by Mary Oliver
The sleepers are very beautiful as they lie unclothed,
They flow hand in hand over the whole earth from east to west as they lie unclothed. . . . (p. 115)
The fetch of his breath and the fetch of his ambition began on the shores of this loneliness. Without it he might have relaxed back from the endless and fiery work. He might have let a little moderation into his rhapsody. Certainly he would not have been the Whitman we mean when we say the poet, Whitman.
Darkness you are gentler than my lover . . . his flesh was sweaty and panting,
I feel the hot moisture yet that he left me. (p. 109)
The erotic and the mystical are no strangers: each is a tempest; each drowns the individual in the yearn and success of combination; each calls us forth from an ordinary life to a new measure. For Whitman the erotic life of the body was all that the word “erotic” means, plus more; it was also its own music, its authority, and its manner of glazing our surroundings so that it seems we have been given new sight. James’s four marks of distinction concerning mystical experience might apply without contortion to the erotic life as well. And Whitman, advocating the affirmative life of the body—I want to say the luster of the body—was at the same time in an alliance with the power of transformation. Was Whitman a mystic? For myself, I cannot answer the question except to say that surely he was a religious poet in the same sense that Emerson was a religious man, for whom life itself was light. For Emerson, it was light as clear as spring in his own orchard. For Whitman, it was that hot burning, that heaviness of intent, that vertigo, that trembling: that merge.
Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of Grass advocates: the healthy, heavy, seeded life of the soul. That such advocacy brought him criticism no doubt was disappointing, but he did not change his work. That he was called coarse and rank must have dismayed him, but he did not alter anything. There was no way he could delete or dilute this part of his cosmology. It was central to everything he wanted to say.
To be surrounded by beautiful curious breathing laughing flesh is enough,
To pass among them . . . to touch any one . . . to rest my arm ever so lightly round his or her neck for a moment . . . what is this then?
I do not ask any more delight . . . I swim in it as in a sea. (p. 120)
5.
What cannot be told can be suggested; such is the theater of Leaves of Grass, hugely long, opulent, illustrative, intense, oracular, tender, luxurious. And you must take it to the hilt, you must stay with it almost beyond endurance, for
This is the grass that grows wherever the land is and the water is,
This is the common air that bathes the globe. (p. 43)
Of all American poems, the 1855 Leaves of Grass is the most probable of effect upon the individual sensibility. It wants no less. We study it as literature, but like all great literature it has a deeper design: it would be a book for men to live by. It is obsessively affirmative. It is foolishly, childishly obsessively affirmative. It offers a way to live, in the religious sense, that is intelligent and emotive and rich, and dependent only on the individual—no politics, no liturgy, no down payment. Just attention, sympathy, empathy. Neither does Whitman speak of hell or damnation; rather, he is parental and coaxing, tender and provocative in his drawing us toward him. Line by line, he amalgamates to the fact. Brawn and spirit, we are built of light, and God is within us. This is the message of his long, honeyed harangue. This is the absolute declaration, and this is the verifying experience of his poem.
Swift wind! Space! My Soul! Now I know it is true what I guessed at;
What I guessed when I loafed on the grass,
What I guessed while I lay alone in my bed . . . and again as I walked the beach under the paling stars of the morning. (p. 59)
Wordsworth’s Mountain
1.
There is a rumor of total welcome among the frosts of the winter morning. Beauty has its purposes, which, all our lives and at every season, it is our opportunity, and our joy, to divine. Nothing outside ourselves makes us desire to do so; the questions, and the striving toward answers, come from within. The field I am looking at is perhaps twenty acres altogether, long and broad. The sun has not yet risen but is sending its first showers over the mountains, a kind of rehearsal, a slant light with even a golden cast. I do not exaggerate. The light touches every blade of frozen grass, which then burns as a particular as well as part of the general view. The still-upright weeds have become wands, encased in a temporary shirt of ice and light. Neither does this first light miss the opportunity of the small pond, or the groups of pine trees. And now: enough of silver, behold the pink, even a vague, unsurpassable flush of pale green. It is the performance of this hour only, the dawning of the day, fresh and ever new. This is to say nothing against afternoons, evenings, or even midnight. Each has its portion of the spectacular. But dawn—dawn is a gift. Much is revealed about a person by his or her passion, or indifference, to this opening of the door of day. No one who loves dawn, and is abroad to see it, could be a stranger to me.
