THE STORY IS CURRENT

(Music is) instantaneous and unpredictable.

—J Cage, Themes & Variations

The story is current.

—HD Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers

The unwritten music of Boursier-Mougenot’s drifting chimes is haunting and resonant while I drive in to W Jefferson to the dump, for gas, to the ABC and grocery store through mountain farmland, dumbstruck by the grace of animals afield—by their casual explorations, by their music, by their delight in each others’ company and in eating, by their beautiful unmade patterns, by the way they huddle together for warmth on cold days in front of dirty white factories and by the way they draft off from each other in the wind.

K and I have lived adrift for most of the past year. We have been uneasy and lonely. We have been poor, despairing, disappointed by job opportunities and unstable living situations, hungry for contact. We struggle with insecurities and anxiety that stem from bruised egos and a lack of faith, tethered to hopes and expectations that hamper our ability to be present, despite the fact that we are surrounded by cows, horses, goats, and bison that all instinctually know how to be organized by the fields that they step into. Boursier-Mougenot’s “Variations” continues to serve as a startlingly reminder that we waste precious time worrying as music (always), finally, composes itself. In this sense, it refreshes our attention to something we already know—namely, that relinquishing authorial agency is a central, spiritual, prerequisite to our daily poetic practices. C Olson: “from the moment he ventures into FIELD COMPOSITION—put himself in the open—he can go by no track other than the one the poem under hand declares, for itself. Thus he has to behave, and be, instant by instant, aware of some several forces just now beginning to be examined” (“Projective Verse”). Boursier-Mougenot’s attention to water as a medium also awakens us to the fact that all music is essentially stray (to our ears) and improvisational—the result of all of the energy that is present in a given field: currents, collision, jets, drift, textures and patterns, etc.

We have been reading P Chodron’s When Things Fall Apart back and forth before bed at night, in attempt to be mindful of this dissonance we feel between what we know (instinct) and the nagging doubts that plague us. Chodron believes that suffering is born of our addiction to our “narrow perspective[s]”: “All anxiety, all dissatisfaction, all the reasons for hoping that our experience could be different are rooted in our fear of death.” Like Olson, she also locates relinquishment as the root of process: “we practice to liberate ourselves from a burden—the burden of a narrow perspective caused by craving, aggression, ignorance, and fear. We’re burdened by the people with whom we live, by ongoing daily situations, and most of all by our own personalities” (120). Thank god that the indeterminacy of writing and daily experience teach us to die (gracefully or ungracefully) by carrying us across the threshold into activity. Susan Howe says all of this with exhilarating clarity and force in My Emily Dickinson: “Liberated from agency, each lyric ‘I’ dies into action.” A mottled white bull and two black cows quietly eat in the shade of maples at the edge of Carter Miller Road and another black cow begins to cross the field towards them—chimes. What happens next is something else. Ever a man of action, HD Thoureau sees the constellation emerging: “Music is the sound of the circulation in nature’s veins” (Journals).

In Todd, NC, where we live, people still celebrate a rich culture that associates wakefulness with being immersed in the activity of a current; they swim, float with coolers of beer buoyed to their rafts, kayak, canoe, fly fish, and put their lawn chairs out into the river to cool off all summer—they are occasionally still baptized (“born again”) in the river (better still, the New River, the second oldest river in the world).

I feel a real connection with the pulse of river-life. As Thoreau asserts in A Week, roads make impositions on the landscape, they reflect our intentions (“narrow perspective”); they carry us to places of business. River-life is a humbling, collaborative process that honors “higher laws” because it requires us to move through the landscape with the current. When we see the blurred reflection of catalpas and arrowhead in current, we see them as they truly are: dynamic. When we see the blurred reflection of our own faces, we see ourselves as we truly are.

The hope (faith) of river-life is that we find we are organized by a much wider realization of presence. Thoreau: “These motions everywhere in nature must surely [be] the circulations of God” (Journals). In the expansiveness of summer, on the other side of a harrowing year, we are learning to be at home in the possibilities of new circumstances. Plenty is underway. A pitchy melody begins to surface through static, crickets, and rhododendron near the compost while a hornet sews violets through the deck rail. My father cuts the engine and we drift under the bridge a hundred times. We are immersed in music that’s like no music I’ve ever heard before. (J Cage in Themes & Variations: “Music = no music.)

