July 2008 Archives
Ten minutes on July 28, 2008
“The best political theory is in novels”
I recall arriving at Stanford University as a graduate student in English in 1976, fresh from Penn and East Coast weather and saying goodbye to my off-to-Harvard-Law girlfriend. I was questioning why I was still doing lit, which meant a lot of reading and then reading about the readings and then writing about the readings about the readings.
Within about six months I was involved in political organizing against apartheid in South Africa with a group of Stanford students and a few faculty. In the next year I read a lot in political and economic theory, trying to get a fix on my own politics. The New Left was recently more or less deceased, but their theory and especially their rejection of older left positions was intriguing to me. And I found theory bracing, direct, laying out positions and interpreting historical events and trends, all of which I found relatively new. I read Hazel Henderson and E. F. Schumacher and Herman Daly and Jane Jacobs; I read a lot of feminist theory, and small and large M Marxist theory, and anarchist theory and history, and had a giddy sense of liberation from the world of literary criticism. I read Barry Commoner and an early ecology book (Our Synthetic Environment) by Murray Bookchin written under a pseudonym; I read Silent Spring and a bunch of texts on nuclear power and in so doing a lot of writing on how to move forward past oil and coal without going nuclear.
It is hard to express how it felt to read these things. First off, I was reading them alongside doing political work, so each reading seemed to help me get a fix on the organizing we were doing, short and long term goals, and how specific issues (anti-apartheid, anti-corporate, anti-nuclear energy and then weapons, El Salvador and Nicaragua support work) fit into a longer term, larger vision of social change. Second, the reading was shared among people I grew to admire greatly, who I felt were acting on their principles, using their Stanford-level intelligences to fight for things that were worth fighting for. Unlike in a classroom, this reading and discussion felt alive, timely, and energizing.
Ironically, as I swerved from reading novels and fiction to reading theory and history, I found that many of the people I was working and organizing with were reading books like Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed and The Female Man and Ecotopia and Herland; they were reading Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown and John Brunner and the Illuminati trilogy boys (Robert Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson). Don’t get me wrong: most of my friends were also reading biography and essays and political writing (Emma Goldman especially!) and taking classes in political theory and so on. But when the night came and the party ended up in the kitchen talking ideas and books and philosophy, it was more often novels that generated the most interesting conversations.
And so several of us came to the conclusion that novels are a better source of political theory than the alternatives, including of course political theory. Why?
This is all an indirect way of talking about a book I am currently reading, James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere. Set in Los Angeles in 1950, it is a social and political history of the city of angels, as well as a whodunit thriller. Here is the book jacket blub from the original hardcover:
Returning to Los Angeles a few years after World War II (the setting of his last novel, The Black Dahlia ), Ellroy has come up with an ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit and past violence converge explosively. At once taut and densely detailed, this is a mystery with the grim, inexorable pull of a film noir, shot through with a strictly modern dose of extreme (though not gratuitous) brutality and a very sure sense of history and characterization.
What makes this good theory, or the opportunity for readers to theorize?
1. The characters speak in the ways LA cops and citizens would be likely to speak at the time. that is, their speech includes their politics: the casual racism and homophobia, the gendered observations, the spirit of the age cold war rhetoric, are all located in realistic speakers, not anonymous historical Thems. And the various levels of response to such talk is also crucial. One character spouts anti-Communist rhetoric; another sees it as overblown and irrelevant to the actual motivation of the speaker; a third and fourth see it as a way to play the game and make money and get promotions.
2. Connected to this, the institutional conflicts and motivations are crucial to understanding why people say the things they do, and keep silent on other things they might otherwise say. No one feels the need to restrain their racism or hatred of homosexuality (the latter is, lest we forget, massively criminalized, so everything from pederasty to consenting rich guys rolling around in private bungalows is both an affront to heterosexual decency AND massively illegal). The police department, the City and LA county governments and political machines, competing Hollywood unions and film companies, the newspapers and columnists, the jazz clubs and alcohol/drug rehab farms, the organized crime gangs and prostitution rackets, all circulate within an economy of information. Money buys protection but not always; the Cold War figures in private feuds and schemes to get promotions. People are regularly shaken down, braced, blackmailed, turned, broken with information; and all this happens with ‘squarejohns” and their wives taking out the trash and driving to work and knowing little about the realities taking place just beyond their perception.
3. Finally, these novels show the intersection of private and public. This cop is also probably a very closeted gay man, immersed in a murder case that involves all levels of the LA gay scene; this other has a complicated and ugly relationship with his Czech wife (a camp survivor) and her son, which inflects his compromise with hard-line Cold Warriors to more or less destroy the ‘Red” union so that the corrupt Teamsters can get their jobs. The personal, in these novels, is relentlessly political.
The Los Angeles that emerges from Ellroy’s "L.A. Quartet" (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) is thickly described, and supports the notion that everything is indeed connected. Treatment of homosexuality is connected with a certain kind of damaged heterosexual masculinity; gays paying protection money to sheriffs and cops is connected with mobsters doing the same. And the political and persona pressures on each character tell; conflict is inevitable, it eats at your gut and causes you to do things that generate more conflict, either externally or internally.
So what theory can be derived from well written and well constructed novels? Theories that take into account the complexity of human motives, and the complicated way that the personal is political. The Dispossessed for example examines not only the difficulties in establishing a truly anti-hierarchical, anarchist society and culture, but also the embedded difficulties and contradictions within hierarchical social structures; neither is “realistic” or “ideal” but rather both are attempts to solve difficult, often intractable problems of human social organization.
As the novel unfolds, I felt amazement; I felt the complex multiple reality of 1950 Los Angeles, and in particular its toxic blends of racism, Cold War opportunism, homophobia, and corruption, come alive, so that when I would look up from the page, I felt vertigo at what has changed, and what elements have remained, changed in appearance but not necessarily in depth. That world changed partly because of political movements, partly because many individuals’ lives changed in small but important ways. And that world stayed the same – the race and class divides, the crime and drug running and protection schemes and ideologies of fake patriotism and paranoiac fear – because of political movements, and because many individuals’ lives did not fundamentally change in small but important ways.
Finally, theory to the Greeks was a kind of seeing. In Greek, theoria means "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at," from theorein, "to consider, speculate, look at," from theoros "spectator," from thea "a view" + horan "to see." Often the Greeks seemed to connect theorein to the stage, in the sense of talking about what one saw dramatized. And so theory is born in dramatization and conflict; the playwright not only entertains, but embeds a story inside the entertainment about core conflicts in the society. Clever, eh? That way the entire citizenry can discuss what the play means, and put this discussion “in play” without having to have it be immediately political and real.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Novels are a kidn of play, a kidn of virtual reality, to rehearse stories about conflicts in our identity and culture and nation; they are models of what is, so that we can see the stories we are currently telling, and when necessary, change those stories.
