The Faraway Nearby (20 page)

Smith's victory was in telling a story compelling enough that it put his on hold, at least temporarily, long enough for her to save her own life and maybe others', maybe his when he surrendered. Spared the death penalty, he is doing life without possibility of parole. She is a motivational speaker forever revisiting her seven hours as a hostage, the story that is the currency of her new life. Tough though the story may be, she preferred it to the story of her husband's murder that had previously defined her life. Now hers is a narrative of finding common ground across great chasms and of surviving and perhaps preventing the deaths of others. Maybe Christianity with its countless tales of sudden transformations gave her the loom on which to weave it.

Musselwhite saved his life by caring deeply enough, Smith by telling in a way that made someone else care or at least hesitate. And by being yanked from the grip of her own troubles by the intensity of that ordeal. Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met. The usual
I
we are given has all the tidy containment of the kind of character the realist novel specializes in and none of the porousness of our every waking moment, the loose threads, the strange dreams, the forgettings and misrememberings, the portions of a life lived through others' stories, the incoherence and inconsistency, the pantheon of dei ex machina and the companionability of ghosts. There are other ways of telling.

As I was approaching this chapter, I woke up in the middle of the night and thought something I should have written down at the time. The empty shell of it that washed up on the shores of morning was to the effect that sometimes an extraordinary or huge question comes along and we try to marry it off to a mediocre answer. The protagonists of fairy tales and fables embody questions about who we are, what we desire, how to live, and the endings are not the real answers. During the quest and crises of a fairy tale the protagonist is nobody, possessed only of the powers of determination, resourcefulness, and alliance, an unconventional estimation of what matters. Then at the end, the story breaks with its own principles and unleashes an avalanche of conventional stuff: palaces, riches, and revenge.

Part of the charm of Andersen's “Snow Queen” is that Gerda rescues Kai from a queen and brings him back to friendship in attics, and that's enough. Many Native American stories don't quite end, because the people who go into the animal world don't come back; they become ancestors, progenitors, benefactors, forces still at work. Siddhartha is rich, thriving, loved, privileged, and protected, and walks out on all of it, as though the story were running backward. He's born an answer and abandons that safe port to go out into a sea of questions and tasks that are neverending.

Essayists too face the temptation of a neat ending, that point when you bring the boat to shore and tie it to the dock and give up the wide sea. The thread is cut and becomes the ribbon with which everything is tied up, a sealed parcel, the end. It's easy to do, and I've done it again and again, sometimes with a sense of betrayal of the complexity of what came before, and sometimes when I haven't done it, an editor has asked for the gift wrap and ribbon.

What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea? What if we liked the brothers to be swans and the nettles not yet woven into shirts, the straw better than the gold, the quest more than the holy grail? The quest is the holy grail, the ocean itself is the mysterious elixir, and if you're lucky you realize it before you dock at the cup in the chapel.

Pared back to its bare bones, this book is a history of an emergency and the stories that kept me company then, but what is an emergency? If you look up the origin of the word you will be sent to the word
emergence,
and
emergence
leads to
emerge:
an emergency is a sudden emerging. The first definition the
Oxford English Dictionary
gives for
emergency
is the same as for
emergence:
“the rising of a submerged body above the surface of water. Now rare.” Then comes “the process of issuing from concealment,” as though an emergency was a bather coming out of the reeds, a secret come out of a mouth. And then the definition we're used to, “a state of things unexpectedly arising, and urgently demanding immediate action.”

An emergency is an accelerated phase of life, a point at which change is begotten, a little like a crisis. Quite a lot of suffering often comes along with it, of mourning for what will be left behind—an old self, an old love, an old order—and of fear for what is to come, of the wrenching difficulty of change itself. The poet John Keats once referred to earth as “this vale of soul-making,” and it's in emergencies and difficulties that souls are made. If an emergency is an accelerated emergence, merge is the opposite condition, “to immerse or plunge (a person, esp. oneself) in a specified activity, way of life, environment, etc.” or “to immerse or plunge in a liquid” or “to cause to be incorporated, absorbed, or amalgamated.”

