North Shore, Mergansers, and Milosz

In a recent essay in the New York Times, Megan Craig, a professor of philosophy at an East Coast university, laments the fact that her profession doesn't entail  "more calisthenics, rugged walking, running outdoors." Perhaps for a professor of philosophy such activities are not required, and might be difficult to squeeze into the daily campus grind, but an academic in her field ought to be aware that genuine philosophers since the time of Aristotle, widely known in his time and for a millennia afterward as the Peripatetic, have associated thinking with walking, and more generally with being outdoors.

Though I'm not much of a philosopher myself, when Hilary and I head north, as we did a few weeks ago, I load my bookbag with the kind of esoteric reading matter that can only be absorbed bit by bit in an environment free of distractions. On our recent five-day "retreat" on Lake Superior, I brought along The Mirror of Ideas, by Michel Tournier; The English Mind: studies in the English Moralists; Philosophy, Writing and the Character of Thought by John T. Lysaker; Connections to the World by Arthur Danto; Heidegger's Hidden Asian Sources by Reinhard May; Nietzsche, Life as Literature, by Alexander Nehamas, and four or five other books of a similar ilk.

I didn't look at any of them. The weather was too fine. But it was nice to have them near at hand, in case I felt the urge to develop a clearer understanding of why joy tends to leap from my heart when the gulls are keening, the sun is bright but softened by a slight morning haze, there's dew on the grass, and the temperature hovers near 60 degrees.

It was a cold wet spring on the North Shore. Ask anyone. By the time w arrived, the sun had reappeared and the hiking trails were lined with lush plant life. I haven't seen so many bunchberries and bluebells in bloom for decades. Then again, we haven't come to the North Shore at this time of year for quite a while. Pale yellow clintonia were blooming in profusion, and also the delicate white flowers of the serviceberry trees.

The non-flowering vegetation was hardly less appealing: native honeysuckle, sarsaparilla, nameless ferns, little strawberries two inches high and alder shrubs twenty feet high. Hiking around Larsen Lake at Crosby-Manitou State Park we came upon quite a few infant mountain ash, may six or eight feet high, and also some rich carpets of club moss.

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Intoxicated by the plant life, yet I did turn my attention occasionally to one of the books I'd brought: The Land of Ulro by Czeslaw Milosz. I was under the impression that Ulro was somewhere in Lithuania. Turns out it's an invention of Wiliam Blake. Looking it up just now on line, I read:

Ulro is the land of the living dead, the realm of the ghostly and the spectral. It is the land of idols, delusions, and abstractions mistaken as primary realities.

In the course of this longish book, Milosz spends an inordinate amount of time analyzing the imaginary worlds created by three writers who don't interest me much: Witold Gombrowitz, Adam Mickiewicz, and Theodore Swedenborg. Yet I kept reading, and was actually enjoying the journey. Here's a typical passage:

How to explain an extreme pessimism coupled with ecstatic praise, with hymns of ecstasy. Who knows whether this contradiction, so full of import, does not constitute the proper theme of this book. At any rate, I have always been hostile to the "dark" tradition of 20th century literature; its mockery, sarcasms, and profanations have seemed cheap to me when compared to the power of Evil that is within every man's grasp. (p. 38)

If that seems pretty grim, how about this:

For some, reading and writing are a passion. The Way, in the sense in which the word is used by the Taoists ... There is a species of people who feel the compulsion more than others, people for whom reality is too painful as long as it remains anarchic, untrappable, and who feel continually obliged to give it order, a language. (p. 46)

And how about those people who feel the urge to write because they consider reality not painful but mesmerizing, staggering—at least some of the time; who find in it an order that has nothing to do with words, or with them, but arises from the earth unbidden and pursues a harmless and attractive agenda?

Wasn't it Gombrowitz himself, Milosz's alter ego, almost, who wrote: "If literature generally dares to speak, it is not at all because it is certain of its truth, but only because it is certain of its delight"?

Such experiences are difficult to capture in words. They tend to sound fatuous, Pollyannaish, or commonplace. Example. For two days we watched a red-breasted merganser zigzagging back and forth across the bay, head under the water, looking for fish. On the third morning, in the sharp clear light, a merganser paddled by—it might have been the same one—with eight chicks trailing close behind, each of them about the size of a lemon. Half of them looked to be actually sitting on mama's back.

A few minutes later, a gull started keening, and a second one replied from a hundred yards up the shore. Not so haunting as a chorus of loons, but still redolent of shipwrecks, bad weather, and lonely walks on the beach.

The water here is utterly clear to a depth of thirty feet at last. A blanket of stones covers the bottom; a few feet from shore, most of them are the size of a golf ball or a small, misshapen potato. Invariably fine-grained and smooth, they're a hodge-podge of pale blues, reds, and tans, and the honeyed glow and slight distortions created by the water above them adds to the charm. 

But charm isn't the right word. We're talking about something elemental here.

Nothing beyond it. No meaning in it.

