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More from Downstream From Trout Fishing in America by Keith Abbott

The wish to assume control over history, and his sadness over the attempts to get things right, recalls a Zen phrase for this process, jushaku shoshaku . This can be translated, “wave after wave of error.” In this phrase, error can also be understood as illusion. This sense of the world’s endless capacity for misleading us is what so closely tied Brautigan’s work with Buddhism–one reason why his fiction became so popular in Japan. Since in Buddhist terms all is illusion, time becomes ahistorical. There is now, and that is all.
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Chenetier gets to the center of the conflict.

On one hand he feels a compulsive fascination for the written–or rather for that being written, for writing as act–and a hope that anything written might just succeed in perpetuating the moment; on the other hand, he feels a fascinated repulsion, because at the same moment writing is killing. The result is a very active polarity which is far more than the classic “life and death” preoccupation of so much writing. Here it is a tension between writing as life and the written object as cemetery, corpse or grave.

The curse and blessing of the imagination is that the mind wants to create an autonomous object, yet it can’t prevent itself from imagining that object’s eventual disintegration and it can’t fail to understand that by giving birth to something, that something’s death is assured. Brautigan’s tragedy, which he enacted in book after book and eventually in his own life, was that he defined everything, including himself, in terms of an ahistorical imagination. Brautigan wanted to round up life in one mercurial, moving, magic vision, but he recognized that he could produce only “paper phantoms,” his term for books.

Once, while cleaning out the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star.

I keep coming back to this:

The curse and blessing of the imagination is that the mind wants to create an autonomous object, yet it can’t prevent itself from imagining that object’s eventual disintegration and it can’t fail to understand that by giving birth to something, that something’s death is assured.

I think this is why Brautigan resonates with me. This is a theme that keeps coming back into my thoughts and my own writing. Always this edge of creation and destruction, knowing that even in creating myself I am destroying myself. Even my fascination with macro photography–the momentary, fleeting, fragile things, a second in time. I think this is close to why I dislike fiction–too static, weighty, permanent. Only poetry–and Brautigan is a poet always–has the necessary lightness and impermanence.

No wonder I’ve been drawn to Shiva-images for years.

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