A week and a few days after Wally died, my friend Michael and I stood on the shore at Hatch’s Harbor, which is just where Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic intersect in a roiling line of watery activity called the Race. At Hatch’s Harbor the sky always seems enormous, the horizontals of dune and marsh and shoreline particularly vast and dazzling. It is especially pristine because the place isn’t easy to reach, accessible as it is only after a long walk through a fire road in the dunes, along a dike built across a huge stretch of marsh, and then round the sandy tideflats skirting a lighthouse whose foghorn tends to sound in all weathers, even the brightest sunlight. The once-manned house is operated by remote control now, the switch apparently off in Connecticut someplace.
In the water that afternoon I saw first one oddly shaped dark form, a sort of mound a few feet from the foaming edge line. It was a seal in the shallow surf, floating on his or her side, eyeing us curiously. My two dogs were with us; I think seals seem to sense them as distant but unlikely cousins, and want to study them. In a moment the watcher submerged, and then rose again a few yards away, a wet black marble bust, the perfectly erect head held with marked dignity and poise. It was joined shortly by another pair of heads. And then another pair, and then another rolling on her side, enjoying the wave of her body and the quick flip of tail. And then there were dozens of watchers, looking toward us with as much curiosity and surprise as we brought to our study of them. The alien world of the water might as well have been, for me, the other world of the spirit; I felt I was looking into the realm of the dead, which I could not enter or know very much about. I thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “At the Fishhouses,” in which she describes the seawater of the Nova Scotian coast as
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals…
Miss Bishop’s marine creatures endure what no other mortals can; they seem more like spirits than living things. This other world was both clear and impenetrable, visible and unknowable. Although dozens of likable faces looked back at me, any one of which might almost have been his.
So began a chain of encounters with seals.
Seals are coastal creatures, citizens of two elements. Though most at ease in the water—where gravity’s unmoored and their bodies arc and tumble freely, somersaulting and floating on their sides, supported by the movement of just one flipper, the flick of a tail—they bring some of that undulance with them to land, on the rare occasions when one sees them out in the winter sun.
I have always associated seals with Wally, through a chain of private associations with the sort of complexity and irrationality that characterizes the way a poetic image twists together a clutch of meanings, fibers spun into a single, complex yarn, various in texture, glinting with strands of separate and intermingling color. Something in the handsome cast of his head, the depth and clarity of his brown eyes. f of Delibes, a ravishing duet from Lakmé called “Dôme Epais.” This aria is an invitation—one woman inviting another to stroll along an Indian river and pick jasmine—and it is pure fluidity, the unmistakable text of a kind of joy, the pleasure of swimming, of free movement, of floating in an untroubled suspension. Wally loved that music, and I imagine that in part this was because he was not, in his body, a comfortable swimmer, though he longed to be; in his spirit was a latent seal.
Seals bear a noticeable kinship to dogs, which Wally loved, and with which he felt a deep and immediate connection. “You like dogs,” a tea-leaf reader in a Boston tearoom once told him, “and dogs like you.”
I’ve just read an Inuit tale, which a friend has sent me, the story of a boy who left his parents behind to live with the seals, and in their camps at the bottom of the sea (where they gather around their fires!) heard their tales of ancient days and times to come.
And I’ve been thinking of Bishop’s seal, who floats, in her poem, in an element like knowledge, and likes to listen to her renditions of Baptist hymns.
And then there’s the notion of the seal as merman, of the creature which embodies the two worlds, unlike us, who live firmly in one medium, despite our brief visits to the other. To be of the coast, a mer-being, is to partake of the liminal, that watery zone of possibility where one thing becomes another, where the rules of one world are suspended as we enter into the next. The coast is the shifting zone of change and transformation. A coast is not a line really but a borderland, site of a continual conversation between elements which transforms both.
