Judging from the books and essays of Peter Matthiessen, it would seem that there is no place on earth on which he has not at least set foot. In 1956, at age twenty-nine, he loaded his Ford with books, a sleeping bag, and a shotgun and set off to visit every wildlife refuge in the United States. The resulting book, Wildlife in America, was published in 1959, the same year he left for the South American wilderness to write The Cloud Forest (1961) and, later, At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965). Under the Mountain Wall, a chronicle of two seasons in New Guinea, was published two years later, followed closely by expeditions to the Bering Sea (Oomingmak, 1967), under the oceans off South Africa, Madagascar, and Australia in search of the great white shark (Blue Meridian, 1971), and on a turtle boat in the Caribbean Sea (Far Tortuga, 1975). He has returned to Africa more than a few times, mostly on overland safaris in search of wild places and wild people (The Tree Where Man Was Born, 1972, and Sand Rivers, 1981), but also aloft in a single-engine Cessna to survey forest elephants in the Congo Basin (African Silences, 1991). The Snow Leopard, for which he won the National Book Award in 1979, chronicles a trek across the Himalayas, combined with an inner journey guided by his study of Zen Buddhism. This is a man who claims he isn’t brave: “I can nerve myself up to quite a lot,” he says, “but I’m always delighted when it’s over.”
Matthiessen has written more than fifteen other books, including the most recent, Killing Mister Watson (1992). His controversial In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) reconstructs the events surrounding a 1975 shootout on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. Two FBI agents and a young Indian were killed in the battle, and American Indian Movement leader Leonard Peltier was later convicted for the agents’ murders. Upon publication of the book, two lawsuits totaling forty-nine million dollars were filed against Matthiessen and Viking Press, initiating one of the longest and most bitterly fought libel suits in U.S. history. The last of these suits was dismissed in 1991, and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, unavailable since its original publication, was re-released.
Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927. He spent most of his childhood in rural New York State and Connecticut, where he developed an interest in and a respect for the natural world. “It began as a passion for snakes,” he says, “and then rapidly spread to marine life, mammals, and birds.” After service in the navy, Matthiessen attended Yale University, spending his junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris. He returned to Paris in 1951 and cofounded the Paris Review, of which he is still an editor. In 1953 he settled on Long Island with his first wife, earning his living by commercial fishing and running a charter boat. “I don’t think I could have done my writing without the fishing,” Matthiessen says, “because I needed something physical, something nonintellectual.” Since 1959, however, he has made his living solely as a writer.
Matthiessen still lives on the east end of Long Island. When at home, he writes seven days a week in a converted children’s playhouse crowded with artifacts from his journeys, sketches of birds, rocks, books, and a United Farm Workers flag. Across the property sits a zendo where Matthiessen, a Buddhist sensei (teacher) since 1989, leads a meditation service every morning at seven. Not far from the zendo are former horse pastures where he likes to play touch football on autumn Sundays.
White: I once heard you explain how important it is to have specific goals in writing books about environmental or social causes, but that you would have burned out long ago if you imagined you were going to effect permanent change. Will you talk more about that?
Matthiessen: It’s in our nature to serve, and I think we need to find a way to do that even if there’s a feeling of ultimate futility about it. Anything we do on behalf of others is worth it, for our own fulfillment as well as the small changes our efforts can create. But if you’re bent on solving large problems or changing human nature, I think you’re doomed to worse than just burnout or disappointment. My goal in writing In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, for example, was to get justice for Leonard Peltier. The broader issue of the book, for which Peltier’s case is emblematic, is three centuries of injustice to Indian people. If I believed I was going to undo all that injustice, I would not only burn out, I’d be a very dangerous person. That kind of idealism doesn’t take into account the realities of human nature. How often does the news on television or in the newspapers really change? It’s essentially the same story repeated over and over again. The Bosnian Muslims and Serbs have been fighting for hundreds of years, and human nature hasn’t changed in forty thousand years.
