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.
*