One morning I saw a stick in a tree. Curved and broken, it lay across a forked bough about six feet out from the trunk. The buds had yet to open so I could see the whole of it, black against a red sky. The tree itself, a young ash, stood in a park near my home. Late that winter I’d walked past it a dozen times. But I’d never noticed the stick. And this was no slender twig. It was a hefty, light-blocking chunk cracked off from the interior. No one around here would have called it a log exactly, though there are places on earth where it would have enjoyed that status and, thus appreciated, perished long ago under a soup pot. In any case, it looked so exposed and awkward among its more delicate neighbors that I was surprised I’d ever missed it. How had it come to so unlikely a perch? Had a child hurled it up from below, or had it fallen from above, storm-dropped like a toad? Whatever the means, it looked so utterly settled into place that I assumed it must have been there a long time. Perhaps the child, if it were a child, was just now lighting a cigarette and merging into traffic. Perhaps the wind, if it were a wind, was just now buffeting the cliffs of El Capitan. I let the possibilities come. I added the stick to my life. There is just no end of things to wake up to.
Earlier that winter, I’d begun walking again. Each morning at dawn I went out for a turn through the neighborhood. It was welcome disruption to a life lived mainly under rooftops. And, as much, spiritual exercise. Considered spiritually such walks are less an act of leisure or fitness than they are a practice in seeing. They restore an elusive perspective, the effect of which recalls a favorite cartoon: beneath a curb-side view of a tin can and discarded tire, one reads, “Milky Way, close up.” I often imagine my walks as two circles of concurrent experiences. One circle is external and sensuous—footfalls and birdsong, rain—the physical journey; the other circle is internal and imaginal—ponderings and conjectures, dreamscapes—the figurative journey. Now and then these two experiential circles overlap, forming a mandorla. In their slender overlay I occasionally encounter an interfusion of both worlds: the imaginal strikingly present in common things. In a state forest I once came upon a pallid balloon, which must have sunk from the sky, and was then standing on its string deep in a shaded ravine, or the indigo dragonfly near a rail bed, who had floated in among the cattails to alight just so on the tipped equator of a bobber. Each such outward encounter enters my awareness as a private symbol in the public sphere, one whose revelations are insistently partial and whose emanations lift like vapors from the lowlands of my inner walk. As years pass, these interfusions abide in memory. Whenever I consider my place in the vastness of space and time, they appear. They are the iconography of my quiet hours.
So, of course, the next day at sunrise I was back in the park. Once again, approaching the ash, I looked up at the stick. Its shape seemed to suggest something, how it appeared snouted at one end while toward the rear it presented a pair of knots, lobed and ventral, and I realized it looked like a fish. A fish in a tree! Amused, I slowed my walking and regarded it some more. The illusion brought to mind a pretty word for these tricks of the eye, pareidolia. From the Greek, it means “beside the thing you’re looking at.” When we discover a face in cracked paint or in the froth of our cappuccino, we are having a moment of pareidolia. While the illusion was charming enough, its discovery brought some disappointment as well, for I figured that the verisimilitude probably exhausted everything the stick had to offer.
A memory of an early Peanuts strip challenged this presumption. From a grassy hilltop, Charlie Brown is pleased to find a ducky in the clouds while Linus observes the stoning of Saint Phillip. Schultz’s humor celebrates the quality of imagination and the complex way that imagination can texture life’s sensuous side. Clearly, for Linus, those clouds had drifted beyond verisimilitude and into a mandorla of his own. In my own case, it seemed there was more in the tree than I first thought. Indeed, I got the feeling that the stick—now a fish—was not about to be dispatched by my categorization of it. As I passed under the ash, the silence above seemed nearly reproachful. The opprobrium had an oddly compelling quality to it, as if a cold little planet were pulling at my breast. I continued my walk, watching the lobed fins turn behind me and then disappear among the branches. Pareidolia, it seemed, would not serve to explain the fish. Indeed, as I left the park the term had acquired new meaning: no more a category of optical hustle, but rather the name for a distracted third daughter in a fairytale, as in, Once upon a time, young Pareidolia went into the forest and was accosted by a fish in a tree.
