May 21, 22
The sky during protracted dusk swirled with cloud, fugitive glimpses of salmon-pink sun filtered along the edge of the ridge, the red lights of the harbor softened in a layer of thin mist hung over the Spit. From here, the fog lays like a blanket over the bay—I look down over it at nightfall, or in the morning, & gauge the gloaming or the dawn. Eos, rosy-fingered. A tired day, again, every part of me heavy while I wait for my back to return to normalcy, while I wait to run. Took a long hike past Diamond Ridge, a preserve home to moose & black & brown bear & lynx & god knows what else, winding trails of barely maintained grass, heaves of permafrost, ankle-deep puddles or rivulets in constant criss-cross. Every forest has its feel—those Tolkienesque firs in Washington shadowed & soft, the verdure & lushness of the redwoods, the scrub-brush & ponderosa pine down in New Mexico—& here it is a cragginess to the trees themselves, a rugged torsion of bark & twisted bough, a dense chaos of alder & ocean spray tangling labyrinthine, felled spruce greyed over like a corpse in ash. & the tall grass, the fireweed, the lichen & tundra moss everywhere. You couldn’t see five feet ahead if a path weren’t cut, a swath mowed, a series of planks laid down. I carry formidable respect & fear into the wilderness every time I enter it, but here I feel something more distinctly than anywhere else—this sense of interloping, of being noticeably other, vulnerable because outside of the prevailing natural sympathy. It isn’t fear exactly, but a kind of self-awareness. How the natural world here has fought tooth & nail, struggled through extremity & severity & unthinkable torsion merely to be. There is a kind of subtle, careless ferocity to the woods here sometimes, arising no doubt from sheer animal population, its bustle & flow. Not a darkness, not an ominous energy—just the animal, simple as that, writ large. Everywhere here—Willa & I have been turned in our tracks on walks & runs by the presence of a moose in the middle of our path or road. We came upon bear scat in the meadow behind the house. Or I read about eagles ravaging sandhill cranes. There is a world behind our world, & it cares nothing for our own. I think about it lately, knowing I am to move from one of the most dense bear populations to one of the wildest tracts of land left on the planet (six million acres)—I could not find surprise in any natural encounter. Fisherman drop net ten yards from grizzlies on the Kenai or Kasiloff, a kind of mutual understanding there. A child walking home from school paused & yelled “moose” to me while I walked Willa yesterday so I wouldn’t provoke the sow nibbling the reeds just off the road. It is ordinary. “There are things we live among, & to know them is to know ourselves.” Maritain in Oppen. I think often, too, about the notion of alethic thinking, of rising to ourselves as we rise to our environs, a synchrony between perception & mere being. Apophansis. What is it, then, to shift a context? To rise at once to myself & to this utter wilderness? Myself & Denali? What will filter through me there, in the vast shadow of that peak?
***
"That which thou lovest well shall never be reft from thee.” That line always, always returns to me, even in paraphrase. Tonight it ghosts me, & with it a briefest passage somewhere in a Faulkner short story—I don’t remember which one—in which the simplest of human moments unfolds into a panoramic sweeping history of humanity itself, the minute experience the optics for the grand sweeping gesture of life itself. A shaking of a hand, or the shiver of a branch, or a sparked flame to tinder, or something equally mundane, equally absent of idiosyncrasy, & he unfurls that banner tailing back even unto Eden. I like sometimes to think that way—that the instant of being in which we find ourselves continually transacting does in fact under every circumstance bear the weight of the world. & just so because, simply enough, it does. Strip life bare of belief, of faith, if the accoutrements of acute consciousness, & this is our world: a pulsing immediacy, blurring beyond the scope of mineral vision, fading into conjecture. This, then, the world. & we, arbiters & agents arbitrated both. That a fleck of sand was hewn over millennia—its quiet drama. How every detail arborizes in a kind of infinite regression until circling back upon itself, snake’s tail in snake’s own mouth. So a world poised upon its axis.
