FANZINE

“There is a sinister air out here tonight, some hint of the monstrous perversion to which any human idea can come.”—Joan Didion, “On Morality”

 

 

Until moving to Boulder, Colorado a few weeks ago, I had never been farther west than Minnesota. My wife and I were both born in Wisconsin, and we had lived in Massachusetts since 2003. As a schoolchild in Wisconsin, the East Coast—New York, Philadelphia, the pilgrims and revolutionary outbursts of Massachusetts—was our national history and truth. So moving from Wisconsin to Boston was a revelation, an encounter with the reality we had lived beneath like shadows. The West? I had no similar yearning for the West; I acknowledged it only as a place born from imagination and dream. In the three novels I wrote while living in Salem, there the West burned: a place of murder and genocide and dust, or a ravaged Eden from persecution, or a land beyond the rules and dictums of what is called “civilization,” a place where every lust and brutality is realized. When I closed my eyes, it stretched, a bleached land of bone and rock, cluttered with the ribs and skulls of beast and adventurer alike, and thorny plants and prairie flowers prodded through the dust, and the pale faces of cliffs were ornamented with the paintings of perished civilizations.

*

After Karissa told me her company was moving, I searched “Boulder Colorado” on the computer. Now the image: a smattering of shops and dwellings and the green of trees and the brown of fields in the shadow of the mountains. Claustrophobic, my throat and chest tightened. The mountains overwhelmed every other aspect of the image. There is no ocean, of course, no visible water. Later when I tell people I will miss the ocean, they often answer, “But there you will have the mountains.”

*

Herman Melville certainly perceived a connection between the sea and the mountains. The tour guide at Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts will bring you to Melville’s porch, what he called his “piazza,” constructed to face Mount Greylock. There stands the mountain as Melville must have seen it, for the mountain, unlike the farm and forest immediately before you, is unchanging to mortal eyes. “The vastness and the lonesomeness are so oceanic and the silence and the sameness, too,” Melville wrote of this view in “The Piazza.” On the second floor of the house you will be brought into the office where he wrote Moby-Dick, Pierre, The Piazza Tales, Israel Potter, and The Confidence-Man, a room chosen not just for its size, but its view, again of Mount Greylock—and there the desk arranged as his desk had been, and there the window, his same window, and there the view, his view. And you will be overwhelmed with emotion, not at the mountains, but at the overlap and bending of time, while the tour guide explains how “a mountain inspired a tale of a whale,” as the official Arrowhead merchandise puts it.

*

Is not Moby-Dick at its heart a novel about the flight from civilization into the lonesome vastness? Is the attempt to catalogue and know the whale not akin to the desire to know the mountain, in its grandeur and unknowable mystery? Is Moby-Dick not the greatest Western ever written? Surely Cormac McCarthy sensed this truth when he created the Judge after Ahab. Only on the sea or in the desert could Ahab and the Judge exist to their truest selves. In the cities of the East they would have been merchants, bankers, politicians. Their demons hidden, suppressed, revealed only in the cruelty of their official tasks.

*

From the airplane window, there was only brown land, flat, vacant, empty. It looked vaguely like Wisconsin.

*

Before the move, I became obsessed with touring historic homes, homes from the colonial era that are fairly common in Salem, and literary homes: Melville’s Arrowhead in Pittsfield, Massachusetts and the House of the Seven Gables in Salem and Longfellow’s house in Cambridge. I have toured many of these before, but now I am desperate to know them again. I take dense notes; photographs when they are allowed. There are streets in Salem where you slide easily into something like a dream, and the surrounding world hazes until a car passes, and even then something of the dream remains. In towns like Salem, there are two realities: the present or what seems to be the present, and then the past, held up like a film or phantom.

The oldest home on the “Boulder Historic Neighborhoods” walking tour—the Dwight-Nicholson House—was built in 1872. Here in Boulder there is the newness of the present, the newness of what is called “history,” and there is the looming awe, the constant backdrop of the mountains that by their immensity reveal the foolishness of the human attempt to measure and catalogue and define the past. In these terms, what is the 100 or 200-year difference between 1872 and when the homes of merchants and ship captains in Salem were built? What is the difference between 1872 and 2015? It is nothing compared to the mountains. And on the mountains time is measured not in human history; here time rises above the cluttered bones of individuals, past the markers of an individual person’s accomplishments, into the anonymous; here the bones of some beast a hundred million years dead; here the paintings of some man or woman belonging to some tribe or civilization or wandering cluster long forgotten; here the dust of what were once mountains and here the mountains risen from what was once the earth—here the knowable world is surrounded by infinitely greater pools of unknowable, ungraspable mystery.

