distant glow

from at the bottom of the river by jamaica kincaid

and who is this man, really? so solitary, his eyes sometimes aglow, his heart beating at an abnormal rate with a joy he cannot identify or explain. what is the virtue in him? and then again, what can it matter? for tomorrow the oak will be felled, the trestle will break, the cow's hooves will be made into glue.
but so he stands, forever, crossing and recrossing the threshold, his head lifted up, held aloft and stiff with vanity; then his eyes shift and he see and he sees, and he is weighted down. first lifted up, then weighed down - always he is so. shall he seek comfort now? and in what? he seeks out the living fossils. there is a shell of the pearly nautilus lying amidst colored chalk and powdered ink and india rubber in an old tin can, in memory of a day spent blissfully at sea. the flatworm is now a parasite. reflect. there is the earth, its surface apparently stilled, its atmosphere hospitable. and yet here stand pile upon pile of rocks of an enormous size, riven and worn down from the pressure of the great seas, now receded. and here the large veins of gold, the bubbling sulfurous fountains, the mountains covered with hot lava; at the bottom of some caves lies the black dust, and below that rich clay sediment, and trapped between the layers are filaments of winged beasts and remnants of invertebrates. 'and where shall i be?' asks this man. then he says, 'my body, my soul.' but quickly he averts his eyes and feels himself now, hands pressed tightly against his chest. he is standing on the threshold once again, and, looking up, he sees his wife holding out toward him his brown felt hat (he had forgotten it); his children crossing the street, joining the throng of children on their way to school, a mixture of broken sentences, mispronounced words, laughter, budding malice, and energy abundant. he looks at the house he has built with his own hands, the books he has read standing on shelves, the fruit-bearing trees that he nursed from seedlings, the larder filled with food that he has provided. he shifts the weight of his body from one foot to the other, in uncertainty but also weighing, weighing. . . he imagines that in one hand he holds emptiness and yearning and in the other desire fulfilled. he thinks of tenderness and love and faith and hope and, yes, goodness. he contemplates the beauty in the common thing: the sun rising up out of the huge, shimmering expanse of water that is the sea; it rises up each day as if made anew, as if for the first time. 'sing again. sing now,' he says in his heart, for he feels the cool breeze at the back of his neck. but again and again he feels the futility in all that. for stretching out before him is a silence so dreadful, a vastness, its length and breadth and depth immeasurable. nothing.
*
the branches were dead; a fly hung dead on the branches, its fragile body fluttering in the wind as if it were remnants of a beautiful gown; a beetle had fed on the body of the fly but now lay dead, too. death on death on death. dead lay everything. the ground stretching out from the river no longer a verdant pasture but parched and cracked with tiny fissures running up and down and into each other; and, seen from high above, the fissures presented beauty: not a pleasure to the eye but beauty all the same; still, dead, dead it was. dead lay everything that had lived and dead also lay everything that would live. all had had or would have its season. and what should it matter that its season lasted five billion years or five minutes? there it is now, dead, vanished into darkness, banished from life. first living briefly, then dead in eternity. how vainly i struggle against this. toil, toil, night and day. here a house is built. here a monument is erected to commemorate something called a good deed, or even in remembrance of a woman with exceptional qualities, and all that she loved and all that she did. here are some children, and immeasurable is the love and special attention lavished on them. vanished now is the house. vanished now is the monument. silent now are the children. i recall the house, i recall the monument, i summon up the children from the eternity of darkness, and sometimes, briefly, they appear, though always slightly shrouded, always as if they had emerged from mounds of ashes, chipped, tarnished, in fragments, or large parts missing: the ribbons, for instance, gone from the children's hair. these children whom i loved best - better than the monument, better than the house - once were so beautiful that they were thought unearthly. dead is the past. dead shall the future be. and what stand before my eyes, as soon as i turn my back, dead is that, too. shall i shed tears? sorrow is bound to death. grief is bound to death. each moment is not as fragile and fleeting as i once thought. each moment is hard and lasting and so holds much that i must mourn for. and so what a bitter thing to say to me: that life is the intrusion, that to embrace a thing as beauty is the intrusion, that to believe a thing true and therefore undeniable, that is the intrusion; and, yes, false are all appearances. what a bitter thing to say to me, i who for time uncountable have always seen myself as newly born, filled with a truth and a beauty that could not be denied, living in a world of light that i call eternal, a world that can know no end. i now know regret. and that, too, is bound to death. and what do i regret? surely not that i stand in the knowledge of the presence of death. for knowledge is a good thing; you have said that. what i regret is that in the face of death and all that it is and all that it shall be i stand powerless, that in the face of death my will, to which everything i have ever known bends, stands as if it were nothing more than a string caught in the early-morning wind.
. . .
