by Richard Bode
“How do you do it?” I ask. “How do you balance them this way?”
He goes about his work, inspecting rocks, turning them over, moving them about. I wait, wondering if he is going to respond. After a while he says, “I don’t think. I just pick up rocks and put them on top of each other.”
Despite his reticence, I manage to pull information from him. He tells me that he works on a flower farm farther down the coast, and that he erects sculptures on the beach in his spare time. I press him, try to find out why he is drawn to these rocks, why he feels compelled to transfigure them into human shapes and forms. There is no money in it, no glory, no enduring fame. He does not gloat over his creations; he does not pander to the whims of admirers like me. He shrugs and goes on stacking stones.
I continue on my way, contemplating the diversity of the human mind. I recall the advice of Paul Cézanne, how he urged young painters to view nature as a profusion of cones, rectangles, circles, and squares. That was how he perceived the world, and day after day, in still life and landscape, he painted what he saw. “Not since Moses has anyone looked at a mountain so greatly,” the poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote upon viewing a memorial exhibition of his work.
Geometric shapes impressed the Greek mathematician Pythagoras in a different way. When he observed a right triangle, he was moved not to paint but to calculate, which is an art of a different kind. He determined that the square of the hypotenuse equals the sum of the squares of the other two sides. When I studied geometry ages ago, I accepted its theorems as given truths handed down by an irrefutable god. But now I ask myself what manner of man looks at a triangle, filters it through his brain, and formulates an equation that reveals the affinity among its angles and sides?
The mind vibrates like the strings of a harp in accord with what it perceives. One man beholds nature and produces a painting, another an equation, another a cluster of statues along the shore. Each discovers his own métier, which is a way of saying he expresses what he thinks and feels in his own distinctive way. The style is personal and particular; it does not arise from a conscious decision, but flows as a river flows out of hidden springs.
The graceful performers of my lifetime rise in memory: Fred Astaire in dance, Ella Fitzgerald in song, Benny Goodman on the clarinet, Joe DiMaggio in center field. I believe the talent was present in them, as it is in everyone, from birth, from before birth, and they felt its tidal pull guiding them, directing them, from an early age. Astaire did not choose the dance; the dance chose him. He had no choice but to tap his feet or die. There is a telling piece of dialogue between Astaire and Ginger Rogers in the classic film To p Hat:
FRED: You see every once in a while I suddenly find myself … dancing.
GINGER: Oh, I suppose it’s some kind of affliction.
FRED: Yes, yes … it’s an affliction .… I think I feel an attack coming on.
Hands, feet, head, and body—they all appear to be flying in different directions, and yet there is symmetry, fluency, abandon in every step, lightness and verve in every turn, and no wasted movement anywhere. The style is not contrived, not imposed; it comes from the brio of the dancer himself, and it is distinctly his own.
There is no cure for an “affliction” of this nature; one must give in to it, cultivate it through constant practice, endless rehearsal, until the gift that comes from a power beyond ourselves is perfectly honed.
The popular presumption is that it is easy for talented people to do what comes naturally. Fred, Ella, Benny, Joe—everything they did appeared unrestrained, as if there were never a time when they skipped a beat, missed a note, or dropped a long fly ball. Even the sculptor down the beach wants me to believe that he picks up rocks and stacks them in an abstract, mindless way. But I wonder what sacrifices he made, what self-doubts he overcame, to attain the clarity of vision that inspires his forms.
Vincent van Gogh addressed the struggle of the artist, the struggle of everyman, in a letter to his brother, Theo:
And great things are not something accidental, but must certainly be willed. What is drawing? How does one learn it? It is working through an invisible iron wall that stands between what one feels and what one can do.
If I did not know it before, I know it now: Throughout my adult life I, too, have been trying to break through an invisible iron wall. I have come closer to achieving that goal here on the sands of Miramar than anyplace I have ever dwelled before. The journey has not been easy; I still have a distance to travel before I fully arrive. But I am on my way toward the center of myself, doing my best to strip away layers of sham and pretense as I go along.
I believe we experience the pulse of our talent coursing through our bodies when we are young. The passion drives us on. We know intuitively who we are and where we must go, in the same way birds know the migratory routes they must follow north in spring and south in fall. But as we mature, we adopt patterns of behavior that stand between ourselves and what we feel.
