Abby’s smiling as her head comes level and she leans back, finishing her stroke with a flick of the wrists to rotate the oars, sending a final pulse of her energy into the passing water. She’s been rowing for hours. Feathering the blades before contracting and bending forward at the waist to send the oar’s blades far ahead before setting the tips to bite the surface. As she comes up she catches sight of Thomas, shivering in the stern sheets, grasping the tiller, trying to keep warm and maintain his lookout.
The sun has set and the dreary, dark day has slipped into a pitch-black darkness. The calm persists. Sounds carry. She can hear the hissing roar of distant surf on a broad sandy beach echoing off rocky cliffs. The sound seems muffled beneath heavy clouds they can no longer see. No sign but the absence of stars and the way the gibbous moon is obscured. Not even a faded, not-quite-so-dark smudge to indicate where it must hang over the shoreward horizon.
The oar-locks creak. Her seat groans under her shifting weight. The ripples of their bow-wave have a rhythm of their own, following her exertions as the boat leaps forward and then easing as she gathers for the next stroke. She can hear their twin, the sounds of the other yawl-boat. Hard for her to see, coursing along just at the limit of visibility to seaward.
Settling into this passage out of long habit. Her hands warm. Her calluses conform to the bare wood of the oars’ looms. Her backside accommodated to the smooth wood of her thwart. Her legs settle in. Heels wedged against foot-rests on the boat’s exposed ribs.
She feels suspended in exertion. Each moment in a different position within a cycle of coil, extend, and recoil. Each breath fits into her movements and each burst of energy is refreshed before the next. This far into the passage she has entered a state in which there is no longer any sense that there could or should be any other way to be. Her movements fit her body, her limbs, her strength. Rhythms seeming to propel themselves brook no consideration of any interruption. The boat beneath her, oars spanning out to either side extensions of her body.
They once rowed through a pod of traveling pothead whales. She felt an instinctive kinship on hearing their breaths, chuffing in sequence. Watching their sleek black bodies rise and fall as their flukes propelled them forward with that same endless enduring quality of cyclical effort fully expressed.
Any thought of what lie ahead is the furthest thing from her mind. What might come to pass when they arrive at their destination. Behind her back, moving in total synchrony with her she senses an embrace-at-a-distance. Paul heaves at his oars. Their tips appear in her peripheral vision at the end of each stroke. A dance. She leads. He follows her every move, adjusting to match her pace. He enters the space she empties and leaves it as she returns. His feet beneath her thwart. At the end of her stroke her hair falls in his lap. As she coils forward and begins to dig in her oars she can feel his breath on her neck. They both grunt to clear their lungs before drawing in their next breath. Their arms curled to power their stroke.
This intimacy is as second nature as the rowing itself. There to be felt in their doubled power as the boat springs forward with their combined efforts. The first level of a connection that bonds them all. Thomas, the other yawl-boat, the rest of the crew back aboard Scheherazade. This belonging is fuel for her exertions. This shared effort its own reward. Joy in being alive in every movement. An enveloping atmosphere they all share.
I had a dream…. Writing, just the simplest most direct “facts.” Creating a space with words, meaning coalesces. As within a dream there is a chasm between the experience and any attempt to recapture it.
“It made sense…” Of course, that’s what dreams do. No matter what. At the time they make sense.
But this was more about how we dream. Whether this method is available to writing.
There are no explanations in dreams. No juxtaposition is too jarring. No missing segue too wide a gulf for meaning not to heal it and carry us across the gap.
Improvisation is in large part about saying yes. We accept what is provided and we add to it without judgement. Enthusiastically.
All we are after is for the movement to continue. We don’t control what happens. We suspend our fear and celebrate the ribbons of joy this brings.
Unapologetic. That is one defining character of living things. We notice this and respond without thought.
We call this trait vivacity; when it is appealing; and lots of other names when we encounter a life-force that crosses us.
Refreshing! If nothing else. In a mental and emotional landscape riddled with equivocations to discover the unapologetic is to find at least a temporary lift. It’s only when we expect this fragment of life, any fragment of life, to be everything. To stand in for some abstraction we insist on placing between us and living. Then disappointment settles over us. How can it not?
It cannot. So long as we insist disappointment has a role to play. So long as we insist that disappointment is a valid response to anything.
“Original Sin!” There are a handful of contenders for it. Maybe disappointment fits the bill. So much of the rest of “The Fall” can be traced back to this dark and fetid worm burrowing its way into our attention and dissolving the awe and wonder it destroyed.
How can anyone attend to any aspect of life and settle on disappointment as their reflexive reaction?
Yet, we do.
“What about the question of pain?”
Here is a quirky defense of disappointment, “How can we face pain, disfigurement, crippling injury, or death without disappointment?” We ask this as if there were a natural quid pro quo. An obvious score to settle.
To begin, let’s take one item off the table. When we speak of our own deaths it’s not death itself we fear. Not death at all. It’s an anticipation of a loss. An anticipation of something we will never experience. Whatever is on the other side of this boundary there will not be an “I” there to feel it.
Pain and its attendants?
Here’s another question, “Have you ever experienced pain and faced it without expectation? Have you ever felt pain and not immediately jumped into a cascading series of assumptions and expectations that rush the mind off into a muddle of abstraction and a vale of disappointment?”
Isn’t it the very unapologetic quality of pain; of any violent disruption of our expectations by an “intrusion” of life; the quality we most reject when we think of pain?
“It hurts! Dammit!”
Yes, it does, but it also IS. It exists in a way we cannot resist or avoid short of dulling or suspending our own consciousness.
Have you ever considered the way pain is remembered? Or, rather, the way, either like or unlike other feelings or experiences, pain itself cannot be recalled? We cannot enter into past pain by simply remembering it. Its most identifying qualities are its insistence and our inability to counterfeit it in memory. Try as we might to screw up its attendant emotions; fear, anger, frustration, despair; we have an absence at the heart of our memories of pain. It is not there.
Then, when we feel pain, it is here. Insistently present and even as we exhaust ourselves in our struggles to “fight it” it takes all of our efforts of abstraction and destroys them as it continues to insist that we experience it moment-by-moment or that we give up our awareness to some degree. Unlike pleasure; which we can derail at will; pain locks us into being as-it-is.
So, in this, isn’t there a quality of pain that is a gift?
You see, the answer to this question, our answer, whatever that might mean….
It’s important to consider this question. It is at the heart of any attempt to reestablish contact with life and its processes. Our refusal to face this question fuels our striving after salvation and exception which in turn feeds the maws of death-dealing we have established to appease the terrifying god we personify. This god who we wish, hope after fruitless hope, will take us out of life’s apparent struggles.
It takes the Enormity of our Predicament; the ways in which it has become increasingly self-evident that the price we pay; and insist the world pays for this bargain; have brought us face to face with this question in a way we cannot so easily deflect.
So long as we can/could assume that we were on the side of “good” by refusing to face the question of pain; we remained blind to its consequences. It is still a race between an increasing momentum of consequences and our lagging awareness of what is at stake.
The self-fulfilling mechanism of our alienation; our insistence that we need saving; is a powerful force that blocks us from looking squarely at the question of pain.
Beautiful piece. I managed to concentrate on it in spite of the coup being carried out.
That was very beautiful. The authenticity and actuality of the chapter, the feeling of rowing among whales, very vivid. Love it.
Also, there were many great insights in that afterword. The unapologetic quality of authenticity or vivacity (etc, as you say, depending). The link from that to improvisation. The roots of disappointment and its significance. And of course pain as the way in and out, depending on what name we give vivacity, etc. Very enjoyable. Thanks.