Landscape: Memory Read online

  19 JULY 1915

  We four ate a very long lunch. Flora and I regaled Father with our Rupert Brooke stories and Duncan told us his very earliest memory from when he lived in Persia.

  He was on a caravan with his mother and father, him held up in his mother's lap high atop a dromedary hump. Really, this is true. The caravan included several dozen families. Duncan doesn't know why. He was never told, being just three, as he was. The caravan was making its way as close as it could to the next oasis, his dad told him so, before a terrible dust storm hit. He remembers seeing the enormous black swirling cloud of dust shutting off the horizon, growing and growing, spreading over nearly half the sky. Duncan had to go to the bathroom. He just had a terrible need right then and there to go. This next part I'm sure he made up because it makes no sense to me. His mother halted the whole caravan, fearing that they'd be separated from the rest and die, and dismounted from the ponderous height, carrying Duncan and a brilliant brass urn. This, Duncan says, was his potty and his mother insisted he always use his potty so as not to develop uncivilized habits. She is, you know, British. She set him up, facing into the endless open desert, the black dust swirling up into the sky, it raising a horrible high whistling sound and rumbling steadily toward them. There he sat on his brilliant brass urn, facing the bleak landscape, with some hundred camels and scores of grumpy people behind him just waiting.

  Flora came with me to the pond for drawing. We'd been bickering about drawing and photos and she saw no reason to let my schedule interrupt that.

  "Why not take a photo, Dogey?" she repeated, kicking a stone along the dusty road north. "You can trace from there, and then paint it in colors, just as you remember it."

  I turned to her. Some disgusting liquid came flying out my nostril, whipping across the trajectory of my turn, and narrowly missed her sleeve. She politely ignored it.

  "I'm not trying to draw a photo,"" I insisted. "I'm drawing what I remember." The sun continued burning brightly down.

  "But Dogey, the photo will help you get it just right. You're only a beginner, you know. This way the shapes will be right." She sounded like me talking to Mother. "Hills and water can't have changed that drastically in five years."

  She wasn't getting it. I rolled my sleeves up like I'd seen Mr. Spengler do whenever he wanted to convince Flora of something.

  "I didn't see it how it is. You see? I saw it differently." That seemed about right to me.

  "What was different?" she asked, furrowing her brow quizzically and touching my arm with her soft fingers.

  I pulled my little landscape out of its holder.

  "See," I said. "That's what I saw." We stopped and gazed at the layered mess of lines. "More or less that." She looked and looked for a long while, then exhaled forcefully through her nose. "Don't you imagine we all see the same things differently?" I asked, hoping to preempt any further objections. "Like when you look out in the dark, everyone sees whatever frightens them?"

  She'd tilted her head down low, bumping her crown up against mine, and begun nodding no, our heads so engaged that we both nodded no (though that's not what I meant).

  "Cameras will put an end to all that," she concluded happily. And now I nodded no in earnest.

  "No," I vocalized. "That's the awful trick of cameras. You think they've caught things just as they are but really it's just nothing. It's worse than nothing. It's nothing masquerading as something."

  I was beginning to feel a bit heated up about it all. I took the little album she carried out from under her arm and opened it up at random. "Look at that," I said, pointing to the photo of me and my spear. "It's all very pretty, but it's not like a person seeing. It's just this paper turning all blotchy from chemicals." I had some sense my argument was getting messy, but I kept on. "It's nowhere, it's . . . it's like being fed through a tube or ... or going to sea in a submarine." I paused to consider my point. "Does that make sense?"

  Flora kept up her quizzical stare. "No," she said simply.

  I thought some more, trying to think to the simple center of what I felt.

  "No one sees the way a camera sees," I concluded, finally.

  "No one sees the way you see either," Flora said bluntly.

  "So?" I answered because that's precisely what I meant.

  "So why are you badgering me about how horrible photos can be if your silly drawing is just as pointless?"

  "I never said it was pointless."

  "Deceitful then. You implied that photos were deceitful."