'death is natural,' you said to me, in such a flat, matter-of-fact way, and then you laughed - a laugh so piercing that i felt my eardrums shred, i felt myself mocked. yet i can see that a tree is natural, that the sea is natural, that the twitter of a twittering bird is natural to a twittering bird. i can see with my own eyes the tree; it stands with limbs spread wide and laden with ripe fruit, its roots planted firmly in the rich soil, and that seems natural to me. i can see with my own eyes the sea, now with a neap tide, its surface smooth and calm; then in the next moment comes a breeze, soft, and small ripples turn into wavelets conquering wavelets, and that seems natural to me again. and the twittering bird twitters away, and that bears a special irritation, though not the irritation of the sting of the evening fly, and that special irritation is mostly ignored, and what could be more natural than that? but death bears no relation to the tree, the sea, the twittering bird. how much more like the earth spinning on its invisible axis death is, and so i might want to reach out with my hand and make the earth stand still, as if it were a bicycle standing on its handlebars upside down, the wheels spun in passing by a pair of idle hands, then stilled in passing by yet another pair of idle hands. inevitable to life is death and not inevitable to death is life. inevitable. how the word weighs on my tongue. i glean this: a worm winds its way between furrow and furrow in a garden, its miserable form shuddering, dreading the sharp open beak of any common bird winging its way overhead; the bird, then taking to the open air, spreads its wings in majestic flight, and how noble and triumphant is this bird in flight; but look now, there comes a boy on horseback, his body taut and eager, his hand holding bow and arrow, his aim pointed and definite, and in this way is the bird made dead. the worm, the bird, the boy. and what of the boy? his ends are numberless. i glean again the death in life.
. . .
i stood above the land and the sea, and i felt that i was not myself as i had once known myself to be: i was not made up of flesh and blood and muscles and bones and tissue and cells and vital organs but was made up of my will, and over my will i had complete dominion. i entered the sea then. the sea was without color, and it was without anything that i had known before. it was still, having no currents. it was as warm as freshly spilled blood, and i moved through it as if i had always done so, as if it were a perfectly natural element to me. i moved through deep caverns, but they were without darkness and sudden shifts and turns. i stepped over great ridges and huge bulges of stones, i stooped down and touched the deepest bottom; i stretched myself out and covered end to end a vast crystal plane. nothing lived here. no plant grew here, no huge sharp-toothed creature with an ancestral memory of hunter and prey searching furiously for food, no sudden shift of wind to disturb the water. how good this water was. how good that i should know no fear. i sat on the edge of a basin. i felt myself swing my feet back and forth in a carefree manner, as if i were a child who had just spent the whole day head bent over sums but now sat in a garden filled with flowers in bloom colored vermillion and gold, the sounds of birds chirping, goats bleating, home from the pasture, the smell of vanilla from the kitchen, which should surely mean pudding with dinner, eyes darting here and there but resting on nothing - not happiness, not contentment, and not the memory of night, which soon would come.
i stood up on the edge of the basin and felt myself move. but what self? for i had no feet, or hands, or head, or heart. it was as if those things - my feet, my hands, my head, my heart - having once been there, were now stripped away, as if i had been dipped again and again, over and over, in a large vat filled with some precious elements and were now reduced to something i yet had no name for. i had no name for the thing i had become, so new was it to me, except that i did not exist in pain or pleasure, east or west or north or south, or up or down, or past or present or future, or real or not real. i stood as if i were a prism, many-sided and transparent, refracting and reflecting light as it reached me, light that never could be destroyed. and how beautiful i became. yet this beauty was not in the way of an ancient city seen after many centuries in ruins, or a woman who has just brushed her hair, or a man who searches for a treasure, or a child who cries immediately on being born, or an apple just picked standing alone on a gleaming white plate, or tiny beads of water left over from a sudden downpour of rain, perhaps - hanging delicately from the bare limbs of trees - or the sound the hummingbird makes with its wings as it propels itself through the earthly air.
*
yet what was that light in which i stood? how singly then will the heart desire and pursue the small glowing thing resting in the distance, surrounded by darkness; how, then, if on conquering the distance the heart embraces the small glowing thing until heart and glowing thing are indistinguishable and in this way the darkness is made less? for now a door might suddenly be pushed open and the morning light might rush in, revealing to me creation and a force whose nature is implacable, unmindful of any of the individual needs of existence, and without knowledge of future or past. i might then come to believe in a being whose impartiality i cannot now or ever fully understand and accept. i ask, when shall i, too, be extinguished, so that i cannot be recognized even from my bones? i covet the rocks and the mountains their silence. and so, emerging from my pit, the one i sealed up securely, the one to which i have consigned all my deeds that i care not to reveal - emerging from this pit, i step into a room and i see that the lamp is lit. in the light of the lamp, i see some books, i see a chair, i see a table, i see a pen; i see a bowl of ripe fruit, a bottle of milk, a flute made of wood, the clothes that i will wear. and as i see these things in the light of the lamp, all perishable and transient, how bound up i know i am to all that is human endeavor, to all that is past and to all that shall be, to all that shall be lost and leave no trace. i claim these things then - mine - and now feel myself grow solid and complete, my name filling up my mouth.