M.E. Breen

I turned 36 yesterday, which made it a good day to go body surfing. I had an idea I was pretty decent at body surfing. My cousin Laurie used to take my sister and me to the beach when we visited L.A.  She showed us how to dive under the waves so they wouldn’t pummel us, and that’s what I did, over and over,  thrilled each time at having carried off this trick of survival. The waves rolled up big and fast, but with an orderliness that suited me. Once, a second wave hit right on the heels of the first, after my head popped up but before I had time to reassemble myself into optimum diving position. And then, boy, I wrestled with death. I got tossed. I got water up my nose. I could hardly believe it. I had never been handled so roughly. I staggered to my feet in the queer meringue landscape of white water.  I wanted to cry or at least tell someone, but my sister and cousin were far away practicing their own moves.

My mood was grave. I felt tricked. Until now, the ocean had given me no more than I could handle. Like a stern but encouraging mother, she had challenged but never humiliated me. But now I was humiliated, and at the core of it was a new sort of loneliness. I understood that bad things sometimes happened to me because other people were mean, and I knew that I didn’t always get what I wanted because sometimes another person’s desires, usually an adult’s, conflicted with my own. I might be baffled or hurt by the agency of others, but I understood it as agency. I wanted this, they wanted that, and those desires either matched or they didn’t. What I wanted at that moment was to think of the ocean as mean, but I just couldn’t. The idea and the rejection of the idea came at the same time. How childish, I thought. But if the ocean wasn’t a bully, what was it? What did it want?

The terrible truth dawned that the ocean had punished me and did not even know it. It hadn’t intended anything by it. It didn’t want anything. And it wasn’t just indifferent to me. I looked for my sister and my cousin, and at the other kids playing and the people sunbathing. We could all just die. Mommy Nature does not care at all.

So, yeah, I totally remember the first time I went body surfing. The next time, twenty years later, my friend Cass taught me you are supposed to ride the waves, not just dive under them. We were in Costa Rica on a black sand beach. The water was warm. We bobbed and waited and laughed at our bad synchronized swimming moves. I only caught about three waves, but everything about that vacation felt joyful and easy. Sure, we got a weird puckery sun rash and uncontrollable diarrhea and I flipped my kayak and lost my water bottle and sunglasses, but we also drank rum out of a coconut and camped in a jungle and snorkeled around a rock island where the fish had all entered the Glorious Rainbow Beauty Competition.

Yesterday morning dawned sunny and warm and un-windy, almost like we were in L.A.  J and I didn’t exactly make the dawn patrol, but we made the 9am patrol, good enough for an old lady. The warm weather was a fake out, because the water was 51 degrees, but I was wearing a wetsuit. That suit is the closest thing to the many magic flying/invisibility/underwater breathing/impervious to fire/impervious to poisoned animal fangs suits I wore as a kid. It had a hood and booties, and after thirty minutes in death-water I was not cold at all.  It was so amazing I felt some of my old survival-vanity returning. Ha on you, Mommy Nature! You same Nature who gave me long purple feet and hay fever and above-average athletic zeal but below-average hand-eye coordination — watch me! I swim! I dive!

But you know those waves that look like sweet migrating turtles from the shore? Sort of humped and low and even? It turns out they are kind of messy and scary when you’re in the water. So irregular! Heaving weirdly, breaking early, breaking late. I caught not a single one. I only even got myself into position twice, and then I was too slow and got left behind, dropped pathetically behind, like a person the bus driver kicks off the bus because, hey, lady, this is the end of the line, even though you’re sure you never passed your stop and where the heck are you and yikes that wasn’t even the right bus.

Still, I was happy and tired and pushing back out through the heavy froth to try one last time, when a wave broke right in my face. I must have looked surprised. I certainly had my eyes open. The water slapped my eyeballs.  It kind of hurt. I wanted to tell J, but he was off practicing his own moves, or at least I thought he was, it might have been him, or a sea lion, or that woman surfer with the nose ring, or Aqua Boy, or Moby Dick, because Nature gave me bad eyesight, and then she knocked my contacts out.

Which, well, turning 36 is like getting hit in the face. There are the little smacks, the creasing and de-gleaming, the jerk mirror, once your most reliable informant, now possibly turned against you by the criminal element. And then there’s the brutal strike of the day itself: Lady, the year is gone! You did not do this. You did not do that. The granary is depleted.  You are eating through your stores.

