Which Way Sings the Willow?

As with much else, I first really turned my eye to the willow thanks to Nathaniel Hawthorne. Those who knew me young may remember that it's always been a favorite — the vine-like tentacles and gnarled trunks. There's something of the fantasy in willows, the magical. But reading his "Buds and Bird-Voices" when recently I'd finished college, back when the spring and summer betokened change, newness, and the every cycling tides of hope, I began to look to willows as a sign of spring, for if the willows were its early voice, then they must hum with the distant sound of hope approaching:

No trees, I think, are perfectly agreeable as companions unless they have glossy leaves, dry bark, and a firm and hard texture of trunk and branches. But the willow is almost the earliest to gladden us with the promise and reality of beauty in its graceful and delicate foliage, and the last to scatter its yellow, yet scarcely withered, leaves upon the ground. All through the winter, too, its yellow twigs give it a sunny aspect which is not without a cheering influence even in the grayest and gloomiest day. Beneath a clouded sky it faithfully remembers the sunshine.

Having watched the trees, 'round here, though, I wonder if Mr. Hawthorne didn't overstate with his "all through the winter." Rather, it has seemed to me that, a month or two before spring's full approach, it hints its intentions through those yellow twigs, somehow emphasizing them, as if renewed life were preparing to burst forth and waits just below the surface.

I've noticed the willows yellowing over the past few days, and although I've been taking it as a moral imperative to look for hope in all things, still I must reflect that change (much less hope) is not such a surety, come warmer weather, as I'd been trained to believe. The cycle of life, so firmly established through years of schooling, has slid into a long, long winter of variable temperature.

Awaiting the overdue spring, Nathaniel's admonition serves as a reminder, if not a lesson to which one can adhere:

In the spring and summer time all somber thoughts should follow the winter northward with the somber and thoughtful crows. The old paradisiacal economy of life is again in force: we live, not to think nor to labor, but for the simple end of being happy; nothing for the present hour is worthy of man's infinite capacity save to imbibe the warm smile of heaven and sympathize with the reviving earth.

A Metaphysical String Theory

As a tool to ensure that the foundation and framing of a complicated addition that I'm building come out straight, I bought a length of nylon string. In my haste, however, I ripped the cardboard spool, and the rapid unraveling resulted in tangles.

From a purely practical standpoint, it would have been more rational to cut out the snarls, salvage shorter lengths, and buy a new length of ready-wound string. But seeing the mess as a consequence of my own poor judgment (in turn, a consequence of my foibles), I undertook to undo what I had done.

What a metaphor for philosophy is a jumbled mass of string! In its loops and self-bindings the thread seems as many separate thoughts, alike in some respects, but unreachable each from each, and he who would understand can only pick them apart, isolate the offshoots, and pull the cut end through hole after hole.

One quickly realizes, of course, that a string of any length is difficult to keep straight while being unwoven back and forth through other notions, so a secondary spool — an organizing belief, if you will — is necessary to keep that which has been sorted orderly. That belief may then be used as a shuttle in the unweaving of the weft from the warp (although both are ultimately the same).

Some shuttles will prove too small for the job. Some will have thorny appurtenances that catch and bind the string anew. And none will prove as suited to the job of holding the string as the original spool, so one must ever be ready to abandon even those holdings that have served the objective well for a time.

All shuttles and spools and even threads, be they what they may, are mere tools, in the end. And the pursuit of disentanglement is most rewarding in ways transcending the implements themselves.

For Those Who Don't Know

I work as a carpenter around fifty hours per week. Another thirty or so, I devote to activities related to my socio-political writing. The rest of my time, I spend with my wife and children. Once or twice a month, I use this cathartic space to entertain myself with language as I work periodic anxieties and lamentations around into meaning and hope. And yet, the likes of Christine — who wouldn't know me from Dostoevsky — feel no compunction about entering my online home, as it were, and declaring:

I have inadvertently stumbled upon your blog and started reading through it - here's a suggestion for you - instead of feeling sorry for yourself like the world has somehow done you wrong and that we all owe you something. Stop wasting so much time on your precious blog whining about it and get out there and make the life for yourself that you feel you are entitled to.

