In which a scholar describes his morning, his method, and the question he has been asking for twenty six years.
The rain came again before first light, as it has every morning this week, tapping its patient fingers against the roof shingles with the persistence of a student who believes repetition is the same as wisdom. I woke before it arrived. I always do. There is a particular pressure in the air that precedes rain by some twenty minutes, and after two decades of living in this place I have become as finely tuned to it as any barometer. I rose, wrapped my old robe about my shoulders, lit the lantern on my desk, and set the kettle over the coals.
I record this not because it’s remarkable, but because it’s precisely the sort of unremarkable thing that most times goes unrecorded, and it has been my conviction for many years that the truth of any life lives in its ordinary mornings rather than in its dramatic afternoons.
Journal entry:
The great error of memoir, I have long suspected, is the memoirist’s instinct to rescue significance from the flood of days to present a life as a series of chosen moments, each one burnished and set like a stone in a ring. But a life is not a ring. A life is more like this marsh: vast, murky, frequently indistinguishable from itself, and yet, if one stands still long enough — absolutely teeming.
The kettle whistled. I poured. The rain began.
I should note for any future reader who comes upon these journals, and I hold no particular expectation that anyone shall, though one writes in hope of it, always, that I am not a romantic figure. I am tall, yes, as my kind tend to be, with the long neck that my students at the eastern shallows have at various times compared to a question mark, a bishop’s crook, and, memorably, a cursive letter written by someone too impatient to finish.
My plumage has gone somewhat grey at the crown. My reading spectacles are held together on the left side by a twist of river grass, as I have not yet found a craftsman in this marsh with the appropriate tools for repair, and I lack the temperament to seek one out in the dry lands beyond the cypress line.
***
I am, by practice and by inclination, a scholar of what I can see from where I sit. This is either my great limitation or my method, depending on the day and the quality of the light.
My desk faces two windows. Through the left, stands the old fishing shack on the far bank, dark most nights, lit occasionally by whoever might pass through, burning a lantern in the small hours the way solitary travelers do, to reassure themselves that they exist. I have observed it for eleven years. I have never spoken to any of its inhabitants. There is more data in a thing observed from a distance than in a thing examined too closely; proximity destroys the very phenomenon one means to study. I have written an entire monograph on this principle. No one has read it.
Through the right window: the lily pads, the dark water, the willows trailing their fingers like a woman washing her hair, and beyond them, the open marsh stretching toward the treeline where the herons of the eastern colony roost. I was born there. I left it at the age of three, following my father to this part of the water, and I have not gone back in any meaningful sense. The eastern herons consider me eccentric. The western herons, I am told, consider me something of a curiosity. I have long since settled into considering myself simply present, which is perhaps the only honest self-description available to any of us.
Journal entry:
I keep books, specimens, and maps. Three stacks of field notebooks stand against the eastern wall, each one labeled by season and year in my own careful hand. A card catalogue built from salvaged wood and the drawer-pulls off a sunken john-boat occupies the right side of the room. It contains observations on wind direction, water temperature, migration patterns, the flowering times of seventeen plant species, the nesting behaviors of forty-two bird families, the social dynamics of the alligator population in the south pool, and one drawer labeled simply “Miscellaneous Griefs,” which I have not opened in some time.
***
My cup is empty. The rain has settled into its steady middle rhythm past urgency, not yet tired. Outside, a bittern doing what bitterns do in rain: standing absolutely still in the reeds, pretending to be a reed. It is a performance I have always found admirable. There are days I would like to attempt it myself, to simply stand very straight and let the world mistake me for something rooted, something that does not think, does not record, does not accumulate the long evidence of having been alive in a difficult and beautiful place. I’m not a bittern. I am, for better or worse, a scholar. So I light a second candle, I open my journal, and I begin again.
I return to one question, year after year, the way one returns to a particular bend in the river not because there is anything left to find there but because the light hits the water at that bend in a way that has no equivalent downstream: Why does it matter to write down the world?
The marsh doesn’t require my record of it. The water doesn’t need my notations on its surface tension, its temperature gradient, its seasonal smell of iron and rot and strange green life. The lilies bloom without my annotation. The bittern stands in the rain with or without my witness. The old shack sits with its single light burning and asks nothing.
I have always written. Before I had proper ink, I scratched notes into bark with my primary feather and kept the pieces pressed between stones. Before I had a desk, I stood in the shallows in the early light and composed sentences in my head, repeating them until I could fix them somewhere permanent.
I’ve concluded, because observation is the only form of love available to a creature with my particular temperament. I can’t warm things. I can’t call out to the approaching storm and soften it. I’m not built for comfort or for consolation. However, I can stand at the edge of a thing, a life, a season, a morning, a grief, and I can look at it until I see it, and then I write down what I saw, and perhaps in the writing-down something is preserved that would otherwise vanish into the general amnesia of water.
The rain is easing. The bittern has not moved.
I turn to a fresh page. This is always the best moment: the page without any marks, the morning without history, the whole long marsh stretching out far and full of what it has not yet given up.
I dip the quill. I begin.
____________________
† The card catalogue drawer marked “Miscellaneous Griefs” was opened once, on the morning of the seventh of the Reed Moon, Year XLII. Its contents are not recorded here. The reader will understand.