The Loom of Lachesis, Vol. 12, Book 12, Chapter 1 - I go back in Time; Light and Winter Solstice; A Space to Consider the Final Act - Ruby Beach and beyond
Reflections in a Temporal Life - I go back in Time; Light and Winter Solstice; A Space to Consider the Final Act - Ruby Beach and beyond
inspired by Hamlet »
Reader: What do you read, my lord?
Skye: Essays. Essays. Essays.
Reader: What is the matter, my lord?
Skye: Between who?
Reader I mean, the matter that you read, my lord.
Skye: Nevermind, sir; essays for essays sake.
Reader: [Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.
I am there - there. And I have been here for a while. Which is to say - an expression for time passing in a rather vague measurement - “for a while.” But still connotes a period of Time - but unspecified. Noun. Adverb. But meanwhile…
Can you stay with me awhile as I complete the journey and the story? Because we have talked together about Time quite often - let’s go back in Time - but not that long ago…
There is here - but then: I am over in Forks, Washington for the long weekend, as the calendar turns over into last month of the calendar year of 2022 (time shifted back). Maybe a little break in the rain. But rest of December looks like showers for the next two weeks. A visit to the coast and Rialto Beach sounds like a smart plan. Recommended beach by Rena Priest and her nice write-up on a different perspective on stones and pebbles (Beach Party). Get on Mora Road and follow the Quillayute River to the Pacific Ocean. But then as I walked the beach - going around fallen trees and driftwood - I feel the unearthly presence of the rock formations…the looming islands rising from the ocean waves. There is a heavy leaden feel in my body, and I shiver with a deep sense of melancholy. I have - and have not - seen this view before…or something like it - from the past.
What is it? These are my new footprints on the sand, yet the islands - the rocks are like a magnet force - signaling a primal connection of where the land ends and the deeper vastness of Time begins. I am profoundly beholden to something uncanny and eerie. I stay with it - cautiously.
A zoetrope of images began to swirl in my mind. In my mind, I am seeing and feeling the The Qatsi Trilogy (Godfrey Reggio) as cinema in my soul and my last breaths. Perhaps Heidegger was right in regards to techne as disruptive in the quest for Being. Koyaanisqatsi; Powaqqatsi; Naqoyqatsi. Look at what we have done to ourselves. If it were not for nature, well then…
The tapestry of life is cinematic and kaleidoscopic memories of a journey. A View-Master reel of selected icons for being alive and as a human Being. Wheel in the Sky (Journey, 1978)…but this is the last stop. No more turning. This is where it all convenes and converges - the tapestry is illuminated at the farthest reaches of land. I can go no further - this where shoreline gives way to a horizon of curvature - the Earth itself. I started with the Appalachians, then the Ozarks, then the Rockies, the Wasatch, the Cascades, and then the coastal range - and here I am. I started with the New River in the Blue Ridge, then the Mississippi, the Missouri, then the Colorado, then the Snake, and the Columbia River. I started with Yellow Pine trees, then Oak, Hickory, Walnut, then Aspen, Juniper, Cedar, and Cottonwoods, then to Douglas fir and Sitka spruce.
Technically, James Island, but it is over there that Odysseus scrambled onto to shore from shipwreck and Calypso awaits. This is Mount Purgatory that Dante climbed. This is a painting of Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. I say aloud the meditative words of Marcus Aurelius, “To be like the rock that the waves keep crashing over. It stands unmoved and the raging of the sea falls still around it.” It is a tonic and it is solace to my soul. But I think back to this: In 1965 two songs about the rock and island as metaphor - as statements of the human condition: Bob Dylan’s, Like A Rolling Stone; and Simon and Garfunkel’s, I Am a Rock. The View-Master reel flips again and - the song Loves Me Like A Rock by Paul Simon (1973). Next frame in view: Petroglyphs on a rock wall in southern Utah. Next frame in view: I am sitting on a massive rock formation near Leigh Lake - looking up at the Teton range. New frame - and the next frame…and I am witnessing in my consciousness a memory montage. Weaving and creating. Writing and living. Carry on Wayward Son. And we will visit Bob Dylan again on the last essay soon to follow…
But I know this as well: all is transitory and temporal. This will all change over time. The river, the trees, the shoreline, and even this rock formation. Writing and dying. This life and all of the events, memories, and experiences. Here I am in context - thrown into a Heideggerian graveyard of trees and rolling surf. I am left to create meaning - but is that really my task and purpose as a human Being? At this point, I have grown weary of epistemology; and the thought of ontology is like a high tide covering up the entire shore of words, narrative, and essays - thus far.