***
Awakened to Willa leaping on my chest, a cow moose feet outside the window & grazing. Then low tide this morning at the beach, the sun restrained, a wall of obdurate cloud crowning the mountains across the water, light shafting through small fissures & falling slant over the rippled sand & standing tide-pools. The little dug holes where crows beak after some left thing, scratch of their talons. Then work, then halibut & red chard for dinner, a pause while the moose again passed right when we would walk, a walk, & now the same fog falling in the same coronal across the bay, the slivered pink alpenglow a kind of secret blushed to tell. Thought about Denali all day today, in a general, removed, odd sort of way—the pros & cons of it, the probably imminent separation from Willa, that version of life I’ll be leading soon. Impossible to do, really, to prefigure an existence the details of which are absurdly foreign to you. In the past, I could picture her, or Willa at least, or even the familiar minutiae—what brand of pasta sauce I’d be eating, the artifacts of our old day-to-day, the carriage in me pulled in wake. & these days I have trouble enough picturing tomorrow for my self-same strangeness, this wisp-of-me in me yet, emptied cavern, echoed voice, lone light flashed across that capacious dark. If I am to ask myself what my life will be like I would ask first what I will be like, what I will be, & I do not know. The self dies into each day regardless, a threshing, slipping dissemblance that leaves a skeleton adorned in little hopes, small dreams. Fever the dream & let walk those bones & what a rattle to wonder after. & that cordate thing lub-dubbing in the ribs, crimson-hung where white arm stretches to hold. & that little ghosted voice. There was a book we read as kids called Funnybones where the skeleton family goes out at night to scare one another while the world sleeps—one of them, I think the dog in a clamorous game of fetch, is shattered & the ensuing pages depict these inchoate suggestions of form, sort of recognizable but for their random inversions: the tail where the head should be, the hind leg where the forepaw would fall. I’ve not thought of that book in at least a decade, but of a sudden it glares at me from its remembrance. What was that Berryman line in the Dream Songs? But it can’t be taken from its source—
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
It was that last bit in my head, though you see the necessity of its place, of what precedes it. & here spill continuously my plights & gripes, & here so often I read myself bobbing in some wake to forget my hand upon the helm. All to say it was a sad day, & nothing more.
***
"That which thou lovest well shall never be reft from thee.” That line always, always returns to me, even in paraphrase. Tonight it ghosts me, & with it a briefest passage somewhere in a Faulkner short story—I don’t remember which one—in which the simplest of human moments unfolds into a panoramic sweeping history of humanity itself, the minute experience the optics for the grand sweeping gesture of life itself. A shaking of a hand, or the shiver of a branch, or a sparked flame to tinder, or something equally mundane, equally absent of idiosyncrasy, & he unfurls that banner tailing back even unto Eden. I like sometimes to think that way—that the instant of being in which we find ourselves continually transacting does in fact under every circumstance bear the weight of the world. & just so because, simply enough, it does. Strip life bare of belief, of faith, if the accoutrements of acute consciousness, & this is our world: a pulsing immediacy, blurring beyond the scope of mineral vision, fading into conjecture. This, then, the world. & we, arbiters & agents arbitrated both. That a fleck of sand was hewn over millennia—its quiet drama. How every detail arborizes in a kind of infinite regression until circling back upon itself, snake’s tail in snake’s own mouth. So a world poised upon its axis.
***
Awakened to Willa leaping on my chest, a cow moose feet outside the window & grazing. Then low tide this morning at the beach, the sun restrained, a wall of obdurate cloud crowning the mountains across the water, light shafting through small fissures & falling slant over the rippled sand & standing tide-pools. The little dug holes where crows beak after some left thing, scratch of their talons. Then work, then halibut & red chard for dinner, a pause while the moose again passed right when we would walk, a walk, & now the same fog falling in the same coronal across the bay, the slivered pink alpenglow a kind of secret blushed to tell. Thought about Denali all day today, in a general, removed, odd sort of way—the pros & cons of it, the probably imminent separation from Willa, that version of life I’ll be leading soon. Impossible to do, really, to prefigure an existence the details of which are absurdly foreign to you. In the past, I could picture her, or Willa at least, or even the familiar minutiae—what brand of pasta sauce I’d be eating, the artifacts of our old day-to-day, the carriage in me pulled in wake. & these days I have trouble enough picturing tomorrow for my self-same strangeness, this wisp-of-me in me yet, emptied cavern, echoed voice, lone light flashed across that capacious dark. If I am to ask myself what my life will be like I would ask first what I will be like, what I will be, & I do not know. The self dies into each day regardless, a threshing, slipping dissemblance that leaves a skeleton adorned in little hopes, small dreams. Fever the dream & let walk those bones & what a rattle to wonder after. & that cordate thing lub-dubbing in the ribs, crimson-hung where white arm stretches to hold. & that little ghosted voice. There was a book we read as kids called Funnybones where the skeleton family goes out at night to scare one another while the world sleeps—one of them, I think the dog in a clamorous game of fetch, is shattered & the ensuing pages depict these inchoate suggestions of form, sort of recognizable but for their random inversions: the tail where the head should be, the hind leg where the forepaw would fall. I’ve not thought of that book in at least a decade, but of a sudden it glares at me from its remembrance. What was that Berryman line in the Dream Songs? But it can’t be taken from its source—
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,
who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.
It was that last bit in my head, though you see the necessity of its place, of what precedes it. & here spill continuously my plights & gripes, & here so often I read myself bobbing in some wake to forget my hand upon the helm. All to say it was a sad day, & nothing more.
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