Where You Are Not
On woods, walking, borderlines, and turns. Also the next issue of the Midstream newsletter.
Iowa, October. The trees have just started to change; most are a pale yellow, a few touched with orange, only a handful streaked with the darker, cranberry color that will cover the trees as colder weather comes. I walked most days this week. I love Nashville, but as with any city, the land feels smaller, smothered by concrete and traffic stops. When I walk by my apartment, I do my best to find roots. I stick close to the tree-line and narrow greenbelts, try and memorize the name of local trees, keep an eye out for the small ecosystem that surrounds the complex: hornets, beetles, mourning doves and, once, a buck. But how different from my hometown, where you can walk five minutes from the house and find yourself in fields. The line at the edge of the town is abrupt—the street simply stops. Farmland picks up at the edge of the neighborhood and flows out, in higher and higher hills, to silos and the Interstate. The sky, I am sure, has more blue here than anywhere else. Or perhaps it is only that the wide horizon and lack of clouds uncover more, that the same clear blue lies overhead across the earth, only there is more clutter to conceal it. But here, it is bright and blue and open, sapphiric in its shade and brilliancy. Below it lies the break between the suburb and the farmland, a clean edge between concrete and corn stubble; you could stand with a foot on each side.
It reminds me of a quote I read the other day, a passage from Quiller-Couch on prose and verse:
“I am journeying, say, in the west of England. I cross a bridge over a stream dividing Devon from Cornwall. These two counties, each beautiful in its way, are quite unlike in their beauty; yet nothing happened as I stepped across the brook, and for a mile or two or even ten I am aware of no change. Sooner or later that change will break upon the mind and I shall be startled, awaking suddenly to a land of altered features. but at what turn of the road this will happen, just how long the small multiplied impressions will take to break into surmise, into conviction—that nobody can tell. So it is with prose and poetry. They are different realms, but between them lies a debatable land.”
Between them lies a debatable land, a boundary crossed almost without awareness. Another writer once gave me this advice: in writing, you can do something badly for the right reasons, you can do something well for the wrong reasons, and you can do something well for the right reasons. Perhaps the right way depends on which country you’re aiming for, prose or verse, or, in the middle of that debatable country, the terrain of free verse. I love the vers libre, the poetry of T.S. Eliot, Mary Oliver, or Walt Whitman; I love how it plays along that boundary and borrows from both countries. The poets who reimagined rhyme and meter—what were their reasons?
I left the borderline and headed for the park: a small bundle of trees, threaded with a path but lightly sketched. I love this walk because it is a little ill-kept and usually empty. The world retreats, and I am left alone with my footfalls and the scold of squirrels as they scramble overhead. Thoreau wrote:
“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”
I cannot move out to Walden Pond, but it is good, for an hour or so, to wander and remember how to suck the marrow from life.
Following the faint trail, I walked through clearings and between the trunks of trees. I am no naturalist, but I do share one of the virtues which a young Gilbert Keith attributed to his wife Frances. “She is a lover of sensation,” Chesterton wrote. I can claim little knowledge about birds and trees and flowers, though I am trying, bit by bit, to tuck names into my pocket, preserved for later recollection, but I too am a lover of sensation. As I walked, I wrote silent lists of everything I saw and heard. The bullfrog calling, a cantus firmus set against the lighter melody of an unseen creek. Swallows and robins, half spotted as they flashed between branches. A fuzzy caterpillar with broken stripes like train tracks on its back. Squirrels that rustled bushes and then skirted across the path, skinnier and with coats a warmer, golden brown than their round and ashy brothers from down South. A hollow knocking, which, if you scan the forest, always leads to a puff of speckled black and white who drills his beak against the bark.
The woods were yellow, both the trees and the light that filtered through their leaves and dappled bars of gold across the grass. I’ve been rereading Dante’s Inferno, and as I wandered through the woods, I couldn’t help but recall its opening:
“Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wilderness,
for I had wandered from the straight and true.”
