|
|
 Mailing address: bo@bo-hemian.com |
|
|
|
1 February 1999 -- The others are out of sight
I'm back in my hidden room at the end of the long dirt road, and the silence has returned. I so often seek to avoid human contact and the irritation that is its unfortunate and unintended by-product, and today I got what I wished for. It is late afternoon and I'm stretched lengthwise on the muslin-slipcovered sofa, looking across the room at where the TV screen of such a couch potato normally goes. I fix my gaze upon the pine-panelled wall and the rear window, for which there is no remote control and only one channel.
The silence, when it is as completely guaranteed as it is in these woods of my imagination, is a rather different experience than just coming home and turning off the consumer electronics for awhile. But it really isn't a whole lot to report about, except to myself. Marketable media content only becomes that way when it offers something of true value to others. This life I describe is really a rather pitiful, self-indulgent and yes, shamefully selfish way to be. I come up the road and settle in, only to wonder why I ran off from a perfectly good society, like the question often asked about "a perfectly good airplane" when talking about skydiving. Then, my mind invariably returns to the paradoxical truth I have heard from countless enlightened authorities; that one's own self is best provisioned by works done for others. It seems there should be an asterisked disclaimer to such a statement--"your results may vary".
But I must admit they are right, since there is little to be glorified in one disgruntled man who walks away in a huff when he tires of playing the game and losing. As so many would tell me from common sense, my sitting here and uttering one tirade after another about a world that does not treat me as I would like does not do much to change its practices. It is not a very useful message, since I really do not matter much in that larger context unless I'm playing my part, according to whatever vocation has been set before me. The wide and varied population of this vast Earth is notable for its intense indifference towards those others who are out of sight and who can be discounted as barbarian, undeserving, lazy, inferior, or whatever adjective of relative disparagement suits the local demagogues in asserting the unique merit of their constituencies.
I'd think some of them really want me back, strapped into my seat of fear-laden integration, doing work of apparent meaninglessness whose effects propagate unseen to the ends of the earth, lost at once in combination with the similar effects radiating from others. As soon as I head out of town and leave them all behind, I am lost to them, and I stop mattering. So that is why departure from the others ends up being such a hollow victory-in-small-part. When my life with them becomes so unlivable that I, myself, am annoyed and need to seek this kind of solace, then I have no business talking about it.
Escape is such a futile business. My train of thought accordingly comes to a halt, as I look out at the unchanging scene across the clearing. After some time in this silent contemplation, I start to think of the others, whom I've excluded from this hollow as uniformly unworthy of forming my company. I have outdone the injustice I often see in such exclusionary behavior as ostracism and discrimination. I have no basis for judgment; the beam is firmly implanted in my eye and it's time to make an appointment with a suitable ophthalmologist. At least I have a start, in that I feel remorse when I leave them. The disdain of the truly misanthropic would not so often allow for the return I inevitably make to the collective whole. Yes, it will be time to go back soon.
RB
5 February 1999 -- Moving along into another day
It is such a beautiful, clear morning as the day begins, with the sun arriving yet further north along the ridge, to enter its well-prepared continuum of various and brilliant blues. As I rustle myself into action once again in the cold stillness of this winter whose end is indeed defined, it suddenly occurs to me that I will not always be here to behold such skies, because similarly finite is the number of my days and the endurance of my physical being. In sharp contrast, it seemed that the days of my younger self had no such limit, but then of course, those times had problems all their own.
My particularly peculiar life has further been one of "uncommon" problems that no one else could fully understand. As another day enters the hollow, giving greater definition to the features of the clearing, the edge of the woods and the hillside contours, I come to realize that I have at long last been given at least one of the "blessings" I so envy in that conjectured population out there that I call "normal". I am admittedly human, and cannot be so unusually constructed as to avoid the end that befalls all men, whether they fit in or not.
