I used to think how sad, maybe even how pathetic, our small lives, so many lives in houses or apartments, with children or not, each morning everyone putting on clothes, working their jobs, buying their food. That everyone loved their days, or didn’t and kept on anyway seemed a trick, an ambush—a newsreel might have called it the “promise of progress,” when really such living looped like a trolley circling a town, the tracks slick with wear. Even before any real sense of daily routine kicked into motion, most forms of habit felt like a trap. Everyone’s life precious to them seemed to me a sort of defeat, a placation, the phrase itself a patronizing pat on the head.
Yet a day unhitched from the orderly currents of morning, noon, evening—how makeshift and slight that, too, would be.
In place of accepting a conventional day, or making one up on my very own terms, what did I want? Meaning imparted from somewhere on high, say a steep, backlit cliff with a windy voice that led to an edge where I’d stand and face off with the queasiness?
All those lives, self-powered, like emergency generators—I couldn’t imagine the vast number of them—or rather, I could imagine too well. I got the gist, I’d traveled and learned the variations, took on new habits as needed—in Warsaw, All Souls’ Day picnics in freezing graveyards with vodka and blood sausages; in Moscow, the rubles folded and slipped into documents at the border. But those variations only proved my point, returned me to the initial sensation: that the loop, circuit, routine was everywhere pulsing along, ongoing, unending, then ending.
I should say, too, the looping sensation was more a set of suspicions, a nagging or twinge, than an articulated fear, and that it broke through only briefly, but sharply, like a headache after an icy drink. It’s nearly impossible to conjure up now for more than a second the circumstances leading to this particular displacement. What I’ve gathered up here sounds harsher than I mean to convey, for my life at the time wasn’t harsh-feeling as much as wobbly, the contours uncertain, the hours either baggy and irregular, or taut with desire.
All this returned recently when, stopped at an intersection, I saw a woman leaving a dentist’s office en route to her car. She dug around in her bag and pulled out her keys. She’ll head home, park, switch on a light as she enters the hallway, I thought. The rattling keys, a hall light switched on—that’s all it took. Just knowing that she (like anyone) moved through a day with practiced gestures (washing dishes, snapping sheets just out of a dryer—or letting everything encrust or wrinkle) led to the old onrush of a world full of others’ inscrutable days unfurling right there on the street—all the tea-wallahs filling glasses on trays, somewhere the bite of warm camel milk, hickory wood falling in curls from a carpenter’s plane in Vermont, markets in Istanbul, bighorn sheep, manta rays, cities, doomed glaciers—every hidden or known subject under study, or in ruins, all vastly worthy, and there, alongside the rush of human endeavors and moments, my own glancing portion. My own brief day.
Now when I watch people (through binoculars, as is my habit when I look up from my work and need a break) it’s exactly the boundedness of their lives, the precise sizing down that moves me. How absorbed and unprotected they are. Lavishing attention comes easily then: across a few backyards and a street, there’s the deep drag he takes on his cigarette, how he flicks the ash deftly (a lifelong smoker), scratches his ear, and draws down the last bit. Stubs the butt in the flowerpot. Hikes his pants up. Opens the door and stops for a final look at the frame, which, running his thumb along, he confirms needs fixing (sanding, from the way he’s plucking the wood), a job I imagine he adds to the list-in-the-head … and then the door closes on my tableau, compact enough to slip into a pocket—though there’s always more to be had, swing the lenses in any direction: garbage man spitting into the truck, wandering dog sniffing just-planted tree. Binoculars make my subjects palm-sized, full of intention, and set in motion by an ordering force.
Then, of course, there are my own small moments, fixed in their own tondos of light, all the common stuff touched in the course of a day—each door’s glass knob, cool even in summer; my grandmother’s wooden spoons worn smooth as bone by decades of stirring. My people, my loves. All the fierce tethers to all the fierce moments—they matter, to the pinpoint I’ve become. That’s the dizzying thing—how the vastness of my singular life does not set me faceless in the ranks of billions, except that it does. I am perfectly speck-like. My days resemble the days of others. That a small portion no longer roils with puniness but is measured in units of transience, and that I take up my day, my sliver, despite—that’s fearsome.
