by Nils Peterson
One of the easy metaphors, easy because it just feels true, is that life is like a river in its flowing from then to whenever. We are both a leaf floating on it, and the river itself. Boat maybe. Raft more likely. But those who know such things say there is a river beneath the river, the hyporheic flow. “This is the water that moves under the stream, in cobble beds and old sandbars. It edges up the toe slope to the forest, a wide unseen river that flows beneath the eddies and the splash. A deep invisible river, known to its roots and rocks, the water and the land intimate beyond our knowing. It is the hyporheic flow I’m listening for.” The person speaking is Robin Kimmerer, a biologist, professor and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. It’s from her book Braiding Sweetgrass.
I’ve used the river image often enough in my own writing when thinking about my life and the lives of others, but now I’m wondering if what I was really trying to do was to find a way to listen to this deeper river, to get a sense of it as it winds its way to, well, Is there such a thing as the hyporheic sea? There must be and therefore all my sea images really float on that sea beneath the sea. Robin says, “One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.” Well, yes. This is the poet’s understanding too, and I think it is the basic understanding of language, maybe of consciousness.
I’m thinking now of a girl I dated my junior year in college. I had to come back to school a little early because I sang in the choir and there was a special program early that we had been asked to sing for. The football team also came back early for its fall practice. This girl in addition to being a singer was a cheerleader. It worked out that fall that she went out with me every other weekend. A football player took her out the in-between weeks. I was a year younger than my class and very shy. I had just started to do things on the campus, act in plays, write for the newspaper, join the creative writing club, finding out how much I loved literature. I enjoyed talking with her. Maybe we held hands, but the truth was she awed me. I was continually surprised she was out with me.
There was a moment, at the end of a date, when I thought I needed to put my arm around her and hold her and kiss her. We, it seems so unlikely but this is what I remember, were in a graveyard near the woman’s campus sitting on a memorial piece, a rectangular piece of cemetery cement the right height, but I didn’t put my arm around her and I didn’t kiss her, we talked some more, then I walked her back to the dorm and soon she was going out every week with the football player. We had been together enough to exchange Christmas gifts. I don’t remember what I gave her, but she gave me a tan cashmere scarf and a pair of leather gloves both of which I treasured a long time.
So, I’m trying to understand how I ended up living the life I’ve led. I got married nine years after I graduated. I think I likely was the last one of the men in my class to marry. There were those who never married.
Considerations. Likely I was a year younger than she since I’d skipped year. Another consideration, this was 1953 and sort of the unspoken sense in the air was that you’d graduate from college, get a job, get married, and then set off living a sensible adult life something like your parents but better. I had chosen to major in English and would this year choose to minor in philosophy. These were joyful choices, the right choices. I had not started to worry about how I was going to go earning a living. When I got to be a senior (where there was another girl with whom I was less shy, but that’s another story), I realized I could put off choosing because all of us guys had to go into the army. The draft was active, though the Korean war was over or about over. My plan was to volunteer to be drafted to get it over with, do my time, get the GI bill and go to grad school maybe in an undefined writer’s way. Well, I turned out to be 4F from a bad knee from basketball. There I was with no money, no plans, no career, and as it turned out later, no (other) girl.
So, back to my cemetery moment. Say I had put my arm around the first girl. Say I kissed her. Say we really got serious. What would the consequences have been? I would have had to think about getting a serious job. Maybe one alternative would have been that she worked while I went to school. Yes, but what would I have gone to school for? Likely a teaching credential and likely a high school teaching job somewhere in Kentucky where all of this drama was taking place. That was a most likely river of life, to go back to my original image, and it might have been a very happy river. But…
there was this other river, “a deep invisible river,” the “hyporheic flow” of my life. It needed me to feel my way around for a few years. It needed me to work in the circulation department of the local newspaper for awhile, look around that world and decide it was not for me. It needed me to be friends with my parent’s Lutheran minister, though I didn’t really think of myself as a member of his congregation. (I did help out. Sing now and again in the choir when they needed an extra bass, direct the Sunday School’s Christmas play.)
When Upsala College, I’m in New Jersey now living with my parents, needed an Assistant Director of Admission and Choir Manager, he recommended me for the job. I got it, and found I liked college life, the people there, the good talk in the faculty dining room. I read all of Faulkner, thought of myself as a prose person, sat in on a few classes. Since I was managing the choir, I arranged my schedule so I could sing with them as I had in my college choir. One of my jobs was to go around summers to Lutheran summer camps and try to convince young Swedes to come to this college.
At the end of two years, I decided this was a job really wasn’t for me any more. I handed my resignation in a few months early. When my term was over, I still didn’t know how I wanted to earn a living. At the end, with no prospect in sight, I gathered my papers up, drove down to Rutgers in New Brunswick, applied to graduate school. My “hyporheic flow” insisted that when I registered I stood next to a poet who had begun publishing in good places. We became roommates and sat long nights at the Corner Tavern talking about poems and I learned so much about how to read them more than in my classes where in many the reading assignments were better than the class.
There were married men living comfortably in “married student’s housing” with a working wives bringing in money of which I had little. Sometimes I envied them, but they envied the tavern talk time. One tried to join one night when the talk went on all night and moved from tavern to our room. His homecoming was not happy. (One classmate’s wife was in a laundromat when a strange crew came in and asked her which pile of clothes was the whitest. She looked down in a rather snooty way and said “that one” and consequently received a royalty check every month for a couple of years. That would have been nice. I could have looked snooty. I likely would have chosen the wrong pile.)
To start again, almost 30 years ago I went to Minneapolis to help celebrate the poet Robert Bly’s 65th birthday. One of the other celebrants was James Hillman, renowned psychologist and author. He had co-edited a couple of poetry anthologies with Robert. We and sat together waiting for a car to take us to the airport. He asked me what I did for a living. I replied I taught Shakespeare. He then asked me the astonishing question, “How did your life make you ready to teach Shakespeare?”
I thought I was a Shakespeare teacher by accident. Poetry was my assumed province. But one day the head of the department opened the door of his office as I walked by, saw me and he asked me if I would like to teach Shakespeare next semester because the regular teacher had just received a sabbatical. I said sure and I taught it for the next 30 years even on closed circuit television to satellite campuses. I wasn’t prepared for it except for teaching a couple of his plays to freshman English classes as a teaching assistant. I didn’t take the graduate class in Shakespeare because I didn’t like the teacher, though I did take a year of Non-Shakespearean Elizabethan drama from a teacher I liked. But as I thought about his question, it seemed as if my whole life had set me up for saying “sure” and being ready to do it. I was astonished to think it wasn’t an accident, it was destiny, my life finding a shape appropriate to it.
Here is a quotation from Hillman’s The Soul’s Code in which he presents the “acorn theory.”
So, too, the image in the acorn. You are born with a character; it is given; a gift, as the old stories say, from the guardians upon your birth.
and another,
There is more in a human life than our theories of it allow. Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal moment in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am. [Or in my case, not do.]
I suggest that when you are thinking about those “peculiar little accidents [that] happen” you are brooding over the “hyporheic flow” of your life, and that it is a “A more reverential way of living.”
All of this got written because a few mornings ago I woke to a dream of that girl in the cemetery wanting to talk.