Tuesday, March 17, 2015

CLXXVII - this is me, writing.

I might have said previously that I was writing a novel. It's difficult in the sense that I don't want to come back, tired of work, and then plug into this without feeling like I have this idea that I can put into language, this sense of me and my place in this world, through words with which I create, with which I give life.

In a way this is proof, funny as it sounds, proof that I know what I want to do. This is my proof to you, in a way, funny as that sounds. I know what I'm doing. I'm a writer. I write. I am, I do. Me. I write, don't you see.

*

“Dad, do you know what I think about when I’m running?”

He looked up at the first beckoning note in his son’s pensive lilt. Slightly toward the further recesses of his mind he grasped that his son was speaking from a faraway place. Glancing now earnestly at his son, he found in the boy’s gaze a sort of profundity, an oldness in a way that he had at first found peculiar, and then, in time, had come to quietly admire. It was weary in a way, ancient in its weariness, no, not weary, perhaps introspective, undecided, but not really those either, a sort of concentrated mindfulness in his look, straining slightly but unfocussed, as if in his mind he were deciphering abstract glyphs, shadowmarks of a race long gone.

They were in a small café, and the lingering smell of dark brew and hewed pine infused the walls themselves, dispensing in pleasant waves as if beholden to its patrons. He lowered his book to his lap, carefully replacing the bookmark where he had roughly read. He glanced now meaningfully at his boy, opening his eyes slightly wider in encouragement, “No, no, I guess not.”

“I wonder what the ocean sounds like.”

It was strange, looking back at the scene, to think of the two men staring wistfully into space. But at the time the only thing he wondered, as he sometimes did when presented with an enigmatic utterance of that sort, was whether his son meant his sentence literally, or as he probably did when wistful, predictably even, as a complete figure of speech. Savouring the opportunity to deadpan, and with an innocent, perhaps tell-tale cheerfulness ringing from his teeth, he began with honest enthusiasm the tale of his fishing expedition of yonder year, in the sharpest, bluest waters two days east of the southern peninsula, where the tuna snapped recklessly in the brilliant sunlit glints off the water.

“No, Dad. I know what the sea sounds like. I mean when you’re in the water.”

“Physically? It sounds like you’re submerged.”

“Yes, I know that. I mean like if you’re floating, just quietly floating. That’s what I imagine myself just being there, when I’m running, and when it’s quiet I picture myself lying in the water, submerged, I’m looking into the water, floating. I hear my footsteps crunching little pebbles on the ground, and that goes away, same goes the whistling wind in the trees, and then my persistent breathing, and now I close my eyes, and I listen, I listen to the sounds of the ocean, the way it sways, and swells, and then I feel a giant mass of watery bulk, a giant sweep under me, and my feet are still running but in my mind I’m in the ocean, and I understand in that moment that the ocean has completely ignored me, it has found in me nothing that is worth its tossing me away. The ocean accepts without a second thought me, my existence, as no more than a part of its distension, and in that obliviousness, that tremendousness, in its disregard and its ignorance of me I find its complete embrace, its comprehension of me, and finally its intractable acceptance of my spirit.”

“Sorta ... brain in a vat.” He nodded, sympathetic.

“No, much more human than that. Much more …”

As his son trailed off, he hmm-ed, and closed his eyes, settling back slightly as his hands wrapped lightly around his chest, book perched tidily in its crook. Floating in the ocean, listening to the sounds that must have gurgled reverberatingly through its depths. Thinking about the edges of each shore that all the interconnected water in the world slipped gently over, thinking about the clinking ice floes that bobbed and crashed at its coldest tips, thinking about the edgy plates of geological crust that must have shifted titanically every so often, the barely perceptible yet unfathomably colossal shudders that must have swelled through in waves and swirls, the incredible decaying effect of that dampening mass of water against water in motion, the infinitely silent pantomime of innumerable creatures rushing swiftly to and fro in unceasing motion below his floating, motionless body, the dark, unknowable depths of the ocean and its marvelous, impenetrable sounds.

“I mean just the silence, and then the quietness, and then as if someone had reached into a secret place and turned up the volume, the sound of an ocean suddenly just loud enough for you to hear, sounds that would have existed for all of time, sounds ancient, mystical, pangeaic, and I would just be completely lost in all that sound.”

What was the ocean, he wondered. The ocean was scary, it was big, deep, treacherous. Not made for man, nor man for it. The ocean was something he never had much occasion to think about, but he reckoned that it was a fearful thing. The ocean was something that perhaps a man might think about once in a while, when considering the great things a man might do in this world, and the ocean would, in fairness, probably have more than its fair share of unthinkably hazardous challenges a man might reckon himself worth taking up. The ocean, I mean, basically a large body of water, right? What’s in it? But he accepted that in its perplexity it mystified some, he accepted that in its inscrutability some might find a mystery kindred to the grander, more abstract queries of an existential nature. Of man’s inexorable quest to find some kind of answer, some kind of, oh, I guess that’s what this is all about.

“I think I’d like to dive in one day and just do all that.”

“I’ll take you.”

“OK.”

Outside, the afternoon sun cast its gentle warmth through the glass of the café. Staring absently at the sun’s erratic illumination through a shifting panoply of leaves, he wondered if he’d ever have to go that far into the ocean. Breathing in deeply, he shook the last blanketing thoughts from his mind, and glancing past his son, he flipped open his novel, searching for the frayed ends of some thread of the narrative.

Just as his fingers touched the familiar strands, he looked up again, and in that moment, frozen eternally in his mind, he remembered feeling a solid sense of peace, seated forever in a scene in which he belonged.

*