About the phrase “In the beginning, God created heaven and earth,” a friend writes, “Depending on a subtle difference in pronunciation, signaling the presence or absence of the definite article, the construct could be different: be’resheet instead of ba’resheet—not ‘in the beginning’ but ‘in a beginning’ God created …”
Imagine each event or being tethered to its originating breath, each moment momentous unto itself, each microflash hot with insistence, finding the contours it alone wants. Surrounded with time, given its space and its very own immanence (the darkness over the face of the deep, gradations of morning pinking up), each beginning is equal in its drive to exist. As John Donne preached in his Sermon XXI in 1628, “All things that are, are equally removed from being nothing.” Thus, everything composed apart from absence, all creatures by way of simply existing, stand shoulder to shoulder in the eyes of the present. Or for Barbara McClintock, who so loved from the start of her work on DNA the many shapes of the smallest minds in all their manifestations, whose affection measured not parts to wholes, divided and dutiful in their contributions, but parts as wholes (“Every component of the organism is as much of an organism as every other part”), her feeling for the smallest functioning elements not a fussiness but a scope.
All systems have their principles, their signature handholds, paths for speeding or tarrying along, lines to speak, procedures to follow, and when in good order, the invitation of one is answered by another. The reliance of one upon its partners isn’t a leaning-on due to weakness, but a cache of singular minds, territories, instincts maintaining a whole, and so well convened they appear to be one. From every angle and everywhere. As when in the warm waters of the South Pacific, the giant clam (up to four feet across and weighing as much as five hundred pounds) and the algae, zooxanthellae, make together an extravagance of efficiency, a concision of means. Open to light, reddening on the lip of the clam, the zooxanthellae take in sun, thresh it, and offer a harvest of sugars and protein to their host (though host isn’t right—since one isn’t homebound and the other visiting), while in return (or not in return but more as operations go) the clam protects the delicate algae, locks the gates, darkens the field in the presence of predators.
Or consider the work of carpenter bees, their holes as exact as those made by a drill, that rote machine whose effect we call perfect. The holes we have here on our new back porch, bitten bright and still ragged, were made overnight by patient chewing. The wood’s unseasoned, new-grass green, and so young I could press a fingernail in, or leave tooth marks of my own, which, meant for no purpose, wouldn’t be in the least bit beautiful. Like any unselfconscious creation, these holes bear the mark of a maker upon them, an order and balance, their edges dusted with neat, rolled specks which soon, all the soft-bellied entries and exits will burnish entirely away. A few inches in, the path takes a sharp right turn and there the queen builds separate chambers for her young and stocks each pantry with a fat ball of pollen. The holes are precisely centered in each beam, not too close to an edge or joist. How uniformly cool it must be in those rooms. How well the young sleep and grow strong in dark, cool, quiet conditions—at least that’s been my experience.
I saw a video recently about a guy who casts ant colony “sculptures” by pouring molten aluminum into their nests. As the long tongue of hot metal is tipped from a bucket into the hole, the mound darkens, steams, and sinks a little under the searing, and all the roads and tunnels fill up. When everything cools and hardens he digs the nest out, scrapes off the ash and dirt, and sprays it all clean with a hose. The nests are up to two feet in length and branch off like any living system designed to circulate life, whose handiwork serves a greater good. Highways and storage rooms, fungi farms, livestock aphids, nurseries, resting spots for tired workers, loom studios (none of this is fanciful, I’ve used not a single metaphor here)—all incinerated. He sells the Vesuvian sculptures for hundreds of dollars (all inquiries must be made privately). “Intricate!” “Amazing!” say his satisfied customers. (One comment reads: “I run a home daycare and we are currently doing a unit on ants. Your video … is great for a visual while explaining ant ‘cities’ to the children. They thought it was so cool they want to watch it again and again. A three-year-old did ask me what happened to the ants. I told him they packed up and moved away!”)
If the word sculpture here requires even a little dissembling, and the appreciation of form a severing of means from ends, I imagine one would begin with the usual tactics, and from a lordly position: Ants are the most plentiful species on earth, or more simply still: They’re only ants. And fire ants at that. Whom no one likes. (Yes, whom—not which, not things—and to push further still, let’s call the grammatical case the direct indispensable to help snap ant lives back into focus, or, according to the rules of grammar, into the subject position.)
