lion.mouth

The Book of Nature is an ancient, embed­ded anal­ogy. We lis­ten for nature to speak and read what’s writ­ten in the stars. This type of think­ing is strange, igno­rant of par­tic­u­lars and mul­ti­tudes and the self. True obser­va­tion is a rad­i­cal dis­ci­pline that cul­ti­vates subjectivity.

Last sum­mer, on the rec­om­men­da­tion of a friend, I read John Stilgoe’s Out­side Lies Magic. The corny title belies the con­tents, which are fresh and heart­felt. Stil­goe is a zeal­ous pedes­trian. As in, devoted to walk­ing. He makes a lion of the every­day explorer; some­one who, sim­ply by notic­ing, scares aware­ness into the “ordi­nary” landscape.

There are fea­tures of the land­scape that are “closed to us,” he puts it. Topogra­phies and his­to­ries we don’t know we’re miss­ing. The per­son who stops to read what’s stamped on a man­hole cover, or fol­lows a power-line to the util­ity man’s fence-hole, real­izes there are whole “sys­tems of closed fea­tures.” This per­son uncloaks the Divine Hand, grounds the meta­phys­i­cal, and sees the tracks we’ve laid. This per­son knows the quiet mus­cle of humans work­ing in blind con­cert. This per­son is sur­prised and invig­o­rated by scale.

What is Stil­goe advo­cat­ing if not a prim­i­tive, unpro­grammed empiri­cism? As it applies to the method, so to our indi­vid­ual selves: the­ory wants obser­va­tion, and obser­va­tion, exper­i­ment. Look­ing makes you curi­ouser and curi­ouser, an end in itself.

It’s true, isn’t it? Over and over again our bod­ies are made sen­si­ble by look­ing. I love cities because the signs are obvi­ous; the settler’s inten­tions recorded in con­crete. The chal­lenge is rec­og­niz­ing the built-in blind­ers. Every object nar­rates, mak­ing sky­lines, parks and neigh­bor­hoods essen­tially unsci­en­tific. But so’s every­thing, from where a per­son stands.

In wilder­ness and rural places it’s even eas­ier to divorce his­tory from mat­ter. Moun­tains are unsolv­able and val­leys seem enclosed. Thoreau looked around and nearly fell apart, writ­ing, “To come in con­tact with it,–rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! The solid earth! The actual world! The com­mon sense! Con­tact! Con­tact! Who are we? Where are we?”

I like to imag­ine the early explor­ers, nat­u­ral­ists and sci­en­tists look­ing around with at least as much vehe­mence as Thoreau. In an essay titled “Strange­ness,” Lyn Hejin­ian writes that they “sought to dis­cover the tan­gi­bil­ity and sin­gu­lar dis­tinct­ness of the world’s exu­ber­ant details and indi­vid­u­al­i­ties with­out spir­it­ing them away from each other.” In other words, they sought to reveal a thing with­out set­ting it apart. It’s a writer’s wish. But to reveal a thing entire is to reveal the uni­verse entire. So you do your best; you describe.

Here’s a sneak-peek at a work-in-progress. I’ll be pre­sent­ing a staged read­ing of the full play (among other things) in mid-December, at the cul­mi­na­tion of my res­i­dency at The Depart­ment of Safety. Time to build excite­ment, y’alls! This is the begin­ning, which is always my favorite part of a play.

THE MEN from THE GIRLS

Every­thing is at war.

DELORES waits on stage.

She com­mands the silence, then sings.

DELORES

Good­night ladies.
Ladies good­night.
It’s time to say good­bye.
Byebye!

No, just kid­ding. Kid­ding.

She stalls.

Here’s a secret for you: I set the truth loose down there like a dog. Didn’t you know? Dogs know exactly what they want, with­out even thinking.

Sorry.

Seri­ously though, there’s a rumor that just won’t die. Some­thing like, less is more. Desire dis­ap­points. Please. As if we all aren’t sick with all the things we want. Believe me, no one’s a Spar­tan for eternity.

I don’t care what your psy­chol­o­gists say, you are not ruled by your desires. You are ruled by me. By my desires.

You’ve got choices. You know what they say. If you can’t make the sun stand still, make him run.

Just kid­ding!

Life is short. What do they say? Let’s roll all our mus­cle and all our charm into a ball of bait. Well, I para­phrase. But, my advice to you, humans: Roll all your mus­cle and charm up into a stink­ing ball of bait, and…

Oh! This. Did you know this? You can out­run any ani­mal on earth. Lope after him, keep on, and he’ll even­tu­ally drop dead. It’s true. Ani­mals can’t sweat like you–

THE HEARTACHES clam­ber on.

Jesus, I was about to give up.

Girls and boys, I give you The Fuck­ups. Excuse me, Heartaches.

They sing in har­mony and dance in sub­tle syn­chro­niza­tion, a la The Shangri Las.

DELORES and THE HEARTACHES

Ain’t hap­pi­ness a turn off? Ain’t bliss a bore?
Can’t we have a lit­tle fun any­more?
Bit­ter the rind and bit­ter the core.
Give me the mis­ery of yes­ter­day,
The heart­break of yore.

You’d be sad to see us go, we know,
When your trou­bles have only begun.
Tell me where is the fun
If the worst that can be has been done?

No more typ­i­cal ter­rors,
No nor­mal night­mares,
Or pre­dictably empty affairs.
I’ve put plenty of ath­letes in wheel­chairs—
Big deal, they can’t walk, no one cares.

You’re beset with regret, and sad­dled with debt,
But no one here’s had their bones crushed, I bet.
No, none of you have really,
Bru­tally and truly,
None of you have really suf­fered, yet.