During the chaos at the end of the apricot summer, I had told a friend my Grand Canyon story, because she had a big decision to make. It was the old story about that trip almost twenty years before, when I had said yes to an invitation to float down the river out of the blue and arrived at my standby motto, “Never turn down an adventure without a really good reason.” It was the moment I had overcome the voice of my mother within me, her fearfulness and dutifulness, a landmark moment in my life, even though I had said yes to a trip that didn't take place at the time. At least from it I crossed an internal border and clarified a principle.

Immediately after I told the story, I got a new invitation to float down the Grand Canyon from someone I had just met. The trip was two years away, an eternity, and then the time came. A year after I went to Iceland I got on a raft at the head of the Grand Canyon to float down the river. At the end of that trip, I realized that it wasn't my turn to be Job anymore, to be pushed so urgently out of being into becoming. It was my friends' turn: they lost family members, ended relationships, got diagnosed with grave illnesses, and I did my best to stand by them as they had me. Other things changed, romances arrived, work continued, emotions and beliefs shifted and metamorphosed.

Sometimes it seems as though the twenty years between the first invitation and my actually getting into that powerful river was a parenthetical era, as though I had to do all the things I'd done to become the person who would finally step on that raft. On the night before we set out, I checked into the remote little motor lodge where Sophie and I had had breakfast all those years before and where I had expressed that wish to go down the river that the river guides at the next table had overheard. The diner had changed a little but I had breakfast there again, and then we got on the river.

The journey down the Colorado River was both a time in which nothing happened—my everyday life was set aside, and we had no contact with the outside world—and an encounter with the forces of change at their most charismatic. We were never more than a few dozen yards from fast-moving water, and mostly we were on it, in it, or next to it. The river was huge, powerful, dangerous in places, and the flow of water seemed like the flow of time, as though I had left behind the particulars of my life to step into life itself. The splash and gurgle of small waves around us and the oars lifting and dropping and dripping made a constant music that became roars and thunder when we drew near rapids.

The water was a force that even in the gentlest places could swirl you downstream fast and pull a swimmer into the current or under a rock, that even in the tributary streams could be overpowering. Approaching a rapid, the rippling surface of the river smoothed out and then that clear, glassy water swelled and you went up over the swell into a stretch where the water roiled, crashed, exploded. The waves could throw a whole raft and its passengers into the air or arch over to deluge it. One wave hit me so hard it ripped off my hat and sunglasses and slammed me into a piece of baggage hard enough to create lacerations, and then came another calm stretch.

The river changed but never ceased, and this temporary life where I was always near that unbroken continuity was an experience of a particular kind of coherence. The river was a snake we rode or resided next to for all that time, never out of reach of its coolness, its strength, its ability to carve stone, to toss trees high into the rocks, to drown the unwary and unlucky, to keep going. The river was an artery into which the red veins and capillaries of the canyon country all drained.

The river itself was green because the red after which it was named came from sandstone sediment that sank to the bottom of the reservoir upstream, where the water also cooled down. The cool green snake we floated on had replaced the warm red one that thrashed its route deeper for millions of years. Once rain fell gorgeously, ferociously, and dust washed down a tributary stream to turn the river red again for a day, and then the next day it was brown, and the day after that green again.

Geology was what the guides pointed out most on the trip, the signs of the deep, deep past, back to almost two billion years ago, as we descended more than a mile below the surface of the surrounding earth. The oldest rock was the Vishnu Schist, relic of an archipelago ground down long before the continents assumed their current form. The canyon is nothing if not a stunning example of the power of the weak that is water over the strong that is stone. The side canyons demonstrated this most overtly, those tall narrow canyons through polished walls of stone with a deceptively gentle stream at the bottom.

What most captivated me was that water in the present and the way we floated through a continuously unfolding space, as though we were tiny travelers in a Chinese scroll. What was absent colored experience too: no money, no commerce, no news, no reflections or mirrors except the tiny one in which I checked how I was doing with the smearing of sunscreen each morning, no windows, no doors, no architecture, no buildings, no keys, no locks, no clock, no hours or minutes, no breaking up of the day into disjointed fragments of indoors and out, solitary and crowds, noisy and silent, hot and cold, sunlit and artificially illuminated or dark.