And yet, what we have left is some sort of consolation. A consoling thought process. The solace of Being - and the sublime knowing that the others (parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and ancestors) before me - who have lived, endured, suffered, thought, felt - and gained wisdom as a result of the journey of life. This is a generational compact - writing as the bond to others - over the span of centuries. The consolation is also found in other writers over the grand arc of Time (recently thinking of Micheal Ignatieff’s book, On Consolation): Marcus Aurelius, Dante, Montaigne, David Hume, and many more, such as Homer, Seneca, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Proust, and Nietzsche. I am hearing the hypnotic and ethereal music - Agnus Dei - by Wojciech Kilar…repeating as a mantra in my head. I imagine this is the music (listen to the Chamber Choir Versija)…for the film (yet to be made) as Dante climbs up Mount Purgatory. Or walking along this stretch of coastline.
What is this place? This grand rock. This island? With trees reaching up to the clouds? What is it - that gathers my gloom and ecstatic moments upon the sand? And then the white hot glare of clarity and comfort. The flint strike that starts the fire. And like the knife blade that slips…and cuts deep through the skin - I am left with surprise, dismay, and marvel at the vicissitudes of fate. The many times I faced the undiscovered country and walked away. Mortality there and then not. But all at once I am knowing that it is proximal and a breeze just over my shoulder. A breath upon my neck. I am the traveler through time and space - and there is no going back. It has all just happened - here and now. This is this. And there it is.
And the water, the rock, the trees, the island. This is a painting - Isle of the Dead by Arnold Böcklin. I am sailing over the water and into the embrace of a story that returns again - and again. A Sailing to Byzantium. The song I hear, as the tidal force pushes the waters higher and higher and the moon is waning gibbous - Elegy by Lisa Gerrard.
The rain is relentless. High winds have dropped heavy branches on the road. Power is out in some places. Short days. Long nights. I hope to see another Solstice - next year. But for now it is all about celebrating the shift to a few more seconds of light in the day, then minutes, then hours. I have lived through many of these cycles - and seasons. The rain. The clouds. The sky. The moon. The sun.
Another song pushes out the Dantesque introspection and I hear the harmonic voices of Joni Mitchell and David Crosby and the haunting pedal steel guitar of Jerry Garcia. The song is “Laughing” - and it floats the spirit, but here I am thinking that it is more a kind of therapy - a medicine for the aging soul. I can see. I can hear. I can taste. I can touch. I can smell. I can think. But I need to laugh. That is all. Laughing. At the edge of existence - this is this. And there it is.
I am here standing marveling at the miracle and the science behind the rotation of the earth and the shift - the axial tilt - by which each day - the day will be longer. Each day a bit more. More light each day. This alone keeps me going…and I think this: a human Being to see the sun rising on the east coast and then to see it setting on the west coast. The arc of time and of this existence. There is time for nature, but there is also time for reading through a suitcase of books. I am sorry to say for those who wonder…I do not have a Kindle. My reading is more tactile with the hard copy in hand, although here I am also typing words (and reading them) on a MacBook Pro computer screen.