Movements between the worlds are limited, and often extraordinary. This is Ludovico Guicciardini, writing in Description of all the Lowlands, a seventeenth-century guide to Holland:
They also claim that, around the year 1526, a merman was taken in the Frisian sea, formed in every way like the rest of us; they say that he had a beard, hair on his head and other hairs that we have, but quite setulose (that is, resembling the bristles of a pig), and harsh, and that they accustomed him to eating bread and other ordinary foods; they say that in the beginning the man was very wild, but that later he became gentle, though not totally tame, and he was mute. He lived for several years and finally, having once escaped the same illness, died of the plague in the year 1531.
Travelers between worlds are mute; they cannot tell us what they know. The language of the other element is untranslatable, though here it seems that, accustomed to solid ground, the mer-creature is also susceptible to its epidemics.
The wounded seal is young and startlingly silvery in the February sun. Its injury is a small bloody line along the tip of one side of the graceful little tail, as if perhaps it’s been bitten; it doesn’t look terribly serious, but of course I don’t know how to read their pain, their expressions. He’s alone on the shore, a fact which in itself doesn’t seem to bode well. Why is he no longer part of the group? When I’ve seen them in the water or, once, in a sunning herd on the edge of the shore, they seemed happily grouped, like a pack of dogs. Do they abandon the injured or dying, perhaps to divorce themselves from the smell of blood that marks an animal as prey? I’ve heard that sharks come in, this time of year, to feed on the young ones.
Beached on a low rise of sand, maybe thirty or forty feet from an outgoing tidal river, he is not pleased to see us, particularly the two dogs who are full of curiosity and longing for a game. The seal raises his head and barks and makes a noise like a hiss of warning; my worry for it is mixed with wondering what those teeth are capable of. Though it seems, distinctly, young—the look on its face suggests that we’d say, were it human, this child is lost. I am busy restraining the dogs; their excited noises, and mine, rouse the seal to action. I fear that it’s incapable of much movement but it awkwardly flips and starts to scoot down the rise toward the water, picking up speed. At the edge of the tidal stream it looks back to us, then slips into the water. It’s no less awkward in three inches of water than it is on sand, but as soon as it reaches a foot-deep stretch of sea it’s gloriously fluid, like a heron taking to air; what was compromised and lurching is suddenly capable of splendid and effortless motion.
A body that was wounded sits stranded, incapacitated. Gone into another element, that same being takes gorgeous, ready flight. I am filled, entirely, with the image of my wounded lover leaping from his body, blossoming into some welcoming, other realm. Is it that I am in that porous state of grief, a heated psychic condition in which everything becomes metaphor?
Or does the world consent, in some fashion, to offer me the particular image which imagination requires?
Metaphor is a way of knowing the world, and no less a one than other sorts of ways of gaining knowledge. Years ago, in Boston, I used to go to weekly meetings of the American Spiritualist Church—something like a Quaker meeting for psychics, or potential ones. After some meditation and singing, people would spontaneously give one another the messages they received. Many of these were incredibly detailed, elaborate pieces of perception about other people involving problems, opportunities, advice. Often the messages involved communication from the dead, who would be described to the receiver in exacting detail. I was never much good as a fledgling psychic. Where others saw clear and detailed pictures, I would perceive just a rush of images, seldom organized into anything coherent. But every once in a while I would see a sort of scene, usually a cryptic one, and feel that it related to a particular person in the group. If I told that person my images, I would usually discover that they made sense to her, even if I didn’t understand them.
Could metaphoric thinking, the sort of work that artists do to apprehend their reality, be the same function of the mind, applied in a somewhat different way? My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor which describes or encapsulates a particular moment; it is a way of getting at the truth. And a way of paying attention, of reading the world.
My seal said, The wounded one’s gone free, gone swimming into what is familiar to no mortal.