You are what's wrong with society - everyone is a victim and invited to the world wide pity party.

Suck it up and do something.

I suppose that in some worldviews, a hardworking and socially involved family man who now and then uses literary habits deliberately to work through unbidden morosities is what's wrong with society. Personally, I'm more concerned that folks who mistakenly believe they've a talent for decisive and life-redefining snap judgments (involving others' lives, of course) have a say in our nation's governance and in both their professional and private lives exert some sort of influence over other people.

Thank you, Christine. You've given me another depressing thought to overcome with words.

Eye Level with the Clouds

A country fair is a harvest of life, and although I can still summon the ghosts of feelings from my youth (the mystery of young courtship, the adventure of the carnival), I experience them, now, as if my senses are dulled. The simple euphoria of interest in animals, crafts, and raffles and the plain pleasures of neighborliness elude me.

From within the porous cage that I've built of philosophy and faith, the noxious thoughts of the modernist in me seep out, hissing that the hollowness is not a function of the polystyrene partitions through which I insist on experiencing the world, but of the fakery of those who pretend to be feeling as I believe I ought. Such is the bitterness of modernity that its own inadequacies are transformed into others' delusions, and all delusions must be trampled so that we all may trade the illusion of richness for an honest paucity spiced with the quick and easily manipulable passions of the materialist.

Still I realize that there's more to an egg toss than the antiseptic thrill of sticky fingers. There's more to a greased pole than an obstacle to reward. And yet, I've a feeling of displacement in this world. Mere hints of the life in which I ought to be reveling come during a moment's breath by the shore before I begin work on somebody else's house or the rouged skyline from which I must tear my eyes in order to negotiate traffic.

Tonight I stood at the top of a hill — at eye level with far off clouds — during a lonely walk and thought that I must wait until I've mastered life enough to get by before I become indulgent master to another dog. I've decided to give up beer until circumstances are such that I drink to enhance relaxation, not to force it to be possible. Too much waiting for a natural order to assert itself has come to require that the now must be buried as a seed of the future.

Unfortunately, I've developed the habit of expecting that good times herald an ending, while suffering is the crank that winds the clock. If I get to where I want to be, another of my imprisoned internal voices shouts, then I can be sure that my life will be taken away.

Ease or struggle, time staggers on, from season to season and year to year, and it's a comfort to pause for the harvest from time to time. The rumble in the distance may not be the coming earthquake that will swallow all, but rather the thunder — bringer of the lightning that I so desperately need to strike.

Up to the Highest Height

As far as I can recall, I'd only ever managed to fly a kite once in my life. It was during a summer romance into which I fell after graduating from high school, but that went terribly, terribly wrong when I embarked for college in the fall. Try as I might, I can't remember what put the notion into our heads to try the wind, but I doubt that I'll forget the sensation of ease — of simple existence and destiny — that I had as we discovered that we could sit down in the field and just hold the string. It was so natural. So easy. The kite just flew as if sliding into its natural state.

Fourteen years later, almost to the day (I'd estimate), another kite responded to my sprint across a field. This one had hung on my home office wall for about a year, a gift from my grandparents, a Chinese design, inspired as a gift, no doubt, by the ethnicity of my uncle's wife. My daughters took turns restraining the paper and wood bird, and I watched lest some seagull or crow would take offense.

At the tips of the trees, today, I've noticed the first hints of the colors of autumn. Anticipation of the season comes to me from my tongue, as well, as the pumpkin beers have found their way upon the cooler shelves once again. Mowing the lawn in the cool, warm air, I felt the fall and therefore felt the familiar longing for tradition and for fate.

School starts soon, although as a working man, I can scarcely believe that the summer used to feel so long. The trade-off for time's rapid elision, I suppose, is that the autumns of my life have never brought kindred humanity so close.

If you want the sense of autumn properly felt, work your way through some collection or other of Nathaniel Hawthorne's short stories. Halloween has it right that spirits walk in the fall, but the holiday errs in its celebration of terror. Kite in hand and progeny nearby, we might discover that we've the closest of friends one-hundred and forty-three years dead. Perchance the clouds were just so for them, as well.

