The doctor was explaining how sperm moved, like salmon, and how the uterus gave them hold, created “current” so they knew which way to swim. I thought, “Jesus, salmon!” and knew I was one once. It was as real as this: I could remember the slow torture of rotting still alive in a graveled mountain stream. Humped up, masked in red and green, dressed for dancing, I was Death’s own delight, her hands caressing me...and this is the part I can’t remember: whether she laughed or wept as we rolled in love.
-       Tom Jay, The Salmon of the Heart

As I turn 40 and enter the second half of my life, it occurs to me how like the salmon is the life of the soul. Salmon is born in a rivulet, a creek, the headwaters of some greater river. He runs to the sea for a mysterious sojourn, his flesh reddens; mature, he awakens once again to his birthplace and returns there to spawn and die. Loving and dying in the home ground resounds in us. We all want a meaningful death in a familiar locale. Salmon embodies this for us, our own loving deaths – at home in the world. Salmon dwells in two places at once – in our hearts and in the world. He is essentially the same being, the sacred salmon, salmon of the heart....
- Tom Jay, Salmon of the Heart

Tom Jay: Civilization is Entropy in Drag

Tom Jay has worked as a salmon fisherman,  a bronze foundry operator, and, for the last seven years, a sculptor. He lives with his wife Mall, also a sculptor, on the Olympic Pennisula of Washington State in a “funky” pole house they built in the seventies. Together they raised a son, now attending university in New Brunswick. A lot of what Tom says has to do with serving a place – the soul of a place, the ghosts of a place. He does this with his art, and he does it with efforts to restore the salmon run to the Chimacum Creek near where he lives.

Tom met me at the Port Townsend ferry driving a twenty-two year old Toyota pick-up truck. He is fifty-eight years old – a solid, muscular man with white hair and a thick white beard. We drove a few miles down the road to the site of one of his sculptures. When I asked him how many miles his old truck had on it, he said he didn’t know. The odometer stopped working years ago. The main advantage of the truck, he said, was that when it breaks down, he can fix it with a hat pin and screw driver. He flipped open the glove compartment, I think by pounding on the dash, and, with a smile, out under from under the junk, he produced both. On the back of his little truck was a bumper sticker:  Civilization is entropy in drag. On closer inspection, I noticed that he was the author and creator of that fine sentiment. (Heron Dance subscribers can spread the message. See inside back cover).

As we drove along the road, Tom talked about salmon. The tape recorder wasn’t running but I remember him saying that although the salmon were in dramatic decline, he had no doubt they would eventually return. The question in his mind was whether or not humans would still be around when they came back. Either humans learn to revere the soul and beauty of this place, or they will perish. Later he said to me:

“If in the Northwest you wanted to have a local spirit, something that embodies the landscape, the salmon would be it. Everybody intuitively understands that. Without the chum salmon, this place would lack a soul. That’s one thing you can get agreement on in the neighborhood from everyone – whether they are wearing camouflage with .45 automatics or business suits or making wood buttons out in the woods smokin’ dope.”

Tom’s connection to salmon began as a boat puller off the coast of Alaska. We each experience a very few events that have the potential to change the course of our lives. The tendancy is to walk on by those events, to pretend they didn’t happen. They beckon change.

“We were fishing off the Fairweather Grounds about 30 miles off the coast of Glacier Bay. We were trolling with spreader polls and leaders and lots of hooks. We got on the fish. In those days, we didn’t have a lot of fancy sonar or radar stuff so it was kind of intuitive. It was up to the skipper to keep the boat on the fish, and this skipper was good. He was fishing one side, and I was on the other. It was a little like a bar room brawl and a little like hitting the jackpot on a slot machine. Blood all over the floor. You are slipping and cursing. When you are on the fish you sleep for three or four hours a night. You have the mid-night sun and you have mayhem.

            “On the second day, he started screaming at me to get the net. I said, ‘The net?’, and he said, ‘Yeah, the fuckin’ net.’ So I grabbed this big net. We were gaffing the fish. Gaffing and throwing them on board, and cleaning them later. I got to his side of the boat, and he had a huge king salmon on a kill line – a rubber line attached to a leader. The fish was five to six feet long and probably a hundred pounds. He told me to bring the net up behind this fish because the gaff wouldn’t get it out of the water. He wanted me to net it from the tail and as I started to bring it up, the fish swam just out of reach. He moved slow --  like a draft animal pulling a heavy load. When I lunged for it, it kicked. With just a wack of its tail it broke the hundred pound test leader and was gone.

