Twenty-nine orbits around the sun ago this week, 377 moons, one of the most wide-ranging, far out and ultimately attained minds of the last many centuries died singing in the Chelsea Hotel.
He was a master polymath, world renowned in string figures and ethnomusicology, in Ukrainian Easter eggs and underground avant-garde film, in fomenting social revolution through folk music and as a Kabbalist and occultist of the utmost highest order. For starters.
Anthropologist Laureate
Harry Smith was the most human person you could meet, and unlike any other human you could ever meet. He’d read everything, remembered everything, saw into the heart of the patterns of nature and drew powerful, universal connections like most of us draw breath.
He could sit silent for eight or eleven hours at party full of wild geniuses so as not to disturb a field audio recording—his life’s work of the last stage of his incarnation—or could hold forth for hours in a cabin where tree stumps, logs and large stones formed the furnishings, on the most arcane and fascinating aspects of virtually any anthropological or philosophical matter at hand—all while smoking the most copious clouds of cannabis and tobacco smoke this side of Woodstock.
He had a bitingly wonderful, wickedly clever and rascally sense of humor, and he could be wonderfully stubborn or unfailingly generous, both within the flash of half a moment. He forsake all stability, every last shred of bourgeois or even basic human comfort and security to be a seer, philosopher and artist. His paintings, films, writings, recordings and collections are all masterful and best in class, and yet he never had any sort of career or aspirations to remuneration or renown beyond whatever hustle was necessary to front the next moment.
An absolutely pure, revolutionary and American creative spirit.
Master Bibliophile
Harry was the only being who could ever outlast me in a bookstore. I had best friends who would simply abandon me, leave and take the wheels rather than continue to wait for me to respond at long last to their pleas to leave after hours of browsing. Yet I would drive Harry to a store and after about half a day I might be ready for the next phase, if only to recaffeinate or eat—but not Harry.
We’d go to a massive, packed, half a city-block long two story affair and you could actually experience a customer come in, ask the proprietor something, and then hear him holler out to Harry, “Hey Harry, have we got any Leo Frobenius?”
“Yeeeeees,” Harry would answer in his signature sly, drawn out throaty and nasally way, “there’s a second edition of Kulturgeschichte Afrikas misfiled in Travel, behind the double stack on the second shelf from the bottom.”
The Patterns Of The Universe
We’d leave with a stack half as tall as Harry—hunchbacked as he was from decades of film editing work where he’d conducted astonishingly masterful and light-years-before-their-time, frame-by-frame painted animations. He’d hustled the dough for the books of course, often from his slightly exasperated but ever-accommodating main patron Allen Ginsberg—and repair to his cabin for nutritional smoke and conversation.
Eventually I’d leave and as often as not drop back by the next morning. The book stack was now scattered asunder, and I’d see he’d be hundreds of pages into a book about, for example, seals.
“Oh hello John!” he’d warmly greet. “Got any graaaaaassss????”
“Did you know,” he’d continue, “that only in countries where men drink milk do they write epic poetry?”
American Grandmaster
He wrote some numinous poems, but for the many many many things he was, poet was not one of them. He said he hung out primarily with poets because they were the only ones with something to say. Still, in all our conversations, he often espoused a knowledge of the body of world poetry that easily eclipsed most lifelong poets, and the same was true for dozens of the most complex and special disciplines.
This does not scratch the surface. Would fill a book to note all the insights and patterns and anecdotes he tossed off in between tokes, and beyond the intellectual dimensions, there would be fascinating, curious, outrageous, unexplainable and wildly funny phenomena ever propagated in the energetic orbit about Harry Smith—in life as well as in death.
So Thanksgiving for me is about holding sacred the kindness shown by indigenous people to the religious pilgrims in the early 1620’s era vulgeris, but also holding dear the most creative, syncretic, magical and free spirit I have ever encountered.
Know it or not, you and everyone else is tremendously in his debt.
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Here, for but one example of his artistic and spiritual prowess, is his version of the most profound symbol in the history of mankind—The Tree Of Life:
❏