A better story is possible.
“The best political theory is in novels”
I recall arriving at Stanford University as a graduate student in English in 1976, fresh from Penn and East Coast weather and saying goodbye to my off-to-Harvard-Law girlfriend. I was questioning why I was still doing lit, which meant a lot of reading and then reading about the readings and then writing about the readings about the readings.
Within about six months I was involved in political organizing against apartheid in South Africa with a group of Stanford students and a few faculty. In the next year I read a lot in political and economic theory, trying to get a fix on my own politics. The New Left was recently more or less deceased, but their theory and especially their rejection of older left positions was intriguing to me. And I found theory bracing, direct, laying out positions and interpreting historical events and trends, all of which I found relatively new. I read Hazel Henderson and E. F. Schumacher and Herman Daly and Jane Jacobs; I read a lot of feminist theory, and small and large M Marxist theory, and anarchist theory and history, and had a giddy sense of liberation from the world of literary criticism. I read Barry Commoner and an early ecology book (Our Synthetic Environment) by Murray Bookchin written under a pseudonym; I read Silent Spring and a bunch of texts on nuclear power and in so doing a lot of writing on how to move forward past oil and coal without going nuclear.
It is hard to express how it felt to read these things. First off, I was reading them alongside doing political work, so each reading seemed to help me get a fix on the organizing we were doing, short and long term goals, and how specific issues (anti-apartheid, anti-corporate, anti-nuclear energy and then weapons, El Salvador and Nicaragua support work) fit into a longer term, larger vision of social change. Second, the reading was shared among people I grew to admire greatly, who I felt were acting on their principles, using their Stanford-level intelligences to fight for things that were worth fighting for. Unlike in a classroom, this reading and discussion felt alive, timely, and energizing.
Ironically, as I swerved from reading novels and fiction to reading theory and history, I found that many of the people I was working and organizing with were reading books like Woman on the Edge of Time and The Dispossessed and The Female Man and Ecotopia and Herland; they were reading Alice Walker and Rita Mae Brown and John Brunner and the Illuminati trilogy boys (Robert Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson). Don’t get me wrong: most of my friends were also reading biography and essays and political writing (Emma Goldman especially!) and taking classes in political theory and so on. But when the night came and the party ended up in the kitchen talking ideas and books and philosophy, it was more often novels that generated the most interesting conversations.
And so several of us came to the conclusion that novels are a better source of political theory than the alternatives, including of course political theory. Why?
This is all an indirect way of talking about a book I am currently reading, James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere. Set in Los Angeles in 1950, it is a social and political history of the city of angels, as well as a whodunit thriller. Here is the book jacket blub from the original hardcover:
Returning to Los Angeles a few years after World War II (the setting of his last novel, The Black Dahlia ), Ellroy has come up with an ambitious, enthralling melodrama painted on a broad, dark canvas. The novel's first half interweaves two stories of lonely, driven lawmen investigating the crimes of social outcasts. In the county sheriff's office, Deputy Danny Upshaw finds that his probe of a series of homosexual murders is unleashing some frightening personal demons. Meanwhile, DA's investigator Mal Considine is assigned to infiltrate a cadre of Hollywood leftists, knowing that in the red-scare atmosphere, any hint of Communist conspiracy he uncovers will advance his career. Impressed by Upshaw's intensity, Considine decides to use him as a decoy to seduce a powerful woman nicknamed the "Red Queen," and the two cases and their implications of corruption, deceit and past violence converge explosively. At once taut and densely detailed, this is a mystery with the grim, inexorable pull of a film noir, shot through with a strictly modern dose of extreme (though not gratuitous) brutality and a very sure sense of history and characterization.
What makes this good theory, or the opportunity for readers to theorize?
1. The characters speak in the ways LA cops and citizens would be likely to speak at the time. that is, their speech includes their politics: the casual racism and homophobia, the gendered observations, the spirit of the age cold war rhetoric, are all located in realistic speakers, not anonymous historical Thems. And the various levels of response to such talk is also crucial. One character spouts anti-Communist rhetoric; another sees it as overblown and irrelevant to the actual motivation of the speaker; a third and fourth see it as a way to play the game and make money and get promotions.
2. Connected to this, the institutional conflicts and motivations are crucial to understanding why people say the things they do, and keep silent on other things they might otherwise say. No one feels the need to restrain their racism or hatred of homosexuality (the latter is, lest we forget, massively criminalized, so everything from pederasty to consenting rich guys rolling around in private bungalows is both an affront to heterosexual decency AND massively illegal). The police department, the City and LA county governments and political machines, competing Hollywood unions and film companies, the newspapers and columnists, the jazz clubs and alcohol/drug rehab farms, the organized crime gangs and prostitution rackets, all circulate within an economy of information. Money buys protection but not always; the Cold War figures in private feuds and schemes to get promotions. People are regularly shaken down, braced, blackmailed, turned, broken with information; and all this happens with ‘squarejohns” and their wives taking out the trash and driving to work and knowing little about the realities taking place just beyond their perception.
3. Finally, these novels show the intersection of private and public. This cop is also probably a very closeted gay man, immersed in a murder case that involves all levels of the LA gay scene; this other has a complicated and ugly relationship with his Czech wife (a camp survivor) and her son, which inflects his compromise with hard-line Cold Warriors to more or less destroy the ‘Red” union so that the corrupt Teamsters can get their jobs. The personal, in these novels, is relentlessly political.
The Los Angeles that emerges from Ellroy’s "L.A. Quartet" (The Black Dahlia, The Big Nowhere, L.A. Confidential, and White Jazz) is thickly described, and supports the notion that everything is indeed connected. Treatment of homosexuality is connected with a certain kind of damaged heterosexual masculinity; gays paying protection money to sheriffs and cops is connected with mobsters doing the same. And the political and persona pressures on each character tell; conflict is inevitable, it eats at your gut and causes you to do things that generate more conflict, either externally or internally.
So what theory can be derived from well written and well constructed novels? Theories that take into account the complexity of human motives, and the complicated way that the personal is political. The Dispossessed for example examines not only the difficulties in establishing a truly anti-hierarchical, anarchist society and culture, but also the embedded difficulties and contradictions within hierarchical social structures; neither is “realistic” or “ideal” but rather both are attempts to solve difficult, often intractable problems of human social organization.
As the novel unfolds, I felt amazement; I felt the complex multiple reality of 1950 Los Angeles, and in particular its toxic blends of racism, Cold War opportunism, homophobia, and corruption, come alive, so that when I would look up from the page, I felt vertigo at what has changed, and what elements have remained, changed in appearance but not necessarily in depth. That world changed partly because of political movements, partly because many individuals’ lives changed in small but important ways. And that world stayed the same – the race and class divides, the crime and drug running and protection schemes and ideologies of fake patriotism and paranoiac fear – because of political movements, and because many individuals’ lives did not fundamentally change in small but important ways.