“Suddenly, my world had a little tear. The tear went in my heart. I didn’t know what to call it. I just knew that that guy, and that fish, and that moment was really important. I was haunted by it. It was bigger than I was somehow.

“Years later, when I got to the Olympic Peninsula, I was walking at midnight, and I saw a coho salmon on a stream. Right away it all came back to me. I knew where I was and who I was. And for the last seven years, some neighbors and I have been working to bring the summer chum salmon back to Chimacum Creek, the major stream in our watershed. They disappeared ten or eleven years ago. They were in gradual decline and as they got down to really low numbers, we tried to trap them – see if we could steal eggs and boost their production. But that all failed, partially through our ineptness, and partially because they were probably headed for eternity anyway. Eventually, we convinced the state to let us take eggs from a sister stock on another stream if we could boost that run to a certain number of fish. The fish in that creek were going down the toilet too. Over the last five years, we got that run up from two hundred to a thousand fish. When we hit that number, we started to move eggs over to Chimacum, and this year, 1999, will be the first year we are going to get fish back -- probably about two hundred fish.

“In the process, we are beginning to learn  where in the world we are and who we are. If you don’t have the world talking to you in a real way, in a way that you have to submit to, you don’t get to learn who you are. It is a pain in the ass to get up in the middle of the night in November when the floods are going and stand up there at the hatchery with a shovel, knowing that if the snows melt and it starts to rain, you can have a little piddle creek turn into a dragon. We made a big pond and a dam to supply water to the hatchery. At certain points we would be out there sandbagging and dyking. If the dam broke, it would bury our intake and wipe out the farmer’s road whose land we were on. Which it did one year. We lost it. But that kind of stuff makes experiences that bind you to the place you live.

“I try to make art that will make tilth – I know that might sound pretentious in a culture that has no real context except vapid consumerism. I like to put it into an etymological construct, because I love words. Consumer is an old Latin word that means to destroy utterly by fire. So we call ourselves consumers. It is our self-willed disaster. We burn tremendous amounts of stuff to attain the life-style we want. I drive a car. I move on fire. It is amazing how much fire in our lives is muffled and hidden. Me too. I am not unattached to the culture. It can suck me right up. The fire can get me anytime. By accident or by a reversion to my old habits. But that is what I keep trying to work with – to be a neighbor rather than a consumer. The meaning emerges out of that; the stories emerge out of that. The whole thing.

“How do you seed a real culture? If you go to the roots of the word culture, it comes from an old Latin word which means to till the earth. Culture comes from turning over the earth so it can receive the seed and the sunlight and bloom. It’s the past. It’s the earth. It’s the ghosts. It’s the blood. The semen. The shit. All that stuff gets turned over every year. And it blossoms. So I sculpt a salmon over and over. Because that needs to happen, for me and the place here. To create that tilth. You create that salmon over and over. You are bored beyond tears. You finally get it. You told the story three hundred times, and you finally came to realize what the story was about. I don’t know what the story is half the time, but I keep trying. I made probably twenty salmon before I started to get anywhere. And now, I think I can make a hundred and fifty more before I really get it right, if ever. Maybe. No guarantees.  If I pay attention and work on it, and listen, and watch, maybe someday I’ll make a salmon that honors the critter.

“The artists I respect most are in constant rehearsal. How many ways can you kiss a beautiful woman? The real artists keep kissing, keep practicing. You forget what you are doing, but you still do it. The guys who are always going for something new are the bright poets. They strike sparks. The sparks are beautiful, and I see the brilliance, but somehow that’s not enough. Then there is the other poet, the shadow poet, who feeds himself into the fire. That poet makes a darker, smokier, longer-lasting light. A bone-warming fire. That poet touches something eternal.