I started with the book, Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton by Joe Moshenska. I am pleasantly surprised to read that one of the themes to consider is how Milton wrote to see darkness giving way to light. Indeed, as Moshenka pointed out, Italo Calvino saw literature in that light: literature serving an existential function as antidote to the weight of living. I read to discover the light; I write to carry forth the light within - and without. And nature provides the changing seasons…darkness given way to light.
I think back to the novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce - and Stephen Dedalus and the bird-girl on the shore. The epiphany of life - life as epiphany. The turbulence of the life journey - and in the end - we simply needed - and wanted - moments of joy. To glide off the river and toward the back eddy - and to rest. And to slow time - for a few moments. To become the light against the dark; as Harold Bloom framed it: “…in a universe of death.” Not melancholy; not despair; rather, to create lightness even when the heavy storm clouds gather and a torrential rain falls upon your soul.
I burn through another book, Recursion by Blake Crouch, that is about Time and Memory and Being…reading fast and consuming the dizzying weaving of stories; and I ask where was “I” in all that time reading?
Three more books - and more published in 2022 - and I suppose then I will be done - all done.
Finished ~
Completed ~
End of the road.
But not yet…a bit longer… a couple more weeks…soon enough. Time enough but always tempus fugit.
As “it” flies, I am still balancing the chronos and kairos. Time as the motivation to keep reading and writing because…time as finite. At least from my phenomenological space - the subjective point-of-view and so I have to make the most of the opportunity of this time while knowing Time will carry on. I will not. And yet the learner until the end. As example,
Book one (of three): Chronos: The West Confronts Time (2022) by François Hartog. How ironic! I went back in time while reading the chapters into my formative years and the seminary experience and Christianity’s hegemony over Time. I visited Augustine again and re-lived the pull of gravity - the bending of Time - as it was understood by the Catholic Church. With Hartog - I followed my human development into later life as a series of reframing the flow of Time - scientifically, and more specifically - psychologically. Then I went forward into the time that is the now - and supposed in the present: the Anthropocence Age. Hartog has provided the foundations for building a literary bridge for me back to Proust and Joyce - and to those who challenged the received view of the interaction to Time. The Greek understanding of Kairos is what matters. How do we proceed into the rest of century? For starters - did I just use a very Chronos-like descriptor…the word - century? And shall I also state that I’m writing this in the a.m. hours (vs. p.m.)? Ante-meridian or post-meridian. This bracketing - this slicing and dicing - this sectioning is both comforting and maddening.
Like this: I was born in the middle of the last century. But here I am now in another (new) century. I am in my sixtieth decade and rounding the corner to the seventieth decade. But the first set of decades seem like a mirage - as they my life then was lived someone else entirely. I cannot fathom the two photos on my desk is “me”. The black and white photos show my father holding me (as a 1 year old) at the beach (Atlantic side) in Florida; I have a droopy cloth diaper on. The other photo (the same day at the beach) being held by my mother a bit further in the water with Gordy our dog. In the background - the Florida beach goes on forever and not a cloud in the sky. My parents are so very young. And now I am so much older. And in between how to account for Time passed? Or for Time experienced? Or for a meaningful existence? How would I describe my Being in all that time? Augustine kind of “threw in the towel” on understanding Time, and I can hardly relate to any apocalyptic “goal post” that frames the present and future as already set. As a “done deal” - and “baked in the cake.” Nope. I would rather go along with The Allman Brothers Band and talk about “Ain’t Wastin’ Time No More” {album “Eat a Peach, 1972”} or in the next year 1973 - the existential lyrics of Pink Floyd’s song “Time” {album “Dark Side of the Moon”}.
Perhaps it is Time to rethink of our existence in another way - in a creative way. Standard Time. Daylight Savings Time. This is the best we can come up with? I am writing this as the sun rises and the earth turns and the fog burns off and by the way - on Pacific time. But I do not think of time (per se) when observing nature, although any nature photographs are duly “stamped” with time and date - and geolocation on my iPhone. I would rather think and feel about (and of) the environment that I am embedded in with words and verse.
