Walking: Brother Wind Returns

nomads sauntering into Turquoise Canyon

Lazing about, trying to remember, as well as invent, the rules for living with a fractured hip, I discovered that ruuscal, associate of Brother-Unit TW, and co-contributor/dirigeant to American Idyll, often the blog of my short dreams, thanks to their haunting meld of image, text, and sound...

I discover that russcal, he has posted an entry on walking, the son of a gun.

Wow, I am getting good at approximating bitterness, eh?

It turns out that handy-dandy Fred recalls every "hip precaution" in the Conservative Approach to Periprosthetic Femoral Bust-Ups Manual. Me? If I do something and it hurts beaucoup or makes a sound like metal torquing on metal, I try not to repeat that motion.

You can shout, even whisper, seductively, hip precaution rules at me all the live-long day and I won't remember to follow them. My learning curves are notoriously stubborn; I am stuck in Lacan's stade du miroir.

Really! See his Le stade du miroir. Théorie d'un moment structurant et génétique de la constitution de la réalité, conçu en relation avec l'expérience et la doctrine psychanalytique, Communication au 14e Congrès psychanalytique international, Marienbad, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1937.

I'm just kidding.

However, the fact that I had recourse to Lacan, and to that stade, formateur de la fonction sujet? That means I am angry from piled-on frustrations, and hiding behind declarations of powerlessness. I never did get Lacan!

I am unable to walk, and by walk I mean the expansive exercise of going from, say, bed to bath.
I am unable to stand, at least as of this moment. (Because this must change, it will change: being sweetly scrubbed to a glowing pink, or even remotely toileted by Fred, la bonne et belle Bianca Castafiore, or any other denizen of The Manor will mark my perfect day for bananafish.)

I had forgotten how painful a busted hip can be, so much so that mere mention of the idiotic pain scale makes my upper lip assume sneer posture. Fred says that when my upper lip sneer combines with my much preferred toothy grins, it's a scary proposition.

You've long ago figured out what I need to relearn daily: It's not about me.

The Good Lord didn't intend for me to take this crap seriously!

On a good day, I remember that before hitting the bottom of my first mug of coffee.

On a bad day, friend, foe, family, or feline has to politely smack me upside the head before that old lightbulb stutters on, and remind me that I long ago left the 6 - 18 month age group behind.

Still, don't mistake my daily enlightenment for willingness to submit to "there-are-people-a-lot-worse-off" or "God-will-not-give-you-more-than-you-can-handle." No, those remain retarded statements, no matter their truth value. Such statements might be backed by the virtue of all the saints, but you don't want to inflict them on someone in the grip of endless, severe pain.

No... You will want to wait a bit, wait for the grip to loosen, for the jets to cool, then smack the Loser in Your Life with all the truisms you have on hand.

I simply need to remember, and to readjust, and then, to hush. It needs to be done quickly, before lack of sleep, loss of x, y, or z, before the firm establishment of a pout, and the deep, deep blues.

Maybe ruuscal has something for me, then? Maybe the impulse of this sister to need a brother has intuitively led to the saving grace of the ant's forefoot* , and to a brother's friend.

Maybe it is always about paying attention, being aware, praying centering prayers.

He's presenting Thoreau, of course, Thoreau's Walking. From our very recent beginnings, TW and I have honored text and image, literal and visual, ut pictura poesis, and almost always through the beauty of the canyon, by the wild, old river.

slanting light on an esplanade afternoon

globe mallow and sandstone

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil--to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.

I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the minister and the school committee and every one of you will take care of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks--who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering, which word is beautifully derived from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretense of going a la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a Sainte-Terrer," a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some, however, would derive the word from sans terre, without land or home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit of undying adventure, never to return--prepared to send back our embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and child and friends, and never see them again--if you have paid your debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free man--then you are ready for a walk.
--Henry David Thoreau (from "Walking")

Brother Wind - Tim O'Brien with Darrell Scott

Made up my mind to go
Some place so far away, I headed west
Without a sad goodbye
No hugs or tears that way, it's probably for the best
Sent cards along the way
Said I was looking for a brand new life
I never settled down
My wanderlust would always cut the ties like a knife
Sometimes the lonesome wind
Calls out just like it knows me
And on a night like this
When I don't know where to go, he shows me the way

He knows me, my brother wind
He's lonely too and he takes me away

I always looked ahead
I was so afraid that I'd be caught behind
Followed a crooked stream
To places I'd never seen and one more highway sign
Just like some other guys
I count the hours 'til the day will end
But it's not so I can rest
For me it's the time that's best for talking to my friend

Cause he knows me, my brother wind
He's lonely too and he takes me away

Now half my life is gone
The only home I have is open road
My skin is cracked and brown
A mirror to the dessert ground and the dusty wind that blows
I never made a mark
Just scattered footsteps on the shifting sand
Whatever pushes me
It's something only he can understand

He knows me, my brother wind
He's lonely too and he takes me away

*** ** *** ** *** ** *** ** *** ** *** ** *** ** *** ** *** ** *** ** ***

*So does the poetry of attention indite salvation, restoration, and peace. Pound sees the lizard in its wild enormity stalking prey along a grass-blade. The world is at work, dramatic and wide. Nature is not arrested. All's well. And this wellness seen up close goes far, all the way to Pound's beloved London where the river, gulls, and garden also go on. His faith restored by sight, Pound continues to see, and the elegant drama of lizard and green fly unfolds along his rain ditch. The pleasures of peace and the gifts of civilization and society are given freely to the open eye by the undetained light of a sunset, the new Pound's (his poem has made him new) "grand couturier." Everywhere in The Pisan Cantos, Pound the hysterical aesthete is calmed and renovated by intimates of his eye, as here, in "Canto LXXXIII:"

mint springs up again
in spite of Jones' rodents
as had the clover by the gorilla cage
with a four-leaf

When the mind swings by a grass-blade
an ant's forefoot shall save you
the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower

In the poetry of attention, the poet comes to his senses. He is saved along the way. Proud mind, which loves to impose itself between appearance and reality (such imposition lies at the core of all bad poems), "swings by a grass-blade" until fact, in the shape of "an ant's forefoot," strides to the rescue. Fact is, faith is, appearance and reality remain tenderly intimate at the origin of poems. Pound knows, having come to his senses: "the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower." In the attentive occasion that is truth in poetry, what you see is what you get. O taste and see.