Checking in, 6/19/12

Need to check into the lit side. As we cruise the islands this time, I find my mind swimming in the same currents, like a salmon returning to the home stream. Carmie, the kinds and I have been having a blast, with only a few hiccups along the way (genoa, battery power), but as we cruise,  out talk seems to gravitate to what’s next for us, what’s the next adventure for us? And I’m back to thinking about Mike and Cordelia. We were walking a trail along the north coast of Patos Island, and I had a sudden strong feeling that they’d been there, or at least Mike a long time ago. 

It is these fleeting notions that keep his memory alive. I will be sitting or walking in a given place and there he is in my mind. Right there, as if he’s been hanging out there  along. But when my conscious ind looks up and around, the image seems to disappear. 

What we know is often what we don’t perceive, or perhaps under-perceive. When a person disappears from a family it is trauma, a psychic injury that does not heal well, if at all.  How is it that my own family has been able to keep this under the rug for so long? How is that I seem always to be lifting the rug to see what’s there? 

The M&C project taking new life is one that takes on questions like these, and pursues them without attempting to answer them, but with a steady conscious effort to define the nature of this particular flavor of loss. The unknowing, the constant guess, the hidden anguish, the edge of despair and helplessness all combined with the need to move on provides a source of tension, which, I dare say, has shaped my life. 

This is the tension that I have long understood to be the big question for me, but which I have recently found only to be one of the smaller questions. It is this need that pulls me through trying times, which so many around me do not comprehend, but which I alone must face in order to see a way through. It is the story of this journey that I wish to tell. Is it that nothing else can have priority in my life? I don’t think so. I fully accept that my wife and kids are my priority and no psychic damage in my life will ever take a step ahead of them in terms of what is the most basic concern of my life. It is their happiness and security that absolutely take precedence. 

So, with that said, I can also accept that there is a place in my life to pursue and inspect the injury for what it is: a hole. A hole like a cavern through which I must venture, through which a discovery must be made; for it is discoveries that create a story, not only the crisis and denoument. The act of discovery is necessary for the advancement of the narrative, and it is the twin narratives of Jade  and myself which must together create the net for catching the unknowns.

And another aspect of this sort of inquiry parallels something interesting in Moby Dick. Ishmael describes a certain path inward both obligatory and disastrous. When a person travels this path he or she is compelled to follow it to the end. Ahab is an archetype of this road to perdition. He knows well that he is in mortal combat with this white whale and he is involved in the pursuit not only of his own life but symbolically the life of man. We are born to find our way through a darkness of our own conjuring, a space like the room in the house that no one knew existed, least of all ourself.

Am I in mortal combat? Melville would have it that I am, as are we all. The enemy, as amorphous and rare as Moby Dick, is that presence within ourselves that reveals our try natures in spite of who we think we are or who we think we will become. We bring the past to the present, and what we know to be true becomes us. Ahab brings everything he is to the pursuit; nothing is so perilous to him as leaving a thing behind that might bring him success in his effort to reveal himself to himself. This singular drive what makes him tick, what gives him life.

Truly one of the finest characters in American literature. What I would like to look into is how Melville uses this character to demonstrate this inner view of the dark human drive to dig at the truth until death.