Next morning, back in the park. Stars overhead, orange horizon; all the eastern branches looked like the wreckage of cathedral windows. I stopped just west of the fish. It was, as ever, at fat rest on its perch. The opprobrium was gone, replaced by a vacancy that invited consideration. I pondered the fish. Its skin appeared black with white fleckings that I guessed were fungi. I decided this fish was male. His circumstances seemed to reveal his sex, this being stuck in a tree for so long. A female, I guessed, would have detected the whereabouts of her interior and soon disappeared into it. But this fish seemed to lack such recourse, or refused to engage it, and so kept to that branch, day after day, resolutely finning his predicament. But if a male, what kind? Mythical, surely—an Ouroborus spread flat, or perhaps a Leviathan, a small one, who’d made a very unfortunate turn in the deep. Yet his silhouette, so factually piscine, refuted that deduction. My form, he seemed to say, swims in taxonomies. I tried a flying fish, a rainbow trout. But neither endured. His settled contours, his shadowed skin, suggested a creature foreign to sunny waters. He had that brooding somnolence one associates with bottom-feeders. A bullhead, then. Or a dogfish. At last a carp came to mind. Perhaps a venerable koi well into its second century. That appealed, at least aesthetically, this locating him somewhere between a Basho haiku and an Escher print. At any rate, if I lacked precision in pinpointing his species, I assured myself I’d gotten close enough. My Prima Materia, after all, was just a stick.
A few evenings later we had a late-season snowfall. All night the snow quietly loosed itself in the street lights. Next morning I got up earlier than usual. The snow was still falling, aimless and unhurried. In the park it coated the trails like poured cream. I paused before the ash. Heavy flakes wobbled to the birth-wrinkled leaves where they lit and went clear. Some touched the fish, cooling him, and made a place for snow to pile. Standing in that misplaced Christmas air, I was whelmed by an insight that turned tumblers in the deepest part of me. Indeed, it changed everything between me and the fish. I saw now that my strange companion was no carp at all. His home was not some pond among raked pebbles, but rather an ocean whose edges had long ago wandered away to form other oceans. I stepped from the trail into the fresh snow and smote my gloves together.
“A coelacanth!” I said.
—
When I was five years old, I received a starter set of the evocatively titled, The Golden Book Encyclopedia of Natural Science. I adored those four colorful books. Since my parents never added to the collection, I focused all of my attention on the contents of that introductory quartet; as a result I entered elementary school with an impressive factual grasp of the natural world that ended suddenly at the letter D. In the C book, of course, was the coelacanth. I learned of its discovery off the coast of Africa—a fish believed to have gone to fossil 65,000,000 years ago. Photographs show a beautiful fish in an other-worldly way; the coelacanth’s fringed body is flecked with scores of tiny white galaxies, as if graced with a tattoo of the Local Super Cluster. The fisherman who dumped the creature from his nets had no idea what he was looking at. The article reported that as he reached to touch it, the coelacanth snapped at his fingers. That detail, so insignificant among the primary scientific facts, retains a rightness that has stayed with me for years. Things from the deep, it seems to suggest, scorn presumption. I’ve long admired the coelacanth, its ken having lived on with such mild unconcern despite our dismal inferences and bleak pronouncements. One cannot help but recall Mark Twain’s “Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” Since my boyhood, the coelacanth has existed in the back of my mind as a compelling but elusive symbol of the contrary impression, a shadowy familiar from weakly lit depths. In that capacity he has been both encouraging and disturbing. In the coelacanth I find a flaw-wizened teacher full of secrets, foil to the death that lies in complete understandings. As a teacher myself, and one bent on clarity, I have not always appreciated his methods.
The following week brought April Fools. The snow turned crisp and slipped away. Each morning I went out to walk. As always, I had to hike a ways—up the long street and then back into the park—before reaching the fish. The ash bordered one of the quieter trails in a section called AC-U3, or Acorn Park, Upper Woodland. To get there, I first had to pass through two small wetlands (AC-W10 and W5). All this I’d gleaned from a municipal report that detailed plans to restore the native flora. To that end, the City had coded the park’s ecosystems and then flagged the invasives for removal. Indeed, last fall the crews had started their work: where once my entrance to AC-U3 presented an illusion of wilderness, it now was a sparse woodland. The dark arches of undergrowth were gone, replaced by a view of taillights exchanging themselves in front of the Flameburger diner. But the crews had yet to cross the marsh that split Section AC-U3 into two woodlands. The young ash was at the marsh’s far side, amid hardwoods still tangled in buckthorn and honeysuckle.
