Tom Mix, The Miracle Rider (1935)

One of the earliest on-screen appearances of Tom Mix (1880-1940) was as himself in the 1910 western documentary Ranch Life in the Great Southwest. Filming on location in Oklahoma, a director for Selig Pictures had found him working as a local deputy sheriff and hired him to handle stock.

Asking for a part in the picture, Mix got a scene as a bronc rider in a rodeo sequence. At the age of 30, he’d been married three times and had taken various jobs with a series of Wild West shows. Later the same year, he was starring in a two-reeler, The Range Riders, shot in Missouri.

By 1920, when he surpassed William S. Hart in popularity, Mix had accumulated acting credits in something like 235 films, all of them silent, most of them shorts. Of these he’d directed over 100. Like William S. Hart he’d begun featuring his horse, Tony, in the credits.

As if

Desert walk

After posting last week’s journal entry here, I wondered whether I had not gone off the deep end, having read too much of mysticism lately. The jargon that crept in made what I wrote well-nigh incomprehensible.

What I meant to say was something more like this in plain English: As questions about life and death typically involve notions about God, however one imagines such a Being, why not imagine God in a way that deepens one’s spirits and contributes to what might pass as wisdom?

A lifetime of consuming literature and movies actually makes this somewhat easier than it may at first seem. It’s called “suspension of disbelief.” Just let go of what argues against irrationality. (The voice in your head that says, “These aren’t real people, just words on a page or actors on a stage.”) Thanks to this mental act of complicity, literature has developed its own way of raising questions about life and death.

D. W. Griffith, The Lonedale Operator (1911)

D. W. Griffith, c1925

The directing career of D. W. Griffith (1875-1948) began with Thomas Edison’s company Biograph, where he made the one- and two-reelers that the New York-based filmmaking Trust permitted. Two early westerns, made in California, are his Fighting Blood and The Last Drop of Water, both released in 1911.

The first is set in Dakota Territory and concerns an Indian attack on a settler's cabin. The second tells of a wagon train, facing various perils, including another Indian attack and running out of water. In a melodramatic resolution of this latter problem, one man dies and is left behind.

Poster, The Battle of Elderbush Gulch

His final film before leaving Biograph was a two-reeler western, The Battle of Elderbush Gulch (1914). This film featured yet another Indian attack and rescue by the cavalry. It starred Mae Marsh and Lillian Gish. After that, given the freedom to make the monumental feature-length films he had in mind, Griffith produced Birth of a Nation (1915) and his big-budget 3.5-hour epic historical drama, Intolerance (1916).

According to film historian Jon Tuska, what Griffith brought to the western were filming and editing techniques that would make the story more exciting for the audience. As one example, he advanced the art of crosscutting, taking us back and forth between two different threads of action.

Does God like jazz?

Morning clouds

Questions like this one are what make Mystery interesting as a subject of speculation and

contemplation. It came to me as I was watching a YouTube playlist of videos by a Polish group, the Marcin Wasilewski Trio (see below). I was literally being thrilled with enjoyment, partly my own, and partly by the pleasure these three young musicians take in creating music.

Theirs, it seems, is a higher order of pleasure I’ll call joy because when you look at the universe (the macro and micro versions of it), that seems to be its intent, an ongoing Big Bang of joy and freedom. Jazz is that. So if it puts a smile in my heart, surely, in some shape or form, it must have a similar effect on the Ground of Being itself. Imagine having to wait through centuries of Gregorian chants for it.

These thoughts followed a meandering connection made a few days ago while I was supposed to be meditating. It occurred to me that I could think of the material world as an interface between me and what I think of as immaterial Mystery, which touches us with hints of itself—a humanly intelligible membrane behind which operates a nondualistic (so mystics insist) infinity that eludes all rational understanding.

Stormy clouds

For me, those hints come in the form of metaphors and analogies that leak through into awareness if I’m alert to them. They resonate not in mental realms of reasoned argument and logic but somewhere deeper, in a rush of feeling, an unaccountable excitement, or a relaxation of some dread or fear, the sense that I am in Good Hands.

The word for that, faith, has I’m told an interesting history. It has evolved from the acceptance of beliefs for which there is no evidence. Over time it has come to mean belief only in what one knows for sure. The first embraces ambiguity, finds reassurance in uncertainty, and tolerates doubt. The second clings instead to beliefs that cannot be known with any certainty—and yet permits no room for doubt.

Faith, for me now, is something I look for signs of somewhere in the body, in whatever I take for the moment as a center of gravity (shifting downward, I’ll add, as the steroids have broadened my girth by 20 pounds). I have been starting each day with a prayer of gratitude: “Thanks for another day to be human.” Cancer has got me doing that.

Before, (I’ll blame no one), and easily enough from my own congenital fears, I have avoided deeply engaging with my humanness—except in limited ways, mostly having to do with thinking, thinking, thinking all the time—my head inserted as I’ve often joked, in a dark place.

MRI time

In the time I have left, I hope to discover more of what it is to be human. There is an adventure of a lifetime, still waiting. I don’t want to have missed it. This came home to me in the PBS series about the Roosevelts this week, each of them an individual portrayed as profoundly wounded and damaged, yet emerging as both human and resilient—despite the odds.

