1859 interview with David James Duncan
1859: What does water mean to Oregon?
DJD: Imagine Oregon without it. Things get scary-simple in a hurry. No water = moonscape. No water = nothing we, or any bird, fish, reptile or mammal, could inhabit. No water = nothing any sentient being would recognize as “Oregon.” So the way we tend the limited water we have is damned important
1859: Explain water as soul.
DJD: Whoa! That’s not a question, that’s a climb up a philosophical Mount Everest! Some words -- and “soul” is one of them -- are so mountainous they generate their own weather systems, sending forth thunderhead-like energies that require us to rethink them again and again. Some words are so potent they deploy us to achieve their ends, not the other way around. Some words -- as the dumpster saint, Marguerite Porete, insisted before Catholic Inquisitors burned her at the stake, can only be understood “in a holy way.”
Soul is such a word. And water, for me, is another. To get at the connection between water and soul I need the help of a word from Sufi tradition: the Arabic word, barzakh. A barzakh separates two things, yet is part of neither thing. For example, the line that separates shadow from sunlight but is neither light nor shadow, is a barzakh. The now-dry, now-wet, ever-moving line on a sandy beach that separates land and sea, yet is neither land nor sea, is a barzakh. The Sufi sheikh, Ibn al-Arabi, wrote: “A barzakh separates a known from an unknown, an existent from a nonexistent, a negated from an affirmed, an intelligible from a nonintelligible.”
Water, in my view, is a barzakh between the natural world and the more mysterious worlds we call “supernatural”. But by “supernatural” I don’t mean inexplicably weird, or occult, or ghostly, or unnatural. By supernatural I mean the opposite of unnatural. The supernatural is the extra-natural; the really really natural.
If I dumped a glass of cold water on your head right now, you would experience it as flagrantly physical. But water is also extremely subtle: it is really really natural. It is present in visible or invisible forms. It comprises 78% of our body and 90% of our brain. Talk to a window on a cold day and you’ll see water vapor form on the glass -- because our language itself contains water.
Now, back to the question: explain water as soul. One of my favorite definitions of soul is Lord Krishna’s in The Bhagavad Gita: “The soul is not born, it does not die. Having been, it will never not be. djd p. 1 Unborn, enduring, constant, primordial, it is not killed when the body is killed. Weapons do not cut it, fire does not burn it, waters do not wet it, wind does not wither it.”
Substitute “water” for “soul” and the definition still “holds a lot of water,” so to speak. Water is not born, and it does not die. Having been, it will never not be. Unborn, enduring, constant, primordial, water is not killed when the body is killed, it just evaporates away as the body dessicates. Weapons do not cut it. And water doesn’t “wet” water, because it’s already wet.
Does fire burn it? Let’s be scientific. Heat changes water from ice to liquid to steam and returns it to the atmosphere. But these forces are just moving H20 around, not literally burning it. Burning is an exothermic self-propagating oxidation reaction that usually gives off a flame. Oxygen gas induces materials to burn, but extreme heat, technically speaking, causes water to decompose, reducing its hydrogen atoms to H2. This is not the same as burning. So Krishna’s soul attributes seem to hold.
Is water deathless? If the sun eventually stops burning, the Earth’s waters will only freeze. And if the sun becomes a supernova, the Earth’s waters will turn to vapor. But neither freezing nor vaporizing is the same as dying. And did you know, by the way, that there is water -- and lots of it -- traveling through space? Some of this space-water, in the that falls into our atmosphere every day, turning into meteors that turn to water or steam rather than “shooting stars”? Have you ever been walking along under blue skies and had a drop of water land on your skin out of nowhere? Could be that water was melted space-ice from a Long Ago Far Away. It could even be that water was “constant, primordial and deathless.”
Cool!
Is water “unborn”? If this is true, it would have to have been here since before “the Beginning”? I’ve spent my life pondering some of the oldest stories we possess---ancient myths and scriptures. Some of these tales seem to suggest that water was indeed here before the story even began. “In the beginning,” say the Upanishads—a scripture composed, according to the rishis of ancient India, by no one; a scripture self-created, found floating like mist, or the bands of a rainbow, in the primordial forest air, “there was nothing here at all... Death alone covered this completely, as did hunger, for what is hunger but death? Then Death made up his mind: “Let me equip myself with a body” (Sanskrit: atma). So he undertook a liturgical recitation (arc), and as he was reciting, water (ka) suddenly sprang from him. Amazed, Death thought: “Recitation caused water to spring from me!” This is what gave the name to and discloses the hidden nature of recitation (arc-ka). Truly, water springs up for he or she who knows the secret of recitation. Recitation is running water.”
