Orion Rising

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June 2, 2006

Nothing Gold Can Stay

I have not been writing this spring.

During the course of my father’s illness, and since his passing last month, my walks have continued to meander on nearby trails through the woods, following the same paths I’ve grown to know these past eight years, and even now, ideas still bend toward me like this year’s new growth, still bright green, at the ends of beech boughs arcing over the trail, but they seem always to spring again away, before ink or pencil can make its mark on my notebook page. Essays half-written eclipse one another on my desk and precipitous heaps of books teeter threateningly underfoot. Not unlike those slender branches of beech, I wait for my thoughts and feelings to grow solid under the cover of hardened bark, ready for the colder weather of a winter that seems already too close. I sense the urgency of growth beneath the waning gold of early spring.

As I’ve been seeking solace elsewhere than in my own words, walking the fragile, frayed edge of unfamiliar emotion, I’ve sought comfort in the words and sentiments of others. Though I am not wont to resort to cliché, my own boughs have sometimes been bent toward T.S. Eliot’s invocation in “The Wasteland” that

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But such an outloook can spiral no where but down, until, with Eliot, after footnotes measureless to man, we enter the ninth circle of the Inferno at Dante’s heels (e io senti' chiavar l'uscio di sotto a l'orribile torre). In an effort to re-ascend, I have of late been retracing the softer contours of footsteps taken by the poet Basho as he wandered his native Japan more than three centuries ago, having chosen a wayfarers life in his later years. He writes, in the timeless tercets of haiku,

A wren of a single branch:
The fragrance of its plum blossoms
Throughout the world

So many many
Memories come to mind:
Cherry blossoms

From what tree’s blossoms
I know not:
But such fragrance!

With sun darkening
On the blossoms, it is lonely –
A false cypress

Passion lies in these words, the poet’s language able to describe feelings I somehow can not. But these verses from a different time and different place frustrate me here, today. I cannot find myself in Basho’s peripatetic muse nor, thankfully, in Eliot or Dante’s somber verse. The poet can only mediate the place he or she knows and I can but try to meet those verses halfway.

On Sunday, I wrote to a friend of my belief that art – good art – can both slip unbidden into a person’s soul and, at the same time, draw that person outside himself.

For me it is like this: just beneath the surface of things, there is the fact of change. A shallow enough plough this spring can indeed scratch painfully into these furrows impossibly long. Change is a fact we all front.

Of an 1839 trip that found Thoreau passing only a few miles south of our home here north of the White Mountains, he wrote,

Go where we will on the surface of things, men have been there before us. We cannot now have the pleasure of erecting the last house . . . and our boundaries have literally been run to the South Sea . . . But the lives of men, though more extended laterally in their range, are still as shallow as ever. Undoubtedly, as a Western orator said, "Men generally live over about the same surface; some live long and narrow, and others live broad and short"; but it is all superficial living. A worm is as good a traveller as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper. The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact, though that fact be his neighbor, there is an unsettled wilderness between him and Canada, between him and the setting sun, or, farther still, between him and it.

Across the road from our door, just before the left-hand bend where the frost-cracked pavement turns to gravel, the pink and white petals of an apple tree, all but forlorn at the edge of the wood, have begun to wither and yield themselves to the coming autumn’s fruit; off to the east, the snow of last month’s storms slips deeper into crevices high on Mount Washington, dandelions everywhere are turning to seed – facts of change front me everywhere.

I have been counting down the last few walks Pemi, Pika, Orion, and I will take through these woods, the times we will pass through our doors, anxiously waiting for the next step and the next place. In these past weeks, as my own departure from these White Mountains to the Green Mountains next month has become more immanent, as I face a ragged emotional ridgeline nearly each day, I realize that my strength lies in the facts of place, and I fear still more change of this time, of this place to another.

Stumbling as I often do with words as through pendulous morning spider webs – where I sometimes crouch low to preserve the spider’s work, and other times pluck them from my clothes to watch them abseil onto a tuft of balsam fir – what I suppose I mean to say here is that in this time when I find the comfort of the familiar largely lost, it is in the experience of the every day that I am challenged to find the cairns and blazes that mark the new path I find myself on. Without those who walk this path with me, I fear I might be truly lost, and for that guidance and comfort I am grateful beyond words.

Posted by pavel at June 2, 2006 11:41 AM

Comments

Posted by: Lorianne at June 9, 2006 3:27 PM