Kids, Time, Rilke

On a hike two days ago with Ada & her new friend Heidi up in Possum Kingdom, I took note eventually that I could just be quiet, lead the way & permit them their own discourse. Subjects were wide-ranging, with the expected asynaptic bursts from one theme to another entirely disparate, as if the taxonomies of the world were divorced from one another & fed through a blender. & then of a sudden Heidi mentioned how every little thing was amazing, & wasn’t it something that God made it all? Ada replied that God was an imaginary person. Heidi, undeterred, expressed her awe that God had made us, to which Ada, ever the literalist, said no, our moms & dads made us. Heidi said no, God made everything one million years ago. Ada parried, noting that the dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago. I reminded them both that we all believe as we want or need to believe, but that the most important thing was to respect one another’s freedom to choose. Then, we pretended rocks were fossilized teeth & looked for rattlesnakes. 

The world as it is, the world as a tale would shape it. I have thought often in my life about the value in a belief system that could lend some comfort to the notions of nothingness that attend to my idea of dying. The closest I’ve ever come, thanks to Thomas Pynchon, is wondering if the laws of thermodynamics might apply to whatever spirit or light there is in our being, but even then, the most optimistic formulation hardly suggests a continuum of consciousness or selfhood. Just energy moving along. 

I think about it today after talking with my Mom about the burden sometimes attendant in choice. We here await our move to Alaska on May 1, after which we will be housed until September, & then we have no idea what our next move will be. Mom finds herself suddenly suspended in liminality as well, of a greater severity & decidedly less thrilling pallor. We want to move towards those notions of gestalt wholeness that underwrite all of the beliefs we heard about all of our lives, all those narratives that weave together in the same ending & point towards eternity. We are supposed to find our place & our peace, eventually, & walk ruts into the ground & sigh out & keep an eye on the wreath of the death door as the clock shifts from counting to counting down. But then we are supposed to be in congress with so many absurdities, & I don’t think I like very many of them. I prefer the struggle involved in discovering what is meaningful to me, not because it abides by rote expectation or achieves an apex of a familiar story, but because my heart lights aflame in the tinder of my hours. Because I know they are passing, & I do not suspect that I will endure beyond their measure. Macfarlane wrote that bit about how “in modernity, mastery usurped mystery.” Well, fuck modernity then. Whatever else is there in life but mystery? Even the things I know most fully, like that I love, I do not understand in the least. Mastery as a conceit seems to me histrionic bullshit, especially these days. 

I always come back to Rilke when I think about time, about how we fit so much wonder in such constraint, jarring against the angularities of finitude with these wild hopes & dreams & loves in us. I read the Duino Elegies again by my Dad’s bed in those days before he died, because I had to. Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. It is, I think, the most impacting line of poetry I’ve ever read. Every moment I’m proudest of was mapped against an adumbrated landscape of fear. Every love I cherish against the tide of time. There is so much in our small breathing, in our small breaths. & then, somehow, there isn’t. So many tales, such profound depth of recollection, every song of the heart, every inflection of the self, & then, nothing. There is fulgence in all things. I want, simply, to speak in the language of its flight. 

On the hike buzzards circled & a roadrunner scurried over the deer path. Talk of God long forgotten, replaced by declarations of tiredness & hunger, we ambled along the downslope, the leaves carpeting the forest floor.