  "Did I?" I stalled. Now I was worried my drawing was indeed pointless. "Why do you say my drawing's pointless?"

  "Dogey! Don't get me all turned around." With that she shook me by my shoulders. "Your drawing's pointless only if you say a camera's view is pointless. Your view is no better than a camera's."

  "Why not?" I objected. "I'm a person, and that makes it better." It seemed a sensible position.

  "But someone's operating the camera, Dogey. That photo you complained about was taken by someone. Me."

  "I complained because you said photos would make us all see the same because a camera sees better somehow."

  "Deceit! That's your point about deceit, you implied photos claimed a superior view." She was clearly relieved we'd found this thread again.

  "I guess I did," I allowed. "Don't they?"

  "I guess you could say that, if people end up thinking it's wrong to see other than how a photo sees. Then people won't let themselves see differently. I don't know if you can really blame the photo for that, Dogey."

  But I wasn't really listening now. I'd suddenly realized it was her photo I'd attacked.

  ''Yours aren't like that," I interrupted generously. "No one could ever think yours were real," and I smiled with praise.

  "What do you mean?" She seemed annoyed by my interruption.

  I thought carefully, looking for just the right way to put it, taking the album in hand and looking closely at the photos.

  "I see them as so very, so," and then it came to me, "very individual." I pecked her on the cheek, knowing I'd seen just the quality she saw. I'd found a word on which we could agree.

  "Yes," she agreed. "They're certainly that. Your drawing is too, you know," and she pecked me back on my cheek. I was glad we'd made up, as we always seemed to by the end of an argument.

  Behind us the clouds had come back in, drifting in off the gray sea, all feathery and wet on the underside. We rushed for the pond, wanting to get in and out before the sun disappeared. We came running through the field and stripped under the oaks, diving into the clear blue pool without a pause. Our swim was quick and vigorous. Splashing and dolphin dives and furious laps but no horseplay on the rope swing, and we were out again, lying wet and clean and empty in the lovely green grass. We soaked in the bright warm sun for a good long time before the mists drifted in across the rest of the sky and shut the whole day down into clouds.

  It began blowing strong before dusk, the sky progressively darker and Duncan deciding he'd best tie his boat down with ropes. By dinner it was almost dark as night and the frightful gusts were battering down through the trees, no rain yet, but that electrical smell of rain about to come in torrents. Father'd cooked a Welsh Cowle, lamb-bone stew with potatoes and leeks from the garden and ladles full of rich broth, which we sat down to eat, all chitter-chatter with excitement and talk to keep the scary night at bay. I was bump up against Duncan, all of us laughing at some thought of Father's, jostling and hoo-hawing, and Duncan kissed me on my cheek without a word or a thought and no one stopping to take any notice.

  My discussion with Flora today touched again on that little disagreement with Cicero. Cicero or Ruskin (or Mother, for that matter) would have no patience for the sloppiness of my paints. Yet I've begun to enjoy it. It appears that I've left my painting in the realm of the nurselogs and landscapes, that lazy realm within which I can continue to embrace the painting's ever-changing face. I have no need for "accuracy."

  But perhaps my enjoyment
is a shelter of last resort, a position to which I am forced by the utter impossibility of my ever successfully using the paints with discipline and accuracy. If I could make my painting replicate exactly the original event, I wondered, wouldn't I delight in that power? Like Cicero, wouldn't I be intoxicated by the sheer certainty of it, the delightful precision and stability of exact reproduction? But paint defies me, and so, it seems, does memory. Even if I had a camera which made photos of the picture in my mind, that picture, the memory of Bolinas five years ago, would be vastly different than the Bolinas I am living in now. It is a blessing and curse for which I find myself feeling quite grateful.

  20 JULY 1915

  Flora saw lanterns flashing and heard voices through the noise of the wind and rain, down on the lagoon. She's gone to wake Father and find a lantern, blankets and rope.

