Possibly, Maybe

I'm sitting in the Gorsuch Commons at UAA where I've just appropriated some food from the chow hall - think prison grade biscuits and gravy and you're getting close to the fare. The boys are here with me on their summer visitation and the entirety of the world is something, much like this image of a flower I captured some weeks ago, altogether unrecognizable in its mystery. Who can say what events conspired to create such as this? The impossibility of it is something on the magnitude of miraculous, similar to the "ordinary, every day goings on" as a wonderful poet associate of mine once wrote in a book of hers. Who can say what will come next? Lottery or car crash indeed. There's no telling what the next 24 hours might hold but, if judging from the previous, there will be all manner of activity. Flurried, harried, rushing, full of sound and fury.

The other day I went on a longish walk around my town. I had all the usual accompaniments: bag, pint of bourbon, notebook, pen, phone, nameless guilt, existential dread, an awful reverence for the Almighty God. My wanderings took me to a local cemetery and I went and sat in the corner while I considered the impermanence of all things and wondered about the aged and near death and the specific kindnesses and meanness and inevitability that seems to ferment in those folk. I sat for awhile with the deceased and felt terribly at one with them along with a shamefulness of my still living, as if I were a charlatan, tricking the universe into allowing me to exist while all these had gone on before. Taking the bourbon for strength, I went and squatted next to Felicia's grandmother's gravestone (not pictured) and told her about things as they were and what had happened in the world since she'd died and how I was thankful for all the things she did for me and the boys while she was among the living. The conversation left me uneasy but in a good way and, as I was leaving, I saw an old native couple placing American flags on the grave of a veteran. They left and I inspected the stone, a Marine who'd died some twenty years ago, corporal, "Semper Fi", I supposed. I had more bourbon and went out and about my walk.

I watched a movie (documentary of sorts) once where the grizzled avatar of Jim Harrison said that he wanted to be reincarnated as a tree and have birds live in him. That sticks with me for some reason that I can't define. There's a beauty to it, an innate thing, the ineffable desire Jim had to have birds live in him that was a beautiful thing. Then I find this tree out in the wild, living and being and twisting to the approximate tune of a cosine wave. You can't ever know what you're doing, I think, you can only move in a forward direction. And at that beautifully fast. At that orgastic pace that Fitzgerald talks about.

Yesterday we spent the day wandering around, me teaching these two about various things. I would listify them but perhaps that is growing tedious. Suffice to say we talked about serious shit. We went to campus, where we still are, and had a nostalgia trip of sorts, or maybe just I did wherein I relived the birthing and rearing and life that I've had with them and all the places we've gone and things we've seen that they've likely forgotten but I haven't. Today, back in the Commons building, a friend of mine and I recounted stories about our fathers' hands and how we remembered them while the boys foraged outside, busy in the naturalistic pursuit of finding and naming local species of plants. Another friend joined us and we talked about the universality of human experience and capital "A" art and what it means to be human beings on this planet. The boys came back and showed us their findings, an alpine forget-me-not and arctic daisy, and we impressed upon them the necessity of living furiously and without pause, in the very fabric of your being.

 

We went to the library at half hour to closing time. The boys were floored by the movement of the Foucault pendulum. They wanted to see it from the top floor and watch its orbital tracings and glory in its mystery, much in the same way that I had viewed in the flower from the previous image. We ascended the steps to do so and as they observed it, they spoke in hushed tones, as ones who view something holy and altogether unknown. On the re-drive into Anchorage the next day, Gavin asked about how planetary bodies receive their rotational motion and I told him some long and likely incorrect explanation about gravitational accretion and angular momentum. After the pendulum, we went into the oversized section and sat on the floor reading, reading, reading, and learning about all the things in this world that we'd never really and truly understand.

You live and you do things and things happen to you and you can't even begin to understand them, only to relate those beautiful things to the ones you make and to the dead and sometimes, if you're lucky, to others that come after who aren't yours in any sense. I watched my friend Dan defend his thesis today. The day before yesterday I was in a park with the genetrix of my unborn child while my other children, those from a different mother, climbed hills and explored forest paths. Today I celebrated the miracle of the Eucharist with my boys before I bought them rosary beads.

You can't get away from it. It's here. It's all right here. All of it.


It's too much. It's far, far too much.