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| Graveyard at the Monastery of Christ in the Desert, Chama River Canyon |
Down from the backwoods mountains of Humbolt County. Worked a week at a farm. Not entirely my scene. Also farm work wasn't necessarily the first thing I wanted to do just coming out of a year and half of work in Bellingham. But it was rewarding and I was able to spend time with an old friend.
I enjoy hard work. But I want there to be more poetry in it. I'm not asking for long discussions of Pagnol's Water of the Hills and Thoreau, but I think of Wendell Berry saying there are only two things human beings are meant to in this world: tell stories and make soil. Blood and bones and soil.
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| My Tent at Flint Ridge |
Now I'm at a free hike-in tent site, Flint Ridge, up on the coast in the redwoods overlooking the Pacific. Just south of Klamath. Beautiful. Will be here for a few days. While I'm alone, I'm still searching for a deeper sort of solitude. I imagine it's up there in the High Sierras. Someplace inhospitable and desolate. Difficult with that kind of beauty that seems as if it wants to annihilate you, like one of Rilke's angels.
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| Moonstone Beach |
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| Moonstone Beach |
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| Moonstone Beach |
The quality about many of the Greek tragedies that has always surprised me is the sense that human beings are an alien, even undesirable, presence in the world. The gods play horrible games with Oedipus and Antigone and Ajax - or what to us seems horrible or a game. Perhaps there is something to the notion that those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad.
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| Buddy on the Beach |
I've always reconciled this with Koestler's gloss on McLean's analogy of our triune brain: we are evolutionary mistakes, lacking the necessary mediating structures between the reptilian, paleomammalian and neomammalian, that we are, essentially, crocodiles riding horses carrying machine guns.
The "gods" - however they might be defined in terms of western culture - are completely justified in thinking of the human as an unwanted presence. We are creatures capable of appreciating the beauty of a Chopin nocturne performed in the evening by musicians who will be sent to the gas chamber the next morning.
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| Beach Shelter / Shrine - Ecola State Park, Oregon |
This world inside my head doesn't match up with the chubby families in RVs and old couples steadying each other on the trails down to beach, the young girls unselfconsciously taking endless selfies and young boys that run into the ocean full of energy and joy like wild colts. Even the burnouts and tweakers, the wannabe pornstars, aging dancers and 9 mm posturing pimp dealers seem sadly sweet and soft, pearlescent tender catfish underbellies of the American Dream. There's nothing Greek out here at all. There are no gods, no chorus, no pro or antagonists. It's all a mumbling grey crowd huddled together in The Waste Land. Eliot as an Old Testament prophet. If men were hollow in 1920, how much more empty are they in 2017? Ephemeral congregations of second hand smoke, of dying breaths, of long 70 year long anal exhalations. No, there's nothing Greek out here. I don't pretend to understand any of it. My language makes less and less sense.
But I do believe - insist - in a real presence, a transcendental ground upon which hope can stand - no matter how violent such a standing is. It's worth living for. It's worth dying for. I contemplate this difference with an increasing sense of equivalence.
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| Road to Flint Ridge |
In this way, I entertain the idea of this being a Death Trip. I'm certain with my hunger for increased isolation and deeper solitude that the risk of something life ending happening to me is much greater than it's ever been before. But it's not an accident that concerns me. I think each of us has an unalienable right to end our own life, in any way that we see as being proper and fit and righteous. I've seen too many people I love die like sad creatures, shivering sacks of flesh draped over shaking bones, hooked up to tubes and sensors in sterile hospitals. Who wants such an ignoble death?
But you never get to choose. Disease and disability creep up on you and leap upon your surprised frame when you least expect it. And then you are sunk, trapped like a creature imprisoned in a skull, no cask of amontillado waiting within. I'd rather go buy a dozen steaks and a gallon of honey and walk into the woods wearing it as a dripping meat suit to enchant death out of the shadows. Let me be devoured by a bear or wolves rather than a health and human service worker with a fixed frown of pitiable empathy or the hundred sad pats of affection from distraught friends come to bid the tearful farewell. Give me the fanged roaring mouth of a grizzly as he gnaws my brains from my skull. Or the wolf ripping the laughter out of my throat. Extreme. Unlikely.
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| Banana Slug at Flint Ridge |
But, there is a hallowed sanctuary up the Chama River canyon, where others have been buried, I think it would be a fine and private place to slit my own throat and bleed out under a dying sun.
There's no cause for alarm. There's time. Even if this is a Chama Canyon Death Trip, there's much to do before I get there. I've got some spiritual currency to spend before I make that last hike up into the canyon.
But it's liberating to know death is not so far away and will meet you at the time and place of your choosing.
For now, it's a sweet old world. Like the Lucinda Williams song. There's a poetry to things, an aura of myth. I wish I were as strong as those that are able to be immersed in the antic hay of the daily drama and still spin gold out of it. I'm not strong in that way. But out here (as he un-ironically writes upon the sapphire glass of an iPhone), it as home as home get for me: displaced, nomadic, unhoused, strange, lone (not alone), breathing pure freebased uncut freedom.
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| Bones on the Beach |
I'm sure the gods have a horrible game for me to enact. Maybe for all of us to enact. I tune the inner strings of my soul to the mythic travelers: Odysseus, Orpheus, Aeneas. There's a difficult, dissonant chord to sing to. With complete and utter amor fati, sitting here beside the fire above the Pacific, I figure what lies before me is a sort of underworld. I'm sick to death of all of this. But I'm addicted to the beauty that is unsealed from the sorrow and the mystery of what has been unsaid. I'm hoping to meet a Sphinx out here, out there, somewhere in the High mountain passes or under the burning sun of the desert. I've been close before but never really was ready to die.
Così la neve al sol si disigilla;
così al vento ne le foglie levi
si perdea la sentenza di Sibilla.
Even thus the snow is in the sun unsealed,
Even thus upon the wind in the light leaves
Were the soothsayings of the Sibyl lost.
- Paradiso, Canto XXXIII, Longfellow Translation