“At its Latin root, art means a ‘well-made joint’. Art is the joint between human imagination and a greater world. Whether it is a piece of music, a melody, an image, a sculpture, a poem – somehow that joint you make, that container, that little moment, acts as a transmission point where if it is made well enough, other people can experience that big thing on the other side. That presence on the other side. Whatever you want to call it. Art is about creating an opportunity for beauty. It is invited in through craft and skill. And vision. Those three things are hard to get in the same place at the same time.  So it is rare. But in terms of creativity, it can be invited, or precipitated under human touch. But usually there are only a couple of those elements there, so it is not quite beautiful. The ego has to be strong to attend to the skill and the craft, and it has to be strong in its perception to serve the beauty that is trying to arrive. It can’t be manipulated. There is so much that is manipulated. And it is pretty, but ultimately it is empty.

“Beauty happens unexpectedly, but it comes out of a practice of attention and humility. And beauty is always a surprise. You can’t go expecting beauty. It comes from tilling those fields. It comes practicing that practice, staying in the place. Because it is a deep thing. It is not a superficial thing. It is not expressive. It comes out of a tilth. It comes out of a depth. It comes out of your grandmother laughing at you from the grave. It comes out of remembering something far away in the past about a dog. It is unexpected and coiled up in us. And those little joints that the artist offers can sometimes invite beauty into the world because they are part of that practice. They are part of making those little nexis points. Beauty is surprise that is latent in the world. It takes imagination to catalyze it, but it is not something that we can control or demand. It invites us.

“That is why sometimes those little Japanese Raku pots are really beautiful. Great skill, great learning and tradition, and then the artists hopes and prays for the accident that will make it beautiful. How do you attend the calling without getting in the way? God blowing through your horn. It sounds a certain way, but you don’t want to focus on the horn, you want to focus on the tune. A lot of artists, myself included, have a tendency to polish the horn, rather than play the tune. My work goes in and out of connection to the degree that I manipulate it. Rather than attend it.

 “The whole notion of beauty has come to be relative: ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.’ I say bullshit. Beauty is in itself. If two people can’t recognize beauty together, we are in deep kimchee. Something is really wrong. Our culture has become a shit pool instead of a song. For me, beauty is something in and of itself. Beauty can happen anywhere, anytime, any place. It can be the way the deer disappears into the birch glade. It can be a little kid. It can be made too.

“It is so strange that we are alive. It is amazing. If we all let it in, we’d all be crazy. Everything that has happened, has proven itself to the right thing. Life is self-assaying. Hopefully how I articulate that least honors the bizarre strange mystery.”

Tom mentioned that he was a recovering alcoholic and I asked him about that.

“There are a lot of different places in a person’s life. They all overlap and inter-penetrate. To talk about them, you break them out. But they are not broken out. I struggle with my own character a lot. I am a recovering alcoholic. There is a whole bunch of stuff around that. The black hole of addiction. And all of the ramifications of that in the family, which since I have changed some stuff, have started to work out. And in the midst of that, the art, that calling, which was always the most authentic thing – unexpected and authentic. . . .

“It surprised me how easily one can deny that one has a problem with alcohol. You could build a whole narrative around it – ‘I am a crazy, drunken, brawling artist‘,  ‘I am a tough guy’, ‘I like to party’, ‘I like to fight’ – all these things I used to do, that alcohol was involved in. I would amplify the romantic narrative. And never get to the substance of it. What I really enjoyed doing was destroying myself. At first I allowed it to happen. Then it became something in itself, where it could come and get me whenever it wanted. I didn’t have a choice anymore. The eagle would come and pick me up and I’d wake up in a ditch or jail.

“What I learned is that there are some places in life that you can’t go. There are places that are forbidden to some people. Not all people. Some guys can drink. I know guys who can get drunk once or twice a year, and they are not alcoholics. For me to live, I can’t go there. My world – I have certain context and territory. I have to live inside these boundaries, and that’s okay.”

Did the transition away from alcohol a couple of years ago affect your art?

“It affirmed it. It was poignant to see some of these ideas that I had ignored, to see that they were still there and still numinous. In the funky piles of scraps and notes, there were still these little orphans waiting for me to show up.