Yeah, but I wore the magic suit. I braved the cold. I felt small and weak. I felt rubbery and large. Briefly I was blind. I got coffee in bed. I ate strawberry pie. I was afraid of the riptide. I was afraid of sharks. I wasn’t that afraid. I read six X-Factor comics. I ate peach and arugula salad. It’s the summer, baby. It’s California, baby. I’m alive.

Remember the neighbor I called Grendel, with the baby rats? We moved into her house. Now it’s our house, but it took a few weeks for me to be sure. The house was built in 1894. It’s made of redwood and has no insulation.  We moved in at the end of the rainy season, and for about a month, while the walls dried out, it smelled like a green aquarium. Maybe we were only smelling Muir Woods the way it smells to a tree squirrel, but anyway, it was bad. The house looked so sweet and smelled so sour there was something almost aggressive in it, an insistence that things are never as good as they appear, that our fantasies are always visual, and when we inhabit them we must inevitably come into contact with the disconcerting or downright disgusting smells, sounds, touches and tastes of real life.

And we didn’t know, at the beginning, whether this was the smell of the house or the smell of our former neighbor. You know when a stranger passes you on the street on her way to the train and you smell her shampoo, and suddenly you can picture her whole morning routine, how much care she takes, the fresh start, the hope she has for the day?  This was the opposite of that, and we were afraid it would get into our clothes.

The cats adjusted first. On his first day in the new house, Didi spent twenty minutes identifying points of egress then went to sleep in the middle of the living room floor. Big Cat hid in a closet until bedtime, when she climbed on J’s chest and kneaded the sheet with unprecedented intensity. She reminded me of the old man in the Pardoner’s Tale (ll. 266-69):

Thus walke I lyk a restelees kaityf,
And on the ground, which is my moodres gate,
I knokke with my staf bothe erly and late,
And seye, ‘leeve mooder, leet me in!”

So Didi wanted out, and Big Cat wanted in, which is pretty typical, and pretty high on the list of Cute Ways Pets Illustrate Conflicting Human Desires.  J pushed Big Cat’s head fur into a little mohawk and held her paw (really) and by the next morning she was fine.

The humans came around, predictably, as soon as the sun came out. The house turned into a sauna. Real saunas, aka, lobster coffins, freak me out, but the house-as-sauna, where I can wash the dishes and pay bills and look out at the Corvus corax consorting on the rooftops and do everything else I normally do except not wearing any socks, was awesome.

That left Truckstop to mourn alone. Our old apartment at the front of the lot didn’t have much view into the garden, but the new place has two big windows overlooking the yard. Truckstop is one of those dogs with an air of reserve. She is dignified, if not entirely self-possessed, and has, I believe, private thoughts. Because mine is a voracious love, and because it can be helpful in planning the day’s walks to know when she last went pee, I take advantage of the new windows and spy on her when she’s in the yard. A few weeks ago I watched her pick her way into the junglish patch of mashed agapanthus leaves and spider plants she prefers, squat, then hurry up the stairs to wait outside our old door. Heart pang! She was like Bodger in The Incredible Journey, except the journey was incredibly short. I tapped on the glass and waved at her, and then we both had one of those moments when you think you might be living in a cartoon. Her ears pricked up. A light bulb appeared over her doggy head. She booked down the stairs and across the yard and up her new, proper, righteous steps, where I waited with open door.

It wasn’t just that once. She goes over there all the time, sometimes to crash out in the sun patch at the top of the stairs, sometimes to visit the big dog, Mama, who moved in, sometimes just to sit and surveil.

As a kid, you hear songs about your hometown early and often. Whenever I heard “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” I pictured a fleshy heart like a giant chicken liver lying on the sidewalk, where it had dropped out of this poor man’s chest without his noticing. I must have known the song was about love, or nostalgia, or anyway something other than an actual organ, but I was drawn to the idea of the heart as a thing. I loved the expression “Eat your heart out,” though I didn’t, and still don’t, understand exactly what it means. The heart works as a weirdly material metaphor. When you say, I lost my mind, you aren’t describing an actual feeling you had in your head. But when you say, That broke my heart,  you are describing an actual pain in your chest.

