Do you see? (2/2)

From the journal or memoir of the one who buried the book and never saw it again

Where does a brook keep its skeleton? I’m sure it has one. As I sit here, not nearly napping and with no Raven to perch above my chamber door, nor utter the fateful three-syllable word, I begin to understand. The language runs through me and around me and I consider pouring myself a small glass of Amontillado, except I have none, never had any, other than in a short story. 

Note: Do you remember the house in Philadelphia where the man walled up his friend, having lured the unfortunate fellow to his death with the promise of fine wine? No, of course not. The story is set in an unidentified Italian city, so why would the tour guide tell me it happened, not in 1846, but in Pennsylvania at the end of the twentieth century when I was there?

My brook, as I explained in Part 1, “Do you hear…?”, was Burgundy Brook in its poetic manifestation, and it is a different sort of stream. Who is to say one is better than the other? Who is to say my thoughts are better than those of the stream I thought was mine? Do you see what I mean, you who will never read these words, just as nobody now will ever read what I wrote in the lost book?

Unless I copy them here, admittedly embarrassed by the unskilled assemblage of lines that were always meant to be lost. You don’t have to tell me they’re dripping with sentimentality

Bury books, too.

Bury them deep.

In red

and gray-white bones

which are memory.

Nevermore is too good for those words, I think.

I looked so hard for the lost book, from every angle. I saw water-soaked wood that looked like corrugated cardboard. Spongy and ridged, its sap lines sucked out by the current. I saw half a dozen bricks in one area. Why were they there? I could see no projects in the area which might have required them, and these bricks were ageless. Remnants of bridge-like wood were in the stream here and there, as if people had once needed to cross from one steep bank to the other. Absurd idea, since the depth of the water never seems to reach further than my knees. The boards now only for squirrels. I saw caves. I heard muted ripples. Nothing more. They’re probably depleted versions of a stronger time for my brook.

Masefield’s words on a plaque on Mermaid Quay in Cardiff come to mind, despite the fact that I am not an ocean-going vessel, although I guess I know about those things. About oceans and how big they are when one can’t swim. I’ve been to Cardiff, however. Been to Wales twice without knowing that Welsh water flows through my geographies. Now that I do, the Cardiff meeting weighs even more heavily on me here. DNA should be banned. (Not books.)

I ask if it’s the current, the water, that takes us or brings us home or if it is the vessel? The type of vessel will be left to each person to decide. 

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,

Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,

With a cargo of ivory,

And apes and peacocks,

Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,

Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,

With a cargo of diamonds,

Emeralds, amethysts,

Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

~ John Masefield, “Cargoes,”1903 

A haven would be nice, but, sadly, nowadays nobody sees Palestine as a haven.

Mere Brook has a cargo too: rubies and topaz mark its path, above and below the surface. Two layers of autumnal foliage forming the upper boundary and the lower one for the water between them so transparent it seems to have disappeared. This leaves the jagged jewels suspended, above and below, not separated by the current but by the air it has become while one stands and translates something.

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by,

And the wheel's kick and the wind's song and the white sail's shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea's face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

~ John Masefield, “Sea Fever,” (1902) Salt-water Ballads.

Masefield came to me in the smoky voice of Aunt Grace, who was so wrinkled and pretty and had tuberculosis but was always my favorite. Aunt Grace used to recite that poem and another by Tennyson, “Crossing the Bar”:

Sunset and evening star, 

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar, 

When I put out to sea,

And I must protest, because I do not really identify with oceans; my life is or feels like a river, or to be more accurate, just a mere stream that is flowing even faster now to the sea, carrying with it everything I ever read and loved, its current strong, but subject to disappearing when placed in careless hands. I too have been contaminated, dashed to bits and washed up still alive on a distant shore, my heart ever like fine vinho verde except a different color.

I hear the sound of violins

Is this how the story ends?

