by Nils Peterson
My last 3QD piece ended with Whitman interrupting my poking around the attic of my past by chanting, “Who, constructing the house of himself or herself, not for a day but for all time, sees races, eras, dates, generations,/The past, the future, dwelling there, like space, inseparable together.” My response was “Whoa, this attic’s a bigger than I thought, thought – this has turned into a hell of a job.”
So, today I thought I’d explore what he meant:
Summer school. California. 1965. I was walking to a class on the short story thinking about opening paragraphs, the where, who, and what of them. I was smoking a cigar, nerves before class. (I quit smoking shortly after.) I was wearing (as one did then) a seersucker jacket and a dull, striped, polyester tie when a gust of wind blew up and my tie billowed out and settled on the ash-deep fire riding above my index and middle fingers, and Presto! a hole the size of quarter.
Well, I’d been thinking about exposition. Suddenly, my mind is with the birth of the weather and the new wind shaking itself loose and setting out from the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk, carrying at first low gray wet clouds, and I follow as it crosses Kamatchka, the Bering Straits, the Aleutians, the Kuskokwim Mountains, and curls down towards Coos Bay, Eureka then along the coast to get here just in time to flip my tie (Is this how change enters our lives? I marveled—it begins last week or last year and far far out at sea).
Now it is 1492 and I’m with the Nina, and the Pinta, and the Santa Maria to the New World, and then with Raleigh and Virginia Dare and Indians and the ceremonious inhaling of dried native flora—then slavery and plantations and the Civil War and depressions and soil erosion and crop quotas and subsidies and the ache of my lungs a couple of years before which made me give up the cigarettes began as a declaration of independence at 16 and switch to the cigar which just burnt my tie.
Back now to the Carboniferous, the Jurassic, great foresty swamps, heavy hang of leaf and vine, the lumber and swagger of beasts, heavings of earth, flux of continents, sinking of seas, the procession of stars, transmogrifications of bog and flesh into dark diamonds… And now I join my ancestors as down from the trees they come making custom and discovering—Ah! Fire, and war, science, shortages, substitutes— and, nodding at my parents as they leave the old country to meet in New York in an English for Foreigners class, I hurtle along by way of miners, capitalism, academia, coal tar derivatives, rayon, nylon, and, at long last, polyester, to swing into my own immediate life on the rope of my burnt tie, thinking—any event holds all history, thinking, the first sentence of every story is “Let there be Nils.”
As Whitman began all his, I’ll let him have the last word.
“On the Beach at Night Alone” edited by Ralph Vaughan Williams for his Sea Symphony.
On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.
A vast similitude interlocks all,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different,
All nations,
All identities that have existed or may exist
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann′d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.
2. Why Not To Hasten to Google. [Happy Thanksgiving]
It’s a little after 4 in the morning – not quite sleepy, an hour before I’ll use the espresso machine beside my bed, a pleasant almost awakeness.
A fragment of a hymn, maybe left over from some talk the other day, “First the blade and then the ear/ Then the full corn shall appear.” Isolated for the moment without tune or or other lines. I could google with my under-the-bed IPad, but, I don’t want to.
Now I’m aware the tune for the phrase was there after all, but I can’t yet remember how the hymn started or where it went next. It’s a lovely phrase and I brood on it – then remember the last words, “Harvest home,” and after awhile the tune to get me there. Next the beginning, “Come ye thankful people come. Raise the song of harvest home.” More, “All is safely gathered in/ E’er the winter’s storms begin…,” and now I’m back to being a boy in the choir of the cathedrally Presbyterian church that the rich people in town all went to. I, as the son of a chauffeur, got to go sort of in the back door to Sunday school, and, yes, the choir, the children’s choir – a good one – Charlotte Garden, the organist, conductor, minister of music, something of a local name. I remember Teddy Baer in the choir, a couple of years older than me, maybe Margaret McKenzie who was in my class at grammar school, brother Bill, maybe, a year or two later, not Jimmy Peale or Walter Pease – did their parents go to a different church or no church?
It is a Thanksgiving hymn, and I remember another, “We gather together to ask the Lord’s blessing,” and now it comes back – I must have been no older than 8 or 9 – leading the whole congregation at the morning service in call and response. It must have been a children’s program put on as Sunday service in the great, resonant high hall of the chapel before all the rich people,
Me: For food and drink and…
Congregation: We thank thee Lord.
[I wait, but more refuses to come.]
Mother was so proud, for years she would recite my words at strange times as sort of a comfort to herself.
So, Google would have come with a cudgel of fact for it is the enemy of memory our dwelling place. You’ve arrived before you even began your journey.