Arrive at the Silence of Yourself: Reading Brautigan

“The light pours itself through a small hole in the sky. I’m not very happy, but I can see how things are faraway.”

After he committed suicide by gunshot, it was weeks before Brautigan’s body was found. As the apocryphal story goes, he wrote in his suicide note: “Messy, isn’t it?”

These words are what led me to read Brautigan. Hardcore punk band Dangers adopted these words as the title for their 2010 album. Whether or not Brautigan actually wrote this seems to be up for debate but it would certainly fit him.

“In Watermelon Sugar” was the standout piece in this collection though “Trout Fishing in America” lived up to its legend. Brautigan has a reputation for being funny but I didn’t find him very funny. I’d say he had a gift of perception, of re-viewing this awful world in which we find ourselves marooned. Most of his language is compact and muscular but his metaphors run wild, going places that are often impossible to follow, which oddly enough makes more sense.

I’ll place him up there with James Agee in my pantheon of American authors who were too much alive for this society predicated on death. All I am is bewildered.

As Brautigan wrote: “he was leaving for America, often only a place in the mind.” Maybe there’s an America somewhere in the sky, hidden in the pockets of clouds. Six-foot-something even without his hat, Brautigan had a head start.