How did he get there? He can’t remember, only that he has lost the right way. How to go on? The wild beasts block the path that leads onward, up the mountainside. It is only the advent of Vergil that saves him. Every time I read those lines, I ask: how often do I find myself in such a state? Lost and looking around, uncertain of how I’ve crossed from one way to another. Yesterday, everything was fine; today, I cannot seem to find a center in the shifting dark.
I climbed a hill, and then another, steeper and steeper as the trail winds beside a tangled field. I thought of Dante, climbing down the Malebolge, through the earth, and up the mountain on the other side. I thought about the vers libre that goes:
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
In order to arrive at what you do not know
You must go by a way which is the way of ignorance.
In order to possess what you do not possess
You must go by the way of dispossession.
In order to arrive at what you are not
You must go through the way in which you are not.
And what you do not know is the only thing you know
And what you own is what you do not own
And where you are is where you are not.
The borderline is thin between where you are and where you are not. The difference between the icy center of Hell and the path up Mount Purgatory is a single turn. One point, two poles above and below. Or like, a Mobius strip, you pass a point and everything flips. Wormholes, too, can be plotted with geometry—two curves pressed up against a rise and run, the speed of light, which everything approaches without crossing. Light is the marker in Inferno, too. Again and again, Dante mentions the stars, perhaps to remind the reader that though we are in Hell, a beacon blinks, a signal from the other side, a message shot through the wormhole. How thin a passage separates the paths, a single twist of physics. Walk through the center and everything upturns. You can do something well for the wrong reasons, you can do something badly for the right reasons, and you can do something well for the right reasons. Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso.
I climbed another hill, and a familiar ache fired in my legs as I scrambled over rocks and roots. Like Vergil, I can climb no higher than the wood at the top of the hill, unable to step foot in the cold blue empyrean of the sky. And yet it seems so close, brushed over the pale canopy and casting fire across the grass, and my shoulders, and the lichen, and my hands, and the red ash berries, and my hair. Close enough to catch.
This summer, I took the kids I nannied to a park and watched the second-born try to climb a slide. His brother had done it easily, scrambled up the outside of the curved tube, tracing the spiral to the top. The younger followed, and failed, sliding back to the first turn, where he kicked off his shoes and immediately began again. I sat nearby, tense, and uncertain if I should call him down. I could see it: the tumble, the scream, the snapped arm, the frantic phone call. If he fell, it would be my fault.
But I knew, too, how badly he wanted this victory, both to imitate his brother and to prove himself. He is one of those kids who meets the world head on, like Jacob grappling God; he will tear his birthright from it with his teeth. He is a secondborn, like Jacob, like I. “The great-souled man,” said Aristotle, “is the one who claims much.” Perhaps it is magnanimity—μεγαλοψυχία—that impelled this child to test himself. He hoped that he could do it; he claimed much. So despite the danger, I didn’t move. I let him climb. Bare feet slipped on hot plastic, toes found a seam in which to wedge, fingers dug for bolts on which to catch, small limbs strained upward. He turned a curve—and another—and another—and then, throwing a leg over the wall, he hauled himself off the slide and sat on top of the playground. Head thrown back, spine straight, he looked like one of those warriors whom Dante meets in the sphere of Mars. Did he feel close enough to catch the sky?
When he came back to earth, I told him: “That was awesome, climbing the slide.”
He shrugged. “Oh. It was nothing.” Dante was never so modest in his tale of his ascent.
In the woods, I followed the trail downtown, past a creek called Lethe, and through the clearing where the three main paths begin. Wood clattered underfoot as I crossed the bridge and re-entered the gravel parking lot. Another border line. It looked the same as when I entered, but perhaps, like the wormhole, like Dante, like the Mobius strip, the world remained the same, but I returned a mirrored image—versus, turned, like a line of poetry.
To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not,
You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.
A way between worlds, out of one and into the other, separated by a thread of intention. You can do something well for the wrong reasons, you can do something badly for the right reasons, and you can do something well for the right reasons.
If I climb high enough to catch the sky, who is watching if I fall?
Paid subscribers: keep reading for this week’s issue of the Midstream Newsletter, featuring quotes from the commonplace book, the “next on the stack” reads on spirituality, ecology, and topography, a few of my fall listening tracks, and more.