And I’m lost on a distant shore

I wake the morning sun

Gold as the ring that I wore

Back when we woke as one

On a distant shore

There, life is blooming now

Close by the wide ocean's roar

If I could buy wings I'd fly

To that distant shore

When you think of me, sing a heart-spun song

…

When you think of me, sing a wide-open song

When it's over, sing it once more

When you dream of me, dream when I'll meet you

On that distant shore

Life is a stormy sea

Hearts can be tattered and torn

I still believe peace can be found

On that distant shore

~ Órla Fallon, “On that distant shore”

If I could buy wings, sings the very Celtic Órla. From another distant Celtic shore, Rosalía de Castro’s lonely woman was willing to walk instead of flying, but for that she needed a railing to hang onto. If only the sea had a railing… She would have gone to her lover who had emigrated, I’m certain.

Leon Russell wrote “On a Distant Shore”: 

Life doesn’t matter anymore 

I know you’ve heard it all before

I hear the sound of violins 

Is this how the story ends? 

And I’m lost on a distant shore

But I don’t hear any violins am not lost in a brook whose shores are closer than my five-feet-one.

My life is merely words, the color of water, as James McBride titled his memoir. 

Palestine. Sunny?

Cargoes blocked from delivery in order to dim the gold and light of Palestine. Masefield never dreamed…

I did catch the scent of something decaying along parts of the shore. It was a scent that’s hard to define, but people who live in Maine know about mills. Old Town or Rumford, they’re all the same: bad for humans as well as the environment. Still, some outfit has recommended western Maine as a great place to live. They clearly haven’t read Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains, by Kerri Arsenault. The Rumford Mill, Nestlé, Poland Springs, all worked the town over and a single disease became the expected end for many residents.

Conflagration. This has happened all of a sudden:

Natural clarity is all I can see, yellow sun and leaves, temporary gold spun perfectly, nevertheless. Everything shaped in sound and echoes rushes over, around me. 

In contrast there is the brook’s very recent contamination due to a dangerous chemical spill at the former military base. I could feel it in the fingers I’d used before resorting to the shovel. It wasn’t an explosion like those decimating Gaza, which is part of Palestine. Still, it hurts.

I went down the steep slope three, no, four times, thinking inevitably of Masefield, yes, but not yet of Wales.

I must go down to the brook again,

to the brook I’ve rarely seen -

We know my effort was futile. I looked, looked hard, and unconsciously tried to summon John Berger. Between his Another Way of Seeing and About Looking, he not only affirms the violence of the male gaze but also demonstrates how art is never innocent or unpolitical. It definitely isn’t.

I wrote this and put it in the book I buried, so ought to record it here for posterity:

This book is not dead,

it has not died. Not yet.

I am here to remind you that

it will live to be read again

I’m thinking this book too was a chariot, Emily. 

Or a frigate, maybe, because you wrote that as well and I believed you:

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry -

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll -.

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul -

But my book, my once-undead little book of stitched vintage lace and old cloth that I left in the stream for safekeeping, has taken me nowhere. Is nowhere to be seen. Perhaps that is as it should be, perhaps I am greedy, having myself stolen line after line, paragraph after paragraph, from others writers’ books. Perhaps I’m at my saturation point after staying so long in Mere Brook and coming up empty-handed, frustrated. You know, though, I did not come up empty-headed, and that may be the point. 

I have started to learn a new language. In it I will find whether the chariot is the body, the mind, or a book, because Emily was ambiguous in that sense. Read the poem again.

P.S.

I forgot to mention that what you’ve been reading isn’t a real journal entry. I am a writer and this whole ‘story’ has been an exercise in writing using the stream of consciousness, a continuous flow of thoughts. Like Faulkner did in as I Lay Dying, or Miguel Delibes did in Cinco horas con Mario. It’s an old avant-garde technique inspired by Freud. Trying write what runs beneath our surface. Words as rivers, books as vessels for words. Is there no end?

P.S.S.

Genocide is still wrong.