And so I ask: All of the sunrises and sunsets combined over a lifetime equate to what? If I said to you (and based on the Gregorian calendar of 365 days {approximately}) that I have seen about 24,100 sunrises and sunsets, you would find that to be numerically impressive, but utterly devoid in emotional connection. I think T. S. Eliot was going there with the poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;” - as a way to indicate desiccation of time past as quotidian and quantified - to the point of ennui. Therefore, I hope I have shown a deeper intention to capture a search for lost time - in a multi-layered fashion. I have attempted to measure with both chronos and kairos. Days and months along with words and sentences. Years and decades with paragraphs and chapters. Could not a story of life - of a life time - get to the heart of the matter? As such, the focus is on weaving both Time and Place as meaningful for a life - as lived. So many threads and our destiny is to gather the past into the present and fashion our own shimmering tapestry.
Book two (of three): Super-Infinite: The Transformation of John Donne by Katherine Rundell (2022). Perhaps I had too much Shakespeare to read and digest, or perhaps John Milton, or Ben Johnson, or T. S. Eliot or William Butler Yeats, in any case, I had overlooked and worse yet, imagined John Donne as somebody else in all these years! Who was he? What was he? Exactly - many - many different persons (yet singular all the while) over the course of his lifetime; and the verse, and poetry, and the varied roles and careers, and weaving of the sensual with the spiritual - all sounded very familiar. That is, complicated and contradictory, and metaphysical and physical…as though John Donne had served as precursor to Hermann Hesse, Jorge Luis Borges, William Blake, and Walt Whitman. Or a mashup of Petrarch and Dostoevsky. Or Montaigne and D.H. Lawrence. But I see now - where I missed the works of John Donne; that is, why the gravity of Shakespeare et al bent the light of Donne away from my literary telescope. I suppose I have Harold Bloom to thank for that - or - in this case to note that Donne is noted in passing (side glances) in a few of Bloom’s works of literary criticism. But what was noted, especially in Bloom’s last work, Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles; The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death (2020), was significant and illuminating. As example (and despite the turbulence in the literary world, in regard to the poetry of Shelly - and whatever T .S. Eliot thought of that…), Bloom mentioned that it was Coleridge who “resurrected Donne…” and that, “John Donne - whether he wrote erotic or devotional poems, plangent elegies or holy sonnets - was very much a unified being.” High praise indeed. But basically a sentence on one page and then the arc of the universe bends back to Shakespeare (the gospel according to Bloom). This book by Rundell had me searching a bit more about Donne and I followed several links, one of which had me convinced that with Richard Burton reading, “The Sun Rising” (by Donne) via a YouTube video, it was the only way to hear the verse in full audio splendor.
And I paused to consider Donne’s verse on the inability of Chronos to capture the essence of Love because hours, days, months are best described as “rags of time” (from The Sun Rising). I do not know why, but this description strikes me to the quick as though seeing a ship with sails in tatters from a violent storm, and yet the captain makes it back to the safety of the harbor. I know Donne is portrayed as a metaphysical poet, yet there is a blunt grounding of the Self in the flesh, the mind, and the soul.
This focus on Time in both Shakespeare (“Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,Wherein he puts alms for oblivion…” and Donne is a catalyst for the question: Are we sure Donne and Shakespeare did not cross paths in their literary journeys at some point in time?
