Passages

November 24, 2008

(riding the bus to work at night, being now employed as a salesperson clear across town)

The ride to work, undertaken in darkness, lit by banks of glowing windows in storefronts where young couples leaned forward across the table over steaming bowls or a woman with hair falling in her face undressed a mannequin, provided me an hour of existential joys and terrors.

A man sat next to me, holding in his lap a little girl who looked to be four or five and wore purple gloves several sizes too big. She was one of those exquisite little children who possess, rather than the common bulbous shape, the proportions of the adult body in miniature. The girl spoke a few words now and then, only enough to answer her father as he told her about the route, and otherwise remained silent, still, and watchful, like a small animal. She was one of those children whose behavior, rather than drawing attention merely to itself, instead suggests the workings of a hidden mind. She was a whole person. Yet she was also small enough to be held on a lap.

Watching from the corner of my eye as her gloved fingers slowly curled and flexed like feelers and her deep-set eyes gravely observed the other passengers, I experienced the sudden attack of my first maternal urge. I wanted such a child. I wanted to watch and guide such a consciousness. It would be like ministering to a saint – bathing the holy body and laboring to decipher the encrypted wisdom of the occluded mind. I wanted to carry such a child, to make her of my own body, to deliver her into the world through my own pain and my own might. I wanted to know every mundane detail about her and still be mystified, astonished.

For a moment this desire, this delight, overwhelmed my other creative ambitions. I laughed at myself for succumbing in an instant to what I had so stubbornly rejected.

Then I became afraid. This was my body attacking my mind, seducing me away from my true work. This threatened the labor I had intended for myself, of forging for myself a keen and unbreakable intelligence and wielding it powerfully against the ugliness of the world. This sudden longing for the child threatened me with selflessness, abidance, and a relenting of the mind’s testimony. It threatened me with peace and quiet joy.

The bus lurched a halt. The man rose, set the little girl on her feet, and walked hand and hand with her off the bus. I looked up to catch her eye, but she was watching the driver manipulate the door lever. As she passed, I caught sight of a reflection in the window opposite me. I could see a girl with her hair pulled tightly into a bun, with deep-set but dull eyes, dressed in something like business casual, and pointing her toes to steady a dish covered with tin foil, which appeared to be her greatest care. She had baked a treat for her co-workers, and this was all that made the night special. I could see in her no suggestion that she bore through the night something of beauty soon to be revealed. She bore cupcakes. She was going to work and was happy that she was now well acquainted with the back office.

It was not hard to imagine myself contented with such a life. Or not contented but placated. It was more plausible that I should continue on in this way than that I should muster latent strength and skill to create something remarkable. It was plausible that I would spend my whole life intending to do something important and never do it. The mind travels quickly at night, (Here we passed through the vacant park.) when the black, blank windows offer so little to catch and hold it back, and is suddenly arrived at death. I thought of dying and leaving nothing of myself here. I had not realized what consolation I had taken from the promise of fame’s legacy until I allowed it to fall from my mind. Then I saw a naked death. My body would fail, and I, clutched in its ribcage, would go down into the earth with it and cease to be.

This was a vision to recommend that I think again of that child and consider how my life could have some consequence. But the joy of my first longing had been too sternly rebuked and could not now revisit me. Instead I thought coldly of the bid for immortality that was extended by biological reproduction. I thought of Shakespeare’s sonnets and history plays, which made much of the issue, invested much comfort and even triumph in it, but always uneasily. To live on in the blood of descendents is a grim hope. The prospect of being translated into a something else is almost as terrible as the prospect of being erased.



December 1, 2008

(driving to Turlock)

Fog lay on the hills the whole way, divulging at times the suggestion of a butte, a basin, a field – but hiding the rest from view, as though the land were suffering a secret birth that the sunlight of later days would reveal. While back in Minnesota the cold and dark of winter was forcing spirits indoors, to be held with the tissue-wrapped contents of old boxes under lamplight, here in California wet air had finally relieved the oppression of the autumn heat and now drew life to the surface of things. Rolling down the window, I smelled in the air a richness promising that, behind the drifting veils of fog, the land was becoming green.

It was spring in December. The ground, the trees, and the cracks in the sound barriers beside the highway were all spilling tendrils of dripping, green leaves. The earth was wet and raw. I saw young, emerald grass at the feet of olive trees and almost cried at it. I was driving to the Turlock Livestock Auction, so I anticipated all this beauty and life soon to be cruelly contradicted: in place of mystery, nakedness; in place of an arbor of brilliant vines, a dead pile.

But the yards were deserted. I drove by twice and saw not a soul of any species. The vacant pens and catwalks of splintered wood could have been the ruins of a market closed some twenty years or more. I drove on into the next town, where little knick knack shops and a coffee shack stood across the street from a gas station and church made of concrete slabs but formed as though to resemble a fairytale castle. The rest was fields, moldering barns, and a trailer park. I adored and thanked it all.



December 22, 2008

(Fort Funston)

I returned to the ocean beach and walked south into the stretch of it called Fort Funston, where the dunes are covered with green and orange ice plants. Again I felt that time was waylaid. Or more than that – regressed. That the human presence was muted. Here were trees and succulent plants growing from the sand, fed by the air, as though the air were as full of life as it had been before the gasping of six billion throats and the hunger of machines had emptied it. The dunes were populated almost exclusively by seagulls, pelicans, and dogs who roamed in large troops or wandered in ones and twos. A mastiff and a yorkie lounged on a hillock in the sand, looking native. The few humans to be seen walked quietly down the shore, now and then throwing a ball to the hounds.

Above, seagulls snapped their wings and quivered taut on the air or rode invisible currents swiftly down to sea. Among them were also men and women strapped into hang-gliders, moving as the birds moved – the human form translated into one with greater power to see, less power to harm. They swept over miles of coastline and left no trace.

We have left our traces on the ocean, in contradiction to Byron’s exalting praise – “ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain.” We have polluted it, dragged its depths, scraped its floor, and left behind us islands of plastic bags and unintended prey. We have despoiled the ocean. But still it has the power to silence and enthrall us. At its edge we drift, unmoored from our own world and compelled by the forces of another, made into hermits or birds. The ocean translates us, but we cannot translate the ocean. Its sound is too polyphonic to be like our breath; it neither roars nor murmurs; it does not speak to us at all.