The Road
I was asked by Melanie as she handed my coffee to me what I was working on this morning. I said, “I do not know. Something will come to me.” She smiled.
I glanced at the front page of the New York Times. The Newspaper stand is adjacent to the counter for coffee additives, paper napkins, and the bulletin board for community events. The Times front page graphic was of our scowling President seated with Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau and President Macron of France. Our President a member of the G-7, a few days ago imposed stiff tariffs on steel and aluminum from Canada and France. Predictably both nations responded with equivalent tariffs on imported American goods. Trade war. Nowadays our mental zeitgeist is shaped by this individual in the White House who in a earlier generation could have been a grand wizard of the KKK. His dark multi-valent antipathy seems bottomless.
My lifeline came in the form of some photographs taken out west by a friend. These photos were of the Grand Teton mountains, and of wild life that inhabit the National Park there. Somehow the texture of the coat of a wild elk, it’s sheep-like, but alert eye seemed more civilized than my sense of what swirls around me here and now in a suburb of Chicago. I would like to “get back” to Nature, and then I’ll understand what that means. Yes I know that Nature is the source of life and of death, Nature kills. My gut tells me that such a death has less malevolence than is the case with “civilization.” Everything that lives dies. The elk will die. My parents have died. I will die. Is there not something beneficent to think of our return to where we began?
I am beginning my reading of the collection of poems by Gary Snyder, Mountains and Rivers Without End. The collection, forty years in the making, reminds me of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Each poem is a meditation on life, and on being. Perhaps I am able to comprehend just a bit as I hear the voice of such a poem with each reading. Such poetry is meant to be lived with.
Here is a fragment of a Snyder poem:
a night of the long poem
and the mined guitar
“Forming a new society
within the shell of the old.”
mess of tincan camps and littered roads.