On the other hand, we can’t disregard human misery, and we must help where we can. Our greatest enemy, it seems to me, is fundamentalism, a rigid mentality on the rise everywhere in the world. In this country, we have Pat Robertson, Pat Buchanan, Jesse Helms, and so forth, who are not necessarily fundamentalists, but whose thinking — or nonthinking — is the same. Wherever you find it, whether in America or Iran or Bosnia, this mentality is very dangerous.
White: Does your approach to writing change when you’re not trying to advance a cause?
Matthiessen: From an artistic point of view, it’s a mistake to impose so-called meaning on your work: it either has it or it doesn’t. A good book originates spontaneously, in much the same way that a hen lays an egg. In a hen, the egg starts in the ovaries in a long series of eggs and makes its way down the fallopian tube. It starts very small, and when it reaches a certain size and weight, it’s ready to be laid. That’s the way a book happens, at least in my case. Something attaches itself to your imagination, and that’s the seed, and it starts to grow. It grows and grows until you can’t contain it anymore; you simply have to write it out of your system. Some people would argue, “That’s easy for him to say, he’s published.” OK, but if I had never published a single word, I’d still be a writer, whether other people thought so or not. You can’t be dominated by how your work is received, because in writing for someone else, you’re not being true to yourself or your reader.
White: But isn’t the process different when one of your goals is to advance a cause, as in Men’s Lives or In the Spirit of Crazy Horse?
Matthiessen: It’s uncommon for a book to be artistically sound and also have an agenda. Occasionally it happens, as in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, but it’s rare. There’s a choice you have to make. Men’s Lives, for example, is flawed from a literary point of view because of the statistics, legal information, and other data I had to include, all of which spoils the harmonious flow of the book. The same is true of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. But, again, that was a choice I made when I took on those projects.
White: You’ve dedicated tremendous time and energy to the Leonard Peltier case, even while you were fighting your own legal battles over the book. What first got you interested in his case?
Matthiessen: I first heard about Leonard Peltier when I was working on a book called Indian Country in 1979. I took part in a sweat-lodge ceremony led by Archie Fire Lame Deer, a Lakota medicine man. Archie spoke about Peltier, describing him as a true leader whom the FBI was out to get. Just a few weeks later, while I was in the Black Hills in South Dakota, one of the young Indians who had been indicted with Peltier offered to take me down to the site of the shootout at Oglala, on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and show me just what had taken place. The more I learned of the case, the more convinced I became that Peltier had been framed. They really had nothing on him. At first, I thought it would be a long magazine piece, but the story and its implications grew more complex and shocking the further I got into it.
White: Why have you stayed involved in the case all these years?
Matthiessen: Cesar Chavez, whom I wrote about in Sal Si Puedes, taught me an important lesson. He said, “You can’t encourage people to strike or protest and then go away if their protests aren’t successful. Once they’ve stuck their necks out, their livelihoods are on the line, and you ought to see them through.” I feel that way about Peltier. I’m not going to write the book and walk away. I talk to him once or twice a week. I’m part of his team, and I’ll be involved until he’s a free man. It’s true, I could have written three novels in the time I’ve worked on In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, the case, the lawsuits, the depositions, and so forth. But it’s worth it. I’ve learned a lot, and I’ve met some wonderful people to whom I feel very close.
White: You’ve traveled and written about people and cultures from all over the world. I’m sure there are times when your reception has not been entirely hospitable, particularly as a white, North American writer. Do you ever feel that your presence is an imposition?
Matthiessen: As a writer, you often feel like a terrible intruder because you’re there to take something from the culture and sell it when you get home. That makes me very uncomfortable, so I try to give something back. As Albert Camus said when he won the Nobel Prize, the concerns of writers in the twentieth century must go beyond their art. Part of one’s duty is to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves.