  I said we'd stay put till she got back, but Duncan said maybe we'd go down if things seemed desperate and Flora'd not yet returned. Of course Duncan saw things as desperate straightaway so we bundled up in sweaters and tied a length of rope around our waists, just in case. We wobbled down the muddy hill through the gusting wind and the rain blowing down in sheets.

  Our meadow had become a raging pond, full up to its lip with water and rippling waves clear across its top from the wind blowing strong. We waded through it and scrambled up onto the muddy road. Rain smacked in fat drops against our faces, making it difficult to see properly. Ghost ridges of wind-whipped white tops floated pale and distant in the black night. It was hard to tell where the shore ended and the lagoon began. We kept stepping out into the cold water without noticing.

  We made our way along the shore toward where Duncan's boat was supposed to be and there, indeed, it was. Duncan had lashed it tight with ropes up amongst last winter's driftwood, safe from the reach of even the worst summer storm.

  "Where's Flora?" I thought to ask, feeling the need for a nice bright lantern. Duncan shrugged into the dark and pointed farther up the shore. The dim shadow of something crashed and wobbled out in the dark water, lunging and dipping dangerously. Sounds of creaking and collapse came clear to my ears. Duncan ran off, dragging me down into the water's edge because we'd both forgotten the rope.

  "Sorry," he laughed at me, offering a hand. We ran in tandem up farther to get as close as we could.

  The shore couldn't bring us close enough to see details. It was something big and built and mostly white, but dark all along its bottom. There were no lights burning and no answers to our calls. We looked all around and saw no lanterns in the distance, no footsteps in the mud, and no cryptic signs, driftwood arranged in an arrow or such as there are in adventure stories. The wreck kept crashing and crumbling out in the waves and we watched and listened so long I got to shivering and Duncan allowed that maybe there was nothing more we could do.

  Flora still hasn't returned. Duncan's set a bright warm fire in the fireplace and we've dragged all our bedclothes out in front of it. We boiled up some water and washed what mud there was off each other's bodies with a hot soaped terrycloth. Now there's just the yellow and orange flicker of firelight making shapes and shadows, and the night so terribly dangerous out there. I feel so sheltered in here now, having been washed clean by the storm and wrecked on the rocks with the ruined hull. Now it's all left in my head. Like Father's cow, merged inextricably with me.

  20 JULY 1915

  For a long time I lay awake, looking down the hill, watching the dim pale lines of the wreck out there in the blackness. Now that we knew it was there, I had no trouble seeing it and hearing a terrible orchestra of creaks and groans and cracking sounds that, it was obvious to me, meant the wind and waves were tearing the last pieces apart. It floated out there in the night, going in and out of sight as I focused too close or lost it through branches. I kept hearing voices out there, but they reminded me of the calling voice of that man drowned at Land's End, so I put them out of mind and curled in next to Duncan to try to sleep.

  I dreamed about Uncle Maury. I saw his legs blown off in our pond, which was a bomb crater. I was trying to swim to him, to get him away from the shell, but I couldn't swim fast at all, like how you sometimes get bogged down in dreams just when you need to go fast. Duncan says I was all fitful and grabby.

  Flora and Father were down by the wreckage early in the morning. We saw them, peering down the hill at first light. The storm had passed and they stood in the various mists down by the water, dawn light suffusing through it, all golden and orange and purple and white. I have much more trouble locating colors at dawn than at sunset. They seem to be everywhere and nowhere.

  It was a launch not much bigger than Mr. McKennan's. This one had a cabin built upon it and various hooks and hoists that seemed to be related to fishing. It was a good fifty feet from the shore, but could certainly be reached at low tide, as Duncan pointed out enthusiastically. From up by the house it looked to be in good shape, save for the split across its middle.

  Father says We're not to touch the wreck as the man whose boat it was came by and said someone'd sold him insurance on it. He's got to wait till this man can come look at the damage before he does anything and that won't be for some time, as the insurance man lives in Sacramento. So it rumbles and bobs out there on its little perch. Some big rock's stuck through its middle and even the highest tide doesn't raise enough to float it or sink it. Father warned Duncan about sharks that tend to congregate around lagoon wrecks.