“Leaving the foundry had something to do with that too. The foundry is a practical world that defines itself. It was a business, a livelihood and it involved me in the lives of other artists, in artistic decisions and lots of fun stuff, but when I left it, my life came to be about inspiration rather than business. I went back into a very fundamental place – into the context of my life and the mystery of my life. Little orphan-like epiphanies came back.  They would be there on my doorstep in the morning. I’d try to raise them.”

I asked Tom how he became a sculptor.

 “In art school, I painted what I thought were big, important pictures. They were awful. They weren’t informed with skill or anything except sophmoric philosophy. But I was outside smoking a cigarette one day and I heard a roar. These crazy ceramists at the college I was at in the mid-sixties were pouring bronze. They had built a funky, home-made bronze foundry.

“It was like falling in love. If you don’t answer that, you die inside.  It’s like when I saw Mall for the first time, and knowing that if I didn’t go and talk to her, something in me would die. So I quit art school and went looking for someone who would take me on as an apprentice bronze caster. I found someone setting up a foundry. In the beginning I just wanted to learn the medium, and support my art, but it ended up becoming my living. It was almost thirty years before I turned back to sculpting full-time.

“Foundry work gave me a humility towards materials. I practiced my scales for twenty years. I got to do other artists’ sculpture, to explore all these different vocabularies. It didn’t make me brilliant, because I am more of a plodder. I have to work hard at it. I am not natively gifted like some sculptors, like for instance my wife. I am not facile. But that foundry work is invaluable to me now. 

“A lot of art is made by guys who just sketch something out and send it off to a foundry or a fabrication shop. It comes back looking big, powerful, and pretentious and it lacks the artist’s blood. I think art depends on how humble you can be with your materials, and skillful and forceful at the same time. That connection is a joyful problem -- a teaching.

“So after twenty years of running a foundry, I faced the reality that my original purpose had been to be a sculptor. I had put that dream aside for all kinds of practical reasons. Or impractical reasons. Finally, I said, “Jesus, I am forty-eight years old. This dream is getting desiccate. I better do something about it.” I started weaning myself off the foundry, and taking some chances making sculpture. The disconnect finally healed itself.

How does money part work in your life?

“The money thing is like – God it is great to sell a piece so I can keep on doing it. And I have to pay attention when I bid out a job that I don’t end up working for three dollars an hour. I try to set a scale of at least  $15 or $16 an hour. The money thing I try to handle that way. It is so reductive. The bottom line. We use that term ‘the bottom-line’ as a metaphor for fundamental. What a fucked-up world. That we imagine fundamental things as a line on the ledger. When its the Earth. Or the soil. Or it’s your own blood, or your father or mother. We have accepted the terminology of commerce for something that is a fundament. But a fundament is something that produces great things.”

Your business card has a quote, “There is no art for art’s sake, the blossoms are ghosts at the wedding.’ What does that mean?

Art is not something in and of itself – it is rife with ghosts, with karma, with character defects. Ghosts at the wedding. To pretend that the things that arrive at my doorstep are mine, that they are my ideas – that is a modern notion. They are visitors. They are not mine any more than a tree is mine. Something arrives and you are responsible for it. You attend to it. You didn’t make it, at least in the deepest, true sense. But in the modern creative world, it is necessary for it to be property. But it is not property, it is a ghost.

“The blossoms are ghosts at the wedding. Some days you are the ghost and some days you are the bride. We get to play all these different roles and parts as we go through life. The blossoms and all the celebration are ancient. Me. Me and my old body. I have to go out to the wedding every day. Yeah. Whether I want to or not. The sun has come up and the wedding is starting.

“This whole landscape is built out of salmon bodies. Out of their ghosts. Modern life doesn’t consider or allow the soul to permeate a place. We assume that we are transient. In the art scene now there are a lot of people with good intention. Strong invention. No echo. We lack the resonance that comes out of having this ghost energy around you, implicit in the landscape . We’ve lost touch with that. The absence is very new. Our psyches aren’t used to it. Our psyches grew up out of a deeper ancestral resonance -- people ghosts and salmon ghosts, and things like that.”

I asked Tom if he had an unlived life.