I have read much in the popular press about these "baby boomers", a group I have apparently joined on account of my 1962 birth (never mind that my father was hardly old enough to be a WWII veteran). If I am truly associated with this segment of demography, then I am supposed to be living a life of denial, especially over the notion of growing old. Maybe these same feelings also came years ago to my parents' generation, but they had the civility and upbringing not to make such a fuss about it, just as they never thought it fitting to mount a nationwide youth movement and rabble-based insurrection during their late teens. Those were the older kids, I always remind myself; I was no more than 10 years old.
Any observer could not deny; however, that the hard season of winter up here at the Cabin is on the decline. I notice today how the sun seems to be rising so high into the sky, compared to some of those darker days closer to the solstice, when it seemed to be present as a mere formality. At that time, the powers of cold and the night had more of their own way. Indeed, I've seen some days of considerable warming here, so that the various places I've made footsteps, paths, and indentations into the snow are now wide and wallowed out. Grass is even showing again. Down at the lower altitudes of the Mid-Atlantic where I live my real life, and especially towards the coast, the snow that remains up here in the hills would be quite the novelty. But I can hardly expect that the hard weather is over, I remind myself, as I finally dress enough for the outdoors and step onto the porch to take in a greater amount of this suddenly-more-brilliant sun.
I am not certain what has changed to distinguish today from similar weather just a few days earlier. Perhaps it is starting to become clear to me that I should be making more of my time and place in this world, since I am just wandering through temporarily, on a single, one-way itinerary. Long ago in the late 60's and early 70's, when we camped out as a family and I stepped from the tent-trailer when the morning came, the various elements of life and living were so firmly planted in my sense of what has to be and what indeed will stay in my own life. But as the old song implies, nothing but "the fundamental things apply, as time goes by", while I must be moving on. I sit on the creaking metal chair in my sweats and loosely-draped parka, drinking a cup of warmed-over coffee from the stove. The seasons are moving along in a highly-predictable path, but my life and how I end up influencing its remainder will take another route, of generally known duration and character but containing sights yet to be seen, as I only I will see them.
RB
9 February 1999 -- Holding out against the weather
Today has been a good day to stay inside. When I got out of bed and stoked up the fire this morning, I saw that about four inches of new snow had arrived, with the clouds overhead so dense as to suggest a lot more was coming. But then I noted how heavy and wet these flakes were, and this was before the full light of day. It is now somewhere past noon, and as I had suspected, what could have been another foot of snow has decided to finish out as sleet and freezing rain instead. I hear it pounding into the layer of snow over the rooftop with the muffled sound of a continuously-poured slurry, not the distinct impact of real raindrops in summer.
I'm expecting to see another leakage soon in conditions like these, but the construction remains sound. I was certainly glad to have had that surface so thoroughly inspected and repaired last summer by the fellow from the village, who followed me up in his own truck. I tend to be acutely aware of the slightest such problems that may arise, seeing them as crises requiring immediate, though often-delayed, remedy.
I look out the kitchen window as I cook up some chow on the stove, watching the bone-chilling precipitation as it continues to fall, unabated, upon the side yard and onto the woodshed roof. The ground has taken so much of it now that the initial, individual pockmarks have joined to form a solid texture of broken snow cover. I'm not going to go out there any longer than I have to, I say to myself, as I take my tin plate and coffee mug to the table, where there is plenty of heat from the stove close by. I find myself excessively absorbed by the singular concerns of this time that I am caught indoors by conditions beyond my control. I should keep my mind, at least in part, on the fairer days that are to follow in two or three months, even though there is value to living in the here and now.
I seem unable to ration my attention effectively between immediate appreciation of what I have today and the inherent optimism of "big picture" living in the long term. My ongoing fear is that one day I'll be back in urban reality, fending off the weary crisis-stream of life with others, and in the midst of a particularly bad day, I will not be able to see any further than the present set of woes. Though I might know fully with my mind that better days to come are a certainty during such a spell, I will still end up in the final throes of defeat, since I will not have sufficient motivation by feeling it as well. I find it curious that I can experience and embody my adversity so vividly, yet the compensating goodness, of which the world abounds in comparable quantity, gets turned away, untouched.
