when writing, even while dreaming, mind seeks ceaselessly. yet, when like wind-borne seeds meanings arrive, they do so silently, propelled by energies vagrant and invisible.
awakening, sitting up, closing the eyes, i behold seeds of words, phrases, sentences swirling about like galaxies of snow on the forehead. to capture them, i convene quiet ingatherings, calm nests of consciousness to lure these fleet potencies homeward. paradoxically, this often marks the beginning of a long and silent voyage, for these fugitive meaning bearers, streaking the darkness radiantly, often lure me across strange and uncharted seas of thought, until they arrive again, against a backdrop of warm, shoreless awareness, with all its powers of unitive reception.
for i have learned that in writing, i must become a cove: open, receptive, wondrously vacuous, a womb of possibilities open to the sea. within the cove’s embrace lies a body of something like water. when breath stills, the water becomes a perfect mirror. everything turns towards the mirror’s reflective surface. half the cove reflects all the mountain. at night, the cove likes the moon over her. the cove is devoted to listening. what is said over there is heard over here. when quiet, i can hear her dreaming. i can hear the stream within her dream … whispering.
it seems eons before these swirling mists and clouds condense, coalescing into torrent. for months i had been dreaming, somewhat moonily, about the debris flow and the virus: of the worlds vanishing in their wakes. i had been contemplating how minds more capacious than my own have responded to loss. the warning of poet czeslaw milosz kept reverberating: what we see before us, here and now, the innocent existence of our world, is not guaranteed, and when our worlds vanish, we humans attempt to rebuild new ones from their remnants.
In the wake of WW II, Milosz attempted to restore the environment he’d burrowed into during his student years in Vilna. The poem is “Bells in Winter.” Its words rebuild a hidden away street, Literary Lane, just opposite the university. A bookstore selling not books but unbound sheaves of paper hundreds of years old, piled high. Manuscripts handwritten in Latin, in Cryllic script, or in Hebrew letters. The graying beard and black caftan of the store’s owner. Down the street, the abode of a famous poet who penned a tale of a princess. The biting frost of winter mornings. The pealing of bells. Many bells. From the bell tower over St. John’s. Over the Bernadines’. Over the Cathedral. At the Missionaries’. And Saint George’s. Over the Dominicans. And Saint Nicholas. Over Saint Jacob’s. Over Saint Casimir’s. The pealing of many many bells, “as if the hands pulling the ropes were building some huge edifice over the city.”
Milosz recreates the simple room he rented on Literary Lane: its low ceiling, its bay window, its oaken bed. He recalls the warmth of the room in winter, warm because of the old servant woman, Lisabeth, who hauled logs from the hallway to feed the stove’s devouring flames. He restores all that perished in what was yet to come. He resurrects Lisabeth’s life, so that, wrapped in a cape of literature, she can eternally walk to morning mass.
Archaeologist Marija Gimbutas was a friend of Milosz. She too lived in Vilna, she told me. She had just gifted me with a hoary oaken statue of Saint Casimir, Lithuania’s patron saint. She had rescued the statue from St. Casimir’s when warring troops were sacking the churches, after all the street signs had disappeared. Next, for the very last time, she brought baskets of food to the Jews she had been hiding away in the forest. Then, in the middle of night, in secret, with no other light nor guide than faith, she fled her homeland, downriver, secreted away to safety on the sure current.
After the war, like Milosz, Marija reconstructed vanished worlds. As an archaeologist digging up remnants of prehistoric civilizations that had left behind what she saw as goddess statues, she reconstructed a narrative of Old Europe: of gentle, egalitarian prehistoric peoples predating the Yamnaya, those first horse warriors who stormed out of Central Asia as far as Ireland and India, leaving in their wake not goddess statues but battle axes, shattered skulls, and their own warrior DNA implanted in the yielding members of bloodied populaces.
Jamie de Angulo, whom Ezra Pound considered to be America’s Ovid, reconstructed the worlds he saw vanishing. He realized what his own country, Spain, and then the U.S. had visited upon West Coast tribes. He witnessed them withering into mere ghosts of themselves: their longstanding cultures, their languages languishing: pushed aside for gold and land. And so, hanging out with shamans, he devoted his energies to preserving the myths and languages and songs of these tribes. Their Old Ways of knowing nature and spirit.
The way he found medicine was by wandering, lost, in wilderness. I paraphrase: There is somewhere in the woods, some individual animal, some one particular deer, a certain locust, or weasel, some one individual denizen of the wilds with a particularly strong dose of power to her credit, and she is the one being whose acquaintance you must make and whose friendship you must acquire, cultivate, and keep. Go into the woods and find her. Seek her out in the lonely places, about the springs. Call to her. Go again. Starve yourself, and go again. Call to her. Sing her song. Try this song, try that song. Maybe she used to be somebody else’s protector, somebody who died, and now she hears that song and she says, “That’s my brother’s song … “
after much of montecito disappeared, many of the community’s church bells fell silent. after some time, the virus appeared. having lost our homes in the debris flow, many of us were still wandering. drawn to my old surfing and swimming grounds, fernald point and its placid cove, i found these feeling like a home away from home.
yesterday, when as usual i arrived before dawn for my daily swim, i spotted a fellow i had seen there often in the early light, standing on the point, still amid a wash of pebbles deposited by storm and tide.
“what are you searching for?”
“glass.” he fished around in his pouch, his palm soon unfolding to display his favorite smooth blue-green dream.
i had been dreaming also, drawn to the point and unreasonably emotional about it, as if fernald point held my very life. i was drawn even more strongly to the cove: the mirroring water, the frail, ribbon-like waves, so womb and tomb-like in their undulant stillness.
and so i too began collecting little shards of glass, sharp edges polished smooth by soft, ceaseless caresses of sea and sand, and giving my little treasures over to other collectors i chanced upon. and it was only then that it happened. it was only then i beheld what had been attempting to speak to me: among the pebbles and cobblestones washed downstream from the canyons, i noticed shards of terracotta, some formed into minuscule dragon-like creatures, some perfectly rounded, like beads adorning alabaster necks, some perfectly heart shaped, immaculately formed and ocean washed.
and it is then i realized: the creek emptying into the sea just up the coast from the point and cove is the streaming presence that for forty years, rushing down-canyon, had whispered me to sleep each night, as if eternally attentive to my spiritual needs as i lay abed, drifting into dream.
i realized these shards of terracotta could certainly be the remnants of the little cottage’s roof tiles.
around the point — in the cove, where driftwood, pebbles, and larger stones are deposited by the very highest of tides and most mountainous of swells, settling ashore in high piles — larger chunks of that reddish old-spanish-days roof tiling had come to rest, gazing ever out over the cove and the seas beyond.
like miniature easter island megaliths, these tiles bear mute witness: stoic in all their savagely chiseled beauty. their concavities, though now chipped, remain: designed to harbor the souls beneath them from sun and storm, like the curved blue of the sheltering sky.