When I think about my life, it becomes obvious that somehow I haven’t come to completion anywhere, or as my mother used to scold me, “You never FINISH anything!” She meant my 4-H sewing project. I finished a lot of essays and stories, but they didn’t count to her. People in Valier would say I never finish my yard -- quite true. But I’m not talking about that. Nor is that about committing to a life of search rather than one devoted to defending one position. Only in the last half-dozen years have I found anyone who understood -- not out of sameness but out of parallel search.
In interaction with Tim Barrus, who is also a writer, there have been two shared metaphors: the labyrinth or catacomb and the door, the aperture of access, a threshold. You may have noticed that I used these two in fiction recently: “The Hall Boy” and the Neanderthal story. The combined key is a long corridor with doors along the sides. I dream these, partly because they are so common in mysteries, police procedurals -- the camera trundles along the carpet from one overhead light to the next and the armed gunman shoots from a doorway or around a corner. Maybe a river with docks along it would work similarly, or even a road with trees along it. An architectural hybrid between corridor and doorway is the enfilade, doors lined up so a person can walk through them in a straight line.
It’s just a metaphor for living through time with periodic contexts that might be jobs or classrooms or marriages or towns. When I was reviewing the Western art mags, I used to keep track of two kinds of paintings: those of doors or gates and those of cafes. There would be a half-dozen of each in most issues and they were often very beautiful.
There’s a Russian movie from the Fifties called “The Cranes Are Flying.” It’s about world war and in it a girl goes back from work to her family’s apartment, rushes up flights of stairs, throws open the door and there is . . . nothing. Bombed-out space, many floors up, distant from all other buildings. She witnessed no violence, heard no explosion, and now had no family. All she did was open a door, as usual, and stand there trying to understand.
George MacDonald, English Universalist minister who wrote fairy tales to feed his children, had a basic construct in his stories: the castle on a hill full of coal mines. The castle itself is a labyrinth of rooms and a winding staircase (a rising labyrinth); the many complex tunnels are like an ant-hill underneath it. They echo, one is the reflection of the other. The stories are “The Princess and the Goblin,” “The Princess and Curdie,” and they never end because to end the story is to end the labyrinth which is actually an income stream.
“Peer Gynt” is another version featuring sea voyages, Morocco, lunacy, thieves and trolls.
What is necessary is not the goal but the comparing of burrowing dark against constructed lighted places. This is very deep in us, so it is hard to think about. It must go back to the first small mammals learning that safety is always achieved by digging into and under the earth and whatever is piled onto it, while the first small birds were learning to leap and glide, then flap and dive. Some seabirds can live for years without ever touching the land. Tennessee Williams often spoke of birds who had only wings, no feet at all and no need for them, never “grounded.” Mammal-me loves the rara-avis-other. Bats, of course, inhabit both worlds.
My understanding of life was changed, once again, when I saw a YouTube vid of the axon of a neuron worming its way through the brain tissue in search of the place it needs to connect -- they say that tip is using something like smell: molecular cues. This is not at all like the stacked-up boxes of cells that we used to believe in. Knowledge as the contents of drawers and books is one thing: knowledge as seeking, smelling, moving -- that’s different. Verb-based. A trip. The connectome: a road map to a story.
But one mustn’t become so focused on the goal that the side compartments are passed up or entered, then forgotten. Alvina Krause, the legendary acting teacher I’ve been remembering on blogs, only slipped up once. She said she had gotten word that one of her students had a good role in a Broadway play. “He MADE it!” she exulted. Maybe because she never was an actor herself, she forgets that being in the first play is a threshold -- oh, yes! -- but then life will present a whole sequence of new thresholds. The play can’t run forever. Being cast in this one won’t mean being cast in the next one. A remarkable performance will mean that next time the performance must be equal or better. And yet there is no better lighted space than the stage.
When one graduates, some people will tell you that this is not the end but merely the beginning. They’re right. The end will be only when the trip is over and the alma mater stops asking for donations. The Middle-Eastern religions: Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all think in terms of beginnings and ends. Some apply these mainly to individuals (birth and death) and some think in terms of nations or “cultures” (founding and final fall). Our scientists get preoccupied with how the universe began and how it will end. The Asian religions are more concerned with just being, participating in the great rolling wave of existence. Yet once they took it into their heads to conquer others in order to guarantee their longevity, they were the most merciless, relentless, destructive of all.
My movie last night was about Jane Goodall: “Jane’s Journey.” (Streams on Netflix.) It’s about her life, how simply it started and then expanded until now it’s about the whole world. Many of the shots were of Jane walking a well-worn path and sitting down with the chimps, just being with them. Their reactions range from mock-rage to pretending not to notice. She speaks calmly about her first husband, a photographer who made her work famous but who was so possessive and jealous that the marriage wouldn’t work. Then her second husband, also very jealous and intent on limiting her, died of cancer. The third “man” was her son who had a hard time separating from her, resented her work and also wanted her for only himself but by trying NOT to be like her.
The movie, towards the end, shows “Grub” the son reconciled and collaborating with his mother to protect a wild but calm hippo pool where a local family has protected and addressed the animals for decades, believing they are ancestors -- which they are in the broadest sense, of course. Few animals are as ugly and potentially deadly. In the pool we see only their ears, eyes, and nostrils above the water -- ugly, alien, wary. Among them float filamentous white flowers so delicate they could be spun of glass. Sublime. But they aren’t going anywhere. Pretty soon Jane and the others went on up the path.
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