Recoiling & Progress

“I pray that my progress has been more than recoiling with satiation and disgust from one style to another, a series of rebuffs." -Robert Lowell

There's a certain soggy, cold, autumn-turning-winter sort of day in the country which reminds me of rural New England in November. Which is a funny/odd reminder of what drove me to the city in the first place.

I went to boarding school in New England from 9th through 12th grades. My parents had this grand idea - somewhat typical immigrant dream - about their elite-educated children, ivy league and would-be Supreme Court Justices or renowned scholars. I was a morose pre-teen of the suburbs, so they figured it could only do me good to send me off. So off I went. They were strange and lonely years, my introduction to class-and race-consciousness and social alienation on a whole new level. I am grateful for the education, a real love of learning got under my skin during those years; and it is ultimately unbecoming, I realize, to complain about an expensive education. At any rate, when those four years were up, I was more than game for something different - for the big city, for a place where there were many more people in general, and many more people who looked more like me.

So this funny/odd reminder makes me wonder if something else got under my skin during those years, despite my abrupt flight to the city: a certain comfort in solitude, the building up of inner resources in the face of an unwelcoming external world; the beginnings - or perhaps the second bloom (the first being a mostly lonely childhood) - of some breed of vocation for quiet and apartness. It's a simplistic but not wholly untrue paradigm for artistic evolution, I suppose - turning one's basic sense of alienation into a creative state. I learned a preference for quiet over noise, for intimacy over crowds, during those years - as a way of survival.

In my memories, both childhood and boarding school are perpetual autumn. When I conjure up those times, I see and feel only a soggy cold, or a crisp cool; silence or the barely audible rustle of the wind, the crunch of leaves under my feet; gray-ness, muted greens and browns, or rays of light shooting through tops of towering trees in a private forest. I try to recall spring and summer, and I see images, but I see them from without, as if observing another body, another being. For many years during my young adulthood I remember thinking and feeling a kind of animosity toward spring and summer; as if thaw, germination, bloom, brightness, and warmth had nothing whatever to do with me, and I bore them, awaited their passing, like a shrill marching band blasting through. Over the last decade or so, this has slowly begun to change, especially as I've taken up gardening in earnest and learned to love spring and summer on their own terms - for their work of fruitfulness, for their own warm stillness, for the ways in which they open their arms for all manner of living creature to emerge and get busy and propagate (yes, even the BUGS).

In two weeks, it will be one full year, a cycle of seasons, since this city-country journey began (since I closed the deal on the house and spent my first night). Ironically, I will be spending that anniversary weekend with my family in the suburbs. I'm sure it will be an interesting and useful "pause" as I launch into the next four seasons of city-country life, and city-country tales.