December 10, 2012 · 11:05 am

A Birthday Is the Thing With Feathers

Today is Emily Dickinson’s birthday.  She is 182 years old.  Here is the poem that came to hand this morning.

#1228

So much of Heaven has gone from Earth
That there must be a Heaven
If only to enclose the Saints
To Affidavit given.

The Missionary to the Mole
Must prove there is a Sky
Location doubtless he would plead
But what excuse have I?

Too much of Proof affronts Belief
The Turtle will not try
Unless you leave him — then return
And he has hauled away

A birthday is the thing with feathers. So much to say now. I’ll try to encompass it all, as we move deeper into the winter dark.  First an update:  The weather is springy warm and humid.  The Saints lost yesterday.  The end of the world is nigh.  Not necessarily because the Giants killed the pants off the Saints, 52 to 27.  Yet, surely these facts must have some meaningful resonance with each other.  I couldn’t help myself.  I was depressed and declared that the dwindling days of the Mayan calendar and the Saints’ abysmal performance are energetically linked . . . somehow.  Then it was time for dinner.  Pizza and beer helped my mood.  I also had to ask Geoff, “What spiritual lesson do we take from this game?”  He hates spiritual lessons and would not answer.   He was even more depressed than I was.  After dinner, several hours after I asked the question, he did finally answer it.  I’m paraphrasing here:  The lesson is that however bad it feels when the Saints lose, it’s never so terrible that you cannot recover and look forward with some optimism, a little joy.  Of course, by “forward” we mean next season, not the next game.  This season is cooked.  And that “look” will have to draw on the deepest stores of renewal and fundamental faith in the simple ideas:  Onward, practice, figure it out, and try again.  Try again.  And then try again.

Now for the poem.  Honest, I did choose this one at random.  The Saints line jumped out on its own.  The stanza at the end holds me.  ”Too much of Proof affronts Belief.”  The literalness of the physical world diminishes our capacity to strive toward the fuller development of our Self.  We won’t do it without that ever receding thing we call faith.  (Faith in what, you ask?  Oh, I don’t know—honor, dignity, fairness, goodness, that seamless connection on the long pass out of the shotgun, the poetry of beauty that works.)  If the things we want to believe in announce themselves in the world as if produced and directed by Steven Spielberg, we’d scoff at these as too literal.  Paradoxically something seems less spiritually True if we can see it as literally true.

So those things we believe in or have faith in—whatever it is, doesn’t have to be God—such ephemera make us get up in the morning and try to accomplish tasks greater than merely maintaining bodily existence.  In order to draw this effort from us, these ephemera must remain slightly unknown, just beyond the limit of the mind’s capacity to comprehend.  If these ephemera that ask for our faith appeared in concrete totality, so we could see all the sides, top and bottom, then we would not accept them as worthy of our faith.  And the engine loses its drive to exist.

Emily plays with the mind’s ability to set its own impossible tasks.  Human survival requires that we try for something that will never be realized.  That’s the job that keeps our blood circulating.  So this is not idle poetic meandering to formulate such ephemera as honor, dignity, fairness, goodness . . . the hope for that perfect long pass.  These are deliberately elusive.  Suggested without complete realization.  (It takes imagination to love the Saints; you have to be able to see things that may never exist.  Imagination feeds the human life force as much as pizza and beer.)  The power of the unproven outcome to simulate our life force is counter-intuitive, but it works.  Now, you’d want to build a house on a solid four-square foundation, such that you can see all the physical aspects and know it has structural integrity, in order to trust that foundation to hold up your house.  Conversely to build a life, you’d start with a foundation made from a concept (honor goodness dignity) that never fully reveals itself.  You must place your faith here without compete proof that it exists.  Human existence rests on the continuing puzzle of unverifiable existence.

Thank you Emily and happy birthday.  I am so happy that you exist.

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April 22, 2012 · 11:11 am

Proximity to Chaos

A few weeks ago I went to the AWP Conference in Chicago.  One of the panel discussions I attended concerned Emily Dickinson’s poems.  The panelists focused on certain themes.  One scholar discussed bird imagery.  Another examined how Emily treats the marking of time, hours, seasons, on the calendar.  David Baker said that Emily is “the most terrifying poet in the English language for sheer proximity to chaos.”