I continue along into my fresh-baked cornbread and steaming beans with bacon, trying to exercise something in the way of optimism. I know that the sleet never continues long at this strength. The ground will eventually drain and the fine greenery of spring is not far off. As in the oft-quoted Psalm, "weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning". Indeed, I'd be most complacent and ungrateful, if not for these requisite times of long-suffering, the ones that build perseverance, strength and character. I only wish that a man did not have to become hardened, by learning to endure such sorrow. I worry about becoming hardened as well to the good that abounds in the world. But as I have already seen, effective shelter against the one does not exclude benefit from the other. They are separate and independent provisions, as much so as the solid roof above my head and this hearty dinner upon my table.
RB
13 February 1999 -- An observation of my surroundings
The sun has returned today, but so has the cold. It is not what I'd call "bitter cold", where one's exposed skin rapidly objects to being taken outside, but it is enough to have solidified the various forms created within the snow during those days when the freezing rain came through. One of these days, winter is bound to turn the corner and begin its final descent into spring. There hasn't been a real occurrence of that "spring feeling" in the air as of yet, and that is always a most powerful motivator of hope, at least as I recall from years past during my real life in the city. One will invariably see people sunning themselves on the warmer days of late February and early March, out in the park or on a sundeck with its equipment still stowed for the season.
This same sun, several degrees south of me and thousands of feet lower, must be making for good profits at the various resort centers. Here, it merely enables a detailed visibility one does not find during the time of foliage, all along the slopes and downward into the rivercut that connects me to the main road. I find my 12 x 50 binoculars, in their case near the front door, and get into my parka to go have a look. I walk out from the porch in my heavy boots, into the reduced layer of snow, through which random and bent remnants of the flowering grasses from last season remind me of what is to come--someday. I stop near the position of the campfire ring, the top of whose circle of stones I can now see with the melt that has occurred, and I raise the optics to my eyes.
Upwards in the right-hand foreground, I can see the location of the waterfall, notable because of its exposed rocks. The unknowing might have missed it as such. Higher up, the ravine broadens out and becomes assimilated into the overall watershed of the hollow. Here and there, I see the occasional pine and fir, but the bulk of this landscape consists of tier upon tier of those barren trunks and branches, reaching up to the ridge-top itself where more rocks assert their presence. Turning about, I look off into the remarkably clear distance downstream, between the intervening lower summits, to see what I can of the flatter lands. It is hard to tell just how much snow is left; since one cannot see much of the ground at such a sharp angle.
I suppose commerce and school years and the rest of public life go on, without interruption in those far reaches, while they wait for lands such as these to become good vacationing areas again. There is really not much for me to do out here, after I've completed my visual survey, so I return to the hearth inside. Far too often these days, it seems the height of frivolity to be "loafing about" up here in this deserted country, since that world-under-way down below could certainly find enough for me to do if I were working some overtime right now. But would those others also satisfy the longings of my heart as well as my pocket, if I lived more in their midst? Well, maybe.
At present, the return on such an investment of running about has been meager, so I end up using much of my "spare time" by myself. It is odd, what can satisfy a mind like mine, such as the simple contemplation of certain things of no great social, romantic, or humanistic import that I will see from time to time on my solitary excursions. It always hits an end, however. I see all there is to see, and then have to move on. But when I'm with the others, the observations can go on and on, sometimes for an entire lifetime, even when I've long ago become tired of making them.
RB
17 February 1999 -- Waiting for joy's return
On another nondescript and grey winter's day, there is little new to report on the surroundings up here at the Cabin. The snow remains in abundance, though melted and compacted by the warmer days--it gets to be something I grow used to every day as I head to the outbuildings for one reason or another. The trees, as before, remain barren and the new undegrowth of spring is still some time off.
