Springs & Falls

(image via Mikia Boom)

Life in a high-rise can make you hungry
For things that you can't even see. - "Fly Away" by J. Denver

The world feels very Walker Percy Love in the Ruins-ish, a prospect which seemed somehow far more invigorating ten years ago. Back then I was reading of dramatic chastisements from the Medjugorje seers, including three days of darkness, and I thrilled to the news since I was more interested in God showing Himself than the prospect of that occuring under the mantle of judgment. Besides, I was dumb enough to think I could ready myself in a few days. Whip myself smack dab into saintly shape!

But I digress. This is a post more about the spring than the harvest. There was a day in mid-February this year, I don't remember exactly when, when I smelled spring in the air for the first time.

I wasn't sure if I was merely assigning warmer-than-average weather a designation undeserved or whether there was truly something deeply buried in my limbic system that awoke me to a border crossed. I tend to think the former because there are moments of disorientation in early spring in which I imagine it to be fall, the opposite if temperamentally similar season.

Now the signs are unmistakable of course. The maples are full of engorged red nipples, precursors of life and leaves, and the ground is soft as the eyes of the trusting after a Hail Mary.

It seemed an opportune moment to take our dog on a long hike in the ruined woods, still disastrously ugly with the natural garbage of leaf mold and fallen limbs but at the same time sensationally alive in that cliched truth that "spring is in the air".

The earth was a pleasing clay, soft on joint but not shoe-spoilingly muddy. The ground felt enlivening and I tried to think of the Greek god of the earth, and how odd it is that those former gods, once treated as powerful and sacrificed for, have now become the subject of poetry, the names symbolizing the opposite of the modern and banal: Zephyrus, Erebus, Minerva, Perséphonê, Iris, Glaucus, Morpheus, Andromeda... such that they find themselves even in a John Denver song:

Smoke rings in a galaxy
An endless flight through time
Lyra gave her harp to him
And left him free to climb

A winter's journey from the moon
To reach the summer sun
To rise again, to sing for you
A song that's yet unsung

Apollo taught me to rhyme
Orpheus taught me to play
Andromeda cast down her sign
And Vega lights my way

Up and down hills we went and incongruous songs came unbidden to mind like "Roll on Mississippi...you make me feel like a child again..." by Charlie Pride and "It Takes a Lot to Rock You Baby" by Dwight Yoakam. Much later, ensconced in my study the title heading "Down an Ancient Valley" from William Heat-Moon's book "The Roads to Quoz" lends to mind the kitschy "Down by the Lazy River" sung by Donny Osmond. ("The whitest thing you ever wrote," someone recently emailed me when I attributed "Sweet Home Chicago" to the Blues Brothers, but this paragraph challenges.)

Coincidentally (God's way of remaining anonymous said Einstein), I read Heat-Moon writing of memory and looking to the past shortly after reading Ray Bradbury on the same subject in "Dandelion Wine". Heat-Moon sees recollections as a high recompense: the ability to live one moment a score of times. He says "backseated children able to find only boredom beyond car windows - if they're looking out - are nevertheless laying a foundation for meaning to arise one day when they'll need significance far more than experience." Everything is symbolic, so love says, and I assign that symbol to mean men on the road to God.
_____

"Time hypnotizes. When you're nine, you think you've always been nine years old and always will be. When you're thirty, it seems you've always been balanced right there on that bright rim of middle life. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy."
 -Ray Bradbury's "Dandelion Wine"

"Dandelion Wine" makes me long for "things you can't even see" to quote Denver. And things I can, like the new Impala:

"It glided. It whispered, an ocean breeze. Delicate as maple leaves, fresher than creek water, it purred with the majesty of cats prowling the noontide."

In the preface Bradbury offers a Greek god-laden poem:

So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods' bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade,
Pretending there beneath our sky,
That it was Aphrodite's thigh...
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
Did all of Plato supersede...
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights;
Then went to bed, there to repent
The evils of the innocent;
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, though the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.