Cage’s talk on “Silence”:

Health (“sanity”) is a process of cultivating attention to life and sounds that are already underway. Radio static, commercials, and stray music drift up through the moans of cows in the morning when I walk Franklin along the unfinished road. Listening to these sounds is a process of externalization that is a restoration: ear/ hear/ here. There’s nowhere else to be. Last weekend in the bakery, I watched a tired father trying to teach his antsy five-year-old daughter how to play chess: “See that piece that looks like a horse?” Daughter: “It’s a horse.”

Excerpt of Cage performing “4:33”:

Like Thoreau says in his Journals, “Nothing in nature makes noise.”

FAST IN THY PARADISE, WHERE NO FLOWER CAN WITHER

At an edge where winter is perforated by rhododendron and wild apple blossoms, my grandmother, Catherine Marion Hauke, is ashes. We went back to MI to visit my family for spring break at the beginning of March and ended up spending most of our vacation at my grandmother’s bedside, saying goodbye. We were with her in the hospital late Thursday night and she died in the middle of a snowstorm early Friday morning while my Aunt Lorel was sitting with her. I touched her hair to say that I loved her before we left on Thursday and again Friday morning before the coroner came while my grandfather sat in shock, holding her hand under the blanket.

My grandmother was eighty-nine years old. She spent most of her last week in the hospital. The obituary that my Aunt Wendy wrote for her said that she died surrounded by friends and family. (She did.) It said that she loved to play cards. (She did.) She also had dementia and a bad knee. She picked out her own urn at Pier One Imports for twenty dollars (“a deal”) and she saw her dead brothers waiting for her outside the window of her room. When my father was looking through files for my grandmother’s birth certificate, he found that she had three different social security cards. We also realized that my grandmother “officially” reversed her first and middle names when she married my grandfather: Marion Catherine became Catherine Marion.

What I want to say is that we live at edges. And, as WC Williams asserts in Spring and All, “Love waits at the edge of the petal.” Edges are sources of tremendous transformative potential. Edges are where we give way to Carlyle and Emerson’s “Not Me.” Writers and readers meet at edges where writing gives way to reading. We come to rest in the activity of the Beloved at edges. R Blaser says this better than anyone else I know when he says, “Companions are/ horizons” (The Holy Forest). My great uncles, who I remember shooting skeets at a farm in Stockbridge, MI, twenty years ago are at the window in a snowstorm. (Memory feels like an old television sliding between channels…)

A little more than a month later, it’s flowers outside. I’m reading C Darwin with students this week because I want to end our poetry class by talking about poems as fossils. Darwin’s writings unsettle the possibility of closure because they posit that fossils provide a record of nature underway

The crust of the earth with its embedded remains must not be looked at as a well-filled museum by, but as a poor collection made at hazard and at rare intervals. The accumulation of each great fossiliferous formation will be recognized as having depended on an unusual concurrence of favourable circumstances, and the blank intervals between successive stages as having been of vast duration. (The Origin of the Species)

Fossils show us that our circumstances are unstable and evolving. They evidence a deconstruction that collapses oppositions (the distance between here and there) by calling to what HD Thoreau refers to as our “savage names” in “Walking.” Darwin: “Would any two workmen ever hit on so beautiful, so simple and yet so artificial a contrivance? It cannot be thought so—the one hand has surely worked throughout the universe” (The Voyage of The Beagle). Fossils make way for a vision of nature that is harrowing and incomprehensibly beautiful.

Loss shatters us and our language fails because, like Donald Revell says in Invisible Green, “The outside is unprecedented, and poetry has no word for it.” Our fossils are “a poor collection” and this is a promise because the edges that lay us to waste are, finally, restorations that give witness to the next place. (Blaser elsewhere in The Holy Forest: “God moves to the end of our sentences.”) The morning my grandmother died, my mother, a devout Baptist, cried and tried to reassure everyone, saying, “She’s not here anymore.” Even though years of conversation lead me to imagine that my mother and I register her statement in very different ways, it’s actually true. She’s gone. (It doesn’t escape me that I’m writing this at Easter. I know the tomb is empty.) Standing in my grandmother’s hospital room, I also felt how important it was to acknowledge her body (form) as a fossil before it went to the crematorium. I love the life that had been there. And, even though, I would have been glad for more time together, I’m also glad to let her go because I know that being is dispersal—a process of becoming. Elegy and ecstasy destabilize each other. Nature overtakes us and, doing so, it restores us to primary process. GM Hopkins: “The world is filled with the grandeur of God/ it will flame out” [my emphasis] (“God’s Grandeur”).