Sometimes I think Truckstop left her heart in the old house, left it there like a bone, and she keeps going back to try and find it. I mean, maybe she did leave a bone in there, but I cleaned up pretty thoroughly so I don’t think so. But then what is she looking for? Does the house still smell like us? It had better not smell like resignation. Did she simply like it there better and wants to go back? Does she think that’s her vacation home? Is she upwardly mobile?

I’m not interested in dog psychology as a science. Is that a science? I mean, biology interests me, co-evolution interests me, but the actual firing of dog neurons can remain a mystery. I admire my dog for her independent dogishness, but I love her as God loves Creation. A pet dog is both natural and man-made, meaning she is a living breathing creature in her own right, for whom I am responsible but who functions separately from me, and also a completely acceptable object for my most extravagant projections. She exists, and I made her. It’s like writing a novel in reverse: first I create the book, then it goes into the world and becomes something in its own right. First Truckstop was born, a puppy in the universe, and then she became a part of my imagination. I adopted her in order to love her, which is not so different from baking bread in order to eat it.

What am I to think, then, if she has aspirations beyond the life I’ve built for her? What if she wants to live in a different house? Of course part of me hates change, too, and during those first weeks when the new house stank I wanted nothing more than to return to the old, small, cheap, crammed, familiar apartment. But I had chosen this, and could no longer have that. I have chosen this, and can’t have that. But maybe Truckstop can have both. Maybe the secret to animal grace is both, not either or. Maybe there is no tension for her in old and new, past and present, or if there is, she resolves it by crossing the yard. Sometimes my novel, the object, and writing it, the action, both feel entirely lost to me, like one of those intense dorm friendships born from a thousand hours of the most compulsive, exhaustive, exhilirating honesty that just fades away as you get older. This person saw your heart, and now she is a stranger about whom you have no curiosity. But each day Truckstop returns to the past to collect her heart. She finds it where she left it, and puts it back in her chest, and sews her world together.

*   *    *   *

“He worried about proximity, judging everything by how near or how far it was from him. Animals and outer space are excellent hobbies for such a person, for each is useful and comforting to humans with more than a passing interest in loneliness.” – from The Life and Opinions of Maf the Dog and of His Friend Marilyn Monroe

That dead boar of the last post has got me thinking about the Decorah eagles. I look in on them every day, at least two or three times an hour if it’s a day when I’m on my computer a lot. I’m capable of feeling guilty about almost any activity, because almost any activity can be something I am doing instead of writing a novel. Making a cup of tea? Not writing. Staring out the window pensively perchance winsomely? Not writing. Reading six straight issues of Annihilation Conquest with my feet propped on the back of the couch in Optimal Sun Ray Absorption Position? Opposite of writing.

But I don’t feel guilty watching the Decorah eagles. In fact I feel the opposite of guilty. I am proud in my bird voyeurism, proud and dutiful. Why should this be? The eagles don’t know that 79,482 people (as of one second ago) are watching them. That’s the whole point. And it’s not as though these eagles have cleansed me of some embarrassing prejudice I held against eagledom. Everyone knows eagles are cool.  They excel at many things humans value: they mate for life, they build their own nests, they stay up all night in a sleet storm to keep their babies dry, they give good profile. So do I feel proud of myself for watching them because I feel proud of them? Because at last I’ve found a candidate I can throw my support behind? OMG, I want to vote for the eagles in 2012.

I realize there’s a distinction between how I feel about watching the eagles and how I feel during the actual watching. When the father eagle (no, I can’t really tell the male and female apart) tucks the babies under his bosom because it’s time to go to bed, well, I really love it. And when the mama eagle turns her beak just so, in her tender, stern, robotic way, and transfers a fish chunk to the mouth of one of the babies, well, I love that too. And when all five of them are together, rending flesh and hanging out, whoa, I love that so much.

