They got a name for the winners in the world.
I want a name when I lose...
These days, my thoughts revisit the past, old memories, old pulsations of the heart.
Along this mystic spiral path, I rediscovered the issues of Alcheringa—a journal published between 1970 and 1980 devoted to “ethnopoetics”—available entirely online. These are just the sort of things I loved my freshman year: that poetry’s primal energy is embodied in speech, not writing, that we ought give listen to the voices of non-literate/pre-literate peoples, indigenous peoples, real stone-age peoples.
In examining some of Alcheringa I came across Jaime de Angulo, a name I’d vaguely heard of but in fact knew nothing about (for some reason, I’d imagined he was a popularizer of peyote, but I was wrong).
An entry by Bob Callahan, Alcheringa: Ethnopoetics. New series volume 1, no. 1, 1975:
. . . The son of a Spanish Don, de Angulo came to America at the age of eighteen, and worked his way out west as a cowboy, taking odd jobs on ranches in Wyoming and Colorado. He arrived in San Francisco just in time for the earthquake of '06. In San Francisco he began to study medicine at the former Cooper Medical College - Cooper then to Johns Hopkins where he received his first medical degree in 1912. The next year de Angulo became a partner in the ranch [in Alturas, Modoc County, California], and met the Pit River People for the first time. His introduction was cut short however by the outbreak of the First World War. He volunteered for service, and before long he was sent to Ann Arbor to attend an early course on psychiatry for army physicians. He graduated then stayed on as an instructor at the school for the remainder of the war.
Back at the ranch a few months later de Angulo decided to drive a herd of horses down from the plateau through the long, five hundred mile, central valley to new homestead land in the Big Sur. . . [and this is only the beginning!]
This last bit about a homestead claim at Big Sur especially caught my eye. In 1972-73, while I was in the Army studying Chinese at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, I had the opportunity to hike and camp and soak in the hot springs at Big Sur, and the region makes a big impression! Thus enabled to picture the coastal region of Monterey, Carmel, Pacific Grove, Asilomar, Arroyo Seco, Tassajara, Berkeley, and San Francisco, I thought it would be fun to read up on de Angulo, who sounded to be a wild, somewhat shamanistic character.
And so for the past couple of weeks I’ve been reading two excellent books about him: 1) a biography written by his daughter Gui de Angulo, The Old Coyote of Big Sur: The Life of Jaime de Angulo (1995), that makes great use of his voluminous letter correspondence, and 2) Andrew Schelling’s Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture (2017), that sets Jaime de Angulo’s accomplishments in the context of American poetry.
There’s really too much to say about Jaime de Angulo —he’s a legend and a mystery—but I’ll toss in a few specimens to give you something of the flavor.
Specimen #1: Jaime’s short piece for The Carmelite, a local paper, Jeffers issue of December 12th, 1928. [Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), a popular American poet, arrived in Carmel around 1914 and built a stone house on the beach.]
“No, I couldn't tell you anything about Jeffers. That man is a mystery to me and has always been. I don't know what he is thinking about, or how he thinks, and as I have never read any of his books...I liked him because he is good-looking. He never talked with me. I did all the talking. I don't know whether he ever understood a word of what I said. But that didn't matter. On the contrary, that was the beauty of it: to talk to a man, and to know that he is not listening to your words. It's like carrying a conversation with yourself. You talk and talk and say anything you feel like saying without any regard for the contradictions, and all the while you have a feeling that the fellow is thinking and thinking about something else, something inside of him. You are perhaps walking with him along the road by the beach. There is the stunted chaparral, and the sand, the beach, the breakers booming. We both see all that. I talk. He is dreaming away. The stunted chaparral, the breakers, the glistening sand colour, my talk. They colour his dreaming. Somehow or other his dreaming gets inside of me and my words get inside of him.
Then he built himself a house, with his own hands. Enormous boulders, mortar half of cement, walls as thick as half the room inside. Why did he do it? He doesn't know himself. But I could tell him. It was all for the sake of that little window, that tiny little window upstairs, where you lie on your stomach and peep at the stormy sea outside.”
Specimen #2: Brochure advertising de Angulo’s ranch Los Pesares (“The Sorrows”) as a dude ranch, to raise money during the Depression:
Specimen #3:
In conclusion, Specimen #4:
A recording of a Jaime de Angulo 1949 KPFA radio broadcast, The Story of the Gilak Monster and his Sister the Ceremonial Drum. Reproduced by permission of the Pacifica Foundation, Los Angeles (6:14).
Interesting piece couldn’t hear the audio