Two items of relevancy:
1) the notion of transformation(s) {noting here the plural} - that John Donne was of many roles, characters, and substance throughout his life. Seemingly, a man on a mission to reinvent and recreate himself as time and place changed as well. This perspective of Donne was reinforced with an article (another link to an online essay) by Andrew Dickson (2017) titled, “Make me New: The Multiple Reinventions of John Donne.” Here is Dickson: “John Donne's work includes passionate and explicit love poems and intense religious meditations. Andrew Dickson explores the poet's many identities, from Catholic child to Protestant adult, from womaniser to devoted husband, and from trainee lawyer, secretary and Member of Parliament to Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral.” After reading Rundell’s book and Dickson’s article, I thought of the connection to the lyrics of Kris Kristofferson in the song The Pilgrim (1971), "He's a walking contradiction partly truth and partly fiction.” And thus we journey through our time and place as a human Being transforming ourselves daily, monthly, and over the longer of life. We will move. We will change careers or jobs. We will find someone. We will lose someone. We will forever be altered by war, poverty, trauma, and illness. We will confront death. But will also experience joy - and the awe of existence. We adapt and many threads are integrated over time. John Donne examined and created the verse and left a legacy of “time in a bottle” for us to read - in the here and now.
2) And yet there were constants in many of the transformations. That is, I take note of the table contents in Rundells’ book: it presents over twenty different “identities” for John Donne. And yet, Donne was a magpie, a man interacting with and collecting and weaving much of his world into coherent patterns - or tapestries - of human existence. Rundell proposed that Donne was an ever-ongoing harvester of the varied contexts around him. Donne was also making new connections with seemingly disparate unrelated scraps from the world. Perhaps this was another cross-connection with Shakespeare. But I also consider similarities in approach to writing about existence (human Being) as found in Walt Whitman’s works (“Leaves of Grass”) - although granted the setting with Whitman is America in the time of Lincoln. But is not that the point? Whether it be Elizabethan era, Jacobean age, Civil War (America) era, or into the 21st century, we are “thrown into” the world and the “I” engages with various settings over the course of the life journey and writing (if the person so chooses to engage in that activity) can evolve from sonnets to sermons - or - be multi-layered stories integrated with the knowledge of “that time and place.”
But a macro level theme emerged from reading about John Donne’s life: his shift from what I have referred to in my own journey that related to the experience of the Clouds and the Cave. I could not help but relate this pattern I discovered in John Donne - that was a similar template (and yet different enough) as he journeyed through The Cave and into the Clouds; whereas I went through the Clouds and into the Cave - and then back to Earth. The spiritual, the carnal; light and dark; the scared and the profane; the Epicurean and the Stoic. But as I have distilled with reflection and introspection, the two sides of the coin are potential experienced and then carried forth through life, while yet a third domain may also be possible. The dialectical outcome of the thesis and antithesis: a synthesis of the two - and in my case - the grounding and the connection of the human Being to Earth. At least this is what I have as my story as it nears the end. But there is comfort in knowing that others throughout history have dedicated a significant part of their life to mapping the terrain of human development - and sharing through creative arts - their experience of Being in a time and place.
Book three (of three): Magnificent Rebels : The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self by Andrea Wulf (2022). I winced when I first read the title. Surely this will grate the nerves of many just hearing about the “Self” in this time of “selfies” and self-obsessive behaviors broadcast across platforms of social media. As example, the words“ narcissism” and “ego” have floated back into sphere of describing political pathologies and bad behavior of corporate leaders - as well as many neighbors that live down your street. And then throw in the “Romantics”…what could go wrong? Both words will be sorely misunderstood by contemporary readers - yes? Surely, “we” are simply exhausted at the onslaught of too much attention on the “self” (again) when it appears the fabric of society seems tattered, and the common-wealth is neither, and the nation is polarized into tribal factions led by would messianic figures or cultish groups following the self-aggrandized leader over (again) another cliff. And the word “Romantic” is now more closely with identified with the TV show The Bachelorette or the book Fifty Shades of Grey or the movie The Titanic.
What was Wulf thinking?
Even the book review in the New York Times (J. Szalai, September 15, 2022) distilled down the message of the book in this fashion: ‘They Preferred to Sing a Song of Themselves - A Portrait of 18th-century German Romantics , who could be petty and narcissistic.” Again - I think this review was the expected reaction in our current state of affairs both physically and psychologically. Covid-19 pandemic. Recession. Inflation. Elections. Weather and climate challenges. NATO, Ukraine, and Russia. Sigh! And reaching for pain relief for the headache - and maybe a glass of Jameson to take away the existential threats of living in the today.