We heat our house with a woodstove and burned drafts of old poems this winter to stay warm. We used them to start the fire and keep it going. Yesterday, I scattered the ashes from our woodstove in the garden where K is planting kale, chard, lettuce(s), onions, and bok choy. Do you know JC Moore’s hymn “Never Grow Old”? We used to sing it in church when I was a kid and now I’ve got a gorgeous Johnny Cash recording of it: Never grow old, never grow old,/In a land where we’ll never grow old. When I open my eyes, our house is surrounded by fog. I open my eyes again and it’s green leaves; spring already feels like summer.

HOUSE-WARMING

I now first began to inhabit my house, I may say, when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.

—HD Thoreau

The house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

—G Bachelard

He who walks with his house on his head is heaven.

—C Olson

For Kirsten and Emilie

Settling into our new house up on the ridge in Todd, NC this week, unpacking boxes, walking the dog over to see deer tracks in the Daniel Boone cemetery, carrying in firewood, learning new students’ names, and driving down slippery mountain roads in the snow, I am thinking about HD Thoreau’s house warming at Walden. The buzz of living close to the bone in his cabin allows Thoreau to dream of a house “larger and more populous” than most of the houses he sees in Concord. Dedicated to eternity, Thoreau’s dream house stands in “a golden age, of enduring materials.” It is expansive and open to others; it allows more of the world into it, and it goes to the world.

Thoreau’s initial descriptions also stress practicality and simplicity in a way that calls to the writing of Walden. His house is “without gingerbread work,” it “consists of only one room, a vast, rude, substantial, primitive hall, without ceiling plastering, with bare rafters and purlins supporting a sort of lower heaven over one’s head, —useful to keep off rain and snow; where the king and queen post stand out to receive your homage, when you have done reverence to the prostrate Saturn of an older dynasty on stepping over the sill; a cavernous house, wherein you must reach up a torch upon a pole to see the roof.” In contact with the elements, this house honors the old gods by restoring its inhabitants to the activity of nature. Even the seeming ambiguity of Thoreau’s use of the word some is a clarity as it blurs the distinction between the human-world and the world at large: “Some may live in the fire-place, some in the recess of a window, and some on settles, some at one end of the hall, some at another, and some aloft on rafters with the spiders, if they choose.”

Honoring the old gods, Thoreau commits himself to ancient hospitality traditions. One of his primary desires is that his house is capable of providing rest to “the weary traveler” during storms. It shelters the way poems shelter; it provides a brief respite to travel just as Walden provides rest because it leaves a fossil of Thoreau’s time at Walden Pond, marking the experience of a life that continues. (Remember that Thoreau’s introduction to Walden in “Economy” states in explicit terms that he is not there anymore: “I lived there two years and two months. At present I am a sojourner in civilized life again.”) The word shelter also doubles, becoming an exposure as the house shelters by revealing the frayed edge where domesticity gives way to the experience of wilderness. Asserting that the only way into the house is to “[open] the outside door,” Thoreau identifies his home with an ecstatic realization of outside space. Doing so, he recognizes wildness in the doorway that ends “the ceremony” of routine by awakening inhabitants from the dull wood into an expansive precision where “everything hangs upon its peg” according to its own nature.

In heaven, the work is eternity (which is no work). The bifurcation between now and then melts into a measureless present where Thoreau dedicates life to the cultivation of attention. His house answers the present without giving thought to what exists outside the moment (after). It “[contains] all the essentials of a house, and nothing for house-keeping.” (It is a process like “Old Marlborough Road,” not a product: “Nobody repairs it,/ For nobody wears it;/ It is a living way.”)

