But it was experience that qualified me to ride around and around as an extra in a movie based on Paul Horgan’s “A Distant Trumpet”. It was set in Gallup, New Mexico, about a day’s drive from Albuquerque, where I was going to college for a Master’s in English Lit. and so brought Keats, Byron, Shelley and Wordsworth to visit the Absurd in the image of Troy Donahue and Susanne Plashette, and myself as one of about fifty Calvarymen. The daily routine was to get a horse, and get in line to have dirt and water thrown on us to make it look like we’d been riding hard and fighting for days without a bath. The Navajo kids they had playing Apaches would grin at us as we came in to suit up and saddle up and say,
“We’re gonna get you.”
But not even that, not even close, it was mostly unintentional comedy. A writer from Albuquerque who lived in abandoned houses and wrote huge novels in which all the characters had names from comic strips and went around and around (and around), always got a broken down old horse that couldn’t keep up and he would talk to it as it plodded along,
“You’re the best damn horse in this WHOLE outfit, yes sir, you’re the BEST horse…..”
And White Cloud, the Navajo chief, playing an Apache chief, was instructed to ride down a cliff and up to Troy and get off and say something in (Navajo) “Apache”. The first time he did it the director hollered at him that he was going so slow it lost interest, so the next time he ROARED down the cliff, jumped off, ran up to Troy and started shouting rapidly and startled Troy so that he broke up laughing.
A lot of Westerns are so romantic it probably takes twice as long to film them just because of laughter breaks. And just in case we forgot it was mostly a fairy tale reality, a member of our group was suffering from a bad marriage that he got into because he got someone pregnant. And his obsessive talk about it seemed to point to all the reasons for the comfortable illusions of identity in Westerns, sad heights from which we could look down into his abyss.
And all night we’d hear drunk Indians roaming the streets beneath our sleazebag hotel, and all day we’d ride into the romance of Indian and Cowboy. One morning I got a horse that didn’t walk, it danced. It reminded me of Crazy Horse’s dream of “dancing horses” from which he got his Indian Name, "Dancing Horses", which the whites translated as “Crazy Horse”. Every step of my dancing horse was springy and strong. I couldn’t believe it was real and then it wasn’t. Some guy came up and said,
“That’s MY goddam horse, get off it!”
And so I did because what did I know? And that's the way, in some sense, it would always be.
On the way “home” we all sang a chorus from a song by Buck Owens that was on the top ten charts at the time:
THEY’RE gonna PUT me in the movies,
THEY’RE gonna make a BIG star outa me,
BIGGEST FOOL that ever hit the BIG TIME,
And all I gotta do is act NATURALLEEE.
And then there was the night in Albuquerque around 1962 when I skipped a very important poetry class, in which tapes of poems by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Denise Levertov, Robert Duncan, Gregory Corso, Charles Olson, Fielding Dawson, Michael McLure and a host of other interesting poets were being played (and played on my nerves), and discussed by a poet I've had to learn a lot from and also had to learn a lot about how not to try to be him, Robert Creeley. Just be myself, easy for him to say, but that group ego was giving my self a pounding, and Mark Twain was saying,
"Just be yourself is the worst advice you can give some people."
Or get over yourself or let yourself go, but how, with the collective angst hanging over me like a thunderhead. I used to tell friends I majored in Theatre but had to get out because there was too much drama. And now there was too much drama in literature. I liked the poetry but the endless ego bashing talk about it set up a mental dissonance that made me feel crazy and I had to get out, out, OUT, anywhere. Or would you just shut up! Would you....just tell me from WHENCE this anxiety that has to always be marking, remarking, like a dog pissing to mark out his territory, and for what this need to pass judgement on everything? What's that supposed to buy you? Play our games, win our prizes? Baby you ain't nothin BUT a game, I'm walking away from the table....
"Where the hell were you?" he asked, "I NEEDED you in that class."
---YOU needed ME! But I'm just a kid.---I thought, but all I could do was blurt out that I went up in the Sandia Mountains overlooking Albuquerque to go horseback riding, but the stable gave me a horse that I felt was too old to be riding, so I just walked him around and looked down at the lights of town....
And he just grinned and shook my hand and walked away.
For the rest of my life I would realize how important his class was to me, and how important it was to get over it and not give a shit about its proposed values to become myself. Later he would tell me he was sorry I had to bear the brunt of his ambition, because he was big that way, and it was gratifying, but my actual grief was for another kind of conversation. I never failed to always get my performance pieces completed too late to let him see what I had learned, what I had tried to tell him, that there was poetic speech that tried to hit things dead on and stumbled into black holes of absolute truth and absolute self and there was dramatic speech in which the ignorance of one character could tell us more about the relativity of truth than the intelligence of all the others.