As a white person, whether you’re a writer or not, it’s often difficult to go into an Indian reservation, or any situation in which Indians are involved, because generally you’re not liked very much. Most traditional people, including those involved in the American Indian Movement, are pretty cool toward outsiders. These people, who are usually courteous and gentle, will not immediately acknowledge you. You have to establish your good will. For instance, if you enter a house, even in the company of an Indian who is liked, he or she may be offered coffee but not you. I’ve had that happen, and it’s disconcerting. People don’t talk to you, they hardly look at you, and you have to go along with that. Maybe someone cracks a joke and you laugh, and if the laugh is genuine, well, perhaps the next remark will at least include you. The next thing you know, there’s coffee at your place, and then some soup or something else may come your way.
We’re very nervous in our society about being liked, and we’re uneasy if we’re not immediately on a first-name basis with the people around us. Indians don’t feel that way. They feel no urgency to like you or be liked by you. If the chemistry is right, the friendship develops naturally. It’s not imposed from outside.
White: A recurring theme among writers — particularly nature writers — is the value of living in one place for a long time. Gretel Ehrlich says, “When you walk out the door, you already know so much because of what the place has taught you. And the scene gets deeper each day. When you have that experience of intimacy with one place, you can apply it in any direction.” Gary Snyder is outspoken about the value of staying in one place. Your approach is different in that you travel and write about places all over the world. In doing so, do you miss getting to know one place intimately?
Matthiessen: I don’t see any conflict between what I’m doing and what Gretel and Gary and others say about staying in one place. I know exactly what they’re talking about, and I agree. First of all, I’ve lived here in Suffolk County, New York, since I was two weeks old, and in this house for well over thirty years. I know every shrub, bird, and reptile here. I certainly could know this place better, but I know it well. Suffolk is a funny county because it extends offshore through the islands, along the coast of Connecticut, almost as far as Rhode Island. In my mind the heart of the county is really out in the salt water, where I have fished all my life. Men’s Lives is partly about my feeling for this place, and it’s in that book that I say, “This is where I come from.” No matter where I travel, I’m not at home anywhere else in the same sense that I’m at home on the coast of Suffolk County.
But if you have the instinct to know your location well and be a part of it, you’ll use that instinct wherever you go. If you notice the plants, animals, and other features of the landscape on your own land, you’ll notice those things anywhere. It’s part of what you do in order to feel at home wherever you are.
The great Zen Buddhist teacher Eihei Dogen said, “Why leave behind the seat that exists in your own home and go off aimlessly to the dusty realms of other lands? Do not be afraid of the true dragon.” The dragon is the Buddha nature, the essence of existence, which is everywhere. You don’t have to go anywhere to find it; it’s right here, right now. Once you have that sense of life, it doesn’t matter where you are. You’re always home.
The Bosnian Muslims and Serbs have been fighting for hundreds of years, and human nature hasn’t changed in forty thousand years. On the other hand, we can’t disregard human misery, and we must help where we can.
White: We’re attracted to certain landscapes for different reasons — textures, smells, wetness or dryness, the kind of wildlife that lives there, and so forth. Beyond our own preferences, is there some less tangible quality in a landscape that either invites us in or keeps us out?
Matthiessen: Indian people say there are certain landscapes that you should not enter. It’s as if the land itself is telling you to stay out. I’ve found this to be true in my own experience. If you force your way into these places, it can be dangerous. You can feel it. It’s like pushing back a very powerful spring. I’ve been in Indian power places where this is true to an extraordinary degree, and it’s very scary. In other landscapes you feel immediately at home, whether it’s just for a day, or an hour, or even less. If someone asked you about the difference, you might not be able to define it, but something feels natural about being there — you are at home.
When you’re camping or trekking, certain places feel right for resting or spending the night and others don’t. It’s not simply a matter of finding a level spot out of the wind or close to a stream. There are other intuitions that make a place feel right. What is it that our instincts pick up? It might not be the same for every person, but I’ll bet it’s the same for nine out of ten who are accustomed to being in the wilderness. This sense is developed to an extraordinary degree among some native people.
Survival in the city, on the other hand, depends on tuning in to a different set of clues. A city dweller uses his or her instincts to screen what would otherwise be an overload of loud, random signals. In consequence, receptivity to the more subtle messages of the natural world is dulled. Perhaps that’s why some people complain that there’s nothing going on outside the city. But it’s like studying a tide pool: you have to stay and watch for a while before you see how alive the habitat is.