Poe claimed he could hear the night darkness as it poured, in the evening, into the world. I remember this now and think, reversing the hour but not the idea, that I will hear some sound of the morning as it settles upward. What I hear, though, is no such sprawling and powerful anthem, as it would have to be, but the rustling of a flock of snow buntings, high and wild in the cold air, like seeds, rushing toward me, and then away. Seeds that sing. I see, on this morning, nothing else, or nothing else moving. Fox tracks are ahead of mine, dimpling the frost, but the fox is nowhere in view.
2.
When I was a child, living in a small town surrounded by woods and a winding creek—woods more pastoral than truly wild—my great pleasure, and my secret, was to fashion for myself a number of little houses. They were huts really, made of sticks and grass, maybe a small heap of fresh leaves inside. There was never a closure but always an open doorway, and I would sit just inside, looking out into the world. Such architectures were the capsules of safety, and freedom as well, open to the wind, made of grass and smelling like leaves and flowers. I was lucky, no one ever found any of my houses, or harmed them. They fell apart of the weather, an event that caused me no grief; I moved on to another place of leaves and earth, and built anew.
Many children build in this way, but more often than not as a social act, where they play the games of territory and society. For me it was important to be alone; solitude was a prerequisite to being openly and joyfully susceptible and responsive to the world of leaves, light, birdsong, flowers, flowing water. Most of the adult world spoke of such things as opportunities, and materials. To the young these materials are still celestial; for every child the garden is re-created. Then the occlusions begin. The mountain and the forest are sublime, but the valley soil raises richer crops. The perfect gift is no longer a single house but a house, or a mind, divided. Man finds he has two halves to his existence—leisure and occupation—and from these separate considerations he now looks upon the world. In leisure he remembers radiance; in labor he looks for results.
But in those early years I did not think about such things. I simply went out into the green world and made my house, a kind of cowl, or a dream, or a palace of grass.
3.
And now I am thinking of the poet Wordsworth, and the strange adventure that one night overtook him. When he was still a young boy, in love with summer and night, he went down to a lake, “borrowed” a rowboat, and rowed out upon the water. At first he felt himself embraced by pleasures: the moonlight, the sound of the oars in the calm water. Then, suddenly, a mountain peak nearby, with which he was familiar, or felt he was familiar, revealed, to his mind and eye, a horrifying flexibility. All crag and weight, it perceived him; it leaned down over the water; it seemed to pursue him. Of course he was terrified, and rowed hard, fleeing back across the water. But the experience led him, led his mind, from simple de
votion of that beauty which is a harmony, a kindly ministry of thought, to nature’s deeper and inexplicable greatness. The gleam and the tranquility of the natural world he loved always, and now he honored also the world’s brawn and mystery, its machinations that lie beyond our understanding—that are not even nameable. What Wordsworth praised thereafter was more than the arrangement of concretions and vapors into appreciable and balanced landscapes; it was, also, the whirlwind. The beauty and strangeness of the world may fill the eyes with its cordial refreshment. Equally it may offer the heart a dish of terror. On one side is radiance; on another is the abyss.
4.
Wordsworth, though he did not think so on that summer evening, was a lucky boy. I, in my hut of leaves, was a lucky girl. Something touched, between us and the universe. It does not always happen. But if it does, we know forever where we live, no matter where we sleep, or eat our dinner, or sit at table and write words on paper.
And we might, in our lives, have many thresholds, many houses to walk out from and view the stars, or to turn and go back to for warmth and company. But the real one—the actual house not of beams and nails but of existence itself—is all of earth, with no door, no address separate from oceans or stars, or from pleasure or wretchedness either, or hope, or weakness, or greed.
How wonderful that the universe is beautiful in so many places and in so many ways. But also the universe is brisk and businesslike, and no doubt does not give its delicate landscapes or its thunderous displays of power, and perhaps perception, too, for our sakes or our improvement. Nevertheless, its intonations are our best tonics, if we would take them. For the universe is full of radiant suggestion. For whatever reason, the heart cannot separate the world’s appearance and actions from morality and valor, and the power of every idea is intensified, if not actually created, by its expression in substance. Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever returns, we experience eternity.
SECTION FOUR
Swoon
In a corner of the stairwell of this rented house a most astonishing adventure is going on. It is only the household of a common spider,* a small, rather chaotic web half in shadow. Yet it burgeons with the ambition of a throne. She—for it is the female that is always in sight—has produced six egg sacs, and from three of them, so far, an uncountable number of progeny have spilled. “Spilled” is precisely the word, for the size and the motions of these newborns are so meager that they appear at first utterly lifeless, as though the hour of beginning had come and would not be deferred, and thrust them out, with or without their will, to cling in a dark skein in the tangled threads.
