Doug Bruns

Posts Tagged ‘Bruce Chatwin’

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The False Cross (Part I)

In Adventure, Writing on June 1, 2012 at 6:00 am

In Patagonia, by Bruce Chatwin

I am going to do something different. I am going to tell you a story, in three parts.

Part one:

It was after discovering Chatwin that Anne decided on Chile. That landscape is littered with young people accordingly influenced, the naïve and the idealistic. It goes like this: They read In Patagonia, fancy themselves full-throated adventurers, ready a rucksack–as Chatwin called it–and head south. “Gone to Patagonia,” Chatwin wrote his boss. Anne was in New York, studying the culinary arts. She loved the city honestly for all the right reasons. Yet, her studies complete, she set out, full of cloudless spirit. That she met Franz, a fishing guide, and married and came to live in Patagonia is worth mentioning. Of greater interest, though, is how she unraveled on the isolated island they called home.

* * *

“We have a problem,” Anne said.

Franz looked up from the boat. He was burdened with gear. His client, Gino, stepped to the dock. “Boungiorno, Anne,” said Gino.

“Boungiorno, Gino,” she said. “And how was your day?”

“Buono. Extraordinary.” Gino smiled broadly. He had had a good day on the Rio Plano. He caught many fish, including a brown trout that was possibly the largest trout he had ever caught, including his record fish in New Zealand.

Anne said she was delighted for him. She patted his shoulder as he walked past, his waders chaffing. He waved to Giovanni who, having returned earlier, sat in front of the lodge smoking a black cigarette. Franz looked at Anne.

“We have a problem,” she repeated. He glanced at his client, now out of earshot. “Yes?” he asked. “Are the dogs okay?”

“The dogs are fine. I don’t think it is a serious problem, but it’s a problem, nonetheless.”

Franz handed her the fly rods and stepped onto the dock. It was an hour before sunset. The mountains were in shadow and the lake was calm, the sky a royal purple. The last boat was heading across the water to the lodge. The engine whined. The other boats were in.

“I got an email. Iridium is going out of business. We’re going to lose our connection.”

Anne and Franz had only a satellite phone with which to connect with the world beyond the mountains, to family, to the travel company that booked the fishing clients and arranged their arrival and departure, to the store in Porto Monte that filled their monthly orders for food and supplies. It was a link upon which Anne grew increasingly dependent as the weeks and months of fishing season stretched out.

“Like I said, it’s not a big problem.” She was calmer now that Franz was home. He studied her. Her companions during the day, the dogs, came over the hill to greet him. She slipped her arm through his and they walked toward the lodge. Franz looked at the sky. “No clouds,” he said. “Should be a good day tomorrow.”

* * *

One night Anne grew troubled in her sleep and fell from the bed, hitting her head on the table. Franz slept soundly through the incident, worn out from his struggles against the wild currents and eddies of his guided rivers. She told him she had rolled over in her sleep and fallen off the bed. But in truth she had had a bad dream in which a train came at her out of a night horizon, quiet until upon her, then rushing at her like a hungry thing alive, loud and earth-heavy. She threw herself to the side, out of its path. She did so just in time, the hot engine lurching past. But she fell from the bed and hit her head. She was embarrassed by the dream and did not tell Franz. Her bruise was noticeable in the morning, and she remained in the kitchen while Marie waited on the clients.

- end, part one-

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Of writers.

In Memoir, Travel, Writers, Writing on April 3, 2012 at 3:55 pm

Bruce Chatwin observed that there are two types of writers, “the ones who ‘dig in’ and the ones who move.” Chatwin was a mover. When I read him I hear the cadence of his restless feet traversing ancient causeways, just as when I read Melville, I smell salt air.

