Mourning Sound

This morning, returning to the house from our pre-dawn walk, Lucy the Wonder Dog and I were brought up short by an eerie sound. We paused at the top of the driveway as we heard a sudden sharp cry, tapering off into into a series of short, despairing ululations. The sound came from the woods behind the house, that slope downwards into a wet-weather brook. Lucy gave me  the doggy equivalent of a  “WTF?” look, and I told her, “Just a screech owl, like the last time, girl.”

A year or more ago, the dog and I had been returning home from our late-night walk, close to eleven, when a hundred yards or so from the house a similar call sounded over head, in the dark treetops swaying in a windy night, under a sliver of crescent moon. That time the sound continued, and seemed to follow us up the hill and right to our door. Lucy was glad to get inside that night, and so was I. This time no repeat of the screech owl’s call pursued us the short distance to the front door. Lucy sniffed in disdain at the front window. She is brave now, at least with screech owl sounds. Don’t let the thunder roll, though, or she squeezes herself into the farthest corner of the downstairs bathroom, behind the toilet.

All the same, even knowing the source of that weird cry, somewhere back in my crocodile brain, a tremor of unease still reminded me of the world we do not know.

All Hallow’s Eve

From ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties,
and things that go bump in the night, good Lord deliver us.

Sirens keep going off, up and down the roads around my neighborhood, fire trucks, police cars and ambulances. I have not yet heard the deep whup-whup-whup of the helicopter ambulance, flying some critically injured victim of the normal Friday night attrition on the roads.

The little tricksters and treat supplicants have by now been whisked home; the 21st century is not as kind to young folk wandering their neighborhoods as the mid-century just past was for my generation. There be monsters here. And not those of the fairy tales.

Last year, walking the dog on dark nighttime streets of a wooded neighborhood, an eerie sound between moan and shriek recurred as the dog and I walked along, seeming to follow us homeward. The sound hovered right above us, matching our pace. The dark, leafless trees swayed in a cold wind. I was glad to reach the house, letting Lucy the Wonder Dog into the bright, warm space inside. Later, checking with a bird call site on the internet, I recognized the sound I had heard as the cry of a screech owl. Mystery solved. But the primal, atavistic fear was not forgotten.

Hallowe’en, attenuated with retail and holiday considerations as it is, reminds us of the feeling of the other, the thing that cannot be explained away with identifying a bird call; the feeling of dread so near to the surface of our quiet contentment.

As I walked the dog tonight, I heard no eldritch sound, only the distant amplified sound of a high school band, and cheers from a football crowd. It was, after all, Friday night, as well as Halloween.

For every ticket bought…

…there is a ride you must take. This is a paraphrase of a quotation from Hunter S. Thompson, who originated many injunctions to the fearful, hesitant many concerned with the consequences of their actions. Dr. Duke went to the other extreme. With great gusto, he bought tickets profligately, and never flinched at the ride.

For most of us, measuring out our lives with coffee spoons, the eventual ride is rarely contemplated, shoved to the back of our minds. We keep our attention focussed on the NOW, and relegate that final Ride to subjects about which we can do nothing. It is that way with mortality. From the first stirrings of rationality, we know at some level that like all creatures we will cease. Living with such thoughts foremost would be intolerable, so we push them aside. Should we lie sleepless in the middle of the night, listening to the gurgles, wheezes and creaks of the biological machine that sustains us, we toss and turn in fear. Growing older, we see grandparents, parents and finally friends and coevals dropping to our right and our left on the grand parade.

Living constantly in that shadow would sap life of its joy, so as the dawn banishes fear, we go again about our lives. But…someday, the Celestial Ride will pause for us, and we will have no choice but to…climb aboard. I have no doubt how the world will end, not in either fire or ice, as Robert Frost debated, but in the final closing of my eyes, when all of creation will cease, and go away.

Time to recharge my glass. Mustn’t wake in the small hours.

The Weight of Country Afternoons

For many years, starting in my childhood, on drifting asleep or waking from daytime naps, I would see a dusty country road cutting through stubbly fields, with a solitary house to my right, across the nearest field.

The weather was always hot in my dream, or daydream, whatever you call it, and apparently a long drought had seared the fields and the huddled building, for dust covered the drooping weeds along the road cut. The pale sky was glaringly bright, the blue washed out, only a few small clouds dispiritedly hanging over the dry earth.

It was late in the day, because the shadows lay long across the fields and spilled out elongated from the tin-roofed house. I was walking on the road, a mostly dirt road with large chunks of limestone and smaller chert fragments embedded in the dry, packed clay. I was oppressed by approaching that house, in that dry field, framed by those long shadows in such a heavy weight of heat and late-afternoon light. Something about the silence of the scene-for no birdcall or sound of machinery pierced the coppery air-added to the odd quality of light and heavy shadows.

In my dreams or reveries I never reached the house. What lingers is the sense of doom and emptiness of the day, headed towards a house I did not know but knew somehow held nothing but sadness and loss for me. I dreamt of this scene and house for years before I ever knew much of farms and farming, before I ever subscribed to Mother Earth News or read all the back-to-the earth literature of the late sixties and early seventies. Perhaps my unconscious was warning me about the perils of a suburban boy growing up to buy a farm and having to deal with omnivorous sows and feckless tenants.

