The Click Point

Derek settled himself in the chair on the other side of my desk.  This was our second conference about his autobiographical narrative.  At our first meeting he had told me he simply couldn’t think of an event in his life memorable enough, arresting enough, pivotal enough to support a narrative that unspooled toward a moment of  unanticipated meaning or insight.  But if I had listened well, if I had interpreted correctly the shadow language laired beneath Derek’s words, his problem was reticence, a reluctance to reinhabit his past experience.  That past, that experience, was, it seemed, not a burbling stream he wished to go a-fishing in.  To complete the assignment, he needed to be distanced from it.

I had told him that the experience did not necessarily need to be personal; it could be something he had witnessed, something that involved someone else.  The important thing was that it had a “click point,” a small, resonant rupture of emergent meaning; a sudden, perhaps initially inexplicable, sense that what he was seeing, had seen, was somehow revelatory, somehow cargoed with insinuation; that, in some fashion, what he had beheld pointed suggestively beyond its immediate context.  The ladenness of these click points, I explained, their significance, often becomes explicit upon reflection.  I recommended that he trawl his past, recent and distant, for such an experience, consider its potential for containing a click point, and come back to see me in a couple of days.

“Dr. D., I did what you said, and I think I may have something.”

“Terrific; good for you, Derek “

“Yeah, well, I’m not sure though.”

“Okay; tell me about it.”

“Well, I was at this baseball game, watching my little cousin.  He was nine, and it was one of those peewee leagues, you know, before they’re old enough for Little League, the kind where one of the coaches pitches, real slow, so the kids can hit it.  He played shortstop. Well, a batter hits a grounder to him, a pretty hard one, and just before it gets to him it takes a hop and hits him right on the chin.  And he kind of crumples to the ground and curls up and starts to cry.  I mean, really cry.  Sobbing.  His whole body was shaking.

But here’s the thing.  It’s like everything stops; everything comes to a standstill.  It was like one of those things we made back in grade school, a diorama.  The wind stops and the flag in left field stops waving, and the sunlight, it’s like it freezes, and the sounds stop, and nobody moves.  Everybody is just standing there watching him.  The coaches and the other players.  And his mom and dad, they’re in the stands, and they just sit there.  And it dawns on me that they are embarrassed.  They’re embarrassed that their son is laying on the ground crying.

Finally, his dad gets up and walks toward him.  Not fast; just kind of strolls out there.  And he stands over him—doesn’t squat down or touch him or anything.  Just stands there, and says something.  I couldn’t hear what.  Then my cousin stops crying and gets up and follows his dad off the field.  He’s like walking in his dad’s shadow.  And when his dad gets back to the stands, he says something to his mom, and she takes my cousin to the car and they leave.  And his dad goes back to the stands and watches the rest of the game.

What do you think, Dr. D.?  Is this something I could write the essay about?”

What did I think?  I thought it was a cluster bomb of a story, a detonation of horror and cruelty and crushing sadness.  I thought it spoke of an inability to love hard enough, or enough, or even at all.  I thought of a self-regard so hermetic that it induced emotional anesthesia. I thought of America’s storied pastime hidden behind a carapace of mockery, the fabled diamond a broken space, a scoured terrain.  I didn’t say this, though; Derek needed to make his own meaning.

“This is definitely something to write the essay about.  Now, what’s the click point for you?  What’s the big-picture insight it afforded you, the realization you came to because of it?  What’s its emotional temperature, its moreness?  What’s it telling you about?”

“Well, for me it’s saying something about how parents forget kids are kids, even if they are playing a grownup’s game.  About how kids cry when they hurt because they’re not old enough yet to have learned not to.  And how getting all protective about our image doesn’t leave any room for feeling what others feel.  You think that’s kinda getting at it?

“Derek, I think you’ve written the essay.  Go put it on paper.”

Derek gets up, heads to the door, then stops.  With his back to me, he says, “Dr. D., I did fudge that story a little.”

“How so?”

He turns to face me.  “That little boy.  That was me.”

And then he was gone.  I wanted to call him back.  I wanted to run after him.  I wanted more.  But I knew that, for Derek, there is a benediction in the shadowed, a blessing in some things only glanced at.

