Today I took a walk. Back behind my house there is a woods, with trails that lead back further in to where there is a pond. I had been working all day, setting things up for my life to keep moving along, filing papers, writing forms, making lists of things to do before I got started on a job I had just been hired to do, and a place I was looking to check out. My thoughts were huddled up inside my brain so that, whenever I stopped working, or ran the course to its end, I was left alone, unmoving and in search of something that would keep my mind afloat. After a few minutes I lay down on the couch. A book lay on the table, and barely glancing at the title, I picked it up and started reading. The book, which was about a magician who had gone in search of others in his field and ended up with tribal sorcerers and healers, learning about their magic and the like, I read with a feeling of the utmost contentment. At times though, with an incomprehensible sense of discontent and agitation. I could remember feeling this way about a lot of books. Well, in fact, I didn’t have to remember feeling like this. Sometimes books open gateways to pain or pleasure whose existence I can be otherwise unaware of. I’m not suggesting they’re the only avenues for revealing these sensations, only I remarked on it for some reason. I read on. The author was outlining a thesis I had heard before: that in the modern world, we become more and more detached from the reality of what he called the non-human world around us – what he meant by this were animals, plants, winds, rains and the like. And he went on to assert that, because of our detachment from these forces, in a way we often replace our surroundings with our thoughts, so that these non-human entities are holed up inside our very skulls. This is what disconcerted me.
. . . . . .
A military helicopter flew overhead. The music bore my thoughts into the ground like a self that had cast off, a mixture of fear and wonder scattered about my head so that all that I heard was the drone of the chopper and above it, a chorus of tree frogs in the distance. It reminded me of the song my mother used to sing to me as a child – an eerie ethereal calliope-like melody. To me, as a kid, it was like noticing my own mortality and at the same time feeling like everything was going to be ok. I looked down at the tulips and daffodils in the garden. It didn’t seem fair that American choppers were killing civilians in Libya. But the garden was beautiful. It felt like a privilege, and yet it felt like something I had to be ashamed of. The night sky was gray, and the sound of the chopper faded into the distance, leaving only the soft ocean-like voice of the tree frogs and the silhouettes of trees, waving like shadows in the night air.
. . . . . .
That night I sat inside and read a few lines. For all this time, I thought, art has been social in origins, and what of the time I’ve felt stuck inside, dreaming that someday people would read my poems and commune under their stars. An undertaking, I thought as I read on, since no one really cares for poetry beyond the poets, and the time of the poem that caused social change has been dead for over fifty years. No, that time I read one of my poems at a Jewish friend’s house at Passover, I had felt a sincere gladness in the room on the hearing of my poem. Even amidst all that painful history I had felt another’s ailments transformed in my own voice. That seems silly to say. Like a poem could do all that. It mattered more to the Greeks what the tribe felt than what the poet/artist himself was feeling. I stepped off the porch to smoke a cigarette. Maybe it didn’t matter at all.
For a time I’ve lived in a house not too far from the city, and a fog surrounding the house lay thick in the woods, dampening the sound of trains and traffic, causing a stillness that the birds would occasionally break. I’d gotten started on a novel, but I didn’t feel that ambitious. Probably I’d lose the thread somewhere in the middle, and drop the manuscript in the recycling bin. Better that it be turned into office paper than end up in a garbage heap. I resolved I’d finish something at least, one chapter, one page, one good paragraph a day before the sun set. I’ve always liked watching the sky turn colors just before twilight, but tonight the fog and clouds were yellowed by industrial light. I thought of getting in the car and turning on the radio, going for a drive into the city, but then I remembered that it wouldn’t tune. The antenna was always the first to go. I stubbed out my cigarette and watched a bird slowly hopping through the wet grass.
. . . . . .
I have this friend. He whistles. Not that whistling in itself is that uncommon, but he whistles in a particular way. Every Saturday he comes over and we watch the news, eat dinner and sit for a while at the kitchen table, talking about the state of things. He’s not particularly politically inclined, but he knows what’s going on in the world. We talk for a while, and when I stand up to do the dishes, he takes his leave and steps out onto the porch. This is an unspoken ritual between us, every week, the same routine. The porch is an outdoor porch, so it’s screened in. No glass to keep out the sound. I’ve always thought of putting in windows, but on this particular night, the air was cool and damp and made a nice covering for the sounds in the woods; an eerie undercurrent of voices that was softened to a quiet mezzo-piano. As I start doing the dishes, the sound of my friend’s whistling hits my ears. Always, it’s like awakening to a dream, the opposite of what people call objective reality. He has a way of commanding someone’s listening; not to the sounds coming from his own lips, but he seems to hold you in a state of acute awareness as to the sounds that surround you. When you watch him, he’ll pause, and put his hand up to his ear, as if compelling some unknown audience to listen. But you have to know my friend to understand this. He is compulsively joyous, and infectious in his way of greeting things as they come.
The thing was, I hadn’t seen my friend in over two months. I had lost my job, and the littlest things had started bothering me. I knew my friend had nothing to do with this, I just couldn’t force myself to call him, or to head over to his house on a spontaneous whim like I used to. Occasionally I would hum a tune and realize, it was his whistling, that bright, melodious and ethereal bell-like quality, suspended in the air around me. One day when this happened, I found a bright white moth lying on the ground at my feet. Its dead form seemed to reverberate with a touch of life, as if some secret had come to it in death, that its dead body was somehow truer, more delicate than its living form itself. That night I dreamt of forest fires that consumed the house. Only one bright white moth escaped, fluttering its wings and winding into the sky.
. . . . . .
Torrential rains fell on the roof of the house the day before I was scheduled to start work. Everything seemed to be waiting for the rain, and now that it fell, there was a cease in the sounds of the woods. The street was empty of cars, the people were all in their homes, and I stood alone on the porch, watching the rain pour down.
I had come to love this place, and in a few days, I would be gone. This realization dawned on me more and more as the rain subsided. The silence of the woods around me broke into a subdued chatter, at the heart of which one hermit thrush began to sing. From his post in the uppermost branches at the middle of the wood came a laughing, warbling trill. A car splashed by on the street passing the house. “How little reverence people have,” I spoke aloud. Partly I was shocked by the sound of the my own voice. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in three days. A group of birds fluttered noisily up onto the branches of the low brown oak across the lawn. They went on chirping as the car passed, and I stood in silence, listening, watching the haze of the clouds grow fainter. Sunlight glinted on the drops of rain suspended on the tips of the branches.
Eliot Cardinaux
May, 2011
No comments:
Post a Comment