As April went by, the coelacanth appeared as ever on his branch. He grew quite ordinary. Some mornings he looked just like a stick. Now and then I’d pause to regard him, but most often I just nodded and kept on my way. While I would have liked to deepen our acquaintance, I understood that whatever might come, if anything, would have to come from the coelacanth. My part was simply to show up each morning and allow myself to see more in the air than a piece of wood. Perhaps that sounds easier than it was. But I’d fallen from practice. As mentioned, it had been a while since I’d done this sort of walking. The peculiar effort, to look for fish in trees, put me in mind once more of Charles Schultz, of Linus, who waits all Halloween night in a pumpkin patch for a conjuring only he believes in. Pathos ends that story when grumpy Lucy finds him shivering at dawn and shepherds him home. It is the genius of Schultz to end Linus’ night in disappointment, but to leave the larger story open; we receive no indication that Linus rejects what has inspired him. We cannot say how his ardor will evolve, or what future guises his inspiration may take. What captivates Linus in such an insistent way—a Great Pumpkin!—includes a trajectory that others may ridicule, but which nonetheless remains an enchantment born of his integrity. It is a kind of love poem written just for him. That, anyway, is what I read into Linus’ story. I admire the courage of this scraggly headed character. Linus has allowed himself to reckon strangely. He suffers his own originality.
When I finally got into elementary school I discovered that I was, as they say, a slow learner. From E to Z in natural science, in math and all the rest, I could not keep pace with my classmates. In an effort to compensate, I disrupted discussions and lessons with much anxious hand-raising and panicky questions. This behavior invited an alternate set of lessons on the playground. Overall, those dispiriting memories proved formative; years later, as a young teacher working with adults in poverty, I decided that the kindest thing I could do for my students, especially those burdened with lousy learning experiences, was to make a practice of answering their questions with exceptional patience and clarity. During that phase of my career I saw little value in the parsimonious disclosure of sages. After all, if one understands what a learner wants, then why not provide a clear answer at the level the question is asked? For many years, such solicitude seemed to me an essential characteristic of any good teacher. But, as I eventually learned, deft explication only serves to a point. Such efforts do little to nurture the curiosity of that Linus who sits wondering in the heart of any student. That insight came back to me one morning on the trail when I paused to gaze up at the coelacanth. By then it was late April and the young leaves had greened in around him. I imagined those same leaves in October, spotted and yellow. In their falling, they would surpass everything he knew. Come January he’d still be there, a stick on a branch at thirty below. The best lessons, he seemed to say, occur without explanation.
As the days passed, the coelacanth came more frequently into my thoughts. In the shower, I soaked my hair and considered him. At stop signs, I peered up through the windshield as if from the underside of water. My contemplations brought to mind a poem by Rumi, “The Phrasing Must Change.” The poem offers the example of a woman who is master of her own originality, her strange reckoning. Each day, Zuleika sees her divine Joseph, her beloved, in the common things around her, in trembling branches and early light, in coriander seeds and softened candle wax. If she comments on any of it, she sweetens her phrases with inner meanings known only to her: when she says the clouds seem to be moving against the wind, the willow has new leaves, the furniture needs dusting, “it’s Joseph’s touch she means.” When she’s thirsty, “his name is a sherbet.” At my work, I hung the poem about Zuleika above my desk where I could look at it while I ate my lunch. On the art of engaging a fish in a tree, Zuleika offered what seemed an instructive approach. The lesson lay not only in her ability to locate God in things like saffron and onion skins but also in the daily practice she made of courting her own discretion. Zuleika walks in a lush mandorla.