Finally, theory to the Greeks was a kind of seeing. In Greek, theoria means "contemplation, speculation, a looking at, things looked at," from theorein, "to consider, speculate, look at," from theoros "spectator," from thea "a view" + horan "to see." Often the Greeks seemed to connect theorein to the stage, in the sense of talking about what one saw dramatized. And so theory is born in dramatization and conflict; the playwright not only entertains, but embeds a story inside the entertainment about core conflicts in the society. Clever, eh? That way the entire citizenry can discuss what the play means, and put this discussion “in play” without having to have it be immediately political and real.
That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. Novels are a kidn of play, a kidn of virtual reality, to rehearse stories about conflicts in our identity and culture and nation; they are models of what is, so that we can see the stories we are currently telling, and when necessary, change those stories.
A better story is possible.
Ten minutes on July 23, 2008
The Zombies are playing on the café stereo, and the young woman next to me is humming along and seat-dancing as she types away on her iBook. I imagine she was about negative eighteen when the song came out. There is something primal about those Hammond reed organs, and about the sixties psychedelic sound. The lyrics are even more than usually banal, but as they plunk along in time to the way cool sounds, the singer gets to croon “Tell you what? I really want to knooo-oow.” Sometimes that is worth the price of the ticket. We all really, really want to know. And therein lies the genius of pop music, such as it is. Catchy hooks, and lyrics general enough to cover a vast array of human experience.
Jem, Nick Drake, “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison…I write by the side of a babbling brook, a clear stream, a slow and lazy river of music, with the occasional warble of customers (“English breakfast tea”) and passersby just outside the window (“So I really will call you…”). Just below consciousness, the cricket sounds of keys, five laptops rubbing their legs and chirruping and occasionally emitting buzzes or whistles or chimes, electronic insects.
Once again I sat down determined to write about one thing – in this case, my four day, hundreds of miles, six guys in a van disc golf tour of Stockton, Orangevale, Auburn, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, Toney’s Mountain. And certainly, a number of wild images stand out in my mind, and the fragments make for a possibly interesting collage: Zack’s amazing day, playing oh hell until two in the morning, my partners in doubles twice dropping their drives literally on top of the drives of our opponents, taking away their advantage on the hole. Playing Penn Valley on a hot-as-coals day and then stripping everything off but shorts and sliding like an animal into the blessedly cool water next to the course, feeling my head so hot it had a halo around it as I dove under and felt the cold cold water sculpt me as a skin-covered consciousness. The big old dogs up at Toney’s Mountain who would uproot stones, then huge boulders, and nose them down inclines, so that on hole #5 Will had to evade a cartoon-size Wiley coyote style rock crashing down the mountain at him, the sound of it impossible to adequately express, the sound of severe and insane injury and at the same time the joy of stolid stones achieving movement and speed.
Eating pizza outside the Round Table after ordering 2 minutes before they closed, the mall empty except for us and employees planning the rest of their night and a clutch of teenagers watching us throw long backhands across the empty lines of the parking lot…and then looking up as two cars drove past on their way to the Dark Knight opening at midnight, all ten of the inmates staring out at us with perfect Joker faces, white with long scary painted-on grins, framed by the car windows. And the way something you do many times, such as the tour, takes on a structure of its own that holds everyone, a four day fiesta and ritual that smooths out highs and lows, crappy shots and miraculous shots, into the general tired happy sunburnt selves that crowd into the food- and clothing-strewn van at fourth day’s end.
And of course there was the sound, just outside of West Sacramento, of the top of the rocket box lifting up and tearing off its hinges and 65 mph, flying up like the rigid model of the Batman’s wings and smashing down on the highway, taking with it Z’s coat with his cell phone and Peter’s computer bag with more or less his whole school life in it.
But what I really felt called to write about – now that my ten minutes is up – is something slightly different. Or rather, something which is the general to the specific of the Tour, which began with bringing my nephew Jeremiah back to Nevada City back how many years ago? Eight? And now it ends with us throwing a disc with Jeremiah’s name on it, and staying at the hotel where I stayed six months ago when Jeremiah’s mom was waiting for us in a casket, and both of them dead and me not.
And that thing is: the passing of time means that we don’t step in the same river twice, and yet we do the same things over and over and over. And so the sheer element of repetition somehow kills the spirit, and the great experiment we are all involved in pursuing is: if repetition is dulling, and yet essential, and inescapable, then how do we repeat and still stay alive to the life in the repeated?
And if time takes away things we once had, people we once knew…as it will, then do we carry them, and ourselves as we were, and the things we did earlier, with us, down the road?
The sheer freedom of existence is, as the existentialists wrote, terrifying, dizzying, even nauseating. And so we create stories, rituals, family networks, organizations, religions, to balance this tension between what is repeated and what is alive, present, meaningful. Just now, in the circles I run in, these are all in question, all up for grabs, all questioned as to their authority and usefulness. Like software, our versions of Meaning are often radically redesigned; like software, if our version of meaning is not compatible with our operating system, doesn’t work well or is not robust enough, then…we experience Problems up to and including psychological Blue Screens.
So sometimes it is blessedly reassuring to go back to things that repeat. Grab disc; stand still; center mind in/as body; see the throw, already thrown, in your mind; step, step, crossover step, turning torso, shoulders, hips, head now looking not up and forward but sideways, even down a bit; feel the moment of limit and begin the uncoiling; bring the arm fast across the chest; at the last moment, nanomoment, the wrist adjusts to the throw and the disc leaves the hand at just this angle, just this speed, just this amount of rotation. But the body is not done: hand and arm continue through the motion, final step is completed, as the body finishes becoming a machine, an interface with an object round and sharp and tapered like a jet wing, so that the body ends as a sculpture of a discus thrower from ancient Greece and the object flies out into air and travels fast and its spin moves it as it must, through air and time accelerating and then slowing and then turning back and then hitting the ground, way way out there, in the future, part way to a goal, but perfect in the moment of marriage of body and tool, all the various parameters of the body disciplined not grimly but ecstatically.
Each throw a prayer, repeated endlessly, until the end.
The Zombies are playing on the café stereo, and the young woman next to me is humming along and seat-dancing as she types away on her iBook. I imagine she was about negative eighteen when the song came out. There is something primal about those Hammond reed organs, and about the sixties psychedelic sound. The lyrics are even more than usually banal, but as they plunk along in time to the way cool sounds, the singer gets to croon “Tell you what? I really want to knooo-oow.” Sometimes that is worth the price of the ticket. We all really, really want to know. And therein lies the genius of pop music, such as it is. Catchy hooks, and lyrics general enough to cover a vast array of human experience.
