About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Read online

  The summer after I graduated from high school I traveled to Europe with fifteen of my classmates. We flew to Lisbon and then spent two months being driven in a small Fiat tour bus with huge windows through Spain, France, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, and West Germany. Later we crossed the Channel and toured England and Ireland. Among hundreds of things I did, I remember laying my hand on the thigh of Agesander’s statue of Laocoön in the Vatican Museums and feeling the sinew of muscle in the white marble; seeing a matador gored and then spun like a pinwheel on a bull’s horn in the corrida in Pamplona; an ethereal light that seemed to bathe Napoleon’s catafalque in blue in Paris; and a vast cemetery of identical white crosses, ranked over green hills in northern France, a bucolic landscape lovely, benign, and enormously sad.

  In the fall of 1962 I entered the University of Notre Dame in northern Indiana with the intention of becoming an aeronautical engineer. Once I got my driver’s license I began leaving school on weekends, camping out or sleeping in the cars I borrowed, whatever was necessary to see the surrounding country from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to West Virginia. I once drove to Mississippi and back with my roommate over a weekend—eleven hundred miles—just to see it, drawn by little more than the lure of the Natchez Trace.

  During my sophomore and junior years I started writing stories that had nothing to do with classroom assignments. I understood the urge to write as a desire to describe what happened, what I saw, when I went outside. The book that engaged me most along these lines was Moby-Dick, which I read three times before I entered college.

  Story, as I understood it by reading Faulkner, Hardy, Cather, and Hemingway, was a powerful and clarifying human invention. The language alone, as I discovered it in Gerard Manley Hopkins and Faulkner, was exquisitely beautiful, also weirdly and mysteriously evocative.

  My attitude toward language and story crystallized on a single afternoon in my sophomore year. I cut a class to hear Robert Fitzgerald read from his new translation of The Odyssey. I’d heard the translation was brillnant; what was spellbinding about his reading, however, was the way the audience became galvanized in beauty by his presentation. History, quest, longing, metered prose, moral consternation, and fantastic image all came together in that room. The feeling broadened and calmed us. Whatever Fitzgerald did in that hour, that’s what I wanted to do.

  I was driven to write, but of course anguished over my efforts. Who was I to speak? What had I to say? As a college student of nineteen, I was being encouraged in the idea that if I spoke I would be heard. The privilege that ensured this, however, was the accident of my mother’s third marriage. It was nothing I’d earned. And much of what seemed to me so worth addressing—the psychological draw of landscape, that profound mystery I sensed in wild animals (which reading Descartes had done nothing to dissuade)—was regarded as peculiar territory by other nascent writers at the university.

  In my senior year at Notre Dame, at bat in an intramural baseball game, I took a high inside pitch that shattered the stone in my senior ring. I left the setting empty. The emptiness came to symbolize doubts I’d developed about my education. I’d learned a lot, but I had not learned it in the presence of women or blacks or Jews or Koreans. Something important, those refinements and objections, had been omitted.

  When I departed the university in 1966 (with a degree in Communication Arts) I left in order to discover a voice and a subject, though this was not at all clear then. I floundered in two jobs for a year, married, finished a graduate degree with the thought that I would teach prep school, and then entered the master of fine arts program in writing at the University of Oregon. I left that program after only a semester, but matriculated at the university for more than a year, during which time I met a singular teacher in the English department, a man named Barre Toelken. He helped me frame the questions seething inside me then about how justice, education, and other Enlightenment ideals could be upheld against the depth of prejudice and the fields of ignorance I saw everywhere around me.

  Toelken pointed me toward anthropological research which demonstrated that other cultures approached questions of natural history and geography in the same way I preferred. They did not separate humanity and nature. They recognized the immanence of the divine in both. And they regarded landscape as a component as integral to the development of personality and social order as we take the Oedipus complex and codified law to be.

  As a guest in the Toelkens’ home, I frequently met scholars and other insightful people from outside white, orthodox, middle-class culture. I didn’t consider that these people spoke a truth no one else possessed; but, listening to them, I saw the inadequacy of my education. It lacked any suggestion that these voices were necessary, that they were relevant. Further, it became clear to me in the Toelkens’ home that their stories, despite the skilled dramatizing of human triumph and failure, were destined for quarantine in the society of which I was a part. I was not going to find these voices in American magazines.

  In the years after those first encounters with senior Native American men, itinerant Asian poets, black jazz musicians, and translators, I deliberately began to seek the company of people outside my own narrow cultural bounds. I was drawn especially to men and women who had not dissociated themselves from the passionate and spiritual realms of life, people for whom mystery was not a challenge to intelligence but a bosom.

  The effect of these encounters was not a belief that I was now able to speak for such people—a notion I find dangerous as well as absurd—but an understanding that my voice, steeped in Jung, Dante, Heisenberg, Melville, and Merton, was not the only voice. My truth was not the one truth. My tongue did not compose a pinnacle language. These other voices were as indispensable to our survival as variations in our DNA.