It’s a minor corrective, I know. Fussy-sounding and secondary to concerns about swarming and stinging, which centralize us. Though left to their work, fire ants will aerate miles of soil, control boll weevils, corn worms, and sugarcane borers, eat fleas, ticks, termites, mosquitoes, and scorpions.
If beauty’s understood as a form of order, its elements perfectly self-regulating, then an orderly day is not a worn circuit, or rote, but a haven and a habitat. And the work of those matched to their tasks, shifting as one, like flocks in a thermal or schools in a river, like beings dedicated to wind, hunger, scent, laws entirely their own—that work, if beheld, fires into awe—a sudden erasure of self, an internal, unbidden stillness.
Now though, more and more, the most basic systems are identified first by way of their ruin. One comes to know them only briefly in their magnificence, before news of their loss takes up its platform, then overtakes the conversation—and rightly, since the conversation is finally urgent.
The snowshoe hare, brimming with muscle, and cunning, and flight, once lived emplaced in an elegant system.
Stay with me now. I’ll slow it way down.
We’re in Glacier National Park in Montana. As soon as the days begin to shorten, the hare’s meadow-brown fur, triggered by changes in the length of daylight, begins to whiten. Linger exactly here, in this moment, so the present won’t grow suddenly steep, break off, and slide under. It’s autumn. A hare’s exchanging one coat for another, brightening as the afternoon dims. The hare’s moving like snow, its back is a soft, blowing drift as it runs. When still, the hare is a snow-covered rock, white fur prickling like early frost.
Now having been with, having seen even briefly, knowing something of the hare in its rightness, we can shift.
As we must, so we can go on.
As a result of rising temperatures, the snows are coming much later these days and the hare, leashed to the light’s firm hand, is exposed too soon, its whiteness loud, a wrong dialect in a hostile town making it vulnerable and thus, overhunted—a situation that affects the lynx as well, whose primary prey is the hare. Pushed to move to higher ground but without new corridors for migration (the land too dense with fast-growing pines, which easily adapt to warmth) the lynx are vanishing, too.
This isn’t news to those who study the behaviors of hare and lynx, or the lives of meadows and languages of trees, but hearing about it for the first time?—how quickly a vast and functioning system is summed up. The once-perfect latitudes, seasons, and cycles, the animal tasks and animal knowing—I had to work hard to compass the interdependencies, take in all the microlinks in the food chain. Food chain: what an ugly phrase, one that hardly expresses the sensitivities involved, the stalking and crouching and held breath all around, chain showing none of the fine calibrations of hares taken down in rightful ways, weakened by age or cleanly startled—or, hares not giving up but deftly escaping, the balances of luck, stamina, circumstance, the whole range of live possibilities that make up the health of a system abiding.
And in this way, too, nest hardly speaks to the scope of ant cities, ant wainwrights and coopers, nannies and farmers, and (stay for a moment underground now) neither do roots reveal the conversations of meadows, the plans worked out for distributing water, the rhizomatics by which needs are met and decisions made in times of want. And fire (whose heart is regenerative, whose scorching releases seeds buried deep in the vaults of cones) looks merely destructive unless cycles are tracked in their proper time and from the distance of centuries.
How late we are in coming to full-on views of once-perfect systems, arrangements now so chafed by ruin they’re barely readable anymore. How to hold them—quickly, I mean, we can’t linger too long, there’s much work to do—when cascades of fresh bad news daily overrun their brilliance.
It’s work to hold, to come to love the parts and particulars of a meadow, nest, day. Slow work. Investment—not “money down” but the older form, “the act of dressing to encounter the holy.” It’s work to track a field of white moving up a hare’s back—and to see, in turn, how the lengthening dark lends to snow its animal form. Work to still the parts of a day, to keep the parts close as they welter and dim. Are overcast or siphoned away. Work to call order back into sight, even as it’s root-cut, or blown. Dismantled. Confounded. Torn.
To understand ruin, know first what it is that’s being ruined. And here it’s exactly the minutiae that matter: piles of washed and folded sheets, neat stacks of ant-cut twigs. Stay with them. All the balances and adaptations that urge themselves forth or retract in disguise, or swarm, or concentrate. That make up a day. Sheering and shorn, burnt and cinched-in—but not wholly gone. Those delicacies. Those radiant systems. Hold them.