The second seal bears no visible wound, but its face is full of distress and exhaustion; the eyes seem enormous, entirely dark, defenseless, world-weary. All of which might be construed as anthropomorphizing, but how could one look into that gaze without empathy? This seal, near the same stretch of beach, was up much higher, a week or two later, where the last stubborn snow held on in the shadow of a dune. Had an especially high tide brought it there? Did it pull itself further from the water, in order to rest on shore? This time the presence of me and my attendant animals wasn’t enough to rouse the creature to return to the water; we were simply enough to cause it more pain. The younger and more aggressive of my dogs, the buoyant golden, didn’t take long to figure out that the seal was feeble, a fine subject to pester. I got him on the leash, hauling him away, and resolved to call the Center for Coastal Studies as soon as I could get home to see if they couldn’t effect some kind of rescue. We rounded the dunes that line the wide marsh, headed back toward the dike and the fire road and home, far enough from the seal for him to be out of the adolescent dog’s mind, I thought. I let him off the leash.
But I’d miscalculated, expecting that his usual scattered attention would hold sway. The seal was too thrilling—too vulnerable—for him to forget so easily. He ran back, and I ran after him, to find him yelping madly at the creature, who was barking back and looking at me with a kind of bottomless exasperation. I leashed the dog and hauled him away again, this time keeping him on the lead until we were far away, into the marsh, a half-mile of dunes in between us and his prey.
Which did not turn out to be enough to stop him; when I made the mistake of letting him loose, he took off straight across the tops of the dunes, abandoning the curvy edge of the marsh for the shortest distance to further torment. I ran right across the dune-tops after him, my older and calmer black retriever loping behind me. When I thought I couldn’t run anymore—dry-mouthed, heart pounding—I made it to the last crest of dune to find him yelping and leaping perilously close to the seal’s head, both of them flashing teeth at one another.
This time the seal’s face seemed to convey a kind of helplessness and desolation that cut me to the core. I wanted a way to apologize for bringing this yapping annoyance, this petty grief, into what was already clearly a deeper pain, a silent and solitary occupation. I felt as if the seal were doing some grave work and I not only couldn’t help, I couldn’t help but harm; I couldn’t even keep my brutalizing pet from making things worse.
We left. Beau stayed on the leash at least a mile, till we were well in the middle of the dike that keeps the tide from washing away the modest ambitions of this town’s airport runways. Even then, released, he thought of running back, and began to, but I was given from someplace the sudden wise impulse to run in the other direction, toward home; making a game of it convinced Beau to run after me, instead of after his own wildness. It was a moment of choosing between loyalties to different aspects of himself, and he chose domestic partnership.
The woman who answered the phone at the Center for Coastal Studies said they’d had several reports of exhausted seals beaching themselves, resting, then riding out on the next high tide when they recovered. Exhausted from what? I asked. The work of finding food, she said. I didn’t know why then, more than any other time, they’d be weary. I described the seal’s look of distress and exhaustion, I said I feared it was ill. She said she didn’t know if there was anyone who could get out that day and look, but perhaps there was. She took my phone number, but they didn’t call.
So my attempts at helping didn’t seem to. The fact of the exhausted, incapable body—the fact of illness?—was intractable. I walked or ran on the wide expanse of marsh and dune, under that huge sky, around the single immovable fact.
The wide elemental landscape seemed to heighten and emphasize the lesson. Do what you can, nothing avails; it even seemed, with my panting, excited companion, that I’d made things worse.
The dead seal is an emblem of perfect repose; it lies like a yogi who’s left the body for a time, gone completely into himself, the beached body left behind in a state of great quietude, utter silence. The head’s turned to the right, so that one cheek rests against the sand. The small flippers lie peacefully at either side, and the perfectly straight spine ends in the symmetrical flourish of the tail. But there is no sense of movement or fluidity in the body, despite the grace and economy of its lines. Could it be one of the same seals I’ve seen? I think the first one was smaller, the second larger, but who can tell, really, since animation changes the scale of things. Does everything look smaller, in the stasis of death? The seals I’d seen had such purposeful fluidity of movement—beings of water, but of fire, too, the electric liquidity of the body as it turned and flipped, the sleek head raised, the eyes full of fear or defensiveness or exhaustion or—was it?—sorrow.