White: What are some experiences you’ve had in which, as you say, “it’s as if the land itself is telling you to stay out”?
Matthiessen: Probably the most gripping one was a summer night in the Siskiyou Mountains in northern California. I was with a man who was interested in the Sasquatch, and we were traveling in a region where many sightings had been reported. On one particularly clear, warm evening we were descending from a high, steep ridge down a logging road into Bluff Creek, which is where the first persuasive footage of a Sasquatch had been taken. With an hour or two of sunlight left, we wanted to get some water from the creek before heading back up onto the ridge to set up camp. As our VW bug wound its way down the mountain, I began to get a weird feeling, as if we were compressing a huge spring and at any moment the accumulated power would hurl us out of the canyon. I didn’t say anything to my friend, because it seemed crazy to have such a feeling on a beautiful, still evening. But a few seconds later a groan came out of him, and when I turned, he was white as a sheet. “I don’t know what’s wrong, but we’re getting out of here!” he said. He had felt it too, and he was terrified. By the time we got to the top of the ridge, the whole mountain was ringing and strange and weird. We built fire after fire and didn’t sleep all night. Something was happening, something was imminent, but to this day I don’t know what it was.
I had another experience like this in the Siskiyou, although it was years later and in a completely different circumstance. I was with a couple of Indian friends who wanted to show me a power place known as Doctor Rock. Again it was a beautiful, clear, summer day. We hiked up through Blue Creek, where we could see Doctor Rock most of the way, but for some reason we couldn’t get there. There was always a cliff or a deep ravine in the way. We ended up on a high ridge, absolutely exhausted and a little scared, yet not even a half-mile from the place. It was as if we were being driven off by unknown powers.
White: We’ve been talking about landscapes, but doesn’t this kind of experience also apply to encounters with animals in the wild?
Matthiessen: I had a wonderful experience in Africa with a female rhino and her calf. I came around a high bush, trekking cross-country, and there they were, right in front of me, scarcely twelve feet away. Behind me, the porters dropped their loads and ran, and I don’t blame them. There seemed no way that animal wasn’t going to charge. I stood there for a moment, terrified, my temples burning. But then, inexplicably, I calmed right down. I had a feeling of complete peace with that animal, and I knew she wasn’t going to charge or hurt me in any way. I was treed by a rhino once, so I knew how very different this encounter was.
I had another unusual encounter once when I was burying my wife’s urn in a stony field. It was snowing, and when I paused — it was hard work — a chickadee came and perched on the handle of my pick. It stayed close by while I continued to dig, this gentle little bird. I felt like Saint Francis.
White: You said that native people seem to have an unusual ability to pick up messages from the land. Do you think this is something we can learn from them?
Matthiessen: Most traditional people don’t feel the separation or estrangement from nature that we feel in Western culture. Their respect for the earth comes from a genuine feeling of being part of it. The land is who they are — that’s the way they express it — and every part of it is precious. If a traditional Indian picks up a stone, for example, he or she doesn’t toss it away mindlessly when finished with it, but returns it to its niche in the earth. It’s not a sentimental or self-conscious thing but a gesture of respect, a Zen way of relating to land and life. My first Zen teacher, Soen-roshi, always made a little bow of gratitude to the world around him. It’s a wonderful habit that I learned from him. Even if I’m leaving some neutral or lifeless place, like a motel room, it feels right to thank the room for its hospitality. In Zen practice, one bows to the Buddha principle, the immanence of awakening, within oneself. I love that idea. A bow is a wonderful way to appreciate this moment, pay respectful attention to the world around you.
Dogen Zengi chastises a young monk for drawing too much water from the stream, then tossing what isn’t to be used onto the bank. Because stream water, like everything else, has inochi, or “life integrity,” it should be treated respectfully. Unused water should be returned to the stream with gratitude and with as little waste as possible.
