by Mark Doty
Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity, a handful of images: a lover’s irreplaceable body, the roil and shimmer of sea overshot with sunlight, a handful of cherries, the texture and weight of a word. The word that seems most apt is partake; it comes from Middle English, literally from the notion of being a part-taker, one who participates. We can say we take a part of something but we may just as accurately say we take part in something; we are implicated in another being, which is always the beginning of wisdom, isn’t it—that involvement which enlarges us, which engages the heart, which takes us out of the routine limitations of self?
The codes and laws fall away, useless, foolish, finally, hollow little husks of vanity.
The images sustain.
The images allow for desire, allow room for us—even require us—to complete them, to dream our way into them. I believe with all my heart that when the chariot came for Wally, green and gold and rose, a band of angels swung wide out over the great flanks of the sea, bearing him up over the path of light the sun makes on the face of the waters.
I believe my love is in the Jordan, which is deep and wide and welcoming, though it scours us oh so deeply. And when he gets to the other side, I know he will be dressed in the robes of comfort and gladness, his forehead anointed with spices, and he will sing—joyful—into the future, and back toward the darkness of this world.
Cold Dark Deep and Absolutely Clear
A week and a few days after Wally died, my friend Michael and I stood on the shore at Hatch’s Harbor, which is just where Cape Cod Bay and the Atlantic intersect in a roiling line of watery activity called the Race. At Hatch’s Harbor the sky always seems enormous, the horizontals of dune and marsh and shoreline particularly vast and dazzling. It is especially pristine because the place isn’t easy to reach, accessible as it is only after a long walk through a fire road in the dunes, along a dike built across a huge stretch of marsh, and then round the sandy tideflats skirting a lighthouse whose foghorn tends to sound in all weathers, even the brightest sunlight. The once-manned house is operated by remote control now, the switch apparently off in Connecticut someplace.
In the water that afternoon I saw first one oddly shaped dark form, a sort of mound a few feet from the foaming edge line. It was a seal in the shallow surf, floating on his or her side, eyeing us curiously. My two dogs were with us; I think seals seem to sense them as distant but unlikely cousins, and want to study them. In a moment the watcher submerged, and then rose again a few yards away, a wet black marble bust, the perfectly erect head held with marked dignity and poise. It was joined shortly by another pair of heads. And then another pair, and then another rolling on her side, enjoying the wave of her body and the quick flip of tail. And then there were dozens of watchers, looking toward us with as much curiosity and surprise as we brought to our study of them. The alien world of the water might as well have been, for me, the other world of the spirit; I felt I was looking into the realm of the dead, which I could not enter or know very much about. I thought of Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “At the Fishhouses,” in which she describes the seawater of the Nova Scotian coast as
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals…
Miss Bishop’s marine creatures endure what no other mortals can; they seem more like spirits than living things. This other world was both clear and impenetrable, visible and unknowable. Although dozens of likable faces looked back at me, any one of which might almost have been his.
So began a chain of encounters with seals.
Seals are coastal creatures, citizens of two elements. Though most at ease in the water—where gravity’s unmoored and their bodies arc and tumble freely, somersaulting and floating on their sides, supported by the movement of just one flipper, the flick of a tail—they bring some of that undulance with them to land, on the rare occasions when one sees them out in the winter sun.
I have always associated seals with Wally, through a chain of private associations with the sort of complexity and irrationality that characterizes the way a poetic image twists together a clutch of meanings, fibers spun into a single, complex yarn, various in texture, glinting with strands of separate and intermingling color. Something in the handsome cast of his head, the depth and clarity of his brown eyes. f of Delibes, a ravishing duet from Lakmé called “Dôme Epais.” This aria is an invitation—one woman inviting another to stroll along an Indian river and pick jasmine—and it is pure fluidity, the unmistakable text of a kind of joy, the pleasure of swimming, of free movement, of floating in an untroubled suspension. Wally loved that music, and I imagine that in part this was because he was not, in his body, a comfortable swimmer, though he longed to be; in his spirit was a latent seal.
Seals bear a noticeable kinship to dogs, which Wally loved, and with which he felt a deep and immediate connection. “You like dogs,” a tea-leaf reader in a Boston tearoom once told him, “and dogs like you.”
I’ve just read an Inuit tale, which a friend has sent me, the story of a boy who left his parents behind to live with the seals, and in their camps at the bottom of the sea (where they gather around their fires!) heard their tales of ancient days and times to come.
And I’ve been thinking of Bishop’s seal, who floats, in her poem, in an element like knowledge, and likes to listen to her renditions of Baptist hymns.
And then there’s the notion of the seal as merman, of the creature which embodies the two worlds, unlike us, who live firmly in one medium, despite our brief visits to the other. To be of the coast, a mer-being, is to partake of the liminal, that watery zone of possibility where one thing becomes another, where the rules of one world are suspended as we enter into the next. The coast is the shifting zone of change and transformation. A coast is not a line really but a borderland, site of a continual conversation between elements which transforms both.
