When I raise my arm I do not usually try to raise it (Wenn ich
meinen Arm hebe, versuche ich meistens nichts, ihn zu heben).
Wittgenstein
Her subject is people in landscapes
of estrangement; his subject is the landscape. You are never
looking out the window he says
to her. Here you are driving through the most beautiful section
of the California coast, and you are talking to me about a novel
you are reading, the words on the pages, the characters’ clothes.
I am in the scotch broom, he says, and he seems to be as far as
I can tell, and he is right I am not. It is everywhere on the side
of the hill wherever the redwoods take a break and one ought to
smell its sweet smell but all I can smell is eucalyptus and that’s
what grows by my bedroom window at home.
We drive for hours. He thinks about the fog
blowing in off the ocean; it drifts over the fields and over
the road. One moment
we can’t see the road,
the next it is clear. Sometimes he is talking about his subject and sometimes
not, but it is always what’s there. When we stop at a rest stop and
look out over the view he knows how the gullies were formed, what the weather
patterns
will be, which ridges connect north and south.
To me the foggy blur over the tops of trees
is a mental affair. You hold in your mind another time and live
there in that other
imagined time while
the
present time, new and raw in some way, presses for attention. But the other
time is held like a fragile glass, transparent but up close in front of
one’s
face. This is a practice from childhood. It serves no purpose except to counter
the insistence of present time and to block it a bit. I can’t remember
when I haven’t done this. Being in two places at one time. This is my
definition of a person, I say, as if I were saying something definitive and
true. He thinks I’m trying to be clever.
It began, no doubt, as a protective device.
That seems to make sense. But when you try to think of when it
was that the other
time became important,
you can’t.
It ought to have been a sharp pain that wrenched one time from another, made
you opt out for good reason, but you can’t think of one. You can think
of a year when you fell from the rotted tree in the side yard and broke your
arm but the pain is merely a word, not even as vivid as the small scar. And
anyhow, what would it be to think of a sharp pain which is not something most
of us can do. All I can think of is someone large leaning over my hunched shoulders
telling me to try, try she said, to sit still. The racing part of my body was
still racing out the backdoor, into the back yard, and out into the street
where it had been just moments before and I was trying. The idea of trying
is what puts one in two places at once since the idea of trying also contains
the idea of failing. I want to try, I want to know how to say to her in that
time so long ago, but I have no way to think about what I am thinking and so
I don’t.
He doesn’t have to try to drive but I do. I guess he is paying attention
all right, but he isn’t trying. When I drive I have to try hard
to pay attention, to keep to the road, to follow directions, to fend
off the fear
of getting lost. Nothing seems so bad as that fear of turning the wrong
way or finding oneself broken down on the country road with only a dim
light from
a distant farmhouse. I am surrounded by darkness. I try to keep calm.
I try to remind myself way ahead of time to keep calm if anything should
happen.
I get tired of trying even when everything goes smoothly and I clutch
the steering wheel. Here I am I say to myself trying to get myself to
watch the view as
if it were an unnatural act, even though, one would suppose, it is the
most natural thing in the world. Look at all those people doing it, she
says to
herself; surely you too can look out the window at the view. You too
can admire the scenery. His subject, the landscape. Try it.
***
But even the ringing in her ears takes her
away and even the effort of sitting still in the car for so long,
even the book she
tries
to forget.
Her novel
is a novel in which the narrator becomes someone else momentarily. She
loses herself in imagining herself a child and she imagines this so strongly
that
she begins to blurt things out, slurp the milk out of her cereal bowl,
race in circles among the trees stomping in pools of shallow water. She
makes
no attempt to conform to the rules, this child, but neither does she
break them;
she simply moves through the world and does what comes to mind. What
comes to mind is rather sing-songy and windy, hooting softly, gazing
out and
running far. The child stands in the side yard by the rotted tree. She
takes off
her red sweater and makes a cape. She fixes the buckle on her red shoe.
She stares
for hours at the view. Although she doesn’t at that time live anywhere
near what one might call a view, no vistas or California coastlines, it doesn’t
matter to her. She stands at the side of the road and looks down it. She doesn’t
move. She sees a rock and she sees it up close for a long time. Her mother
calls for her but she doesn’t come, not because she is trying to disobey,
but because it just doesn’t occur to her to come.
Years later she sees an elaborately constructed
miniature garden planted into the cleft of a great stone, the
tiniest rock garden
she’s ever seen with
lichen, alpine plants of various sorts, saxifrages, gentians, pinks, penstemons
and what looks to be a fold with a red dot in the center. The novel isn’t
a great novel, perhaps it hasn’t yet been written, but it is what she
is thinking about when he says again, look at the view and there are waves
crashing against the boulders and melting down into waterfalls and crashing
again. It is almost larger than she can stand and she’s back
at the restaurant looking through her water glass. Through the crash
of the waves, she hears
him asking something.
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