The eyes. Besides life, they are all that is missing from the body, and it is this absence that finally makes the form before me seem not at rest but dead. Gulls have taken the eyes away with their insistent beaks; their footprints are stamped all around the head like ancient letters on the clay tablets of Babylon. The law which they inscribe is that of hunger; what is soft, what is unguarded, what yields to them is what sustains those white engines, all wings and throat, which carry an appetite so large it obliterates all else. At first when I see that the eyes are gone, I think this is terrible and I imagine I will be unable to keep looking, but it isn’t like that. Having been with Wally at the end of his life and then with Wally’s body—form in repose—there is something new and unflinching in my looking at flesh. The spaces where the seal’s eyes were…sockets doesn’t seem the right word, these are little caverns of bone, reddened with a bit of blood, their depths not entirely visible. They enter deep into the sleek face, beneath the whiskers and the sweet upward curve of the mouth which one wants to read, in the living animal, as a smile. In death the mouth is relaxed, as blank and unreadable as the face of a sleeper.
Wally’s body was almost unspeakably beautiful to me. All the last months of his illness, his head had been turning to the left on his pillow in a way that looked uncomfortable or rigid; people were forever straightening him out. This seemed intended to make him comfortable, but perhaps had more to do with the helper’s need for a more familiar kind of alignment. In a moment, the muscles in his neck would pull again back to the left, and over time they became so stiff that it was difficult to bring his head back to center. This was something to do with whatever unnamed thing was happening in his brain; as happens after a stroke, the sides of his body behaved in different ways, not quite in concert. After he died, his head lolled to the right freely and loosely, as though the tendons could at last compensate for the time they’d been taut. There was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin. Which seemed polished, as it cooled, though not stiff; it was as if his body moved toward the condition of marble, but marble that’s been palmed and warmed, touched until it picks up something of human heat. The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.
It is strange now to write this—after eight weeks—with the kind of odd detachment that language can lend us. It’s as if I am watching myself—not in the plain light of film or the factual journalistic one of videotape, but as if through some kind of antique instrument, one which preserves the luster of the moment, the beauty of its peculiar light. Which seems to me now like the light of Dutch still life: rainy, northern, gentle, interior light that has itself a kind of resonance and presence. The instrument through which I look at that night (curious now that it seems instead like a deep winter afternoon, a snow-locked day at the very heart of winter, far inside the body of time) holds me at enough of a distance that I can describe what I see, that I can bear to look and to render, and yet it preserves the intimacy of those hours. That quality, their intimacy, is perhaps more firmly unassailable than any feeling I’ve ever known. I have never felt so far inside my life, and Wally’s.
A week after he died, a book displayed in a shop window stopped me in my tracks on the sidewalk. It was a volume of reproductions of Michelangelo, and on the cover was a nude man, a figure from the Sistine ceiling, his eyes closed, his fine malleable flesh a kind of ash gray, the gray-white of porcelain clay. Looming behind the surface of his skin, especially in his face, were other colors; a blue like the hinge of a mussel shell, a coppery green. I felt as if I were seeing Wally there, the dead body held up for us to contemplate. The body dead is, in a way, our world’s great secret. We see always flesh in motion, animated, disguised beneath its clothing and uniforms, its signals and armatures, its armor of codes and purposes. When do we look at the plain nude fact of the lifeless figure? Pure purposelessness—and thus, in the absence of the spirit, strangely and completely present. Never having a chance to see it, to assimilate our horror of it and go on to actually look, how would we know that the lifeless body is beautiful?
And empty. As empty as these spaces where a seal’s eyes were, which contain now a little March sunlight, and wind off the surface of the marshy harbor, and the fluid music of shifting bird-cries counterpointing the regular exhalation of the foghorn. Which seems to be warning us, this clear day, for no earthly reason.