But is that not the point?
In all of this - we have science and technology and (supposed) rationalism and hoped-for “reason” - and yet - yet still…we have soul-melting anxieties about the present and the future. Infrastructure, government, laws, ethics, values, virtues, dogma, doctrine, creeds…all seemingly advancements forward into…something. And yet, we still hurt. We still feel. We still bleed. We still seek solace from the way in which simply living - and being alive - is compromised and forfeited by the crush and the loss of Self into the masses - or the mob - or the cult - or the social media platforms - or the polemics - or the money - or the fame - or the mountain of externalizations that force and bend and crush the individual under the weight (I think back to the term and title “Beneath the Wheel”) of society and culture - without regard to the individual - the Person - or Being.
Let me be clear: The Self - the “I” - the Being - is not the same as being selfish or focusing on the individual ego or slipping into solipsism. I reflected that the group in Jena (Germany) were part of the grand pendulum that swung away from the collective, the doctrinaire, the customary, and the received view, and gravitated toward the other direction of the individual (or individuality) as center point for literature, art, culture, and philosophy. But as we have learned throughout history, the dialectical activity, the ebb and flow, the emergence and then dissolution of many ideas become mixed, mashed up, transformed, synthesized, and threaded into ”new” patterns. One of the lessons learned in Jena (via Wulf’s book - and also see a more in-depth and balanced critical review by Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Symphilosophizing in Jena”, October, 2022, in the New York Review of Books) and has also been a literary meta-pattern over time is the delicate balance between being influenced and being an influencer to others and being your own influence unto (upon and within) one’s Self. As Appiah noted, even with friendships, there are also feuds. There is a dynamic within mentors and proteges…masters and apprentices. Teachers and students. Ideas are shared and modified over time. There is an expansion and contraction. The thoughts turn into fractals and a web of connections - and can also turn into a cul-de-sac - or fragment in a chaotic mess.
In my opinion, I admired Wulf’s literary leap (yet again) into history and philosophy - and nature (see her previous publication - The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World - her style of writing - “fits” my point in the life course and my place in this time and space in western Washington - the Olympic National Forest and Park. Yes - a melding of minds (as it were), a “symphilosophizing” effect. Well, almost. I do not claim that Wulf and I are simpatico in life (per se), but the topics and interests in the writing domain are similar and above all else: to write of the connections and the web of influences that stream across the centuries. And strangely enough, I follow many of the breadcrumbs in the spirit of a Harold Bloom book, “The Anatomy of Influence of Literature as a Way of Life” - whereas the breadcrumbs are now threads in my tapestry and within Wulf’s book (and 18th century Germany as origination), I started with Goethe and Faust, (as I connect back to the seminary) and then to Alexander Von Humboldt and the focus on nature and observation (as I connect back to Aristotle - and then to the seminary - and then to biology), then to Friedrich Schelling and Naturphilosophie (as I connect back to Caspar David Friedrich, Hölderlin and Hegel, then to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, then to Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman)- and thread them all into an interdisciplinary tapestry (or as one reader might say - a hearty Cajun gumbo) that has been woven in my life course.
Poet-scientist. Scientist-Poet.