As shelter promises rest and makes way for exposure, good housekeeping gives itself away. Walden, Thoreau’s dream house, doesn’t hide anything. (“You can see all the treasures of the house at one view.”) All of the inhabitants are presented to guests upon arrival. Everything in the field is luminous, including traces of the circumstances in which Walden was composed, and Thoreau counts himself one among the other objects. His home is generous as a poem can be: “[its] inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest, and you cannot go in at the front door and out at the back without seeing some of its inhabitants; where to be a guest is to be presented with the freedom of the house, and not to be carefully excluded from seven eighths of it, shut up in a particular cell, and told to make yourself at home there, —in solitary confinement.” Opening his door to guests and readers alike, Thoreau welcomes them into the most vital parts of the house. He relinquishes privilege to divorce authorship from authority, warning that the dangerous implications of agency “poison” the possibility of true companionship: “Nowadays the host does not admit you to his hearth, but has got the mason to build one for yourself somewhere in his alley, and hospitality is the art of keeping you at the greatest distance. There is as much secrecy about the cooking as if he had a design to poison you.” Thoreau knows that the buoyancy and warmth of guests charges the creative process of homemaking (“worlding”) anew. He also knows that readers, in turn, write the afterlife of Walden.

When Thoreau closes his discussion of his dream house in “House-warming,” he puns, linking parlor to parlaver in order to critique empty or profane talk. He dismisses metaphors, techniques, and “artistry” that unnecessarily complicate our houses (“slides and dumb-waiters”) by keeping guests and readers at a distance from the reality of the places where we eat and work: “It would seem as if the very language of our parlors would lose all its nerve and degenerate into parlaver wholly, our lives pass at such remoteness from its symbols, and its metaphors and tropes are necessarily so far fetched, through slides and dumb-waiters, as it were; in other words, the parlor is so far from the kitchen and workshop. The dinner even is only the parable of a dinner, commonly.” Focusing on craft, etc., we orient ourselves to representations rather than activity. We get the “parable of dinner,” and I want the real thing. I’m hungry.

What’s for lunch? Atlas Sound while wind carves drifts down the ridge from our house where snow glitters in the sun like tinsel. Finches fall down from branches like leaves, and a little woodpecker hammers a new tree at the window.

I want that for a sandwich.

DEPARTURES ARE ARRIVALS

In my World Literature class this semester we have been talking about wandering as transformational experience in a way that corresponds with HD Thoreau’s discussion of ecstatic contact in “Walking.” For Thoreau, walking combines aimlessness with a sense of holy purpose; it is a means of stepping out of agency, security, and the trappings of privilege in order to be organized by “Higher Laws.” There is no return for Thoreau’s walker (“Knight Errant”) because the activity of walking is change. Thus, he encourages us to walk using the same language that Jesus uses to call to his disciples in The Gospels: “We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return,—prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again,—if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man, then you are ready for a walk.”

Getting ready to leave Tuscaloosa for North Carolina later this week, I keep returning to Rimbaud’s poem “Departures” from Illuminations. I have known the Louise Varese translation by heart for years

Seen enough. The vision was met with in every

air.

Had enough. Sounds of cities, in the evening and

in the sun and always.

Known enough. Life’s halts.—O Sounds and Vi-

sions!

Departure in new affection and new noise. (New Directions 1946)

*There is a note in the margin that I wrote ten or more years ago in a script that I now barely recognize as my own: “Departures are arrivals.”

Thankfully, my teacher Donald Revell has recently translated “Departures” anew

Seen enough. The vision strives against itself in all atmospheres.

Had enough. Hubbub of cities, at evening, and in the sunshine,

and always.

Known enough. The impediments of life. —O Hubbubs and Visions!

Departure into new affections and noise! (Omnidawn 2009)

I’ll take two.

Both translations evidence the way departures and arrivals press against each other to celebrate Rimbaud’s realization that leaving makes way for wakefulness as it allows us to see our surroundings with fresh eyes—we arrive “into new affection and noise.” (Ezra Pound in a guerilla cage at Pisa: “Nothing counts save the quality of the affection.”) Revell’s translation also cuts in two directions because it addresses tensions of departures related to perspective by emphasizing that “the vision strives against itself” to be born.