But what about when Big Johnny First Hatched keeps shoving Wee Linda Last Hatched out of the way at feeding time and gets to eat the entire liver from Mama’s meticulously eviscerated gopher/rabbit/small deer? Then I worry. And what about when Middle Sibling Romona just sort of sits there and pants? Or when Linda lies down and stretches her neck out like a dead camel? Or during that sleet storm, God help me!  I worry every morning before I open my computer that during the night the nest has been obliterated. I worry the tree fell down. I worry about marauding owls. I worry about rogue bird viruses. I worry about loud trucks on the highway and heavy winds and sibling rivalry. My fear is so possessive, and so vain, and so in vain. Why is it only when I stop watching that I think something truly bad might happen?

At last I’m starting to understand the connection between the dead boar and the live eagles. The boar was decontextualized, and the eagles are over-contextualized. The boar had no story, no history, no family. She was dead and alone in a strange place, two things no one thinks are cool, and especially not in combination. But the eagles have their own home and family and purpose, and on top of that they have whatever  meaning I impose on them. And oh, have I imposed. I am the marauding owl of imposition, dropping into the nest all my worries about fairness and luck, my notions of who deserves what, my anxiety about the vulnerability of the living things I love. Because the eagles are in my house, by internet magic, I keep trying to make them more like me. In other words, more human. In more other words, as sick with the fear of death as I am.

I suspect I wouldn’t feel this way if didn’t have access to the eagles 24 hours a day. There’s something unsettling about that degree of access. It exceeds the natural limits of curiosity and pushes things into Big Brother territory. Granted, I did just binge read a comic book in which the techno-organic race The Phalanx try to infect everyone with a mind-control computer/biological virus, but I can’t help but feel that the Live Cam gives us a level of access it’s hard not to mistake for control. When both parents leave the nest (like they just this second did) and I think, Babies! Keep a low profile! and the babies put their heads down, and then I think, Mama, get back there! And then Mom or Dad returns, I can’t help but feel, at least a teeny, tiny bit, that I have directed the action.  I mean, if you could watch the infinite universe unfolding over infinite time, at some point  you would begin to notice patterns and repetitions, and then you could begin to make predictions, and then would it be so strange if your predictions began to feel like creation?

So here we are, all — let me check — all 72,644 of us, all at our separate desks and couches, and most of us, at this moment, really wanting those parents to get their eagle butts back into the nest, there’s owls out there, dang it!, and I imagine if the eagles had cameras pointed at us that we couldn’t see, or that looked so unlike anything we were used to caring about that we didn’t assign any meaning to them, well — what? What would they make of us? Would they love us? Would they want to eat us? Both?

Oh, the eagles don’t care. They conserve their energy. They are committed to the business of living.

The dog beach has two decks. The upper deck, along the cliff top, offers paved paths, shrubberies, water fountains and sweeping views. The lower deck is the beach itself, cliffs on one side and water on the other. The beach is about the safest place I can think of to let your dog off leash if you have a badly behaved sort of dog, but it presents its own hazards. To reach the lower deck people and dogs descend through a sort of ravine between the cliffs. There’s all sorts of rubble in the ravine, big chunks of concrete and poking up pieces of wire left over from one of the roads the army built here. As ravines go, it’s not particularly narrow and not remotely scary, but it always reminds me of the crack in the earth that swallows Lois Lane’s car in the Superman movie.

Every time we head down to the beach from the upper deck, Truckstop runs to stand on top of an iceplant-draped bulge of cliff, the highest point around. She stares out to sea and sniffs the air, then, transmissions received, drops like Lindsey Vonn through the chute. Usually she slows down at the bottom and starts investigating her beloved clumps of beach detritus, but sometimes she keeps running. That’s bad. It means a horse is nigh, or else Death.

Not dog death! But animal death, usually substantial animal death, in the form of a harbor seal or sea lion. Of course that’s what I assumed she was heading for, two Saturdays ago, when Truckstop sprinted toward a dark, lummoxy carcass in the distance. There’s no point calling her when she does this, though I do it anyway, shriek and stagger through the deep sand after her, one arm pinned across my ribs, emergency sports bra-style, the other hand flapping the international Putrefaction Alert signal.

When Truckstop reaches a dead seal she flings herself onto it, she really tosses herself, with the controlled abandon of a dancer, and the corpse catches her. She lands on her back, sticks all four dragon feet in the air, and writhes. It’s her ballet, and I know she is happier in this moment than when I lie with her on the couch and kiss her eyelashes.  If I ever have a kid, and the kid becomes a teenager, and the teenager wants to play a video game called Destruction of Humanity VI instead of sitting down to eat the grilled cheese sandwich I made him and talk about his dreams for his future, well, I will be prepared.

