These are times when a book gives you a small, perfect gift, and that's how I felt this morning with my feet kicked up on the coffee table. It's a beautiful essay. If I could I would reprint it here for you in its entirety, but it runs for ten pages in small print, and I haven't got the time or the reprint rights. As I write this I have my book propped open with my left elbow, and I'm trying to find a quote that captures the essence of this in a jar, because this morning it spoke to me so clearly, held me riveted while my tea grew cold. It said things I have tried to say, but it's better than anything I ever managed.
Last night I finished a new draft of my thesis. This draft has been a long time coming, and finishing it was an immense relief. It's a draft, which means it will be coming back around eventually--if there is anything in my life that is not iterative right now I don't know what it is--but I've completed this leg of the journey and reached my temporary resting place. And it feels light and hopeful, because not only have I made it here, I think the rest of the way will be easier.
This journey has been hard on me; I may as well admit it. Last summer in Manitoba I took an ill-advised mountain bike journey and ended up on a thin path made impassable by dozens of fallen trees. Optimistic, I pressed on rather than turning back, hauling my bike through the deadfall. I was wearing sandals; later in the day, I found a slug of blood where a deep gouge had been cut into my foot. And my lack of preparation didn't end there: I only had one bottle of water.
There was a boil water order on nearly all the water in Riding Mountain at that time, which means even the water brought up by pumps wasn't considered safe to drink without a few minutes at a rolling boil. I could not imagine the water in the lakes was safe to drink.
But I have never been as dehydrated as I was that day. I started to think about drinking the water that had collected in elk footprints along the trail; I thought I could feel the function draining out of me. So of course, when I reached a lake, waded in as deep as I could get, and I guzzled the water I found there like it was my last shot at redemption.
And then I returned to my bike, which I had left lying on the trail while I sojourned down to the water. And I found it trapped under a tree trunk, which was not how I left it. Once I extracted it, it was apparent that the bike was mostly unscathed, save one dent and the fact that the fork had been wrenched out of place, making the front wheel parallel to the handlebars. I had 8 kilometers back to campsite, a busted bike, a bottle of pond water, and really no alternative: I kept walking, wheeling my bike along beside me where I could and carrying it where I couldn't (looking at the Riding Mountain website, now, there's a quote from the warden about the trail I was on: "Tilson is hell for wheels." In my defense, the map I was working with was in French.). And I was fine. I was back at camp by six, I would later repair my bike in Dauphin, that lake water did me no noticeable harm. But I've thought of that day in the year since, when I wept and fought through the first weeks of December, when I'm trying to write my thesis and I find it difficult to muster the energy. All I need to do, I tell myself, is keep going, and yet I stop and dither.
Sometimes it seems like comparing my thesis to that day in Manitoba doesn't really hold. We can all find hidden reserves of strength when we feel backed into a corner, and when I am writing my thesis I am at least comfortable, with water from a tap and heat from a furnace. And yet--and yet. What I'm doing is reminding myself that those reserves are present within me, deep and calm and waiting. Like a lake, I suppose. I am reminding myself that I can keep going, because I have before.
Although I maintain that Kingsolver's fine, acrobatic essay deserves to be read in whole, I think I've found the quote I'll leave you with. It takes a little time to get through, as some worthy things do:
"For each of us--furred, feathered, or skinned alive--the whole earth balances on the single precarious point of our own survival. In the best of times, I hold in mind the need to care for things beyond the self: poetry, humanity, grace. In times when it seems difficult merely to survive and be happy about it, the condition of my thought tastes as simple as this: let me be a good animal today. I've spent months at a stretch, even years, with that taste in my mouth, and I have found that it serves....
"In my own worst seasons I've come back from the colorless world of despair by forcing myself to look hard, for a long time, at a single glorious thing: a flame of red geranium outside my bedroom window. And then another: my daughter in a yellow dress. And another: the perfect outline of the full, dark sphere behind the crescent moon. Until I learned to be in love with my life again. Like a stroke victim restraining new parts of the brain to grasp lost skills, I have taught myself joy, over and over again.