Mass Changes

I am old enough to remember when, as a consequence of Vatican II reforms in the 1960’s, the Catholic Mass transitioned from being said in Latin to being said in vernacular English.  I preferred Latin.  Even as a young boy I felt the elevated and solemn beauty of a language that would remain incorruptibly sequestered on an island time, and I somehow understood—and was enchanted by—the way Latin connected me to an incomprehensibly deep and mysterious history.  Even today, Latin, for me, is indissociable from golden patens and jeweled chalices and incense and light shafting through stain-glass windows and words and music rising up to and resounding in dusky high-vaulted ceilings. 

So, it was with no small interest that I read  that on Sunday, November 27, 2011, at the beginning of the Advent season and the official start of the Roman Catholic Church’s liturgical year, churchgoers participated in a different Mass than they had the previous Sunday.  On that day a new translation of the Roman Missal, the Latin book of prayers upon which the Mass is based, went into effect.  The new translation traditionalizes Catholicism’s most significant ritual by cleaving much more closely to the Latin original.  The often-repeated congregant response, for instance, to the priest’s “The Lord be with you,”—“And also with you”—has been altered to “And with your spirit” because it is both a literal rendition of the Latin “Et cum spiritu tuo” and it acknowledges that the priest is about to perform an action reserved only to those who have received the sacrament of Holy Orders.  In effect, the Church intends the new translation to darn with the formal stitch of its official language a community gathered under God’s authority to hear His word and witness the spirit of Christ channeled through His ordained representative on Earth.

Of even more interest, however, were the reactions of some of those in the pews.  Despite the changes not being an immaculate inception—churchgoers were advised well in advance, and “cheat sheets” containing the altered prayers and responses were available—they were not pleased.  Like the last Incan emperor Atahuallpa, who cast away the Catholic breviary because it would not speak to him as it did the priest, they disowned what they did not understand.  “I am furious with the Church,” one congregant declared.  I am so tired of being told exactly what I have to say, exactly what I have to pray.  The changes are so meaningless.”  Such a view articulates, precisely and with unconscious irony, one motivating reason for the changes: a sense of worship-style entitlement that fits well with an ethic of individuality, but not with the Church’s view of a gathered, worshipping community.

Another, “distraught” by changes that seem “ridiculous” and “stupid” in their trivial concern with “semantics,” refused to “learn the damn prayers.”  Who, he asked, wants “to go to church and be confused.”   A third, also semantically-challenged, wondered about the change in the Nicean Creed from Jesus being described as “one in being with the Father” to “consubstantial with the Father”: “Consubstantial?  What is that word?”  Quite a bit, as it turns out, for its temporal arc reaches back to the Arian Heresy, a 4^th-century controversy in Church history that involved nothing less than the nature of Jesus Christ and the mystery of the Trinity.  Arius, a priest from Alexandrine, Egypt, claimed that the Father and Son were of like being but not like substance: the Son came after the Father and was created by Him.  Such a position contravened the officially endorsed teaching that the Son was of the same substance as the Father and co-existent with Him.  The Council of Nicea in 325 settled the matter in favor of the traditional position: the Father and Son were of like substance, consubstantial.  Arius was declared a heretic. The change to “consubstantiation,” then, purposefully anneals the semantics of here-and-now with the there-and-then, reestablishing a doctrinal matrix of meaning that the more vernacular and less literal “one in being” does not express.

I cannot help but wonder, though, if the stiff-spined resistance to the Mass changes mask a deeper issue for which the aggrieved denunciations are a surface token.  Could it be, I wonder, change itself, that atomizing centrifuge within which we spin with what seems ever-increasing speed, that beleaguering sense of Rocky Horror time-warping discontinuity, that has provoked the outcry?  In the abstract, as a word merely, or as an observed but safely-distanced phenomenon, change presents us with few problems.  It is not hard.  Making it, however, is.

We are creatures of habit, remarkably adept, as Thoreau notes, at “easily and insensibly” falling “into a particular route.”  Routine beckons, the customary solidifies, and revolutions in behavior, as Thomas Paine knew, are tumultuous: “a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” raising, as a result, “a formidable outcry in defense of custom.”   The habitual is unrecognized decision making; routine is unacknowledged choice, insensible because it has become so heavily muscled over time that we think it a natural fact, just the way it is, the way things are.  History, context, explanation, contingency all are swept away, and we find ourselves contentedly housed on a cul-de-sac of time.  We cohere, our lives emplotted in a narrative, seamless and durable, whose theme is the who we are.  “Our notions pass for true,” as William James observed.