There was nothing to take shelter from, not cold, not danger, and no shelter to take: we lived in the open air all the time, seeking shade, approaching the dangers of the river with prudence but not separating ourselves outright from the world around us. I thought of the Heart Sutra, of the passage “there is neither ignorance nor extinction of ignorance, neither old age and death, nor extinction of old age and death; no suffering, no cause, no cessation, no path; no knowledge and no attainment.” There was an abundance of all kinds of absence and lack.

As the river cut through eons of stone, as we descended deeper into the canyon, it grew hotter and hotter. I stopped setting up my little tent and used my sleeping bag only as a pad to lie on. On the last night of the trip it was so hot I couldn't sleep, even lying in just a slip on the high ledge where I had thought I might find a breeze, and so after midnight I slipped on my eternally dirty and damp river sandals and walked down the narrow path through thick dust, past barrel cacti and cholla cacti, past the beautiful mesquite tree bower I'd thought of sleeping in before I realized it was full of red ants, past all the sleepers in their varieties of repose and silence, into the zone where the dusty ground turned into pale sand that settled when the lighter red dust was washed downstream.

The six tethered rafts were lined up in a row, each river guide sleeping on the broad bench of his or her raft, like Thumbelina in her walnut shell or Peach Boy in his peach, but the baggage raft was uninhabited. I waded into the river, keeping the music of my movement through water to a faint sloshing chime, and slowly circumambulated the raft, one hand on its side for safety, a little intimidated by the pure cold mystery of the dark waters that tugged at me as the bank dropped away and I went in deeper. I walked into the river up to my neck and walked out on the other side of the raft, cooler.

This chapter has no place in the sequence of chapters for
The Faraway Nearby
; it was written instead to travel alongside all of them. In the physical book it runs as a continuous thread one line wide across the bottom of every page of the text. –Rebecca Solnit