But this time she reached the dark lump of body and stopped, still wagging and bristling, but a little uncertain. I got closer and saw the thing that was making her hesitate. The body had a tail. I don’t mean flippers. It had a curling black tail. It had hooves. It was a dead demon!

Actually it was a boar. I’d never seen a boar before, alive or dead. I’d seen a pink pig with black spots and lots of hair, but this thing had fur, and it was all black, and it was huge, except for those small sinister hooves. Many years ago I went to an exhibit about mythological creatures at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Included in the write-up on the Roc was the sentence, “to make a bird terrifying you need only make it bigger.” This turns out to be equally true of pigs.

I did some research. Neither pigs nor boar are native to the United States. Spanish and Russian settlers brought domestic pigs with them to California in the early 1700′s, and then in the 1920′s a rich dude in Monterey wanted to hunt wild boar on his property and imported some from Europe. The boar did not stay on the rich dude’s property, but wandered off and mated with some escaped domestic pigs and created the fearsome thing I saw on the beach. There are lots of them now, and they are considered a threat to farmers and native species alike, but they do not, as far as I know, like to hang out at the beach. The beach was not the right place for a boar. It was not the right place for it to die. Truckstop agreed and opted not to dance with the body.

We continued on our walk and came home and lay on the couch together, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the boar. I had felt a kind of hatred for it. It was so strange and ugly. Or rather its strangeness had made it particularly ugly to me. It was of nature, but outside the place nature had assigned it. Imported, hybrid, lost, it seemed triply cursed. Demons have hooves and horns and swishing tails attached to human bodies precisely because these things are scary taken out of context. And so I had feared and hated the decontextualized boar, which seemed a form of barbarism in me.

The boar, a female, worshiped Iris. Her parents called her Dot but as soon as she was old enough she had her name legally changed to Dawn. She lived in Mendocino County. After a full, happy, long, chaste, vegetarian, peaceful, meditative life, Dawn waded into the Russian River and let it carry her to the ocean. For the first time in her life she saw salt water fish. She saw a dolphin and a seal, with whom she felt a kinship. She saw a turtle, she saw a whale, she saw starfish and sea cucumbers. She thanked Iris for the gift of her life, and then she died.

Packing up my mom’s apartment I came across a book review she’d saved from February 22, 1998.  The illustration alone makes it worth saving: a giant, Blue Meanies-style head wailing in a pram. The book in question is The Beast in the Nursery, by Adam Phillips. The review is by Stephen Greenblatt. I haven’t read the book yet, which sounds so lame about something that came out 13 years ago, but what can I say? I’m a slow reader. I do not exaggerate when I say J reads five books to my one. I read book reviews the same way I once read Lucky magazine, so I can shop without spending money. I actually tagged pages with those “Yes” and “Maybe” stickers they provided. Tagging turning out to be a surprisingly good proxy for buying. I neutralized my desire by acting on it, and even the most inane action would do. Plus, cheap! I think the magazine would sell even better if they gave you a “NEVER” sticker too.

With reading, as with fashion, I feel like I’m perpetually working toward something rather than through something. The matter at hand, the outfit or paragraph at hand, is rarely the right matter. I always think I should be better or differently dressed, or farther along in the book. Which is weird, because with reading, I’m also always afraid of losing what I have. If it’s a book I love, I’m afraid of losing my pleasure in it by getting ahead of it, as though if I read too fast I might outpace my enjoyment. Certainly I don’t want to outpace my understanding. I do not skim. I do not know how to skim. I do not know how to extract the wheat.

Oh no. I’m afraid this is one of those moments of distressing extrapolation. I’m afraid in life generally I do not know how to extract the wheat. A teacher I loved in college confessed during an Elizabethan drama seminar that the previous night his wife had caught him counting the pages to the end of Henry VI Part 3. I remember being charmed and a bit shocked by this glimpse into privacy and domesticity. You mean you aren’t just a giant head elongated by ideas wobbling around campus on vestigial lemur feet? I also remember thinking, “Page flipping merits spousal joshing? Here is a whole different kind of person from my kind of person. Here is a person who is successful at his work because his tasks absorb him.”