The scholars read from prepared remarks, eloquent and formal.  Then one of the readers looked up from his pages and interrupted his own erudite exegesis to blurt out: “She’s so weird.”  The words seemed to jump from his mouth of their own will.  His tone was part admiring and part exasperated.  I appreciated his honest emotional and subjective eruption.  Time and again, after all the academic wrestling with Emily’s poems, she leads us back to the beginning . . . where she is just so weird.

I notice this the most when I read a poem that I had already wrestled with sufficiently.  I thought I had gotten my arms around it and understood it, or at least some small part of it.  Then after some time passes, I read the same poem again and it appears as an entirely new animal to me.  My second reading is nothing like the first.  Somehow that “understanding” slipped through my grasp.  Hers are less like poems than smoke.

Emily the shape-shifter, she is her poems, stripped bare of any of the easy handles.  Yet in that nakedness she remains utterly cloaked.  We just have to start over again, new to the poem each time.

Here is one that I have not wrestled with yet.  At least I don’t I think I have.  Or not lately.

#578

The Body grows without —
The more convenient way —
That if the Spirit — like to hide
Its Temple stands, alway,

Ajar — secure — inviting —
It never did betray
The Soul that asked its shelter
In solemn honesty

The Soul and the Spirit are not interchangeable terms.  These are identified separately, although both reside in the same holy place, the Body.  The Spirit may hide, while the Soul asks for shelter.

My first reaction here is to recall the Mother Superior character in The Sound of Music when she counsels the troubled Maria that the convent is not a place to hide from the world.  Women choose the cloistered life to pursue something within themselves that they can only find in solitude and isolation from the world.  A woman who is afraid of the world or needs a hiding place would do better to face the thing that frightens her.  The contemplative life is not for cowards.  Although one could be tempted to treat it as a refuge from a cracked and chaotic world.

If Mother Superior could have this conversation with Emily, the poet would have responded that her Temple, her body, is both ajar and secure.  The Body invites.  But who gets this invitation?  It’s very exclusive.  Other people?  I doubt it.  The Body invites the Soul inside to join the Spirit (present at birth, maybe) residing or hiding depending on how you look at it.  Soul comes to the Body from the rich, complicated world out there.  Soul is some non-embodied source that may join that indwelling Spirit.  The Body protects this union, offers a safe place for this marriage to take place.

I am not sure who would win the rhetorical contest between Emily and Mother Superior.  It would be an interesting debate.  I don’t think the answer to Emily’s prayers lies “out there.”  Something else in Emily’s Temple keeps her “in here.”  She isn’t saying . . .   Weirdo.

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February 2, 2012 · 9:22 am

February’s Foot

Ground Hog’s Day seems a good time to make this announcement.  My book, My Bayou: New Orleans through the Eyes of  a Lover (Michigan State University Press) has been published and should arrive in bookstores any day now.  There is more information on my new website.

Ground Hog’s Day or February 2nd is also Imbolc, sacred to Brigid with her great belly-shaped cauldron.  It is also the Feast of the Purification of the Virgin, when the Blessed Mother leaves her postpartum seclusion and goes to the temple, where she is bathed and prepared to re-enter society.  Forty days after his birth, her baby has grown safely past that delicate, infection-prone stage of early life, and she may present him to the world without fear that he’ll catch his death of cold.

The day marks the faint stirring of new life.  It shows here in this mild, rainy humid place.  The Japanese magnolia in my yard is sprouting all over with small green leaves.  There is a lot of dead brown junk, but I see the beginnings stirring underneath.  This weather would be considered spring by most other standards.  Emily looks onto a New England winter that is nothing like mine.

#1133, ca. 1868

The Snow that never drifts —
The transient, fragrant snow
That comes a single time a Year
Is softly driving now —

So thorough in the Tree
At night beneath the star
That it was February’s Foot
Experience would swear —

Like Winter as a Face
We stern and former knew
Repaired of all but Loneliness
By Nature’s Alibi —

Were every storm so spice
The Value could not be —
We buy with contrast — Pang is good
As near as memory —

The only thing Emily and I have in common right now is February’s Foot. We’re both under it. The difference between this condition in Amherst, Massachusetts and New Orleans is that here February’s Foot wears a jeweled strappy sandal with a soft sole and a kitten heel. In Emily’s case, the foot on her neck wears an ice-crusted boot, thick, solid, unforgiving.

