The Sea Again
A long time ago, I decided to cut a separate swath. It was not an error of modest declination, but a back azimuth to the paved road I had always traveled. I thought I would feel some measure of gratitude or satisfaction. Some feeling of success, but instead there is a relative unease with each new tree. I've really lost touch with a lot of things. I feel "half-awake", someone wandering forward with hidden steps.
I don't know. Thoughts no longer come easy, and my world is un-hinged.
I am watching a River Runs through It for the first time. Kind of backwards I guess, since I plan to read the book... but oh well.
I didn't watch it years ago because one of the many evangelical Christian publications my parents subscribed to slaughtered it... I still remember part of the Review... paraphrasing, "A vaguely metaphysical meandering movie mixed with fly-fishing fails to inspire only to remain insipidly unsatisfying in its religious conviction." So I never saw it, although at the time I secretly wanted to.
Years later, unbound from the bonds of conservative belief, and everyone else gone to bed a long time ago, I sit here watching. I found out today my biological grandfather who I never knew loved the book, so in absence of the written page, I succumbed to audio-visual. Not a perfect movie, but a good one. I liked it. "Life is not a work of art" just to quote real time, sitting here next to the Christmas tree, 5 days from the rolling over of another year, the crashing and tumbling of gears as the creaking clock moves forward. No, life is not a work of art, although art should be a work of life. That's probably why the really good art is hidden and often unpopular until a future generation far removed hears the message.
Every family, every life is different. Some are fascinating, some are profoundly mundane and utterly uneventful. Yet, there is a sacredness that is often only seen in retrospect. Its not even the beauty of something that we can miss. At times, the very reality of a thing is not captured until we are remembering it thoughtfully, years later, in a darkened room or watching the flames of a fire.
I can't hold onto this life, anymore I can hold onto the people around me. They walk and move and breathe. You can't hold onto people and things without suffocating reality or even worse, carving it into something it is not. Simply let it all ride. Flow.
If you hold on, you kill things.
I stopped taking as many pictures of special events precisely because of this. I wanted to make sure I made a really good memory, not worry if the battery light would come on. Seriously, how many of us really watch that hour long, jerky camcorder video of the dreadfully stretched out school sing along?
I do not want to remember my life through the lens of a viewfinder, mechanical or spiritual.
In the movie I just watched, the boys are told by their father that if they listened, they could hear the voice of God in the waters. The last thoughts of one of the boys, as the old man, is that he is "haunted by the waters". I think God, the beauty of this universe and reality, gets through to our heart by way of a random music. A gurgle brought home through fluid form that collides with solid rocks and swaying reeds. Driven by wind and the force of the transubstantiation of mountain snow, the water sings because there is no measured meter. There is no careful art. It is a wild song that comes from a heart rich with blood and earth and sadness and joy. The words of God are the random acts of brownian motion, collisions of light photons with a maelstrom of water droplets creating a brilliant rainbow. It is in the unplanned and biological exuberance of a natural rhythm that God speaks.
A certain trollish critic told me a week ago he thought my poetry was tiresome in its predictability, and proceeded to list a series of proper poetic forms I should experiment with. I don't think I am going to listen to him, because when I write, I pour out from a battered canteen cup, etched with symbols of my soul's campaigns, the contents of my heart. I suppose I could build a factory in my soul, and create in accordance with linear measurement, but I think I will dip my cup in the water that laps against the rim of that homo sapien that is called Mike.
I do miss certain things. The close bond I used to have with my sister. My children are no longer young. My childhood. A certain clarity of purpose.
As Masefield wrote in Sea Fever: I must go down to the Sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky, And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by...
I memorized that in my room on a bright Texas afternoon, reciting it standing in the center of my blue carpet, the sun warming my face, while I watching the Ash tree swaying outside my windows. Later that night, my wet hair combed carefully to one side, I carefully recited in a family talent show after a "fancy meal", the Sea Fever poem. My mom and dad clapped, and I was proud of myself.
I always liked that poem. It captured something that was just not in my heart, but also resonated something of the human condition. It melancholy longing was reassuring because I knew that someone else had felt the way I did, standing in that synthetic island of blue, repeating a poem, rolling the words around, hearing the sound of the bombers that flew over the government housing I grew up in. The sea was a distant memory of trips to Hawaii. I had never been on a boat, but I knew instinctively what Masefield was getting at. Here was a dose of his reality, and I could make it mine.
So screw that critic. I took his critique seriously until it began to damage the connection I had to the real. My real.
So I guess I've come full circle. I spent a year waking up in Iraq. Then I spent a year trying to hold onto that recovery. Now I am learning that a man must keep part of himself awake, but sometimes, it is good to sleep. Sometimes we plop in milk and sugar, sometimes we drink the coffee black. The key is never to run out of coffee.
Its a little sad, but I was reading some of Rainer Marie Rilke tonight. Here is a poem I can understand:
You playmates of mine in the scattered parks of the city,
small friends from a childhood long ago:
how we found and liked one another, hesitantly,
and, like the lamb with the talking scroll,
spoke with our silence. When we were filled with joy
it belonged to no one: it was simply there.
And how it dissolved among all the adults who passed by
and in the fears of the endless year.
Wheels rolled past us, we stood and stared at the carriages;
houses surrounded us, solid but untrue- and none
of them ever knew us. WHAT in that world was real?
Nothing. Only the balls. Their magnificent arches.
Not even the children . . . but sometimes one,
oh a vanishing one, stepped under the plummeting ball.
Goodnight!
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