by Donna Kane
Nineteen
The Gaze
Oh, bliss of tiny creatures,” wrote Rilke (in “The Eighth Elegy”) “that remain / for ever in the womb that brought them forth!” After twisting a corner of a tissue into a makeshift rope, I dunk the tip of it into my wineglass and wait for the moth that has flown into my drink to grab on. The moth swims valiantly but badly, its scales slipping off, leaving a silvery wake, a slick that shines as if lit by the moon, which strikes me as doubly tragic because the bedside lamp probably cast its glow on the wine’s surface, making the Merlot seem a moon to traverse by, and now the flotsam of the moth’s wings are adding to the overall sheen. When the moth clasps the rope, I hoist the insect up and set it on the window ledge. I wait for the moth to emerge from the folds of the Kleenex, stripped to its fretwork, joints bristle-bright, antennae waving as if feverish to know what is left of its body.
In his elegy, Rilke wrote, “We alone see [death]; the free animal / has its decease perpetually behind it …” How could Rilke have known? I examine the moth. The moth’s focus seems unfazed as it cripples along the ledge, carrying onward toward who knows where. It would be easy to imagine the moth as unaffected by its fate. But anything from a certain distance tends to take on an indifferent air. When an astronaut takes a picture of Earth from outer space, the planet looks like a blown-glass bauble, a unified singular object. I hardly ever think of myself as part of it. At such a distance, it seems I don’t exist. But I must be there, in some of those photos.
If I look at a tiny grey moth resting with its wings fully opened, flattened against a window frame or upside down on a wall, it appears as a shred of wasp nest, a flake of hammered silver. But if I take my glasses off and peer with my nearsighted eyes, the moth becomes startlingly clear. I can see the lacework of the moth’s wings, a brindled filigree like the tail feathers of a grouse, a striped fan of brown and white trimmed in copper. I can see the moth’s face, two bright eyes like minuscule beads of oil on a head small as a grain of sand. I can see the moth’s antennae witching the air I breathe. I have no way of knowing if the moth is staring at me, but that’s how it feels, that an exchange has been made.
When a “dumb brute’s calmly / raising its head to look us through and through,” says Rilke, we see the reflection of “the free and open,” an outward gaze unburdened by “consciousness such as we have.” I have stared hard at these tiny moths. I have tried to see the blissful ignorance that Rilke thought was “so deep within the brute’s face.” But nothing of such privilege has come. I could never see how the moth was unaware of its existence. I could never see how it was oblivious to its death. Maybe when two different species look at each other, and neither one knows what the other one is thinking, it only feels like “the open.”
I have always felt the pleasure of reflection. When I was a child, we had a World Book Encyclopedia. I loved the pebbled texture of the faux leather covers and the gold-coloured letters embossed on each spine. My favourite volume was H. Inside was a chapter on human anatomy. One of the gilt-edged pages was blank. Overtop that page were several thin sheets of plastic. On each sheet were coloured images of different parts of a man’s body—the bones, the internal organs, the circulatory system, the muscles. The images were aligned so that, when each sheet was superimposed over top of the one below, it altered the appearance of the man. Each sheet built upon the last until the man was made whole. It impressed upon me at a very young age that I would never get to see the inside of my own body, my own heart and lungs. Even more astonishing was the realization that I would never see my own face as it appeared to others. All I ever saw was my reflection. I would look in the mirror and see my blue eyes, my imperfect nose, my mouth with the tiny scar on the upper lip from the time I got thrown from a tire swing. I would study my features in two dimensions. Using the mirror for direction, I would raise my arm to touch my right cheek and find I’d touched my left one instead. How strange, I thought, that others see me in ways I cannot.
Being aware of thinking makes me wonder what it would be like to not think, to turn my gaze, as Rilke suggests, outward into “the open.” Yet there is such pleasure in thinking, in being aware, and Rilke must have felt that too. Many believe the Duino Elegies, which include “The Eighth Elegy,” is one of the greatest poetic works of the twentieth century.