Jem, Nick Drake, “Crazy Love” by Van Morrison…I write by the side of a babbling brook, a clear stream, a slow and lazy river of music, with the occasional warble of customers (“English breakfast tea”) and passersby just outside the window (“So I really will call you…”). Just below consciousness, the cricket sounds of keys, five laptops rubbing their legs and chirruping and occasionally emitting buzzes or whistles or chimes, electronic insects.
Once again I sat down determined to write about one thing – in this case, my four day, hundreds of miles, six guys in a van disc golf tour of Stockton, Orangevale, Auburn, Grass Valley, Penn Valley, Toney’s Mountain. And certainly, a number of wild images stand out in my mind, and the fragments make for a possibly interesting collage: Zack’s amazing day, playing oh hell until two in the morning, my partners in doubles twice dropping their drives literally on top of the drives of our opponents, taking away their advantage on the hole. Playing Penn Valley on a hot-as-coals day and then stripping everything off but shorts and sliding like an animal into the blessedly cool water next to the course, feeling my head so hot it had a halo around it as I dove under and felt the cold cold water sculpt me as a skin-covered consciousness. The big old dogs up at Toney’s Mountain who would uproot stones, then huge boulders, and nose them down inclines, so that on hole #5 Will had to evade a cartoon-size Wiley coyote style rock crashing down the mountain at him, the sound of it impossible to adequately express, the sound of severe and insane injury and at the same time the joy of stolid stones achieving movement and speed.
Eating pizza outside the Round Table after ordering 2 minutes before they closed, the mall empty except for us and employees planning the rest of their night and a clutch of teenagers watching us throw long backhands across the empty lines of the parking lot…and then looking up as two cars drove past on their way to the Dark Knight opening at midnight, all ten of the inmates staring out at us with perfect Joker faces, white with long scary painted-on grins, framed by the car windows. And the way something you do many times, such as the tour, takes on a structure of its own that holds everyone, a four day fiesta and ritual that smooths out highs and lows, crappy shots and miraculous shots, into the general tired happy sunburnt selves that crowd into the food- and clothing-strewn van at fourth day’s end.
And of course there was the sound, just outside of West Sacramento, of the top of the rocket box lifting up and tearing off its hinges and 65 mph, flying up like the rigid model of the Batman’s wings and smashing down on the highway, taking with it Z’s coat with his cell phone and Peter’s computer bag with more or less his whole school life in it.
But what I really felt called to write about – now that my ten minutes is up – is something slightly different. Or rather, something which is the general to the specific of the Tour, which began with bringing my nephew Jeremiah back to Nevada City back how many years ago? Eight? And now it ends with us throwing a disc with Jeremiah’s name on it, and staying at the hotel where I stayed six months ago when Jeremiah’s mom was waiting for us in a casket, and both of them dead and me not.
And that thing is: the passing of time means that we don’t step in the same river twice, and yet we do the same things over and over and over. And so the sheer element of repetition somehow kills the spirit, and the great experiment we are all involved in pursuing is: if repetition is dulling, and yet essential, and inescapable, then how do we repeat and still stay alive to the life in the repeated?
And if time takes away things we once had, people we once knew…as it will, then do we carry them, and ourselves as we were, and the things we did earlier, with us, down the road?
The sheer freedom of existence is, as the existentialists wrote, terrifying, dizzying, even nauseating. And so we create stories, rituals, family networks, organizations, religions, to balance this tension between what is repeated and what is alive, present, meaningful. Just now, in the circles I run in, these are all in question, all up for grabs, all questioned as to their authority and usefulness. Like software, our versions of Meaning are often radically redesigned; like software, if our version of meaning is not compatible with our operating system, doesn’t work well or is not robust enough, then…we experience Problems up to and including psychological Blue Screens.
So sometimes it is blessedly reassuring to go back to things that repeat. Grab disc; stand still; center mind in/as body; see the throw, already thrown, in your mind; step, step, crossover step, turning torso, shoulders, hips, head now looking not up and forward but sideways, even down a bit; feel the moment of limit and begin the uncoiling; bring the arm fast across the chest; at the last moment, nanomoment, the wrist adjusts to the throw and the disc leaves the hand at just this angle, just this speed, just this amount of rotation. But the body is not done: hand and arm continue through the motion, final step is completed, as the body finishes becoming a machine, an interface with an object round and sharp and tapered like a jet wing, so that the body ends as a sculpture of a discus thrower from ancient Greece and the object flies out into air and travels fast and its spin moves it as it must, through air and time accelerating and then slowing and then turning back and then hitting the ground, way way out there, in the future, part way to a goal, but perfect in the moment of marriage of body and tool, all the various parameters of the body disciplined not grimly but ecstatically.
Each throw a prayer, repeated endlessly, until the end.
Ten minutes on July 12, 2008
Yampa, Part 2
Of course, for every object in light, there is a shadow, and often it is in the shadows that we find the rest of the story, or another story altogether. So, for example, I could mention the complexity of the organizing of the Yampa trip, in which our intrepid and charismatic organizer invites his close friends to come, hoping to make numbers for the tour, and ends up with too many people, and drama ensues. Before the moment when we put our things in dry bags and hop into the rafts, easy peasy, there is energy expended getting people interested in the trip, money to be asked for and given, plane tickets to buy early or later (with the resultant unpleasant surprise about the cost of plane tickets these days), bags to be packed with things appropriate to camping at some altitude, rides to be arranged or offered, lodgings to be reserved or hoped for…and this doesn’t include the actual trip planning by the Holiday people.
But in this case I will allow those details to remain in the now semi-shadows. (Watch this space for possible musings on the dynamics of organizing small groups to vacation together; process junkies, you know who you are!). Instead I want to explain why I named my trip the Kindness of Strangers Tour.
In preparing for the river trip, I think I used about 4% of my brain. This, strangely, is exactly the amount of knowledge that the theory of the Law of Attraction asserts we harness without using the miraculous knowledge contained in the workshops, life coaching, and books promulgated by those who believe in the Law of Attraction. The other 96% of my brain/attention were being spent on: figuring out where Bailey was going to be for the days I’d be gone; worrying about Margann’s daughter Liz and her two dogs on their way to Los Angeles and suddenly housing-bereft when a water main broke and flooded their home-to-be; watching Euro 2008 soccer games; seeing big-ass wildfires break out approximately every couple minutes in my county, including smoke rising directly over the hill that rises from our cohousing community up toward UCSC and Martin Road, smoke then drifting on winds blowing more or less at us; hanging out with my B daughters, just home from college (watch this space for what a B daughter or son or parent might be, and how you yourself can be one for fun and profit); walking my dog Cliff and wondering when more people will come up to me and tell me I look like my dog, who looks like a cross between a skunk and a prospector; trying to spend time with my lovely but overworked tri-wife, and succeeding at about the same rate that our government succeeds in taking bold steps to reduce global warming; and so on.
