On Looking

Now, more than hitherto, there occurs shocks, surges, crossings, falls and almost scrambles, creating thus a different space, a space scattered and unknown, space enclosing spaces, superimposed, inserted, polyphonic perspectives.

And even as I am built anew by fear these days, here, in Baltimore, I am also, right now, assembled by the brisk feel of New England, and fall, and my childhood there. That peace. Those biting blue skies. The elements mingle, brick by brick (though the sensation is softer and welling) and add up to this moment, a seep and twining that constitute now. Of course, this moment has little to do with simple construction, simple addition. But it’s hard not to think in these terms.

Events crosshatch: the air this afternoon is cleanly scented, still unstark, and in it, among sheering leaves, among goldfinches lifting and scalloping air, a sniper—in a patch of woods, gas station, mall parking lot—is hiding, aiming and shooting.

Other things, too, are stacking up today: campaigns for Maryland’s governor, though few of us now seem to notice, so frightened are we to pump gas, to let the children walk to school. Candidates must wrest control of voter attention, the paper says. “Rest” I say to my son, who learned from other kindergartners there’s a bad person out there shooting, my son who’s going to take it easy this afternoon, play Crazy 8’s, maybe a little chess, inside.

Inside such perfect weather, an investigation is mounting. State Mounties are out on their horses, horses such as the angry men mounted this evening as they rode out of De Smet, Dakota Territories, to a riot at Stebbins camp, deep in Montana, 1878, I read to my son as he went uneasily to bed. As the Ingalls family rested uneasily By the Shores of Silver Lake, in the perpetual now that is book time. The children tucked in, the lake serene, the riot ongoing in moonlight, on a night just like this, I point out the window and up, to where “the great round moon hung in the sky and its radiance poured over a silvery world. Far, far away in every direction stretched motionless flatness, softly shining as if it were made of soft light.” The moon outside Joseph’s window. The very moon that swallowed both that writer’s fear, and mine.

These days, late afternoons in our small living room, a form unfurls and spreads its weave—music building and cloaking, uncloaking and reaching. The fugue my husband is working on makes available to light, and with a light of its own brings forth a moment: amber with its captured specks, bubbles of breath and veering planes. And across the country, now, right now, in that other Washington, where it’s a still-bright two in the afternoon, there’s a search on for bullets a suspect once fired into a stand of trees. In a quiet neighborhood, ATF agents saw down stumps and haul them away in trucks as evidence.

This time of year, when the sky darkens early and clouds stack up in thick, western swells, I see therein a mountain range I once knew. (The sniper, we will come to learn, had a mount for his gun in the trunk of his car: the trunk of his car a small terrain of roughened upholstery, the gun at rest there, those beveled edges along the muzzle, the boredom of waiting, his fingernails scraping up curls of grime, flicking them off. Sun in a beam through the punched-out lock reaching a summit, casting its curves.)

When the sky darkens and clouds rise like a near mountain range, my neighborhood plunges into a valley, makes of itself one of the small, snug towns I loved as a child in New England. I’d like you to believe, as I wanted to believe, that I actually “lived as a child in New England,” for I felt such familiarity when visiting, as if I’d found a home I hadn’t known I’d lost—in Great Barrington, East Hardwick, at our friends’ small farm in Clarkesville, New Hampshire, way up near the Canadian border.

What it is—is what else it is. Not just that this afternoon’s thick, boulder-clouds resemble the mountains I loved as a child, but that the one scene collapses in on the other, time reworks and folds together. And I live in both places.

What it is—is what else it is. For this reason I am often startled by the simplest gestures of things: a leaf scratching along sideways moves as a crab does, so much so that the animal’s likeness comes powerfully in, and the shock of seeing a crab on the sidewalk trumps reason. And though I tell myself “it’s fall; leaves dry, scratch and blow, not crabs,” I’m jittery walking down the street—not frightened exactly, I can’t say afraid—but always the scene I’m in breaks open and floods. The stuff of an elsewhere comes in, as when, among the dried, speckled shells of crabs this summer, a snowball rolled oceanward before returning itself to a clump of sea-foam. The flap of an awning blows in wind—and it’s a low-flying bird’s wing. The dark underside of a mushroom’s gills, grown tiered and up-curved after rain, makes a tiny Sydney Opera House. Right there, hillside of the reservoir. Australia, just a few blocks from home.

