Month: March 2012

The spirit and living at the edges

I have just spent a week at the ocean, and Mark Doty has been in my head.  This can only send me in one direction: it makes me think, as I often do, of one of my very favorite essays, Doty’s Cold Dark Deep and Absolutely Clear, part of which is available here. The essay is a meditation on the death of Doty’s partner, Wally, and it contains some of my favorite sentences ever written. Doty talks about a wounded seal on the beach, and muses on the image of the merman, a being who slides easily between worlds. The coast becomes place where this slippery transferability is made easy.

Doty also shares some observations on writing and ways of imagining and integrating our experience.  As someone whose instinct – in writing as in life – leans towards the metaphorical, I love what he has to say about that as a way of understanding the world.  His lines about the spirit are among those I hear most often in my head; he’s up there with Wordsworth for most-frequent haunter of my thoughts.  Haven’t we all had moments where we feel our spirit, like flames, both a part of our physical presence and something, somehow, ineffably separate?

My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor that describes or encapsulates a moment; it is a way of getting at the truth. And a way of paying attention, of reading the world.

The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body’s earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.

Doty’s essay is not strictly about the ocean but it is suffused with images of the coast and of distant water (cold, dark, deep, and absolutely clear).

The body is not me. I am my body, but I extend beyond it; just as my attention laps out, as my identity can pour out into the day. I have learned more about this, living beside the water, as if the very fluidity of the landscape gets inside us and encourages our ability to slip our fixed bounds and feel ourselves as extended, multiple, various.

There is something I find essentially familiar about being near or on the ocean.  This is something I must have inherited: my parents, both passionate and intuitive sailors, cite as one of the major reasons for moving home from London their longing to be close to the ocean again.  I am at my core a liminal being, born just at the beginning of the turn from one season to another, drawn to the edges and hems of this human experience, beguiled most of all by the shadow at the border where light and dark bleed together.  It is surely no accident that I am so deeply moved by sunrise and sunset, which are the edges of time just as the coast is that between earth and sea.

Perhaps I am drawn to these boundaries because it is there that I feel, as Doty says, extended, multiple, various.  Maybe it’s here, in the blur between one world and another, between one night and a new day, that my spirit recognizes its true home and, in its comfort and elation, makes its presence known to me.

To dig deep into the actual

To take what there is, and use it, without waiting forever in vain for the preconceived – to dig deep into the actual and get something out of that – this doubtless is the right way to live.

– Henry James

Images from a week by the sea

A symphony of blues.

9.5 years since a successful heart transplant.

Our long shadows on a morning walk out to the end of a pier into the ocean.

Caped in towels, they disappear around the curve.

Sunsets every evening over the Gulf of Mexico that took my breath away.

If that’s not sacred, I don’t know what is.

Enormous excitement over the honey badgers at the Naples Zoo.  I swear Whit has not seen the YouTube video, but you’d think he had because his rendition of “honey badger don’t care” is eerily good.

Filling the spaces

It’s true more often than we realize: each new love is built from the wreckage of the loves that came before.  In Kath, Mike saw Lisa; in Art’s eyes, she resembled our mother.  I can’t look at Mike’s face without seeing Dad’s.  Art, to Ma, was the living ghost of Harry Breen.  We love those who fit the peculiar voids within us, our hollow wounds.  We love to fill the spaces the old loves left behind.

– Jennifer Haigh, Faith

This passage, from Jennifer Haigh’s lovely novel Faith, has been haunting me for days.  It’s not an understatement to say that this is the central theme of the novel I am so clunkily attempting to write: an exploration of the holes inside each of us, punched out in the shapes of our earliest loves, first dear friends, and family members, around whose contours our own are shaped.  I am fascinated by the ways our lives are shaped and directed by early experiences, and by the disproportionate power of those we first love.

I am thinking this week about the people in my life who contributed to those hollow wounds, those whose words and input will echo throughout my life.  For many of us the – most, even – I suspect that the response to those who early, and irrevocably, shaped who we are is subconscious.  Certainly we are rarely aware of the spaces as they are being gouged out; more likely we happen upon them, later, either because they howl and ache or because we trip over them, startled, on one way somewhere else.

Are you aware of those who shaped and defined your own peculiar voids?  My sense is that for some these people are obvious, and for others they are a surprise.  Maybe that combination exists, actually, in each individual life: we are carved out and hollowed by both those we might imagine (a parent, a first love) and those whose power we did not understand in the moment (a friend, a quick relationship).  I often think of the interior of others as a landscape (or as of a night sky, full of sparkling) and so I love this image of there being hollows and chasms in that terrain, molded by people long gone.

And on we walk.  Empty and full, shaped and carved out, swollen with love and devastated by loss, every single day.

 

The grubby intimacy of siblings

 

Last week, we watched Tin Tin.  I mostly watched Grace and Whit.  At one point her leg was slung over the arm of his seat, and his hand rested on her foot.  Sometimes this kind of intrusion results in a loud explosion of bickering, with some shoving.  But at other times it falls unnoticed into the rich swamp of shared childhood that they are crossing together.  I thought of the intense, often grubby intimacy of siblings, the way they are each other’s morning and night, the only other person growing in this unique terroir.

I missed my sister then, who is halfway across the world in Jerusalem.  I’ve written before about the opinion, held by some, that our most formative relationships are with our sibling(s).  And I have written reams about my particular sibling, my adored sister Hilary, the adventurous one, the brilliant one, the brave one.

Watching Grace and Whit – every day, but especially inside the hothouse of a week of vacation – I think of Hilary constantly.  They are each other’s first peer relationship, the person with whom they share these essential early experiences, to whom they will announce excitement and heartbreak, against whom they will probably always measure themselves.  They witness together the messy reality of our family life, both its raised voices and its enthusiastic embraces.  I admit perhaps too readily that my desire to have a second child was secondary to my desire to have a sibling for Grace (of course, that faded the instant Whit arrived, when I immediately loved him as much as I’ve loved anyone else on earth).  But my impulse was right, of that I’m certain.  I am intensely thankful when I observe their closeness, striated as may be with arguing.

After all, I would not be who I am today without Hilary.  In the simplest terms, her influence pushed me to explore further and to try harder.  There’s no better example than that we would never have gone to Jerusalem last December if she and her family had not chosen to live there for a year.  I watch my children bounce off of each other, their sharp corners gouging into each other and  their arms providing comfort when it is needed, and I think of Hilary.  And I am overwhelmed with gratitude.