Saturday, September 1, 2007
The Mystic’s Map
The last two days have been unusually alike.
“A couple of days ago we were at College Station,” Booth told Micah
yesterday at lunch, “and we had been cooking
chicken. And the chicken had bones inside of it. And the bones had been cooking
so long that when we ate the chicken, we didn’t realize we were eating
the bones, too. That's how dumb we were!"
“What a great story, though,” said Micah. “You ate the bones of a chicken. But
think how disgusting that is.”
“I’m pretty sure it makes you the devil,” I said.
“Yeah, I guess I’m Satan now,” said Booth. “He always eats the bones.”
“Of course,” I agreed. “Bones are his favorite part of the rib.”
“Yeah, and he cooks the humans in his little crockpot,” said Micah.
“That’s why he dresses as a wolf in a granny costume,” I added
matter-of-factly.
For a few minutes I thought Micah was going to die.
“Hold on, hold on,” he said, as well as he could through not being much able to
breathe. “Can we back up about thirty seconds here?” He couldn’t do it, though;
he was close to tears. Booth glanced him
over with a worried look.
When he had recovered himself enough to speak again, he led
us line-for-line back through the conversation to the point where he had
started choking up. “Not only does it not make sense,” he concluded, “it’s not
even relevant to what we were talking about!...”
“I’m glad you’re starting to see the way we roll,” I said.
He ran back into the serving-room to fill his glass again, and he was laughing
all the way.
“That’s the hardest I’ve ever seen him laugh,” said Booth, when he had gone.
“And we’ve said funnier things! I mean, was my ‘waaa-tah!’ joke not
funny? Come on!” [“What is a kung-fu fighter’s favorite beverage? Waaaaa-tah!’]
“Yeah,” I agreed. “‘Knee grows?’” [“Why is the black man so tall? Because his
knee grows!”] [Neither Booth nor I will be contenders for the P. C. Prize this
year]
I went to bed spectacularly early Friday night because I knew that midnight
marked the anniversary of the hour I stepped off my plane in London at the
Heathrow airport and I didn’t want to be awake to celebrate. During the eleven
hours that I slept last night, somewhere another year ago I would have been
wandering about in aimless desperation hoping that I hadn’t lost my bags,
amongst a mob of foreigners, and driving in a taxi through the furthest reaches
of the vast and endless city towards a certain house upon a certain street I
knew I never could have found in any other way. An hour after I had reached my
flat, I had taken the subway for the first time towards a boat to Greenwich on
the golden-gleaming river, and I spent the day there, wandering alone among the
distant-seeming ruins of another world. What a transport: to have been carried,
in less than a day, from muttering in fevered anguish round the dreary edges of
a desert landscape to a green and rainy city half a world away where all the
peoples of the earth exist and live and earn their bread as one.
One year later, it is difficult to be back here. And yet I know full well how
good things are right now: my life is so profoundly better than it was last
year, my wealth and treasure of experience so infinitely richer, that living
for today is all that I can do. Besides, as Meredith reminded me last night,
it’s only been nine months since I returned from London, and the
greatest parts about it didn’t really happen till the end – the lostness of it
all, the sense that I was just a street or two away from an encounter with the
Infinite, which lurked among the streets at night, the shivery feeling I would
always get at stepping from a station into crowds or walking through a park
beset all round with buildings which I’d seen in photographs since I was young.
Suddenly the poem comes to mind that I recited for the benefit of Kendra when
we went to Stonehenge in the second week:
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows;
Say, what are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain:
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
I always seem to hope that if I meet with timelessness and leave off all the
toils of the normal day, that time will cease or narrow to a trickle and the
hours lengthen round me like the shadows in a dark room as the evening falls. I
felt that way at Stonehenge, though, there amid the sheep along the edges of
the world, at childhood’s end, and life went on somehow – a year of it. The
tragedy of being real is that the story never ends, not even when it should
have ended long ago. I suppose that is what Tennyson was thinking when he wrote
“Ulysses”:
I am part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades
Forever and forever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end!
To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use.
As though to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
The good thing is, not much has changed except that I’m a
great deal closer to the life I longed for then. It was a dismal moment when I
stood with Allison on the platform near the trains at Edinburgh and tried to
put in words my recent feeling of the vastness of it all – of Lucifer
descending like a meteor from heaven to the earth, of stout Balboa standing
silent on a peak in Darien, there at the meeting of two seas, of wings that
beat and flap against the night, of airy currents in the vasty deep and all the
waters in their magnitude – how could I say all that? I merely waved my arms
about a lot and made her wish for several weeks that I had never come. But now
I know of what I speak; I know I’m not alone in seeing it – not least with
Allison, who seems to see it more than most at times; and oh! that other world,
the world that only I can see, for now at least, is rising from the
waters like the moon above the seas.
I visited Tyler’s room this morning and I talked with
Jonathan whilst he was in the shower; Jonathan says that it’s my special
blessing and my special curse to be a writer and a mystic, which is another way
of saying that I’m all-too-often frustrate with desire, with a longing for a
something I can never fully comprehend. And yet: “That is the land of lost
content, I see it shining plain.” Our blessing is that we get to be Moses,
standing on the mountain, gazing in a reverie of silence on the verdant land
below. Our curse is that, with all our looking, we can never enter in.
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