That last characterization must come from my 35-year old self, not my 19-year old self.  Absorption strikes me as a distinctly middle-aged goal, and I’m pretty sure my college categories were limited to Fascinating and Boring. But I did understand, even at that age of sweet and furious convictions, that I was the sort of person who spent the time she should be reading in counting the pages left to read, and the time she should be absorbing material in speculating about what level of attention qualified as absorption.

In any case, that moment from seminar stuck with me, so, in the spirit of Phillips and therapy, let’s assume it’s important. But what does it have to do with the book review? Greenblatt defines Phillips’ thesis as follows: sad adults have lost their curiosity. Like Hamlet, they feel “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable / Seem to me all the uses of this world.” The job of the therapist, then, is to restore curiosity. Adults are all dying to get back to the state of frenzied curiosity your average kid feels about a trip to the zoo.  That sounds fair enough to me. I think for most of us, curiosity depends on the conviction that whatever you discover in your investigations will not harm you. I read an article a few months back about the mother of two boys with a vicious form of muscular dystrophy. She spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to direct attention and funding to the disease, as do many parents in her position. The remarkable thing about this woman was that she remained an activist even after both her sons died in their late teens. Even after her first, desperate, protracted investigation revealed a problem she could not solve, a problem that caused her terrible harm, she remained curious and hopeful.

For the rest of us, I suspect absorption makes curiosity possible. Absorption in a single task limits curiosity blow back.  Comic books often use the trick of cramming ever more panels and speech bubbles into the pages as the issue progresses. The reader gets increasing amounts of information and visual stimulation, but each individual panel gets smaller and less significant. Usually the last page of the issue is a stand-alone page rather than a spread. You have to turn the second page of the previous spread to see it, and there’s something about the physical act of turning the page, that momentary delay before the inevitable outcome, that makes you catch your breath. What you see when you turn the page is a single, blown-up image, totally out of scale with the art on the preceding pages. Often the image is of the hero or villain of the moment, or sometimes just one body part, a face or a hand. Sometimes, if it’s an outer-space comic, the image will be of a planet, a huge, spiny, malevolent alien world, or maybe an enormous fireball speeding toward a tiny, imperiled Earth. If there is any text at all, it’s just a single word or line. It always blows my mind, even when I’ve seen the trick a hundred times.

Having your mind blown in comics is good. Having your mind blown by suddenly confronting a problem of enormous scale isn’t so good, but that is where curiosity inevitably leads you. Most of us learn to limit our inquiries to problems with discernible boundaries, though how badly we need the boundaries depends on mood. When my problems congeal into an immense and boulder-like mass, all I want to do is watch dumb formula TV like The Gates or Supernatural and do crosswords. An actual grid! When the world seems more like a teeming hive full of interesting bees, I’m able to take some risks and chase some bees.

It’s when the world seems like a massive ball of string that you wind up like Hamlet. Having a parent die is like walking along the road and looking down and seeing the end of a rope. You pick up the rope and start to follow it, and at first you are like, huh, long rope, and then gradually you realize that the rope is everything, the road under you and the sky above you and the town in the distance ahead of you and you yourself. You are unraveling the thread of existence! You can drop the rope, but it doesn’t make any difference because you have seen how all things are connected. And then how natural, because you are sad and tired, to see the world as infinitely sad and tired.

That’s what’s so strange about all this. It is our natural human impulse to see connections between things, but the connectedness of everything is what overwhelms and defeats us. Greenblatt talks about “a problem with which Phillips repeatedly grapples but that he cannot resolve: psychoanalysis is an integral part of the culture that kills, or radically diminishes, the curiosity that its practitioners hope to enhance.” He goes on to say: “In a critique of Anna Freud, Phillips acknowledges that ‘psychoanalysis – as both theory and practice – can . . . dispirit people by making them better able to endure their ungainly fit with the culture.’”

This is the part of the review that finally makes sense for me of the idea that adults want to regain the curiosity of childhood. It isn’t curiosity we want, exactly, but the freedom of unlimited desire. As kids we could want everything precisely because we knew so little about anything.

So here we are, such weary adults,  afraid of what we might discover only because we can imagine so much.