December Drive

Driving home from the transfer station in Schroon Lake. Thinking about my place in the world and what meaning my life has - you know, the usual preoccupations of mind when going to the dump. (By the way, I'm definitely not an ironic or sardonic person. I'm grindingly serious.) Looking at the open water of Paradox Lake. Thinking about how forbidding it is on this cold December day with furious flurries of snow and a cold wind and stone gray subdued white/brown/green landscape. The open water itself is so dark and has such depth to the darkness like inkiness. Thoughts of how trite my thoughts about it are. How lacking my descriptive powers. How inadequate to the power of what I'm seeing. Can't think of anything to describe such an amazing phenomena as that dark water so moving and frightening and awe inspiring and so black like you can see down into the depths of the blackness and it doesn't end - just snuffs everything out. And then I think I would like to be able to describe things like a poet describes things? My lip curls at the thought that I could do such. I remember how Marilynne Robinson so amazingly described the water under similar conditions in Housekeeping and made it such an important part of her book. It was the numbing welcoming nothingness that called to life. Then I thought of the book How to Read a Poem, by Hirsch and remembered that he says that the reader is essential to the writer. There is a dynamic energy between the Poet and the reader. This made me feel somewhat more connected to what I was seeing and to creative effort. In the face of lack of descriptive powers, I can at least read and be awed and pass it on.
While thinking about this relationship between the poet and reader, I drifted to the Kabbalistic Mystics of Safed who thought of the vessels containing the creative energy of God as having shattered upon creation - the force of creation was just too much to be contained. These mystics saw the job of humans as having to find these shards of vessels and reveal them and prepare them for the return to the creative source. For the mystics, this was done mostly through the meditative efforts of study and prayer. This struck me as not too different from the relationship between the poet and reader. Reader, critics, teachers, book groups, all read and explore the text, comment on it, and pass it on to others. And, all of this creates a 'public' for poetry which affects how the poet conceives of his/her work and continues the creative process. Then my mind wandered further afield and I thought of Thoreau who chastised the Town Fathers of New England for missing the boat by not designating a 'cloud watcher' to appreciate the beauty of all the clouds that passed overhead. In a sense he saw that no one was meditating on the creation so that it could become part of the creative process. This, of course was also reiterated by Edward Abby in Desert Solitaire as he was sitting in the shade of his trailer in Arches National Park spending a hard day watching the clouds overhead. So far, I'm stacking up ways to feel connected to the world at a pretty good rate and giving myself some pretty good company. I'd say it's a pretty good afternoon in early December in Paradox.