Wally’s body was the vehicle through which I knew him. All other knowledges proceed through the body, after it, as it were. His was a wonderful vehicle, a beloved one, but it was not him. This fact seems so strange to me, so heavily laden, a deep vein of the incomprehensible. I find myself repeating it, trying to formulate it: we are not our bodies. The body is not me. I am my body, but I extend beyond it; just as my attention laps out, as my identity can pour out into the day. I have learned more about this, living beside water; as if the very fluidity of the landscape gets inside us, and encourages our own ability to slip our fixed bounds and feel ourselves as extended, multiple, various. Walking the shore, a warm day in March, toward that huge headland of cloud hung above and ahead, one pure white cliff above the dunelands, I become, momentarily, cloud, running dog, the raddled sonics of gull and wind and breaking wave. The wave seems a separate thing, yet it’s a product, an effect, of that which is waving; gone into my elements, I am equally fluid.
The plainness of the poor abandoned body became more plain to me when I encountered Wally’s ashes. The week after his death, while I anticipated receiving them, I imagined the relationship I might have to them. It had been terrible, to let the body be taken; had I not been so certain that it was not him I couldn’t have done it at all, I could never have allowed it. But even though it was only his body (only! as if that were some minor thing) I couldn’t allow him to go naked, without something of home, so I sent with him a quilt I’d made for him, years ago, a red and white geometry splashed with starlike red leaves. I am not much of a quilt-maker; my clumsy stitches were done in honor of my quilting grandmother. First I’d thought it would be a November birthday gift, then Christmas—and then eventually the thing spread across my lap and legs kept me warm all winter and into a Vermont spring while I worked on it. The stitches were rough but they were mine, every one of them. His body left wrapped in it. I didn’t watch. I took the dogs down to the harbor, beneath a great wheeling starry void, the air so cold and sharp and still it seemed it might crack.
The next day I had to sign papers at the funeral home, and I began to look at different sorts of urns and vessels (everything made for this purpose seemed obscene, or banal, or at least achingly and inappropriately bland). And I began to think what it would be like to receive the ashes, the commingled evidence of body and of fabric. Which did not come and did not come; the day before the service, a week from the night of his death, the funeral director told me the ashes might not arrive, that they were “somewhere between Brockton and the post office.” I wasn’t very understanding; I told him I wanted him to know how much it meant to me for the ashes to be at the ceremony. I told him I expected that, and after a hesitation he said he’d have them there. “You understand,” I said, “how much it means to me.” I wasn’t sure he did; my statement was an imperative, as though if I ordered him to recognize the magnitude of my need, he would.
In fact, the package arrived at the post office on Saturday morning, and the man from the funeral home arrived in my kitchen at ten-thirty, where a host of friends were getting ready for the day. I went by myself into the bedroom, the room where Wally died, with the plastic box and a kitchen knife to break the sealing tape. I sat with the thing on my lap, cut the binding, and slid the brown polymer coffer—coffin?—open. Sealed there in a plastic bag, strangely cold from its journey through the mails, were the remains of my darling: little pearled bits of gravel, almost like ground clay. There was a moment of piercing, utterly abject grief—this is what is left—and I swear it was followed, in less than a minute, by the clearest sense that what I held was inert, only a material, not even alive in the way that clay or soil is. If it was clear that Wally’s body wasn’t him, then it was even more clear that this sack of—what to call it? stone?—was even less so. The funeral directors have a word for this stuff, one of those deeply debased late twentieth-century words which do disservice to what they name, or rather what they avoid. “Cremains,” they call it. It makes me shudder, aesthetically, still, but I admit I understand better the impulse. They may want language to serve to distance us (or them) from the fact of the body’s burned residue, but the plain fact is that there is about the material itself a kind of distance, a lack of relation to what it was.
In the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest poem in the world, there is a heartbreaking declaration of a beloved’s death: “The companion Enkidu is clay.” A beautiful and bitter irony, since the poem which preserves the love of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is itself inscribed on tablets of clay. But clay has so much more soul and presence, such a quality of heaviness and sorrow to it, such a definite scent and taste. In that same poem, clay is described as the food of the unmourned dead; its heaviness and moisture perfectly evoke the humor of grief. But ashes have a kind of anonymity, a quality of no-life which feels, at last, vacant, without essence.