But change confronts us with the rupturing awareness of time’s hissing passage.  It threatens, reminding us that we are not left handed or right handed, but minute- and second-handed.   Tempus fugit, as Latin has it, and we don’t like the fugiting, don’t like the curled lip of time that mocks us with our smallness, that unsettles all we have settled, and reminds us, with a kick-drum thud, of the inevitable event horizon of our days and ways.  My father-in-law once told me he considered computers stupid contrivances.  “I don’t know how to work one,” he said, “and I don’t want to learn.”  But underneath that curmudeonly bravado, that defiant individuality, lay a fear that he couldn’t learn; that it eclipsed his capability; that “behind the times” was indelibly calligraphied across his forehead; that he was antiquated, obsolescent, time’s relic, carelessly discarded by a culture careening relentlessly forward; that he had been abandoned in a wilderness, beyond the orienting needle of even the most sensitive compass, bereft of rock and refuge and harbor and keep.  What my father-in-law was saying, really, was “I’m afraid.”

“Change,” the poet Wendy Videlock writes, is “the new,/ improved/ word for god.”  And in an oblique sense at least, that is the end for which the Mass changes were designed.  But as Videlock also says, while change is “mighty enough/. . .to shelter” and “ bring together,” it can also “estrange us.”  We experience that estrangement, that unfamiliarity, that unbelongingness, most forcibly from ourselves, with ourselves, to ourselves.

Surprise!

In Wendell Berry’s novel Andy Catlett, young Andy says “I had begun to be surprised by the extent to which life consists of surprises.  I don’t know, but what it consists of is mostly surprises.”  Marcus Aurelius says “How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.”  One wonders if, as Andy grows older, he will, like David Copperfield, come to channel that flinty Roman Stoic: “I know enough of the world now,” David says, “to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything.”

*     *     *

Surprise measures abnormality, an incongruity between expectation and outcome, the gap between a coherence we infer and an incoherence we experience.  We can’t help being surprised.  It springs from part of our brain’s standard equipment, an automatic, unconscious, and corner-cuttingly quick use of perception, intuitive thinking, and knowledge of the world to make connections, to fit parts together into cohesive wholes.  Should a burly Hell’s Angel on a Harley hog say, in a Boston Brahmin accent, “I do so enjoy tatting lace,” we almost instantaneously register an associative discrepancy.  Which is to say, we have a surprise response.

*     *     *

I like language that surprises me, that traduces the rules governing how words are aligned, grouped and related; that in pushing against and beyond the parameters of linguistic structure pushes us out of the deep-channeled groove of thought and into mindful experiencing.  This, for example, from e. e. cummings’s “Cambridge Ladies”: “. . . sometimes in its box of/sky lavender and cornerless, the/moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy.”  Or this, from Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”: “And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves/Trail with daisies and barley/Down the rivers of the windfall light.”  Or this, from Gary Lutz’s short story “Divorcer”: “These were quelled girls with queering glowers, older young women unpetted and inexpert in dress, sideburned boys who were uglifiers of their one good feature . . .”  Who can read these words without an embodied jolt, without being startled into the well-appointed but constricted souls of the Cambridge ladies, the innocent wonder of childhood, the abjection of postmodern youth

*     *     *

When she was four-years-old, my granddaughter overheard me make a snide and dismissive comment about the Disney princess phenomenon.  She came and stood right before me.  “Grandpa Jerry,” she said, “don’t step on my dreams.”  I was surprised by the precocious sentiment, and I was stung into shame.  Can a heart throb with self-abjection?  Can a heart break with self-recriminatory sadness?  Can it fracture, shatter?  Can it be smithereened,  be big-banged into pieces?  Mine did, and was.

*     *     *

In Poe’s story “The Cask of Amantillado,” the narrator,  Montressor (“my treasure”), an aristocrat  who no longer commands wealth or respect, the last of his line—an aristocrat whose only remaining treasure is his aristocracy—devises a meticulously planned act of vengeance against the wealthy arriviste Fortunato (“the lucky one”) for his having “ventured upon insult.”  He lures an inebriated Fortunato to the catacombed cellar of his palazzo and walls him alive in a crypt’s recess.  Fortunato quickly sobers up.  “For the love of God, Montressor,” Fortunato begs.  “Yes,” Montressor mockingly replies as he mortars the last stone in place, “for the love of God.”