•   •   •

Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. This is the title of a short scientific report from 2006, and the moths are a species on the island of Madagascar named
Hemiceratoides hieroglyphica,
but the title is a sentence, and the sentence reads like a ballad of one line or a history compressed down to its barest essentials. There are two protagonists in it, a sleeper and a drinker, a giver and a taker, and what are tears to the former is food to the latter. The story tells us everything we ever wanted a story to tell. There is difference. There is contact. You can feed on sorrow. Your tears are delicious. Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The sentence can run away with you until you have forgotten science and the lack of sorrow in the tears of birds—in this case magpie robins and Newtonia birds—and remembered your own tears and pictured an asymmetrical relationship in which one sleeps and one is awake, one surrenders and one acquires. One is being and the other doing. The moth is alert, at work, stealing tears and flying through the night, because there is also night in this sentence, and wings of two kinds. As though the two characters were day and night itself, or as if the drinker fed on the dreamer the way the moon reflects the light of the unseen sun. That moths drink the tears of sleeping birds is a template for many things; it is a container of the familiar made strange, of sorrow turned into sustenance, of the myriad stories the natural world provides that are as uncannily resonant as any myth. The ancient Greeks used the word
psyche
for breath, for life, for the vital essence of life, for the soul, and sometimes for butterflies that were the emblem of the soul, though I wonder if a moth could also be a soul and if the Greek word encompasses them too. In the tale known as “Cupid and Psyche,” Psyche is a wanderer whose odyssey begins when she is brought to her own funeral pyre in the mountains and abandoned there. In this tale that has all the hallmarks of what would become the classic fairy tales of female seekers, she awakes alone in a palace. There an unknown, unseen lover visits her only at night. In paintings Cupid, the unknown lover, is often portrayed with the wings of a bird, Psyche with those of a butterfly. Nevertheless it is he that is the moth, coming at night, feeding on her, ravishing her in the dark, lying low by day. The rest of the old tale is familiar. Urged into suspicion and curiosity by her jealous sisters, the girl with butterfly wings acquires a desire to see him. She lights a lamp in the darkness. It drips one burning drop of oil that scalds sleeping love with pain. He reacts as if he never before knew pain, and perhaps he didn't, perhaps gods don't until some mortal violates the rules to look at them and burns them with the sorrow of their gaze, the sorrow that belongs to us and not to them. So often in these myths we hear how the human becomes divine, immortal, impervious, but there should be a story heading in the other direction, whereby a god becomes human, for love, because of pain. Love has been burned and made visible, and he flees. To regain her bird-winged love, Psyche must sort by evening a mountain of several kinds of grains and beans mixed together, an impossible task until a throng of ants carries out the work on her behalf. A reed, an eagle, and a tower help her with subsequent endeavors: the whole overlooked, voiceless world speaks with her and seems to be on her side. The tale of Cupid and Psyche is told by an old woman held captive by thieves in
The Golden Ass
,
a novel written in Latin about
A.D.
160 by the North African Apuleius. Like
The Arabian Nights,
it contains tales within tales. Though the old woman “bent with age” is poor and abject, the tale she tells is of princesses and gods, one of the great allegories of love and the evolution of the soul. You can read “Cupid and Psyche” as a romance in a literal sense, or as the attempt of consciousness and desire to reconcile, to find a way to coexist. Read this way they are not two beings but two aspects of a being. After Psyche's tasks are completed and the lovers are reunited, she gives birth to immortal pleasure. Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds, and love like that of Cupid and Psyche is only one kind of symbiosis. Some species of yucca plant and of moth depend upon each other. The white moths hatch out of their cocoons as the white flowers open. They mate and the female pollinates the flowers while laying her eggs in them, so that they will produce the fruit on which her offspring will feed. The yucca survives only by the pollination efforts of this moth, the larvae survive only by consuming this particular fruit. They would not exist without each other, and yuccas of these species grown elsewhere have to be hand-pollinated. Not all meals for moths are so exquisite or particular. A lot of butterflies and moths engage in what is called “puddling,” landing on pools of water, piles of manure, rotting fruit, to feed. Moths of the genus
Calyptra,
sometimes known as vampire moths, feed on vertebrate blood, and a dozen or more species of moth visit the eyes of mammals to drink fluids that provide proteins, salts, and other minerals. Mostly males drink from these sources, and their meals give them resources for the spermatophores they provide to the females of their species—a packet that contains their genes to fertilize her eggs, but also nutrients to help feed the females and create their offspring. No other kind of animal gives a gift quite like that. People like to think about butterflies and moths as though they were flying flowers, but they are fierce insects, struggling through each phase of life, spending time as caterpillars, bursting skins, dissolving selves in chrysalises and cocoons, mating in various intense and lengthy ways, devouring plant poisons to make themselves inedible, extending their extraordinarily long tongues at manure and puddles. Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds, and other moths feed at the eyes of deer, elephants, water buffalo. There are crocodile tears and moths that feed upon them. In the forests of Southeast Asia several species that feed at the eyes of human beings were documented by the patient entomologist Hans Bänziger, who remained still while they found him and fed at his, as he reported in “Remarkable New Cases of Moths Drinking Human Tears in Thailand” in the
