It could be a Chinese funeral for all the notice they were
taking of each other. Each involved in a solemn gesture like a transparent jar,
that left no room to speculate on where the others might have been left. It
always comes as a shock to realize that there aren’t any, that this was always
a lonely place, not even created by God so you can’t call it godforsaken. Just
like that, lonely and a little formal which stands out in such a wilderness the
way a hitching post would stand out in the Gobi desert. You know it’s not meant
for you, for you to notice, but still, there’s a hushed deliberateness about it
that’s not the same as the regular emptiness that passes slowly by like a
conveyer belt with nothing on it, nothing to convey except the idea that this
could be something if the light of the world would let it. And yet—there’s a
bee! A bunch of them, must be a whole storm of them come drifting in like the
sea all of a sudden. And you are made to understand that the sea is someone’s
property, that everything belongs to someone even if that someone doesn’t know
about it, is unconscious or long dead and buried ages ago. Promise me sea, you’ll
reveal your owner’s name? Oh, we, we’re just waves, whatever they are. No
belonging, no being. But the faint throbbing? That must be art, the kind that
reveals nothing, no dead longings. Just a still-life a child might draw. But I
thought the finished-art notion was supposed to stick around and be something,
a hat or something. That’s the enthusiastic part of it, imparts pep, makes you
want to get up and leave. Yes, well, all right, it does do that, you’re right,
and so now it may be time for you to leave. You’ll know, somehow. Yes, but the
thinking part, I liked that. I kind of like to think about thinking. And so you
shall, and you may never have to go anywhere. But I kind of like the idea of
travel, gets you different places, you think about them and come back and you
have had what I call an experience. The children’s dresses may grow other
places, topsy-turvy winds funnel the spruce branches. The library’s stuck on a
pile of steps too high for anybody to climb. Waves bang against the shore with
a dreadful lack of enthusiasm. We could stay here and dream about these, but
inasmuch as we have seen them it behooves us to stay here and reflect. Reflecting—isn’t
that the most important thing a human can do? Look at how a pond reflects trees—imperfectly,
perhaps, yet as perfectly as it knows how, and the little mistakes in the
reflection are what makes it charming and nice, gives stealth to what would otherwise
be a random picture of choice. Surely this is the reason we are all drawn to
art, and why art loves us, and if anything were any different, that is more or
less perfect, it wouldn’t have the same hold over us. What I mean is we can
dream safely in our environment because art has set soft, invisible limits to
it. This way we don’t hurt ourselves, neither do we dream of unregulated
schemas that might be beyond or outside us that might wish us no ill yet
actually consume us one unguarded day. The afternoon, the hill, the ribbons,
the kindly greeting of a passerby from a car, the library books to be collected
and returned, they are sitting in the hall, the chill of a look of evil from a
random child passing, the unspeakable number of houses that just go on mounting
into the sky, the indifferent birds (and does each one have a nest?), the
smooching and lovemaking that goes on on a mattress just above us, the tears
and gentle crashing of the sea that really does mean it now and is sorry about
having appeared indifferent before, the balcony that seems too big for the
small hotel it’s attached to, Mother’s dress on the day they came to tell you
it was time to get dressed, they were taking you to the city, there was a small
chance you might never return, the cauliflowers and potato bugs, the whole heap
of music that in time will reduce all this to an orderly pile of dust . . . Oh,
it’s just too much to stand! I know that, but you must stand here and stand it.
What if they came by and saw us? What would people think?