So packing was successful to the extent that I had a tent (brand new, with the mesh through which you can see the night sky), a sleeping bag, warm clothes, new Tevas specifically named Star Gazers, and so embedding a vision of walking with my new product and talking knowledgeably about constellations.
At the start of the Kindness of Strangers tour, I called Wanda to beg a ride from the airport and a place to stay on the back end of the trip and a ride to the river. I think I threw in a promise to be (attempt to be?) amusing. I got off the little Delta puddle jumper jet and collected my bag and found Kevin and Wanda deep in conversation about the Law of Attraction. At first I hoped they were talking about me specifically, but soon I learned that this Law of Attraction discourse is one of those New Age crossed with Madison Avenue type products:
“Breakthrough Discovery Reveals
The Revolutionary ‘Secrets’ About
The Law Of Attraction And How To Manifest Anything You Want
In Life... Like Magic!”
Long-Lost Secrets Never Before Explained
About How To Apply The Law Of Attraction
To Create The Life Of Your Dreams
Finally Revealed In Startling Materials!
Neither Kevin nor Wanda was enthusiastic about this discourse. I felt happy to be picked up from the airport and even happier to be in a car where two of my favorite people in the world were tossing a hapless set of ideas back and forth and whacking it with verbal tennis rackets. The mountains were out and snow capped, the traffic was light, and it was fun to listen to ideas like:
1. Why any belief in lack, scarcity, or limitation is false, and the many ways in which such a belief
can hold you back in achieving your dreams.
2. Discover what cause and effect really means. Most people get this all wrong. But if you know
how to really apply this to your life, you'll be able to reap the benefits much more effectively.
3. Learn about the #1 secret you need to be aware of if you want to avoid fooling yourself into
believing you’re doing things right, while actually you're doing things wrong entirely.
We drove to Wanda and Howard’s Salt Lake neighborhood, which is lovely and tree lined and reminiscent of the America of television in the 1950’s, and Kevin and Claire and Lina packed and left for the river, and Paul and Anna came and picked up Wanda and me, and we drove to Vernal, where we would spend the night and then wake up early to drive to the put-in.
Originally Wanda and I were going to camp near town, but we got a late start and with one thing and another, including eating dinner with our friends, we ran out of light and so asked Paul and Anna if we could crash in their hotel room. Little did I know that this would be the theme of the trip for me.
The next day we drove in vans to the put-in, went through the PFD talk (personal flotation devices – I guess “life jacket” was too much of a buzz-kill in terms of marketing, implying as it does the possibility of death), floated down the river for a short time, decamped on a beach a couple hours down the river, set up tents, drank Nora’s Lemon Drops and Kevin’s gin and tonic with nice fresh lime juice, at a dinner that couldn’t be beat, fought the First Battle of the Mosquitoes, and went to sleep.
Here I discovered, in rapid succession:
1. It can get cold in the mountains on a river.
2. I had purchased a tent to look at stars through, and so chose to omit the fly; it turns out that mesh walls are to cold what the straw walls were to the Little Pigs’ wolf.
3. I had cleverly left my warm Patagonia jacket in my car at the airport in San Jose.
4. I had left my cozy long underwear in Paul and Anna’s car back in Vernal.
5. I had not brought my three season down REI sleeping bag under instructions from friends who said it made no sense to bring down to a river; what if it got wet? Instead I had grabbed what can only be described as a zero season bag, polyester, thin and aged, good for a sleep over in a warm house with wall to wall carpeting.
6. The combination of two gin and tonics, one lemon drop, dinner with salsa, and the extreme shivering of my body in the Antarctic conditions I’d prepared for myself, were unkind to my poor stomach.
7. Walking to the portable bathroom on the beach at 2 a.m. was a revelation; a dense pattern of bright stars in a sky cut out like a jigsaw puzzle piece by the canyon walls hovered over the rafts, the sand, the tents and brush and water.
8. Sleeping for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, waking up shivering for twenty minutes, and repeating, allows for a wide range of topics to be mulled over: eternity, prayer, the living conditions of the first, unhoused humans, the high quality of contemporary camping clothing and equipment, nostalgia for poly pro and things with the words REI and Patagonia on them, the hallucinatory possibilities inherent in sleep deprivation, Homer’s description of rosy fingered dawn and its relation to the present glacial rising of the pale Utah canyon sun.
Note: searching the internet I found a free essay from a site called 123helpme!.com, addressing the needs of Western civ students struggling with writing on Homer without having read much if any of the original. In this essay we find that “throughout Odysseus' journey, the metaphor of the dawn symbolizes his odyssey from immaturity, maturity, and fulfillment.” I love this sentence, since it is both terrible (odyssey from fulfillment?) and, therefore, also sounds authentically like the kind of thing a mediocre undergraduate might write, not something cadged from the internet. The essay goes on to argue, if argue is the word I want here, that rosy fingered dawn represents Odysseus as inexperienced ruler, to be replaced by later epithetis like "gold-throned dawn" and "bright-throned dawn." My favorite parts of the site? The big button that says “report plagiarism” (you can say if you think one of these abysmal free essays was written by someone other than 123helpme!) and the small print below the essay:
Important Note: If you'd like to save a copy of the paper on your computer, you can COPY and PASTE it into your word processor. Please, follow these steps to do that in Windows:
1. Select the text of the paper with the mouse and press Ctrl+C.
2. Open your word processor and press Ctrl+V.
Company's Liability
123HelpMe.com (the "Web Site") is produced by the "Company". The contents of this Web Site, such as text, graphics, images, audio, video and all other material ("Material"), are protected by copyright under both United States and foreign laws. The Company makes no representations about the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or timeliness of the Material or about the results to be obtained from using the Material.
Suffice to say, my camping is at about the same level as the Material produced by the Company and pasted into countless word processing pages by countless inmates of the Educational-Industrial-Complex. I was watching the rosy fingered dawn and wondering, how on earth am I going to gather life-sustaining warmth to myself in the next black-fingered nights?
Hence the Kindess of Stranger tour. I woke up in an amazingly good mood, my stomach took in nourishment without complaint, the sun warmed me nicely, just as it warmed those proto-humans I felt I had come to resemble. By using those handy little things I call “words” I let my nearest and dearest know I was in grave need of basic survival gear. In so doing, I found myself engaged in research on what extra gear various people brought, and it turns out, everyone brought at least one extra bit for outliers such as myself. And so by nightfall I found myself with:
1. Warm wooly hat from Morgan our river guide;
2. Cozy poly pro long underwear from Wanda;
3. A sweet fleece jacket from Dirk;
4. My tent fly, from myself to myself.
Obligingly, the weather was much warmer, almost balmy, that night, so my zero season bag couldn’t suck all the delicious heat out of my body and give it to the ground. And as I lay there that night, with a full stomach, encased in things that said REI and Patagonia, I felt like I embodied, literally, the kindness of strangers. Well, perhaps not strangers, exactly, but you know what I mean.
