Barry Holstun Brennan Lopez

 I asked about death::,you are just alone at death as at birth if that is alone. saw relic around the bone of Donne, saw the bones of my loved ones underground, pat says, waiting for Ezekiel’s word, heard the light dark solid, not that it helps, it’s only youth who know nothing of it that can write glib thoughts of death, those who know have nothing to say, barry lopez, really Holstun Brennan, was burned out by prostate cancer and fire in the last year of his life the same as kim clement, accident prone, broke both wrists falling from a roof, just as Jason did, who lay for the whole night before he was found. Or Mr. Kredit fell from roof at 80, or Momo languished 4 years, Borges had a better demise after escaping Argentina when he died in Geneva and found love, …Stevens got baptized.

 Barry Lopez was a monastic, out of order, a desolate who lived with the Inuit, tracked the wolf, wolverine but as anybody famous got infected with himself and his piety, so got burned out of the environment he loved, didn’t clear the brush. The brush in this is all the pious thoughts that burned in the brush with his archives. Yes he said that love is what matters , it is all, but the monastic, the near Jesuit mind displaced into comfort, with his wife’s four daughters to care for him. -this is how he passed in the distraction: still thinking life mattered at the moments of death—who knows--this is the emotion ridden life of the death, by his wife and four nee daughters (: On Christmas Eve morning, he woke up and said, "It's a wonderful morning. How is everyone?" Barry entered nearly every day with joyful optimism, including his last ones.

Barry's passing was gentle. [distracted from death] The five of us were with him, the four daughters he cherished and me. We played John Adams' music (a brother to Barry), we also played Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten" at full volume while we held him. In the final hours, we filled the room with Richard Nelson's (another brother) birdsong recordings—particularly the cackling ravens. We hung a self-portrait of Rick Bartow on the wall where Barry could see it. (Those two were probably already making mischief.)

Barry's dearest Auntie, Lillian Pitt, guided us. The scent of herbs, the prayers, the fresh air through the windows. The light. We told him a thousand times, a thousand-thousand times, that we love him, that we will love him always, that he could cross his river now. At 7:21, he stepped in, with one last long breath.

 

All this is coda to his more torturous passage in and around the Catholic mystic metaphor in Madre de Dios.

I’m five years beyond him at 80,  and we only have our lives to bear that far, to the Door--displaced to temporary housing in September, when wildfires ravaged his home in the CascadesThe fire destroyed all of his original manuscripts, his wife said, as well as the artwork and artifacts that he had collected during decades of travels. shortly after the fire he developed cardiac ailments that contributed to his death. obit

Near Finn Rock, Oregon, ahead of a wind-driven wildfire advancing westward toward us down the McKenzie River Valley.— along the north bank of the river, between the town of Vida and the hamlet of Rainbow, where the fire started at about 8:30 p.m. on September 7th, after a wind-whipped, high tension line snapped and ignited ground cover, tinder dry after many weeks of draught. More than 700 homes and outbuildings burned to the ground.

- Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney were sleeping when a neighbor’s call woke them and a young firefighter pounded on their door; of their house on the McKenzie River the images of fire in the canyon as they fled — with their cat, Debra’s purse, and the clothes on their backs East Oregonean

Our home and guest house are damaged but still standing. All of our outbuildings are gone, including a large archive building

-- [he blames climate change!-I don’t like the preachy side which is feminized and self reproving, in the masculine it distills compassion and sorrow, but in fame circles of environmentalist--, but the agony of the poet in the desert and on the river and on, is moving] betrayed by his last morning waking up in good spirits acting the role of the infirm who want everyone to like as if they are running for office but they are running out of time.

-- What struck me first about Barry was his frailty and deep despair. As we all knew, he'd been ill for some time, and now he said he didn't think he could withstand another hit. John Keeble

--In the end of life and death we come down to our name, lopez was Irish, not Spanish, Holstun Brennan,  entirely Gaelic in his lyric

before the temple of fire barry lopez

[Memoir] Sliver of Sky, By Barry Lopez | Harper's Magazine “I’m on the alert, now, though, for an often innocuous moment, the one in which an adult man begins to show an unusual interest in the welfare of someone’s young son — especially if it’s my grandson. He still, at the age of nine, reaches out for my hand when we start to cross a dangerous street.”