When Death or Nothingness began to create the very first body in this very ancient tale, water “sprang from Death.” So it seems to be latent within Death or Nothingness. In this sense, water is indeed “unborn,” for it was latently here before “The Beginning.” And our “water as soul” equation is holding. Wow! What a question you asked! I never chased this line of thought before.
Let’s try a Western wisdom tradition on the same question. The Genesis account of creation has it that God, “in the beginning... created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let their be light: and there was light.”
Double wow! Unpack this mind-bending passage and it seems to be telling us that, before the creation of the very first god-thing, light---before the first instant in Time and point in Space from whence God begins to create “creation”---water was already here, it was already “deep,” it had a “face,” with “darkness” upon it. And I’m pretty sure that dark face was already wet. Isn’t that wild? Is the Bible is saying that water is the one element the Creator did not create? That it’s as old as the Creator? My mind is starting to vaporize here, my mental H20 is decomposing into H2. But Genesis seems to suggest that when I stand in a river fly fishing, I’m standing in the flow of my own soul. What a notion! It turns the whole fishing situation inside-out, doesn’t it? I’m not standing “outside” when I’m in that river. I’m standing in something that’s Inside, the way the soul is Inside. Maybe that’s why baptism, beginning with Jesus, was conducted in flowing rivers: because “the kingdom of heaven” (and of rivers) are “within you.” Maybe it’s why Moses began his life launched downriver (into the “kingdom” hidden within himself) in a floating reed basket.
As a mere mortal, I can’t speak to this “water as soul” question with authority. I don’t recall being present “in the Beginning.” But just because my brain doesn’t remember something doesn’t mean it couldn’t have happened. I’ve forgotten plenty of stuff I’ve done. At age fifty-seven my mental memory is like Swiss cheese. But the brain is not the only part of us that remembers. We talk about “body memory” and “muscle memory. As a water- and soul-lover I put in a vote for “soul memory” too. My soul may very well have been present In the Beginning. If it’s immortal, as the Wisdom Traditions insist, why couldn’t it have stood, laid, or floated around in a nothingness, watching God say, “Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters”? To be honest, this feels vaguely familiar! For all I know, I love the first page of Genesis because it jogs a soul memory of my presence at The Beginning. For all I know, I’m the Alpha and the Omega staggering through this little Oregon & Montana trout fisher life with a hilarious Low-Self-Esteem problem. For all I know, I’m the Almighty Herself, stuck in the throes of a “Call me Dave” dream that could pop like a bubble on the surface of a trout stream one day. How can souls “live forever,” as Krishna promises, if their lives don’t reach all the way back to The Beginning as well as forward through Eternity? Think about it: the only way any of us are going to live forever is if we already have.
1859: As someone who’s fished for decades in Oregon, what trends have you witnessed vis a vis: water flow, fish population, development?
DJD: That question’s got the potential to leave us depressed if we’re not careful. Let’s fly like ospreys or eagles, way up over the question, and look down on the changes in Oregon and the world with great care.
I was born into a world of 2.6 billion humans. I now live in a world of 6.7 billion humans. That’s Trend #1. That’s huge.
Trend #2: We live in a time of great havoc, selfishness and suffering.
But -- Trend #3 -- we also live in a time of great transformation and positive change. I was born in a world of overt Jim Crow, overt belief in Manifest Destiny, and overt faux-Christian chauvinism. Now we’ve got a progressive black president, a worldwide wave of passionate ecosystem defenders, and a new kind of spirituality, even in some evangelical circles, that translates and ponders the spiritual texts of all humanity and engages Truth in many forms.
Positive change, in Oregon or anywhere else, is hard to track for several reasons. One reason is that much of it is sitting in the hearts and imaginations of people with little access to major media. Another is that positive change is good news, and good news is not news at all as most “news programs” define it. Which brings me to Trend #4:
Radio and TV news varies, but it almost all shares a tendency to edit the goodness out of reality. It almost all headlines random evil, creating a litany of malady ("If it bleeds it leads"). Our “news” also features steady obsession with the merely political at the expense of the alive, the physical, the real. The “news” asks elected officials for their inane, self-serving, visionless comments on virtually everything, casting them as virtual porn stars of power. Those of us who want true news of the planet, and of our true purpose in life, have no more to gain by watching these info-writhings than we do by watching the other kind of porn. The so-called “news” out of Washington D.C. blacklists reality itself, tacitly telling us that our own lifelong firsthand experience is meaningless. Let me give an example.