I suspect Fortunato was surprised.  I would be.  But that surprise enfolds a horror, for Poe ambiguates what we think we know: the difference between sanity and insanity.  If Montressor is sane, he has directed a highly rational intelligence toward a hideously deranged purpose.  If he is insane, insanity is not babbling idiocy but, rather, wears the mask of cool, calculating reason.  And precisely there is the horror: how can we tell what self-animating purpose harbors itself in those among whom we move?  Do you think that, in Poe’s day, a neighbor of someone who has committed some heinous act, stood before a reporter and, stupefied by surprise, said, “But he was such a nice guy.”

*     *     *

In the half-light of a dawn this past summer, as I waited for the Mr. Coffee machine to deliver enough bracing brew to begin my day, I looked out the kitchen window and was surprised to see a fully antlered deer nibbling on the Pauls Glory hostas in the garden.  As I stood there, he suddenly stopped and looked right at me.  I raised my hand, palm outward, and said “hi.”  It was all I could think to do.

One winter afternoon I watched two sparrows standing in the snow, facing each other.  One would puff itself up, take a step forward, and utter such a harsh chirp that the other hopped backwards.  Then it puffed itself up, stepped forward, and blared a chirp that sent the other skipping backward.  They repeated this display of avian machismo for five minutes before flying off in separate directions.  Alpha-maled stalemate, I suppose; Passeridae gridlock.

*     *     *

I dislike surprises that disrupt my routines.  Now, I realize that routine is routinely denounced, habitually vilified, and uniformly maligned.  Emotional anesthesia!  Spiritual quarantine!  A perpendicular fall from the intellectual firmament!  That Yankee scold Thoreau says, “It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. . . . How worn and dusty, . . . how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity.”  For Thoreau, routine is essentially passive, a half-life: we “insensibly” “fall” into it.

I wonder, though.  Routine can be sensible and active.  Routine is how my classes get prepared and tests get written and papers get graded; it is how books and articles and blog posts get read and essays get written; it is how grass gets mowed and the house gets painted and snow gets shoveled; it is how meals get prepared and clothes get laundered and carpets vacuumed.  There is much to be said for spontaneity, but routine is the conduct by which I conduct my life.  Routine makes time.

The world besets us with its clamor and clangor, its clatter and claptrap.  It musses and messes us up.  It grates and abrades with the blistering friction of the here-and-now.  We are beleaguered by its 4G-ed haste, frayed by its unsparing demands on our attention; impinged upon, continually, by its helter-skelteredness.  Routine tames that world, patterns and familiarizes it, slows it down, domesticates it; it enabling us to exert some control over it, to dwell in it, to write our lives in it.

*     *     *

I especially dislike being the featured guest at a surprise birthday party.  The deer-in-the-headlights stare of initial incomprehension; the dope duped feel; the stuttering struggle to say something equal to the occasion, to be coolly glib and buccaneeringly witty, and managing only a feeble “Wow, what a surprise;” the mildewed comments about age and its debilities; the forced performance of it all; the perplexed and implacable self-consciousness of it all; the contrived responsiveness of it all.  Surprise party?  More like surprise attack. 

Still, someone cared enough about me to arrange that party.  That’s pretty surprising.

*     *     *

But birthdays themselves, I do not mind.  As the anniversaries of my initial appearance on the planet, they remind me of the most surprising thing of all: my natality.  I was born.  And while I occupy but a moment’s moment in the 13.7 billion history of the universe, while I comprise but a minor hieroglyph in the story of humankind, I am, and that small conjunction of subject and verb is so huge I am compelled to predicate it with nouns and adjectives that corral it and make it, if not fully understood, at least partially comprehensible.  Birthdays are ambassadors from a far, far country, bringing the news that the earth has once again spun its way around the sun, and I am here to observe it.

