the mirror the echo is a gate

01 July 2007 - 22:55

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>

How can our past seem so close at times it feels as if we could step right into it? How can something I wrote more than four years ago come rushing to meet me, erasing everything between it and this moment?

the sheer beauty, perhaps. ... i walked through the gates with the two people with whom i most want to spend my time. and that is what i suppose you have to do when you meet perfection, your dreams manifested in front of you, home: keep walking; marvel, but keep walking.

Before I left to return to Pennsylvania, Kale and I spent an afternoon at the Columbia River Gorge. Vistas like this entranced me:

As I gazed out into those layers of clouds and light and leaves and waves, I felt anxiety rise in me. The beauty was too much. I took fifty photos of the same view, trying to capture it, to hold on, but at the same time leaving it already. If I stood there all night, the view would have changed until it became unrecognizable, but that moment of worship for it seemed to extend into eternity.

Something came over me that afternoon. My anxiety about my life seemed to expand, to merge with my anxiety about beauty, anxiety that is a form of adulation. Lights shining across the river looked like campfires to me, and I felt like the gates of time were opening, and I was a Native seeing this land before any white person came here. When the rain began at Wahkeena falls, I could no longer contain myself, and I began to dance. The sound of water -- rain hitting our van, asphalt, fir needles, packed earth, the waterfall splashing down rocks -- was my only music.

When you encounter the greatest beauty in your life -- this beauty IS your life -- you can try to capture it, record it, knowing you will have to walk away. Or you can let moments of time echo each other across an illusory abyss, give yourself up to their beauty, and dance.

I danced among bridges, archways, columns, Shepherd's Dell, Crown Point, Multnomah Falls, a roaring freight train, clouds, ospreys, lamp posts. I ran through a creek bed and hopped up on a tree stump with Kale following behind me, laughing. I mimed a totem pole, a tree with branches extending outwards, a ballerina.

I saw time as a mirrored hallway, lovers as dream symbols, totem animals.

I feel like I might never make it back here. To Oregon, my homeland. To this feeling, my true home. That thought resounded in my mind. It was only that anxiety that allowed me to grasp forever so completely.


From Anne Carson:
Short Talk on Hedonism
Beauty makes me hopeless. I don't care
why anymore I just want to get away.
When I look at the city of Paris I long
to wrap my legs around it. When I
watch you dancing there is a heartless
immensity like a sailor in a dead calm
sea. Desires as round as peaches
bloom in me all night, I no longer
gather what falls.

<<--unravel * reintegrate-->>