Wild Fox Zen
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Author Bill Holm died last week very near Minneota, Minnesota, where he was born and raised. In an essay of his that I’m rereading, “The Music of Failure: Variations on an Idea,” in The Heart Can Be Filled he says, “At fifteen, I could define failure fast: to die in Minneota, Minnesota.”
Bill was from Icelandic stock and lived there for a while as a young man. He writes with a clear and steady eye. It’s a style of writing that interests me in the same way that taking pictures from the woods near my house interests me.
Further on in the same essay, “The Music of Failure,” he addresses the issue of failure, refreshingly not in Buddhist terms:
Nothing that is itself can conceivably be termed a failure by the transcendental definition. But things must acknowledge and live up to their selfness. This is fairly effortless for a horse or a cow, more difficult for a human being, and judging by the evidence of history, almost impossible for a community or a country. When it happens occasionally, as I argue that it did in the case of the Icelanders, it creates a rare wonder, a community that has eaten its own failures so completely that it has no need to be other than itself. Iceland has no army, because an army cannot defend anything genuinely worth defending. In my more melancholy utopian moments, I think America would be better defended without one, too.
I look forward to reading more of Holm’s work.
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