Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [28]
And we are always given something, it seems, since these walks provide exactly the balance which the dogs (and I) seem to prefer—enough of the familiar, so we don’t have to think about it too much, and enough of novelty, so that something to occupy our attention is always appearing, something we haven’t thought enough about yet. Sometimes, of course, what satisfies the dogs’ needs is not what engages my attention, but a good deal of the time we seem to agree on what is interesting. Motion, strangeness, novelty of scent, the presence of an unfamiliar creature, open space in which to range freely—to these both our species respond. Beauty, of course, does not appear on the dog’s register of values, as far as I know, though a number of other qualities we could consider abstract, such as affection, loyalty, tenacity, curiosity, cunning, exasperation, patience, and longing certainly do. Dogs have a moral sense, but I am not sure they have an aesthetic one.
Loveliness, even in these months of living in sorrow, compels me. Once Wally and I met an elderly man who had lost his wife to Alzheimer’s; he was not a widower, yet, but the woman that he’d loved was, in essence, gone. She’d studied piano, he told us, with a pupil of—Paderewski, was it?—and taught generations of children herself. She lived now in the town nursing home, adjacent to the cemetery. Her needs were such that he could not care for her. Her sense of memory and meaning, and then of language, had dissolved into a hopelessly confused, continuous present, a nightmare fog of not-knowing. He stayed on, in their ancient house, giving tours, which was how we met him. For a couple of dollars, he’d bring you into his low-slung, chimney-anchored house, a perfect full Cape, circa 1745, its twelve-over-twelve windows opening onto exquisitely plain little rooms. Because he’d grown tired, over the years, of repeating the tour, he’d play a tape he’d made explaining the history of the house. But he’d not lost his love for narration, either, so he’d sit poised beside the reel-to-reel and, after a bit of recorded rap, he’d shut off the machine and tell us about himself, and his wife, and their forty years together inhabiting this comfortable museum. We sat side by side on the sofa, enthralled. The history of the house had become, it seemed, inextricable from his history. When it was time to go, the tape completed, our curiosity about every room satisfied, I complimented him on the beauty of the house, what a rich and evocative surrounding he’d found and made for himself.
“Yes,” he said, “but as the poet said—Rossetti, it was—you know Rossetti?”
“Dante Gabriel?”
He nodded. “He said, ‘Beauty without the beloved is like a sword through the heart.’” I felt then as if he saw into our story, its coming unraveling.
But his experience hasn’t been mine, exactly. There is something about the glories of the world which makes me feel, in some way I’m hard-pressed to articulate, closer to Wally. The heart’s pierced, maybe, but that penetration’s a connection to what is larger than us, more ongoing. Perhaps, in encountering beauty alone, with my two unimpressed companions, I reconnect to what Wally and I used to experience together, which contains something of us still.
So yesterday, when I watched a finback whale feeding off Race Point where the sea-bottom declines steeply from the beach, so that the whales can come near enough to shore for one not only to see them, but sometimes to hear the soft wet puhhh of their exhalations, I was happy not only for myself but somehow also happy for Wally. Because he is in a place without limit now, of a piece with animal energies, capable of swimming to the bottom of the sea and hurtling himself toward air and sunlight again? Do the dead dissolve their individuality back into the world? That does not sound to me like such a bad ending to come to, whether we are conscious of the return of our energies or no. But perhaps it is even better than that, the afterlife; imagine that purest portion of self, the