man of two minds

Sierra, Sept, 2000 by David James Duncan

In a frenzy of grief and love for nature, a novelist wrestles with his inner activist.

I became a fiction writer, after long, painstaking apprenticeship, at the age of 29. I did so out of a sense of calling, out of gratitude for the sustenance that the art form had given me, out of raw heartache for humanity, out of a desire to write antically of humanity's antics, and out of an overtly contemplative yearning for the loss of self that occurs during the daily making of fiction, in the biblical belief that he that loseth his life shall save it.

I became a nonfiction writer--after no apprenticeship whatever--at the age of 40. I did so not out of a sense of calling, but out of a sense of betrayal, out of rage over natural systems violated, out of grief for a loved world raped, and out of a craving for justice.

In donning a second literary hat, I became chronically conflicted: every page of nonfiction I now write, no matter how valid it seems on its own terms, feels like a betrayal of the fiction writer I originally set out to be. Yet every work of fiction I write, no matter how proud I might be of it, forces me to feign obliviousness toward the abuse of the loved and endangered places and creatures that comprise and share my home. I admire fiction boundlessly. Artistically speaking, I would always rather create fiction than try to give voice to a dying river or vanishing species. I just don't feel my world gives me this choice. Once upon a time, only Rome burned while we fiddlers fiddled. Nowadays, the entire planet grows scorched. When events are local, corporate-propelled, politically spun, directly devastating, and the people of my watershed are being scammed and lied to, the need to make nonfiction leapfrogs my fiction, becoming the most direct means I have, in an industrialized world of ideas, of championing the industrially dispossessed.

The fiction writer in me is contemplative to a fault, self-abnegatingly self-absorbed, and happiest when he's so lost in the wilderness of imagination and music of words that the travails of this world exist only in the Valmikian palm of his hand. I see my fiction-writing persona as a benign monomaniac; a self-giving narcissist; a Glasperlenspieler so absorbed in his spielen that he doesn't care whether anyone but he even knows what Glasperlenspieler means.

The nonfiction writer in me is also lost--in incredulity at the agonies and extinctions that industrial humanity is inflicting on our planetary home. He is therefore, of necessity, a public figure, aiming his work toward the most timely and largest possible voting audiences. I see my activist persona as a dithering desperado, constantly near tears at the vastly reduced world he'll be bequeathing his kids, sincere as a larvatoting ant on a crushed anthill in his desire to preserve what remains--and in constant dire need of Lao Tzu's boomeranging reminder that "he who strives to be of use in this world soon burdens his fellows with his own insufficiency."

My inner fiction writer is a complete and demanding personality.

My inner nonfiction writer is a complete and demanding personality.

How does it feel to have two demanding literary personae crammed into my one head and body, fighting for possession of my pen? Gnarly! But if we reclusive artists, we confrontation-hating contemplatives, we humans, do not rob our private selves often enough to give voice and succor to the primordial and life-sustaining, I believe we'll soon live in a land so reduced and desperate that our delicate art forms will not exist.

One blue-then-crimson-then-starry-skied evening last July, I had a parable of a dinner with the triple-hatted lepidopterist/author/activist, Robert Michael Pyle (henceforth "Bob"). Bob writes from and fights for the damaged landscapes closest to his life and heart: the Willapa Hills of Washington, the High Line Canal in Denver, the habitats of bigfoot and butterflies. Bob had spent our dinner day negotiating 200 miles of one of the most scenic roads on earth--Idaho's Lochsa River Highway--yet managed to perceive hardly a scene. Why? Because Bob, being Bob, had his eyes glued to the air in front of his car, trying with all his might to avoid collisions with the abundance of butterflies. I can only imagine his pain. An equivalent day for me would involve driving a car 60 miles an hour underwater, up, say, the Big Hole River, splattering trout after innocent trout all over my windshield and grill.

Bob Pyle is a man who worships butterflies, a man who goes into instant ecstasies at the sight of inert obtect pupae that normal people mistake for bird turds, a man I once saw reduce eavesdroppers to tears as he told of the violent death of his lifelong female companion--till the listeners realized the deceased lover was Bob's favorite butterfly net. He is a man who had me near tears with his descriptions of what the killing pollen of Monsanto's bioengineered corn may be doing to America's monarch butterflies. At our midsummer night's supper, though, something besides butterflies had fought its way to the front of his lobes.