Lost objects

Suppose, instead of finding yourself, you were to take as a goal to lose yourself, to wander, to immerse yourself, to get lost? 

Losing things is easy; really getting lost in a familiar space, if you are not already, can be harder than it seems. Let me be clear: I don't mean you should set out to lose your place in the world--that's painfully, mournfully easy.  All it takes is a slip in memory, an argument, a falling out of love, death. Although perhaps the line between these two sorts of loss isn't as stark as I would wish.

Here now, I've barely gotten started, and already I'm tangled up. Let me begin again, and unravel my theme as if we were going on a walk and the path was opening at our feet.

Long ago, I had a friend with whom I played this game: we set out, on foot or in her car, and wandered aimlessly, without a map. The point was to get lost if we could, to baffle ourselves, to have a hard time making out way back home to our apartments, our respective partners, our schoolwork.

We took lostness as a sort of holiday, or tried to. But getting truly lost in a small city you know well, bounded on one side by the water, with familiar hills rising in the distance--this is not so simple. Not to know the name of the road you traveled on, or where it led was one thing, but was that really being lost? Not to be able to pick your way back, to be stumped or puzzled, panicked even--that was something we never really experienced on our little voyages.  Not then anyway. 

Of course, we had each other and we had time--or rather, we took it, along with a longing for adventure in weeks seamed with obligations and deadlines. Every time we set out, we circled back, unwittingly, and were surprised to find ourselves on familiar streets.

Once we set out just after a rainstorm. The gutters were charged with water, each street a roaring stream. It was summer; the leaves drained water on our heads. Just before dusk we came across a trunk set out along the curb. We opened it. Inside: notebook and a small woman's garments. Handwriting in Chinese.

We kept the trunk. My friend's husband, who was ethical and meticulous in this way, tried to find the owner, but whoever had packed this trunk really was lost--to us anyway. After awhile, we scattered the trunk's contents.  I do not know what happened to the notebooks, but I took and sometimes wore one of the garments, a long high-collared sleeveless red silk brocaded vest; it buttoned over my chest and fell all the way to my feet. 

I left it later at a girlfriend's house in New York. We'd gotten into a bitter fight and I fled for Canada with most of my stuff, leaving just the cape folded on the shelf, as if I were a snake, shucking a past skin, a past life.  Who knows, perhaps that's how the red vest came to me. It was, surely, an immigrant object.

Now, more than twenty years later, I have no idea where it is, or who has it, or where it's traveled, if anywhere. Perhaps it's in a landfill, its silk threads rotting, the red dye leaching, slowly entering the earth and groundwater. 

Or perhaps someone else wears it, and dances in the night, hair wild, vest trailing behind her, as I did. My friend with whom I tried to get lost? I do not know where she is either.

Notes
The red silk window-covering was hung by Gary Markle.
Windows were photographed in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, in December 2014.

Too Windy for the Birds

3 April 2013

Backlit clouds of morning blare.
Behind the huddled islands,
it's raining out to sea.

Silver spray flies
over dark and stunted trees--
too windy for the birds.

That rock in the bay looks like a boat again:
a fisherman bound home and

forever missing shore. 

Notes

I took these photos this morning, the view from inside looking out to sea, and then reflections of the clouds and water in the window, seen from the outside looking in.

I am enjoying the exercise of trying to write a (short!) poem each day.  It is a bit like labouring over a puzzle, although, for me--puzzles make me impatient--far more satisfying. For poetry is a habit of thinking, or perhaps of arranging, a way, like drawing, of resting here where I am for a time, and rendering what I see. Such rendering is never, in any medium, a simple act of description; it is always layered with memories and speculations, musing, fantasies, sorrow, bad jokes and snatches of dreams.

Find the poetry in every day: that could be an injunction to meditation or some sort of healing. For when I do this, the anxieties, the lists and preoccupations, the physical pains incurred in daily living drain away. And although I am touched by sorrow--today, meditating on several tales of ships lost at sea (the Miss Ally, for example, and the Bounty, as well as the man who drove off the ferry last week in Cape Breton; he and his car sank immediately, and then were inaccessible under the ice that drifted into the harbour)--I am also utterly joyful.  Here, in the act of making something while looking carefully at what is before me, is an acquaintance with rhythm, with precision, heart's pulse and peace.

On Getting Lost (Again)

It happened in mid-February, on a sunny, windy weekend afternoon.  We'd been walking on the access road to Taylor's Head Park, along the water.

I suppose it happened because I was scanning the tracks on the road, looking for the ripped-off gull's wing we'd seen on the walk in, half of its feathers intact. I wanted a picture of it, and I hadn't stopped earlier. I was peering at the road so intently that I lost my place on it, and walked right by the little path that leads off to the parking spot at the end of Old Taylor's Head Road.

Not long after I walked on by, something clicked in my mind. Oops. I've gone past the lot. And so I turned back, but then somehow didn't see where I was supposed to go.

A brief moment of suspension; confusion; growing blankness.  A dense grey rain in my brain.

Oh, I thought, I'm mistaken (another little click in the brain), and I turned around again and headed back up the road the way I'd been going when I felt that I had gone too far.

After awhile, I recognized a distinctly bouffant-topped black spruce I'd photographed a year ago on another winter hike, then a boggy patch to the west, but the stone wall near the Bull's Head trail tipped me off: I'd certainly gone too far.  I knew it.

And so I turned around again, but I must admit I was confused.  I felt stupid, the way I used to feel in kindergarten when I was asked to point to something with my left hand or to turn to the right.  Which was left? Which was right?

