Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [30]
I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now.
And yet.
And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily, hourly presence.
My experience of being with Wally, in the hour of his leaping out of the world, brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone.
And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? You can adopt any belief system you want about ultimate things, the nature of our sojourn here and afterward, but doesn’t doubt always stand at the ready, prepared to undo the articles of faith? Perhaps so that meaning cannot be given to us, defined for us—at least not in any real way.
We need our doubt so as not to settle for easy answers. (Need, I say, as if we had the option to get rid of it!) Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves; if earthly existence does have purpose, I would be willing to bet that is part of it. But only part. Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by the forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. The one thing we can say with great certainty about human perception is that it is partial. And perhaps that is why we are, of necessity, creatures of doubt.
Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.
Doubt, the magician, pulls the white tablecloth out from underneath the china, disrupting everything. But once the cloth is pulled away, what has been built atop is still there. I can have the rug pulled out from under me at any time and am still willing to go back to believing.
Just as I will, inevitably, go back to doubt.
Today, when we come down from the undulant dunes to the shore, there’s further evidence to consider. The beach is an arena of mortality, corpses washing in and out, the consequences of predation or pollution or exposure—or just the plain propensity of life to end—everywhere visible.
The dogs relax on the shore, sure of where we’re headed. One likes to stay within a few dozen feet of me, sniffing every fragment of otherness the beach has to offer; the other loves to range, and these wide horizontals give him the double pleasure of being able to run far into the distances and keep an eye on me at the same time. (In this way he’s an emblem of my spirit: he wants to cleave and he wants to fly.) During this time we have little contact with each other, overtly; we are three students of reality involved in our work, each with his own approach to the problems of epistemology.
Neither dog has much interest in what catches me first. A—flotilla? little armada?—of jellyfish have met their destiny along the line of the estuary where bay and marsh meet. They are scattered far and wide, maybe a couple of dozen of them, and they range in diameter from the size of a doll’s saucer to that of a dinner plate. The smallest are simply disks of transparent jelly, gelatinous plasma in which nothing is differentiated. In the ones which are a little larger, something begins to develop in the center, a rayed