  In my earliest essays, I wanted to report what others were thinking, and I was driven by a feeling that these other voices were being put asunder by “progress” in its manifold forms.

  Although I’m wary of pancultural truths, I believe in all human societies there is a desire to love and be loved, to experience the full fierceness of human emotion, and to make a measure of the sacred part of one’s life. Wherever I’ve traveled—Kenya, Chile, Australia, Japan—I’ve found that the most dependable way to preserve these possibilities is to be reminded of them in stories. Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives. It is through story that we embrace the great breadth of memory, that we can distinguish what is true, and that we may glimpse, at least occasionally, how to live without despair in the midst of the horror that dogs and unhinges us.

  As long as it took for me to see that a writer’s voice had to grow out of his own knowledge and desire, that it could not rise legitimately out of the privilege of race or gender or social rank, so did it take time to grasp the depth of cruelty inflicted upon all of us the moment voices are silenced, when for prejudicial reasons people are told their stories are not valuable, not useful. Anyone educated in the existence and history of metaphorical expression—Schrödinger’s or Li Po’s—cannot help but recoil before such menace, such ignorance.

  ONCE I WAS asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, “Tell your daughter three things.” Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she’s reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else’s comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They’ve been around a long time because the pattern
s in them have proved endlessly useful, and, to borrow Evan Connell’s observation, with a good book you never touch bottom. But warn your daughter that ideas of heroism, of love, of human duty and devotion that women have been writing about for centuries will not be available to her in this form. To find these voices she will have to search. When, on her own, she begins to ask, make her a present of George Eliot, or the travel writing of Alexandra David-Neel, or To the Lighthouse.

  Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.

  Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don’t necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, or wherever, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.

  Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three I trust.

  IN THE PAGES that follow, you will see how this thinking has played out for me. My beliefs will be apparent, but not, I hope, obtrusive. And it will be obvious that I have left town, or tried to, and that I’ve wanted to put to work what I saw. I’ve chosen these essays to give a sense of how one writer proceeds, and they are reflective of my notion of what it means to travel. The order is not chronological, and I’ve not included all the work of recent years.

  If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it’s to contribute to a literature of hope. With my given metaphors, rooted in a childhood spent outdoors in California and which take much of their language from Jesuit classrooms in New York City, I want to help create a body of stories in which men and women can discover trustworthy patterns.

  Every story is an act of trust between a writer and a reader; each story, in the end, is social. Whatever a writer sets down can harm or help the community of which he or she is a part. When I write, I can imagine a child in California wishing to give away what he’s just seen—a wild animal fleeing through creosote cover in the desert, casting a bright-eyed backward glance. Or three lines of overheard conversation that seem to contain everything we need understand to repair the gaping rift between body and soul. I look back at that boy turning in glee beneath his pigeons, and know it can take a lifetime to convey what you mean, to find the opening. You watch, you set it down. Then you try again.

  PART ONE

  Out of Country

  1

  SEARCHING FOR DEPTH IN BONAIRE

  I

  THE LAST DAY I spent on Bonaire, a Catholic Sunday, I drove most of the small Dutch island’s few dirt tracks and undivided asphalt roads. This short traverse—the island is only twenty-four miles long—took me south to rows of refurbished slave huts standing alongside towering, blistering-white mounds of sea salt; out to a windward Caribbean shore to look at pictographs made centuries ago by indigenous Caiquetío Indians; then to Gotomeer, a lake on the northwest coast where at dusk flamingos rise up in a billowing sheet of pink, flecked with carmine and black, and roll off south across the Bonaire Basin for the coast of Venezuela, sixty miles away.

  That dependable evening Angelus of departing birds deepened the architecture of the sky, and it resolved, for a moment, the emotional strain of my brief, disjointed conversation with this landscape. No longer Caiquetío land, no longer Spanish, provisionally Dutch, Bonaire has become an international hinterland. Five hundred years of complicated cultural history have produced a subtle, polyphonic rarity here, full of striking temporal hitches. At a fruit stall an elderly woman in a thirties-style print dress pops a button of dirt off a fresh cantaloupe with her thumb and waits for a young man in J. Crew casuals adjusting his earphones to see that he’s in the way. Not long after deplaning, one easily feels embarrassed for having come here, as I had, with but a single idea: to dive the pellucid waters of the place Amerigo Vespucci named La Isla de Palo Brasíl.

  BONAIRE IS the second largest of five islands in the seemingly indefinite Netherlands Antilles. Sint Eustatius, Saba, and Sint Maarten (which the Dutch share with the French)—three very small, densely populated islands clustered five hundred miles northeast of Bonaire, to the east of Puerto Rico—compose one geographical element. Bonaire and its larger neighbor, heavily populated Curaçao, compose the second. (Nearby Aruba, long a sixth member of this political archipelago, seceded from the Dutch Antilles on January 1, 1986, resolving a fractious sibling rivalry with Curaçao but sharply curtailing its own access to financial assistance and technical advice from Holland.)