*

Westerners, Karissa and I are told, are obsessed with freedom: freedom to carry firearms, ingest marijuana, hike and bike and move about wherever and whatever terrain they please. Are they drawn to this place, where the sheer openness proclaims a literal freedom of movement? Have they made a willful flight from and tossed off of the traditions and rules of the East? Most of the people we meet here are from other states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, New York, Massachusetts. Or does this land make them this way? Do you become the thing the land makes of you? “Partly both,” our friend Ben answers, as he drives us from the airport.

*

Is The Shining a Western? Is 2001: A Space Odyssey?

*

Karissa and I and our cat, Iris, arrive at our new apartment five days before the movers. The front door opens into pools of open space. In the bedroom, our friends Ben and Shannon have established an air mattress, a litter box, some cat toys. How Iris will respond to this move has been my primary anxiety for months—she is sweet and nervous, and I cannot bear to think of her in discomfort. Now she crouches in her carrier, shivering, her eyes fat with terror— she will not come out, and she turns away when I reach to pet her. “I don’t think she trusts us anymore,” Karissa says.

We wake in the night to Iris stalking around us. In the darkness she finally finds her comfort: the open space filled, and now her cover provided by the night. We fall asleep listening to her investigations. In the morning she is gone; the bedroom is small and empty—there are no hiding places. Finally I find her in the area beneath the sink in the adjoining bathroom, an impossible space to squeeze under. There she stares out with fat eyes. Six hours later she is still there. Seven.

So goes her routine for a week—hiding during the days, shivering and growling at the slightest noise, and always her eyes swollen with darkness. At night she searches the apartment. Often I follow her or sit near her for the noises of this place too unnerve me to sleeplessness. Now I watch my cat creep into the moon pooled living room, otherwise vacant save our bodies. She is terrified, but she is compelled by her greater instinct to explore and investigate and know. I could not put my own hand into the total darkness without first comprehending what awaits—

*

“Feb 23 Froze hard last night. To-day pleasant and thawy; has the appearance of spring, all but the deep snow. Wind south-south-east. Shot a dog to-day and dressed his flesh.”

*

Ben and Shannon are fanatical about the mountains; in the evenings they change from their work clothes and venture into the wild. They become desperate, claustrophobic, if more than a few days pass between mountain hikes. For Shannon, this is a learned fanaticism, but Ben has dreamed of the mountains since he was a boy. For the mountains, he says, he moved to Boulder. I do not ask him to explain what it is about the mountains because to articulate the connection would diminish it, and besides, living those years on the Massachusetts coast I’ve heard many people talk about the ocean with similar desperation and fanaticism. There, a thousand Ishmaels driven to the sea.

*

“They cannot scare me with their empty spaces—”

*

On the mountains time cannot be measured in human terms, yet in Gold Hill, an unincorporated mountainside town several thousand feet above Boulder, the structures are often dated to their gold rush era origins and proclaimed on plaques as “historic.” Even those who live on a mountain, maybe especially those who live on a mountain, must reduce the incomprehensible to the comprehensible, must moor their experiences within human precedent.

Ben and Shannon brought us to this town after what I freely admit was a terrifying ride up a winding mountain road: pavement and then the illusion of pavement, dirt and dust stamped down, and frequently no guardrails, only the mountain and the road and the world far below; bicyclists going both directions pass us, faces and bodies contorted with exertion.

Gold Hill has a small school, a tavern, and a shop selling homemade crafts, trinkets, and canisters of air. The shop proprietors, a husband and wife, talk to us kindly as we browse. Of their cat, who is just now getting over a recent injury, the wife says, “He hurt his leg after he saw a bear.” And the husband tells us about a mountain lion he watched leap the road from a standing position. Down the street there is a general store bearing signs for Wi-Fi service and another warning of what to do in case of lion attack: “Don’t give up!”

Later Ben tells me of another mountain he has hiked. It is a place of soot and char, ravaged by fires and populated by lizards alone—

*

“Feb 25 To-day Mrs. Murphy says the wolves are about to dig up the dead bodies around her shanty, and the nights are too cold to watch them, but we hear them howl.”

*

The people I meet in Boulder are overwhelmingly cheerful. I am told this cheerfulness is owed to the blue skies, constant sun, fresh air, physical activity, legal marijuana. When people learn I have moved from Massachusetts they gush about my new home: “What a wonderful place to move to!” At the supermarket the cashier tells me she is “living the dream” when I ask how she is. I laugh because I think she is being ironic, but she continues, “Living the dream, loving every minute of it.” I want to believe she is unhappy, bored, weary—I have come to expect a pool of deepening truths beneath the surface reflection. I no doubt verge upon the paranoid in my expectations. I hope I never trust this simplicity and good cheer.

*

Here crows stalk about the rooftops, picking at the shingles. Or they scrape and pick at the lawns murders of five or six. The shadows when they fly, I close my eyes to the sound of their wing beats thrumming. Later I see two vultures circling against the droning blue skies. What death do they now watch?

