clarity

Dear Readers – I wrote this post last month while I was migrating my blog to its new platform and doing all the accompanying behind-the-scenes work. I hope you’ll agree it’s still timely. ~ Beth

I’m at my desk, listening to familiar pond sounds – the high-pitched chip, chip, chip of an agitated chipmunk and the scoldings of a couple of titmice. There’s a breeze coming in off the pond, which Michael describes as “luscious,” and for which we’re both grateful, as the mercury is supposed to climb to well above 90° F today. The pond house is not air conditioned, except for a small window air conditioner in the bedroom.

It’s our first day back from almost a week spent in Downeast Maine. I still have ocean in my ears, gulls soaring white against blue skies in my eyes, and salt in my nostrils. It’s a curious feeling to have returned to a place one truly loves, a place one calls home, yet feel that one is not wholly there. In my particular case, part of me is still wandering that rocky, meandering coast.

There, we cross causeways linking places as if by threads. We sleep on an island floating on astonishingly green sea water. We spot a pair of bald eagles doing the samba as they tag-team for fish. A wee hummingbird carefully checks out my red shirt as I hold my breath, listening to its wings beat the air.

On the island’s roads, impatient Mainers pass us over the double yellow as we gawk at yet another beautiful vista. Impoverished families with too many children and not enough money rub elbows with well-heeled tourists in the only grocery market around. It’s a place where people work for themselves, whenever they can, doing different jobs as the seasons change, living off the land and the sea. And of all the many places I’ve been in the U.S., these islands and shorelines may well be my favorite.

We hike through pine forests whose floors are an expanse of curly, frosty moss, like something from The Lord of the Rings, traversing a trail continuously crisscrossed with roots. The trail goes up a steady incline until we walk along a level crest of pale gray granite; then, we climb down, down, down, and, finally, blink our way out of the relative darkness of the forest, and on to a wide sandbar, revealed by the lowering tide and lit by the late afternoon sun. The sandbar connects the island we started from to another island, very small. It’s an island where bald eagles nest, but the chicks have already fledged.

We find a tide pool. A tiny, perfect crab of scarlet seems to have the realm all to itself. Although we are conserving our water and are tired and hot, the hike back takes less time. Have our eyes and feet gotten used to traversing all the roots without tripping? The woods are as quiet as they were on our outbound journey. Just a few rustlings in the leaves, an occasional bird call I can’t place. One or two territorial red squirrels chatter at us. We all have the sense that there are more creatures in the forest watching from their hiding places. The others mention bears; I’m not worried, and I smile to myself.

As we become familiar with the road our inn is on, we begin to notice more, not less. Several houses have smaller cottages on their properties; perfect studios for writers and musicians. We comment on the house with all the interesting metalwork – reclaimed and repurposed scraps formed into sculpture; each time we pass, we see something new. We admire the meadows, part of a nature preserve; they are still in bloom, full of goldenrod and sea lavender, and the boundary fences are adorned with many birdhouses.

We pass a gnarled apple tree on the side of our road several times a day. It is a beautiful old thing, and it has already dropped a quantity of golden apples tinged with red. These apples lying in a pile on the roadside under the dear tree pierce something inside me to my own core. I recognize the feeling; it’s one I’ve experienced frequently. It’s a heightened sense of consciousness, the feeling that I must pay attention now to this moment, to this place, to the loved ones I am with, and not forget, not ever forget, before the moment slips away forever.

I recently came across a reference to Jack Kerouac’s “Essentials of Spontaneous Prose” (1959). In “Spontaneous Prose,” along with an explication of his writing method, Kerouac set down a list of 30 writing essentials. It has been years since I’ve read the list. Once upon a time, I had a copy of it pinned to my bulletin board. Here are the first five:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never to get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr life
5. Something that you feel will find its own form

Many of the rest are just as wondrously wild with the occasional non-sequitur, like number three, thrown in. I suppose if you’re Jack Kerouac, however, number three is not a non-sequitur in the least.

Some of the rules defy simple interpretation and are just plain wacky. For example, number 11 states, “Visionary tics shivering in the chest.” Rather than employ my literary interpretation skills, I think I’ll just leave that one alone.

To peruse the whole list, plus the rest of the Essentials, you can find it here.

It is with Rule number 19, however, that Kerouac lands the great resonator:

“Accept loss forever.”

Loss is the thing that’s always circling around the edges if you’re a writer. It’s not something we talk about very often. It’s the consciousness that time moves faster than we do at the same time it moves slowly. Moments, feelings, people, vistas are in constant danger of being lost, and we know we will eventually lose them. Those beautiful, piercing, glistening moments of full clarity. We know they won’t, can’t last.

Life is a fleeting proposition.

Loss, to a writer, is the knowledge that no matter how hard we try, we can’t record, observe, pay attention to, be conscious of everything. And, yet, our poems, our songs, our essays, and our pictures and paintings are our attempts to capture the moments, the impressions. It’s an imperfect art. We stand outside of ourselves, anticipating and recording, at the same we’re participating. The best writers and artists succeed, or come very close to succeeding, and those are the works that land like blows to our very bodies and take our breath away.

We write because and in spite of loss.

We write to record those scenes of golden apples and astonishingly green sea water. We write to preserve the curve of a particular cheek and the crinkle in the corner of a loved one’s eye on that lovely afternoon, standing on the sandbar between two islands in Maine.

Tagged as: apples, birds, boats, eagles, hiking, island, Kerouac, loss, Maine, ocean, sea, writing