For Barry Lopez on His 78th Birthday

 

"Barry was not one to invest in answers. It was the questions that pulsed in his body and propelled him forward no matter where he traveled in the world."
—Debra Gwartney, "Fire and Ice" 

Barry Lopez died on December 25, 2020, shortly before January 6, 2021, which would have been his 76th birthday. Of course, that date two years now lives in infamy, a day of insurrection in the United States.

Within the next few months, a little book I wrote in the wake of that day will be published: About That Life: Barry Lopez and the Art of Community. (It was originally scheduled to come out this past fall, but the publisher got a little backed up.) It will be published as an open-access book with a Creative Commons License by Punctum Books, so the PDF will be freely available and the paperback will be as affordable as possible. I will have more to say about the book when it is released.

I want to note Lopez's birthday today, however. Of the people I have met in my life, he was among the most important influences on how I see the world. He was the leader for a workshop I participated in at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in the summer of 2000, and though I did not see him again after that summer, his presence left a deep impression on my psyche. 

Lopez is most famous for his nonfiction, and that fame is justified. Of Wolves and Men, Arctic Dreams, and Horizon are monumental works. I've always been something of a miniaturist and minimalist in my tastes, so as much as I respect those books, it is his individual essays and his short fiction that I most cherish. Indeed, the book that made me forever a Lopez fan was one that was assigned in high school by an ecology teacher my senior year, a little  essay packaged as a book, The Rediscovery of North America. (Word for word, few books have had as deep an effect on my life.) At Bread Loaf, I asked why the essay had been published as a book of its own. He said (if I remember correctly) that it was his editor's idea, and at first he thought it was nuts. How could you even make a book from such a short essay? But then after it was published he saw the effect it had on readers and he realized his editor had been right — the essay is so compressed, so rich with implication, that it would have been lost if included in one of Lopez's collections. It needed to be in the form of a book for it to realize the power inherent in its words. I've held onto that idea for a long time. A book is not about length; a book is about finding the best physical form for the ideas, images, and language between the covers.

Too few people read and appreciate Lopez's short fiction. In terms of quality, he was a more inconsistent writer of fiction than nonfiction — he published some stories that are, I think, pretty weak. I sympathize with that, having done the same (and having written far more that are weaker than anything I've published). Fiction is only consistently high quality if the writer is either some sort of rare genius or, more often, if the writer sticks to forms and topics that they have been successful with in the past. Lopez didn't do this. He ranged widely. His early short stories (in Desert Notes and River Notes) are mostly sketches, brief moments, maybe prose poems. Winter Count mixes those sorts of stories with more developed ones: we see the writer becoming a storyteller. Field Notes is the work of a writer really in command of his talent. His next collection, Light Action in the Caribbean, is a development and a departure from what came before. It is his most inconsistent book in terms of the quality of the stories, with his greatest highs and lowest lows, but it is thrilling because it is the work of someone who is stretching, experimenting — he challenges himself to go beyond the vision and style of all his earlier work, and he titles the book after his most angry and violent story, a story few people would have guessed he would write. (And he ends the book with "The Mappist", for me his greatest single work of fiction, one of the great short stories of American literature.) Then came Resistance, a sort of novel in stories (but not quite a novel, not quite stories), a new approach again, melding a nonfictional voice with fictional content, strange and fragmentary, a book of glimpses and hints and voices.

Seek out these smaller works. But be patient with them. They do not yield their wonders immediately. They ask you to sit, to meditate. You must not read these things quickly. They were not made for TikTok.

Barry Lopez is dead. Today is his birthday. The first birthday after his death was an insurrection in Washington, D.C. With these facts in mind, I can only think to quote Lopez himself, from the end of the first essay in a posthumous collection, Embrace Fearlessly the Burning World, an essay titled "Six Thousand Lessons": 

I began with an intuition, that the world was, from place to place  and from culture to culture, far more different than I had been led to  believe. Later, I began to understand that to ignore these differences was not simply insensitive but unjust and perilous. To ignore the differences does not make things better. It creates isolation, pain, fury, despair. Finally, I came to see something profound. Long-term, healthy patterns of social organization, among all social life forms, it seemed to me, hinged on work that maintained the integrity of the community while at the same time granting autonomy to its individuals. What made a society beautiful and memorable was some combination of autonomy and deference that, together, minimized strife.
It is now my understanding that diversity is not, as I had once  thought, a characteristic of life. It is, instead, a condition necessary for life. To eliminate diversity would be like eliminating carbon and expecting life to go on. This, I believe, is why even a passing acquaintance with endangered languages or endangered species or endangered cultural traditions brings with it so much anxiety, so much sadness. We know in our tissues that the fewer the differences we encounter in our travels, the more widespread the kingdom of death has become.


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image: portrait of Barry Lopez by Robert Kaiser, 1997, via The Oregonian

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