Mud

I recently changed desks. The process required that I move a few piles of papers that were rooted, it seemed, on my old desk. Rather than simply move them to my new-to-me antique mahogany battlement, I sorted through the piles and in this effort, a single sheet, like a falling leaf, swung through the shifts to rest directly beside my computer on the top of the desk. On the sheet is written a paragraph from the last page of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, that I had copied by hand years ago:


Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and hummed of mystery.


I love this. I love McCarthy’s writing. It was this line from All the Pretty Horses, that drew me to his work:


He thought that the world’s heart beat at a terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of the multitudes might be exacted for the vision of a single flower. 


To be clear, I am not a fan of violence, and as a curiosity have no dogged interest in New Mexico, but I have read everything that McCarthy has written because of the beauty of his sentences. To me, he writes as if composing a musical score, echoing it up off of the desert floor, or the squeak of leather horse tack. His words slow me down, and like most wonderful music, I listen with my heart. It is as if it strains to get to the words before my brain does, to punch out of my chest and meander in and around them as if the sentences were split-rail fences reaching deep into the world. Difficulty arises if I allow my heart to hang out on the fences for any length of time–the vulnerability of this; I am a sitting duck for self-doubt, and mean judgement–some, of my own rutted imaginings, but not all.


It is synchronous that I should find the paper with the paragraph on it right now. I was feeling flung into spring without any grounding–a flailing idiot, scrabbling along the tired path toward happiness which I am beginning to realize is nothing but a chimera. It is a relief to grok this, and in this discovery it occurs to me that it is peace that I’m searching for instead. My definition of happiness involves unhitching and leaving the deep mud of reality, the smell of it, far away and medicating into the oblivion of the world’s games. I’ve tried this and it does not work. It is the mud that I need; all the rest is tiresome and laid with brutal traps that require, over and over again, devotions of worthiness and an insane willingness to maintain a persona of lesser-than in order to win entry. Peace is better for me. A personal peace has no traps, and asks only for sincerity, authenticity. Peace comes from a direct link with nature and an ability to walk in, heart-first. The problem is that, unless I am careful as hell,  this vulnerability leaves the heart open to all of this meanness percolating through the ether lately. That is a real problem that I do not know the answer to, and I can’t be the only one. 


 I have no idea what is coming. 



Would you mind sending me a little sign that you have read this piece to the end? Thank you.