So I wrapped the stuff in a silk Japanese kerchief and placed it in the brass box I’d bought. Which I carried, that afternoon, to the service, and which I think only a few people noticed anyway, in the rush and swell of the speaking and the music, the spinning intensity of the day.
I had thought that the ashes would somehow be the service’s center of gravity; the place where everything deepened, opening into the darkness of grief. But it wasn’t like that; they seemed a sort of afterthought, an extra. When people asked, before that day, what I was going to do with them, I said I’d let them go eventually, scattering them, but in truth I couldn’t really imagine it, couldn’t think I’d ever really be ready. But once I encountered the lifeless sack of what once carried his life, I could think of dispersing them—thought, in fact, that perhaps then they’d be more alive, mingled again with water, soil, and stone, the rising yeasts of the world. They are going, this spring, out to Hatch’s Harbor, where my seal lies, a body resolving even as I write into thousands of things which are not the body—entering into gull and tide and the unseeable tiny lives inside the sand.
I lay my hand on the seal’s back. The spring sun has warmed the fur, which catches the light. I want to caress it; I want to lie down beside it. I am stopped by some nagging sense of what is clean and sanitary (voices from elementary school in my head, I guess, about touching dead animals), and perhaps more by some sense of propriety, of the dignity and unapproachability of the dead. It would not be right to pretend we could approach their bodies, that we could hold them. I held Wally’s body for a long time, and I could feel as I did, as I let my hands know him for the last time, that the body was moving away from me, sinking into itself. Perhaps that is one thing the soul is: our outward attention, the energy and force in us that leaps out of the self, almost literally, into the life of the world. The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body’s earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.
Without spirit, the body closes back into itself like an old piece of furniture, an armoire whose ancient wood is still fragrant, resinous, whose whorled grains and steady sleep refer back to the living tree. The cabinet is an elegy to the tree from which it arose, the body a brief unkeepable elegy to the quick and shining self.
Is the body a shell?
A few days ago, on the dogs’ morning walk along the harbor—when I am mostly not awake—I picked up a green crab’s shell. Or a portion of one; the legs were gone. The body contained within the central carapace had become a sweetmeat for a gull. What was left was this patinated green husk about the size of a soda cracker, a tiny breastplate. It resembled, in fact, something retrieved from a sunken Greek or Roman ship, lost armor pulled from preservative Mediterranean brine.
The reason I put the shell in my pocket was the color of the interior, a startling Giotto blue, a sky from heaven or Arizona rinsed and shining. At home I left the fragment on top of the refrigerator; by afternoon the blue had faded to a kind of milky lacquer, a faintly skyey mother-of-pearl. By the next day it was a pale, iridescent opal. A lovely color, but far in power and register from that initial cerulean. Imagine living surrounded by that blue, bearing in one’s own body the most brilliant wash of the summer firmament.
What color is the underside of our skin?
The fragment made me think of Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo, whose head “we cannot know” since it’s long since gone; in the power and presence of the fragment a whole sense of spiritual life arises. Broken, the god speaks to us more clearly.
This morning I picked up a second crab. I do not know why this one died; there is no visible sign of damage. It is about the same size as the first. But this one’s intact, centered on a white saucer on my desk. Are crabs subject to rigor mortis? If so, this one has only left the world just a little while ago. Move him in any way and the legs shift into a pleasing, vaguely Chinese pattern, the weight of the—torso, is it?—balanced by the two larger claws which reiterate, even in death, their message of menace and power.
It smells of seaweed and ruin.
I will not open this shell; I am less squeamish now about the tumbled mess of the flesh, but I’m no scientist. Yet there is something I love about placing this body next to the fragment of shell whose dry lavender interior reminds me of what was there: even in the smallest chamber, a sky.