Once, in London, traipsing around Bloomsbury, I sought out the home of Virginia Woolf.  It is not open to the public, and is now converted office space. But the brass plague confirmed the address. I was reduced to peering in through a barred street window. There were fax machines and furniture, a woman in a beige sweater pounding away on a computer and the flurry of activity one associates with commerce. I tried to imagine Mrs. Woolf there but failed–a “dug in” writer who slipped through my fingers. The failure was particularly poignant in that she had so famously observed, “A woman is to have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”

Likewise, I found Gertrude Stein’s Paris house, her salon at 27 rue de Fleurus, the place she shared with Alice B. Tolkas. Stein called Alice “Pussy” and Gertrude was “Lovey.” There is that awful scene in A Moveable Feast, where the young Hemingway, standing in the foyer of Miss Stein’s house, overhears her upstairs: “Then Miss Stein’s voice came pleading and begging, saying, ‘Don’t, pussy. Don’t. Don’t. Please don’t. I’ll do anything, pussy, but please don’t do it. Please don’t. Please don’t, pussy.’” She was dead eighteen years when Hemingway’s memoir of Paris and being hungry was published–”But this is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.” Of his writing, Miss Stein said, “Hemingway’s remarks are not literature.” He got her back in the end.

Hemingway is nowhere to be found at his Key West home, despite its well-preserved museum condition. I suspect his spirit has been trampled by hoards of tourists over the years. Papa too was plagued by their presence and had bricks shipped from Baltimore, where they’d been taken up from newly paved streets, to construct a wall around the place, protecting his privacy.

I went to Prague seeking Kafka, the writer who perhaps more than any other, ushered us into the modern era. But he too had disappeared. The City of a Thousand Spires, however, remained true to a fashion and I gave myself to its dark alleys and endless cobblestone streets. “Prague doesn’t let go,” he wrote. Though Prague invites the exercise of transmutations, to this pilgrim the city is more given to music. Smetana and Dvorak are easier to find than the man of The Castle. I do not think this unusual as music, once released abides ripe in the atmosphere, whereas the written word must be sought out.

The spirit of Joyce is to be found in Dublin, though ironically he wrote in self-exile. Thoreau’s cabin at Walden is lost to history, but Emerson’s house in Concord remains and it is easy to imagine the great man dug in, to use Chatwin’s phrase, surrounded by his books and working intently.

And of Chatwin? I found him a desert stretch removed from the Minaji Plain in Rajasthan. But that is another story for another time.

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The last best place.

In Books, Curiosity, Reading, Travel on March 27, 2012 at 7:00 am

I mentioned in a previous post, Leaning into Wisdom, the three major influences in my life: books, nature, and travel. I write a lot about books. I write less about my forays in nature; and least about travel. Today, I wish to focus on travel.

I recently discovered a travel blog, Fabulous 50′s, by Sherry Lachelle. Sherry is clear-eyed and writes with verve. Her posts reminded me of the adventures I’ve enjoyed (well, most were enjoyed). She got me thinking.

I embrace phases, wild crazy enthusiasms and reckless occasional diversions of direction. One of the longest lasting of these phases–for lack of a better term–has been travel. During my travel years I nurtured an insatiable urge to see the world, whereby I was planning one adventure while on another. I traveled to fish. I traveled to climb mountains. I traveled to take photographs, to find writing subjects. I traveled as an excuse to travel. I was restless and thought of myself as a proto-Bruce Chatwin nomad. I saw a lot of the world, including some of the most beautiful and exciting places you can imagine. Patagonia, Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, the Seychelles and so on. Then I moved to Maine in the spring of 2009 and put away my passport.

The travel phase, after thirty years, came to a self-defined stop. It was, as a friend observed, as if I’d reached my destination. Indeed, over my travel years I was often asked where in the world I would drop my “favorite place” pin. Always, and without hesitation, I responded, Maine. Now I reside in my favorite place and I do not take that for granted.

There are places that resonate. And there are places that don’t, places that seem dead of vibration. Maine resonates with me. It is a profound lesson: place matters. I am a baby-boomer raised in post-war America. The notion was that one can pick up and go, put down roots, then simply pick up again without repercussion. But I’ve discovered, contrariwise, that place matters. And when you find your place, take note. You’ve made an important discovery.

Now the restlessness is gone, but curiosity remains. The value of travel, whether to far-off locations or weekend getaways, is a thing I understand first hand. It’s hard knowledge realized of action. The best travel effects me as a journey of a hyper-aware self in accelerated space and time, an experience where the senses are fed and the energy is loaded. It is a profound way of building experience and sparking curiosity. At times there is even wisdom to be realized.