In most indigenous cultures I know about, old people and children have an honored place, just like stream water or a stone. They have life integrity, inochi. The Dani of New Guinea, with whom I lived for a few months in 1961, show tremendous patience with their elders, and, like the North American Indians, they include their children in everything they do. No matter what’s going on, the kids are right in the middle of it, running around, spilling food, making lots of noise. It’s a nuisance at times, but in the end the children are less frustrated and a lot better behaved.
Many forms of behavior and ritual in indigenous cultures show the sense of connection the people feel with the world around them. We can learn something from this, but as Westerners I’m not sure we can fully experience it. The sense of being part of the land, instead of an observer or an environmentalist, is probably what some of us are seeking, but I wonder if we will ever find it. The Indian’s love of the earth has nothing to do with environmentalism. We can’t consciously adopt Indian attitudes toward nature because traditional people don’t have any attitudes toward nature. They are nature. Wilderness is a false concept to them. They have no word for it.
White: It’s awkward to talk about a “relationship with nature,” because the phrase itself implies that nature is something different or separate from us. James Hillman says that having an attitude at all, whether it be as caretaker or conqueror, keeps us separate and forever doing something to or for or with nature. The roots of sustainable culture, as Dolores LaChapelle suggests, lie in experiences where we neither oppose nature nor try to be in communion with it, but rather find ourselves within it.
Matthiessen: Yes, I think that’s true. In Buddhism we teach that all self, all separation from the One, is illusion. There’s a wonderful metaphor of a bottle of sea water floating in an ocean, and our ego is the glass bottle that separates our little bit of water from the whole. We’re not different from the sea water in which we’re floating, yet we assign our little bottle selves names, social-security numbers, ZIP codes. Every such idea or concept only fortifies the illusion of a separate existence.
This illusion of separation is not just between us and the rest of nature but also between us and the past and future. Our advanced technology leads us to believe that our brain has evolved beyond that of our ancestors. It isn’t so. Scientists have known for a long time that the human brain has not advanced appreciably since the appearance of modern humans roughly forty thousand years ago. In New Guinea, the Dani people we lived with represented a “Stone Age” culture. All their tools — axes, adzes, spears, arrowheads, cookware, and so forth — were made of stone or wood. They had no metal. By modern Western standards, they were a “primitive” people, yet they showed many of the qualities we associate with “advanced” intelligence and culture. Among other things, they’re an immensely humorous and subtle people. To judge from appearances, some of those children would be caught up in just a few weeks if they were transplanted to a school in the U.S. They’d come out of the Stone Age and into modern times without serious problems.
White: What about the prevalence, among the Dani, of war and customs like chopping off little girls’ fingers during mourning, or sending out raiding parties to kill anyone they encounter — men, women, or children?
Matthiessen: The Dani went to war about once a week, but their wars — half-day battles, really — are nothing like ours. Unlike more “advanced” peoples, they’re very easily satisfied when it comes to killing. If one warrior is killed, or often if someone is just badly wounded, the war is over. In fact, these events don’t seem to be about killing at all but more like a ritualized contest in which the men can show off their bird-of-paradise plumes and the women can vent insults from the sideline. Really, the atmosphere is a lot like a football game. And one had the feeling that these so-called wars would be quite rare if the men didn’t need an excuse to “guard the women” and thereby get out of weeding or doing chores. The men built watchtowers and sentry posts, where they sat around smoking tobacco, fixing their bird-of-paradise plumes, and watching the women work. Once in a while the women would protest, and in response the men would go over to the frontier and propose a war. The reply might be “We can’t come out to war today. We’ve got to harvest our sweet potatoes.” “Oh, come on,” the others would insist. “We’ll give you the best part of the field, and we’ll only bring a hundred guys — you can have two hundred.” It was all negotiated in advance — all but the death.
Raids on the enemy were infrequent, but if one group lost three or four people in a series of wars and the other side lost none, the first group might send out a raiding party to even things up. They also practiced mutilation, as you point out, but you’ll find these so-called primitive customs practiced among people all over the world. Look at some of our own practices, such as circumcision.
