April 15, 16, 17
A run with Willa this morning from Bishop’s Beach towards Diamond Ridge & back, along the waterfront at low tide, the sloping slate-grey rocks & seastacks like the barnacled backs of beached walrus. Closer to the shoreline, how the sand lays itself out in ripples that firm up, inches apart, & stretch in semicircles along the receded arm of the waves, themselves multiform, scalloped in their entries across the sand so they might appear from overhead a frothing gossamer doily, a fringe-end, no semblance of straight line. The bay cut half from view by thick & malingering fog, save for a window of sunlight miles along towards the Cook Inlet proper, sparking those distant peaks with sunlit snow. It was good to run, to feel a coursing in me. & spent time before in the library, searching half-assed after anything—a job, a rocking chair for sale in the paper, something upon which to hang my energies. Took out the Skeet Monastery dog-training book, to Willa’s imminent delight I’m sure. Heard from Pete here in town & I’ll help raise the radar on his boat tomorrow afternoon, strip it of its winterized shrink-wrap. A busy schedule I keep. Truth is, I am realizing that I bumble increasingly before seeking out employ & balk at the prospect of any kind of tenured endeavor, not out of sloth or indolence but out of respect for the fact that I have been in denial without quite recognizing it. Hard to call it that, replete as each day has been with breakdowns & lulls & longing & protracted hours of something kin to anguish, but now, the gravity in each instant thickens, the weight of each breath that falls from my lungs a new heft. I am in it, & I do not know what it is, exactly. Only after almost seven years I am suddenly alone in Alaska—that is, perhaps remarkably, as far as my exasperated understanding goes. Past that I cannot comment, abandoned to utter & complete indeterminacy. I am fully aware, now especially, of the import of imbuing these crucial days with intention, guiding them even if I give in to them, holding my chin up even if I am prostrate. I am finally amid the work I set out to do, opening the door & letting myself in, sitting down to engage in an exhaustive & ongoing conversation, a plague of questions locust-hummed, beating against the bare bulb. Times in the past I’ve been this way I’ve focused so poorly. In Providence at twenty-one I stared at blank walls & waited for some knock on my door that never came. At twenty-six in Iowa those months I drank myself blind & stupid, acting a child, hazarding my heart, a ruinous work. I know now what not to do, how not to act as custodian to this ache. I am flooded by it, but it will pass, leaving this intact, that salvageable, this disappeared & that held close. One prepares for a flood, after one has seen its inexorable arrival, not by attempting to divert it, but by bracing & enduring, intrepid, a faith in its finitude, clutching its fluxing crucible to one’s chest. Until that moment when one emerges, water-battered, soaked through, a fine exhale of blue breath, one can only wait, listen for a quieting, slack-limbed, locust against a light.
***
I grow anxious at dawn. Like light cuts clear the cleft that rendered me here, sets its quick-sloped & sheer cliff-lines in sharp relief. Where I almost came to know the sweetness in the meadow air atop Turtleback Mountain, or the acrid & malingering odor of decay at low-tide along the cove. The cawing of the blackbirds, the ritual cacophony of the rooster each morning. That cathedral of a barn. Or the hotels along the way, or the shuddering at the border, the slow awakening to the cold fact of absence. I couldn’t tell you the names of the towns I slept in. I couldn’t tell you, now, the stretches of road that steered my mind from my heart’s pursuit, that conjured a hand to my chest & spilled praise from my lips. Or those many weeks meandering across the country, the Salt Flats, San Francisco, the redwoods, the Snake River in its slow bends, running into Tahoe’s emerald-blue water. Or Denver before, some fevered & riotous place in my memory, some distant ghost of myself animated in recollection, footfall clapping in echo. & before. & before. Blade to draw, past to sever, to find myself this lumbering island again, this floe pushed past every familiar shore. How I lodge myself in some other’s cocoon, stunt my own manifesting, hush my own tremulous voice & bind it gagging in fear. Caterpillar, to weaving, then. Is every move pretext to delay? If I cannot blame the ground beneath me, would I then blame myself, finally? & what would I put off, what would substantiate my hesitations? If I move, I remain novel victim, wind-martyred. That child in me. So let it here cocoon me, enwrap me, skein, warp & weft, & fill my mouth with silk, & empty it of babble, of words spelled in straw. Brittle house, frail hovel, stretch to taut to cover over. I’ll abide.