The winter freeze in her poem has a cleansing quality, setting out a pure white space. The cold kills off everything but loneliness. The color of white is really the absence of color. We can even call white the color of death exactly—it does not point to loss or decay, but removal.  A vacancy, where life and color used to be.

This a an abrupt contrast to my February where winter is a riot of color. Purple, gold and green! Carnival is about to explode into our daily lives. We grow fat on cake and misbehavior. One of the first changes I noticed in myself when I made New Orleans my home was that my customary seasonal affective disorder disappeared. All my life I had experienced a deep depression in winter. My emotional state went into steep decline in January and a didn’t come up to a level approaching normal until April, after the ice had thawed. Once I’d had a few winters in New Orleans, I noticed this depression never had a chance to take hold of me again. Just as winter sadness began to creep into me, Carnival would snap its fingers, and I had to get busy, making my costume. It’s impossible to be depressed under the gauzy banner of Mardi Gras. Plus the weather doesn’t lock you indoors where depression incubates. Who knew?! All those years I didn’t need anti-depressants, just the Pagan Rites of Carnival.

This is genius, whoever thought of it. What a smart antidote to the inevitable emotional flattening that our environment slams us with each season. Of course, New Orleans is not the only place to celebrate Carnival. The practice exists in France, Germany, Italy, South America . . . wherever you find deep and old enclaves of Roman Catholics, you find this wise, psycho-cultural anti-depressant. Just not in New England. Those Protestants wear their depression with pride. Important to note this is not the grand, sparkling, spiking pain of Roman Catholic suffering—also called “passion”—how operatic. No, the Protestants have cornered the market on that low-grade, chronic, dulling down, long drawn-out suffering—the pain of endurance.

I’m over-simplifying, but I’ve got my reasons.

Emily strives to make the point, “pang is good.” She insists we need these blanketing snow-bound February storms where all the eye can see disappears as if into the great void for a time, which on the poet’s clock is forever. Emily claims that without the contrast, we do not gain the emotional value of the return to life. While under the frost of February’s foot, the depressed person cannot remember anything else but nothingness and loneliness. It stretches infinitely in all directions at once. The depressed mind knows no limits, sees no shape or cycle to her emotional life. Each minute of winter is eternal.

Emily wants us to consider the value first of being muffled into vacancy and then given a reprieve. The shift from nothing to something, the first green shoot that sends life and juice into all our cells, and we return to ourselves. Em says we can’t fill ourselves up without first becoming empty.

I’m not sure . . . after enduring plenty of those vacant winters myself, I want to invite Emily to live in south Louisiana for a few seasons and then ask if she is still so attached to that seasonal affective disorder. I’m glad she has made poems about it. What else is there to do in western Massachusetts in February? Still I’d like to see what Emily would do with Carnival. Wouldn’t you?

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December 21, 2011 · 12:03 pm

The Seed of Noon

Winter Solstice tonight—time for darkness and contemplation, waiting.  We pause at the turning point before embarking on the long return to summer.  Emily holds a splinter of light and asks: Where does it point?   What is the path it wants to illuminate? Not the whole path, just the beginning.  It begins with a song.

#250, c. 1861

I shall keep singing!
Birds will pass me
On their way to Yellower Climes —
Each — with a Robin’s expectation —
I — with my Redbreast —
And my Rhymes —

Late — when I take my place in summer —
But — I shall bring a fuller tune —
Vespers — are sweeter than Matins — Signor —
Morning — only the seed of Noon —

Sound brought the universe into existence and so does everything else come to life with sound.  When we speak an intention or desire, that begins it.  “I love . . . I want . . . Why don’t we?  Would you . . . Will you?” All these sounds lead to trouble and change.  The ground shifts because someone says, “I want.”

Emily does something a little out of character here when she writes: “I take my place in summer . . . “  which pleases me.  She announces her right to occupy space.  She is a fully realized person of weight and substance.  That “I take” borders on aggression, assertion certainly.

Then at the end in the direct address to “Signor” her tone dials back from the hungry tigress to the coquette.  “Vespers are sweeter than Matins . . .”  She veils her energy in a pretty and holy metaphor.  By the time we get to the end of the poem, however, it’s too late.  No one can mistake the fierce woman behind the flirty words.  She has already tipped her hand.  She may soften her note to persuade, rather than frighten.  But this Signor faces a woman of appetite.  He should be so lucky.