The Sense of Life

It was the smell of Lewis's The Screwtape Letters that sparked the melange of associations between memory and present day. That, and the scent of grass and sunshine as my daughters climbed the hammock around me, pretending it to be the rigging of a pirate ship. I worried that they climbed too far toward the hammock's hooks, where the ropes all come to a point, and yet, I recalled that my favorite challenge, when my parents would bring me to the Renaissance Festival in New York State, was to climb the rope ladder in an attempt to ring a bell and win the prize. My daughters contented themselves with banging the chain against the metal supports. On what grounds could I fear for them?

My other favorite game at the Festival was swooping down a steeply hung rope riding a plastic horse, jousting lance in hand and aimed at a ring that hung above the bottom of the arc. I don't recall what safety precautions were taken (it was, after all, before the day of the consumer-lawyer dependency pact), but my mother must have held her breath with each pass.

This week marks our very first event related to our eldest daughter's schooling. Off she'll go, her life now proceeding through settings over which we, her parents, have only indirect control. I've none of the predicted sadness, but more than my share of the apprehension.

The specific odors of Screwtape that jarred my memory working were of the adhesive and the paper. which are similar to those of the programs through which I thumbed when my sleep-away piano camp in Bennington, Vermont, would bring us to ballet performances at Saratoga or classical concerts at Tanglewood. I was eleven when my parents first dropped me at the camp's door, and I wonder now, a father myself, whether I'll have the courage (and, yes, the trust) to let my little ones stroll so freely through the world.

As the girls climbed over me in their pirate games, I saw myself so prominently in them that I realized that they are not made precious by those reflections of their parents, but by their autonomous existence. They are their own selves, in God's narrative, and perhaps the best parents can hope to control is whether they grow up with the comfort that life indeed involves magic or they are prematurely burdened with the sense that there is no meaning to it at all.

For all my fantasies about how my own adult life will turn out, the conclusion is unavoidable that they will find more magic climbing about the world's rigging on their own than weaving imaginary baskets under the watchful eye of their father.

Rocking Slightly

So I've set up the hammock.

I don't expect that anybody who happens upon this space these days will have followed it closely enough to understand the significance of that, but suffice to say that the thing has hung in two different sheds for a total of four years (or so) and never been used. Indeed, it had become a symbol of the life that I wasn't living. When an acquaintance bemoaned his having failed to take his boat out yet this summer, the hammock came to mind — a vessel of a different short that I had failed to take out yet this century.

The decisive realization was that, for all my labor, I've gained mere inches in financial advancement at the cost of miles of living. All of those activities that I'd held so dear — from walking the dog to practicing piano — have drifted away, and I've very little to show for the sacrifice. What's the point? So I've spent some time softly swinging.

I had one of those experiences, recently, wherein one's contemplations are interrupted by an internal voice that seems almost otherly. The question on which I brooded was what I should do with my life, or about my life, and the voice asked, "Well, what do you want to do?"

"I want to write."

"So then write."

Experience suggests that nothing rejuvenescent will come of either the writing or of the hammock, but sacrificing repose and passion has gained me little, so there's little to lose by throwing myself into the wind.

The Carpenter's Access to Luxury

Click here for a streaming MP3 reading of the following. (Click here to download it.)

During my (paid) 15 minute break in the morning and my (not paid) half-hour lunch as a carpenter, I've leaned against gateways and taken in views that other families must spend generations accruing the wealth to enjoy. Workers can develop a feeling of temporary ownership of the empty mansions in which they toil for most of their waking hours, and for the average construction crew, there's nothing so humanizing of the young billionaire as cutting a hole for duct-work in his bedroom and finding his stash of naughty DVDs hidden on the tippy-top of a nine-foot shelf. Far from solidifying a kindred sense, however, these mild epiphanies that the rich and the working are all human — sharing traits both transcendent and base — make differences in standing and perspective even less comprehensible.

Many's the time I've turned to my younger coworkers — most, I suspect, not accustomed to such lunchtime conversation — and wondered aloud what effect it must have on the psyche to have so much. When I had a dog to walk, I would most nights pass a view that brought regular feelings of spontaneous gratitude to God for having created the world thus, and I owned neither the perch nor the view. I imagine that people born of great wealth must feel as if those views were created for them. Leisure time, fantastic settings, great privileges — such is life. Their life.

