back to Issue 19
by Scott F. Parker
1.
Last time I was back in Oregon I walked with my mother one overcast morning along the west bank of the Willamette. The water, like the sky, came to me in shades of gray. Before me, as all around me, was the color and the light that over the years of my youth had taught me how to see and thereby how to be. Walking, I felt the comfort that comes when the world beyond the mind corresponds to the world within. Ruskin warns about the falseness of assigning our emotional state to the natural world, but when a person returns to his element after an absence and the resonance between the environment and him springs organically, pathetic verity might be the appropriate term, either that or home.
2.
I’d felt this way upon previous visits over the fifteen years since I’d moved away. This particular morning, as my mother and I stopped at a railing to talk about the ends of lives and what had been best in hers (a revelatory essay, “You Are Accepted,” in which Paul Tillich meditates on sin and grace, had not been among those things I had expected her to mention), I watched the flat surface of the water conceal the river’s steady movement northward. It occurred to me then that just as there were things I could see and things I could not see, there were things I could know and things I couldn’t know, and that gray was not only the color of my soul but the state of my mind.
3.
As I’ve aged, I’ve come increasingly to believe that true thought arises in curiosity and resides in uncertainty. Only the unthinking person or the most self-satisfied philosopher believes that certainty is desirable, let alone achievable. But perhaps it’s natural that I would arrive at my position, as the circumstances of my origins continue to mold my development. It’s possible that the vanity of certainty is discouraged by a climate in which the gradations and slant of the light illuminate the world only ever partially and fleetingly. The default opacity of a Portland winter discourages a person from imagining they can see things clearly enough to deliver a final pronouncement. This gray place is made for thinking in gray, for declining the temptations to assign the lazy labels of black and white, this and not also that. This is a subtle place, where distinctions are relative, where the difference between raining and not can be faint. A suitable habitat for an essayist, the thinker least prone to overconfidence, it rewards the subjective, the nuanced, the variable. Portland, in its essential grayness, clouds the conventional metaphor for thought. Here, thought pursues un-enlightenment: not darkness but the ambiguous, the uncertain, the provisional, the foggy. To live very many winters in the Northwest is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, that the quest for certainty has always been a fantasy.
4.
I’m tempted to imagine that Elliott Smith would know what I mean, but, then, suicide reveals a person at his most decisive. Maybe the uncertainty was mine alone as I drove in the beating rain down one street after another to nowhere in particular as Smith’s melancholy songs played. Only later did I understand that in naming his defining album Either/Or Smith was invoking Kierkegaard’s binary of aesthetic and ethical life and that this binary was one that no breadth of essayistic thought could transcend.
5.
Is the essayist merely an aesthete occupying the lowest stage of human life? What, finally, is gray to me but an aesthetic, a certain taste for Smith’s tender music, waterlogged socks, the poignancy of an afternoon coffee by the window watching umbrellas go by, and the freedom to change my mind as I’m inclined? It looks so indulgent through Kierkegaard’s eyes, this passive, withdrawn mode of being—there but not there—ironic, lyrical, amoral. If I’m going to look through someone else’s eyes, I prefer Joan Didion, for whom “style is character.” From that perspective, aesthetic life itself can be a form of ethical commitment. Refusing to step out of life’s gray doesn’t have to be a way of avoiding responsibility; it can be a way of taking it.
6.
It isn’t for everyone, this kind of life. It carries with it a melancholy in which not everyone thrives, as not every self contains some circle in which it is perpetually drizzling. If you can locate it, though, there is a pleasure and an art to longing for the sun. If the rain doesn’t get you down, it may yet sustain you. It is only by the constant rain that we come to know the worth of our sunny days. In the meantime, as we await them, we are free to learn from the delay. Ken Kesey writes, “You can’t stop the rain from falling, but you can learn to dance in the puddles.”
7.
To dance easily in Kesey’s puddles is to embrace geography as destiny and to allow that where you are is who you become. Certain species thrive under the gray skies of the Willamette Valley, the Cascades to the east trapping the rainclouds coming in off the Pacific: evergreen, moss, fern, fungus, fowl, salamander, slug, salal, nutria, newt. And might we suppose that the essayist too is appropriately suited to thrive in such an environment, that the essayist too was born under a raincloud?
8.
Growing up here, I didn’t think of myself as a writer, let alone an essayist. I thought of myself as I was: the kind of person who liked to take long walks alone in the rain; the kind of person who liked to let his thoughts roam freely under the cover of darkness; the kind of person who celebrated not information (of which I felt I had precious little) but the meaning that sometimes issued from concentration and sincerity and open feeling, all of which were best accessed during those adolescent years in the privacy of my own wandering mind. My relationships mattered, too. I cared about people and memories, ideas and their expression. In a way I didn’t fully understand, I saw that the world meant more than it was. That was the magic I approached in the rain of my youth, the magic part of me I knew I couldn’t live without.
9.
But then, as these things go, the doubt begins to doubt itself. Mightn’t this essayist be overly insistent on the merits of a gray-inclined mind? Mightn’t he be making a virtue of happenstance? Mightn’t there be better ways to live than in the thrall of thought? Let’s allow this dissenting voice his word. He assures me that thought leads only ever to thought and that thinking, alive as it may be, is never more than a piece of life—one thing, not the lens onto all things. He tells me that thought is inherently oppositional and that to oppose reality is no way to experience it. I could argue these points but only if he sticks around to hear me out, which he has decided not to, leaving me alone in the cloud of my own thought, looking for a way out.
10.
In his absence, this other self leaves me with perspective, a needed point of reference against which to locate and perhaps define myself. It was the same when at twenty-three I left Oregon for the first time. From the height and clear light of Colorado, I understood for the first time that I would only ever be happy in the rain. Is it any coincidence that this was the year I began to write in earnest?
11.
Which returns me to that gray Portland day, walking along the river with my eighty-year-old mother, listening to her talk about life and how it looks from where she stands. After our walk, I will follow up on her mention of Tillich by reading “You Are Accepted.” In his account of the difficult separation a person undergoes from the Ground of Being that only grace overcomes, I will recognize that acceptance is possible even for a self such as mine, one perpetually divided against itself, and that if it comes it will have to come washing over me like the falling rain.
.
Scott F. Parker is the author of Teaching without Teaching; A Way Home: Oregon Essays; and, most recently, the chapbook Clouds.