High School Darwinism

Natural selection and adaptability. Survival of the fittest. Unaccountable mutations. Characteristics suitable to an ecological niche. Contention over limited resources. Am I rehearsing the Darwinian principles of evolution? Nope. I am describing my day-to-day experience, and the experience of young men like me, who attended an all-boys Catholic high school, a Galapagos of buccaneering energies and churning impulse, a mad clamor of distilled testosterone, an image-addled hothouse of carefully stage-managed signifying practice, an ambit of status-seeking gambits, all governed by one overarching principle: do not stand in opposition to the group. To do so would be, well, maladaptive. One quickly learned the weather vaned lesson of pointing in the direction of the prevailing wind, and that wind inevitably blew one into the sometimes good-natured but always abrasive friction burn of adolescent competition.




Competition was fiercest over the resource in least supply: regard, admiring notice, enviable attention. Success in sports, of course, proved a time tested and honored means of garnering regard. But so was the kinesthetic presence involved in being cool, owning something cool, or being associated with someone or something cool. Who owned the coolest car, wore the coolest blazer to the fall dance, combed their hair the coolest, talked and walked the coolest, smoked cigarettes the coolest, never ever slipped on the icy school entrance steps? Who assumed the detachment of a Zen master under even the most stressful circumstances? Whose dad had the coolest job? Who had the most attractive girlfriend, the most girlfriends? Who managed to pass through the lunch line the most times before being caught by the lunch-room monitor? Who played in a rock and roll band, had access to Playboy magazine, had a compliant older brother who purchased beer for our parties? Who triumphed in the periodic after-school fistfights? Who practiced a brazen nonchalance toward the teachers, passed tests while loudly proclaiming they had not deigned to open the book, had total command of sports statistics, could tell an unending supply of dirty jokes? Yes, competition for the tribute of recognition was ferocious, except, of course, for academic accomplishment, but at least there were multiple ways by which it could be won.



Had you any hope at all of being a person of significance on the formidability index, you adapted, and quickly, to the high school culture’s jockeying and jostling for hierarchical status. Participation was virtually an existential requirement. Winning insured your prime-time visibility. Playing well but less successfully imparted a fringe-time standing, a sort of vestibule to the glamor and prominence of prime-time. Lose often enough or refuse to participate and you were “caspared,” mausoleumed in 3a.m. off-network syndication and ShamWow infomercials, a silhouette of a silhouette. I was a fringe-timer.



* * *



During the winter months I played intramural volleyball. Being short, stocky, and unblessed with both speed and a vertical leap exceeding 6 inches, I was assigned the position of setter. The intramural teams were coached by one of the Christian Brothers who formed the bulk of the high school’s teaching corps. The Christian Brothers, a Catholic religious community dedicated to educating youth, operated my high school. My team’s coach was Brother Barry, a buzz-cut, jut-jawed ex-Marine who was now, evidently, a soldier for Christ. Brother Barry whole-heartedly and full-throatedly advocated the competitive ethos that catalyzed the student body. For Brother Barry, volleyball was not a wholesome and healthy recreational activity, nor was it a pleasant diversion for passing time on long Wisconsin winter evenings. It was a battle to be won, a battle that, as Brother Barry frequently reminded us, would, like the Marines, make us men.



One evening after a game, as I sat head-hung before my locker, dismayed by the particularly robust pastiche of ineptitude I had displayed, beleaguered by the thought that I had caused our team’s loss, I heard Brother Barry’s voice, anger-infused and stiletto-sharp, from three rows of lockers away: “We should’ve never lost that game. We’d have won if that fat-ass DeNuccio had got into position quicker.” I stared into the empty locker across from me, then at the fading imprint on the concrete floor of wet feet passing down the aisle. I dressed quickly and walked home quickly. I walked very quickly.



The next morning, at the end of his World History class, Brother Barry called me aside. “Last night I said some things I shouldn’t have,” he told me. “I just wanted you to know I apologize.” Just like that. Not contrite. Not sorry. Not sincere. Not seeking forgiveness. A simple statement of fact, crisp, neat. And probably a matter of damage control, for I found out later than someone had told him I had overheard his remark. He had compacted his cruelty into a small candleflame of regret, then hurriedly snuffed it into a thin vine of smoke. “Oh, it’s OK, Brother,” I said. What else could I say? I was a kid, my jingle-jangly nerve endings close to the skin’s surface. What he said was hurtful, and I was hurt. “It’s OK, Brother.” But it was not OK. It was not even in OK’s zip code. I expected more from an adult. I expected more from a Christian Brother.