Yes. That I what I am and continue to be. And Wulf’s book has resurrected and reinforced my self-examination and self-awareness and my identity as a Being as a necessary bridge in this existence - this time and space - and this here and now as something different, yet the result of a long anatomical influence of connections (via literature) over time (of so many centuries) to see and observe - and to listen and touch and feel - the contexts - the environments of which I am embedded in both as scientist and as poet/writer. Allow me to provide an example of that intersection of scientist & poet/writer in a recent time and place. It was at the end of September 2022 (the 27th) and I was exploring the Olympic National Park and Forest area as my final destination point to write and to expire this mortal coil (but not yet). After hiking through some trails near Lake Quinault (Olympic National Forest), me eyes were accustomed to a green-saturated landscape with occasional bright colorful brackets of fungi on fallen trees. But, I had heard that the Ruby Beach had been “opened” (re-opended) after some construction and upgrades to the park access area, so I wanted to visit there before heading north to the Forks area - and focusing on Rialto Beach as my final destination. Maybe…
Ruby Beach
I had checked the tidal and sunrise charts for the day - Tuesday. Barometric pressure. Wind Speed. Wind Direction. Rain jacket and layered clothes. Cold and rain, but then clearing up a bit on Weds. Colder still. iPhone 13 Pro Max fully charged. Heading north on 101 and enter the parking lot. I exit the car and take note of the surroundings, the context, the environment - and scan it all inward and approach the trail as a naturalist. This is nature! I am an astute observer of “it” all around me. The parking lot is on the higher cliff side and after reading a few flyers posted on the information board, I walk to an observation platform. I see Cedar Creek below me - which is less a creek and more like a small lake or pond as it winds it way toward the Pacific Ocean. I can see a large “island” further up the beach - at least an island with low tide. I take note of Picea sitchensis, Sitka spruce, as I walk down the path toward the beach. There is sand, and there are rocks of many sizes - from marbles to Frisbees - but all rounded and smooth from the ocean waves as a large tumbler polishing gemstones. The beach is also covered with large washed-out-bone-white logs - hundreds lining the shore as far as they eye could see north and south. The sky is turbulent with gun-metal roiling clouds threatening rain and the surf is active with waves thundering in my ears. I noted how the rough water rushed up to the crest of gray rocks - all the size of my iPhone- and then the ocean sounds as the water pulled back - dragging the rounded rocks chattering like maracas and rain-sticks. I walk toward the “island” with a sheer face wall - rugged and topped with a few trees. As the tide was coming in - rising - the ocean waters were coming in from the left and from the right - and then colliding at the center before me. I could approach no further. The large stack was becoming an island as I stood before it. I took a few more steps back - and then back again. The tide was relentless. I noticed a large group of gulls further down the shoreline and planned to walk in that direction to take a few images with my iPhone and record the Genus and species. But after a few steps - I had a
strange visual perspective - and perception. I had take a few camera images of the gulls - and went as far as Genus (Larus), but when reviewing the images I thought I had accidentally taken all of the gull photos in black and white. How could this be? Did I touch the wrong setting for images? There was no color in the photos. I looked up and I felt as though I had suddenly lost touch with reality all around me. It was gray upon gray upon gray. The sky, the water, the gulls, the sand, the rocks, the logs, suddenly the color was muted down and out. All was faded into subtle light. I thought for a moment I had lost all color vision - as though my brain could not register wavelengths of light. Did I experience an organic event - a stroke - in my brain? But wait…my binoculars are still green. My layered fleece jacket is blue - and the outer shell rain jacket is green. And yet, the landscape all around me was grayness…as the eyes of Athena…as in George Gray - one of the many “dead" speaking in verse in the Spoon River Anthology (Edgar Lee Masters)…as in Hegel’s insight, “When philosophy paints its gray on gray, then has a form of life grown old, and with gray on gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only known; the Owl of Minerva first takes flight with twilight closing in.” Athena. Minerva. Owl. Twilight. Philosophy. Sojourn into Gray. The contrasts - the shadows - the shadows dancing, October Project, in a fews days it will be - the gray scale - the photographs of Ansel Adams - the Snake River and the Tetons - the Moonrise at Hernandez - the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe - the grey lines, the skulls, the hills - the graymalkin in Macbeth - Shakespeare is gray in all matters - gray matter - the Picture of Dorian Gray - David Gray, Babylon - Micheal Gray, Outtakes on Bob Dylan, Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door…well, yes I am.
I walked back to the car. I hope I can remember to write this down.
Almost home.