Perfect as a pebble.
Lying flat on my back on the grass under the sun near Battery Park and all becomes clear. My legs are tucked up crossed like a horizontal meditative pose. There’s this thing I’ll call my distance. A physical-mental thing, if it had a shape I think it would be a triangle. It means that I hold back from a straight-forward all-engrossing two way relationship. Introduce a third point. Another relationship, just to complicate matters. Or just “other things”. Doors that are not yet open but might be interesting. It’s a strange thing, keeps me in a kind of limbo land. It keeps me free and inspired and entertained, which are all good. But it also stops me from plunging into the heart of things. A triangle.
Maybe that’s why Le Clézio’s talk resonated with me so much. He had an apparent total engagement with the world and with the moment, as well as calm. I’m not bad at the engagement, but off it goes in all directions at once, keeping the calm out. Something to work on, as I’ve told myself many a time before. I used the word “apparent” for Le Clézio purposefully. Who knows, maybe he has his demons too, and is just good at tempering them when he talks in public.
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I hadn’t seen a horseshoe crab ever before, then suddenly encountered hundreds. P and I went for a swim at the run. The run is a little flow of water along the edge of a Chesapeake tributary, protected by a sandy barrier. P used to swim there as a girl, and I could sense her delighted thrill of memory as we took off our shorts and t-shirts, left them on old plastic chairs dotted with caked bird poo and, in our bathing suits and canvas shoes, stepped over the syncopated rocks and waded into the cold river. We swam across with happy though slightly timid breaststrokes, underlined with that river-swimming wonder about what might be swimming alongside us. Then as we climbed out on the other side I saw two dark flat shapes lumbering along the shoreline. Then two more. Horseshoe crabs. Their prehistoric tanks of shells hid the living, breathing, mating bodies underneath – bodies locked together as their invisible legs carried them along in a straight line (why the need to move?). Then two more, two more, they were everywhere, the whole shore was covered with crabs in the act of creating more crabs. I felt, stepping quietly around them, like I was trespassing on their ancient rhythms.
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