Rough Likeness: Essays Read Online Free Page B

at the jaw’s hinge, a darkened spot where muscles and tendons would gather in. There, where I stopped, were the bones of a mouth, base around which sensation assembled, arc and dip where joy would mass, interest tighten, a grin inscribe. It was a small animal’s head tilted up (in sun, early fall, the leaves translucing, drying and brightening) inclined toward the three-note call of a bird. Right there, regarding the call, head back and locating the mark, not in danger or hunger, let’s say a raccoon settled into the grass to find a sonorous point in the blue and unencumbered sky, leaves dipping into the picture and shirring, not orange/red/yellow (though they were), for the photoreceptors in a raccoon are differently keyed than ours, and its sky would gray out, its tree putty into a blunter thing from whence the call issued.
    It’s not that I mean to animate the world according to my whims or a lordly perspective, or that I’m bent on assigning virtues, human ones, and sowing them widely among all beings, so I might feel at home everywhere, always. I don’t mean to collapse all that is between the raccoon and me, force kinship, Lia-fy any creature.
    It’s just that here, today, with a quantum of sadness settling in ( sadness , not grief with its solid occasions) and a quantum of something else buoyant and lithe, I looked down (perfect skull) and then up (blue sky with birdcall) and the loop of perception closed, countervailed any singular mood, and I was less alone.
    Such a feeling comes on in waves and one goes under I can say, since I grew up near the ocean knowing the excruciations of tides—not because it’s easy to say “wave” for sadness and its workings. I wouldn’t do that, not here, not now; it’s more that I know very well, in a familiar way, the species of force that, without intention, draws one in, and pushes one out again, scoured and worn. Waves plunge, overpower, rash the shore, rake it. Waves sift, wrinkle and breathe. Steed , I learned later, for intense, white-foamed things ( The trampling steed, with gold and purple trapt / Chawing the foamy bit, there fiercely stood ) so yes, there are many angles to consider—sound, for instance, the tight squeeze of those e ’s and the o ’s invitation—when noting that waves work well on behalf of layered-up moments.
    (And, I should add, when I first saw Rembrandt’s waves—it was The Abduction of Europa, in a book at home—new shades of sensation were affirmed; I could find, after that, in puffs of real sea foam at any local beach on Long Island, the bull who was Zeus, bearing Europa fast away, Europa seeming up for the ride, muscled and ready, balanced and whole, borne over waves on another’s will, the roiling, darkening sea inviting, the Europa in me RSVP-ing, all I was leaving, and all I’d be finding churning together, suggesting....)
    I so loved the ocean as a child that I had to be dragged out when it was time to go home. If you’ve grown up with waves, you come to learn that they don’t knock you down as much as allow you various decisions about staying upright, show you’ve chosen to stay in their path, try your luck, pit your strength. And though we say “a wave knocked me down,” it’s not that waves care. They’re as rote as heartbeats. Down, though, draws the eye—because Dante’s geography promises you’ll find your very own species among the fallen. Down because Lucifer, who once tended light, fell away from the light, and now lives below us. Because down is where we go for essentials, where we seek the authentic by way of the thoroughgoing need to come clean: Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down/Learn of the green world what can be thy place... .
    So let me confirm: when the bird call came, I was looking down. And there was the skull. Surrounding it was a sensation, and above, a sky very deeply blue. Then it happened: the picture got bigger: the skull was, I saw, not a skull at all, but a weathered mushroom, eaten