Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [14]
A week after he died, a book displayed in a shop window stopped me in my tracks on the sidewalk. It was a volume of reproductions of Michelangelo, and on the cover was a nude man, a figure from the Sistine ceiling, his eyes closed, his fine malleable flesh a kind of ash gray, the gray-white of porcelain clay. Looming behind the surface of his skin, especially in his face, were other colors; a blue like the hinge of a mussel shell, a coppery green. I felt as if I were seeing Wally there, the dead body held up for us to contemplate. The body dead is, in a way, our world’s great secret. We see always flesh in motion, animated, disguised beneath its clothing and uniforms, its signals and armatures, its armor of codes and purposes. When do we look at the plain nude fact of the lifeless figure? Pure purposelessness—and thus, in the absence of the spirit, strangely and completely present. Never having a chance to see it, to assimilate our horror of it and go on to actually look, how would we know that the lifeless body is beautiful?
And empty. As empty as these spaces where a seal’s eyes were, which contain now a little March sunlight, and wind off the surface of the marshy harbor, and the fluid music of shifting bird-cries counterpointing the regular exhalation of the foghorn. Which seems to be warning us, this clear day, for no earthly reason.
Wally’s body was the vehicle through which I knew him. All other knowledges proceed through the body, after it, as it were. His was a wonderful vehicle, a beloved one, but it was not him. This fact seems so strange to me, so heavily laden, a deep vein of the incomprehensible. I find myself repeating it, trying to formulate it: we are not our bodies. The body is not me. I am my body, but I extend beyond it; just as my attention laps out, as my identity can pour out into the day. I have learned more about this, living beside water; as if the very fluidity of the landscape gets inside us, and encourages our own ability to slip our fixed bounds and feel ourselves as extended, multiple, various. Walking the shore, a warm day in March, toward that huge headland of cloud hung above and ahead, one pure white cliff above the dunelands, I become, momentarily, cloud, running dog, the raddled sonics of gull and wind and breaking wave. The wave seems a separate thing, yet it’s a product, an effect, of that which is waving; gone into my elements, I am equally fluid.
The plainness of the poor abandoned body became more plain to me when I encountered Wally’s ashes. The week after his death, while I anticipated receiving them, I imagined the relationship I might have to them. It had been terrible, to let the body be taken; had I not been so certain that it was not him I couldn’t have done it at all, I could never have allowed it. But even though it was only his body (only! as if that were some minor thing) I couldn’t allow him to go naked, without something of home, so I sent with him a quilt I’d made for him, years ago, a red and white geometry splashed with starlike red leaves. I am not much of a quilt-maker; my clumsy stitches were done in honor of my quilting grandmother. First I’d thought it would be a November birthday gift, then Christmas—and then eventually the thing spread across my lap and legs kept me warm all winter and into a Vermont spring while I worked on it. The stitches were rough but they were mine, every one of them. His body left wrapped in it. I didn’t watch. I took the dogs down to the harbor, beneath a great wheeling starry void, the air so cold and sharp and still it seemed it might crack.
The next day I had to sign papers at the funeral home, and I began to look at different sorts of urns and vessels (everything made for this purpose seemed obscene, or banal, or at least achingly and inappropriately bland). And I began to think what it would be like to receive the ashes, the commingled evidence of body and of fabric.