What is she up to?  Emily sings in celebration of the late harvest, the fuller tune of that mature season of summer that comes after the callow, youthful spring.  Furthermore, her song lasts forever, long after the Robins have been silenced by age, death, winter.  The song that Emily sings onto the page is informed by the intelligence of a long life and all the shocks that give her voice dimension and timbre, the story beneath the song.  This song is sweeter because it is more interesting, complex, veined with an awareness of death, thus more sustaining.  Em says that time has made her the better lover.  Her song isn’t kidding around. Signor is an idiot if he doesn’t recognize the value of that.

Tonight for the solstice, I’ll make a meal—not sure what yet, but something good.  Then we will have grilled figs, our own late harvest.  We’ll light the candles on the Christmas tree, and sit in the darkness to watch the small flame flicker against its opposite.  We’ll do all that just to know what it looks like to hold a light in the dark.  We will complete these gestures, as we do every year, to see our hope external and playing shadows on the wall.

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December 10, 2011 · 9:42 am

New Figs in Winter

Good morning.  Today is Emily’s 181st birthday, and there was a total lunar eclipse.  It might have been somewhat visible in our sky at about 6:00 a.m.  But I slept through it.  Chances are it would have been covered by clouds anyway.  The day is gray and cold.  Here are Emily’s prescient remarks:

#415, c. 1862

Sunset at Night — is natural —
But Sunset on the Dawn
Reverses Nature — Master —
So Midnight’s — due — at Noon.

Eclipses be — predicted —
And Science bows them in —
But do one face us suddenly —
Jehovah’s Watch — is wrong.

The poem gives us a solar eclipse, not quite consonant with today’s weather, but I’ll take it.  The “Sunset on the Dawn” is the line I like.  She points to an eclipse, which darkens the sun just at the time that we expect it to be most bright, as a reversal of Nature.  Yet it can happen and often does.  Eclipses occur all the time.  We know about these events and what causes them.  Yet the eclipse still touches some atavistic fear that the sun may be dying and the world coming to an end.  In our primitive reactive lizard brain, nature is perverted when the sun doesn’t do what we expect.

Given that we see eclipses happening all the time, albeit not often, wouldn’t that make it “natural” insofar as it does happen in nature?  Apparently not. Astronomers map out eclipses well into the future in their star charts.  They always know what is happening out there and calendar celestial movements with mathematical precision.  Even with all that comforting information, these events still arouse an old anxiety about the correct order of things.

The eclipses that change us, that reverse Nature, are the ones we didn’t predict.  Here Emily means “eclipse” more broadly as a sudden change, something gone, or something returned.  I want to ask what makes one thing a product of Nature and another a reversal of Nature?   If it happens in the physical world then that is Nature doing its work, right?  If it surprises us or “face one suddenly” that is only because we have not yet fully understood our Nature.  These unexpected “eclipses” that Emily suggests serve only to reveal the unseen parts of ourselves.

I particularly enjoy her blasphemy at the end:  “Jehovah’s Watch — is wrong.”  There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio . . .  Jehovah’s Watch is Adam and all the humans that descended from him.  The human body and mind comprise the watch tower that houses Jehovah’s presence.  Emily says that Jehovah’s Watch is wrong.  Not Jehovah.  She does not presume to know the mind of God.  But she is willing to dismantle the bricks of the self-appointed watch tower—those fallible humans who have missed a few turns in the road along the way.

She is not willing to genuflect to Science, either.  There are a few things that the astronomers failed to predict or explain.  For Emily the truth is in the middle, in that tension between faith and knowledge, where the foreground and background shift past each other in a constant optical illusion.   The middle ground where poems rest.

Speaking of reversals of Nature . . . my fig tree gave me five ripe figs this morning.  Here we are on the cusp of the Winter Solstice and my silly fig tree, who apparently can’t tell time, has decided to bear new fruit.  Geoff’s fig tree (which I gave him—everyone I love should have a fig tree) has also fruited spontaneously and mysteriously in this early winter.

