we read aloud and make a consideration of a letter Johnny Dark wrote to her. The same Dark who illustrated Motel Chronicles with his pictures and more recently his lifetime of friendship and correspondence captured in the documentary Shepard & Dark & collected in the book Two Prospectors. Racey relates being called in over to Shepard’s farm to cook for Patti Smith. Darn talking to me with my fiancee Pravina (who I imported across state-lines not from California but rather NYC, but that’s, of course: another story) about Carl Jung, about Shepard reading Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and how he had borrowed Sam’s copy for himself to read, and in looking at the parts Shepard had underlined & then concurrently observing Sam’s work in progress, he could feel the influence upon the last works that Shepard was working upon, surrounded by family & friends, on his farm.
“The closer I get to my ending, the closer I am getting to rewriting my beginning,” Nicholas Ray once observed, and I am reminded of this observation. He entered that particular observation of which I am reminded into the public record via the film Lightning Over Water (what that wouldn’t have come to existence without the aforementioned Teuton, Wim Wenders, who raised money, collaborated on several fronts with Ray, essentially mid-wife’d the project to being).
Ray had met Shepard & Patti Smith via director Bob Gaudlini in 1971 when they were rehearsing for the play, Cowboy Mouth. He provided some input during rehearsal. Of Nick Ray, referencing this time period and connection between himself & Ray, as quoted in the book, Nicholas Ray: An American Journey, Sam Shepard said:
“I just liked his tenacity.”
Ray made record in the Book of Life (or at least it was transcribed from his sessions as a college teacher in the 70s and published as I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies in 1993 by the University of California Press):
“Sam Shepard is one of the craziest of today’s contemporary writers.”
As the New York Dolls once sang, “Everything connects and that ain’t Nowhere.”
I come now to the night I was invoking at the beginning. There is a story there. But the “O. Henry” twist here is I ain’t gonna tell much of it. That semi-rhetorical question of just what the hell I was doing on Sam Shepard’s property does have to do with my friendship with Racey.
What particulars & questions/non-questions I will tell-tale are as follows:
After receiving an invite to a dinner party for Shepard’s family & friends at a public table in Midway I received a further invite to a night-cap (with puppies). In one evening I met Sam Shepard, his warm & charming sisters (as Racey said, they reminded her of my own mother, Carolyn), and one of his sons, who was engaging in the flowing of conversation with me, along with his girlfriend. His son’s interest in mountain music/string band music/bluegrass came up as a topic in the evening. I asked him if he was a fan of Bill Monroe, and when he confirmed, I related to him the pilgrimage/tale of pilgrimage I had made to Monroe’s rural hometown in western, KY & pay respects at his final resting place at the Rosine Cemetery.
I confirm I got to shake Sam Shepard’s hand & speak some simple, formal words to him thanking him the privilege of meeting his family & pleasure of getting to put my boots on the ground of the Undisclosed Location of his primary Sanctuary/Hide Out/Bollingen Tower — Shepard & I as bodies, as boats in passing along the river of/at night and what would prove to be Shepard’s bodily twilight, charting for the immortality of a Spirit’s flow back to the stars.
The old 8th century Legend has it, Li Bai drowned, drunk again, after falling out of a boat, leaning over, attempting to embrace the reflection of the moon in the Yangtze River. And/or: maybe just stay on some great rock & remain fishing, forever.
I won’t move the camera in any closer on the details than that. I’ll keep the camera mostly outside with me, on the early spring Kentucky grasses & out there under the stars with the puppies, Shepard safely inside his house with his sisters. That seems like a perfect place to leave him, to let him rest.
Racey soon enough took flight with her man Darn out to California, ending the chapter of Midway. Shepard dies. As Christmas 2017 approached, I received an unexpected gift in the mail from Darn, to both myself & Pravina. He shared with me in a letter via the U.S. mail, among other things, one of the quotes that Shepard had underlined in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which I quote here:
“…people are established inalienably in my memories only if their names were entered in the scrolls of my destiny from the beginning, so that encountering them was at the same time a kind of recollection.”
Whatever it is we think living life is about, it’s probably not that. Whatever it is we make art about, it’s probably not that, either. Living life, like making art, is as a series of moments, some of them like fish by the fisher, are caught, but some are not. One fails to catch one thing, one catches another thing: one releases something.
& then Octavio Paz quoting John Cage:
“Everything we come across is to the point.”
Just what and just where are the bridges we’re all crossing or even getting stuck upon? Did you grow the mustache? Did you bring the binoculars? Are you wearing the cowboy boots? Are you ready to walk Somewhere and not just Nowhere?
Even if as Olson wrote as previously quoted, “there are no walls there are no names,” in paying tribute to Shepard, I’d like to respect as tribute his privacy, or at least what I understand as his idea of privacy in life & also respect what I perceive as our shared Muses, he & I & therefore do the writing to get at some truths rather than mere reportage. Which has its place, but that’s one thing; this (and Shepard’s in his, as Master (to my apprentice), approach/style), another.
Shepardia:
Inner/Outer. East/West. Micro/Macro. Male/Female. Humility/Expression. Intoxication/Clarity. Exile/Engagement. Privacy/Revelation. Being/Ancestry. Death/Renewal.
There’s an alternate take to this last sketch, the “un-O. Henry’d version,” if you will or (won’t) in which I report the facts as a linear sequence of events with all detail from memory intact. But that’s a take I’d recount for you, dear reader, only in person, in living conversation as the oral tradition would have it, one set of face & ears to one or more sets of other faces & ears, no device of recording or transcription of words around. The way of ye olde “Pre-Homeric Jams,” as I am partial to put it.
But for that unvarnished, unexpurgated version/variations, as the great Master of American Buddhism, Dean Martin once said, you’d have to: “Find me,” for the face-to-face spin of the yarn.
If the American Buddhism I’m ascribing to Dean Martin, the concept of it, confuses, dear reader, I’d refer you as inquirer to another Dean, aforementioned, the late Harry Dean Stanton (of the Fuck It School of American Buddhism).
Hell, even if you, reader/inquirer, have found yourself finding me, this reporter, just too gawdam Kentucky about it All, I will quote the late but not never Master, Stanton:
“There’s no answer to the state of Kentucky.”
But who needs Kentucky when you’ve got the Milky Way (which is/is not (also) Kentucky, right)? We’re all One or at least the many contained under/within One, and, either way Milky or no, as I pull the electro-magnetic lever to release the hounds to the ether & to put forth these words for reading/a flickering candle for Vision, upon the occasion of my 42nd birthday, I notice…news has hit the wire of the first evidence of exoplanets beyond our Milky Way & I think back to my opening lines under the stars on Sam Shepard’s farm among these sketches & a grin manifests upon this reporter’s face and in my being as approaching the end of these sketches becomes a return to the beginning of them.
I recently came across (to the point) lines contained in the book given to me as a Christmas gift by the lady of the house (American Religious Poems (edited by Harold Bloom)), from John Berryman’s “Eleven Addresses to the Lord.”
& I swipe those, Berryman’s lines, to— as I submit these sketches & put away the pencils —
place those lines here for you/me/us now,
as something like a closure:
“Ease in their passing my beloved friends,
all others too I have cared for in a travelling life,
anyone anywhere indeed. Lift up
sober toward truth a sacred self-estimate.”