The encyclopedia also had a section on human intelligence. There was a diagram that compared humans to other animals. The images were in black silhouette and each animal was given a standing, a rung on the ladder of cognition. A horse was smarter than a rat. A pig was smarter than a horse. Humans were at the top. It didn’t occur to me then that the intelligence of a pig or a horse or a rat was determined by how closely its behaviour matched ours.
Bats navigate the dark by sound. A wheatear flies from Alaska to Africa, yet we’re still not sure what guides it. I am limited by my own particular way of thinking, my own particular senses. Rilke’s thinking goes along these lines too. He suggests that our way is unchangeably distinct from that of all other animals, and he writes that it is our fate, “being opposite, / and nothing else, and always opposite.” But wouldn’t that be the fate of non-human animals as well?
My cat puts his paw on my face when he’s hungry. He opens doors with levered handles. How intelligent, I think, as if these sorts of acts prove his cognition while everything else he does in a day, things I can’t understand, do not. Maybe Rilke intended the irony at the heart of “The Eighth Elegy.” Perhaps he meant for me to catch the contradiction in claiming, on the one hand, that humans can’t know beyond their own perceptions, their own way of thinking, and then, on the other, to claim we can know what goes on in the brains of non-human animals.
There was one time when a moth fell into my glass and wouldn’t accept the tissue I offered. I had to use my fingers. Feeling the moth’s body, equal to the thickness of embroidery thread, pinched between my thumb and forefinger, startled me. Recognizing the moth’s vulnerability, its thin film of chitin, a hardened protein that protects its heart in the same way my flesh separates my internal organs from the rest of the world, caused me to drop the moth. It landed on top of a bookmark I’d left on the window ledge. One of the moth’s wings was crushed beyond repair. I stared at it. The moth looked dead. I picked it up, gingerly, intending to put it in the waste bin but it was as if a small gust of wind blew it from my fingertips. It went back to the bookmark and sat. Each morning and night I’d give it a poke. It would flutter up and then settle back down. It did what it did on the bookmark with its crushed wing and then, at the end of three days, it died.
Its body went from powdered membrane to dust, and no way, I thought, would I look so tidy in death, so gossamer. The moth fades, desiccates, and doesn’t leave a stain on my window ledge. Or so it all seems from this distance.
When someone tells me they’ve transcended thought and experienced pure being, that “openness,” I imagine, of Rilke’s elegy, I am eager to know how they got there. Some say they meditate. I’ve tried that, and I confess it makes me cranky. I know it takes work and patience and maybe I haven’t tried hard enough.
Some say they stare at an object until the thoughts and words they’d attached to the object disappear. They look until a film of perception unglues and they see beyond the object. I’ve tried that too, and sometimes my mind goes blank, sometimes I feel calmer, but I have never felt any real enlightenment.
I have had this experience: catching sight of a familiar object in a place where I didn’t expect to see it—timothy grass, for example, so common to the paths and fields I walked as a child, appearing in a vase in an art gallery in New York. Or I’ll be fumbling with a button or a lock and it won’t work the way I expect it to. In those moments, my memories, my old perceptions, are temporarily numbed, anaesthetized, and, for a moment at least, I glimpse these objects with a detached eye. I see the thing, not as if for the first time, but in the way that metaphor works—out of context. The ob
ject flares strange but razor bright. If I’ve ever thought I might be on to something, it’s during these moments. But the material world was still present, and my senses, if anything, were more revved up than ever. And when the moment passed, and my feeling of close-to-something-like-an-answer vanished, what I was left with was a reminder of how small I am, how insubstantial—a fleck of something in a universe of countless other flecks, flecks with parts that can’t be known by others, parts that can’t even be known by me.
And yet I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t stop wondering what it would be like to break free of myself. But if I could, I would still want to know what I was seeing. I would still want to think about it. I would not want my consciousness to disappear entirely, to have it become invisible to me. No. What I want is to break free, as Rilke said, of “the womb that brought [us] forth” and then, when I’ve had a good look around, to come back and reflect on it. I would like to go where Rilke went when he wrote the Duino Elegies. Some say it was after he heard the voice of an angel. When I read “The Eighth Elegy,” I am reading a translation of Rilke’s original work. My comprehension of it is yet another kind of translation. I read it even so.