One morning in early May I went out overdressed for the weather. When I got to the ash, I stopped to knot my jacket at my waist. Looking skyward, I said to myself, It’s another orange dawn. I said, The curved branch is black against the glow. My words went up among the twigs, and then I shared a little silence with the coelacanth. As I was regarding the shape of him a robin came to perch near his head. For an instant, as I gazed at both, I could not say which was more real than the other: the creature so labeled and understood to be a robin, Turdus migratorius, or the chunk of wood hove up from the duff (or dropped from above) and now a coelacanth. Though the moment lasted just a second, I marveled to experience such a startling collapse of categories, and in the instant that followed scrambled to preserve the sensation much the way a person struggles to remember a dream. As the perspective dissolved, restoring the familiar divisions, I realized that the coelacanth had made his move.
Or not. Surely the fact of a robin forever trumps the metaphor of a fish. Straightaway I heard a man’s voice from those educational films of the 1950’s: “This is a tree. Sometimes a log or other debris may become snared in its branches. These can create interesting effects. The ash, meanwhile, is a hard wood with many useful commercial properties.” As I considered the robin I was forced to acknowledge its irrefutably sensible features—the signature eye rings and striped throat, the famous breast—any of which could be verified across a thousand robins. But what evidence was there for the coelacanth? I suppose I could wrest his crude likeness from the tree. I could lay the stick in a tray and examine every deciduous cell beneath a lighted lens. But despite my diligence, I would not discover a single scale of the coelacanth’s numinous flesh. Alternatively, I could probe the heartwood, looking for a fossilized fishbone, for proof positive of the historical coelacanth. I might do one or the other for several hundred years. Either way, I’d be left with a piece of wood and an ocean of anxiety should I mistake so literal a thing for a fish that swims elsewhere.
My brief shift in perspective got me to wondering once more: what lies behind the artful surface, the spiritual intimation, that so beguiles our effort to net it in words? Precisely what is it, this fish that swims elsewhere? At evening I loitered at my window and watched the clouds. Have you ever gone looking? Lots of people have. Our literature is rich with elegant responses, each in its own way ending with ellipses. Over the next week or so, I leafed through a few books of reputable searchers—Plato’s Republic and King David’s Psalms, the fairy tale about the girl who looks east of the sun and west of the moon, the lectures on metaphysics by the good-natured William James, and the wild verses of Emily Dickenson, written as she rowed the seas in Eden. The writer Jorge Louis Borges scented it on a late Argentine afternoon. In a poem called “The Other Tiger,” he introduces a creature of his own invention, a big cat “made of symbols and of shadows….scraps remembered from encyclopedias.” He goes on to set this particular tiger apart from the physical animal, “the tiger of the vertebrae” pacing in Bengal or Sumatra. Then, most interestingly, he identifies a third tiger, a creature comparable to the first or second, but neither one nor the other. He calls his search for it “unreasonable,” yet he keeps looking for this third tiger, which, he concludes, “is not in this poem.” I think Borges would equate the fish that swims elsewhere with this third tiger. If he were to offer anything more, I imagine he would continue along the lines of his via negativa, his negative way, pointing up all the places where a third coelacanth is not: up in the ash tree, for example, or anywhere in this essay. The nuance of Borges’ subject—cleaved thin to a vexing translucence—reminds me of a passage in the Gospel of John, the verse in which Jesus confounds the literal-minded Nicodemus by saying that the breath of the spirit is wind but not actual wind. I sometimes wonder what kind of Christianity we would now have had Jesus added that there is a third wind as well, and it’s nowhere in Scripture.
If you say to a black man in America, “Good to see you,” a sizable number will reply, “Good to be seen.” That the compliment is not reciprocated is a nod to Invisible Man as well as a compensatory blessing for one who has gone unnoticed by whites for three centuries. Good to be seen, indeed. I suspect that the private symbols that come to us of their own accord, so illumined in imagination, so marginalized by an insistent literal-mindedness, might say as much. As well, such marginalization may be the result of a less adversarial disposition, let us say one born of a bookish preoccupation with traditional symbols—our circles and griffins, ankhs, winged gates and stars—the sheer variety of which would demand years to canvas and appreciate. Consider a man so distracted, who one morning steps into the world and spots a fish in the tree. Amazed, he exclaims, “Good to see you!” and the fish, if it replies at all, says, “Good to be seen.”