Movements between the worlds are limited, and often extraordinary. This is Ludovico Guicciardini, writing in Description of all the Lowlands, a seventeenth-century guide to Holland:
They also claim that, around the year 1526, a merman was taken in the Frisian sea, formed in every way like the rest of us; they say that he had a beard, hair on his head and other hairs that we have, but quite setulose (that is, resembling the bristles of a pig), and harsh, and that they accustomed him to eating bread and other ordinary foods; they say that in the beginning the man was very wild, but that later he became gentle, though not totally tame, and he was mute. He lived for several years and finally, having once escaped the same illness, died of the plague in the year 1531.
Travelers between worlds are mute; they cannot tell us what they know. The language of the other element is untranslatable, though here it seems that, accustomed to solid ground, the mer-creature is also susceptible to its epidemics.
The wounded seal is young and startlingly silvery in the February sun. Its injury is a small bloody line along the tip of one side of the graceful little tail, as if perhaps it’s been bitten; it doesn’t look terribly serious, but of course I don’t know how to read their pain, their expressions. He’s alone on the shore, a fact which in itself doesn’t seem to bode well. Why is he no longer part of the group? When I’ve seen them in the water or, once, in a sunning herd on the edge of the shore, they seemed happily grouped, like a pack of dogs. Do they abandon the injured or dying, perhaps to divorce themselves from the smell of blood that marks an animal as prey? I’ve heard that sharks come in, this time of year, to feed on the young ones.
Beached on a low rise of sand, maybe thirty or forty feet from an outgoing tidal river, he is not pleased to see us, particularly the two dogs who are full of curiosity and longing for a game. The seal raises his head and barks and makes a noise like a hiss of warning; my worry for it is mixed with wondering what those teeth are capable o
f. Though it seems, distinctly, young—the look on its face suggests that we’d say, were it human, this child is lost. I am busy restraining the dogs; their excited noises, and mine, rouse the seal to action. I fear that it’s incapable of much movement but it awkwardly flips and starts to scoot down the rise toward the water, picking up speed. At the edge of the tidal stream it looks back to us, then slips into the water. It’s no less awkward in three inches of water than it is on sand, but as soon as it reaches a foot-deep stretch of sea it’s gloriously fluid, like a heron taking to air; what was compromised and lurching is suddenly capable of splendid and effortless motion.
A body that was wounded sits stranded, incapacitated. Gone into another element, that same being takes gorgeous, ready flight. I am filled, entirely, with the image of my wounded lover leaping from his body, blossoming into some welcoming, other realm. Is it that I am in that porous state of grief, a heated psychic condition in which everything becomes metaphor?
Or does the world consent, in some fashion, to offer me the particular image which imagination requires?
Metaphor is a way of knowing the world, and no less a one than other sorts of ways of gaining knowledge. Years ago, in Boston, I used to go to weekly meetings of the American Spiritualist Church—something like a Quaker meeting for psychics, or potential ones. After some meditation and singing, people would spontaneously give one another the messages they received. Many of these were incredibly detailed, elaborate pieces of perception about other people involving problems, opportunities, advice. Often the messages involved communication from the dead, who would be described to the receiver in exacting detail. I was never much good as a fledgling psychic. Where others saw clear and detailed pictures, I would perceive just a rush of images, seldom organized into anything coherent. But every once in a while I would see a sort of scene, usually a cryptic one, and feel that it related to a particular person in the group. If I told that person my images, I would usually discover that they made sense to her, even if I didn’t understand them.
Could metaphoric thinking, the sort of work that artists do to apprehend their reality, be the same function of the mind, applied in a somewhat different way? My way of knowing experience is to formulate a metaphor which describes or encapsulates a particular moment; it is a way of getting at the truth. And a way of paying attention, of reading the world.
My seal said, The wounded one’s gone free, gone swimming into what is familiar to no mortal.
The second seal bears no visible wound, but its face is full of distress and exhaustion; the eyes seem enormous, entirely dark, defenseless, world-weary. All of which might be construed as anthropomorphizing, but how could one look into that gaze without empathy? This seal, near the same stretch of beach, was up much higher, a week or two later, where the last stubborn snow held on in the shadow of a dune. Had an especially high tide brought it there? Did it pull itself further from the water, in order to rest on shore? This time the presence of me and my attendant animals wasn’t enough to rouse the creature to return to the water; we were simply enough to cause it more pain. The younger and more aggressive of my dogs, the buoyant golden, didn’t take long to figure out that the seal was feeble, a fine subject to pester. I got him on the leash, hauling him away, and resolved to call the Center for Coastal Studies as soon as I could get home to see if they couldn’t effect some kind of rescue. We rounded the dunes that line the wide marsh, headed back toward the dike and the fire road and home, far enough from the seal for him to be out of the adolescent dog’s mind, I thought. I let him off the leash.
But I’d miscalculated, expecting that his usual scattered attention would hold sway. The seal was too thrilling—too vulnerable—for him to forget so easily. He ran back, and I ran after him, to find him yelping madly at the creature, who was barking back and looking at me with a kind of bottomless exasperation. I leashed the dog and hauled him away again, this time keeping him on the lead until we were far away, into the marsh, a half-mile of dunes in between us and his prey.
