invention in stillness
“Still hunting is when you take a stand in the brush or some place and then become motionless, and things begin to become alive, and pretty soon you begin to see the squirrels and sparrows and raccoons and rabbits that were there all the time but just, you know, duck out of the way when you look at them too closely. Meditation is like that. You sit down and shut up and don’t move, and then the things in your mind begin to come out of their holes and start doing their running around and singing and so forth, and if you just let that happen, you make contact with it.”
– Gary Snyder1
There might be lots of circumstances and motivations that lead us to invent a self and a world. [Ù23, 89] But one of the simplest circumstances I can think of is to take a walk; a walk, I mean, of the sort that this writing aims to mimic—a saunter in the sacred sense of the word that Henry Thoreau gave it, recalling medieval pilgrimages. [Ù14, 16]
Time rushes away, loosening its grip. Without an agenda I am free to look at things, to see them, to feel the veil fall away between subject and object, me and them. Thus springs up already a new relation, and it’s like a new road, a crack in a dam because from that first rearrangement of relations comes a whole new set: leaves on grass, the prickly stubble growing out of the broad face of the earth; the sidewalk a soft carpet unrolled before me like a chunk of new sod.
I am quiet and peaceful, my eyes open and immobile. They aren’t hungry or grasping, I become a rock and when I withdraw my grasping “I” from the scene the rocks and stones begin to sing, like the toys in “Toy Story” that come to life only when the humans are absent.
Only I do have to be there—just still as though I weren’t there, so that outlets can become bellybuttons and I can feel the weight of human construction past and present immense on the broad back of the earth, but maybe bearable, even beautiful too, as the thick nests I find in the forks of trees, or the twigs those forks hold like a giant child has stuck them into his sandbox, playing at forests.
Or when I walk through the sand dunes along the northeastern shores of Lake Michigan and each footprint copying the entire dune, so that it becomes easy to say, with Julio, “sometimes I am larger than the horse I ride and sometimes I fall into one of my shoes, which is alarming, to say nothing of the difficulty of climbing out, the ladders constructed knot by knot from the laces, and the terrible discovery, there on the brink, that the shoe had been put up on the wardrobe.”2
1 Gary Snyder, “Craft Interview,” The Real Work (New York: New Directions, 1980), p. 34.
2 Julio Cortázar, “On Feeling Not All There,” Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, Trans. Thomas Christenson (San Francisco: North Point, 1986), p. 19. In Spanish: “Del sentimiento de no estar del todo,” La vuelta al día en ochenta mundos (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1967), p. 22.