May 8

Long run from Bishop’s Beach at high tide, running along the fluxing limn, frothed white wave-lap in its endless advance & retreat—an hour before a storm broke, the heaving crests four feet & taller breaking over the rocks & pulling them ineluctably back with a magnificent & effortless violence, the sound like a building being razed, ominous enough to keep Willa close at my heels. At one point pinned with three feet between water & cliff—an unusually high tide. & now the rain constant, the sky grey & occluded, the range across the bay a dull insinuation of itself at root, peakless where summit drifts into clouded mist. There was a run I did once, up Mount Sanitas in Boulder, maybe a year ago, where the summit was swallowed whole in thick & heavy fog. Slivers intimated human shape & you heard a voice & looked & saw the rended seam of white closing up & nothing else. I sat a moment, then, & watched what few figures there were come & go, & thought it some rare & fine glimpse at something beyond itself, something beyond our living, beyond our numbered days. & though it was my body there in its torsions, my knees absorbing the blows, my eyes fixated on coming steps, there was nothing of the corporeal thereafter—it was a dream, an ether. & maybe it’s that way with fog, or with obfuscation or penumbra—maybe when our optics blur & smoke over there is a different kind of world we must abide. This time here. This heart in me. This awareness that I am, beyond my comprehension, beyond my fledgling soundings, irrevocably changed, even already. How we approach the swirling umbra, & whether we run headlong into it or turn away in slow-trod retreat. Is it too much to say, perhaps for the first time in my life, I am proud of myself? It is only fear, after all, & it, too, only throws a fading shadow, a quick mist.

***

& what is everdrawn, what carriage carries still, beyond a hope, beyond a vague diminution of hope? Time’s foe is all. & we, like Hopkins says, selfwrung, self-racked, & always already a lonely begun. Here is the thing of it—beauty crushes me, & I find it, crushingly, everywhere in evidence, & all the attending terror of recognition, all of the mortal nerve splays out like quick to needle’s touch, tender-in-me, brided to the rich ache I carry now. & I don’t care what it is; only, that I care, beyond my wanting. A dog’s forlorn gaze from a wooden porch, a shallow puddle, a house in the distance with a warm & aureate glow, a kind word, a photograph, a memory, always a memory—how saturated the fiber of the daily grows in it, all of this beauty, & all of it fluxing into disappearance, coming to quick dissolution. The ache in me sometimes the world-ache, the thanatos ache—is that the word?—hum-of-life, our contract, how we relinquish to time, & how we would purport to claim some of its loosened strands our own. There is the beauty—that though we know it will all be reft from us, yet we wrestle to cherish it. And that we cherish it.

“So, what subjects do we copy out and paint, we mandarins with Chinese brushes, we immortalizers of things that let themselves be written—what are the only things we can paint? Oh, only ever things that are about to wilt and lose their smell! Only ever storms that have exhausted themselves and are moving off, and feelings that are yellowed and late! Only ever birds that have flown and flown astray until they are tired and can be caught by hand,--by our hand! We only immortalize things that cannot live and fly for much longer, only tired and worn-out things! And I only have colors for your afternoon, my written and painted thoughts, perhaps many colors, many colorful affections and fifty yellows and browns and greens and reds:--but nobody will guess from this how you looked in your morning, you sudden sparks and wonders of my solitude, you, my old, beloved—wicked thoughts!”

Damn it, Nietzsche.

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