Which did not turn out to be enough to stop him; when I made the mistake of letting him loose, he took off straight across the tops of the dunes, abandoning the curvy edge of the marsh for the shortest distance to further torment. I ran right across the dune-tops after him, my older and calmer black retriever loping behind me. When I thought I couldn’t run anymore—dry-mouthed, heart pounding—I made it to the last crest of dune to find him yelping and leaping perilously close to the seal’s head, both of them flashing teeth at one another.
This time the seal’s face seemed to convey a kind of helplessness and desolation that cut me to the core. I wanted a way to apologize for bringing this yapping annoyance, this petty grief, into what was already clearly a deeper pain, a silent and solitary occupation. I felt as if the seal were doing some grave work and I not only couldn’t help, I couldn’t help but harm; I couldn’t even keep my brutalizing pet from making things worse.
We left. Beau stayed on the leash at least a mile, till we were well in the middle of the dike that keeps the tide from washing away the modest ambitions of this town’s airport runways. Even then, released, he thought of running back, and began to, but I was given from someplace the sudden wise impulse to run in the other direction, toward home; making a game of it convinced Beau to run after me, instead of after his own wildness. It was a moment of choosing between loyalties to different aspects of himself, and he chose domestic partnership.
The woman who answered the phone at the Center for Coastal Studies said they’d had several reports of exhausted seals beaching themselves, resting, then riding out on the next high tide when they recovered. Exhausted from what? I asked. The work of finding food, she said. I didn’t know why then, more than any other time, they’d be weary. I described the seal’s look of distress and exhaustion, I said I feared it was ill. She said she didn’t know if there was anyone who could get out that day and look, but perhaps there was. She took my phone number, but they didn’t call.
So my attempts at helping didn’t seem to. The fact of the exhausted, incapable body—the fact of illness?—was intractable. I walked or ran on the wide expanse of marsh and dune, under that huge sky, around the single immovable fact.
The wide elemental landscape seemed to heighten and emphasize the lesson. Do what you can, nothing avails; it even seemed, with my panting, excited companion, that I’d made things worse.
The dead seal is an emblem of perfect repose; it lies like a yogi who’s left the body for a time, gone completely into himself, the beached body left behind in a state of great quietude, utter silence. The head’s turned to the right, so that one cheek rests against the sand. The small flippers lie peacefully at either side, and the perfectly straight spine ends in the symmetrical flourish of the tail. But there is no sense of movement or fluidity in the body, despite the grace and economy of its lines. Could it be one of the same seals I’ve seen? I think the first one was smaller, the second larger, but who can tell, really, since animation changes the scale of things. Does everything look smaller, in the stasis of death? The seals I’d seen had such purposeful fluidity of movement—beings of water, but of fire, too, the electric liquidity of the body as it turned and flipped, the sleek head raised, the eyes full of fear or defensiveness or exhaustion or—was it?—sorrow.
The eyes. Besides life, they are all that is missing from the body, and it is this absence that finally makes the form before me seem not at rest but dead. Gulls have taken the eyes away with their insistent beaks; their footprints are stamped all around the head like ancient letters on the clay tablets of Babylon. The law which they inscribe is that of hunger; what is soft, what is unguarded, what yields to them is what sustains those white engines, all wings and throat, which carry an appetite so large it obliterates all else. At first when I see that the eyes are gone, I think this is terrible and I imagine I will be unable to keep looking, but it isn’t like that. Having been with Wally at the end of his life and then with Wally’s body—form in repose
—there is something new and unflinching in my looking at flesh. The spaces where the seal’s eyes were…sockets doesn’t seem the right word, these are little caverns of bone, reddened with a bit of blood, their depths not entirely visible. They enter deep into the sleek face, beneath the whiskers and the sweet upward curve of the mouth which one wants to read, in the living animal, as a smile. In death the mouth is relaxed, as blank and unreadable as the face of a sleeper.
Wally’s body was almost unspeakably beautiful to me. All the last months of his illness, his head had been turning to the left on his pillow in a way that looked uncomfortable or rigid; people were forever straightening him out. This seemed intended to make him comfortable, but perhaps had more to do with the helper’s need for a more familiar kind of alignment. In a moment, the muscles in his neck would pull again back to the left, and over time they became so stiff that it was difficult to bring his head back to center. This was something to do with whatever unnamed thing was happening in his brain; as happens after a stroke, the sides of his body behaved in different ways, not quite in concert. After he died, his head lolled to the right freely and loosely, as though the tendons could at last compensate for the time they’d been taut. There was a deep calm to his face; he seemed a kind of unfathomable, still well which opened on and down beneath the suddenly smooth surface of his skin. Which seemed polished, as it cooled, though not stiff; it was as if his body moved toward the condition of marble, but marble that’s been palmed and warmed, touched until it picks up something of human heat. The heat in him lasted a long time. I loved that heat. I don’t know how long I held his face and his shoulders and stroked him; as he began to cool I kept my hands on his belly, where the last of his warmth seemed to pool and concentrate. Here the fire of the body came to rest, smoldering longest, down to the last embers.