Among travel writers, Paul Theroux, is, to my taste, our best. He is a master of the genre. Writing of his youthful travels, he says, “I wanted to find a new self in a distant place, and new things to care about. The importance of elsewhere was something I took on faith.” We are remiss when we ignore the importance of elsewhere.(Theroux’s last travel book, from which this quote is taken, is  The Tao of Travel. I reviewed it for MostlyFiction last year.)

Three years after retiring the passport, I am gearing up to set out again. I’m planning a big trip, an adventure into the world’s biggest mountains and the juices are starting to flow. Place is settled, but remnants of wanderlust fortunately remain. Stay tuned.

Got a favorite place? I’d like to hear about it.

Thanks for reading.

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My new library card

In Books, Reading, Technology, Writing on November 12, 2010 at 2:59 pm

There are books I want to read and own. And there are books I want to just read. So, there being a “read only” book currently in my purview, I marched up to the newly renovated Portland public library and got a library card. I am embarrassed to admit that it is the first library card I’ve had in, maybe, twenty years.

I live in a small place now, already filled with enough books, such that book overflow is beginning to occur in my man-cave office-study in town. Too, there are hundreds of books still back in Maryland, books which presumably will never make their way north to Maine. Also, libraries are green. It is a benchmark recycling notion, this business of taking a book, reading it, and returning it for someone else to enjoy.

I have been thinking a great bit about the impact of technology on modern life. The theme has been explored in a number of posts here. There is a book, Hamlet’s Blackberry, by William Powers which explores this question. Here’s the jacket blurb:

At a time when we’re all trying to make sense of our relentlessly connected lives, this revelatory book presents a bold new approach to the digital age. Our computers and mobile devices do wonderful things for us. But they also impose an enormous burden, making it harder for us to focus, do our best work, build strong relationships, and find the depth and fulfillment we crave.

Using his own life as laboratory and object lesson, and drawing on such great thinkers as Plato, Shakespeare and Thoreau, Powers shows that digital connectedness serves us best when it’s balanced by its opposite, disconnectedness.

Exactly! Powers has been interviewed on PBS & NPR, the book has been discussed in the Wall Street Journal, by Diane Rehm and Katie Couraic. It’s been on the Time’s Best Seller List. Where am I going with this? The library doesn’t have a copy! Nor can they get me one! (I do not use exclamation marks arbitrarily, I want to point out.) I suddenly am feeling as if I live in a remote backwater outpost. Okay, a bit of an exaggeration, granted. It’s just a disappointing first library experience. When I pointed out to the librarian, a congenial woman with a terrible hacking cough, all of the above, the press notices, the interviews and so forth, she as much as challenged me, wondering out loud if it really was on the best seller’s list.

I know my reading tends to the esoteric, but this is mainstream, for god’s sake.

Enough ranting. In a follow up visit I picked up Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Chatiwin’s The Songlines–both books I need to refresh myself with for a piece I’m working on. They had the books. No surprise there. I should point out: both books were likely purchased long before the library budget started to get directed to DVDs and audio books, movies and CDs, which were the articles everyone was checking out at the front desk. It would be ironic if libraries were, in the fashion of my experience, to contribute to the death of the written word, being presumably the last bastion of orderliness in the messy digital war of ideas (or lack thereof).

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This just in: “Nearly 2,000 volunteers lined up on the Akoni Pule Highway on Saturday to form a human chain, so they could pass the thousands of books – or huki puke, in Hawaiian – over a mile and a third down the road to the new library.” Check out: Good library news.

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To Transform Awareness…

In Creativity, Family, Memoir, Photographers, Photography, The Examined Life, Thinkers, Travel, Writers on August 12, 2010 at 3:46 pm

“I recently asked some friends what they would grab from their house if it was on fire and they had only three minutes to escape. This question has intrigued me for some time. I can’t remember when I first thought of it—or maybe it was put to me at a dinner party by a host desperate to get things rolling. Regardless, I am curious about what people find important, and this question speaks directly to the issue. It is, too, I confess, a self-serving question, as I am trying to figure out what is important to me and am hoping someone will help me down that path. Anyway, my friends on this afternoon answered typically. Of the four, three said they would grab the family photographs. The holdout said he’d reach for his guitar. Guitars aside, in my unscientific poll, most people say they would most miss their photographs if all their belongings were irretrievably lost.”

To read the rest of my meditation on photography (among–too?–many other things) and why we take pictures please go to Obscura Press.

