In the Heat of the Night

Today was a hot, wind-of-fire day in Pasadena, the kind of day that is usually accompanied by news of fire in the mountains. The sun stood alone all day in the sky, beating down on the city, accepted and magnified by the layers of asphalt and tall buildings of glass and stone. And when night came, the heat fell to the earth in one last desperate gasp – surrounding and filling our little apartment, weaving itself into alleyways and remaining hidden from the coastal winds which must blow somewhere far overhead. I won’t miss these days.

I rode my bike back to work after lunch today like I always do, and the heat formed an imposing force – like pedaling full bore through the ventilation system of a furnace. Heat wears me down, and even the air-conditioned confines of the branch weren’t enough to revive me. Just now before midnight, the apartment is cooling. I have awakened with the need to write.

Wyatt cried a lot again tonight. Anna and I spent the whole of the evening playing tag-team – taking hour-long turns trying to woo Wyatt to sleep only to eventually tap out and beg for the others assistance. Someone at work told me about his first six months of parenting and the strange memories he had of passing his wife in a hallway during the early morning hours as if she were a ghost … or maybe it was that he felt he was a ghost. That image scared me, but not as much as having to recognize its accuracy at times for Anna and I.

Intimacy is constructed of sustained, focused attention from two people. It requires touch and words spoken and heard without distraction. It requires time and energy and the assurance of a person’s worth. Right now, those basics of intimacy are being restricted or challenged by the ever-pressing needs of being a parent. Anna said she feels like Wyatt can be a sound-proof glass positioned cumbersomely between myself and her. She is right. Sometimes our best attempts to speak to each other – to reach each other, to be intimate – are thwarted. So we are learning new ways to be with each other. I guess we are also learning that our intimacy has born a work between us – a work to be shared that in itself is and will cultivate intimacy. Wyatt is both gift and labor.

Anna has been thinking more and more about land and gardening. I noticed today she was checking out a book by Wendell Berry (from Kentucky!) called “The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture,” which is about our divorce from the land and how it has led to a crisis in our families and culture.

Amazon.com summarizes the book with the following:

“Since its original publication in 1977, The Unsettling of America has been recognized as a classic of American letters. In it, Wendell Berry argues that good farming is a cultural development and spiritual discipline. But today's agribusiness takes farming out of its cultural context and away from families, and as a nation we are thus more estranged from the land - from the intimate knowledge, love, and care of it.

Sadly, as Berry notes in this edition, his arguments and observations are even more relevant than ever. We continue to suffer loss of community, the devaluation of human work, and the destruction of nature under an economics dedicated to the mechanistic pursuit of products and profits.”

There’s a connection here. Berry’s lament is largely one of intimacy; we have as a nation lost a sense of intimacy with our land, and consequently with ourselves and each other. Without the daily restrictions and disciplines of living off and from the land, we’ve become consumers and demanders of goods. We no longer have to give sustained attention and care and energy to the ground beneath and around us, which allows us to go through the day with much greater ease, but at what cost spiritually and communally?

I’ve started reading “The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories” by a British journalist named Booker. It’s a weighty, thorough examination of the whole of human storytelling, and it strikes out with the claim that there are really only seven basic plots that all stories (novel, play, film or folklore) draw from. I usually try to devour an exhaustive book like this every so often with mixed success. I’ve got about two weeks before we move, and I have to return it to the library before we go. Odds are not good, but I’m hopeful.

iTunes has carried me through these last couple of nights. Tonight I’m listening to a playlist of more mellow rock classics – Wild Horses by the Stones, The Times they are a Changin’ by Dylan, The Boxer by Emmylou Harris. Right now, I’m jamming internally to the good vibrations of a young Elvis singing That’s All Right. It’s more than all right. It’s cooling off, at least until the sun rises over Pasadena for another long march across the sky.

Wes