Some words in memory of a friend

by David Abram

Dale Pendell. Just the sound of this somewhat unusual name brings — for me and, I suspect, for many others — a whiff of magic, intimations of things marvelous and yet deeply real. I have been teaching in Devon, England, these last few weeks, and upon dropping around the home of an unusually gifted oral storyteller working in the Celtic tradition, I glimpsed a copy of one of Dale’s books on his shelf, and I pulled it out, exclaiming, “Dale’s just left us, you know…”

“No!” he yelled, and straightaway began wailing. He’d only encountered Dale’s work in the last year, and had already come to feel him as a close ally — though they’d never met. So it is with Dale, whose work steadily feeds the creative craft of countless other persons in other places — poets, philosophers, novelists, healers, scientists, mystics, artists of all sorts.

Although Dale and I had a number of very long and luminous conversations over the phone, I only got to spend time with him and his beautiful partner Laura a couple times, each lasting several days. First at their wonderful home at Mantis Hill, when he and I put on an evening of wild ecological storytelling and ritual in a fine auditorium Grass Valley, and then a year or two later in Point Reyes, where we did some teaching together. It was all too brief, but I was immeasurably altered, and deepened, by these encounters with a soulful man of great elegance, eloquence, and generosity, possessed of a wild and free-ranging imagination that was both mischievous and wise. Darkly wise. Whimsically wise. Dale’s was a capacious heart and a most compassionate intelligence. Any one who has read his entries in his online journal, The Retort, recognizes his ferocious candor and honesty, and his ease with vulnerability. He was a really beautiful guy.

For me, Dale was a brother-in-magic, a genuine natural magician — which of course was the original name for what we now call science. Paracelsus was a natural magician. Giordano Bruno was a natural magician. Dale Pendell was a natural magician — very much so, a researcher honing and refining the experimental method, bringing it up to date. He was a chemist in the best sense — an alchemist, or rather an OWL-CHEMIST, as was obvious from his resplendant eyebrows.

He was also an owl-chemist with words — a practitioner of mythopoesis, a shapeshifter conjuring reality with the craft of magic speech. He wielded words in strange ways, story-thick, image-laden and synaesthetic. His was not really a metaphoric language, but rather a METAMORPHIC language, invoking a shapeshifting reality in which each thing or being was crouched in readiness to become something else. For Dale was really an Animist with Buddhist leanings, or perhaps a Buddhist with wild Animist leanings. An animist, for sure — since there is in his writing no thing that is definitively inert or inanimate, no object that does not have its own interior animation and expressive potency, it’s own pulse. All earthly things are filled with wondrous and sometimes dangerous agency for Mr. Pendell. I have gobs of favorite passages from his books. Here is just one of them, from when he is writing about the nature of the ally:

Allies live in the wilderness. That is a good place to find them. Don’t get hung up looking for jaguars: mountains can be allies, rain is an ally, minerals are allies. Some are more active and some are more passive. Some you can trust, with some you need to parley; some are so powerful it doesn’t matter whether you trust them or not. Go alone.

Of course, Dale himself was a remarkable ally. Not just to his many friends, or to the many writers, thinkers and artists nourished by his work. He was a major ally to the rooted and leafing and flowering beings, and to many animals as well — to raven and coyote and spider. But more secretly and sacredly, Dale was an ally to the winds, to the waters, and the rocks — to the bony goodness of the body and the stony solidity of the breathing Earth. He was a brother and lover of the palpable terrain where he lived — a deep ally, that is, of the ground underfoot.

Hence his insistence, even and especially in his Pharmako trilogy, on cultivating what he called ‘the ground state.’ If we don’t know the ground state — the feel of that place we go not when we get high, but when we drop down low and touch ground, that place where we are utterly at home with ourselves, the realm of simple, clear-eyed wakeful clarity, unclouded by chemistry and uncluttered by concepts — if we’re not familiar with the ground state then how can we possibly track the effect that any particular plant — any particular poison or medicine — is having upon us?

Dale’s magic, and the outrageous wonder of his books, is that he is able to dance gracefully between divergent realities, to glide and leap between wildly different and even incommensurable worlds — he moves in a world made up of worlds within worlds within worlds. Yet it’s clear that he’s able to do so only by virtue of continually cultivating a profound familiarity and intimacy with the ground state — by replenishing his alignment and alliance with the ground underfoot. Only by joining himself to the ground, again and again — only by keeping faith with the palpable earth — is he able to so artfully calibrate and recalibrate his leaps and glides and tumbles through the innumerable other worlds that he visits. For after all, among all the countless worlds — the many psychedelic worlds, and the microscopic realms, and the vast galactic realms, among all the evanescent spiritual worlds and the many virtual worlds that now claim our attention — there exists only one world sufficiently outrageous and impossibly weird enough to contain within it a portal, or threshold, onto every one of those other worlds. What I learn from Dale’s work is that only one world is inexhaustibly complex enough to contain an opening onto all the others — and it just happens to be the same world that we share with all these wild-flowering plants: this earthly biosphere, this Earth.

For all his renown as a poet of altered states, Dale’s real art was to show that all those states are secretly rooted here, in the actual ground underfoot — this earthly ground that we share with the other animals and the plants, the most magical world of them all. He was a poet-bard-physician providing potent medicine and necessary poison for a culture woefully estranged from the Real in its wonder. His craft was at every point in service to the more-than-human earth. I shall miss him greatly — but I will keep consulting him through his writings, through the plants, in the waters and the gusting winds.