I was raised within sight of the Columbia/Snake watershed and now live in the headwaters of the same river system. I have fly fished those rivers and creeks with a passion for half a century and, as a result, have knelt in river shallows and held easily a thousand gleaming adult salmon and steelhead in my hands. My writings on these experiences have been read by millions. Some sixty thousand Americans wrote the Army Corps of Engineers in favor of lower Snake River dam removal, based on an article I wrote for Sierra Magazine in 2000. Yet for eight of the past nine years, policies governing my home watershed and its endangered salmon and steelhead have been determined by a conniving indoorsman named Karl Rove and an astoundingly ignorant Texan named George W. Bush. Neither has ever caught, held, cherished or released even one wild salmon or steelhead. Yet their deviously abstracted minds govern the waters of 5,500 miles of Idaho, eastern Oregon and eastern Washington rivers in the Interior West being stripped of their salmon by neocon superstition. And “the news” only tracks the superstitions those fellas call “policies.” The tens of thousands of hours I’ve spent immersed to the knees or waist in these actual waters, studying and relishing every life-form they support and worshipping the salmon in thanks for all they’ve given me, are not “news.” The “news” is the salmon “policies” of Rove and Bush. And this disconnect continues under Obama. Because the BPA runs the dams, because the BPA greases Patty Murray’s political career, and because Patty Murray is an Obama administration insider, the adminitration has accepted the biological opinion of the Bush administration even the so-called news in that bi-op, as it applies to wild salmon, is not news, not fact, not science, not healthy, not real.
The “news” and our politics are not capable of expressions of love like those you’ll find in the best science, poetry, film, prose, oral accounts, children’s drawings, and local watershed groups celebrations, about wild rivers and salmon. The “news” and our politics, if I took them to heart, would negate the joys and sorrows of my entire fly fishing life, and my gratitude to the Maker of Rivers, Seas and Salmon. The “news” is now babbling about the fact that Patty Murray and the BPA have duped, bribed or deluded the Obama Administration into accepting the Columbia/ Snake biological opinion of Bush and Rove though that bi-op is not biological or scientific or spiritual or true at all. What can I say in response but to hell with that kind of “news”? Such “news,” if I accept it, negates the reality of my life experience, the existence of the soul hidden within, and the outcry of the vast majority of Northwesterners, who love salmon. The “news” and our politics negate the legacy of the commercial fishermen Jesus, Peter, James and John and the commandment on the Bible’s first page to steward our planet by allowing our “blessed” fishes to “fill the waters of the sea.” I stand by the experience of my life, and by the lives of the salmon and steelhead I’ve held in my hands. The “bi-ops” of connivers who’ve never touched such a blessed creature are not “salmon opinions” or “biological” or wild or true at all.
1859: Tell me a good (relatively) nonfictional Oregon fishing story.
DJD: I spent the last two days with a PBS “Nature” crew doing a documentary on the horrors of being a wild salmon suffering state and federal “recovery efforts” in the Columbia/ Snake watershed. All of these salmon swim twice the length of Oregon, and deal with sixteen dams, in their migration to the Pacific and return home to the mountains. The film guys were ragged from three weeks of filming industrial hatcheries and dam-mitigation devices and endangered salmon slit open and killed and posthumously processed for their eggs and milt instead of being allowed the ancient, godgiven, first page of Genesis blessing birthright that is the Spawn.
At the end of two days of hard work I took them, without hope, to a tiny tributary of the Clearwater 28 miles from my house -- a stream that touches the Montana border 4000 feet above sea level and 665 river miles from the Pacific. All they wanted was a canned shot of me, “the broken-hearted salmon lover,” scanning the stream seven hundred feet below us with my binoculars, trying to spot a salmon in a pool. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, bright sun, no chance of seeing anything due to crashed salmon numbers again this year. I did the phony Bino Shot though it embarrassed me. They started to pack. But I'd already done some phony fly fishing that was bugging me, too, so I told the camera man, "Wait a sec. That pool I was scanning sometimes holds salmon. You should at least shoot the pool so that astute viewers know this wasn't just staged. Anybody who knows salmon will know that is good holding water. It adds credibility to everything you’re doing to let folks see it."
