Between Two Whiles

4:06 am.  Steady rain.  Soprano-drops falling on pavement. Tenors tapping on leaves.  One, relentlessly pinging on the window frame with a touch of dissonance, that I have not altogether decided isn’t plain tone-deafness.  Sitting here, not sleeping, three days of my life replay in a sequence in my head, as though not separated by seven or eight years on either side.

 I have been intentionally, cathartically, thoroughly rain-drenched three times that I can recall.  Each location, each compulsion was very different, but these experiences are not laced together in my mind by way of circumstantial information.  Rather, they commune in a place where sensory experience embodies the fullness of Truth, unquestioned, unassailable.  

As I recall, my age at the time of each particular event was nine, seventeen, and twenty-four.  The patterns goes something like this: Overwhelmed with the hugeness and smallness of life, shrinking under the foreboding “and” that cling to the coat-tails of each well-dressed answer, resigned to the unyielding reflection of my own temperament in the climate out-of-doors, I take my nine- seventeen- twenty-four year old plight out-of-doors.  

Walking in the rain, sans umbrella, sans coat, perhaps even sans shoes, begins as a pitiful surrender to the Big Bad.  But as the rivers and oceans and lakes and creeks fall down from the world beyond my reach, driving sorrow and helplessness and humanity into soggy bones, fullness awaits.  The rain indulges the self-satisfying urge to be absorbed by one’s own situation.  It makes sure you can feel it.  Though indulgent, it is also clever; Succumbing to my personal symbolism–supersaturating me with my own emotion–I absorb a universal, unifying element.  Rain is not personal.  Puddles, sloshing into my shoes, in between my toes, are not particular.  My problems, really, are not unique and therefore, perhaps not so perplexing.  

And I am undone, released from my self-enclosing, self-destructive world.  Walking gives way to dancing, slogging to puddle-pouncing, sorrow to hope, isolation to integration…wetness to dryness.  And what fell so relentlessly as pain and confusion evaporates effortlessly, returning to the atmosphere what I took, and taking some of me.  I have been purged.  

Stepping out into the rain requires abandon– a time offering, a sacrifice of the sense of self-sufficiency or the ability to remain unaffected.  But shouldn’t we more often stop toiling to build barriers between ourselves and others, ourselves and our surroundings, our atoms and those of all else?  It is rarely practical, but I say the intermingling ought to happen before another eight years passes me by.  

So…yeah! Bring on the rain!

Hmm…I realize only now that I have completely strayed from my original intent with this post.  Swept away with the rain I suppose. So, I’ll touch upon it in brief…(I can’t promise late night fantasies and not deliver).  Seeing as it did not seem wise to go traipsing about in the rain in the middle of the night in a new town, my desire to be transformed by rain settled upon dreaming up ideal scenarios, wherein being in the rain (literal and metaphorical) would always involve dancing due to setting and company.  So ideal scenario one:

Live as a gnome family in the roots of a tree!

I wish to gather everyone that I love and live together as a little gnome village in the shelter of tree roots!

Or…I wish to gather everyone that I love and travel around in an ice cream van dispensing love, hope, and treats!  There would be much singing and dancing and ice cream eating (of the non-dairy sort)!

Artifacts from my recent tree-gazing amblings.  

There are words for these images.  As of yet, they lie underfoot, twisted and full of refusal.  Reflected in their leafier and fruitful skyward counterparts, I am quite sure they must, at some time or another, ripen and fall.  Though I know not what they sound like, or how they feel on the tongue, there is a sort of contentment that comes with sitting underneath and upon them, capillarily responding to an unnamed certainty.  Experiencing the inexpressible.  

“Trees are living organisms comprised of three separate yet intimately connected parts.  Even without a sophisticated knowledge of the complex chemical interplay carried on via the capillaries of the trunk between roots buried in the ground and the branches and leaves that spread out far above them, the early human observer must have understood that each of the tree’s three general areas somehow needed the others for the whole to continue to flourish.”  Ptolemy Tomkins, This Trees Grows Out of Hell 

I have always been drawn to trees, and have happily looked at them with wonder without asking myself why.  My unchallenged fascination progressed to such a degree that I found myself in line at a bookstore to purchase a book based on the fact that it had “Tree” in the title.  (Before you snicker or mentally hurl some adage about books and judgement and covers, I must add that this lazy, impulse purchase was a raving success!)  Impulse, intuition, instinct, inkling–whatever you want to call it, I am glad I yield to it sometimes.  This book, Ptolemy Tompkins’ The Tree Grows Out of Hell, turns out to deal with the question I have been asking myself without actually asking it.  It combines history with mythology and a little theorizing, positing a perception of Mesoamerican culture with the tree as a cosmic cipher.  How cool, right!?  With another half to read, this is to be continued after I finish gathering nuggets!  But for now…TREES!

Refuge in the Season of Deluge

Of the Surface of Things

I
In my room, the world is beyond my understanding;
But when I walk I see that it consists of three or four
Hills and a cloud.

II
From my balcony, I survey the yellow air,
Reading where I have written,
‘The spring is like a belle undressing.’

III
The gold tree is blue,
The singer has pulled his cloak over his head.
The moon is in the folds of the cloak.

                                           -Wallace Stevens

Walking I have been doing much of lately, Sir Stevens.  And, as you attest, in so doing, the impossible landscape has made itself plainer. 