As evening settles in and I become enclosed in this one small region of kerosene lamp-light for the overcast and moonless night, I begin to feel a certain despair come across me. I don't think I shall experience the typical sensation-rich visit that tends to make for a good story. I peer into the growing darkness outside the front window, my eyes cast upon the rugged terrain and overwhelming signs of the life to come, yet these do not register. I remind myself that I am just one rather solitary man, and this indifference is hardly a cause for concern to those carefree ones I see so often, living their "normal" lives. It is no condemnation of human life as a general principle when all I have is my own biased testimony.
Actually, it is a cause for praise, that the sighs of the dispirited are not to be a prophecy for the world at large. It is good that such lamentation does not hold the attention of very many for very long. Because there is such popular distaste for "whining" and summary denunciation of those seen sitting on "pity pots", I might have a false sense of what the "normal" really experience on a day-to-day basis. Maybe they despise such displays of open anguish because if they had their way, many of them would launch into moanings of their own that would quickly put me in my place. I must remember this, next time I'm down there with the group. Some are probably wearing smiles they have practiced for so long that they have convinced themselves that they are not doomed by troubles that would crush me in an instant. That's how I should play the game when I get back, as insincere to my own self as it seems.
The night arrives fully and my sense of enclosure within emptiness becomes complete. I am aware of the relative luxury of my problems, for to be able to focus upon nothingness means I have been spared grave torment, at least for now. Objective reality, while sparse in its benefit, is also taking it easy on the punishment side as well. Why, I should be jumping for joy right now, shouldn't I? Joy, unspeakable, in the midst of this relatively low-grade sorrow, is there for the knowing. But it will not come tonight. I think of how the square miles of empty woodland surround me--just me--as I stretch out on the sofa under the lamp on its stand. I might as well be here, when the only face I can show the world right now is not the one they want to see. What is it, from the Beatitudes, that the "poor in spirit" receive? Oh, that's right, the kingdom of heaven. This is a little hard to believe right now, unless my poverty is not truly spiritual but of my own making.
There's no escaping it--I have to drive back down to that real city life tomorrow in the truck and try to sing to myself, with feeling, "grey skies are gonna clear up / put on a happy face." One day I might be among the ones who can really claim the kingdom of heaven as theirs, the ones to whom such a call to action is a most basic of platitudes. "No," I say to myself, "they don't want to hear about my problems down there in town." They just want a little good news; a bit of inspiration for their own ongoing battles to live with gratitude rather than resentment and fear. Therein lies true pursuit of God's kingdom; to find such cause for faith, and to share it, when appearances do not justify such hope.
RB
20 February 1999 -- The terrain is slowly illuminated
I see the sunlight enter now through the panes of the front window, and I rise from my bed in the alcove to gaze upon the rough crest of the ridge. The dark outline of its silhouette is so familiar to me now, burned into my memory from many a morning like this, when it becomes the central feature of definition between the waiting, snow-laden woods and the uniform extent of blue that descends to meet it. This gives me cause to appreciate the aesthetic discipline of the geomancy and feng shui masters of the far East, usually dismissed by my ingrained skepticism. I can almost imagine "my" hillside in one of those idealized artistic renderings, with its carefully-placed calligraphy, perhaps with trout jumping from the stream and a deer or two in similarly thoughtful poses, gazing upwards at the sun.
I walk over and get the cast iron stove under way, to make some coffee, reminding myself that this is nothing more than an empty landscape, and I am a bit out of place within it. This structure, indeed, is an imposition; the clearing "should" actually be to itself, and I imagine it will be one day, when these writings become too difficult to maintain in the face of urban and social pressures back in the real world. I think ahead, in the bad habit that I have, to the various obligations that await me down there. My image is always one of being hopelessly swamped, if I am not ready to react at moment's notice to any imaginable "threat". How sad are these subjective interpretations of what for the most part are expected transactions of living. There is beauty in those sets of circumstances; the relationships and the vocations brought about by particular abilities, but I see them as just a tour of duty; a terrain to be mastered before moving on.
I look out the kitchen window, where the sun casts a sharp shadow of the building's northwestern corner against the random surface of the snow. The woodshed remains in darkness across the side yard, but not the outhouse, where I see that the wooden plank door is beginning to show signs of surface wear. The truck, parked at the end of the dirt track, captures the sun's glare on those portions not dulled by the salt, mud, and sand of the roads below.
