Joseph McElroy - Women and Men

Ever drifting, drifting, drifting

On the shifting

Currents of the restless heart;

Till at length in books recorded,

They, like hoarded

Household words, no more depart.

— for which once when she recited it spontaneously at Bedloe’s Island in 1885 among the uncrated parts of the Statue of Liberty, she subsequaintly "here with" received in the mail on her birthday a marbled copy of Longfellow’s rendering of Dante’s Commedia inscribed to the uncle of the Inventor of New York by (as the Hermit always addressed our reverend apostle of a shaggy national literature) "Wadsworth," H.W.L. himself at his dining-room table in Boston, near where the diva’s doctor’s mother at Sunday breakfast once upon a time pooh-poohed his "Hiawatha studies" and nearer in time (but not place) to the table where a Unitarian sage momently adopting a shaman’s baritone wrote with the copacetic beat of a Hindu god that

If the red slayer think he slays,

Or if the slain think he is slain,

They know not well the subtle ways

I keep, and pass, and turn again.

Far or forgot to me is near

and so forth, words once recited by their mother to his younger brother Brad while Jim stood outside the music-room door listening and when there was silence looked through the wormhole. Which, with us probably in it, was flushed out after the diva’s doctor left and before her South American officer returned seeking not only her flesh but, as she, an anxious daughter, well knew, further information. The worm’s gone, and we’re behind the news because the diva has already sung another role and all we know, feeling about opera (grand, bel, comique , or other) as Grace Kimball and Jim Mayn do, is that at the crunch the priestess, torn as she was between love and anger, didn’t kill her two kids but instead disappeared into flame conveniently offstage.

We ask no more of her, and she’s followed by applause we hear without being told — not followed by the silence in Windrow, New Jersey, the silence in the next room, the music room, which made Jim secretly in the hall outside bend down and see what he could see through the keyhole because his mother had been sort of sick really months now but he saw only her bare elbow pleasantly at its inner angle puffed and creasy and then as she went on reciting or reading again her elbow moved out of sight and was instantaneously replaced on the chair arm by the fingers of Jim’s brother, the fingers were all he saw. Not long after that their mother’s death by drowning was reported in the Windrow Democrat. The report was incomplete, omitting reference to a suicide note one report said had been left impaled on a beach umbrella strut at Mantoloking, and as the days went on — and a day came when Margaret took Jim to the cemetery for the laying of a stone — he recognized that he did not want the body to come ashore because he would want to see it.

And so the weather and the sea made a secret familiar cover for the powers that be and wind and weather a sandman’s cover also for a mother who disappeared where salt waves rolled and eyelashed upon a beach but who then, as a future absence, brought herself close inside her offspring, furnishing a gap where, after that old silence, her voice would sometimes resume: "When me they fly, I am the wings." So she would pick up perhaps the vague memory of Emerson from her mother Margaret, if not the love of verse, which she had on her own.

And through this gap a future would always come, as she did not: except a breathing wind that came firm and steady, expelling, drawing back, the night, the day. And hearing this wind, her long-lost son Jim found obstacles for it.

From any distance it is all by itself. But he is not thirty-five miles away now. But what is he?

Risen alone off the dry plateau, this rock or mountain of a rock has seemed as alive as it is dead. Now nothing stands between him and it. Upwards of fifteen hundred feet of ancient gross height, it is as much before him now as the great morning is all around him.

Look, he’s not a landscape man, and here the Indians have given this thing back to him.

Ship Rock: he doesn’t know what he feels — he feels that much and more. And then knows that if now nothing stands between him and it, nothing ever did.

There’s a word for it, there always is, he thinks, for the Rock all by itself. It is all by itself — is this the huge thing about it? — as grand as its name, Ship Rock.

From far off, it is like a mountain let go by some landscape it once belonged to. But close up, two miles away now, two and a quarter, it has him all to himself. (Well, now you got it, how you gon’ move it?) What was moving out there on the Rock? An eye that swept through him unseeing, leaving him what he is. He’s what he is, no more.

Ship Rock is great and natural, a mount freaked out of nowhere so you can see it from anywhere, that shows a rock can be greater than a mountain. It’s doing something he can’t get away from. Stately monster-craft bound always in some direction other than his, as if it has no memory of prey, has only his memory.

Look, he’s not a landscape man, he didn’t plan to be here. Yet having stopped, he feels how long he’s been going. And so he looks and looks, and for several minutes doesn’t look into other spaces of this New Mexico morning. As if he’s made a discovery. Though he and discoveries are as much beyond each other as the curls of taste in his mouth are too close for contemplation if not comfort. But they’re not the taste, the touch, of raised numerals on credit cards but of cigarette smoke, of bacon, buttered toast, yolk of fried eggs, last night’s booze at a motel he’s checked out of that’s thirty, forty miles away, coffee with all the creamy chemicals that went into it to give you a send-off where you stayed seated at a breakfast table that comes with all the furniture on top of it in front of him that makes you love America, a table chosen for the window it is near, your shoes on the carpet, thumb and finger on the cup handle, waiting for the — smiling toward the — waitress in her cowgirl outfit far away across the motel’s sparsely populated dining room. There’s a painting of Ship Rock by this window that looks out on the aquamarine swimming pool. But it wasn’t the painting by the window that brought him to where he is now. And where is that?

The Rock rises upwards of fifteen hundred feet right up off the plateau. Half again that long at its base on this south side, it still seems less massive than lofty, for it is alone. That’s what the local Navajos call it — the Rock. Pretty much one rock (mono-lith) with craggy crops lifting towards two westward peaks with a massed steady shift against downward veins of long, vertical sharding and against the backward pull of what starts two-thirds of the way up, a slow climb beginning at the top of what looks like sheer cliff and climbing from there so that, notch by notch, the eye that is taken along these splits and levels takes his whole crazy body into what he’s witnessing, until something is an event.

What is?

Is it his desire to change?

To be going nowhere for a change? But he has been.

His desire is to be here — that’s it.

But he already is.

But he would like nothing to witness. Not here in the stillness of the morning wind. Not Sandia Man crossing the strait from Asia twenty-five thousand years before they thought of Christ.

Yet what is moving? Something is moving.

For him the Rock and where it is are also an aerial photograph, black and white, in a friend’s complete book two thousand miles east of this great morning of the plateau. The picture shows Ship Rock and two reptile tails running out from it south and west like low ranges. They’re called dikes.