I take a sip of the Merlot, no hint of moth. I look at the tiny creature on the window ledge. It shakes its diminished body, then, with its joints twitching, I watch as it drags its thinned shadow toward—what, a will to survive? Perhaps. Though it looks, just now, a little more like hope.
Horse blankets dry in the sun on a camp day at Heaven’s Pass.
Twenty
Rituals of a Wound
Every day Comet’s wound begins to scab over and every day I hose the scab away—think of a marshmallow roasted in the fire just long enough to form a crust that you then pull off, the sticky goo put back in the fire and roasted again. It feels a bit counterproductive—every day the healing that Comet’s body undergoes is taken away. But when I compare the wound to the picture I took a few weeks ago, I can see that the flesh is a lighter pink now, also pebbled, less oozy though still raw.
As the days go by, I realize I’ve come to enjoy the practice of getting up and going out to hose Comet. The fresh exuberance of morning is hard to ignore. When I was a teenager I’d sleep in on the weekends and my dad would always admonish me for missing the best part of the day. Dad, I now know what you meant. Even on the worst days, when it’s rainy or I haven’t slept well, I can feel my body doing little jumps for joy at the aesthetic pleasure of morning, seeing the grass getting greener, the lilacs flowering, the fleece flower, lupines, daisies and columbines getting lusher, everything bursting with life, morning exposing the core of it.
I have established a routine. Out of bed at 6:00 a.m., I slip into whatever work clothes are at hand, go downstairs and put the kettle on to boil, grind the coffee beans and then put on my coat and gumboots, out the door, across the lawn past the lilac trees, down the slope of the yard to the Quonset, hose Comet, Fura-Zone, Swat, then to the farther corrals, ducking under the fence, through the grassy area that leads to where I feed Comet, the repetition of my route packing down my trail around an anthill, through the quack grass, around a wild rose bush to the hay bales.
When my children were little, we had traditions, things we did on birthdays and at Christmastime, rituals I now look back on with nostalgia and longing. As if I became who I was through the rituals I’d learned, and now, having lost those traditions, I feel lost, bewildered.
Many rituals are borne out of necessity. “What works, survives,” says Wayne. The practices that prove successful are the ones that continue on into the future. There are many habits turned ritual on the trail and nearly all of them are there to make the work efficient. When we come into camp, there is a certain sequence repeated every day, after we tie up our saddle horses. Our first task is to unpack the pack horses. We put the panniers in a row, the gear in its respective spots—bridles hung on a tree, saddles placed on their backs, stacking one on top of the other. Once the pack horses are unpacked and each one is hobbled and turned loose, we do the same with the saddle horses, each rider doing his or her own. Then the cooking gear is unpacked, someone lights a fire, someone else goes for water, and once the kettle is on the grate and the cook’s happy, then and only then do people disperse to put up their tents. This particular sequence is the most efficient way of setting up camp and getting supper started so you have time to enjoy the evening and relax without having to cook in the dark. The repetition becomes a kind of mantra, and it is comforting not only in its familiarity but because it works, it’s efficient—saddles off, people fed.
The route I take to see Comet becomes a trail because it gets me to the horse and to the hay bales the quickest. Walking the trail each morning has given rise to a kind of comfort. Wayne will say that in the mountains he likes his trails—they reassure him that he’s in the right place, give him something to follow. Most of the time he is following game routes, but sometimes he makes his own way. It’s possible that this changes the habits of moose and caribou and bears, animals that might use Wayne’s way instead. Particle physics claims that every time we are observed we are changed, and that we change others just by observing them. Perhaps a standard by which to assess the impacts of change, whatever it might be, is to determine whether or not that change alters our own routines, our own efficiencies.