And when I became an adult, I expected more from myself, for, despite my best intentions, I found that competition can alter character without deepening it, forgot that we were made for cooperation as well as competition, found that I failed, that I thwarted my better self, that I could be mean-spirited and unkind, get angry and frustrated, cause hurt and humiliation, disrespect the inner lives of others. I tried not to, but I did. It is a good thing, I think, that we are always destination-bound rather than destination-arrived. So long as there is an around the next bend, an over the hill, a down the road, so long can we expect to be better, broaden our emotional imagination, resolve that the radius of our actions will extend beyond the raw moment, the cubicled experience. Perhaps Brother Barry came to the same conclusion. I hope he did.



* * *



And yet, strangely, surprisingly, for I anticipated otherwise, my rather flat-lined pulse on the student regard meter spiked. Though I spoke to no one about it, my Brother Barry experience sped rapidly through the students’ high-speed, word-of-mouth, distributed communication network. Suddenly, I was bolded typeface in the fine print of my classmates’ consciousnesses. How did I know? Ron Rutella, an impeccably credentialed prime-timer, cool’s cool, strolled up to my locker one morning and said, “Don’t sweat Brother Barry. He’s a prick. You just had a bad game. It happens. I know. You gave it your best shot, didn’t you?” “Yeah,” I said. “Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it,” and then he ambled on down the hall. I knew my time of sunsplashed attention would be short-lived. I knew I was still a fringe timer, always would be. But I also knew that schoolboy justice, so frequently merciless, can sometimes deliver a moment of grace.

Easter

Just now, if I stand in the backyard garden at just the right place, I can see the rubied tulips at the foot of the rose-leafed dogwood surmounted by the lavendered explosion of the red bud in the smaller “nook” garden across the yard. Just to the left, the butterfly bush is undergoing its restoration and soon will be attracting those lepidopteran flutterers that carry summer on their wings. I feel like a stranger in this sightscape, the only thing in it in physical decline, the only thing with wintriness about it, the only thing deblossoming. And yet, standing here, rooted to the earth, I somehow feel at home, as if my being here, my witnessing this small-scale epiphany, is somehow right, necessary. An act of communion. I feel as Thoreau did when he stood immersed in one foot of a rainbow: liberated from the densities of matter and gravity, swimming like a porpoise in pure color; an experience removed from instrumentality; an experience unmolested by the necessity of representation; an experience of hint and intimation and innuendo, of pure value, of meaning as meaningfulness; of self, at least for that stilled moment, as a precondition for transcendence.

In that stilled moment, I think I know what “soul” means: our capacity to recognize and acknowledge those rarefied moments when things abracadabra to a different order, take on a luminescence, demand a sustained act of mindfulness; when the drone of the quotidian becomes music; when the block letters of the everyday become calligraphy; when the eye—and through the eye, the mind and heart—is struck and simply must gaze, steadfastly and unblinkingly; when we realize, as did William Carlos Williams with the red wheelbarrow, “so much depends/upon” what we are seeing. The soul is that glistening instant when body and mind, the material and spiritual, distracted from distraction, fuse and transition beyond almostness and in-partness into the uncloistered wholeness of a being being wholly in the world.

And in that stilled moment, I think I know what “Easter” means, that movable feast set some 1700 years ago on the first Sunday subsequent to the full moon subsequent to the vernal equinox, itself a fused moment, of winter and not-winter transitioning to spring; that Christian replacement for the pagan festival of Eostre, Germanic goddess of dawn, itself a fused moment of night and not-night transitioning to day; that capacious holiday, making celebrants of anyone, no matter their faith tradition, that day of basketed sweetnesses and the joyous laughter of children scurrying to discover hidden eggs, themselves emblematic of a fused moment between born and not-born transitioning into aliveness; that day of the hoped-for, the wished-upon, the expectation-imbued; that day of a risen Redeemer or simply the redemptive promise kindled by the rejuvenated earth, once more, once again, gloriously, thankfully, resurrecting itself from the cold-stoned obduracy of winter.