I apologize for my unforeseen absence and lack of updates.  Despite what this record shows, I have not been without the beween-whiles, but instead, actually absorbed in very real sorts of liminal life spaces.  I am returning to BetweenTwoWhiles one year older, one degree more official, and one job more secure.  I realize I am still quite a few posts short of being “caught-up” but, in keeping with the spirit of this blog, I must remember that such a perspective of Time is only illusion. 

Though it is against my better judgement to place my own attempt at poetry in the vicinity of Rilke’s, well, sometimes other-than-better judgement gets the better of me.  So, I am starting off the occasional original poetry post with a revival from the year I spent in Greece, on the island of Paros…A land of much inspiration to be sure. 

Walking Thee, I Land

The fall of my feet is regular, in long, memorized strides,
Arrival only distinguished from next departure by a
Vertical moment of stance.
A metronome, regulating breath in three-step
Pace–one-measure-in, one-measure-out—
At home, this aspirated waltz is all score, for
Important though the percussion may be, the flat drone,
Of rubber against asphalt only recalls the
Manufactured hell I run to escape.

But here, I am keenly aware of the beats
Themselves, as earth, real earth, responds
Beneath me. The cool hush of sand falls in
with each trebly, nasal inhale; I quicken
Pace, as if to claim my lung’s capacity of unburdened air,
Twice as often. Trading bread for toast,
Beach meets warm crunch of gravel underfoot,
Accentuates the basal in each exhale, and
With conscious spell I force the last stale, city
Air out through pursed lips.
Bounding.
Breathing.
Percussion and winds,
We revel in our refrain, the earth and I.

Rounding the bay, maintaining watery left,
A now-straight-stretch narrows before me into coastal
Mountain, jouncing in my horizon
As if conducting this somatic symphony. Again,
My pace quickens, yielded to an accelerando.
The wind has the grass atop mound flying
Ecstatically like dramatized hair of the impassioned maestro. Trying
To exact such details, squinting into the distance, I pass
Into shade, underfoot, overlooked.
Shaken by a chill that forces
my eyes wide again. So wide
In fact, that I see
Only shapes.
Only peak, large and looming.

Now barely moving, staccato bouncing sobers
Into deep, sweeping gestures as mountain grows, fills my
Sight, and I wonder that
I am powerless against the dictated rhythm. I can
Scarcely connect my bounding from left foot
To right to the mainspring of the world’s
Pulsing so. But, 
Thinking my causation reaffirmed, the bounding
And the pulsing stop, concomitant.
I cannot be sure whether I
Have sustained the last note
Through the final gesture, or if gesturing
Has stopped with my note’s expiration.
All has stopped. Beneath
Rimy shell, a pulling apart from
Myself, repelled and drawn forward, new chorus.
Tremens et fascinans.
Transfixion.
Active immobility.

Only eyes dare move in such presence,
O Fixture. And, slowly. Or,
As what hints at slowness to one sifted between
The grip of time. Surely still for the first time,
I realize how life has taught me to walk
Posthaste.
Envious shadow bears down with the weight of all
Former glories, passed in haste, burying
All but the hatchet.

This awning cannot be born by
The learned posture of one forever taking leave.
Pin-footed, former logic flies
Off. Mirroring the profile of your skyward marge,
This keen non-understanding rises
Within me. You,
With a hundred sprawling, gnarly feet, move not.
Though endless waves at ankles break, you reach
Out with four-bearing toes submerged,
A striking pose of balance.
Upward.
Outward.
How is there remain without stagnate? Just above
The cobalt lick of sea, dainty yellow buds beam. Golden
Blankets fleece fear and draw me
Up.
Out,
of my counterpoise.

Scaling, what wells up within
You, bearing each rock further
From the fulcrum core. My own
Surface expanding, skin, in hair-stands, lifts off
Muscle, off bone. All lift, no push or pull. Crescendo
Bringing whispers to ear, where I stand upon god’s acre. Light
Now with pardon.

Still once more.
Poised upon pinnacle with lightness of the so thoroughly unburdened self.
Birds hang below in air, thickened with so much of me. Over
The edge, lithic features punctuate the space-falling onto water.
Where, beyond, inverted mass is swallowed. Features far
Reaching enough to keep me from my sending back.

Now, to remain, and begin to be grafted here.
Looking down to secure final footing, feet
I cannot see. But middle, bulging, rounding so
It seems I am once again below, looking up. Terra summa,
Can birds’ breath rise from beneath, at sea?
No, the once vacant,
mounts up
within,
expectant.

bench-sit

I have always enjoyed a good sit on a bench…Taking in the world from a station somewhat universally accepted as neutral.  One can simply sit on a bench, and in sitting, fulfill all that is expected of them for that span.  An onlooker’s amnesty.  

Yesterday I found myself sitting on a stony bench in a small New Jersey town, nestled behind a rather dense cluster of trees and shrubs, as I rested my sore feet before starting the return-leg of my walk. (Even a compulsive wanderer like myself can be foiled by the mysterious sudden smallness of shoes and the throbbing of smushed toes.)  As there were precious few NJ personalities to be seen, on account of the thicket and the weekday morning hour, my attention fell upon my less animate surroundings.  With the help of the refuse from the trees overhead, my solitary morning was filled with characters.  

I know what the images conjure for me, in the way of character types, but I am curious as to how this reads to anyone else.  For instance, what names or informal titles would you give to the six characters in the collage above, based upon the minimal representational information?  I’ll give you an example from my own cast…Bottom left, meet “Comb-over Kirk.”    Swell guy.  He’s not really even wanting for hair.  He just likes to counter the symmetry of his mustache with some exaggerated coiffing.

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