Myopia.

At times I feel my thoughts are cushioned by my porous, spongy way of sensing, I worry I am inoculating myself against a certain terrible clarity with this myopia, this ancillary reality. My eyes dwell on the sky too often, and so my writing is overfull with remarks about the weather and the land, or stimulated by memories of broad seascapes and great forests that only exist to me now, at this moment, as a series of inconstant photographs accompanied by a lingering perfume. What stands outside of people, the objects and daily phenomenon of our lives, when transmuted into a substance of our body, are utterly unique to us and are absorbed and nourish us singularly. The things beyond the thin border of our skin, those objects and animals are only created by our witnessing them. Beyond that margin are the mysterious things of another plane, and it is on their terms that we all must relate, with our garbled, languishing tongues.

A thunderstorm penetrates, the hot sun penetrates, but to one another people only come close but never breech any barriers. They press their mouths to one another’s, they try to enter into each other’s eyes, try with words and gestures to hypnotize or teach each other. They mumble and grasp for permanence, looking for immortality under the flesh of another, in the veins of the other. All in all they try despairingly and fiercely to find a mirror and an echo.

The first human words uttered perhaps were imitations of a thunderclap. Animals sing and call in a language that is a burlesque of inundations, skies trembling with storms, the imperceptible noise of the growth of plants, the erosion of mountains, and the cold wind blowing sand in the desert. I am no different, acquiring my speech and my temperament from the confluence of forces and objects inhuman, seeking out a mirror and an echo in the lightning spirals of a tourbillion.

A Solitary Swimmer.

To slip into the ocean, to actually be there, not imagining it any longer- not isolated by the abstractions of distance that invariably separate a memory from the sensations that etched it into our past. When one recalls a sensory impression, an event, the body arches backwards toward it. The brain reaches out through the fingers and toes and face, imaginary arms extend to feel again what was once not at all an impression, but an instant of the numinous and ineffable present. Something lifts which was weighed down in the center of the body, and images accompany and accentuate this completely motionless motion.

As the body sinks into the ocean the mind changes. It is as if the eyes are reading a piece of musical notation, and the brain at the same time is attempting the dual effort of visually conjuring every gesture of each living member of the orchestra. A friend said to me, “When you submerge your body your thoughts focus only on the acquisition of the next breath”, which isn’t entirely true. That notion is there, but it is reflexive, like the stride of your legs as you walk when you are not aware of your gait and the swing of your shoulders because you are distracted by a particularly lovely building or the height and depth of the sky. Your mind is not detached, rather, your mind and your body coalesce into essential movements. Your breath is taken, but you do not notice, you thrust your limbs through the darkness, you think to open your eyes- but not yet! You hold off, treasuring the last few seconds of such an unaccustomed experience. I was tempted there to say “unnatural”, or “inhuman” experience, but this state is utterly natural and utterly human. Sometimes the instant after one awakens from a long sleep, there is a momentary disconnect between the mind and its surroundings, when there is no immediate lingual response, when nothing is named. All of what we sense is contingent on our associations to what we have named. Sinking into the ocean, we are briefly without names for things.

On this particular trip to the ocean, advection from the south had carried smoke on its winds from a wildfire in North Carolina. There was a slight acrid smell in the air, and here and there hung low clouds of white smoke in the windswept trees and long grasses along the island, giving it an even more alien look than usual. I have always been struck by the trees here, short and wiry, with trunks like bleached vertebrae and tufts of white-green vegetation exploding from the limbs, all grown sideways and off-kilter from the force of steady sea wind. I come here and I too strip myself down to my essentials. I wear as little clothing as possible. My back and shoulders become red in the sun. I lie in the sun with my eyes closed and feel its warmth touch every hair on my arms and legs. I eat the food of the ocean, scallops, crabs, shrimp, and fish. I bask in the water from which my sustenance is pulled, I eat vegetables grown and cooled and strengthened by the salty breeze. To eat what comes from the land you live on, to be of the land and the water, to know your humanity all the better.

My shoulders and back and cheeks are red. I walk across the hot sand, not feeling the heat at all. My eyes peer off to the horizon; they are inevitably drawn to that long, endless arc on the other side of which I dream someone is looking back toward me in their imagination. The cold at first stings when the waves begin to touch my knees and thighs, so I throw myself into the break. I am under. I am swimming outside of myself and inside myself. My head and shoulders break the surface. The water is no longer cold, but has diffused a perfect equilibrium of temperature throughout me. My head bobs and watches simultaneously the sun glinting off the sea through the slight haze of wildfire smoke and the motion of gulls circling above in an almost perfectly unbroken sky.

It is said that those who love books are those for whom the world is not enough. On the contrary, at times such as these I am absolutely content with this world. And it is because I will eventually leave that I set down in words all that I can recall in my thoughts and body, so I may understand my contentment.

Thoughts Surrounding "Anna Karenina"

Happiness is a far more vague word than truth. Happiness one feels; truth one senses after distance and consideration. Happiness is a composition and mingling of moments, a realignment of the past with the present. When I experience a situation that rings with truth, however, it is like a stone wall, immovable, implacable, cold and indifferent. Happiness and sadness alike are made of cascading memories sent tumbling through the present by some interloping impression. Truth exists alongside time, both endlessly and recklessly destroy and create. Truth and happiness have nothing to do with each other, though they touch at so many common points. I’m not trying to philosophize about it, I don’t care to define either, I will use both words as they suit me.