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House a’fire

In Depression, Family, Reading, The infinity of ideas, Thinkers, Travel, Writers, Writing on July 2, 2009 at 8:32 pm

I recently asked some friends what they would grab from their house if it was on fire and they had only three minutes to escape. This question has intrigued me for some time. I can’t remember when I first thought of it—or maybe it was put to me at a dinner party by a host desperate to get things rolling. Regardless, I am curious about what people find important, and this question speaks directly to the issue. It is too, I confess, a self-serving question, as I am trying to figure out what is important to me and am hoping someone will help me down that path. Anyway, my friends on this afternoon answered typically. Of the four, three said they would grab the family photographs. The holdout said he’d reach for his guitar. Guitars aside, in my unscientific poll, most people say they would most miss their photographs if all their belongings were irretrievably lost.


Many years ago, I bought a video camera. Of course, with my usual lack of marketplace acumen, I bought a Beta video recorder, not VHS, but that is beside the point. Our kids were little and I felt compelled to record their every moment. It is a phase through which many young parents pass, particularly those boomers raised on “Kodak Moment” pablum. I dutifully fulfilled my fatherly obligation to posterity, recording holidays and birthdays, snow-fort building and summer beach fun. But after a while, a year or two, I stopped cold. I had watched a series of tapes I’d recorded, the kids being particularly little and cute, and it struck me hard and fast: I don’t want to watch this when I am old and they are grown and gone. I sensed a dark nascent warning, a potential for a wet-blanket-smothering depression. These tapes would prove to be an undeniable visual reminder of that which I no longer possessed: my youth and my future. My imagination, in my future viewing, delivered me to death’s door, and certain of the tapes would undoubtedly transport me, Black Dog in chase, across the transom. It is an admittedly contrary viewpoint, probably profoundly irrational, and I will likely regret my decision. But I’m not going to take the chance. No, no more videos. If the house burns, the videos stay. Same for the photos. My memory, unaided by even a photograph, will have to serve, as it should, being that much more exacting for its fragility.


I read recently a comment the critic Frank Kermode made regarding a collection of his work, the compilation of which forced him to make some difficult decisions. He wrote that he had to confront “what ought and what ought not to be let go.” Precisely—and that is the troubling challenge. What ought to be not let go? To direct Kermode’s challenge to the world of the tangible, What would I pull from the burning house? Though not for lack of effort, I can’t think of a damned thing, leaving me to fear that I exist in a sub-human state, as to be so lacking in sentimentality that no thing has emotional value. Sentiment aside, to plumb the human desire for possession, is there no thing so essential that I cannot live without it? Again, I come up empty handed. The easy answers are not worth risking my life in the burning house. I would want my cell phone, because my wife and children call me on it. I would want my laptop because that has everything–some would say, “my life”–on it. And I would want my current reading material because I am a reader first. But these are all things that help me do the important stuff—they are not the important stuff—and can be replaced.

They are nouns and I long for verbs, active verbs.

I have on occasion lived out of a backpack. There is a wonderful simple elegance in having everything one requires on one’s back. The unfettered freedom is palatable, and it does not surprise me, given the layered complexity of modern life, that backpacking is the most popular and widely practiced of outdoor activities. It is a relic, an unfathomable connection to a time when we as a species freely roamed anywhere and everywhere, Africa to the Bearing Straight, our only possessions the ones we carried. (It is a compelling thought that we, as a species, have walked at some time or another virtually everywhere.) The only thing I recall from my first reading of Walden is Thoreau’s admonition to simplify. (From the second reading, getting to know Henry David better, I thought: What a wild man. He would have been a curious house guest, an experiment of his own making, a site to see.) Buddhist monks are sent into the world with only their robes and alms bowl. That is simplicity. Unencumbered is the word. An old woodsman I once met out in the Uinta Mountains of Utah said he could not conceive how a person could wake up in the morning and not see mountains on the horizon. He was someone who knew what was not only important to him, but necessary. “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone,” wrote Thoreau. To be so compact and efficient, like a snail, or rather like my favorite amphibian, the common painted turtle, as to travel freely, wanting for nothing extraneous, is wildly releasing–and I think, close to an Absolute Truth, if such a thing existed. It is interesting that the painted turtle’s carapace is keelless, gaining her a range of motion subject to the least interference. The physicist and the code writer strive for the most elegant and simple equation or line. The architect and the draftsman seek elegance in an edge, a bend or radius that bespeaks simplicity in form. It is, I think, innately clarifying that life reflect the same principal. There is an entry in Camus’s notebook, not even a sentence: That wild longing for clarity.