*

When you are on the ocean it is everything. It is the universe. A mountain’s majesty is obvious, and the mountains too have a ubiquity, for in Boulder the mountains are everywhere, in that they follow wherever you are. But for all their near-measureless age and beauty, they have not the ocean’s mystery, the universe spread blue and rocking from horizon to horizon, and the vast unknowable worlds beneath. Perhaps Melville approved of this difference, and that is why he sought Greylock and not the sea as he aged. Yes. A young man seeks the vast unknown and wanders to the center, and there the mysterious terror buffets and thrills him, but the elder man’s heart, his soul, his mind now matured and formed as it is, cannot survive such tumult. The vastness would derange him.

*

“measureless oceans of space—”

*

Yes, on the ocean as in the desert the openness allows for every fever and perversion. Ahab is deformed into a mad-god aboard the Pequod. The ship’s surgeon in Melville’s White-Jacket finds no resistance in fulfilling his longing to cut and butcher, and those who die unnecessarily under his care are little mourned. In Bosch’s “Ship of Fools,” nuns and monks and peasants become glutinous, sensual, as they drift lonesome waters, drinking, playing the lute, singing lustily. They eat cherries while one cuts a roast goose lashed to the mast and two of their number, nude, circle the boat like pale fishes. They have been out too long on the water. The Judge—

*

“Feb 26 Hungry times in camp plenty of hides but the folks will not eat them; we eat them with tolerably good appetite, thanks to the Almighty God. Mrs. Murphy said here yesterday that she thought she would commence on Milton and eat him. I do not think she has done so yet; it is distressing—”

*

Did the Judge wander the desert too long, and now become the mad thing? More so than Ahab, who in odd moments perceived his own fracturing, and so knew Ahab was not Ahab. Was the Judge ever not the Judge? Did his madness drive him to the wild or did his soul fracture there? Perhaps he was not a man at all but a demon driven to the desert, for in the desert there is Christ famished and watching is the snake shimmering in the sands. In the desert there is Christ burning, and there is the crimson beast slouching in the dust. In the desert there is Christ, and the scorched thing Christ becomes, gazing unto the world from the ash and char with new burning eyes.

*

I have for a long time believed it necessary for a great writer to become lost in the imagination, to lose some sense of the distinction between the actual and the dreamed, to walk about in a haze. Yes, of course, Melville lost his mind staring into that vast consciousness, the ocean of his soul. How else was Ahab given life if he did not emerge from the mind of a man similarly fevered?

*

When we move to a new place do we become that place? Do our identities and selves layer upon us? And what of the world, for we see this land through the lens of our own experiences—I see this apartment through the contrast with our old even as contexts, identities, new furniture and old merge. Is the West the West? Do we carry yet the East within us?

*

What if Melville had gone west rather than returning to New York once he could no longer afford his farm in Pittsfield? What if he had traveled to the mountains and prairies of the American West rather than the Holy Land? Situated in some mountainside shanty, the smoke coiling from the chimney apparent even thousands of feet below. His wife driven mad by the solitude, the height, the vultures that swoop and perch upon the rocks, little speaks through the days, other than to read aloud to her husband from the local papers, his volumes of Milton, Browning, and his own unfinished work. Melville perhaps once a week takes their mule down the narrow dusted mountain road. In the general store below he buys rice, beans, flour, sugar, and what tinned produce they have in this place. Perhaps in town they assume he is a prospector or believe him with the haze about his eyes a prophet or perhaps they know him for what he is, a failed writer. So the days and then the years and the world on their mountain little seeming to change but the town below now rapidly altered. He raises goats and chickens; he writes. Composing in such a land does he evoke the stark bleached West, the horror and freedom and murder and terror of America becoming? He would not have written Clarel, but would he now write of the mountains? Or were the late sailor poems and Billy Budd inevitable? Would the seas of his youth haze his mind again no matter where his abode? Do we carry our days within us, those strongest and purest days, while then all the others fade? Perhaps most of our lives we have lived in the shadows—

*

“Feb 26 The Donners told the California folks four days ago that they would commence on the dead people if they did not succeed that day or the next in finding their cattle, then ten or twelve feet under the snow, and they did not know the spot or near it; they have done it ere this.”—The Diary of Patrick Breen

*

Is my earliest memory not of the West? I remember dust. I remember children in the dust of the road and from the dust they rise. “Come over here, Kid,” they say. So I go. There in the dust, a clutter of small bones. “Dinosaur bones,” one says. “See?” Overwhelmed, I run home.

*

“But it so happened, that those boats, without seeing Pip, suddenly spying whales close to them on one side, turned, and gave chase; and Stubb’s boat was no so far away, and he and all his crew intent upon his fish, that Pip’s ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably. By the merest chance the ship itself at last rescued him; but from that hour the little negro went about the deck an idiot; such, at least, they said he was. The sea had jeeringly kept his finite body up, but drowned the infinite of his soul.”