maybe we're fished for

envoi

The automatic machine guns, the half-tracks, the dragoons’ cars, paraded up the long slope toward Belgium with the thunder of great herds of cattle, the sound of the caterpillar treads on the rough gravel almost drowning out the whine of the motors in low gear. Sometimes Grange would close his eyes and discover, astonished, how the war, even in its most somnolent moments, roused the ear so much more intimately than the eye by this giant harrow’s clatter passing over the broken earth. He was struck too by the forest’s facile adaptation to these fierce and arrogant cavalcades. The long perspectives of its roads, the tunnels running for miles through the trees toward a mysterious disc of daylight at the horizon, were not made for the colorless lives of woodcutters and charcoal burners who had vegetated here waiting for the curtain to rise. The forest breathed, more ample now, awakened, alert, its remotest hiding places suddenly stirred by the enigmatic signs of time’s reversion—an age of great hunts, of proud cavalcades—as if the old Merovingian lair were quickened by a forgotten scent in the air that made it live again.

When he had blown out the candle, everything changed. Lying on his side, his gaze plunged down over the Meuse; the moon had risen above the cliff; the only sound was the calm murmur of water slipping over a submerged weir and the cries of the screech owls perched quite near him, in the trees on the opposite bank. The little town had vanished with its smoke; the odor of the great forests glided off the cliffs with the fog and drowned it to the depths of its factory alleys; nothing was left save the starry night and around him these miles and miles of forest. The afternoon’s enchantment returned. Grange realized that half his life was going to be restored to him: in wartime, the night is inhabited. “Under the stars . . .” he mused, and thought vaguely of narrow white roads beneath the moon, the round apple trees in black pools of shadow, tents pitched in woods full of wild animals and surprises. He fell asleep, one hand hanging out of his bed over the Meuse as if across the gunwale of a boat: tomorrow was already very far away.

The land swallowed them, toil took them, wood-burning stoves and childbearing, pots, pans, curtains, livestock, gardens, all the sorry work upon the land, all that worry for the earth and its objects, the careful crops, the tireless and terrible tending they were broken to, as though the world around them were someone sick in a sickroom, breathing their last; so that even the preparations for the wedding, even the pies that were baked, the huge stews, soups, and kettles of beans, the barrels of sauerkraut, the strings of stool-like sausage, the hot hours of canning, deprived them of what they intended to sustain and were with these labors celebrating. Had a little of this time and this devotion been given to thought or to feeling, to the cultivation of some sense of themselves which went beyond the drayhorse, if some small effort had gone into renewing sensation, into a passion for beauty, the elevation of desire . . . into love (someone save the word, it does not factor, and I’m unable), then, perhaps, just possibly . . . but the load was too heavy, the sky too great an enemy, and they lived the lives they lived like hoe handles, as washerwomen, cooks, wombs, silos—as physical locations—and now they were grandpas and grandmas, aunts and uncles, tired and tiresome, victims of the bodies they had used like ploughs upon themselves, for they were prairies too, desiccated, windswept places, and the dust from their own dryness had come for them at last, had risen from their own abused bodies as that greater dust had risen from a dry abused land, and now, staining them as deeply as crazed plates, it settled back in answer to a cry from their birth for an end; and it was appropriate, only right, as a sign from God or from the selves they might have been, that occasionally the substance which made the symbol should multiply itself, seek something in hyperbole which otherwise could not be reached, and so (like an ash of mourning large as night) become monstrously manifest—in a whirling wind, a plague of locusts, or a storm of dust—until it finally caused the deaths it all along had been an emblem and a warning of.

Look for shadow in this double-lit mist. A dark communion in the burning streets between the landscape and the smarting senses suggests more sterile agonies. Clouds out of control decoct anticipation. What use can any of us have for two moons? The miracle of order has run out and I am left in an unmiraculous city where anything may happen. I don’t need more intimations of disorder. It has to be more than that! Search the smoke for the fire’s base. Read from the coals neither success nor despair. This edge of boredom is as bright. I pass it, into the dark rim. There is the deceiving warmth that asks nothing. There are objects lost in double-light.

It does not offer me any protection, this mist; rather a refracting grid through which to view the violent machine, explore the technocracy of the eye itself, spelunk the semi-circular canal. I am traveling my own optic nerve. Limping in a city without source, searching a day without shadow, am I deluded with the inconstant emblem? I don’t like pain. With such disorientation there is no way to measure the angle between such nearly parallel lines of sight, when focusing on something at such a distance.

Others took refuge in the forest, the safest place to hide from the authorities and preserve their way of life without risk of contamination by the outside world. [...] For the most radical Old Believers, holiness was directly correlated to isolation. The highest holiness was the life of the hermit. In the Bible hermits retreated to the desert; in Russia they retreated to the forest. But they called the forest a desert, deriving the names for hermits and for monasteries from the same word. The forest was the wasteland of holiness, the emptiness of God.