We can’t consciously adopt Indian attitudes toward nature because traditional people don’t have any attitudes toward nature. They are nature. Wilderness is a false concept to them. They have no word for it.
White: Our tendency to romanticize indigenous cultures doesn’t seem to leave them much room to be real people.
Matthiessen: Romanticizing is patronizing, and a form of racism. We don’t allow them to be simple human beings — to be great when they’re great, and to be sons of bitches when they’re sons of bitches. I think Western culture is so starved for spiritual identity that we exploit and ruin everything authentic that we find. We romanticize nature in the same way, and this intensifies the very sense of separation we’re trying to dissolve.
Being an Indian is no guarantee of being a spiritual person. For example, although traditional people are usually very respectful toward the game they hunt, there are always exceptions. An Indian friend once told me a story of being out with another Indian who shot a deer. The bullet only grazed the deer’s scalp. It fell, stunned, then staggered to its feet again. My friend said, “Well, finish it off.” “You think I’m going to carry this son of a bitch out of here?” the guy replied. He grabbed the deer by the antlers, marched it back to the car, and shot it there.
The only traditional people I’ve been with who generally seem to show disrespect for game are the Pygmies in the Ituri forests of Zaire. They’re a raucous lot to begin with, very funny and spontaneous, and wonderful woodsmen. But when they catch something, they throw it down and slit its throat without any respect whatsoever. Their brutality startled me. The Pygmies in the mountains of Zaire, farther south, seemed quite different. They were tracking gorillas when I was with them, and, compared to the Ituri Pygmies, these mountain hunters were remarkably gentle and quiet. Perhaps if they were hunting and not tracking, or hunting something not dangerous to them, as the other Pygmies were, they would use more brutal methods. I don’t know. The perception of brutality or disrespect could also be part of my own ignorance. Maybe for them it was a celebration of some ritual. Who am I to say? But the Ituri hunters appeared more disrespectful toward game than most white hunters. And that’s saying something, because white people are generally disrespectful.
White: You’ve witnessed a lot of killing out in the wild, and you write about it beautifully. I was transfixed by the story in The Tree Where Man Was Born of wild dogs hunting zebra in the Serengeti. What have these experiences taught you about predator-prey relationships among other animals?
Matthiessen: I’ve always found it wonderful the way animals interact in situations in which one is being taken by another. And from what I’ve seen, scientific theories of shock or whatever cannot entirely explain their behavior. The story of the wild dogs and the zebra is a good example. It was a mare protecting her foal. She ran the dogs off a few times, but they just circled back. They seemed to know she wasn’t serious. If she had been, she could have run them down and bitten and kicked and stamped them to death in minutes. As a member of the horse family, a zebra mare is quite capable of doing damage, but in this instance with the wild dogs, she put up very little fight. Even the foal put up only a token protest and then quit. He just stood there while one dog hung by his muzzle to hold his head down and the other dogs eviscerated him. Perhaps in shock, he bowed his neck in a kind of offering. For the next few minutes, all you could hear was the wet sound of the dogs eating. It was a very unpleasant business, except that the foal seemed to be completely resigned to it. Meanwhile the mare, who was just twenty yards away, had already returned to grazing. Eighteen hours later, after the dogs had gone and the hyenas, vultures, jackals, eagles, ants, and beetles were all finished, nothing was left but a dark stain on the grass.
Anyway, my impression was that the mare’s ears were not flattened back the way they are when animals are angry or frightened. When you see horses, dogs, or other animals fight among themselves, their ears are always back. But in this predator-prey situation, the ears were up and forward, even on the mare as she chased the dogs, or the foal as he was torn apart. It was as if they were performing a grim kind of dance. I’ve watched lions make a kill, and it’s the same thing. They don’t appear angry; their ears are shot forward all through the process. But when they fight another lion, their ears are flat to the head. I have to be careful here, because I don’t like quasi-spiritual speculation in which everything turns to mush, but there seems to be a ritual acceptance of killing and being killed, of eating and being eaten. It’s odd, but often the most interesting situations are also the most difficult to talk about. We have no vocabulary that suits the purpose.