  Sophisticates on Curaçao regard lightly populated Bonaire as hopelessly bucolic; a promotional brochure says foreign investors will be pleased by its “progressive and cooperative political climate.” Lying safely south of the track of Caribbean hurricanes, its mildly humid air cooled by persistent trade winds, the island is a rocky, desert place, crooked like a dog’s hind leg. Its landscape rises gently from green, red, and lavender salt ponds in the south through a bush plain to low, brush-covered hills four or five hundred feet high at its northwest end. It is without a permanent river (residential freshwater comes from a desalinization plant and a few natural springs), although brilliant fair-weather clouds regularly stream west over the island, even at night, obscuring the Southern Cross and other familiar constellations.

  Before an impatient eye, Bonaire appears stark and bony. Its early cover of brazilwood and lignum vitae forest is gone, sold to Europe piecemeal, centuries ago. Its dry, meager vegetation, rooted in bleached coral rubble, lies trampled and battered by generations of donkeys and bark-stripping goats. Its coarse headlands of volcanic ironstone, irradiated by a tropical sun, scorch and nick the hands.

  Starkness of a different kind arises from a contrast between the genteel manner of Bonaire’s residents, entering and exiting (light as sparrows) the innocent pastels of their stucco homes, and the island’s two modern, rigid, metallic edifices: Bonaire Petroleum’s brightly lit oil transfer terminal in the north and Trans World Radio’s antenna park to the south, a powerful transmission facility operated by a fundamentalist Christian sect.

  A fevered search for mineral wealth and the religious acquisition of souls, of course, form the beginning of Bonaire’s engagement with the Old World; these subjects—spiritual salvation and the control of resources like oil—are old ones on Bonaire. In 1513, Diego Colón dismissed Aruba, Curaçao, and Bonaire as “islas inútiles” (useless, meaning without metals). The Caiquetíos were brusquely sold off to hidalgos in Hispaniola, where they soon perished working in Spanish “gold” mines. In 1634 Bonaire—the name apparently derives from a Caiquetío term, bajnaj, meaning “lowland”—was acquired by the Dutch in their search for sources of salt and wood. Two hundred years later slavery was abolished; open to settlement, Bonaire stabilized as a sort of sprawling hacienda. People independently grazed cattle and sheep, grew aloe vera and divi-divi pods, evaporated seawater for salt, burned coral to make chalk, raised horses, and made charcoal, all for export. This diverse subsistence economy, augmented later in this century with wage labor off-island—in oil refineries on Aruba and Curaçao, aboard fishing vessels, and in the cane fields of Cuba—persisted relatively unchanged until the 1970s, when real estate development and tourism began abruptly to alter the island’s tenor.

  This latest economic wind blows with a vaguely disturbing odor—the forcing pressure of big, fast money, the entrepreneur’s heat to create wealth in “undeveloped” lands. (From an older Spanish perspective, p
erhaps it’s only plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.) A modern visitor from the United States like myself takes wry note of the fact that Bonaire Petroleum and Akzo Salt, the great bulk of the island’s economy, are U.S.-owned businesses, as is the fundamentalist station. You see all this—a strangely beautiful landscape, attractive people, a kind of praying mantis economy—more or less quickly, in the first few hours. But I did not travel here to nurture a ready cynicism. I did not make the long flight through Denver and Miami to idealize whatever threatened virtue there might be in rural Bonairean life, or to feed any sense of irony over the fate of the Monroe Doctrine in postcolonial America. I came with a single intention: to become intimate with the island’s undisturbed realm—its fringing coral reef.

  Bonaire’s reefs are among the most astonishing in the Americas. Patient divers can find nearly every one of the western Atlantic’s seventy or so kinds of coral here. Schools of horse-eye jack, swift as tuna, bolt into the dimness. Starfish and white anemones pearlesce in the lugubrious shadows cast by Atlantic manta rays. Blizzards of tropical fish swarm over and through fields of exotically shaped sponges, some tall as barrels. Four-foot-long tarpon, predatory fish whose ranks of scales resemble chain mail, routinely rise at night from Bonaire’s near depths to swim alongside divers in the dark. Most days, one can see farther than eighty feet in the limpid, sun-shot water. Among the rare local creatures I hoped to find were a cryptic, ambushing hunter called a frogfish; pistol shrimps; glowing fluorescent sponges; and an animal emblematic of the Jovian peculiarities of these waters, the ethereal sea horse.

  I would eventually make seventeen dives, over eight days. I would lie awake those nights, a trade wind blowing through my room, trying to understand where I was. The contrast between a desiccated land and the rococo display of life in the sea, between hardscrabble existence on tenuous farming land holds and the burgeoning growth of condominiums to provide housing for divers like myself made sleep difficult. As we sometimes seek to hide ourselves in dreams, so I focused those nights on the beauty of the world into which, come morning, I would fling myself.