He thought this a good idea so he moved tripod and camera to the cliff edge and started framing the shot. Right when he got things aimed and framed I saw movement through my binoculars. An enormous female spring chinook swept into the crystal clear water and spawning gravel at the tail of the pool. Jim Norton (a salmon lover like me and the progenitor of the film) and I went nuts. Then the other guys saw her and caught on to the one in a million miracle of it and they went nuts too. These four men had spent three weeks filming every techno-debacle in the entire system starting with a time lapse of the eight dam gauntlet. At the sockeye facility at Redfish the techno-aliens who run the place had written WELCOME HOME SOCKEYES! on the labratory wall where they kill and slit open the guts of every returning fish and start throwing antibiotics and antifungals and anti-headrot-drugs thanks to concrete tank abrasions, and maybe athlete's foot ointment and Preparation H into their industrial sockeye Mitigation Soup. At every dam, going and coming, young and old salmon are crushed or flumed or tagged or handled or sucked into barges or fought over or devoured by introduced predators or miscounted or techno-diddled. The crew had not seen ONE wild salmon doing what wild salmon were created to do. Though she was 700 feet below us, because she was 700 feet below us, we were blown away by this perfect fish, huge and unmarked, her body looking as if the ocean and estuary were a quarter mile away. She stayed in the center of view finder, like a ham actor. It was incredible.
“Is there a male? Is she alone? Is it useless that she made it?” the crew started worrying.
Ah! Genuine human concern. As if in answer to it, she was joined by a jack -- a small male of maybe 6 or 7 pounds. A mere boy, but better than nothing. And his presence stimulated her. Right there in bright sun, water clear as air, she turned on her side and began ramming a redd into the gravel, her body shining like a silver knife blade, water churning, stones visibly flying, not a mark on her, the jack going nuts swimming circles around her, over her, under her.
Then a big eggplant-colored male appeared out of nowhere! a beau, a MAN of a boyfriend, a big strong sperm-laden Swain with shoulders and courage and a toothy kype to drive off opportunistic egg-eating trout! The crew and I lost it again. They started worrying some more, like parents now, invested in the drama. "Are there many bears around here? It’s so shallow down there, the water’s so clear. Won’t a bear just catch her?" One might, sure, but at least a bear isn't a government 'mitigation facility' behind a cyclone fence and barbed wire where spiritually tone-deaf technois carve WELCOME HOME CHINOOKS! on the concrete.
We watched the three-way jack-buck-queen dance for half an hour. Then the fish disappeared and the film guys were out of time. They remained in disbelief all the way to my house.
It doesn’t get better than this, Jeff. That wilderness stream is the salmon’s, and our, best hope. Trying to make “the system” better, we’ve created hell. Trying to improve on the first page of Genesis blessing given to the seas, we betrayed Genesis. We will not fix “the system” ever. That is my belief, and Obama’s attempts to fix it, and his failures, confirm my belief more every day. But don’t despair! Because there is a perfect System hidden inside the unfixable “system.” Yesterday, when five tired grown men saw it, they couldn’t help shouting for joy. They’d seen a Holy Family and perfect end to a film and knew it.
Every act of perception or love that accesses and honors this truer, greater System gives fleeting viability to the unfixable system. That’s why I’m still quoting Ma Teresa: We can do no great things, only small things with great love. A Salmon Queen did something stupendous yesterday. Not by trying to do a great thing, but one tail stroke and gill-breath at a time, she defeated sixteen dams and thousands of technocrats and bureacrats and fish trackers and fish mutilators and the BPA and Patty Murray and Google’s data center at The Dalles and, alas, the Obama Administration (which has accepted Bush’s Bi-op!), and began, broken “system” or no, to beat a home for her offspring in the very spine of this Continent. In the Name of biological imperative and, I will gladly say, Love, that Queen stood by her single tiny birthstream and the thousands of glowing orbs she’ll soon lay in its stone bed. Sometime this fall her stream will freeze over. And she’ll be long dead. But in the gravel beneath the ice, her glowing orbs will begin opening tiny eyes, sprouting tiny tails and fins.