Invariably I turned the wrong way, and the teacher said, no, no. Left. Right. What's wrong with you?

What was wrong was that I was dyslexic.  My mother gave me a ring that I wore on my right hand for a time. Asked to turn to the right, I'd check my hands. Right: where the ring is. Turn.

I continued the practice of wearing a permanent "lead ring" into adulthood, so as not to have to confess that I didn't know my left hand from my right.  If asked, left or right, I still have to look at my hands, make a gesture, sense this side of my body or that one to be sure of the direction.

Such care has perhaps made me a decent nautical navigator--I'm rarely complacent about knowing just where I am, and check my bearings often.

But there on the road I felt stumped. Then panicked.  Confused.  I'd lost my bearings in space on a familiar road. I've been here many times and yet, where was I?

Only two directions to go--how did I miss the parked car?  I'd passed it, clearly, but where? And when? And how?

I began to feel not simply stupid, but terrified. I'll admit it; I began to cry.

I ran back down the road, back the way I'd come, back the toward the place I'd been before I knew I'd gotten lost, back towards the water, away from the highway, my heart pounding, fear squeezing my throat.

Nothing was familiar; everything was. Was I going the right way or not? What did it mean that I'd gotten lost?

I felt like I'd never find my way out of this blurry zone, this loosened, fallen state. My mind was gone; I'd lost it; here was definitive proof.  Early onset Alzheimer's.

The more I panicked, the less I knew.  The less I could think.
The less I could think, the more I panicked.

And then there I was, at the path to the car. Surprise! It was here all along?

The map of the world settled down into place but not my heart.

Nor Marike's. When I hadn't come, she'd gone looking for me, back, of course, the way we'd come, to the water.  I'd already passed by while she was down at the car, and so I didn't see her head back out; I didn't hear her call me, and she didn't find me.  Classic slapstick: one goes in the front door just as the other goes out the back, and they miss one another, and run about in circles for hours, shouting.

Except. When I didn't come and didn't come, and her path didn't cross mine, there along the water, she began to imagine that I'd tumbled into the water and been swept out to sea.  She'd come back to the car to try to call out a search crew, and there I was, finally, stupified and ashamed.

Maybe something is wrong with me, I suggested. I didn't really want to confess that I thought I was done for, head all amuck, grey matter leaching, another confused soul peering nearsightedly at the world.

Don't be ridiculous, she snapped, just try to stop being so distracted!  It's that annoying camera; you can't see where you're going because you're too busy looking through it.

I'm hoping she's right. So far, the votes are on the side of distraction, not neurological contraction, though I still have moments when I wonder...

Wait. What was I thinking? Where was I? Am I where I think I am--and what if I'm not?

NOTES
All photos taken at Taylor's Head Park on February 10, 2012, the day in question, as I was walking distractedly.  The whole collection may be seen here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/karincope/sets/72157629762847289/
I never did find the clipped gull's wing again. It was probably the wing of a gull cut down by an eagle or a hawk, the wings bitten off as so much useless inedible weight.

Lost and Found on Land

25 February 2010
San Juanico, Baja California Sur, Mexico

Northerlies, northerlies, northerlies.  Fierce winds blow every day, all day.  We sit on the boat and ride up and down, watching, watching.  Will our anchor hold?  Will the 17 other boats here also hold fast? Yes, and yes, to everyone's relief.

Today the wind died down a bit and we went ashore.  We hauled the dinghy way up the beach and went for a long walk up dry creek beds and down dusty roads....Saw wild fossils, volcanic rock, all kinds of cacti living and dead, the desert in flower, birds of every sort, tracks of horse and cattle, even the dried skull of a cow of some sort, rotten hide tossed beside it, by a brackish waterhole.  I took pictures of everything, all in black and white so they have the flavour of an old Mexican movie from the 50s.  

In fact, I got so busy taking those pictures (especially of the skull) that Marike got really far ahead of me and I lost her!  And the trail.  It led beside the brackish waterhole to the beach, and then along a ridge. But I was far enough behind that all I was really following was Marike's hat.  I thought.

Turns out when I got to the beach--certain that she was WAY down the beach ahead of me talking to someone--that the hat-wearer wasn't her at all, but another sailor in a wide-brimmed floppy hat. And a beard. 

It was hot, the sun high, I couldn't find the trail, and I was thirsty. Marike had the gatorade. 

I started to get worried.  I looked way up on the ridge, along the road there, where I expected to see her, a dusty figure trudging uphill, white shorts flashing in the light. Nada. 

I used the camera to zoom in on spots at one end of the beach or another.  Yes, a flash of white, a flutter.  She's waving to me! 

Oops, no.  Pelicans, not Marike. 

Where was she?  How could she have disappeared? How could I have lost her?  What if she were on the trail somewhere and met up with a rattler or tripped and fell? What if that happened to me while I was looking for her?  Or what if I got lost? What if........?

Finally, I regained my reason and began to look for signs of the trail BEFORE the beach, between the brackish water and the last line of hills.  The beach, I reasoned, was what had distracted me; I'd been too seduced by the sea and that floppy hat, so that I missed both trail and girl.

Yes, there it was!  And there were her tracks.  I followed them along, through a fence, and soon there she was, coming back from the top of the hill. Turns out she'd seen me on the beach. Or, thought she'd seen me, but it was a mer-lady built of driftwood.  Then she did see me--I was looking right at her, she said--and she motioned for me to come. But I never saw that. 

Still, when we finally did meet up (I stowed my worry immediately, feeling silly, feeling embarrassed) that yicchy green gatorade she was carrying was pretty delicious....

More on metaphors--or not--