Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [136]
Today is the first of March; I’ve come here for a month to work in a grand old villa hundreds of steep cobbled steps up the hill from the village of Bellagio. My room is a buttery Naples yellow, thick walls pierced by two windows and french doors opening on to a balcony. My first day, my first moment alone in the room, I opened the doors and stepped out onto the stone shelf suspended above the steep switchback paths of rosemary and lavender, above the green-black cypresses flinging themselves vertically toward heaven, above the jigsawed rose-tiled roofs of the village, above the softly luminous hazed expanse of the lake and its distant mountains, behind their smoky blue veils—a landscape like the background in a Leonardo.
How could one not, in that moment, be completely absorbed in the present? What possesses us like the present does, when we give ourselves to it completely?
And then I realized, on that steep little ledge with its lace of iron railing, that this time I didn’t imagine myself falling, had no desire, now, to jump. There was too much in the world to see, too much I wanted to pour myself into, to encounter and absorb, too much I wanted to do.
The present begins to hold a possibility, in its thin, luminous edge. It suggests and supports a future.
I want to know how the story of my life will turn out.
Dogs
Dogs, in a way, are the present. Animals are infinitely attentive to now, wholly present with what’s in front of them. Entirely themselves, without compromise or dissembling. Pure directness of being, the soul right in the eyes, brimming to the edges.
Arden and Beau: heart’s companions, good boys, eager, steady, always exactly where they are.
And what is right in the present, at this moment’s fresh edge, also seems to lead right into the next moment. Last month, with Michael at the animal shelter, I sat in a pen while a dozen puppies climbed over and around us, all eagerness to be just where they were, these dozen new beings come into the world of time, to follow each moment into the next, along the arc that passing through time makes. In those almost identical faces, eyes becoming equal to the light, I couldn’t miss it: desire for the next moment, and the next, one at a time, each entirely attended to.
Heaven
Ongoingness, vanishing: the world’s twin poles.
Each thing disappears; everything goes on.
The parts pour into nowhere, the whole continues.
And to be nowhere is to be in heaven, isn’t it, in the boundless, loose from the limits of time and space?
Isn’t the whole world heaven’s coast?
Coherence
In his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov describes an instance of coherence, the way a book of matches appears as a pivotal image a number of times, in very different contexts, in the writer’s life. Delighted, he finds the patterning and coherence of art showing itself in experience, in memory. He writes, “The following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, I think, the true purpose of autobiography.”
So we become our stories.
Driving to school, the autumn after Wally’s death, I was thinking of something Rena had told me; Wally’s therapist had become my friend, the bond between us beginning in our common affection for him, but opening swiftly into affection for each other. In a meditation, she’d seen Wally coming to her on a great white winged horse, a Pegasus.
So I remembered the blue tattoo of Paolo the nurse, that winged horse that Wally had loved imprinted on a biceps he’d admired.
And then I remembered something I’d completely forgotten, something Rena didn’t know. Years ago, when Wally and I first met, we had all kinds of endearments for each other, silly little names we liked to play