When I search my past for the fish that swims elsewhere, I do not see much of him at all. He is a mingy haunter. Beyond The Golden Book Encyclopedia of Natural Science, I locate him exactly twice, and neither appearance is as apparent as his visitation in the tree. In each memory, he appears wholly suffused in a feeling, one whose signature complexity—profoundly unsettling, darkly assuring—enabled me to recognize him decades later in that late-spring snowfall. The first of these recollections occurred during a visit to a natural history museum. I was about fourteen. What lingers is neither the Neanderthals nor the dinosaurs, but rather an unremarkable case that displayed a pair of tusk-shaped shellfish washed up on a beach. The broad window offered little else to look at. Painted on the back wall was a featureless sea. It receded to a pink horizon that may have been dawn but could have been dusk and has since become for me Wallace Stevens’ “evening all afternoon.” The moment was the Early Devonian, the Age of Fishes. What haunted me then was the implication, so casually presented, of time’s cool democracy. Two shellfish on a deserted beach forty million years ago: the quality of that archaic moment was no different than any recent Saturday when I lay in bed reading, say, The Golden Book Encyclopedia of Natural Science, my two legs flung out on the sheets. As I stared at those shellacked tusks, I was awakened to a formative thought: whatever I hoped to preserve of my identity—the whole shebang of this John Landretti— was going to have to make peace with a process far more committed to anonymity.
Years later, one January evening, I had my second acquaintance while sitting alone in a Catholic church. Catholicism was the faith of my childhood. As I’d come into my thirties, I found myself increasingly drawn away from its communal rituals and creeds and toward the solitude of its mystical backwaters. I read the Catholic mystics, Saint Theresa of Avila, Meister Eckhart, and others, each of them wonderfully complex, all of whom struggled to reconcile the originality of their visions with the orthodoxy of their time. Eckhart was tried for heresy, as well as St. Therese’s mentor, the famous visionary, Saint John of the Cross. While they each proved constant to their vows, I lacked such fidelity and was slowly thinking my way out of a religion. On that winter night, I had in mind something a priest had recently told me, that all religions were valid but that Catholicism was God’s most perfect expression of that validity. I’d heard as much from various Evangelicals, each referring to a translation of the Word that in its alleged perfection subordinated or annulled all others. In the dark of that evening, as I weighed these competing perspectives, I noticed how peacefully the stained glass windows had given up their stories. From the vantage of memory, I might say that those dark shards lay against the night like the scales of stygian fish. As I lingered in the candle flicker the great Catholic symbols of my youth—the Crucifix and Virgin, the Byzantine angels—all seemed to abandon their parochial unity and become the many faces of God. They touched my body with a single silence whose depth seemed equal to eternity: anonymous guest, that silence, amid the pews or out on the quiet seas, in all the midnight rooms where people lay wondering; it required no name, and none was given.
—
Symbols, especially a dream symbol, frustrate the modern mind. We are confounded by what the religious historian, Mircea Eliade, calls their “multivalence,” their “speculative audacity.” One night we dream a snake made of light or a tree filled with edible roses and if we dwell on either our purpose is not to let the image infuse us with its veiled and kindly disruptions but rather to figure the thing out, to turn its evocative weirdness into a manageable idea. Meister Eckhart nicely captures the ruin in this tendency: “…The least creaturely idea,” he says, “is as big as God. Why? Because it will keep God out of you entirely…it is when the idea is gone that God gets in.” The dream image, the symbol that inexplicably haunts your waking hours—a tiger in your study or the Great Pumpkin, the fish in a tree (both the one in the ash and the other on Golgotha)—all elude the closure of ideas. They fail as done deals. Yet each offers the psyche a “speculative audacity” big enough for God to get in.