At one point Milosz writes:

There is in Pascal a kind of Manichean distrust of nature and the things of "this world" which has made him a hero in the eyes of the pessimists, of those who later, in an era proclaiming the intrinsic good of the "nobler savage," responded with a mordant irony. Pascal's defense of Christianity is thus waged in anthropocentric terms, asserting the "anti-naturalness of that unique phenomenon call consciousness.

Milosz makes it clear that he shares that distrust. Not me.

Spring All Over Again - Locust Petals

White petals of the black locust tree litter the garden and the deck, like confetti from a grand celebration we weren't invited to. It's impossible to see the blossoms themselves on the branch without binoculars, the tree is so tall. For twenty years I thought it was the neighbor's tree, deep in the woods, obscure and last to leaf out. Well, who really owns a tree?

As I sit here on the deck, soaking up the bright sun and exquisitely cool air, I'm thinking I might start up a pagoda dogwood farm. 

We got our volunteer by chance (I guess that's what a "volunteer" is) from one-time neighbors Chris and Julie, with the help of the local chipmunks, no doubt. Chris had a thick head of Lebanese hair and a maniacal grin. He liked The Who and wished he could party more. Julie, shy and near anorexic, spent a lot of time with her mother. Eventually they had a child and moved to Edina—the schools, don't you know.

I spotted the sprout under the bedroom window one spring day. Now it's thirty feet tall, and three of its youngins' are developing here and there out in the yard. We've given a few away.

Every spring I catch sight of the chipmunks venturing out on the delicate branches  to harvest the berries with feverish daring and precision.

Jeremy, Our neighbor to the other side, is a bachelor. He likes the local schools so much that he teaches there. One day recently, in a fit of good humor, I agreed to help him remove the buckthorn from the woods that separates our yards. I suppose it was the right thing to do, but now the privacy screen is largely gone.

"My sister's friend is a landscape designer," he told me. "She'll help me figure out what to plant there to create a new screen." Knowing Jeremy, that's not likely to happen any time soon.

A few days later, I noticed that the forsythia in our front yard had sent out a substantial sucker. I dug it up and replanted it in the disturbed soil where the buckthorn had been, along with a two-foot chunk of root—making sure it was on our side of the lot line, or at least near it. The plant is gangly, but three weeks later it's still green, and it looks to be doing fine.

As I tamped down the soil around the plant, I was reminded that we'd gotten that shrub from the woman who lived next door when we moved it, back in 1986. Cliff and Jan were among the neighborhood's original residents. A childless couple, they'd been living here for forty years by the time we arrived. Cliff worked for the phone company. Jan volunteered at the University Landscape Arboretum, where she availed herself of every opportunity to bring home cuttings from the experimental plant stock.

I'm sure the redbud at the corner of their house, right next to our driveway, is one of the oldest in the state. She once told me she had nineteen varieties of hosta growing in the shady northwest corner of her garden.

One day we ran into each other by the garbage cans next to the garage, and she offered me a clump of roots from the forsythia she was tidying up. At the time, I didn't know what a forsythia was.

"You know, the yellow flowers. First bloom of spring," she said.

"Oh, yeah," I lied. "Sure. I'd be delighted. Thank you."

"Don't thank me for the plant," she replied. "Just thank me for the labor of digging it up."

Now there's a gnomic remark.  I puzzled over it for years. Still do. 

Half a life later, the forsythia is returning home to the other side of the lot line.

Cliff and Jan used to go bowling once a week. "I don't much like to bowl," she told me once with a chuckle. "but if I stopped going, we wouldn't have anything in common." She delivered the remark without rancor, out a deep yet somehow chipper melancholy that she'd probably lived with throughout her life.

In any case, she was exaggerating. Cliff, too, liked to garden. He looked after the roses and the lawn, while she handled everything else. Back in the Korean War era Cliff planted the five Colorado blue spruce—one-dollar seedlings—that served as a privacy fence between our two back yards for several decades. A few years after planting them he severed the roots with a shovel to encourage them to go deeper, thus stabilizing the tree.

I told that story to a master gardener at the farmers' market just last week and she said, "Well, all he did was bonsai the tree. Anyway, they don't recommend planting blue spruce in Minnesota any more. Too humid."

Those trees are now sixty feet tall. I wouldn't call them bonsai. It's true, one of them blew down in a storm a few years ago--so much for deep roots--and Jeremy had a second one removed this spring. It was dead. The other three are doing fine, though on two of them the branches are bare to a height of thirty feet. Not enough sun. 

One of my great gardening challenges is to get things to grow underneath these towering spruce. Buckthorn, honeysuckle, and other invasives seem to do the best. Wild grapes. Canadian elderberry. If it's green, we'll take it.

I wonder if anyone thinks about Jan any more. Or even remembers her? In later years she had eye trouble and wore boxy wrap-around sunglasses when working out in the yard. The year Cliff died, I asked her (tactlessly, it seems to me now) where she was going to go for Christmas. "I suppose I'll be with Cliff's family," she said. "His brother lives right down the street." Then she gave that sweet little cackly laugh and added: "I don't know if they like me, but I guess I'm part of the family by now."