  The storm seems to have made quite a mess of the woods. In Bourne's Gulch one of the older cedars fell, taking down a whole line of younger trees with it, marking the woods with a sharp tear across the hillside so sunlight drifts in to places where it hadn't been before. It's hardly noticeable from up on the ridge, just a small line across the even trees, but it will change everything on that hillside, given time. The rain will run differently now, and some soil will go, eroded away from where it sat so safely. The sunlight on the forest floor and the changed run of the water will mean new plants in new places. Cedars will eventually grow again in the place cleared out by the fall, but that may be long after we're dead and gone.

  We took the ropes off Duncan's boat, watching it steam in the hot sun. Two pelicans lifted off the wreck, circled up into the warm sky and dove straight down into the cold salt water. Sharp and clean.

  * * *

  21 JULY 1915

  Flora stayed out again last night. She and Father must've gone to talking very late. It's made it so lovely with Duncan, not having to be polite.

  The pond is full up to its lip. Much of the meadow's turned to mush, all because of the storm. No more lying in the grass for the next few days. Cows frequent the pond now, curling up to nap on a knoll back by the oak trees.

  We washed smelt under a cold-water tap in town with Grover. Buckets of smelt all cut open down their bellies.

  22 JULY 1915

  Duncan nailed down the last boards today. We brushed a whole bucket of pitch up and down, inside and out, sealing every last seam shut and touching up each other's bellies. He says we won't sail until he's done painting his design.

  Another note from Father. I found it in my shoe. "John the Baptist had a little fit, some variety of epileptic seizure. So very much (the totality of those numberless stimuli that we mediate through our thoughts with ease every day) flooded his simple mind at once it was as a white flash. An intensity. An infinity of presence. An absence of distinction. An immediacy. Imagine, the totality without mediation, no things to stand for other things." I'd best save it for later.

  Duncan gave me flowers. A bouquet of wildflowers from the mesa, all rough and rumpled in his sweaty hand. I was sitting with my dumb book when he sneaked up from behind and held them close by my ear, and out of view. Oh their fragrance, sneaking around me. We made garlands and set them on Father's and Flora's heads.

  23 JULY 1915

  Ruskin tells me nothing about colors. How can they ever be right, all bound up in oily goo? Around me there is simply light.

  We don
't see Flora at all after dinners. It's me and Duncan and the dark.

  24 JULY 1915

  All day at the pond today, the meadow finally dry and the grass so thick and lovely green from water and sun. I did flips from the rope swing, showing off. Duncan did a double flip.

  Duncan's done the whole boat in a base of silver gray. He says that's just the beginning.

  25 JULY 1915

  I've arrived at a small handful of modest conclusions. All of this mulling over memory may have actually moved me, forward, or somewhere.

  (1) My painting is glorious. The wet gobs of paint splotching unpredictably are glorious. The hundred different pictures it's been are blessed and divine. Its layers are wondrous, each and every one lying evident in the surface. That I may never actually finish it is staggering. It is a perfect picture of my memory.

  (2) Cicero is glorious. His high ideal of finding a way to hold-fixed memories is inspiring, tragic and doomed to failure. His confidence that hard work will succeed in making such a system work is alluring and stupid. I too still wish to be given that impossible blessing and curse, a perfect memory.

  (3) My memories form a glorious landscape. Weather washes over them all. Earthquakes burst through them from below. While always changing they are never gone. They shift and rearrange, rolling over and into each other like water that runs down the river to the sea arid returns again in rain clouds. They emerge like trees growing from the rotting wood of fallen giants. It is a rhythm that doesn't end.

  (4) Duncan makes me delirious. He is an empty vessel. His body is miraculous, washed in the river of my attentions. When we're completely together we have both disappeared. Is there a word?

  (5) It's as if I've found Father's notes inside me. Scary.