Exit a shaman

I have been struggling to accept that Sam Shepard is gone. I never met him, but his fierce dreamscapes, the theater he conjured from the detritus of the American West, were profoundly meaningful to me as I came of age, another son of the West wondering where, and how, the myths had gone. For those of us who were exposed to his theater in the Bay Area of the 70's-80's, or who (like me, in college), have had a chance to perform those hallucinatory--yet somehow emotionally precise--raving monologues and stripped-bare showdowns before an audience, his theatrical voice was a mysterious revelation, an incantation, gushing from some ineffable psychic wound that made his work deeply human. A shaman is gone, but the crack that he opened in the language, and our imagination, remains.

Please also read Patti Smith's beautiful remembrance of her friend.

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