I know I must soon leave, to continue my apparently aimless journey, wearily hauling myself to countless places I have not seen and others I've seen frequently but resent seeing again. In a glimmer of all-too-rare optimism, I know that I shall one day be capable of seeing and feeling the human virtue-by-design that truly resides within each of those various settings, rather than seeing an unrelenting horde of opposition at every juncture; each seeking its own glory at my expense. If I am to accord myself any dignity, I must see dignity in the others as well, since I cannot escape being human.
I take my coffee mug, finally, to the sofa and look back out into the clearing, which is beginning to acquire enough backlight from the sky to gain distinction below the basic shape of the ridge. So many are the indentations, rises, and undulations at the upper end of "my" hollow! It is not so simple as just the ridge itself. I think to the times last year when I was walking about up there, appreciating those many small, fine points; the trees, the rock-ledges, the turns in the trail. The ridge is but one of many features, all of which join to create something that far exceeds the sum of its countless parts. Yes, it is "right", just as the collection of apparently-random experiences of my day-to-day life within the crowd all fall together for the good into that curiously-shaped envelope that I only see as an outline from this great distance.
RB
27 February 1999 -- Choosing what to do next
Once again I arrive at the simply-adorned, wood-panelled room at the Cabin, to try my best to discern a course of proper action, given the many confusing and contradictory signals life has been sending my way, down there in the crowd. I open the damper and carefully build another fire in the fieldstone hearth. I watch the flames execute their single plan, that of consuming as much of the seasoned wood upon the grate as possible.
Outdoors, it remains gray; the snow a dingy color that has not been refreshed by new accumulation in some time. It is full of droppings from the hemlock pines that stand behind the woodshed and further mottled by the recent meltings. The snow, too, has a single course of action and future destiny: to be melted and to run off into the stream, eventually flowing past the village below. We humans, on the other hand, are never shown such unambiguity and concrete assignment in these lives that are at the mercy of our free will.
Maybe, quite simply, there is no way of completely knowing and minimizing the "cost" of a next move, as with the reasoning used by game-playing computers. As I sit near this fire today, waiting out the dreariness of late February, I am confronted with a need to discern something--anything--and put all I have into it. Indeed, the famous sportswear corporation is party to great wisdom when it tells me to "Just Do It." For so long, I have scoffed at such an invitation to irresponsible impulsiveness, since "it" could be completely opposed to common sense and better judgment. This whole world seems to be able to pick "it" out with amazing skill and accuracy, but to me, "it" remains mysteriously undefined.
In my times of solitude and detached observations of others as they live, I have studied each instance of this arbitrary next choice, and they all end in pain of one sort or another. None seems "acceptable", at least from how I see "it". The others, while obviously suffering grievously on account of their momentary decisions, have nonetheless made their choices and are living meaningful lives, while I sit here, growing older. The Church tells me that I've been left to make such decisions so that I might pick the "right" choice of loving God and seeking first his kingdom. I begin imagining a hidden yet ubiquitous infrastructure among those "normal", the ones with whom I so often compare myself, whereby Godly inspiration to right and proper actions towards such goals is continually piped in, the way water is always there when I turn on my city tap.
I see myself faced with one of those questions where, since I have to ask, I wouldn't understand the answer anyway. I must therefore look terribly strange to the others, asking as I do about such fundamentals. "Everyone knows that, you fool!" Well, they should speak for themselves. Every action on my decision list leads to a dead end, and I cannot yet appreciate the joy that resides in the interim. It is as if I were to see the entire contents of my woodshed as its final pile of ashes, and count it for nothing since that's what it will end up becoming. Well then, I have no choice but to "eat, drink and be merry", if as Ecclesiastes' philosopher realizes, "it is all folly". I do not grow younger, yet I pass up a staggering array opportunities for enrichment with each decision to hide out and "be safe". Sometimes, I would think, it is better to "be sorry".
RB