Gratitude

On a recent morning, looking out a kitchen window, I saw a cardinal in my winter-ravaged garden. The sight instantly filled me with a vitality of feeling that suspended the moment of looking into a clock-frozen now, a pause poised over time. That red knot of energy, that rubied spot of gladness, that pulsing heart amid the purgatorial gloom, recalled for me the bloom and color that had been driven deep and dormant by the earth’s backward tilt, to await the summoning shout of spring. That cardinal was a rumor of redemption irrupting into the fallen present. It was the beauty of innuendo. It was a stop-and-pause-to-reflect thing, a thing given me from beyond me to see and enjoy, an evocative and immersive moment to linger in and experience wonder at.

That wonder made me feel gratitude, and that gratitude made me feel reverence. Not gratitude to something but about something; not an owing or indebtedness, not an imposed obligation, but a state of being, a style of feeling a moment’s wholeness, an urgent tug of attunement, a succouring inspiration, a quickening and a homage, an impulsive heart-leap of nowness and thisness, an attentiveness so intense it transports the seer inside the seen. And not a reverence that is religious in a doctrinal sense, not a matter of practice and ritual, not a worship exactly, but, rather, an attitude or stance, a recognition and receptivity, a willingness to be beckoned by the sacramental in the everyday, to lift our heavy eyelids and see the mystery and magic the world discloses to us continually, to experience respect, deference, veneration.

We need gratitude, I think. Our lives too often seem immutably mutable, constitutionally vulnerable and subject to immanent wounding, to weariness and fault, to vagrant hope, to encumbrance. We too often feel potshotted and potholed, too often metered by the poetics of adversity, too often unmustered and unsettled, too often marionettes to motions not our own, too often homeless in our consciousness of ourselves, spectral presences in our own lives. We too often pound the kick-drum of self-rebuke. Our per capita output of regret seems astonishingly high. Like bubbles, we are always balancing inner and outer pressures, seeking an equipoise to preserve a membranous self that often feels sketched in outline, partial, waiting to be filled. We fear we are subplots whose connection to the governing theme of a larger story is disturbingly unclear. We yearn to pronounce ourselves, sound ourselves out, write our narrative in bold block letters, and yet, too often, language fails us, the words point elsewhere or otherwise.

And yet, and yet. The world to some extent echoes our thinking about it. We need gratitude, not to deny the sad existential truths, not to turn a blind eye to the shearing hurts that beleaguer us, not to slough off the dark otherness of our lives with thoughtlessness or the anesthetizing bright-sided optimism of Irving Berlin’s “I’ve got the sun in the mornin’ and the moon at night.” No, we need gratitude to see fully, to cultivate mindful notice, to avoid what Aldous Huxley called our “almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.” We need to ask ourselves the questions Mary Oliver poses in her poem “Gratitude”: “What did you notice?” “What did you hear?” “What did you admire?” “What astonished you?” “What do you want to see again?” “What was most tender?” “What was happening?” Answering those questions, Oliver says, will “shake us from our sleep.”

We can catch our breath, catch a moment, catch ourselves. I believe we can be wise. We can balance the ledger’s debits with credit entries. I found one several mornings ago. A cardinal, mid-winter, in my garden; a vermillion throb that, for as long as I bore witness to it, banished the drab and droop, the blasted and bedraggled, the parched and shriveled, the scurfs of snow and crust of frost. I regarded it, as the physicists say, as a fine-structure constant. Indeed, I’d like to think a strange and wondrous physics was at work that morning. A tensile force bound the particles of cardinal and me into a tight nucleus of sensibility. It was hardly a fearful symmetry. It seemed enough, sufficient. It was a souvenir against forgetting. And I did the only thing that seemed appropriate. I said, “Thank you.”

The Storm King and Don Quixote

During my junior year in high school I owned what would now be considered a vintage lighter, the kind that featured a striking wheel, a wick, and a wind hood and that required periodically soaking cotton packing with lighter fluid and replacing the flint. The name “Storm King” was etched on its brass casing. That lighter lit many a cigarette when I hung out with my best friends Jim and Mark at Barney’s DX station, back when cigarette smoking was still considered cool and the Surgeon General’s warning a mere surmise. It also illuminated late-night keyholes, discovered keys or coins dropped on darkened car floors, and fired up the charcoal at grill-outs. An all-purpose tool, indeed, and I seldom left home without it.

