Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [5]
This is how I see through the wider end of the telescope, when my perspective’s wide enough to see us as part of this vast interchange of being, not its center. On other days, the water of grief—deep, impenetrable, dark, cold—pours over everything and I am lightless, unseeing.
Whether or not I have faith in the future, whether there is a personal future for Wally or whether I am all there will be of us (and then those who might read or remember me later all there will be of me)—well, whatever I believe today, whatever my marsh and my study convince me of, the future does go on without us. The world doesn’t need us to continue, although it does need us to attend, to study, to name. We are elements of the world’s consciousness of itself, and thus we are necessary: replaceable and irreplaceable at once. Someone will take our places, but then again there will never be anyone like us, no one who will see quite this way; we are a sudden flowering of seeing, among the millions of such blossomings. Like the innumerable tiny stars on the branching stalk of the sea lavender; it takes how many, a thousand, to construct this violet sheen, this little shaking cloud of flowers?
“Eternity,” Blake said, “is in love with the productions of time.” Perhaps, in fact, eternity inheres in the things that time makes; perhaps that’s all of eternity we’ll know: the wave, the flower, the repeated endless glimmerings and departures of tides. My error, which perhaps really does express itself in that pain in the fifth vertebra, lies in thinking the future’s something we can believe or disbelieve, trust or doubt. It’s the element we breathe. Our position in time—ungraspable thing!—is the element in which we move. Our apocalypse is daily, but so is our persistence.
Part One
COASTAL STUDIES
Sweet Chariot: February 1994
I grew up in two religions.
The first one—comforting, strange, rigorous, in its way—was comprised of an astonishing and lovely set of images. It was a religion given to me primarily by my grandmother, whose East Tennessee faith had the kind of solidity and rock-depth upon which Jesus must have intended to found His church. She was Peter’s rock, unshakable, holding us all up—or at least holding me up; I was too small to have much of a sense of what she meant to my parents or to her husband, my cantankerous and difficult grandfather who outlived her by twenty years. My memories of her are very particular ones: a day out behind our house when she and I picked dandelion and poke greens, sunlight filtering through the thin flowered rayon dress she wore—this would have been 1957 or ’58—and she showed me the right leaves to pick for the greens she’d boil with fatback to serve with the chicken she plucked and set to roast in a black graniteware pan sparked with a whole firmament of stars. In that house, where she and my grandfather lived with us, their room was a secret source of meaning and depth. I didn’t like him much but I liked his things: a drawer full of beautiful useless old fountain pens with marbled cases, cigar boxes full of rubber bands, stuff saved for the day it would surely be needed. I loved her with all my heart, and everything that was hers: the green rocking chair, a fruitcake tin filled with swirled peppermint candies, the Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red, like holidays on a calendar. She would set me up on her lap and, rocking all the while, read Bible verses to me. I’m not sure if I remember especially her readings from Revelation or if it simply feels to me now, whenever I hear someone mention a phrase like “last days” or “apocalypse,” that the scent of her—lavender, peppermint, and clean old dresses—and the texture of her clothes, the Bible’s leatherette cover and onionskin pages, are forever commingled with those words; some essence of her imbues them. It was she who presented me with my first religion, which was the