I was thrilled to receive these fruits, no matter how unnatural their arrival.  The pickings in Summer are usually slim because those idiot Blue Jays eat all my figs before I can get to them.  The birds can spot the ripening blush sooner than I do, which makes sense—they’re more invested.

In any case, my answer is Yes!  I will take this late harvest.  The figs are fat and sweet.  Perhaps a little tougher than what I’d get in July.  Still, this fruit will feed me just fine.

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December 5, 2011 · 9:38 am

Between Spirit and Dust

As we move toward the best season of the year, Emily’s birthday on December 10th, the news is good.  Ford in his Flivver and all is right with the world.  The Saints are 9 and 3.  Last night, Patrick Robinson flew like a bat out of hell to block that field goal attempt by the Lions.  A thing of beauty.  I’m happy with where we are at the moment.  Although the Titans could give us some trouble next week.

Despite the cheery season, Emily returns to her favorite subject.

#976, c. 1864

Death is a Dialogue between
The Spirit and the Dust.
“Dissolve” says Death — The Spirit “Sir
I have another Trust” —

Death doubts it — Argues from the Ground —
The Spirit turns away
Just laying off for evidence
An Overcoat of Clay.

Here Death is the argument between the matter of the earth and the ghost in the machine.  Death gets to say something, but Death owes its existence to the tension between the physical outcome of organic degeneration and our imagination’s stubborn refusal to give in to that.  So much spirit talk is born out of sheer obstinacy.

My focus goes to the line where she characterizes Death as a dialogue, not an entity, although Death does assume form and speech in the poem.  Death is a conversational exchange.  It takes two to create Death.  An essential split in our nature is where Death emerges as a character with something to say.  Without that duality within ourselves, we don’t have anything to talk about.  Or rather we have no one to talk to . . .  No dialogue, no Death.  Only changing form.  Skin, hair, bones, teeth, dust, mud . . . fertilizer.  And then some other form.

My own conversation with Death has been lively off and on since I was fourteen years old, both as a theoretical concept and as a more brute consideration.  This past September is a good example.  If you want my advice, don’t get cancer.  It puts a damper on things.

All right, I’m being glib.  That’s how we roll in my tribe, especially when considering Death.  The way to get through life with any dignity is to act the fool.  Afraid of Death?  Grab him by the throat and crack wise.  You’ll never make a friend of Death.  But do make him your straight man.

For the record:  I’m not dying.  Not yet, at least.  But I had an interesting brush with malignant melanoma.  A bad mole on my left arm.  The good news is that we found it at an early stage, so the surgeon removed it all in one swoop, along with a large portion of my skin.  No need for further treatment, no chemo or sentinel node biopsy.  I will have to be on high-alert for other bad moles, but for now I am in the clear.

Those are the clinical facts, over and done with in the space of a month.  The waves that move out from those facts continue to roll up against my thoughts, and I expect will do so for the rest of my life, which I hope will be a long one.  My sister who is a survivor of stage III breast cancer has talked about “the gift of cancer.”  My friend Shaun who is also a melanoma survivor used the same phrase.  They were talking about cancer as a great awakener.  That it clarified how they had been neglecting some essential part of themselves.  They said cancer gave them the power to love their own lives and act accordingly.

So I have been looking for the gift of cancer in my medical adventure.  It’s here.  What great material.  I can run my engine on this for a long while.  And I’m not done yet.  Not by any means.

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September 1, 2011 · 12:40 pm

Sea Change

Lance has undergone a sea change.  He found his courage, and by God he screwed it to the sticking place. Yesterday, the wind died down to almost nothing so the sea went flat as a dinner plate.  Geoff and I went swimming and left Lance on the beach because we were tired of coaxing him to do something he obviously didn’t want to do. We went out pretty far to a point where the water came up to our necks.  I looked behind me and lo there was Lance, trundling through the water.  His skinny legs pawed the water, his toenails extended as if attempting to dig into something solid.  What could be going through his mind? And why would he attempt this, when he was plainly terrified?  Does he like doing things that scare him? The dog brain, simple though we may believe, remains a mystery.

