The Mind as Muskeg

“If I develop this little story of a personal experience as a kind of parable, it is because I believe that in one way or another we mirror in ourselves the universe with all its dark vacuity and also its simultaneous urge to create anew, in each generation, the beauty and the terror of our mortal existence.”
Loren Eisley, The Mind as Nature, 1962

There are awakenings. Last night I had at least three different kinds, which did not do well for my sleep budget, nor for the length of this post.

I was awakened by a restless Cedar-pup, with real fear of a repeat of the previous night’s diarrhea fest, and a hurried stumble out the back door. I was re-awakened a dazzling couple of minutes later, at 2:30 am in the frozen muskeg that is my back yard. And I think I’m at least a little awake today to some left-behind aspirations of my youth, as I entered the teaching vocation.

Potty training Cedar is not one of my better teaching performances. After a couple of nights of pukey-skittery misery, last night I finally put her to sleep in the kennel in my room. I heard her stirring somewhere after 2, hustled to find my slippers and sweats — all elevated to be free of teeth– sniffed each room wary of more brown slime, and stumbled out onto the frozen grass. Above us, the aurora twisted and spun black into green into pink and back. With Cedar on the leash I tried to capture a photo or two, but then just made myself stand still and feel really tiny— a speck in fathomless universe, tiny.

While Cedar expressed herself, so did the universe.

I was awake, and duly stunned. But I had a dog to wrangle, and only an hour and change to sleep before the alarm would go off, so I swallowed it whole and inarticulately, dragged the dog in, and got another hour or two of sleep.

Later in the morning, I was too busy to write, but I realized that a moment under the aurora had stirred something in my own Lab-thick skull. I had fresh recall of some blend of haunting moments walking to school in the pre-dawn hours at Unalaska. It was my first teaching job, and to survive, really, I had to work 12 or 14 or 18 hour days. Some of those dark morning walks were dreadful, in mocking winds, sideways slush, an occasional cab-van splashing through muddy potholes. But sometimes, between Aleutian fronts, the planet would still, and the sky would open up to a zillion stars. I had the feeling I was at sea.

Maybe because earlier in the evening I was texting with cousin Steve, who is at sea, on night watch somewhere in the Atlantic, crossing into the horse latitudes, or maybe I somehow saw myself in the dark vacuity of the universe in a way that floated some random debris up from the shipwreck of my memory. But this morning I had a keen return of the kind of feeling that got me into teaching—the idea that finding young people’s spark, maybe even their genius, as we explored beautiful works together was a calling, an adventure, a quest of some kind. (This was long before I’d encounter No Child Left Behind or standards or Robert Marzano or pacing guides or “The Science of Reading”.)

That momentary flash to the star-still walks to work at Unalaska turned me back to Loren Eisley, one of a handful of writers who rescued me from withering as an English major. An archaeologist and a naturalist, a brooder and a poet, Eisley wrote clearly and compellingly about specific stuff in the outdoors, but also about how our brains, our existence, are themselves part of an evolving nature. (Now I need to go back to The Immense Journey.)

Between meetings (one of which included Cedar going Kujo on me…biting me under the table, nearly tearing the arm of my shirt as I tried to summarize our morning’s accomplishments), I found a copy of Eisley’s “The Mind as Nature” online. I was searching for its final lines to try to stitch together the morning’s awakenings. As I skimmed the brooding essay, I came across lines I quoted in my application to a teaching credential program 30 years ago.

“There is no more dangerous occupation on the planet, for what we conceive as our masterpiece may appear out of time to mock us–a horrible caricature of ourselves The teacher must ever walk warily between the necessity of inducing those conformities which in every generation reaffirm our rebellious humanity, yet he must at the same time allow for the free play of the creative spirit. It is not only for the sake of the future that the true educator fights, it is for the justification of himself, his profession, and the state of his own soul. He, too, amid contingencies and weariness, without mental antennae, and with tests that fail him, is a savior of souls. He is giving shapes to time, and the shapes themselves, driven by their own inner violence, wrench free of his control–must, if they are truly sculptured, surge like released genii from the classroom or, tragically, shrink to something less than bottle size. “
Eisley, “The Mind as Nature”

How I miss that mystery and sense of indeterminism in teaching, where it was up to us to walk warily between those edges, rather than needing “to be accountable” and to “deliver” pre-selected content with “fidelity.”

Anyway, I found the concluding lines, and in retrospect they are colonial and patronizing. Why do we need to know her skin color? (Cue a fourth awakening.)

In Bimini, on the old Spanish Main, a black girl once said to me: “Those as hunts treasure must go alone, at night, and when they find it they have to leave a little of their blood behind them.”
I have never heard a finer, cleaner estimate of the price of wisdom. I wrote it down at once under a sea lamp, like the belated pirate I was, for the girl had given me unknowingly the latitude and longitude of a treasure–a treasure more valuable than all the aptitude tests of this age.

But I do love Eisley’s sense that we have to get out there under the dark sky–even here in a subdivision built over muskeg–if we’re going to expect to wise up, or to create something before the muskeg takes over again.