I don’t think so. Something much deeper was in that dream. I wonder if it will return, and when. It is as though by dreaming of passing along that road, I walked over my own grave and gave myself a chill in spite of the heat of the dusty dry landscape. Or maybe I just had spells of indigestion.

I don’t believe that, either.

Watching Traffic

As my life uncoils into early old age, I increasingly offer up this prayer: Lord, let not my body outlive my life. I have watched several of my forbears lapse into twilight before the final dark, kept alive by marvelous machineries, the triumph of medicine and the despair of helpless family witnesses.

The Midnight Watch

Most of every day for most of us is full of action, noise, diversion, we fully involve ourselves in doing. Thinking, when we must, is tied to the daily round and how to accomplish what the day demands, work, family, preparation for the following day. In the evening, as energy runs low, we tire, grow drowsy, fitfully read or watch TV, talk with our companion, wife, lover, child or grandchild, and so to bed.

If we are lucky, sleep comes swiftly and completely, sinking us into oblivion for the whole night, interrupted perhaps by a bathroom call, followed by sliding again under the waves of sleep.

Increasingly, my nights are broken and scattered by bouts of insomnia, rarely lasting all night, but there is something so empty and still and devoid of distraction about the hours after midnight, when no other person is awake, that brings me inescapably face to face with…me. The biological machine which houses my life, my consciousness. For a few hours, I am Lear’s “bare, forked animal,” with nothing to occupy my mind but what I have done, or omitted to do, where I am going—a dwindling list of possibilities as I grow older.

Sometimes this feeling of stark reality bleeds into the daylight hours, I catch sight of my aging body and face in a mirror without preparation and wonder who that bulky, aging and sagging man could be, until I realize that I am the reflection in that mirror. I look increasingly on my body as on a house from which I will be eventually evicted by the processes of nature. At 62, soon to be 63, I know that my tenancy is much nearer to termination than to the distant beginning.

In Medieval times, when lifespans were much shorter than now, from an early age people took a course of mental inoculation against such unanticipated fears. Memento mori, works of art, adorned their walls, reminders that “all flesh is grass.” A later age transmuted this practice into the carpe diem school of poetry. Andrew Marvell, whose most memorable poem “To His Coy Mistress” is a great example of such application of a sense of mortality, gave me the two lines on the top of my home page:

Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Try making the sun run at midnight. Or two ante meridian. Ah, well, the sun will rise again tomorrow, and the noise and stimulation and preoccupations of the day will for a while provide an anodyne to angst and fears that I shall cease to be…before what?

Not yet…please

The Incredible Terror of Mind

Apart from what I know of neurons, synapses, medulla and a smattering of other words, I think of my mind as a House. A large, disjointed warren of passages, rooms, sub-basements and a maze of wiring and plumbing. Haphazard in plan, growing by accretion of memory and stored emotion until no floor plan or schematic could render it intelligible.

The most-travelled passages, those I use for the daily business of sustenance and amusement, are worn and scuffed. Behind walls and around corners, in the dark places, strange noises make me quicken my step and escape to the next relatively well-lit room. If there be monsters here, I know that they are of my own creation, and therefore infinitely terrible. The sum of all my missteps, misunderstandings and omissions, and the commissions of every Deadly Sin.

I like the brightly lit rooms, more carefully and successfully added. Little pools of light, memories of childhood cleansed of bullies and responsibility and fear. A room sounding with the crash and thrum of great music, melodic or syncopated, sacred or profane. Beethoven. Leadbelly. Hank Williams. (if you need qualification, you are lost.) Mozart. Hundreds more, who have contributed bits and fragments of music ready for calling up, and this is a Good Room. Next, an even bigger room, lined with books, papers, all the forms words take. Shakespeare, Faulkner, William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Yeats….the line stretches on to the Crack of Doom. And around the corner, opens a high-ceilinged room with a clear northern light, full of paintings and sculpture. Vermeer. Goya. Leonardo, Bosch, Michelangelo, Gauguin, Holbein(s), Whistler, Picasso, they all glow with the absorbed northern light. These are all, all very good rooms.

And, glowing with an even warmer light, sounding with the laughter and surprise of childish speech, here is a room for my grandchildren. Their parents share the room with me. This is the Best Room, for I share it not only with children and grandchildren, but with the babies’ Granny Babs, my Beloved. Here, I am never alone. And that is the strongest sort of Good.

But even there, in the Good Rooms, faint sounds sometimes seep through, errant currents of malfunctioning neurons. Memories unbidden. And from deep in the lowest sub-basement, past long staircases circling ever downwards, past rooms with cold, dripping water coursing down dangling, rusty chains, like the set of Alien, a large hatch rattles and bulges against the strong bolts my fear has faintingly rammed home for security. SOMETHING wants out. There Terror lies. For that Something is my most imperfect and basic Core. The howling in the dark of my maimed and tangled Self.

The trick of living is to know the dark places exist, and continue to live, to build more rooms, to house the generations you have sired and your children have borne. Family, children and grandchildren. Fresh and without the Dark Places yet. Continuity despite the Doom we all keep locked down in the last sub-basement, under strong hatches…that finally are Not Strong Enough.

But that’s all right. I have time yet to play with my grandchildren and feel deep tenderness for my Beloved.

Life is.