Natural History Bulletin of the Siam Society
twenty years back. He photographed one drinking from his own right eye with its furry wings outspread, looking like a tremendous tear or a misplaced brooch or a flower petal, an ornament invading his face. When another species came and drank, “I then caught the moth by cautiously lowering the wide net over my head and the moth.” Moths drink the tears. The word for teardrinkers is
lachryphagous,
and for the eaters of human flesh it is
anthropophagous,
and the rest of us feed on sorrow all the time. It is the essence of many of the most beautiful ballads and pop songs, and why sorrow and heartbreak are so delicious might have to do with the emotions it stirs in us, the empathy for others' suffering, and the small comfort of not being alone with our own. With a sad song we feel a delicate grief, as though we mourn for three minutes a loss we can't remember but taste again, sorrow like salt tears, and then close it up like a letter in the final notes. Sadness the blue like dusk, the reminder that all things are ephemeral, and that because there is time there is change and that another name for change, if you look back toward what is vanishing in the distance, is loss. But sadness is also beautiful, maybe because it rings so true and goes so deep, because it is about the distances in our lives, the things we lose, the abyss between what the lover and the beloved want and imagine and understand that may widen to become unbridgeable at any moment, the distance between the hope at the outset and the eventual outcome, the journeys we have to travel, including the last one out of being and on past becoming into the unimaginable: the moth flown into the pure dark. Or the flame. Australia's endangered golden sun moth lives a long time underground, feeding on the roots of wallaby grass, and then metamorphoses into a diurnal moth without a mouth that has a few days to live and reproduce on stored energy. Other moths and butterflies also live brief lives without eating. And other moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. Sadness always contains distance, spaciousness, takes us away, while happiness at best brings us home to this very moment, this very place, so perhaps they are the sentiments of the far and the near (though rage and fear arise from the proximity of the unwanted as well as the absence or departure or threat of departure of the desired). Sadness and happiness—if those are even useful words, because as the years have gone by I have wondered if we want other language for emotion, if we would rather speak of deep and shallow, because the things that move people to tears are sometimes joyous and because the attempts to ward off sadness so often ward off depth instead—by distraction, for example. Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments “when hope and history rhyme,” the arrival of the long-awaited, the revelation of a pattern in the universe that is also the revelation of your own power of making and perceiving order, and sometimes just extraordinarily intense beauty, including moral beauties—justice done, truth honored, order or wholeness restored. Maybe from that we can extract a definition of beauty that has more to do with depth: beauty is one of the things that make you cry and so maybe beauty is always tied up in tears. And maybe we can practice taxonomy, in this case of the things that produce tears rather than drink them. Pain. Sorrow. Loss. Thwartedness. Joy. Pattern. Meaning. Depth. Generosity. Beauty. Reunion. Recovery. Recognition and understanding. Arrival. Love. Mortality. Precision. Or maybe we can call depth the genus and all these other things the species. Moths drink; birds sleep; there are tears; there are dreams; there is difference. A mature insect, including a moth or butterfly, is called an “imago”; the plural is “imagines,” and the cells that bring about that maturity in moths and butterflies and other flyers are called “imaginal cells.” These cells lie dormant in the larval creature and begin to reinvent it in its mature form, its imago, when the caterpillar has dissolved itself into a thick fluid and its old life is over; it's a death and resurrection at midlife. The other meaning of the word
imago
is an idealized image of a person, usually a parent, formed early in life. As I was writing this I went to see my mother, and a little ways into trying to be with her in the era past when she would murmur more than an occasional word and I would only rarely understand it, I remembered that I had a copy of Rilke's
Duino Elegies