For the rest of the trip I noticed all the ways people did for each other. Some people had clearly spent a great deal of effort preparing for the alcohol and mixed drink needs of their comrades, and spared no effort in inventing new drinks (Nora’s Gin Flip with macerated wild juniper berries) and in the laying on of social lubricants. Laura brought Wizard, the card game that became the kid-and-adult joining activity of each evening; Tycho brought both superior insect repellent AND, crucially, an aloe-lidocaine cream. Each night people would approach him, beg in various ways, and then stand while he sprayed them, or go off with handfuls of insect-bite deadening goo and slather their angry bites with it. Three of us had the foresight to buy quantities of Double Shots, which doubled as a kind of legal tender, and I found all the kids approaching me when word got out via Lina that my soothing spray spf 45 Neutrogena sun block was the bomb.
Full disclosure: when I moved to Santa Cruz in 1979 I got interested in Tarot readings. Not that I felt these were somehow magical; I just liked the excuse to make up stories, and to play the role of soothsayer. Try saying sooth sometime; it is quite enjoyable. Anyway, forever my own card has been The Fool (I can hear you guys snickering out there, so stop that immediately!!). The Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana; he is shown in the Waite deck as a young man dressed gaily with a bag on a stick over his shoulder and a little dog by his side, walking blithely over a cliff. The first card signifies the power of innocence; not knowing what dangers surround him, he simply goes forward, and improbably, the universe supports him. He hitchhikes with his girlfriend to a concert, sleeps on a porch, and the next day hitching he meets a woman who takes the couple to her house and lends them her car for two days. The Fool card is first, and last is the Mage or Magician, who has learned to know and manipulate the principles and powers in the world that the Fool, in his folly, simply experiences through lack of fear.
You may notice, in this last description, an amusing element. My folly results in my being taken care of, which results in a knowledge of my friends that could not have happened if I had come prepared, which results in more love, affection, and appreciation of the social economy of gifts. It’s like an O Henry story, like the Gift of the Magi, but where you get to keep the comb and the watch.
It’s like the new law of attraction.
Yampa, Part 2
Of course, for every object in light, there is a shadow, and often it is in the shadows that we find the rest of the story, or another story altogether. So, for example, I could mention the complexity of the organizing of the Yampa trip, in which our intrepid and charismatic organizer invites his close friends to come, hoping to make numbers for the tour, and ends up with too many people, and drama ensues. Before the moment when we put our things in dry bags and hop into the rafts, easy peasy, there is energy expended getting people interested in the trip, money to be asked for and given, plane tickets to buy early or later (with the resultant unpleasant surprise about the cost of plane tickets these days), bags to be packed with things appropriate to camping at some altitude, rides to be arranged or offered, lodgings to be reserved or hoped for…and this doesn’t include the actual trip planning by the Holiday people.
But in this case I will allow those details to remain in the now semi-shadows. (Watch this space for possible musings on the dynamics of organizing small groups to vacation together; process junkies, you know who you are!). Instead I want to explain why I named my trip the Kindness of Strangers Tour.
In preparing for the river trip, I think I used about 4% of my brain. This, strangely, is exactly the amount of knowledge that the theory of the Law of Attraction asserts we harness without using the miraculous knowledge contained in the workshops, life coaching, and books promulgated by those who believe in the Law of Attraction. The other 96% of my brain/attention were being spent on: figuring out where Bailey was going to be for the days I’d be gone; worrying about Margann’s daughter Liz and her two dogs on their way to Los Angeles and suddenly housing-bereft when a water main broke and flooded their home-to-be; watching Euro 2008 soccer games; seeing big-ass wildfires break out approximately every couple minutes in my county, including smoke rising directly over the hill that rises from our cohousing community up toward UCSC and Martin Road, smoke then drifting on winds blowing more or less at us; hanging out with my B daughters, just home from college (watch this space for what a B daughter or son or parent might be, and how you yourself can be one for fun and profit); walking my dog Cliff and wondering when more people will come up to me and tell me I look like my dog, who looks like a cross between a skunk and a prospector; trying to spend time with my lovely but overworked tri-wife, and succeeding at about the same rate that our government succeeds in taking bold steps to reduce global warming; and so on.
So packing was successful to the extent that I had a tent (brand new, with the mesh through which you can see the night sky), a sleeping bag, warm clothes, new Tevas specifically named Star Gazers, and so embedding a vision of walking with my new product and talking knowledgeably about constellations.
At the start of the Kindness of Strangers tour, I called Wanda to beg a ride from the airport and a place to stay on the back end of the trip and a ride to the river. I think I threw in a promise to be (attempt to be?) amusing. I got off the little Delta puddle jumper jet and collected my bag and found Kevin and Wanda deep in conversation about the Law of Attraction. At first I hoped they were talking about me specifically, but soon I learned that this Law of Attraction discourse is one of those New Age crossed with Madison Avenue type products:
“Breakthrough Discovery Reveals
The Revolutionary ‘Secrets’ About
The Law Of Attraction And How To Manifest Anything You Want
In Life... Like Magic!”
Long-Lost Secrets Never Before Explained
About How To Apply The Law Of Attraction
To Create The Life Of Your Dreams
Finally Revealed In Startling Materials!
Neither Kevin nor Wanda was enthusiastic about this discourse. I felt happy to be picked up from the airport and even happier to be in a car where two of my favorite people in the world were tossing a hapless set of ideas back and forth and whacking it with verbal tennis rackets. The mountains were out and snow capped, the traffic was light, and it was fun to listen to ideas like:
1. Why any belief in lack, scarcity, or limitation is false, and the many ways in which such a belief
can hold you back in achieving your dreams.
2. Discover what cause and effect really means. Most people get this all wrong. But if you know
how to really apply this to your life, you'll be able to reap the benefits much more effectively.
3. Learn about the #1 secret you need to be aware of if you want to avoid fooling yourself into
believing you’re doing things right, while actually you're doing things wrong entirely.
We drove to Wanda and Howard’s Salt Lake neighborhood, which is lovely and tree lined and reminiscent of the America of television in the 1950’s, and Kevin and Claire and Lina packed and left for the river, and Paul and Anna came and picked up Wanda and me, and we drove to Vernal, where we would spend the night and then wake up early to drive to the put-in.
Originally Wanda and I were going to camp near town, but we got a late start and with one thing and another, including eating dinner with our friends, we ran out of light and so asked Paul and Anna if we could crash in their hotel room. Little did I know that this would be the theme of the trip for me.
