I just ate my first biscuit from an airport. In front of me, a chatty bartender is enjoying morning conversation with a chatty passenger. Between topic sentences, he cracks a few Coronas and hands them to travelers. I can’t decide which is more odd: the 7AM beers or the 7AM Panda Express. I’m settling into my coffee.
I’m traveling to Carmel (CA) for a residency at Robinson Jeffers’ Tor House. In honor of this privilege, here is a rebroadcast of an early Dwelling post (and the most popular until I wrote my first “Listical”).
Robinson Jeffers: The Watchman of Tor House
If ever a poet has understood the humility with which we must face the world, it is Robinson Jeffers. His poetry gave voice to what the poet-king David penned: “Man is like a breath; his days are like a passing shadow” (Ps. 144:4). In Jeffers’ work, the natural world is always surpassing, outlasting, and swallowing the human. In contrast to our fleeting lives, he heralded the “enormous inhuman / Beauty of things…the beauty of God, the eternal / beauty.”1 This transcendental Beauty – Stoic in its metaphysical totality – encompassed both the screams of tragedy and the calm solace of the surf: “Beauty is not always lovely; the fire was beautiful, the terror / Of the deer was beautiful.”2
Given the power of Jeffers’ voice and his harsh condemnations, it is easy to imagine the poet as callous and misanthropic. After all, he wrote that “civilization is a transient sickness.”3 Yet, his “inhumanism” is less a philosophy and more an embodied corrective to malignant human arrogance. Solipsism must be burned in order to see the “beauty of God.” At the heart of Jeffers’ life and work, there lies a deep affirmation. Behind the poetic sword, we find a father reading to his boys and eulogizing their bulldog’s grave. If Jeffers bludgeons with his verse, the violence is a defense against the onslaught that would slay his home.
The home represents, for Jeffers, a harmonious intersection between frail human projects and the durable natural world. Nowhere is this more clearly manifested than in Tor House.
My visit to Carmel last spring solidified this interpretation in my mind. A sense of home rests on the tucked-away plot of coastal land, a “beautiful secret / In places and stars and stones.”4
Tom Rusert, Tor House’s program coordinator and now friend, showed me around the property. I had driven through a storm in Southern California that morning, and the weather followed my itinerary. When I arrived, blasts of Pacific wind threw salt-drenched air against the coast and our eyes. Inside the house, however, it was silent. We read poems aloud and each syllable sank into the stone.
We crossed the small interior garden to Hawk Tower. I climbed the secret passage that Jeffers hid inside the tower’s belly. Tom led the way to the pinnacle, the little perch where Jeffers watched the sun set with his evening glass of red wine and cigarette. We looked out over the surf at the breakers to find their terminus against the cliff. The moment was alive with wonder.
A picture of dwelling coalesced, a deep sense of rest in Jeffers’ bivouac. In his poem commemorating the house’s cornerstone, Jeffers described a reciprocal relationship between humanity and the environment:
no one
Touched you [the stone] with love, the gray hawk and the red hawk touched
you
Where now my hand lies. So I have brought you
Wine and white milk and honey for the hundred years of famine
And the hundred cold ages of sea-wind.
I did not dream the taste of wine could bind with granite,
Nor honey and milk please you; but sweetly
They mingle down the storm-worn cracks among the mosses,
Interpenetrating the silent
Wing-prints of ancient weathers long at peace, and the older
Scars of primal fire, and the stone
Endurance that is waiting millions of years to carry
A corner of the house, this also destined.
Lend me the stone strength of the past and I will lend you
The wings of the future, for I have them.
How dear you will be to me when I too grow old, old comrade.5
The longevity of the granite far eclipses the human presence. Yet the human presence is reconciled with the natural world in the project of building. The stone is anointed with honey and milk and wine. It is set apart and consecrated for an affirming use, to “build us a hold against the host of the air.”6 In a Heideggerian sense, the house brings the fourfold together. It safeguards the earth, sky, others, and the divinities. It gathers together consciousness and stone.
There is a central reciprocity: “the strength of the past” and the “wings of the future” are combined in the act of building. Such togetherness produces a deep sense of being at home, dwelling. Jeffers is tender toward his “old comrade.”