 

 One thing I always felt about the author is he didn't sound like a Lopez, but he's not, he's a Brennan, Irish. That fits. Cut off from his youth, his family, his mother unable to protect him, the pain is unbearable when we learn that the last months of his life were hastened by the complete destruction of all the artifacts he collected from so many travels as well as all the usual work in progress and drafts of his manuscripts. He and his wife had two hours to evacuate the fire. By then he was weakened anyway by age and illness. That was about October. He was dead at Christmas, even with a happy face, inwardly devastated, which he told his confidants, could not recover from that. (John Keeble. In Memorium. @ https://www.barrylopez.com/) I'm telling you that these circumstances magnify my compassion for all of us who walk the path of the wayfarer.

Even though he was Book Award winner and got grants, knew every famous person and hobnobbed he may not be too complicit with the Elite, but he does share the obligatory attitude, arrogates criticism of U.S. war policy to footnotes, shows his guilt over his stepfather's hidalgo background, votes democrat like he should. There's nothing to be done about it. He must be viewed by desolation and then he is one of us all. Sliver of Sky (2013) https://harpers.org/archive/2013/01/s...

And that explains his love of the natural and the primitive, of the wolverine..."the deepest and sometimes only relief I had was when I was confronted with the local, elementary forces of nature: hot Santa Ana winds blowing west into the San Fernando Valley from the Mojave Desert; Pacific storm surf crashing at Zuma and the other beaches west of Malibu; winter floods inundating our neighborhood when Caballero Creek...But deep inside, I knew things remained awry."

The Sliver of Sky he looks at during all this devastation is the same as the train set in the attic of Mia Farrow's home that her daughter looks at while Woody Allen does the same as was done here. Only in the river and the desert, in Antarctica and the Arctic is there an ocean for him to bathe his sores in.

Finally this, from his article, The Scary Abundance of Water (2002):

"Like tens of thousands of sexually brutalized children, I lived in silent compliance. My patient hope was somehow to walk away, to no longer have to endure his compulsions in the small, nasty apartment he kept on the roof of his sanitarium. But when my dreamed-of escape became reality, when I was rid of him, I missed California to the point of grief. The sound of mourning doves at first light; the unpopulated middle stretches of Topanga and Laurel canyons, with their bolting jackrabbits; the long beaches at Zuma and Leo Carrillo, where it seemed to me the biggest waves in the world came to their crashing ends — these sounds and places were my refuge from the threat of ruin in that room. Without them, without the surgical sharpness and (on another day) the smoky nature of the sun's light as it spilled into the Valley; without the astringent smells of fresh eucalyptus buttons and pepper-tree leaves clinging to the skin of my fingers — without these things I believe I would have perished. Left like a wet rag doll in the bed of a beast, I might have gone through some other door." https://www.laweekly.com/a-scary-abun...

I have liked Barry Lopez in spite of his preachy sanctimonious moralizing on nature and man because of his first book, Desert Notes and its Introduction. It and he are utterly desolate, likewise in River Notes. It is all action. He gets out of his pickup in the desert, trails behind, rides his bike, in and out, changes seats all while it drives itself. He is cut off. I also love his Apologia except it reverses the desolation to the carcass beside the road into compassion, at least for the animal, the man never gets away. So I lived with his pain through his first 7 books and wandered off until I heard of his death this past Christmas, 2020 and took a look at what I had missed. Horizon was in the library. All the time I read it I thought the title was Excursion, Barry going down the Yangtze with a writer's tour group, pumping Chine and the CCP I guess the intention. He always seems a tourist, even in his own life. Always trying, even at death putting on the happy face, the ultimate irony in the desolate, but that is politic too. When you're up for realignment, that's what they call death now, you want as many visitors as possible to while the time. Not everybody gets to die suddenly in a parking lot. So he treated his wife and 4 daughters to a happy day, played music and died.

After I was done with Horizon I looked at the notes and turned to #2 at the first. Then I searched the Harper's article, found it and read why all this desolation was so. The horror is greater than can be said. He does say it and gives a full account of all sides, the psychology of the predator and the rationalizations of the victim-that's the important thing, in addition to reaction of their "protectors." Go over that again. At the end he says he casts a cold eye on men around boys. Never cold enough. I want to say that room is left for some implicit justice in his account of his stepfather going to CA when Barry told him of the events around age 17. The police, etc. were inconclusive and the stepfather vague, even said the .... had done a lot of good for alcoholics. That the predator's death was never proved and he could not be found seems a possible behind the back admission by the stepfather Lopez that his trip to CA was successful, and that he killed him, after all he is descendant of a hidalgo, and he praises him as a blind. Cast a cold eye on death, horseman.