“Look at the sea. What does it care about offences?’ – James Joyce. Ulysses

I went away for a couple days to the ocean, to a place I’ve been going as long as I can remember, though I haven’t been in a few years. I was going to take the time to think and write. But I didn’t really think or write. To be honest, in real life I have to read all day every day — it’s my gainful employment. I’m a little word-weary. I’m a little thought-weary. I am very very news-weary, and I was glad to be away from all of that.

On the ride down through the barren pines we passed through a burnt low green landscape in the stirring wind and waves of drizzling slight rain like fog. I sat in the back seat and let my mind wander. The time slipped away as we passed liquor store after liquor store and churches and garage sales nobody lived near enough to visit. It’s a dark, salty, wild feeling, as you pass these vacant tiny towns on the way to places everyone stays or wants to stay.

I thought about the people who live here and the lives they lead. In some parts of the world (maybe most parts of the world), people seem out of place, and here there’s a strong sense of something deeper and older and wilder than the strip malls and vacant bars that crop up like coarse grass on dry sandy soil.

We passed lawns littered with Trump signs and Confederate flags. You can only escape so far and so completely. Years ago, we drove these roads in the evening. We passed a lot of trucks with religious messages painted on them. In keeping with the burnt and barren landscape, the messages were all fairly dire and doom-filled. We were driving back in the lightning-lit gloaming of one of the longest days of the year, and I saw a sign that said, “God still talks to us.” And we passed a darkened field under a sky cut across by strange horizontal lightning, and the field was filled with the slow glow of lightning bugs. It occurred to me that if you’re listening to the messages of angry hate-filled preachers on late night Christian radio or reading messages of blame and shame on pickup trucks, and not listening to the messages of the fireflies or the rain or the waves or the cricket outside my back door, god might still be talking to us, but you’re hearing the wrong voices.

The green on green in the tangled grey gnarled trunks, everything pulsing by like time passing. I didn’t think I didn’t sleep, I just watched it all as it bent and curved in the raindrops on the window.

And then I just sat on the porch of the house I’ve been visiting at least once a year since I was weird and awkward. Still so. I played solitaire and listened to birds different than my home birds, and I didn’t think about everything I was thinking about as I was thinking about it. The clouds cleared, the day warmed. Like my mind, the day started in mist and ended in mist and burned clear briefly in the middle, with a melancholy fog horn having its say. We heard an indigo bunting. The world smelled of ferns and sassafras and seawater and the warming of the day. The baking of the sand and salt and the still water and the rolling water. I wasn’t writing. I wasn’t thinking. Eventually I found myself in the ocean with a few of the people I love the most in the world. They don’t live far, but I don’t see them often. I am not a brave swimmer-in-the-ocean. I am not brave. But here I was in sea-glass green water, in the softly rolling waves, sharing space with wheeling sea birds and dolphins close at hand and sea monsters far away. Rising and falling. Rising and falling. Cool in my body and my mind, for a moment, watching the deep hushed blue shadows rimming the great round swell of the ocean, of the whole round earth. And here we are. Right now. And then it’s gone.

Not thinking, not writing.

Till human voices wake us and we drown.¹ I’m writing now, clearly. Or opaquely. We always come back to words. What is the use of talking and there is no end of talking. There is no end of things in the heart.²

1.Eliot
2.Pound
le gazze ladre