surprise & delight
awe infinitum… well, where else do you find it but at a bus stop in the snow?
i did not expect to find it there. i did not expect the snow. in any case last sunday when i first woke to the snow i did not expect it to continue. i scarcely recognize this city and i am so thrilled by its capacity to surprise me! last night i wrote about traveling. tonight, i want to commit to this city. plant a garden, get a dog. i am more in love than ever. stomping in snowdrifts while i wait for the bus. a few years ago i saw a performance by the tania perez-salas compañia de danza when they came to portland. one of the dances they performed, “waters of forgetfulness,” featured a shallow pool of water that served in its way as dancer and musician. it is a beautiful, beautiful piece. tonight i thought of it: me and the snow and my laughter when i kicked it into the air and fell over on the snowy sidewalk–what a dance, oh my goodness.
this is one of my very favorite poems–nights and days like this (”like this”! what is this?) always leave me softly reciting the last two lines to myself, over and over–
MATINS
Not the sun merely but the earth
itself shines, white fire
leaping from the showy mountains
and the flat road
shimmering in early morning: is this
for us only, to induce
response, or are you
stirred also, helpless
to control yourself
in earth’s presence–I am ashamed
at what I thought you were,
distant from us, regarding us
as an experiment: it is
a bitter thing to be
the disposable animal,
a bitter thing. Dear friend,
dear trembling partner, what
surprises you most in what you feel,
earth’s radiance or your own delight?
For me, always
the delight is the surprise.–Louise Glück
on traveling and paying attention
i am currently reading blue highways: a journey into america by william least heat moon, about the author’s long wandering roadtrip on the backroads of the country in the 1970s. despite the author’s obnoxious nostalgia for some imagined “simpler past” and his overeagerness to demonstrate his lack of racism (he is part sioux but appears white, and when a black woman in louisiana tells him she prefers southern whites to northern liberals because the southerners are at least overt about their racism, the author, himself from missouri, apparently fails to notice the irony) he has some great stories to tell. and he says:
Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of Heat Moon’s–believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get–that man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.
Etymology: curious, related to cure, once meant, “carefully observant.” Maybe a tonic of curiosity would counter my numbing sense that life inevitably creeps toward the absurd. Absurd, by the way, derives from a Latin word meaning “deaf, dulled.” Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one. STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, the old railroad crossing signs warned. Whitman calls it “the profound lesson of reception.”
New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope reveals quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?
and
The aura of time the mound gave off seemed to mock any comprehension of its change and process–how it had grown from baskets of shoveled soil to the high center of Caddoan affairs to a hilly patch of blackberries. My rambling metaphysics was getting caught in the trap of reducing experience to coherence and meaning, letting the perplexity of things disrupt the joy in their mystery. To insist that diligent thought would bring an understanding of change was to limit life to the comprehensible.
and
“Are you just moving through?”
I gave a précis… When I finished, he said, “Your little spree sounds nice until you go back.”
“Don’t have to go back who I was.”
“Can you get out of it?”
“I’ll find out. Maybe experience is like a globe–you can’t go the wrong way if you travel far enough.”
“You’ll end up where you started.”
“I’m working on who. Where can take care of himself. A ‘little spree’ can give people a chance to accept changes in a man.” I was sounding like some bioenergized group leader…
“What you were talking about sounds like marital problems,” he said.
“I guess, but my point was that what you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do–especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” I was doing it again.
my mom gave me this book, she told me, because i want to bike across the country, and she thinks that once i realize how “boring” most of the country actually is, i won’t be so eager. so far her plot is not working at all.
i might join the peace corps first, though.