Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [4]
The grief which sweeps over me is the grief of anticipation. It is a grief in expectation of grief, and it carries with it a certain degree of guilt, since one feels that what one really should be doing is enjoying the moment, being together now while it is possible to do so, rather than giving in to some gloomy sense of incipient loss. And while most of the time I can maintain that sensibility—the preciousness of the present, the importance of not projecting too far ahead, not trying to feel my way blindly toward the future—I can’t sustain it all the time. The future’s an absence, a dark space up ahead like the socket of a pulled tooth. I can’t quite stay away from it; hard as I may try. The space opened up in the future insists on being filled with something: attention, tears, imagination, longing.
The more one tries to live in the present, it seems, the more one learns the inseparability of time, the artifice of our construction of the trinity of experience; yesterday, today, tomorrow meld into one another, blur in and out. We move between them at the speed of memory or of anticipation. Trying to remain in the moment is like living in three dimensions, in sheerly physical space; the mind doesn’t seem to be whole unless it also occupies the dimension of time, which grants to things their depth and complexity, the inherent dignity and drama of their histories, the tragedy of their possibilities. What then can it mean to “be here now”? That discipline of paying attention to things-as-they-are in the present seems simply to reveal the way the nature of each thing is anchored to time’s passage, cannot exist outside of time.
Take, for instance, the salt marsh where I walk near Wood End Light, out beyond Herring Cove Beach. That marsh is perhaps my favorite place in the world; it feels inexhaustible to me, in all the contradictions which it yokes so gracefully within its own being. It is both austere and lush, wet and dry, constant and ceaselessly changing, secretive and open. I have never, in years of walks, grown weary of looking at it, perhaps because there is no single thing which constitutes “it”; the marsh is a whole shifting confluence of aspects. At low tide it’s entirely dry, a Sahara of patterned sand and the tough green knots of sea lavender, beach grass around the edges of the beds of the tidal rivers gleaming as it bends and catches light along the straps of its leaves. As the tide mounts, twice a day, this desert disappears beneath the flood. It is a continuous apocalypse; Sahara becomes sea becomes sand again, in a theater of furious mutability.
Its lesson—or at least the lesson I draw from it today, since this teacher’s so vast and has so many possibilities hidden in its repertoire—is that what one can see is the present, the dimension of landscape which is in front of us now. But now is shaped by the past, backed by it, as it were, the way the glass of a mirror is backed by silver; it’s what lies behind the present that gives it color and sheen. And now is always giving way, always becoming. It is this progress into the future which gives things the dynamic dimension of forwardness they could not have were they composed solely of a past and a present. If past and present are the glass and its silver backing, then future is what is coming-to-be in the mirror, the image that presents itself, intrudes into the frame. I mix my metaphors with abandon, because I am talking near the edge of the unsayable, at the difficult intersection of what I can feel but barely say.
Wally is in my body; my body is in this text; this text is light on my computer screen, electronic impulse, soon to be print, soon to be in the reader’s body, yours—remembered or forgotten, picked up or set aside, it nonetheless acquires a strange kind of physical permanence, a persistence. My friend Billy, hearing about what I’m writing, says, “long-term survivors, you’ve got to address long-term survivors.” It’s a message of hope he wants; hope is perhaps simply a stance