“Well, I think it’s important to be a intelligent as you can at all times.” He said.
But that's not where it's at for me. I'd rather be a clown than to try to participate in seminars full of people trying to be as intelligent as they can at all times and just sounding dumb and dumber. If Jerzy Grotowski knew anything when he told a super serious actor,
"It is important not to die too intellectually."
It is also important not to be too self consciously intelligent, and to be as stupid and silly as you can sometimes in order to show, like the justice system, that the search for the truth has to be a dramatic conflict or an arbitration if it's not to be a masturbation, and the dreary lives of ordinary and ignorant people speak volumes that we are deaf to at our peril. Through the years I would wish to hell he was there at magic moments when I could make silences speak in musical comedies where subscripts took it to the limit. And I would turn to his ghost and say,
“Where were you!? I needed you in that 'class'!”
He wrote on the blackboard once:
“What do you have to say?”
More importantly, what do other people have to say? Yes WHAT? I wondered back then when there were solid lines between people and places nobody could argue with. And now there are no places, much less safe ones and no lines and so no “away” in which to throw the garbage, or as Sartre and Camus realized, people we don't like. The crime scene is everywhere. The disaster is everywhere. Where can we run to? How can we relax? Only the tightrope walker knows. Who are we? What would be real fulfillment? Only the SHADOW KNOWS!!! Yes just keep on talking, keep on walking, but for godsake, keep on listening...
And what did I need that old horse for? What did HE have to say? There was a feeling of wholeness and quiet out there, nothing that thought it had to last forever, the sky like a huge silent cry and yet whole, complete, time no longer moving and every so called "moment" already gone by the time you could say "now". THAT was the Big Time, and I prayed to the god of clowns to let me be the "biggest fool that ever hit the big time",
the Big time Big Self of childhood and night sky with starlight streaming straight into your brain on a lost two lane New Mexico road one night, and the wind whispering a thousand miles,
"You're nobody, you're nobody, you're nobody...." and that's OK...
...FOOL! FOOL! God Damned Fool, that constantly echoing self flagellating refrain of Country And Western songs OUGHTA have qualified me as a Cowboy, but the Big Time Big Self was to become a totally different, audience participation, labor of lovelessness. FOOL! FOOL! Well I'd rather be a fool than any serious man flinging feces and words at the wall to see what will stick and driving nails to prove he's a carpenter...
But if that’s what you believe you have to believe it alone, she said.
In years to come I would go back to those poets and their precious pain, their nursery rhymes trying to be projective verse and/or drama, their dead right moments held like a pearl growing inside an oyster, a precious hurt saved by a professional victim unwilling to let it out and diminish its power, like the line from HOWL (speaking of animals),
“…the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit.”
and then torn and unfulfilled, I would go back to nature for relief from their terrible beauty and remember “an incredibly fucked up young man” (as he had once described me) and an old horse who had a lot to say to each other,
and all the rest of a hurting broken world that also had nothing to say.
And there was a cold winter morning in Kansas when I rode out with my then brother-in-law and his son to find a Cow who was pregnant and had not shown up at feeding time. He took it personally. When his animals were hurt, he seemed to hurt worse than they did. We took a horse trailer out to where the road ended and then took our horses off in separate directions across the snow covered hills but not so far apart that we couldn’t see each other from the ridges. I saw her first, down in a gully partially hidden in some scrub trees, and waved to him and he waved to his son and I saw them coming at a gallop as I rode down the hill, got off and dropped the reins in the snow beside her. She was lying on her side with her womb prolapsed and lying flat and bloody on the ground. The calf was dead. We had to get the vet to come with a boom and a sling, put the womb back in and transport her and hold her up in the barn until she’d recovered enough to start eating.
Something about that life and death scene, has stuck with me through the years. The feel of old oiled leather saddles and bridles, the smell and mass and energy of big animals and blood on the snow...what you came from and all to which you can aspire. And seeing a womb all flattened out, without shape, was as if all space-time had flattened and so was no longer infinite. It was only the angle, the curvature that gave life and death any meaning, or as someone said,
“All meaning is an angle.”
Or as Conrad Aiken wrote in "Blues For Ruby Matrix",
Those curves of hers
That curve beyond
Geometry of hand, or eye
Or mind.
( And, if you ask me, are not kind.)
It all plays over and over in my mind through the years, the grey skies, the gently rolling hills, the cow, the calf, my ex brother in law dead now. Part of me will never leave that place but the rest of me can't stay there, because the whole scene is a creation of time as moments instead of flow, something that is and is not, is just a THING we want that just points to a hole that can't be filled, too perfect, like European cattle in the Western U.S., unsustainable.
Maybe that’s why, at the end of the movie, the cowboy is always riding away.
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