I am watching the shadows of tall trees shaking in the wind. The sun is hot and bright and the shadows are strewn across the tables and the walk and the faces of the people talking and eating. I watch the entanglement of shadows writhe and dance across the brow of a young man talking to a pretty young girl. I watch them smear and distort, darkened as if by ink. A man next to them is almost snoring. I myself am holding a book in my hand and drinking tea and noting the dancing limb-shadows, the violent leaf-shadows that no one else seems to notice. I look at people as I look at myself, as filters of experience who either are crushed or uplifted by what they have known, either made weaker or stronger than the quality of their original nature. Surrounded by people, I wonder at their happiness, I try to read their story in their faces; I listen to how they speak and what they speak about.

“The singing women approached Levin, and it seemed to him that a thundercloud of merriment was coming upon him. The cloud came over him and enveloped him; and the haystack on which he lay, and all the other haystacks and carts, and the whole meadow with the distant fields all started moving and heaving to the rhythm of this wild, rollicking song with its shouts, whistles and whoops. Levin was envious of this healthy merriment; he would have liked to take part in expressing this joy of life. But he could do nothing and had to lie there and look and listen. When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him.”

““How beautiful!” he thought, looking at the strange mother-of-pearl shell of white, fleecy clouds that stopped right over his head in the middle of the sky. “How lovely everything is on this lovely night! And when did that shell have time to form? A moment ago I looked at the sky, and there was nothing there- only two white strips. Yes, and in that same imperceptible way my views of life have also changed!””

“He left the meadow and walked down the main road to the village. A slight breeze sprang up, and it turned grey, gloomy. The bleak moment came that usually precedes dawn, the full victory of light over darkness.”

“He looked at the sky, hoping to find there the shell he had admired, which had embodied for him the whole train of thoughts and feelings of the past night. There was no longer anything resembling a shell in the sky. There, in the inaccessible heights, a mysterious change had already been accomplished. No trace of shell was left, but spread over half the sky was a smooth carpet of ever diminishing fleecy clouds. The sky had turned blue and radiant, and with the same tenderness, yet also with the same inaccessibility, it returned his questioning look.”

I am reminded of the first time I appreciated the night sky when I was young, on the bank of the Patuxent River near my home. The moon is full (at least it is full in the flawed recompense of my memory) and I am surrounded by my friends, but no one is speaking. It is a clear night; the stars are thick and full and in motion, and long skeletal fingers of ghostly clouds are daubed and smeared here and there. At the full height of the sky I finally see the Milky Way. And at my feet it is all reflected in the silently passing water, and in that surface among all the other wonders I see my own wavering outline, and I am unsure at first of what the dark mass is crouched there, startled and unsure of its existence even then.

I am isolated in this memory; it lingers behind every experience since. These singular memories, perhaps meaningless to another, but resounding within me with all the force of life, these partitioned moments, when wonder starts in stillness; instants that stand solidly apart from happiness or sadness, points that sound deeply in strange and inaccessible tongues and tones... stone-like truth.

An Introduction.

My hours are bracketed by silence that is, as Kierkegaard notices, the qualitative opposite of silence. My silence ends when I exorcise whatever has formed internally within that silence. I cannot picture opposites perfectly; I can only pronounce the imperfection of my memory. I try to define notions and colors in the thick of a stone-white cloud. I try to make out a landscape, to allow my breath to blow mists and fog from the forests and roads, so my eyes can apprehend the hillsides and the sun and the faces of the people moving about, so that I might find my way to them through the inward noise of experience. Behind all of that flows another channel of thought, one whose current laps at the bank of all my experiences, trying to pick and pull and carry away any little thing into the next inevitable silence.

I am nothing; my quantity is similar to that of sunlight reflecting off drops of moisture on the lace of a web strung between blades of grass in an isolated, untended field. I am spun by a spider into an infinitely fine web, at each cross-section the contact point becomes a word, and the slightest breeze tests my strength. My intuition and my intellect are those ultra-fine threads winding from word to word. Everything is filtered through; each second of the day is run through like a sieve held in a stream. I reach my hand and thought out to whatever sticks, trying to take hold of what the spider is not already gobbling up.

I am nothing, and how can nothing have an enemy? But I do have an enemy, and this is my fight against it. As the universe teaches, everything came from nothing. So the enemies of that which is nothing are all the forces that prevent it from becoming. I know that it is true, that something can come from nothing, because before I was born there was only an abyss, and then at the moment of my birth the world came into being. I am aware that for me to have been born there already had to be the world in which my mother existed. I’m not arguing against that, but that is her world, and this is mine, and our worlds, as all people’s, are as alien and as intimate to each other as the sun is to the sea. The sunlight hits the sea and shimmers, it moves in flux with the surface of the water. All of the opposites coming together on one thin surface of movement and experience, all the different elements of water, wind, and air, and all the animals in the depths and the sky that require all of it to exist, becomes a fine mesh that we absorb and sort, and that becomes our universe.

Because my thoughts are my own and your thoughts yours, because they comprise the lattice-work of our lives, and because the only commonality between us is language, I stare through a stone-white cloud and try to create a landscape on which we can meet. I try to stave off the enemies of becoming; I try to focus my energies on one goal, that is, to exist.

These writings will be the voices I remember, the images that form that I find worth saving from dissolution, the letters I write and receive that find no other proper place, sketches of faces, descriptions of walks, studies of bodies and buildings and moments, stray thoughts that have solidified into sentient feelings. These will all be products of silence.