“There is a side that pokes up all the time that I can’t live. Basically just a hobo. A guy who is invisible but intact.  When I was young, I used to ride around on the freight trains and be with the hobos. There was something there that I loved. I don’t know what it is. I can’t describe it. If you gave yourself over to it, it wouldn’t be a false sense of freedom, it would be what it is. A poetic loneliness. Just out there going. When I was young, it was a powerful sense of freedom. Some of the guys I traveled with were pretty happy. And some were pretty sad. I don’t have any illusions about that. But if there is an unlived life that haunts me a little bit, it is that. It isn’t strong. It is a current. I wonder, ‘Why am I thinking about this?’ But it comes back all the time.

“I know that if I did it, I would miss many important parts of my life. The question is how to bring it into your life without literalizing it.“

If we accept for a moment that we are put on this Earth to learn something, what are you here for?”

“This time around I am here to learn to listen. I am coming to the last third of my life, and the koan, the riddle of my life, is how to listen. That is what I am supposed to figure out. To pay attention to the other.

“You have to learn to listen to the inside too. It is not so much to yourself, but what is inside yourself. There is a difference between listening to the ego, and listening to everything that you saw but didn’t know what you saw. And intuition – intuition plays a really important anchoring role in my life – but it only bursts to the surface on occasion. When it happens, I know I better pay attention. ‘I am in love.’ Or, ‘Shit, I am in danger.’ So I know it is a constant subtext that blossoms.  The little fragments of intuition. Not that it can be named, but we feel it.

“I was having a sweat with a guy last night – an old friend who is going through a lot of stuff. We talked about the model in contemporary western culture. Men solve problems, step into the fray. I think that heroic psychology has infected feminism too. It teaches us that we make our own meaning. But I’ve learned that meaning emerges not out of my will, but out of my relationship to the things that are around me. I’ve learned that humility is not weakness. People can have the organ of humility and be plenty strong. And they are fierce and they are powerful, but they are not deluded.”

How do you relax? Celebrate life?

“In my life now, the celebration happens in small things. The Friday or Saturday night sauna with Mal, sweating and talking slow. And then going out and sitting in the starlight, watching the moon on the water. I used to snorkle dive. I still swim down the Ducklebush River when the salmon come up. And I go hiking a couple of times a year. We live on a country road. Mall and I walk every night for a couple of miles.

“I probably celebrate life most by trying to pay attention to the little things -- even to what the carpenter ants are doing under the house.  There is a woodpecker that comes to the studio every day to work on a cedar tree. I love that stuff. How the dog turns around before he goes to sleep. Or the way the horse whinnies – Mall has this old horse – he whinnies this soft, poignant whinny – ‘We are all going to die.’ When we come to feed him, he breaks my heart sometimes.”

I asked Tom about what he found most difficult in trying to live his values.

The hardest part is living your rhetoric—articulating your life in action. The words really don’t mean much unless they come out of a condition that has been established by an action. The action has to be based on a set of principles.

It is easy to say things, to pronounce, to express, but to actually enact is something entirely different. For me it has been a continual process of learning that I have do as well as say.

Trying to live in your truth involves a degree of uncertainty and confusion. More perceived mistakes. It is a lot more of a confessional life. You haven’t taken a program and lived it. The warts and the dust show up a lot more. That has certainly been the case in later life for me.

I was very willful as young man. Until quite late there was a strong current of selfish will. There is some remorse that I am having to attend to lately. And remedy by making amends to people. There are people I’ve had to contact and say “I was wrong”. If I don’t do that, there are parts of my life that are ignorant. I am in denial. Rather than be ignorant, I want to be emotionally alive. So I go into it and say, “This was really wrong and I am sorry.” And then listen to what gets said.

 …I watched my father die angry. He was afraid. He was afraid because he hadn’t gone to some of those places and said, “Oh yeah, this was a mistake, that was a mistake.” It wasn’t that he was a bad person. Most people don’t want to do that because it is too painful. The whole ethos of modern times is this subtle but pervasive self-righteousness about the individual. The individual knows what they want and what they are—that whole relativist thing—rather than honoring connections, acknowledging that what we do hurts or helps other people. Rather than be honest about all that stuff, there is a more defensive posture in the collective culture.

 To go to people and apologize is cutting back against the flow. It is embarrassing. Some of the people I have gone to make amends to are embarrassed. They don’t know what to do. Some do. Some are welcoming and they receive it and it is enlivening. It is not predictable.