***
Thinking this morning about the value of & commitment to honesty harbored here with me in this small space, equitable companion. Awakened again heavy-hearted, a headache even, but have tried, as ever in this process, to allow for the dolor that underwrites an eventual joy. & minutes into the morning air, Hopkins sprung upon me from his waiting in the wings—
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call of thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile
His an anguish rooted & clouding both, a soul’s torment that endured through many years. & I wouldn’t offer mine as a tormenting mind, nor consider my Jackself jaded, though I am well aware of my tendencies towards the dramatic. In all, it is merely the notion of kindness to self that appeals to me this morning. In Chodron, she touches on the same idea. Honesty can attain to generative heights only if tempered with kindness. Only if comfort find root-room. The difficulty here for me is separating the act of living honestly, which I take for the presiding concern, the compass & cartographer of my time now, from the act of conclusion. The impulse to totalize, to investigate with pretext, to anticipate meaning, even if by calling after an echo, conjuring a ghost. Hardest to let moment dehisce blankly into moment, a husk layer-sheathed, another husk. Totality & infinity, for Levinas. The Saying & the Said. To refrain from a stale dialogue with the touchstones of my past—or rather, to recognize those touchstones re-animated in their retrieval. to sound without hope of precise measure. How I am both who I have been & something entirely other. One thinks of retreat, of a terminal bid with honesty, as a sort of field work to evaluate certain hypotheses. Surely, that plays into it here, but the challenge is letting the page go blank before turning it. Discovery rather than recovery. & kindness along the course.
& a Nietzsche bit that has helped years over to pull me from ossifying: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” Truth, for him, was willingness-to-call-truth, a rack upon which we hang our hats. No telos. No working-towards. No system by which to gauge progress or demerit—only the blank possibility suffusing each day with its morning.
***
I grow anxious at dawn. Like light cuts clear the cleft that rendered me here, sets its quick-sloped & sheer cliff-lines in sharp relief. Where I almost came to know the sweetness in the meadow air atop Turtleback Mountain, or the acrid & malingering odor of decay at low-tide along the cove. The cawing of the blackbirds, the ritual cacophony of the rooster each morning. That cathedral of a barn. Or the hotels along the way, or the shuddering at the border, the slow awakening to the cold fact of absence. I couldn’t tell you the names of the towns I slept in. I couldn’t tell you, now, the stretches of road that steered my mind from my heart’s pursuit, that conjured a hand to my chest & spilled praise from my lips. Or those many weeks meandering across the country, the Salt Flats, San Francisco, the redwoods, the Snake River in its slow bends, running into Tahoe’s emerald-blue water. Or Denver before, some fevered & riotous place in my memory, some distant ghost of myself animated in recollection, footfall clapping in echo. & before. & before. Blade to draw, past to sever, to find myself this lumbering island again, this floe pushed past every familiar shore. How I lodge myself in some other’s cocoon, stunt my own manifesting, hush my own tremulous voice & bind it gagging in fear. Caterpillar, to weaving, then. Is every move pretext to delay? If I cannot blame the ground beneath me, would I then blame myself, finally? & what would I put off, what would substantiate my hesitations? If I move, I remain novel victim, wind-martyred. That child in me. So let it here cocoon me, enwrap me, skein, warp & weft, & fill my mouth with silk, & empty it of babble, of words spelled in straw. Brittle house, frail hovel, stretch to taut to cover over. I’ll abide.
***
Thinking this morning about the value of & commitment to honesty harbored here with me in this small space, equitable companion. Awakened again heavy-hearted, a headache even, but have tried, as ever in this process, to allow for the dolor that underwrites an eventual joy. & minutes into the morning air, Hopkins sprung upon me from his waiting in the wings—
My own heart let me more have pity on; let
Me live to my sad self hereafter kind,
Charitable; not live this tormented mind
With this tormented mind tormenting yet.
I cast for comfort I can no more get
By groping round my comfortless, than blind
Eyes in their dark can day or thirst can find
Thirst’s all-in-all in all a world of wet.
Soul, self; come, poor Jackself, I do advise
You, jaded, let be; call of thoughts awhile
Elsewhere; leave comfort root-room; let joy size
At God knows when to God knows what; whose smile
‘s not wrung, see you; unforeseen times rather—as skies
Betweenpie mountains—lights a lovely mile
His an anguish rooted & clouding both, a soul’s torment that endured through many years. & I wouldn’t offer mine as a tormenting mind, nor consider my Jackself jaded, though I am well aware of my tendencies towards the dramatic. In all, it is merely the notion of kindness to self that appeals to me this morning. In Chodron, she touches on the same idea. Honesty can attain to generative heights only if tempered with kindness. Only if comfort find root-room. The difficulty here for me is separating the act of living honestly, which I take for the presiding concern, the compass & cartographer of my time now, from the act of conclusion. The impulse to totalize, to investigate with pretext, to anticipate meaning, even if by calling after an echo, conjuring a ghost. Hardest to let moment dehisce blankly into moment, a husk layer-sheathed, another husk. Totality & infinity, for Levinas. The Saying & the Said. To refrain from a stale dialogue with the touchstones of my past—or rather, to recognize those touchstones re-animated in their retrieval. to sound without hope of precise measure. How I am both who I have been & something entirely other. One thinks of retreat, of a terminal bid with honesty, as a sort of field work to evaluate certain hypotheses. Surely, that plays into it here, but the challenge is letting the page go blank before turning it. Discovery rather than recovery. & kindness along the course.
& a Nietzsche bit that has helped years over to pull me from ossifying: “What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.” Truth, for him, was willingness-to-call-truth, a rack upon which we hang our hats. No telos. No working-towards. No system by which to gauge progress or demerit—only the blank possibility suffusing each day with its morning.
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