In a zeitgeist so increasingly hostile to complexity and irresolution, so inflected with political and religious fundamentalism, how best to court the complex symbols that inhabit our lives? Apt counsel steers me toward a religion for which I feel some affinity. Within that community I might find guidance through its images and prayers, locate, as it were, a synchronistic Buddha or Christ in my coelacanth, and so follow an established path into what is finally ineffable. Or I might risk a more secular route, read a lot of books and poetry, sit with a candle in the woods on rainy nights and feel the inexplicable affection that haunts the shadows of the earth. In The Interior Castle, her field guide to the soul, Theresa of Avila writes, “The important thing is not to think much but to love much; and so do that which best stirs you to love.” To gauge the authentic power of a creative work—and a personal symbol is, if anything, a creative work—Vladimir Nabokov insists that a person should not respond to the impressions of mind or heart alone, but rather to a combination of both which he says occurs in the spine. With characteristic acerbity, he advises, “Rely on the sudden erection of your small dorsal hairs. Do not drag in Freud at this point. All the rest depends on personal talent.” While Nabokov’s subject is the assessment of great literature, I find his exhortation applies equally well to assessing the self’s native mysteries; it reminds me to trust what wisdom I have and offers a practical way to distinguish an authentic symbol, one whose source is the unknown, from those allegorical toadies that now and then pop up to serve the ego while leaving one’s dorsal hairs flat.
In a song called “The Knuckleball Suite,” Peter Mulvey describes a summer evening in a small town. It might be somewhere in Iowa. His images offer up rain not long after a ballgame and pink clouds tall on the horizon. Mulvey describes a few people in this town. Four verses in, we meet Sally:
Sally’s barefoot in the backyard calling out to that star above the pines
Sally’s barefoot in the backyard calling out to that star above the pines
And for once that star answers, it says, “Sal, you are the wine, you are the wine”
I find it appropriate that the first line of the verse repeats itself, for it’s clear that Sally has been calling out to that star for some time. She’s made a practice of it. She has a relationship with it. And, as it happens, that evening—who can say why?—she is requited. I am fond of Sally. In way, I regard her as one of my teachers. She reminds me of a Zuleika nearer to my own time and place, her bare feet well planted in the clover of a Midwestern evening.
Of the power of questions, and of the difficult art of teaching, the critic Northrop Frye once observed that the reason great educators present far fewer answers than questions—more than the students themselves ask—is that merely providing an answer shuts down a student’s self-exploration and deeper inquiries. As Frye points out, “Unless something is kept in reserve suggesting the possibility of better and fuller questions, the student’s mental advance is blocked.” As a teacher, Frye’s goal was always to split the atom of presumptuous thought. My initial zeal to pre-empt such questioning, to deploy clarity in order to spare students the anxiety of their ignorance, delayed my appreciation of this tact. As an older teacher now, I recognize the wisdom in Frye’s approach. Indeed, I’ve come to fancy that this “keeping something in reserve” is the instructive method of the divine universe itself; though we may wish it otherwise, God doesn’t much condescend to hand out answers at the level we ask them. To do so, one might say, would be to make a tautology of enlightenment. This is why mystical writing is so trenchantly allusive; it precedes and follows the wisdom of Emily Dickenson by telling it “slant.” My own way to engage the obliquity is to make a practice of those morning walks, to show up and keen myself to the nearly imperceptible subtleties of divine requital.
—
Early one evening in July I walked to the park. It had been a couple of weeks since my last visit, as I’d been out of town with my family—a summer trip to the ocean. Near my usual entrance, the municipal workers had laid fresh timber for a bridge through the muck. When I crossed into Section AC-U3, I saw that the crews had finally crossed the small marsh. In the far woods, they’d cleared the invasives. Here and there, back in the duff, lay heaps of chopped brush. While the ash looked the same as ever, the forked bough no longer held the coelacanth. His disappearance, so unexpected, took me aback. As I stood there looking at his old perch, my loneliness surprised me. I wandered over to one of the brush heaps and poked around. At a second pile I poked some more. I felt like a grubber, selecting logs and tossing them aside. At last I stopped. For a few minutes, I stood gazing at the second pile. By degrees, I felt myself overtaken by that serene breathing which so often settles on us when we stare into something inconclusive and beautiful—like a small radiance of midges seeking one another in evening light. Above me, among the canopies, a jet was speeding along at altitude. Its contrail was vivid, a puffery as straight and purposeful as a professor’s chalk line. Back a ways, in the air, the line was already coming apart: curls and points, a foreign calligraphy.