I’ve also been reading Sam Harris’ new book, Waking Up, about spirituality without religion. This may seem an odd choice, since Harris is an avowed atheist, and he would surely scoff at some of my ruminations here. So far, his book covers a lot of scientific research into the workings of the brain—not what I expected—and he gets a bit self-congratulatory if not smug about his own preference for rationality.

This gets a little tiresome, as he seems not to know how boring he makes it by comparison with the rich suggestiveness of poetry and storytelling—the English major in me always ready to suspend disbelief. The man is a champion of meditation, however, and I’m curious to know how it fits into his scheme of the universe.

Desert Regional Medical Center, Palm Springs

Health news. This week was my monthly MRI and visit with the oncologist. Nothing has changed.

The tumor, what’s left of it, remains stable, and swelling from surgery in January has reduced yet a bit more. My meds have been adjusted again, steroids and anti-seizure dosages reduced by 20 to 30%. Discussion of whether it will ever be safe for me to drive a car again resolved to “probably not.” Meanwhile, I have started another 5-day course of chemo. Going into it, my blood count is good this time. I’m hoping not to have the usual week-long bout of fatigue—and that the taste of food will not revert again to zero.

No poetry writing this week, but I’m making progress with shifting more attention to the right side of my brain (same side as the tumor), where I’ve been dusting off the neuroreceptors for metaphor and making the guest room comfortable for any surprise visits of Mystery.

Closing out this week with a quietly meditative piece by the Marcin Wasilewski Trio, “Cinema Paradiso.” Enjoy.

Previously: Metaphor

Willard Wyman, Blue Heaven

Can’t say how many times I have anticipated the opening of a review with the words, “This is really an unusual book.” For all the predictable conventions of storytelling, I am still often surprised by the unexpected turns a writer’s story takes. I don’t mean turns of plot, because we expect that in a novel. They are, in fact, a convention of the form. A novel would not be a novel without them.

What I mean is the presence or absence of conventions so out of the ordinary and unusual, you feel like your GPS has purposely taken you someplace you never intended to go, and could not find on your own if you tried. This happened to me with this novel.

Blue Heaven is a prequel, preceding in time Wyman’s earlier High Country (reviewed here a while ago). It introduces in its later chapters a character who is at the center of High Country, and is the link between them. Blue Heaven takes place during the 1910s to 1940s. High Country unfolds in the years that followed.

While Blue Heaven is set in the Swan range north of Missoula in Montana, High Country follows its characters southward to California’s High Sierras. Both novels are about wilderness packers and the mystique of being in the mountains, especially at high elevations, over passes, and along watersheds in hard to access back country.

William Kittredge, ed., The Portable Western Reader (1997)

Editor William Kittredge has done a remarkable job of bringing together this great collection of Western writers representing a vast swath of terrain, covering prairie, mountains, desert, and Pacific Rim. At 600 pages, his book is an introduction to over 70 writers from the journals of Lewis and Clark and the collectors of Native American chants and tales to the writers of late 20th century fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Some are well known and easily associated with the West: Wallace Stegner, A. B. Guthrie, Louise Erdrich, John Steinbeck, Edward Abbey, Maxine Hong Kingston, Raymond Carver, Larry McMurtry, Ken Kesey. Many are lesser known and deserving of a wider audience, such as James Galvin, Adrian Louis, and Linda Hogan. As someone less familiar with the poetry inspired by the region, I appreciated selections from a wide range of poets, including Montana poet Richard Hugo.

Describing the experience of reading this book is like trying to sum up a year traveling in another country. There are several familiar works: Wallace Stegner’s great story “Carrion Spring,” set on the northern plains during the spring thaw after a horrific winter kill and the opening of Ivan Doig’s Montana memoir This House of Sky.

Plus Terry Tempest Williams’ chilling essay on the rising incidence of breast cancer in her family after above-ground nuclear testing in 1950s Nevada,  childhood memories of homesteading in the Nebraska Panhandle, from Mari Sandoz’ book about her father, Old Jules, and a discourse on water from Gretel Ehrlich’s essays about ranching in Wyoming, The Silence of Open Spaces.

Broncho Billy and the School Mistress (1912)

Broncho Billy Anderson

Gilbert M. “Broncho Billy” Anderson (1880-1971) was the first great cowboy star. A vaudeville actor in New York when he appeared in Thomas Edison’s Great Train Robbery in 1903, he was so taken by the enthusiastic reception of this short film that he decided to make a career of filmmaking.

By the end of the decade, he was a partner in Essanay Pictures and had appeared in 82 films. The company was based in Chicago, and Anderson, inspired to make cowboy movies, roamed the West with cast and crew cranking out 15-minute films at a rate of one a week for several years.

Anderson understood the importance of having a continuing character, and he bought a story by Peter B. Kyne in Saturday Evening Post, which featured a character called Broncho Billy. Reportedly unable to find an actor for the part, he played the role himself and the series began with “Broncho Billy’s Redemption” (1910). From then on, he was billed as Broncho Billy Anderson, appearing in a series of 144 films during a period that ended in 1915 when he left Essanay.

Anderson produced two more westerns, Shootin’ Mad (1918) and The Son-of-a-Gun (1919), after which his movie career rapidly ended. The introduction of feature-length films had made the old one- and two-reelers outdated. Film historian Jon Tuska argues that the new sophistication of the 1920s also altered what audiences wanted to see.