White: Have these experiences changed the way you look at your own death?
Matthiessen: Yes. They’ve given me more acceptance of the changes and passages that we’re all a part of. I can’t say I enjoyed watching wild-dog kills, but I was exhilarated by them. I wouldn’t have missed them for anything. Isn’t that strange? It’s like Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot, my favorite novel. It’s truly a heartbreaking book, yet in the end not the least bit depressing. In fact, because it attains a truth that’s hard to grasp, it’s very exciting. I hope the moment of my death will be an encounter with this kind of truth.
It’s curious you should be asking about all this, because just last week I gave a dharma talk about meditation and death here at our zendo. We all acknowledge the fact of death, but there is tremendous denial in our culture when it comes to confronting our own. There’s a peculiar resistance, as if somehow each one of us were the exception. How terrified we are of death and dying! At one point, I could see my students’ eyes glazing over, as if they were saying, “Of course, I know I’m going to die. But why are you making us look at it? Why be so morbid about it?” So I had them all turn and put their hands on the face of the person next to them. With the fingertips on the cheekbones and the thumb at the mouth corners, I had them pinch lightly, exposing the teeth and drawing the skin taut on the cheekbones. This exercise brings out the skull, the skeleton. There was a deadly pause, then startled moans. The skull isn’t something that appears after death. It’s here right now, and our death is, too. It’s very important to perceive your death as part of your life, right now, not as something separate, in the future.
White: Perhaps being sentimental about death is another form of separation.
Matthiessen: If taken too far, yes. If I find a bird dying on the beach, I’ll twist its neck to put it out of its misery. I’ve been accused of being callous for that, but I think it’s callous to let it suffer. Our values are so strange! In my hunting days, I knew a man who had a beautiful bird dog that fell into a spear pit. She was impaled in six or seven places. This guy refused to let the poor dog die. He took her to the veterinarian for operation after operation, at great cost. After eight or nine months, the dog was still alive, though she could scarcely walk. Think of the needless pain the poor creature suffered for this man’s notion of “kindness” and “generosity.”
White: Stephen Levine says that pity is a fearful, self-centered state with “a quality of considerable need about it.” In Healing into Life and Death, he tells the story of a woman dying of cancer and how she noticed that there were two kinds of people who came to visit her in the hospital. The first kind could hardly sit down next to her, and when they did, they couldn’t sit still. They would thumb through magazines or open a window if it was closed, or close it if it was open. The other kind of person could just come in and sit down quietly next to her. They had room for her pain because they had room for their own.
Our advanced technology seduces us into believing that we are in complete control, that we can make or break or fix anything. But nature has a way of reminding us that we are not in control, that we are not really on top, that we’re going to feel pain, kill, and be killed, just like everything else. James Hillman says that nature wants us to remember our death.
Matthiessen: We’re taught that death is utter annihilation, utter loss: loss of the self, loss of the past, loss of the future. In a culture that lends itself to that kind of denial, who wouldn’t be afraid? And who wouldn’t want to avoid experiences that remind them of the unfathomable reality of their own death?
Anything unknown can be scary, but that doesn’t mean we should dread it or keep it at a distance. Zen teachers treat death as a part of life; often they’re still sitting up when they depart. I like that. Death shouldn’t be a dark cloud that follows us around, shrouding our behavior and our attitudes toward life. I believe it’s possible to be free of that. My ambition is to die the way a ripe fruit lets go of a tree. Life is great, but that doesn’t mean I want it to go on forever. Of course, it’s easy to talk now; I’m not on my deathbed. When the time comes, I may be whining with the best of them.
“At Home in the World” is excerpted from Jonathan White’s Talking on the Water: Conversations about Nature and Creativity, a collection of interviews with writers, artists, and scientists. The book grew out of White’s experience hosting a series of “floating seminars” on board a sixty-five-foot schooner. © 1994 by Jonathan White. Reprinted by permission of Sierra Club Books. Available at local bookstores or call the Sierra Club Bookstore for credit-card orders at (800) 935-1056.
— Andrew Snee