It can be difficult working in their ocean-front mansions during the families' in-town season. In winter, the rich are phantoms — no more real than when one sees them on television or reads of them in books — and one scarcely believes the groundskeepers that they exist at all. When they do stop by to review the projects' progress, they seem more like character actors in an elaborate illusion than living conduits of tremendous wealth. In the summer, the tradesman must watch, while he toils, as they enjoy their vacation from... what? Their lives are vacations. It would be edifying to follow them around for a while — here and wherever it is that they go in the fall — to investigate just what they do. They fill their houses with superfluous furniture; with what do they fill their days?

Don't get me wrong. Some such folk are wonderful people. I've recognized, in my time as a driver of nails, an exuded gratitude and respect when I'm the guy who can, for example, fix a door so that the dogs cannot sneak out and be mauled again by the coyotes that are attracted to the acres of open land. The experience of months of intensive doggy-care has exposed some vulnerability that I have the knowledge, skill, and tools to prevent from being chafed once more. But always interceding in such interactions is my knowledge, and their apparent ignorance, that with less labor than I am expending, they could fix the debt problem that has dogged me for over a decade.

Perhaps they are unaware of their own ability to fix doors, as it were, or maybe lifetimes of outreached hands have led them to do the math concerning the cost of too dramatically indulging a sense of responsibility. They would be able to solve a great many people's problems, and yet they aren't able to solve them all, so it could be that they learn early on (in youth, perhaps,
and subconsciously) not to burden themselves with finding their own boundaries for giving, taking instead those that society has defined. Our society, unfortunately, has defined them poorly, not only through the legitimization of avarice, but by its tendency to grab for, rather than apply pressure for, wealth.

It is a shame, and detrimental, that our too secular society seems intent on rubbing out the distinction between obligation and responsibility. Yes, responsibilities can be shirked, but explicit and enforceable obligations give the impression that responsibility ends with them. For a brief while — of which we under fifty sometimes hear tell — America seemed to have faith in the shapeless forces of cultural expectations, one of which held it a courtesy to allow others a chance to accelerate. Now, it appears that only coyotes and the fortunate carpenter may come and go past the walls that attempts to manage the distribution of wealth, and the stoked strategic concomitant of class envy, helped to inspire.

Back in Print

Well, after longer than I care to mention (curious readers can look in the "Elsewheres" section to the left), I've finally begun publishing pieces again. I was tempted to say that I've "managed to publish something," but that would imply that I've been trying and failing, which I have not.

So, I'll present "Moral compass swings to nihilistic pole" (about abortion and conservatism/Catholicism) in today's Providence Journal as what I hope it to be: a return to publishing, rather than the early fluke that my first piece in the Projo — five-and-a-half years ago — turned out to be.

I Don't Know What to Do

Was a time when I found it cathartic to lay out all of my concerns and feelings in print, but lately the idea seems wasteful. I've exponentially more responsibilities, now, and my problems seem to jumble all over each other, knotted, as well, with my blessings. If I've time to spend in thought, it may certainly be better spent than wallowing.

Yet tonight I cut the sad figure of a thirty-something man strolling through the suburbs alone. Smells and images permeated the muggy early-summer evening, raising vague memories that I might once have been able to bring more vividly to mind. The particular laundry detergent, redolent flowers, the mist of night-time lawn sprinklers. Perhaps the memories have compounded too dramatically to permit ease in sifting them. Perhaps I haven't the mental energy to do the sifting.

I don't know when the last time was that I saw a field full of lightning bugs, but just as I began my descent down the last hill to the water, with the million-dollar view, it seemed as if all of the lightning bugs that leave my yard dark in their absence had gathered there. Even so, they flashed a somewhat melancholy metaphor — their beacons dispersed as lone voices calling out. How similar might the suburbs look if one were a step removed into abstraction and able to see the prayers and cries of people in their homes as visual things. One imagines the light drifting out into space, not lost, but traveling to one with infinite sight and freedom from time.

I haven't such sight, nor such liberty, but not quite beyond the boundary of hearing, I sometimes sense a voice offering comfort, and guidance, too, although never as concretely as I would like.