We have been educated, from Sunday school to Hollywood, that the prophets of old lived simply, by choice or divine edict, scratching out an existence, but living, at least in my imagination, a life of crystalline clarity. “The prophet is a fool, the man of spirit is mad,” wrote Hosea. I have visited the dusty expanse of the Middle East. There is good reason the desert breeds visionaries and madmen. Have we come very far? I am a struggling minimalist–they were beggars at the temple gate, voices in the wilderness. Mad fools, to paraphrase Hosea. The man who goes to the Seven Eleven for milk at night and turns up ten years later living on the other coast in another life is, I think, the most creative prophet imaginable—though likely a personal wreck. He starts over, creating a new self, like a snake shedding its skin, with the knowledge of the old, but free of it. I started a novel once whereby the protagonist walked away in the middle of a workday from a successful business, leaving a wild and brief note for his partner: “You’re in charge. I’m out of here.” He disappeared to everyone who knew him. He walked right out of the novel and even I couldn’t find him.

Though likely the story teller in him, Bruce Chatwin claimed to have telegraphed Magnus Linklater, his boss at the London Sunday Times, “GONE TO PATAGONIA FOR FOUR MONTHS.” I used to illogically figure that if I were ever imprisoned I would be forced to live a life of stark anti-materialism and simplicity. I would become a sequestered monk. It, prison, in this warped fantasy, sounded an odd and freeing experience, albeit a dark one–a place devoid of human vanities and illusions. There is nothing to pull from the burning house where there is no house in the first place. In a moment of introspection, Chatwin recorded this thought: “Do we not gaze coldly at our clutter and say, ‘If these objects express my personality, then I hate my personality.’”


Nature strives to complexity. Organisms, like government, never evolve into smaller, more basic structures. To the contrary. That is the principal of evolution. To strive in the opposing direction, to simplicity, is counter to what our DNA is orchestrating behind the scene. Advertising, Madison Avenue and consumerism aside, this is biology. Perhaps we not only derive satisfaction from the material things that fill our lives, but are also fulfilling our genetic obligation to complexity. Of course this is metaphorical and not what nature had in mind. You will never see a migrating bird with a fanny pack.


It has been an insidious journey from the backpacking days of my youth. Some time ago my wife, daughter and I went away for a three-day weekend to the lake. They packed a bag or two. I loaded my bike on the overhead carrier, put my fly-fishing gear in the back, along with photography equipment, books, laptop and trail guides. Clothing too. They looked at me, the great yapping minimalist, their eyes challenging. My wife was miffed, my daughter humored. I was embarrassed. I advise against revealing such duplicity in front of loved ones; years of hard-earned respect will be snatched away in instant. Of course I was troubled in that way only self-reflection can trouble one. We can be hardest on ourselves. How had I traveled so far? So began my quest to answer the question of what ought to be not let go.


In reality, I am no longer worried by my lack of personal interest in possessions, which I believe suggests progress. I am no less human because I have no sentiment for things–in contradistinction, I think I am more so. Maybe our things can get in the way of our humanity. I do have many things still, far too many, but find comfort knowing that none are essential. I relish the freedom I sense upon returning from a donation collected of yet more purged stuff. To purge is clarifying and releasing. When I travel for short periods now I carry everything I need in a daypack. Two recent trips abroad found me managing fine with a simple carry-on. We are escaping the big house and moving to a place with less of a footprint, to use a modern and descriptive word. I struggle to resist consumerism, and have got rid of the big SUV for a small import. I know environmentalists applaud my efforts, and though that is a side benefit, my motives are largely to protect my personal environment–that is, to find clarity in simplicity, and if not find it readily, then carve it out. It took a long time to get to this place from which I must start again, only in reverse.


The house is on fire. My family and Maggie the dog are safely outside. I am running through the burning rooms one last time, sirens in the background. I pick up nothing but speed, rushing freely and without burden to the open portal.