The next day we drove in vans to the put-in, went through the PFD talk (personal flotation devices – I guess “life jacket” was too much of a buzz-kill in terms of marketing, implying as it does the possibility of death), floated down the river for a short time, decamped on a beach a couple hours down the river, set up tents, drank Nora’s Lemon Drops and Kevin’s gin and tonic with nice fresh lime juice, at a dinner that couldn’t be beat, fought the First Battle of the Mosquitoes, and went to sleep.
Here I discovered, in rapid succession:
1. It can get cold in the mountains on a river.
2. I had purchased a tent to look at stars through, and so chose to omit the fly; it turns out that mesh walls are to cold what the straw walls were to the Little Pigs’ wolf.
3. I had cleverly left my warm Patagonia jacket in my car at the airport in San Jose.
4. I had left my cozy long underwear in Paul and Anna’s car back in Vernal.
5. I had not brought my three season down REI sleeping bag under instructions from friends who said it made no sense to bring down to a river; what if it got wet? Instead I had grabbed what can only be described as a zero season bag, polyester, thin and aged, good for a sleep over in a warm house with wall to wall carpeting.
6. The combination of two gin and tonics, one lemon drop, dinner with salsa, and the extreme shivering of my body in the Antarctic conditions I’d prepared for myself, were unkind to my poor stomach.
7. Walking to the portable bathroom on the beach at 2 a.m. was a revelation; a dense pattern of bright stars in a sky cut out like a jigsaw puzzle piece by the canyon walls hovered over the rafts, the sand, the tents and brush and water.
8. Sleeping for ten to fifteen minutes at a time, waking up shivering for twenty minutes, and repeating, allows for a wide range of topics to be mulled over: eternity, prayer, the living conditions of the first, unhoused humans, the high quality of contemporary camping clothing and equipment, nostalgia for poly pro and things with the words REI and Patagonia on them, the hallucinatory possibilities inherent in sleep deprivation, Homer’s description of rosy fingered dawn and its relation to the present glacial rising of the pale Utah canyon sun.
Note: searching the internet I found a free essay from a site called 123helpme!.com, addressing the needs of Western civ students struggling with writing on Homer without having read much if any of the original. In this essay we find that “throughout Odysseus' journey, the metaphor of the dawn symbolizes his odyssey from immaturity, maturity, and fulfillment.” I love this sentence, since it is both terrible (odyssey from fulfillment?) and, therefore, also sounds authentically like the kind of thing a mediocre undergraduate might write, not something cadged from the internet. The essay goes on to argue, if argue is the word I want here, that rosy fingered dawn represents Odysseus as inexperienced ruler, to be replaced by later epithetis like "gold-throned dawn" and "bright-throned dawn." My favorite parts of the site? The big button that says “report plagiarism” (you can say if you think one of these abysmal free essays was written by someone other than 123helpme!) and the small print below the essay:
Important Note: If you'd like to save a copy of the paper on your computer, you can COPY and PASTE it into your word processor. Please, follow these steps to do that in Windows:
1. Select the text of the paper with the mouse and press Ctrl+C.
2. Open your word processor and press Ctrl+V.
Company's Liability
123HelpMe.com (the "Web Site") is produced by the "Company". The contents of this Web Site, such as text, graphics, images, audio, video and all other material ("Material"), are protected by copyright under both United States and foreign laws. The Company makes no representations about the accuracy, reliability, completeness, or timeliness of the Material or about the results to be obtained from using the Material.
Suffice to say, my camping is at about the same level as the Material produced by the Company and pasted into countless word processing pages by countless inmates of the Educational-Industrial-Complex. I was watching the rosy fingered dawn and wondering, how on earth am I going to gather life-sustaining warmth to myself in the next black-fingered nights?
Hence the Kindess of Stranger tour. I woke up in an amazingly good mood, my stomach took in nourishment without complaint, the sun warmed me nicely, just as it warmed those proto-humans I felt I had come to resemble. By using those handy little things I call “words” I let my nearest and dearest know I was in grave need of basic survival gear. In so doing, I found myself engaged in research on what extra gear various people brought, and it turns out, everyone brought at least one extra bit for outliers such as myself. And so by nightfall I found myself with:
1. Warm wooly hat from Morgan our river guide;
2. Cozy poly pro long underwear from Wanda;
3. A sweet fleece jacket from Dirk;
4. My tent fly, from myself to myself.
Obligingly, the weather was much warmer, almost balmy, that night, so my zero season bag couldn’t suck all the delicious heat out of my body and give it to the ground. And as I lay there that night, with a full stomach, encased in things that said REI and Patagonia, I felt like I embodied, literally, the kindness of strangers. Well, perhaps not strangers, exactly, but you know what I mean.
For the rest of the trip I noticed all the ways people did for each other. Some people had clearly spent a great deal of effort preparing for the alcohol and mixed drink needs of their comrades, and spared no effort in inventing new drinks (Nora’s Gin Flip with macerated wild juniper berries) and in the laying on of social lubricants. Laura brought Wizard, the card game that became the kid-and-adult joining activity of each evening; Tycho brought both superior insect repellent AND, crucially, an aloe-lidocaine cream. Each night people would approach him, beg in various ways, and then stand while he sprayed them, or go off with handfuls of insect-bite deadening goo and slather their angry bites with it. Three of us had the foresight to buy quantities of Double Shots, which doubled as a kind of legal tender, and I found all the kids approaching me when word got out via Lina that my soothing spray spf 45 Neutrogena sun block was the bomb.
Full disclosure: when I moved to Santa Cruz in 1979 I got interested in Tarot readings. Not that I felt these were somehow magical; I just liked the excuse to make up stories, and to play the role of soothsayer. Try saying sooth sometime; it is quite enjoyable. Anyway, forever my own card has been The Fool (I can hear you guys snickering out there, so stop that immediately!!). The Fool is the first card of the Major Arcana; he is shown in the Waite deck as a young man dressed gaily with a bag on a stick over his shoulder and a little dog by his side, walking blithely over a cliff. The first card signifies the power of innocence; not knowing what dangers surround him, he simply goes forward, and improbably, the universe supports him. He hitchhikes with his girlfriend to a concert, sleeps on a porch, and the next day hitching he meets a woman who takes the couple to her house and lends them her car for two days. The Fool card is first, and last is the Mage or Magician, who has learned to know and manipulate the principles and powers in the world that the Fool, in his folly, simply experiences through lack of fear.
You may notice, in this last description, an amusing element. My folly results in my being taken care of, which results in a knowledge of my friends that could not have happened if I had come prepared, which results in more love, affection, and appreciation of the social economy of gifts. It’s like an O Henry story, like the Gift of the Magi, but where you get to keep the comb and the watch.
It’s like the new law of attraction.
Ten minutes on July 9, 2008
Yampa, part one.
