David has informed me that rattlesnakes have been spotted hereabouts so now I seem to anticipate reptilian shapes flickering at the edge of my vision. I have been unable to ascertain whether they rattle before or after they strike, but will hope that it is before. Funny that the sound of a child’s toy should be a portent of doom.
Patrick spent the morning here with us in an endless and unsuccessful search for a tiny wild orchid called Ladies’ Tresses, which he says blooms only around the U.S./Canadian border. He has a small botany book, which he now carries everywhere, and fieldglasses for the birds. We descended the bank through the damp, leafy places where the plant should have existed, but found absolutely none, only a great deal of fireweed. David says the Americans probably stole every example. I had my umbrella with me though the sun was shining. I swung it through the undergrowth in front of me to flush out rattlers, but we found none of those either.
Patrick said only six words to me all day, in the form of a question: “Why have you brought your umbrella?”
He didn’t stay to hear my answer but rushed on ahead, eager to get to the whirlpool.
It is becoming more and more difficult. How much of this am I imagining and how much is real? Does he intentionally make metaphoric reference to his own behaviour… looking for Ladies’ Tresses? I am sure, or, at least I think I am sure, that he still watches me. I have seen the glimmer of his fieldglasses in the forest, and once I glimpsed his tweed jacket through the leaves. Then, when he’s here we behave with such indifference towards each other. And David carrying on about the war as if nothing were happening. Nothing is happening.
And yet… and yet, I feel the power of his observation.
I think of “Andrea del Sarto.” Why did Browning put the cousin’s whistle at the end of the poem? Perhaps it should have been there throughout. Every time I read the poem I hear the sound of it from the beginning; a subtle invitation – come out from behind your walls into the scenery. Let the view change around you… forever. And Andrea:
“the weak-eyed bat no sun should tempt
Out of the grange whose four walls make his world.”
Andrea imagining heaven as “Four great walls in the New Jerusalem.”
Earlier this evening, just before dark, I walked out into the night air, over to the edge of the bank. Quarter moon over the whirlpool. Quite abruptly, just at the moment when it’s not quite night, the sky opened, exposed its black distances. Everything around me became unsurveyed… unsurveyable.
Now, searching for a voice other than the dark, I am back in the tent reading. Here the coal-oil lamp on the table turns the canvas yellow-orange and deepens the odd bits of colour on the furniture.
In this light I am reading Browning. Pulling in around Browning, trying to avoid the pull of the open dark, the limitlessness of the stars over the whirlpool.
Reading Browning. Learning Patrick.
“Love’s corpse lies quiet therefore
Only love’s ghost plays truant
And warns us how in wholesome awe
Durable masonry; that’s wherefore
I weave but trellis-work pursuant
– Life, to law”
Part of me, however, still listens to the night; not to the small intimate sounds, scratching and rustling near the tent, but to the larger experiences: the low, constant sigh of the whirlpool, the gentle, steady breeze at the top of the pines.
I am listening and reading, my attention shifting from Browning to the outdoors, to a glimmer of Patrick, back to Browning, And once, after I had read the lines:
“The solid, not the fragile
Tempts the rain and hail and thunder”
I was certain that I could hear the creaking of a thousand stars as they changed position in that dark, unfathomable sky.
