Today, Here

Today. The broad stroke of autumn insinuates itself suddenly, against the sharp sunlight & shade, layered in the receding arms of boughs that overhang us as we walk the road. Geese fly low overhead in a broken vee, hesitate, turn back toward the east. A spider curls her legs in tight to her body to wait out the chill of morning. My daughter wears a parasaurolophus costume we sewed for her & races from one familiar landmark to the next-- the mailbox shaped like a bass, the two stone lions guarding the driveway that she calls Aslan & Nola, the dog print cast in the asphalt. She points to a leaf spinning wildly at the end of an unseen spool of gossamer-thin spiderweb. Watches it collect light & then shake it into shadow, over & again in its tensile spin. 

I am hungover, thinking it wise last night to compound the fraught witness of the election with whiskey to calm the nerves. I am dismayed, at odds with the banners this country has chosen to unfurl, the flags to fly & whistles to blow. Dunbar-Ortiz wrote about how our present political circumstances come largely as the logical progression of every ill & evil that carved this country out in the first, & seen in the light of what our colonialism is & was, it is hard to argue. What absented itself from my register of hope last night was faith in an ethics. This morning, in our texts with friends & family, we ask the same questions-- what are the values we’ve been trying to instill in our children worth? Is there a purchase for goodness anymore, at least in a public eye? If we can’t see change now, how will it ever come? 

I have had two parallel lines of thought coevally this morning. That last stanza of “Dover Beach” lodged itself in the oculus of my thinking, a sieve through which all else seems to flow. This is the disparaging side of things:

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle & flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night. 

All of which nonetheless is hung upon the proffered hand of what remains inviolable, which is simply what is true between two people. Which leads me to the second, more amorphous thought of Wendell Berry’s Art of Loading Brush. There is much to unpack & think through, but what strikes me today is how Berry posits a cosmology entirely predicated on a fierce fealty to what is immediate, what is local, & what is good. The compass of a compassionate ethic requires such a surfeit of intention & energy & action on a strictly interpersonal level that, if all needs are met, perhaps we ought to start there. 

My compulsion is to transfer all of my anxieties about the world’s seemingly absent inherent good into grandiose tableaus for my children-- grooming them for presidencies or whisking them away to the Outer Hebrides or sailing around the world while studying Locke & Hume & Levinas. But the fact is that where we are, wherever we are, I have to teach goodness in precisely that context. The world is not something ideationally at large; the world is already all around us, & our choices about how best to engage it within the bending compass of an ethics manifest themselves not on a global scale nor some darkling plain, but on our morning walk & in our playroom & in how we laugh with one another in our joy or hold one another in our sorrow. We can tend to what is before us, instill what good we can, love how best we can. 

Ada picks up a vermillion leaf, turns it, finds the backside a kind of crimson bleeding into white. She notices that the baby rattlesnake that had been run over is now gone. She points at the vultures in the slow swirling song of the vectors, looks for the glint of pearlescent snail shells in the ditch. Suddenly I have only this world, only this delimited purview, a compass shrunk to what I can touch. & I am permitted, at last, to feel good.