Lance swam like a sewing machine.  Chucka, chucka chucka.  Sturdy and desperate at the same time.  He paddled over to me and looked me straight in the eye to make sure he got credit for the effort.  The he swerved over to Geoff to check on him.  Geoff was wearing a snorkel mask at the moment and was looking down into the sandy floor,  so he did not see the heroic Lancelot striding the waves toward him.  Lance poked his snout into Geoff’s side, and Geoff startled, lifted his face out of the water.  Having thus satisfied himself that Geoff was not dead, only floating face-down in the sea, Lance turned and returned to shore.  The slow rising humps of water pushed him along when his skinny legs failed.  Once on land, he shook himself off and rolled in the hot, loose white sand, so he appeared to be dusted in flour.  Then he came right back into the water to make the same trip all over again.  He kept this up all day.  We had to drag him home in the late afternoon.  What a difference a little wind makes.  Suddenly I have a brave new dog.

Emily has been having sympathetic brain spasms.

#556, c. 1862

The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly — and true —
But let a Splinter swerve —
‘Twere easier for You —

To put a Current back —
When Floods have slit the Hills —
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves —
And trodden out the Mills —

That splinter that has put my brain out of groove? Tiger sharks.

We took a guided snorkeling expedition to another part of the peninsula, near the state park.  They dropped us off on a sandbar that led in one direction (about a half mile) to shore and in the other direction out to deep water.  On our way there, we encountered a pod of dolphins.  One swam close, brushing against the hull of our boat. Without fail every human on the boat clambered to the railing and leaned out to coo and sigh, as if apprehending the Baby Jesus, Himself.  I was first in line, cooing above all the others.  How do they do it?  Dolphins, I mean.  They inspire a near-universal response of awe and love.  Our mysterious friends of the deep.  We can be with the dolphins and not be afraid.  Even our crusty, grumpy Captain Gary turned soft on us when the dolphins appeared.  He sped the boat in their direction, knowing they would swim along, racing and leaping to keep up.  Apparently they love the hum of the engine, especially a catamaran.  The shape of the hull amuses them somehow.  Reminds them of another dolphin, perhaps?  Who knows?  But they definitely respond to the racing boat, much the same way that Lance will snap his head around and rivet his attention to my hand when I hold a tennis ball.  I hold him in my thrall as I wave the ball.   The dolphins are locked in similarly.  The boat’s shape and sound must strike a chord in their brain history.  They know what to do with a boat.  They play with it.

When we got to the sandbar, Captain Gary dropped anchor and turned us loose for about three hours to explore on our own.  The area immediately around the boat was shallow enough to walk.  While Geoff and I were snorkeling in the deeper water, I attracted the attention of a remora, which is a long gray fish with white stripes down either side and a suction cup on its underside.  These generally attach themselves to sharks and then coast along waiting for the shark to kill something. The remora scoots out to eat the bloody remnants floating around after the shark has taken its meal.  Anyway, this remora would not leave me alone.  It darted in and around and all up and down my legs, gliding along my skin, looking for a place to attach.  I swatted it away, but it kept coming back to me.  The fish ignored Geoff and only wanted to attach itself to my legs.  I swam away from it, flippering fast in the water, then stopped and looked down.  The damn thing had followed me and continued its fascinated inventory of my legs.  “Why?” I asked.

“He senses your predation,” Geoff said.

“I’m a vegetarian!” I yelled at the remora.  It didn’t seem to believe me.

I climbed back onto the boat so I could re-apply sun block.  Sound carries beautifully across water,  so I could clearly hear our snorkeling guide Spencer casually chatting with other folks in our expedition. He was reassuring them that they did not need to worry about sharks.  “Wherever you find dolphins, you won’t see sharks,” he said.  Apparently dolphins dominate sharks.  When they play Rock-Paper-Scissors, dolphins win every time.  The reason is not that dolphins love us and want to protect us from sharks.  Another cherished myth shattered out there on the sunny Gulf coast.  The reason is that dolphins and sharks compete for the same food supply.  And dolphins beat up sharks because they can.  They’re smarter, faster, and more aggressive.  Even more importantly, dolphins know how to work in groups to protect their food supply, whereas sharks tend to be solitary feeders.  Sharks are dumb, but they have figured out that it’s healthier to stay away from dolphins.

A minute later I heard shouting.  “Oh look!” Spencer was pointing, very excited.  Then a saw it.  A black, knife-shaped shadow, about three feet long, darted through the shallow water where Geoff and the other folks in our group were paddling around.  It moved super fast and then disappeared into the forest of undersea grass. “There’s a shark, right there,” Spencer cried, pleased with himself, as if he had produced it himself.

