Inscape

Hopkins doted on those instances, brief & few, when a flash of recognition occurred between the inner landscape of oneself & the outer swell & surge of the world. They were a numinous experience for him, a reckoning with the inscape of the world without in the wordless terms of the world within. The sway of wind sweeping across the top of a wheat field, how that wave in susurrus pulsed with life & shivered off into oblivion. As if the frequency of the thing witnessed resonated & hummed a harmony with the one that thrummed in him. 

I love the sensibility of that phenomenon because it sweeps up everything that crushes you in one distinct sort of vanquishing. It is everything & then it is nothing. I’m overfond of the Rilke line from the Duino Elegies that “beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.” Or, more bleakly put for J.A. Baker, “beauty is vapor from the pit of death.” It is finitude that converts joy so swiftly, accessorizing it in its presentations with the forepangs of nostalgia, such that its sweet song finds a minor key in its singing. Like the notion of the saudade-- every scrap of love for a place amplified by the distance between its shores & the person enraptured by longing. 

Ada wanted to learn about the universe this morning. We read the introduction to a field guide on night sky viewing & learned that since the creation of the universe, everything has been in a constant state of motion, pushing away from its center into limitless, expanding circumference. As galaxies push further from us, within their trifold shapes their own set pieces, too, are in ceaseless motion, in orbit or on axis, burning out over billions of years or coalescing into firmaments manufactured of fission. Everything that we see, & everything that we don’t, is always coming together or moving apart, under pressure or exhausted by it. Every flare & fire, every blur of light, every constellation adrift overhead, every star by which we find our compass & know where we stand. 

I have noticed that with Ada & Whitman, there are blinds in time wherein we seem to dissolve into one happiness, one flight of fused brightness, an incommunicable joy. I recuse myself from age & meet them somewhere behind all of the bracketed definitions of who we are, in elemental life. As if merged in an inscape, as if frequencies resonating with one another before time takes us back to ourselves, back to being a father & his daughter & his son on a particular day, in a particular place. I know those moments to be fugitive, but they fill me, overbrimming, with everything that life can be. I clutch to them & steal them to my heart & bid them never part from me, never be reft. They are, for that, beautiful, fully. 

Neither of the kids is ever still. They rise in the morning & commence their wild ebbing & flowing with the particular elasticity & resilience of their age. They expand, they grow, they burn bright, & they constellate us no matter the skies. Most days, upon their settling finally into sudden sleep, I bodily crave silence & solitude. But ten minutes later I always miss them.   

I like the notion that beauty conjures itself in relation, in witness. I like, too, that we cannot discover it if we don’t will ourselves to look for it. Maybe this explains my obsession with long journeys-- simply because they submit to the ceaseless flux of the world & resign themselves to feeling it fully. To strive after it is to encounter it, or its possibility, in every corner that one’s will allows. Ada climbs the hill behind the house & stumbles on a mountain cedar root. She tells me she is okay & then holds up a snail shell, gleaming white, in her hand, her face aglow with sudden joy.