Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [11]
Beached on a low rise of sand, maybe thirty or forty feet from an outgoing tidal river, he is not pleased to see us, particularly the two dogs who are full of curiosity and longing for a game. The seal raises his head and barks and makes a noise like a hiss of warning; my worry for it is mixed with wondering what those teeth are capable of. Though it seems, distinctly, young—the look on its face suggests that we’d say, were it human, this child is lost. I am busy restraining the dogs; their excited noises, and mine, rouse the seal to action. I fear that it’s incapable of much movement but it awkwardly flips and starts to scoot down the rise toward the water, picking up speed. At the edge of the tidal stream it looks back to us, then slips into the water. It’s no less awkward in three inches of water than it is on sand, but as soon as it reaches a foot-deep stretch of sea it’s gloriously fluid, like a heron taking to air; what was compromised and lurching is suddenly capable of splendid and effortless motion.
A body that was wounded sits stranded, incapacitated. Gone into another element, that same being takes gorgeous, ready flight. I am filled, entirely, with the image of my wounded lover leaping from his body, blossoming into some welcoming, other realm. Is it that I am in that porous state of grief, a heated psychic condition in which everything becomes metaphor?
Or does the world consent, in some fashion, to offer me the particular image which imagination requires?
Metaphor is a way of knowing the world, and no less a one than other sorts of ways of gaining knowledge. Years ago, in Boston, I used to go to weekly meetings of the American Spiritualist Church—something like a Quaker meeting for psychics, or potential ones. After some meditation and singing, people would spontaneously give one another the messages they received. Many of these were incredibly detailed, elaborate pieces of perception about other people involving problems, opportunities, advice. Often the messages involved communication from the dead, who would be described to the receiver in exacting detail. I was never much good as a fledgling psychic. Where others saw clear and detailed pictures, I would perceive just a rush of images, seldom organized into anything coherent. But every once in a while I would see a sort of scene, usually a cryptic one, and feel that it related to a particular person in the group. If I told that person my images, I would usually discover that they made sense to her, even if I didn’t understand them.
Could metaphoric thinking, the sort of work that artists do to apprehend their reality, be the same function of the mind, applied in a somewhat different way? My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor which describes or encapsulates a particular moment; it is a way of getting at the truth. And a way of paying attention, of reading the world.
My seal said, The wounded one’s gone free, gone swimming into what is familiar to no mortal.
The second seal bears no visible wound, but its face is full of distress and exhaustion; the eyes seem enormous, entirely dark, defenseless, world-weary. All of which might be construed as anthropomorphizing, but how could one look into that gaze without empathy? This seal, near the same stretch of beach, was up much higher, a week or two later, where the last stubborn snow held on in the shadow of a dune. Had an especially high tide brought it there? Did it pull itself further from the water, in order to rest on shore? This time the presence of me and my attendant animals wasn’t enough to rouse the creature to return to