In my late adolescent desire to appear the embodiment of sophistication, I perfected a technique of snapping the Storm King open by squeezing it between my thumb and index and middle fingers. Despite diligent practice, however, I was unable to combine that dexterous move with hitting the striking wheel to cause an igniting spark—a feat that would no doubt have had the editors of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not hustling to my door. During the summer between my junior and senior years I somehow lost the Storm King and, strangely, through the time from then to now, have sometimes recalled it and wished I still possessed it. Undoubtedly, I could find a Storm King somewhere online. But I’ve never really looked. I wouldn’t buy it. I want the one I had back then.

* * *

In the winter of 1979, while visiting my folks over the Christmas holidays, I announced that, after eight years of small-town Wisconsin high-school teaching, I had resigned, effective at year’s end, to enter the Ph. D. program at the University of Minnesota. The graduate coursework I had done during the previous summers to move up and across the pay scale had awaked in me an eager desire to know more, to know better. I wanted to become a college professor. The University of Minnesota had not only accepted me, but also offered a teaching associate position.

Dad was pleased. He understood the urgent tug of aspiration and the seizing need for intellectual plenitude and self-betterment. His life embodied it. Mom, too, but she worried about my leaving a secure job in the present for an uncertain job in the future. It was not an idle worry. The graduate school application materials I had received included a cautionary statement describing the precarious market for tenure-line positions in higher education. I was effectually readying myself on a high board for a half gainer into the unpredictable. Still, like Dad, she supported my decision.

A week later I received a small package in the mail from Mom and Dad. It contained a small, hand-carved, wooden figurine of Don Quixote, mounted on Rocinante, shield in one hand, lance in the other. A note was included: “We know that for you, no dream is impossible—except for that one about playing middle linebacker for the Green Bay Packers.” Beneath my words, they had heard, as they always did, my own anxiety about the wisdom of my action.

That figurine occupied a prominent place on my bookshelf for many years until, somehow, amid the confusion of a move, it inexplicably disappeared. I have, ever since, mourned its loss.

* * *

A cigarette lighter; a figurine. Two small objects whose loss I lament. Elizabeth Bishop says in her poem “One Art,” that “so many things seem filled with the intent/ to be lost that their loss is no disaster,” but I do not find the implied indifference to be the case Perhaps I am afflicted by a Freudian melancholy, induced by an attempt to reclaim the libidinal investment of a lost object. Could that be why the songs of that troubadour of nostalgia and loss, John Mellencamp, dominate my iPod’s playlist? “Hold on to sixteen as long as you can,” he sings in “Jack and Diane,” because “Change come around real soon/Make us women and men.” And yet, I do not believe that we lose sixteen in the process of becoming adults. We carry it with us, as we carry all pieces of ourselves, into the present, if not as parts of who we currently are, then as points from which the who we are evolved. We gestate long in the womb of experience. Amid the jostling push and pull of the events that mark our lives, we carry those pieces forward to retrieve and stabilize ourselves, to calm the often turbulent churn that threatens to rend our I’s from our Me’s. We poach in the preserve of memory and carry our trophies forward to selve ourselves, to stitch a coherent sense of who it is that we have become.

Some say the past is inaccessible, a country whose borders, once crossed, permit no reentry. I think the readmission policy is considerably less implacable. Perhaps Walt Whitman says it best: “It avails not, neither time or place—distance avails not.” We enter the past often to repopulate and recontextualize ourselves. Indeed, I sometimes find the same memory requires several visits: they are too ponderous for just one, too rich in their thereness; too complex, too densely layered to be taken in whole at once; too value-tinseled to be cursorily released in deference to an impetuous present; too filled with micro-revelations and small but fully visceral epiphanies.

Nor is the past a silent country. It calls. It hails. It speaks, continually, sometimes with the buttery drawl of pride or the trilled dialect of joy, sometimes with the moonlight inflection of nostalgia, sometimes with the clipped accent of regret, sometimes with a blowtorching howl. Always it speaks, a persistent soundtrack, and always we hear it, even if we are not listening.

A cigarette lighter and a wooden figurine. Two artefacts, cupped in remembrance, unduplicatable, absent but ever-present, objects that mean, still, and whose value lies in that recession-proof market of people and places and events connected to them, and to me.