I can see that my interactions with Comet are changing him. When he sees me coming, his ears perk up. He has grown used to the routine, to the treats I offer while I spray water on him, the oats I bring when we’re done. And he knows that between the end of rinsing and bringing out the oats, I have to apply ointments and fly repellent to his wound. In the beginning, after I’d finished hosing, I would tie him up to the fence and then go pick up the Fura-Zone and Swat where I’d set them on the ground. Now, when the hosing’s done, I take Comet’s halter off and leave him standing freely. He stands and waits for me to return with the ointments. Only when they’ve been applied does he head toward the Quonset and stand inside, waiting in expectation of oats.
And our interactions have changed me. I think of him when I’m not there. I think of the wound and how it feels when I place the palm of my hand against it, the way the heat transfers to my hand and sometimes, also, how it leaves a thin etching of blood. I think of Comet’s mane and tail, how it feels to brush the knots away, I think of the places where he likes to be rubbed, places he can’t easily reach, the velvet hollow where his back legs meet his belly. My perception of him has changed. I’ve learned that he can be pushy for attention and a little stubborn. I’ve learned he can be arrogant and strong, but that he is never as strong as he thinks he is. I talk to him. “Comet, did you know that at the Royal Ascot, if you want to sit in the Royal Enclosure you have to wear a headpiece big enough to qualify as a hat, not a fascinator? Which means the headpiece has to be bigger than ten centimetres. Your wound is much bigger, but ten centimetres is still pretty big for a glorified barrette. Oh, there is fascination everywhere. Rolla in the summer is a bit of a carnival, have you noticed? People arrive on their way to the mountains and people arrive on their way back down and lots of them want to look at you, and when Wayne calls, he always asks how we are.”
When people stop on their way up, I give them letters for Wayne with pictures of Comet’s wound. When the guests return, they bring notes back. Last week, in a bag of Wayne’s laundry, I found a thick curl of birch bark. With a felt marker, Wayne had drawn a heart with an arrow through it, and inside the heart, he’d written our initials.
I spend a camp day hiking above the Gatho River.
Twenty-One
Hiking to the Top of the Ridge
I think again of how a footprint communicates the way thought and language do, that a single track or footprint is like the subject of a sentence, but to be a complete sentence, for thought to emerge, you need action, a predicate. For a predicate, for meaning to emerge, one foot has to make contact twice. There has to be m
ovement.
Sometimes I like to go one step further—to think of my body as the subject and my mind as its predicate. Together we make a sentence where meaning emerges. But when my body and my mind are both in action, then we’re really cooking with gas.
Walking has always been one of my greatest pleasures, and not just on the trail, though I feel the pleasure of it there most keenly—to be on my own, free of the demands of the pack string; a camp day on which, if the weather is good, I climb up through the buckbrush where Bucky gets squirrelly, prepared to bolt, because he can’t see over the briars, up to where the vegetation grows thin and the shale bares itself, scrambling up a scree slope where no horse would ever go and where it’s best if I don’t look down, to the ridge where I walk along, zigzagging as I make my way steadily higher, amazed at how much distance I gain in ascension, how the camp’s blue overhead tarp dissolves into the trees, the place I’ve been an Alka-Seltzer tablet fizzing away, all the details, the grit of the day, and what I have is panorama, a point where I can see over every mountain range, and the view gives rise to an ache in my belly.
To walk is to act on an insatiable hunger for more, and when I stand at the top of a mountain I can see so much more. I can see places I have never been and also places I have—there’s the lake, the Gataga, the strip of burned trees, the landscape loosening its limbs with each distinction: the sandbar, the marsh, the path to the creek, each part phosphorescing like lamps turning on, wick by wick, inside me.
They say that charting the Milky Way is like mapping a crowded city from within its midst. If we could travel outside of it, then we’d see the place more clearly. I’ve tried to picture the Earth as though I weren’t on it, to imagine the spin and tilt of an object parted, but I could never detach from my body’s weight. I’d get as far as imagining myself looking down—always looking down, never up, which may have something to do with my relationship with gravity. But even if I get to the imagined up there, I can’t break free of Earth’s tether. I can’t get my feet off the ground, outside of its midst and frame of reference, from the place where thought takes shape and matters.