"It's not such a wide gulf to cross, then, from survival to poetry. We hold fast to the old passions of endurance that buckle and creak beneath us, dovetailed, tight as a good wooden boat to carry us onward. And onward full tilt we go, pitched and wrecked and absurdly resolute, driven in spite of everything to make good on a new shore. To be hopeful, to embrace one possibility after another--that is surely the basic instinct. Baser even than hate, the thing with teeth, which can be stilled with a tone of voice or stunned by beauty. If the whole world of the living has to turn on the single point of remaining alive, that pointed endurance is the poetry of hope. The thing with feathers.
"What a stroke of luck. What a singular brute feat of outrageous fortune: to be born to citizenship in the Animal Kingdom. We love and we lose, go back to the start and do it right over again. For every heavy forebrain solemnly cataloging the facts of a harsh landscape, there's a rush of intuition behind it crying out: High tide! Time to move out into the glorious debris. Time to take this life for what it is."
3 comments:
I remember you're thing about remembering page numbers. You think it's stupid now but I started doing that to try and copy you; these days I just can't keep track of bookmarks, they disappear on me. I spend a lot of time hunting for my place. I also remember you used to drink out of the brooks and streams when we went walking around here. I've since learned that Ted Woodier (a figure of local infamy) burns old TVs and computers that he picks up from the dump upstream in that same brook that runs past my house. Probably best not to drink the water around here. Lots of people have been dumping a lot of stuff for a long time.
I'm working the second draft of my novel, even though I still haven't actually written an ending for it. I decided to try a rewrite (more of a tweak) to see if I could do whatever I need to do to get my head right so the ending will work on paper the way it does in my mind. I'm afraid I'm not getting on very fast. I'm only on page 32 or so out of 200. I stopped for a few minutes to look up types of stone that might have been used for a particularly old stone statue and ended up surfing the net and wasting all my time trying to figure out how to print a picture of a hunky punk from a church in Somerset England. The photo's copyrighted of course. >_<
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jacquiross/3313678117/in/photostream/
Hunky punks have nothing to do with anything I'm working on but that little guy is adorable. I feel protected from evil spirits just looking at that picture.
See, my problem with the no-bookmark thing is that, even when I was championing it, I was not always that great at remembering the page numbers. I also think it works better if you're going to return to the book in a few hours (which was pretty much always the case with me in elementary school) rather than a few days. But I completely agree with my old thesis that bookmarks are a pain and easily lost. I mostly use scraps of paper, usually drawn from my endless supply of grocery store receipts.
I've always liked drinking from streams (honestly, I wonder if I built up some sort of tolerance drinking from streams as a kid), but I've also always been much more wary of lakes than I am of running water. I am not actually sure if this is sound logic, though I guess running water is less likely to have stagnated and maybe tends to be cooler (?). Anyway, most of the water up here is good to drink, huzzah. I've mostly stopped drinking from streams at home, though occasionally I can't resist.
One thing I found helped me with drafting was having two word documents open side-by-side and manually retyping everything. I don't know if this is useful to everyone (or, alternatively, something you're already doing) but it slowed me down forced me to reconsider everything; it also made me feel more accomplished for some reason. On the other hand, this latest drafting also involved a lot of rearranging of ideas and incorporating new sections, so.
That hunky punk is excellent. Can you print it from the file here?
My friend Mike helped me save a screen shot but I think I'll try your link, my print outs came out rather blurry. He seems like he ought to be in a story but I don't have any ideas. He's been around for hundreds of years so I imagine others have probably written about him too.
It's funny but I keep having to remind myself that you don't actually know any of my friends from high school. Mike sat next to me in English and Geo Studies my freshman year of high school and is useful from time to time.
Anyway, I wasn't sure how I was going to do the second draft because having two word documents open slows down my poor ancient computer and makes the screen crowded. I finally bit the bullet and printed out my first draft in sections even though this feels like a horrendous waste, especially since I'm tweaking while typing and not editing on the page. Though I have been using the blank pages after each part as spots for note taking, so there's that. Physically retyping seems to be necessary for this kind of tweaking because I never know where I'll find a sentence that needs to be slightly altered, though I've been mightily tempted to copy and paste in a few sections. I get along all right until I get to some part that needs to be rewritten in total, then I tend to stop dead in my tracks. The biggest problem is getting distracted by the internet. I write a lot more if I'm working in a notebook out on the porch or something.
I'm looking for the bits where I was fuzzy and unclear, trying to find out where I went so off track that I couldn't find the ending, which means eventually I probably will be rewriting in an actual notebook because the story won't match my printed draft any more.
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