“What was that story you were just feeding those kids? ” I demanded, trying not to sound shrill.

“Oh, I tell that to everybody,” Spencer said as he climbed into the boat.  Our crusty, grumpy Captain Gary had just returned from his foray into the deeper water.  He already knew about the shark—a bonnet shark and an old friend, it seemed.  “Yeah, this is his hangout,” Gary said.  Wonderful.  Our guides have brought us to a “shark hangout.”  I must have looked as stricken as I felt because Spencer launched into the spiel:  Most sharks shy away from people.  They’re more afraid of us . . .  etc.  I am suddenly lonesome for my couch.

The conversation turned, naturally enough, to tiger sharks.  Spencer described them as “garbage can fish” because they literally will eat anything, regardless of nutritional content.  Plus, they differ from other sharks in that they do not shy away from humans.  Oh, no! Tiger sharks yearn to embrace their human cohorts—in the most intimate manner imaginable—tear their limbs from their torso and wear their intestines like a necklace.

The only local tiger shark attack that Spencer knew of was a man who was fishing in waist-deep water.  He had packed the bait into his pockets.  A passing tiger shark liked the smell of that and tried to get into the man’s pockets . . . violently.  “The way I see it, “Spencer said. ” The guy baited himself.” Then he raised his shoulders in a philosophical shrug and fanned out his hands, as if to say, “I rest my case.”

Yeah, hard to argue with that one.  The guy was totally asking for it.  Oh, but Spencer wasn’t finished with his story.  He and his nephew had recently caught a 12-foot tiger shark and released it.  I asked where, hoping the shark was living happily in Hawaii now.

“I’d rather not tell you,” Spencer said.  I stared at him until he succumbed to my will.  “A couple of miles from here.”

Great.  That’s just great.  Rather than think about this too much,  I sank back into the water and returned to my patrol of the grass beds.  Beneath my snorkel mask, the flickering blue and green ovals of fish first zigged and then zagged in their group fish-think when they felt the water shift with my movement.  The sunlight illuminated their skin with triangles of gold.  I happened upon an extremely large conch shell that had fastened itself to the lip of an equally large scallop shell.  I nudged it with my flipper.  The creature inside the conch shell reacted with a furious poof of sand and disengaged its hold on the scallop.  The conch creature (I later learned) had been in the middle of feeding on the scallop creature.  More predation.  When had I first glimpsed the two, I thought they were having sex—some exotic, inter-species coupling.  It could happen, right? But no, this was hunting, not loving.  I’m always misunderstanding things by filtering the world through my own prism. The sorrow of my life.

My brain, Lance,  tiger sharks, dolphins.  Our respective mental engines are going chucka, chucka  . . .  It’s a miracle that any of us manage to co-exist at all, if only because each of us is running in an entirely different groove.  Back to language and communication.  I have been thinking about why we all react with such romantic exhilaration when the dolphins show up.  The simple reason may be that the dolphins respond to us in a way that shows they are aware of our presence as something other than food or a threat to their food.  They play with us.  What else could that be?  They swim with us in a manner unmistakably frivolous.  This suggests some imagination at work.  Their capacity for play and willingness to involve us in their game tells us that they are imagining things about us—just as we also involve them in our imaginative vision.  We’re having a simultaneous and briefly mutual fantasy with the dolphins.  This is how love affairs get started.

The startling point for us humans (because we believe we’re at the top of the kingdom) is that we feel seen by the dolphins.  A barrier between us drops.  We see real evidence of understanding.  We feel we could have a relationship with the dolphin that we could never have with a shark who looks at us with the same dead, empty eyes as we look to our own grilled steak on the dinner plate.  With the dolphin we look into a lively mind  that is utterly alien from our own in its wildness and self-possession.  A dolphin is really not like a dog, who also plays with us.  We have a  contract with dogs, who goof around to curry favor, so that we’ll feed them snacks and give them pedicures.  The  dolphin doesn’t need us.  Yet, the dolphin seems to want us for its own benevolent reasons.  When we feel ourselves folded into this strange intelligence, we are both thrilled and humbled.  Do we deserve to be loved?  Probably not.  That makes it even more exciting.

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