Dreaming the World

A dark, even for November, day, presaging another nor’easter. We seem stuck in a cycle where we have a week or two of parched conditions, followed by a couple of days of flooding rain. The coming storm promises to wet without flooding, before giving way to another long dry stretch.

A look up the street shows bare branches with a spattering of fading leaves. Here and there across the city Japanese Maples burst forth in intense hues of maroon; there are areas of brilliant yellow as well among the faded browns of the oaks. In our new micro-forest a woodchuck has taken up residence for the winter, raising the question of what shall we do about that come spring.

The election has come and gone, and we are left with some sense of relief, a certainty that the next two years (at least) will be dangerous and chaotic, and the hope that foresight will outweigh the urge to vengeance. Here in Rhode Island our two neo-liberal senators appear bent on passing bad legislation, laws that will only intensify the destruction. Of course, they have lots of company, at least until the new congress convenes.

I have continued reading Kate Zambreno’s longer works. These books fall somewhere between memoir and fiction, the two paths endlessly intertwining as one turns the page. As I read I think about how all writing is inevitably a form of autofiction. How could it be otherwise? We are always writing our lives as we live them, our internal conversations a form of fiction making that we once called Joycian, a stream of consciousness narration of the unfurling moment.

My birthday falls in mid-November and my internal dialog inevitably takes on qualities of the seasonal thinning in the natural world. Perhaps because I lived in rural England when age seven, the time we truly become attached to places and begin to be a self, the first page of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native has long seemed to me to define my internal November landscape:

A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment. Overhead the hollow stretch of whitish cloud shutting out the sky was as a tent which had the whole heath for its floor.

The heaven being spread with this pallid screen and the earth with the darkest vegetation, their meeting-line at the horizon was clearly marked. In such contrast the heath wore the appearance of an instalment of night which had taken up its place before its astronomical hour was come: darkness had to a great extent arrived hereon, while day stood distinct in the sky. Looking upwards, a furze-cutter would have been inclined to continue work; looking down, he would have decided to finish his faggot and go home. The distant rims of the world and of the firmament seemed to be a division in time no less than a division in matter. The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could in like manner retard the dawn, sadden noon, anticipate the frowning of storms scarcely generated, and intensify the opacity of a moonless midnight to a cause of shaking and dread.

In fact, precisely at this transitional point of its nightly roll into darkness the great and particular glory of the Egdon waste began, and nobody could be said to understand the heath who had not been there at such a time. It could best be felt when it could not clearly be seen, its complete effect and explanation lying in this and the succeeding hours before the next dawn; then, and only then, did it tell its true tale. The spot was, indeed, a near relation of night, and when night showed itself an apparent tendency to gravitate together could be perceived in its shades and the scene. The sombre stretch of rounds and hollows seemed to rise and meet the evening gloom in pure sympathy, the heath exhaling darkness as rapidly as the heavens precipitated it. And so the obscurity in the air and the obscurity in the land closed together in a black fraternization towards which each advanced halfway.

The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.…