Alevins, they’ll be called then. An incredible creature, something out of a fairy tale, but real. A head, mouth, eyes, tail, fins -- and an enormous glowing SUN for a belly. A sun that gives the alevin everything it needs. I’ve said it before and say it again with fresh love thanks to yesterday: There is a fire in water. There is an impossible flame, hidden in undammed free-flowing wilderness water, that creates not heat, but life. That fire guides our 90% H20 brains and 78% H20 bodies and blood, heartfirst, to the True System that is the only hope and help for “the system.” Spiritually speaking I’m an alevin feeding at that fire and always will be.
Small things. Great love. Thank you Queen. Thanks Mama T.
1859: What are Oregon’s biggest challenges in river conservation?
DJD: Mother Teresa says, “We can do no great things, only small things with great love.” In keeping with that philosophy, I’ll confine myself to one Oregon conservation challenge: the removal of those four wretched lower Snake River dams.
1859: Tell me a little about the new novel. Plot? Have you found a new publisher? Release?
DJD: I’m in the middle of a creative effort, and a contractual negotiation, that make it impossible to speak about what I’m doing as a novelist right now.
1859: Is there an excerpt?
DJD: Sorry. Copyright issues.
1859: What’s your take on The River Why film production?
DJD: My battle with the producers of the film and with Sierra Club over their handling of my film rights was settled last fall. I’m done with the makers of the current production, and they’re done with me. My name is off their project, and Sierra Club’s name is also off their project. I tried to remove my title from their project, too, but the federal magistrate in San Francisco let them keep it. The rights have reverted to me, but whether I’m ever to make a movie may depend on what happens with the movie made by my former legal enemies. They did make a movie, which I failed to block, though I tried my hardest. Had I made a River Why movie, I’d have transferred it to Idaho so the LSR dams and endangered salmon would figure in the story. It’s ironical and still painful that Sierra Club prevented me from doing that. Sherman Alexie would have co-written, and he’d have had carte blanche to create hilarious and poignant Nez Perce characters, as only he can do. Patrick Markey and Matt Salinger would have produced. If the current film bombs, we four may reconvene and make The River Why right.
Because I sued, I’ve finally been paid for the fact that they held on to my rights for 25 years and wrote a crappy screenplay and filmed in a rush and used a non fly fisher to play the world’s greatest fly fisher and a rubber salmon to play a wild chinook, and so on. I will say, their film seems well cast. There’s some good actors in their movie. But in order for their film to be any good, how to put it? The Italians consider it good luck when a bird craps on your head. A great horned owl nailed me with a load when I was walking on the Bitterroot River last year, ruining my favorite wool fishing hat. But I’ve been pretty lucky ever since.
As regards the upcoming River Why movie I failed to stop, I believe vast flocks of birds are going to have to crap on a whole lot of people in order for it to be any good. But, that said, let’s not forget that those peoples’ souls -- and Patty Murray’s too -- are as unborn, primordial, enduring, constant and beautiful as yours or mine. One day we’ll get it figured out, and become more worthy of our soulful waters, and whatever wild denizens survive.
OUTTAKES
Water AS soul. The concept startles me, because it pretty much asks: is water coequal to the unspeakable, everlasting spark within life forms? Soul, to my mind, is the very God-fragment in created beings. Much as I love water, to equate water and that fragment forces us to dance with pantheism. I’m only a panentheist -- a crucial distinction. A pantheist equates God and created things. A panentheist sees a mysterious link between God and creation but, in humility and gratitude, refuses to limit that link by defining it. My sense is that an unseen, unborn, unkillable, guileless Perfection pierces all things. But we humans, animals, fish, birds, rocks, planets, and stars come and go. The Ancient, All-piercing, Unseen Perfection is the only constant.
I have friends who can tolerate news and politics precisely because they know it’s poison, and have learned how to watch it without drinking it. To consider oneself “well-informed” because you allow yourself to be psychically bombarded or entranced by delusions and illusions several times a day is a fairly sure way of knowing nothing about the positive change that’s going on in the world. Such “news” renders the true heroes of our time invisible, and reduces even good-hearted newscasters to posturing and mincing as they convey a steady false knowing. “Patty Murray says that dams and salmons can coexist and that lower Snake River dam removal is a violation of bipartisanship,” says the so-called “news” even though dams have extirpated 90% of the Columbia/Snake’s salmon.
