Essay: Jim Harrison

The Theory and Practice of Rivers and a Poet’s Plea for an End to an Empirically Constructed Economically Motivated Orthodoxy

Written at a time of great despair following the tragic death of his young niece (fifteen years old), Harrison’s The Theory and Practice of Rivers does not unmask, but rather exudes the poet’s anti-empirical sentiments. Manifest in Theory and Practice is Harrison’s attempt to cope with this recent and unexpected tragedy, an event that has “blurred” (5) the poet’s vision to a degree in which the world has become unrecognizable. For Harrison, existence has become emotionally unbearable, and the thought of perceiving the world strictly through an empirical lens is grossly inadequate: “On the bank by the spring creek/my shadow seemed to leap up to gather me,/or it leapt up to gather me, not seeming so/but as a natural fact” (19). You might even say that Harrison’s Theory and Practice, like much of his work, possesses an air of magical realism, as Harrison’s worldview and notion of reality represented in the poem privilege the human imagination and subconsciously engendered symbols over “facts” and the construct of life borne by empiricism and science:

“On waking after the accident/I was presented with the ‘whole picture’/as they say, magnificently detailed,/a child’s diorama of what life appears to be:/staring at the picture I became drowsy/with relief when I noticed a yellow/dot of light in the lower right-hand corner./I unhooked the machines and tubes and crawled/to the picture, with an eyeball to the dot/of light which turned out to be a miniature/tunnel at the end of which I could see/mountains and stars whirling and tumbling,/sheets of emotions, vertical rivers, upside/down lakes….” (28)

It is not that Harrison rejects science so much as he rejects the domination of our psyche and understood existence by the empirical episteme, especially the appropriation of empirically shaped reality in the name of economic gain and competition. Through his poetry, Harrison implies and, at times, explicitly states, that we are more than scientifically understood economic beings, the corollary being that life, itself, is far more than an economic competition employing the empirical episteme as its tool. To complicate Harrison’s intention (Roland Barthes notwithstanding), perhaps Harrison is suggesting that it is human beings, rather than animals and other lifeforms, that are capable of more than economic necessity, mere survival, by means of their capacity for imagination. And/or, maybe, a necessary function for human survival is the engagement and validation of the human imagination (an activity fostered by myth-making), the idea being that it is through our imagination and subconsciously engendered dream-world that human beings have access to powerfully liberating, broadening views of life (Harrison might say “real” life) that are at once regenerative and sustaining, allowing us, ultimately, to experience our sensibilities and to live with them. It seems that by connecting with and validating his imagination and subconscious, Harrison, with the “overly-developed” sensibilities of a poet has managed to survive.
Is Harrison trying to evangelize in The Theory and Practice of Rivers? Maybe: “‘Why do you write/poems?’ the stewardess asked. ‘I guess/it’s because every angel is terrible/still though, alas, I invoke these almost deadly birds of the soul,’” (11). Reading these lines, however, I get the sense that by writing poems Harrison is attempting, first-and-foremost, to invoke his own “deadly birds”; what we do with his poetry is our business.
At any rate, Harrison’s position is clear: there is more to life than science in the service of economics, and, it seems, many of our contemporary illnesses of mind, body, and spirit stem from a failure to grasp this tenet and a concurrent lack of awareness to anything in existence beyond that which is posited by the empi-economic paradigm. “Life,” she says, “this vastly mysterious process to which our culture inures us lest we become useless citizens!” I am not sure whom the speaker is here; however, the statement speaks to the essence of Harrison’s theme: to open ourselves up to something other than the delimited view of an empirically-based, economically-motivated existence into that of the imaginative and restorative realm of mind and myth: “What is it to actually go outside the nest we have built for ourselves,/…: to go into a forest alone with our eyes open? It’s different/when you don’t know what’s over the hill–….” To use our minds for something other than science, something other than economic productivity, to use our minds for imagination to create and connect with a world in which we can survive.