A Cou­ple of Quotes:

“If we wish to speak of it sub­stan­tively, we must make a sub­stan­tive of it by writ­ing it out thus with hyphens between all its words. Noth­ing but this can pos­si­bly name its del­i­cate idio­syn­crasy. And if we wish to feel that idio­syn­crasy we must repro­duce the thought as it was uttered, with every word fringed and the whole sen­tence bathed in that orig­i­nal halo of obscure rela­tions, which, like a hori­zon, then spread about its mean­ing.” –William James

“I’m a roman­tic; a sen­ti­men­tal per­son thinks things will last, a roman­tic per­son hopes against hope that they won’t.”
–F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Cou­ple of Theories:

In one, every­thing is clipped. Cured. Cap­tured and killed. The story is refined by a thou­sand retellings. Torn from the orig­i­nal giant and passed through suc­ces­sively smaller hands down smaller halls to the tini­est office with the tini­est edi­tor at a knife’s-edge desk. Glib myth. Pat per­sua­sion. A kiss.

In the other, we are after a panorama. Truth is not a point, an accu­racy, but an entirety. A ram­bling drunk. An accom­mo­dat­ing tan­gent. Begin­ning one sen­tence after another with, ‘Else­where…’ and ‘Mean­while…’ and ‘Also…’

In both, romance is com­manded by the impos­si­ble. It makes heights bear­able. We can’t extend our reach, but we can manip­u­late the dis­tance. One’s a stab, the other a flood. Angles on infinity.

A Cou­ple of Poems:

1.

A man at Good Will scared me
with Hello! He was tall
and honked like a blade
of grass between my thumbs.
Then one with weak eye­brows told me
he couldn’t reprice those ‘til tomor­row.
A warn­ing, like a crav­ing, meant to shame me,
and the yarn was taken out of sight.
All this put me in a bad mood
and I thought again about the ad; the one nam­ing
the lit­tle white gully of her chest, and
how she’d com­pli­mented his blank
–reply with the thing she liked
if this is you–
I left feel­ing my own bra fill
with sand. It was that kind of day,
when I had the idea, too late, of
answer­ing his blank
with a list of things
I’d tried to buy
but couldn’t.

2.
The neigh­bors moved in to walls of pri­mary blue.
I heard them ham­mer­ing
at night, heard them back up against a first gladness

while I was mak­ing a kind new word for you;
one that includes river, inlet,
trib­u­tary and stream: the whole ocean
abbre­vi­ated to an arm,
like a pruned limb under my side—

What has this to do with neigh­bors?
Oh, an arriv­ing love; a purchase.

Can any­thing besides bore­dom defeat romance? Stop me—boredom is just a love song sung in elim­i­na­tions, as hands love the hours with tucked thumbs and weather invents the charts’ devo­tion; What our eyes do to prose.

Intel­li­gence is roman­tic. I wrote that down but I also remem­bered. The oppo­site of what’s real is not fancy. Some­one else fin­ished that thought, beautifully.

My par­ents mailed me pic­tures of my dog in another woman’s jew­elry. I look at the pic­tures like a chal­lenge; I show them off.

How do you explain the insep­a­ra­ble num­ber of things with­out the impa­tience
of import? Bring it all to shore, as we do in sen­tences. This is a sen­tence. And some­one else, with a footnote.

I could start again, to shore; give up the index for a human traf­fic light.

What I mean is just that if the gates are really gone we’ve been more watch­ful than we thought: nar­row if not per­mis­sive, delib­er­ate if not care­ful. Not sure, let­ting any­thing amount to consent.

“When speak­ing Russ­ian, a self is felt but has no proper name.” But in Eng­lish we’re cow­boys: bri­dled romance car­ries us from con­text to noun.

We cup a land­scape for its porce­lain rim and trace it, only. This is the mean­ing of a palace of time, the sanc­tity of tub­ing down the river.

I am devoted, then, to a charged tedium, a slack inter­est. At The Office of Weary Sur­prises, I reg­u­late sum­mer tem­per­a­tures. When the clock says to, I lead com­pany exer­cises: stare and hum, stretch the truth, sad­dle up and weep.

Or, Fig­ures 1–10: notes from con­tin­ued study.

fig.1
Romance doesn’t hap­pen just any­where.
You are its nat­ural habi­tat, a life so won­der­fully con­fined.
Your time lim­ited, your scener­ies small, your sen­tences curbed.
For you, the right words are as good as air travel.

fig.2
Romance is a weed that crops in mem­ory and yields gar­lands.
It is half a heart parad­ing as the whole.
Not deceit, but a gen­er­ous, mag­ni­fied hon­esty.

fig.3
Romance is loaded.
It keeps piles of unguarded forg­eries.
Romance dumped the gold stan­dard and ran off with infla­tion.
It elopes with each new frac­tion of a cent.

fig.4
Romance can tell a story, but never a joke.
It’s a device that invents num­bers then loses count.

fig.5
It learns from arrows.
Thins to a line and hard­ens to a point.
Nar­rows enough to be held and drawn; to pierce.

fig.6
The Art of Let­ting Some­one In is pocked with secrets, so Romance with­holds some­thing, always.
It is a mine­field of dim­ples just below the horizon.

fig.7
Romance abstracts pos­si­bil­ity from the lump in your throat.
It invents, rehearses and refines a future with­out betray­ing intention.

fig.8
It is a most humane har­bin­ger, proph­esy­ing only in pri­vate.
And it serves div­ina­tions like delicacies.

fig.9
Romance needs what is given.
Its power is surprise.

fig.10
It’s a knack.
Draw tomor­row over today, then hook the past and bury it cen­ter: a belt of vaulted earth.