I mean to say, too, that it’s not all jittery, these exchanges. I remember seeing, at my uncle’s house, a cat’s brain, preserved, and how the brain’s topography slid into more: a crush of continents ribboning up, river-valleys gone to inclines, post-glacial, scoured and jarred. And how standing in front of the pen-and-ink drawings of neurons, those cells were stretching, wavering blooms, tributaries, sidewalk cracks.

When I am clear enough to catch it, it’s the motion of Bach’s Prelude XIV, the sense of it-all-going-on-at-once, one voice seeding always the next swell, unending, the swell out-spinning, the strands of sound buoyant, a weave tightened and cinched like the lip of a purse until the last tilt, and the pucker of folds lets the gold go.

I came across this a while ago: “In music the distance and the nearness of space, the limitless and the limited are all together in one gentle unity that is a comfort and a benefaction to the soul.”

And what in the soft air, the chalk-blue of the blue spruce, the sky orange and pink just the other morning as I took the garbage out—what ferried me past my fear? What brought me instead to my old summer job as a coffee vendor, lower Manhattan, awake before dawn on Avenue C, the junkies cooled off, the Bowery wide and dank and mine to share with the bakery trucks, the newspaper trucks, just a few of us going out, a few coming home. Here’s the blue dawn air settling over the cart I readied at my corner in front of Trinity Church, at Wall Street and Broadway—here now, in October, at six a.m., and fifteen years later.

What about this, from Emerson’s journal: “The universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever, as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms—the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes, the upheaving principle of life everywhere incipient, in the very rock aping organized forms. Not a form so grotesque, so savage, nor so beautiful but is an expression of some property inherent in man the observer, an occult relation between the very scorpions and man. I feel the centipede in me, cayman, carp, eagle and fox. I am moved by strange sympathies.”

Strange, yes, this sympathy, clearing a space, preparing a ground for meetings to occur—but fragile, too. Terribly fragile. So why, why, I have been wondering, did my friend, standing at the shore one night this summer, watching the white breakers arc, curl and fall—why did she say, even as the chill spray hit our faces and we shivered in relief from the day’s heat, how could she say “it’s just like a movie”? And pull us from the evening damp, the woody, splintered boardwalk, sweet ache of leaning on the chest-high railing, rumble of the arcade fading, folding in and out of wind. Why break the hum and echo of the moment we were in? Why leave the moment just then forming, moment that would, some morning, some evening, return to her a quality of light or air or scent and displace the sadness she might be feeling?

I’ve never been able to conjure, in winter, summer’s heat. I cannot, by will, regard the snow into a fringe of green. So while I believe the sniper will be caught, I cannot summon that peace, nor compose a time without this pulse of fear. I only know fear comes to me. And also peace.

On October 24th, hours before dawn, the sniper is caught, with an accomplice, sleeping at a rest-stop near Myersville, MD. It’s been twenty-five days now since the rampage began. Eleven people are dead. And though the snipers are locked far from us now, a world away—three miles away, just downtown, in hyperbolized space (Supermax, the sine qua non of desolation)—here they still are, large in their absence, and circling. Fall, like an axis, collected them in, spooled all the fear up.

Fall also spun around itself translucing yellows and flaming red stems. Last flocks lifting whole into trees for a rest, leafing back the empty spots, and late afternoons, a neighbor’s carrier pigeons let out for a spin, angling like a single wing, an arm crooked up to block the glare. Thick pumpkins. White mums. Fall gathered these in.

And fall gathered, too, on this afternoon, my husband working up Prelude XIV; my son and his friends dropping split, rotting walnuts, thunk, in tin pails; the blade of air sharpening as the temperature falls; box elder bugs swarming the shed’s southern wall—and everything, everything else uncountable, unaccountably part of, that constitutes now. And all this I call fall, I call late afternoon, will come back, will come hauling its wedge of cold fear, its unbidden relief, oh who can know which, some long summer hour when lines of road tar loosen in heat, a boy sits idly peeling a stick, and wood wasps drill slow, perfect circles in eaves.