I recently had a conversation with Tom, discussing this idea of being-at-home.
Tom emphasized the tactile attributes of life at Tor House, the embodied acts of dwelling that were central to their everyday life: building fires, cooking together, walking beside the shore, planting trees, reading to each other. These acts of home rooted the family in the physical world, the analog: “the House had running water, but no gas, electricity, or telephone.”7
This encounter with the physical led to the imprint of the family upon the place. Robinson and Una intertwined their interests into the place itself. In Tor House, one will find artifacts (collected by them or given to them) from around the world :
“Seven pre-Columbian terra-cotta heads from the Teotihaucan ruins of Mexico were cemented into the structure, along with an obsidian sacrificial dagger, an Aztez mask, a fragment of a mosaic from the ancient roman city of Timgad in North Africa, a fragment of a meteorite, a stone from Ossian’s grave, a piece of marble from Hadrian’s villa, a piece of carved white marble from the Greek island of Delos, a sculpted human torso from northwest Indian, three tesserae from the Roman baths of Caracalla, a fragment of a wall painting from Pompeii, three stone from an Indian cave at Tassajara, stones from the Carmel mission, stones from the ruins of Melrose Abbey and Dryburgh Abbey in Scotland, stones from nearly every round tower in Ireland, a pottery fragment from an earthwork on the Orkney Isalnds, and a piece of white rock from the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt.”8
Karman rightly notes: “Clearly, the house they built for themselves was more than a simple cottage by the sea.”9 Their home was an amalgamation of their world. The place adopted the contours of their values and the shape of their life. In Tor House, the marks of life are quite literally set in stone.
Contrast this with modern interior design. You will find spaces that look ever more like a showroom in an IKEA. Clean. Ordered. Sanitary. You might be in a den or a dentist’s office. The décor of mass production moves the home one step closer to the ubiquity of a hotel. We try to erase the human presence.
In addition to being speckled with these artifacts, Tor House was also tattooed. Jeffers painted small poems and family mantras on the wall. It’s hard to miss the playfulness in these watermarks of home, a playfulness that is easily overlooked. But, as Tom rightly noted, “Hawk Tower is the ultimate tree house, complete with a dungeon.” The Tower was not just a place for Jeffers to carry the heavy mantle of his art. It was also a place for Una and the boys. It was a place to be together and at home.
American philosopher Henry Bugbee wrote that “…the life we lead and the philosophy we believe in our hearts cannot be independent of each one another.”10 It is tempting to imagine a yawning chasm between Jeffers’ philosophy and life. Yet, his testament to place argues against such a split.
Tom has recently encouraged docents to help craft this holistic approach by making more substantial use of Jeffers’ letters, collected and curated by Jim Karman. By approaching the prose before the poetry, one can encounter the man before the artist. In doing so, we don't neglect the art but establish the horizons to rightly frame the verse. We can recognize that there was indeed a man – a husband and father and grandfather – behind the thundering poetic voice.
I’ve come to think of Jeffers as a watchman. Una noted that her husband would never go to bed without first going outdoors, often around midnight.11 I can see Jeffers walking along Tor, tracing the canvas of sky as it moved across dark water, a night watchman, guarding the little home. There is something hauntingly beautiful about a man who stretched his thoughts to the heights of philosophy, poetry, and theology, and yet lived close to the earth. It wasn’t a trick, and he wasn’t a guru.
As Tom and I reminisced about our stormy day at Tor House, we tried to articulate the gripping nature of the place itself. We fumbled at words: energy, presence, mood?
The atmosphere was thick with echoes of artistic mastery, of the poet striving at the ineffable. Yet, there were other reverberations. The residue of a family clung to the stone and the ever-renewing collapse of surf.
If you know someone who might also enjoy Dwelling, please share. Word-of-mouth is one of the best sources for growth on Substack. I would deeply appreciate it. Thanks!
“To Kill in War is Not Murder”
“Fire on the Hills”
“New Mexican Mountain”
“Salvage”
“To the Rock That Will Be a Cornerstone of the House”
“To the House”
James Karman, Robinson Jeffers: Poet of California, 29.
Ibid. 30-31.
Ibid. 31.
The Inward Morning, 107.
Karman, 31-32.