with me and read three of them to her. In one of them were the words, “what we're now striving for was once / nearer and truer and attached to us / with infinite tenderness. Here all is distance / There it was breath. . . .” It was a good way to keep talking, and I listened too, and the familiar lines became more fiercely elegiac, more stern and wild, spoken aloud. Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The contemporary poet Robert Hass once wrote of this most solitary of poets, this man who was always putting distance between himself and intimacy, “There are pleasures, forms of nourishment perhaps that most people know and he did not. What he knew about was the place that the need for that nourishment came from. And he knew how immensely difficult it is for us to inhabit that place, to be anything other than strangers to our own existence. To learn not to be a stranger is the burden of the Duino Elegies.” Moths drink the tears, and the elegies arrived in Rilke's head like visitors from afar, Rilke a butterfly hunter trying to put himself in the way of strangeness, letting it feed at his tears. In 1912 he had been walking on the cliffs near Duino Castle on the Adriatic when he heard the opening line addressed to the angel. He wrote the first elegy immediately, parts of others soon thereafter, and then “he needed to live with his desolation,” Hass said. The poet underwent a difficult decade before he finished the ten poems in another explosion of imaginative force. Long afterward, I sipped at Rilke's tears, I fed the sound of them and myself to my mother, and, perhaps, you have fed upon mine. Psyche spills a drop of oil on her love and to get back to him has to journey through hell and to the ends of the earth. The route is rarely direct. Psyche's story itself wandered north from Italy and became the French tale of Beauty and the Beast, written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in the eighteenth century. Beauty's kindness and the water she pours upon the Beast's dying body like a baptism or a flood of tears is what disenchants him and returns him to human form. It's a classic fairy tale in which everything wants to return home to the familiar, to the human, to the happy. The journey in these tales is full circle, but the story itself kept traveling. In Norway a white bear who speaks with authority comes for the youngest daughter of a poor man, who gives her away to provide for the rest of the family. She gets on the bear's back and the story opens into a subarctic version of “Cupid and Psyche.” The tale's title, “East of the Sun, West of the Moon,” comes from the vast distance she goes, helped by the winds, to complete her ordeals. She travels on the wind, outwits trolls, and washes out of his white shirt the three drops of hot tallow she had dripped onto him at the outset of her crisis. That what in classical Rome was the God of Love appears to be a polar bear in Norway suggests how far stories travel, and how little Psyche's lover's identity matters. He is the perplexing beloved, the one who is unalike and unaccountable and unaccounted for. He is what is lost that must be recovered to be made whole. The white bear is charismatic, an animal by day, a man by night, and you wonder if the old tellers of the tale noted that in the far north he might be animal all the time in the long light of summer and mostly human during winter's long nights. These marriages to animals are pervasive in the pattern that you can trace through so many stories, mostly male animals and female human beings, including the arctic sea goddess stories in which a woman marries a dog, a fulmar, a storm petrel, or a handsome stranger who turns out to be bear rather than human. A Tlingit version of the story of the woman who married a bear was told by a blind old woman named Maria Johns to an anthropologist named Catherine McClellan on July 16, 1948, near Whitehorse in Yukon Territory. The husband sometimes has the form of a man, sometimes a bear, and the wife becomes a bear in the end and is obliged to murder her family after her brothers have killed her husband and driven her into her animal nature. The story explains the kinship between humans and bears and the taboos on eating grizzlies, though it's more than that. It's not a circular tale; nothing comes back to where it started; what is animal remains animal and what is human goes away, and yet because of these journeys without return, a kinship arises. A skinned bear looks terrifyingly human, a fanged and muscular man who never was. Moths feed on the tears of sleeping birds; we feed on the tales of loss and generation. The California poet Gary Snyder retells Johns's tale in his essay “The Woman Who Married a Bear” and wrote his undergraduate honors thesis on another northwest coast story, this one about a chief's son who married a beautiful goose, lost her, searched for her. He had managed to marry her because she took off her skin—in these tales being a bear, a swan, a serpent, is like wearing a garment, and when they strip naked, it's not so much that they're human, but that they are no longer so different, and the distance between them can be closed by desire. And the goose without her feathers could not fly away. Perhaps the stories propose that human beings are perpetually naked animals, more a potentiality than an identity. In the end, after a long quest, the bereft husband of the goose becomes a seagull. The Ohlone people near me still dance the bear dance, men with black and white lines drawn on their skin, wrapped in bearskins, stepping this way and that, the teeth and ears and fur and claws of the animal silhouetted against the firelight at night when I saw them, so that what was human and what was bear was not so clear, and perhaps what was both was where we resided that evening, as though we'd gone back to the place before we were separate. The Native North American stories are not so convinced that human beings are at the center, or that when you travel you come back again. Moths drink the tears of sleeping birds. The birds sleep on, inadvertent givers. The moths fly on, enriched. We feed on sorrows, on stories, on the spaciousness they open up when they let us travel in our imagination beyond our own limits, when they dissolve the boundaries that confine us and urge us to extend the potentialities of our imperfect, broken, incomplete selves. Those apricots my brother brought me in three big cardboard boxes long ago, were they tears too? And this book, is it tears? Who drinks your tears, who has your wings, who hears your story?