I am less precise about the timing of these events than I would like. While I was quick to notice the spider and her web, I was slow to write down the happenings as they occurred, a concordance I now wish I had. It was so casual at first, I was sure that something—probably a careless motion on my part—would demolish or tear the web and remove the spider from sight. But it did not happen.
I began to watch her in October, and it’s fair to say that being a poor sleeper especially when away from home, I have watched her quite as much during the night as during the day.
Now it is early December.
I am extremely careful as I descend or ascend the stairs.
_______
Perhaps when I pass by she senses my heft and shadow. But she floats on her strings and does not move. Nor, I think, would she flee easily from any intrusion. Her egg sacs, all of them, are hanging near her, in an archipelago, the oldest at the top and the newest at the bottom, and without question she is attached to them in some bond of cherishing. Often she lies with her face against the most recently constructed, touching it with her foremost set of limbs. And why should she not be fond of it? She made it from the materials of her own body—deft and plump she circled and circled what was originally a small package, and caused it to grow larger as the thread flowed from her body. She wrapped and wrapped until, now, the sac sways with the others in the threads of the web, not round exactly, but like a Lilliputian gas balloon, pulled slightly along the vertical.
And still she fusses, pats it and circles it, as though coming to a judgment; then pats some more, or dozes, still touching it. Finally, she withdraws her sets of legs, curls them, almost as if in a swoon, or a death, and hangs, motionless, for a full half day. She seems to sleep.
The male spider comes and goes. Every third or fourth day I catch sight of him lurking at the edge of the web. What he eats I cannot guess, for the treasures of the web—which do not come, sometimes, for many days—are to all evidence for the female only. Whether she refuses to offer him a place at her table, or whether he has no need of it, I do not know. He is a dapper spider; being male and no spinner, he lacks the necessity of the pouch-like body in which to store the materials from which comes the bold and seemingly endless thread. He is therefore free to be of another nature altogether—small, and shy, and quick.
Twice while I have been watching, when the egg sacs have been in the unseeable process of pouring the tiny, billeted spiders forth, he has been in the web. Perhaps, like some male cats, and other mammals also, he will take this arrival with ill humor and feast on a few of his own progeny.
I do not know.
Whenever I see him poised there and lean closer to him, he steps briskly backward, is instantly enfolded into darkness and gone from sight.
_______
It is five A.M.
Good fortune has struck the web like an avalanche. A cricket—not the black, flat-bodied, northern sort I am used to, but a paler variety, with a humped, shrimplike body and whiplike antennae and jumper’s legs—has become enmeshed in the web.
This spider is not an orb weaver; that is, she does not build a net silken and organized and centered along a few strong cables. No, her web is a poor thing. It is flung forth, ungloriously, only a few inches above the cellar floor. What is visible is in a wild disorder. Nevertheless, it functions; it holds, now, the six egg cases and the cricket, which struggles in a sort of sling of webbing.
The spider now is never still. She descends to the cricket again and again, then hastens away and hangs a short distance above. Though it is almost impossible to see, a fine line follows her, jetting from her spinneret; as she moves, she is wrapping the cricket. Soon the threads thicken; the cricket is bound with visible threads at the ankles, which keep it from tearing loose with the strength of the huge back legs. How does the spider know what it knows? Little by little the cricket’s long front limbs with their serrated edges, flung in an outward gesture from its body, are also being wrapped. Soon the cricket’s efforts to free itself are only occasional—a few yawings toward push or pull—then it is motionless.
All this has taken an hour.
There has been nothing consumable in the web for more than a week, during which time the spider has made her sixth egg case and, presumably, before that, carried through some motions of romance with her consort, and produced the actual eggs. Her body during this week—I mean that dust-colored, sofa-button, bulbous part of her body so visible to our eyes—has shrunk to half its previous size.
Then, as I continued to watch, the spider began a curious and coordinated effort. She dropped to the cricket and with her foremost limbs, which are her longest, she touched its body. The response was an immediate lurching of cricket, also spider and web. Swiftly she turned—she was, in fret, beginning the motions of turning even as she reached forward—and then, even before the cricket reacted, with her hindmost pair of limbs she kicked it. She did this over and over—descending, touching and turning, kicking—each of her kicks targeting the cricket’s stretched-out back limbs. She did this perhaps twenty times. With every blow the cricket swung, then rocked back to motionlessness, the only signs of life a small, continual motion of the jointed mouth, and a faint bubbling therefrom.
Now she might have been asleep as she lay, lover-like, alongside the cricket’s body. Later—hours later—she moved down along its bronze chest, and there fed again. Slowly her shrunken body grew larger, then very large. And then it was night.