Virgil’s Eclogues explore this tension as a matter of attachment, marking the elegiac nature of departures as his shepherds often find themselves displaced. Meliboeus: “But we have to leave our homes and go far way” (“Eclogue 1”). Doing so, Virgil calls to life as a constant birthing forward that couples joyfulness with sorrow:

I was trying to drive my goats along the path

And one of them I could hardly get to follow;

Just now, among the hazels, she went into labor

And then, right there on the hard flinty ground,

Gave birth to twins who would have been our hope,

Back on our farm. (Meliboeus, “Eclogue 1”)

Change is especially terrifying when we are fixated on what must be left behind—our friends, our family, our routines and our sense of safety. Meliboeus is emotionally shattered to leave his home and fields because he loves them. Lycidas is, likewise, heartbroken that he will forget all of his songs because he knows that our new lives forget the old ones—they are the beginning of a new circumstance. “Having no particular home,” they must, necessarily, learn to be “equally at home everywhere” like Thoreau’s walker.

Leaving, Virgil’s shepherds find themselves singing as a means of processing their loss and moving forward “into new affections and noise.” Because they walk while they sing, their songs score distance and a dispersal of agency; the poverty of the “I” extends outward towards the “you” the way an echo spreads out as it carries through the forest. Lycidas: “Let’s keep on going, but singing as we go./ Singing makes the journey easier./ I’ll carry the basket for awhile, so you can sing” (“Eclogue IX”). Making way for company, The Eclogues also reveal change to be harrowing and solitary as Lycidas’ inability to recognize a song he has heard speaks to the insurmountable distance across which they attempt to translate. Lycidas: “What was that song I heard you singing, alone?” (“Eclogue IX”). Ecstasy is transit and ecstatic experience is always, finally, absolutely singular as it finds us alone with God. (W Whitman: “I am afoot with my vision.”)

Reading Virgil’s Eclogues in the beginning of the Christmas season, I am overwhelmed by the promise that the angel of the Lord first delivers the gospel of Christ’s birth to shepherds. While I look around our apartment, preparing to begin to pack up what’s left of our stuff, it’s hard not to feel like we failed here. We’ve made some new friends, for sure, and I am forever grateful. My partner wrote a beautiful book. This was also a hard place to live, far away from loved ones and primary company. Like everybody else, I worked my ass off working full-time for part-time pay sans benefits, and it was hard to buy groceries the last couple of weeks between paychecks. I am not leaving for a job. I have been trying hard to get one, but I can’t seem to pull it off—most of our friends can’t get jobs. The economy is bad and the current academic “system” is a fucking nightmare. It seems like there’s no room for us at the inn.

Faced with what have felt like soul-crushing circumstances this fall, I am desperately clinging to Thoreau’s belief that the poverty of wandering is advantageous because it strips away what is unnecessary. (I woke up thinking about the Gospel of Luke this morning.) I know it’s true. God comes the way of the lowest. I have seen plenty of evidence. I am also scared as Hell. (“The impediments of life.”). Paradise Lost admonishes us that home moves to begin in Hell or otherwise. We are going. We’re gone. (Milton’s Satan: “Space may create new worlds.”) Looking backwards to some perceived sense of safety is ruin; it’s a problem of perspective. (Satan: “I myself am Hell.”) Getting caught up “trying” to agent our way out of the circumstances is ruin—feeling tired, worried, angry, etc. Even the obligation of hope is exhausting.

Like Thoreau’s “Walking,” Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems calls to the advantageousness of poverty as Maximus advises that, in America, the poet should “take the way of/ the lowest” because “the light does go one way towards the post office,/ and quite another way down to Main Street.”

Presence is the baseline and we are leveled to it. Thoreau: “We need to witness our own limits transgressed.”

W Whitman: “Why should I wish to see God better than this day?”

WC Williams’ “Burning the Christmas Greens” also asserts that “the vision strives against itself” by locating the Christmas tree (a symbol of our renewal) as a part of a much longer Lucretian process as Williams watches its ashes crackle in the fire: “All recognition lost, burnt clean.”

My disappointment, shame, anger, and, finally (hopefully), my grace.

WCW: “Ash and flame and we, in/ that instant, lost,// breathless to be witnesses,/ as if we stood/ ourselves refreshed among/ the shining fauna of that fire.”

We leave here, and we arrive here. Robert Creeley: “Here now—/ begin!” (Pieces).

There is no room for privilege or accumulation.

I am sitting at an old card table that my dad found by the side of the road, eating soup with my girl in a strange place that never felt like home (not for a second); our dog is asleep on the carpet next to us.

“Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy.”