Full disclosure: my life is pretty damn sweet sometimes. June is like a diving board: one bounce for my last exam, another for the minute after I turn grades in, a third for when Bailey is done done done with the school-as-job 6am up back at 4 homework and do it again schedule. June is turning a corner and seeing, just down the road, bigger than life, the sun, beckoning and promising.
So June came and I flew to Salt Lake on Bailey’s birthday (June 20) and the minute I hit the tarmac I felt like the adventure was on: five days on the Yampa, five days on a wild undimmed river with canyon walls like the cathedrals a Greek god might fashion while working him- or her- or itself up to the Temple of Poseidon. Like the cathedral walls someone might dream and then downscale into the rich marble interiors of the Duomo in Firenze. The colors would make a Manhattan interior decorator speed dial their color consultants; the richest, deepest grays browns blacks impossibly weathered and textured. And all seen through the clearest, cleanest air in thousands of miles, as though the doors of perception had been powerwashed from both sides.
I’m glad I didn’t see any pictures of it beforehand; I wanted to turn that corner and see the river, the River, and the first bend of it, and then the scene around that bend. I wanted surprise, sublimity, surrender. I wanted the floor of time to drop out from under me.
And so was it twenty of us? congregated on the town of Vernal, a town of giant plaster dinosaurs dressed up in cowboy clothes with lightbulbs for eyes and standing 25 feet tall, forever about to lunge at the gas station just to its left. We slept and ate and drove to the put in and watched mosquitoes in randomly moving gangs mug our friends and suck their blood, and force them to spray large amounts of Off! And other protective liquids onto their unclothed and clothed parts.
The tiny reminders that we are oh so easily distracted. And the big river pouring by, high with snow melt and volume, regarding us, or rather disregarding us, until we enter in rafts, and then carrying us on its back, one more stick or branch to be ferried past some of the most jaw dropping canyons in the West.
I could show you pictures. Or. You could just, you know, go. Or, you could tune in tomorrow for the next installment.
But I will say this. Just as when I got off the Green River a couple years ago, on the Desolation Canyon trip, just as when I spend more than four days anywhere backcountry, or deep in Yosemite, traveling at the speed of water, or legs, once again I felt as close as I have ever felt to holding, if only for moments, a feeling in my chest and along my skin that I don’t even know I crave until I sense it. And then I understand moments in Whitman, in Wordsworth and Shelley, and in the best of the modern writing on our interaction with, for lack of a better term, the natural world. Wordsworth writes about this general experience of the beautiful and sublime elements of the natural world:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Perhaps all things are simply mirrors of our perception. But places like the Yampa, like great and productive works of art, help us see something, feel something, beyond our usual words and sensations. Perhaps we cannot fully sustain this seeing “into the life of things” that the Romantics imagined would allow us to shape our modern world into something more just and more beautiful, more sustaining of the best in the human spirit. I left the river and got on a plane and then another plane and spent nine days on the East Coast, and even though I went to some beautiful places and the trip was just fine, the magic of that post-Yampa body I was sporting certainly faded. To quote another Romantic,
"the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."
I think some of the giddiness, and paradoxically, the humility I feel coming off a great river like the Yampa stems from this tantalizing sense that just out of reach, just beyond words, lies so much that we need, like food, like air, to do more than survive, to live, that enigmatic verb.
Yampa, part one.
Full disclosure: my life is pretty damn sweet sometimes. June is like a diving board: one bounce for my last exam, another for the minute after I turn grades in, a third for when Bailey is done done done with the school-as-job 6am up back at 4 homework and do it again schedule. June is turning a corner and seeing, just down the road, bigger than life, the sun, beckoning and promising.
So June came and I flew to Salt Lake on Bailey’s birthday (June 20) and the minute I hit the tarmac I felt like the adventure was on: five days on the Yampa, five days on a wild undimmed river with canyon walls like the cathedrals a Greek god might fashion while working him- or her- or itself up to the Temple of Poseidon. Like the cathedral walls someone might dream and then downscale into the rich marble interiors of the Duomo in Firenze. The colors would make a Manhattan interior decorator speed dial their color consultants; the richest, deepest grays browns blacks impossibly weathered and textured. And all seen through the clearest, cleanest air in thousands of miles, as though the doors of perception had been powerwashed from both sides.
I’m glad I didn’t see any pictures of it beforehand; I wanted to turn that corner and see the river, the River, and the first bend of it, and then the scene around that bend. I wanted surprise, sublimity, surrender. I wanted the floor of time to drop out from under me.
And so was it twenty of us? congregated on the town of Vernal, a town of giant plaster dinosaurs dressed up in cowboy clothes with lightbulbs for eyes and standing 25 feet tall, forever about to lunge at the gas station just to its left. We slept and ate and drove to the put in and watched mosquitoes in randomly moving gangs mug our friends and suck their blood, and force them to spray large amounts of Off! And other protective liquids onto their unclothed and clothed parts.
The tiny reminders that we are oh so easily distracted. And the big river pouring by, high with snow melt and volume, regarding us, or rather disregarding us, until we enter in rafts, and then carrying us on its back, one more stick or branch to be ferried past some of the most jaw dropping canyons in the West.
I could show you pictures. Or. You could just, you know, go. Or, you could tune in tomorrow for the next installment.
But I will say this. Just as when I got off the Green River a couple years ago, on the Desolation Canyon trip, just as when I spend more than four days anywhere backcountry, or deep in Yosemite, traveling at the speed of water, or legs, once again I felt as close as I have ever felt to holding, if only for moments, a feeling in my chest and along my skin that I don’t even know I crave until I sense it. And then I understand moments in Whitman, in Wordsworth and Shelley, and in the best of the modern writing on our interaction with, for lack of a better term, the natural world. Wordsworth writes about this general experience of the beautiful and sublime elements of the natural world:
Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened: -- that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on, --
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Perhaps all things are simply mirrors of our perception. But places like the Yampa, like great and productive works of art, help us see something, feel something, beyond our usual words and sensations. Perhaps we cannot fully sustain this seeing “into the life of things” that the Romantics imagined would allow us to shape our modern world into something more just and more beautiful, more sustaining of the best in the human spirit. I left the river and got on a plane and then another plane and spent nine days on the East Coast, and even though I went to some beautiful places and the trip was just fine, the magic of that post-Yampa body I was sporting certainly faded. To quote another Romantic,
"the mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness; this power arises from within, like the colour of a flower which fades and changes as it is developed, and the conscious portions of our natures are unprophetic either of its approach or its departure."
I think some of the giddiness, and paradoxically, the humility I feel coming off a great river like the Yampa stems from this tantalizing sense that just out of reach, just beyond words, lies so much that we need, like food, like air, to do more than survive, to live, that enigmatic verb.