When I was a boy, I wrote as I wanted to write, never striving for cleverness, for I was too young to know what cleverness was. The words sprang out of my raw emotion, and the children who were my classmates and friends laughed and cried when the teacher asked me to read aloud. But when I became a man, I began to write for the approval and applause of others, who I thought controlled my destiny. It wasn’t until I went back to my childhood, to writing the way I wanted to write, thinking the way I wanted to think, feeling the way I wanted to feel, that the words rose easily again.
The creation of an authentic work of art, the creation of an authentic life—they are one and the same. Neither can be accomplished as long as affectation obstructs the way. The life that lives behind a mask, that calls attention to itself, is doomed to fail.
I once knew a man who died of the mask he wore. For a long time I thought we were close friends. When I was told that he had killed himself, I sank to my knees, as if I had been struck a mortal blow from behind. I couldn’t understand how someone who possessed so much charm, so much confidence, so much common sense, could take his own life.
I gave the eulogy at his funeral, and I mourned—for him and for me. I realized that this man who I had thought was my friend was really a stranger. All I ever saw, all I ever knew, was the wit and conviviality that covered up the agony he bore.
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
When I first came upon those lines by Edwin Arlington Robinson, I was a sophomore in high school and I didn’t know what they meant. How could someone like Richard Cory, who “fluttered pulses when he said Good-morning,” who “was rich—yes richer than a king,” who “was admirably schooled in every grace,” go home one night and put a bullet through his head?
But the poet knew what I didn’t know—couldn’t know—as a youth. He knew that Richard Cory isn’t an anomaly; he is a familiar figure who strolls the streets of his town, pausing here and there to chat with people he knows. He is always cordial, always neatly attired. But what he presents is not himself but a counterfeit picture of himself, a carefully composed disguise to impress those he encounters along the way. And so his life is not a real life; it’s a masquerade.
The world is filled with Richard Corys. They are dying, just as my friend was dying without my knowing it. They are dying slowly, dying inevitably, because, whether they admit it or not, they despise the person they pretend to be and lack the courage to become the person they are.
I do not know what plagued my friend, and now I never will. Perhaps he was beset by a profound moral dilemma that he dared not disclose. Gay men and women talk about “coming out of the closet,” as if they are the only ones too ashamed to show their true selves. But since the suicide of my friend I have come to believe that many of us would sooner die than remove our masks and stand barefaced before the world.
An elderly couple, walking arm in arm, approach me on the beach. The woman has thick lips, a bulging nose, a large wart on her cheek.
The man is bald; he has thick black eyebrows and a heavy double chin. They are barefoot, strolling slowly, absorbed in their conversation, but as they pass, they turn to me and nod pleasantly, as if, for a moment, to admit me into their company.
It occurs to me that the woman could cover her blemishes with makeup; the man could undergo a face-lift. With the aid of a beautician and plastic surgeon they could present a much different countenance to onlookers and passersby. But if they did, the false face would dictate what they said and how they behaved, and they would lose the genuineness of their smiles, which light the day.
On my desk in my beach house, I have an array of postcard portraits. The faces are so flushed with life. One is a study of St. Ambrose by Peter Paul Rubens, the massive head, the crooked nose, the curly beard, the intent eyes. Is this how St. Ambrose looked, or is the portrait the consummation of Rubens’s fertile imaginings? St. Ambrose died twelve hundred years before Rubens was born. But in the painting the two men merge: The guileless artist shows us the guileless saint.
There are other portraits in my personal gallery. A flirtatious young girl raising her veil by Bartolomé? Esteban Murillo. A serene young woman by Edgar Degas. A despondent man by Paul Cézanne. A blithesome butterfly girl by Winslow Homer. Whenever I look at them, I become convinced that the hope of the world lies not with churchmen, statesmen, or politicians, but with men and women like these who have banished pretense from their lives.
One by one they go forth, affecting by their presence the way we think and act. They are the light of the world. Like a city set on a hill, they can not be hid.
Occupied with these thoughts, I barely notice the passage of time. Before I realize it, I am at the post office, where I stop twice a week to pick up my mail. My box is low; I have to stoop to remove the contents. As I rise, I turn and confront a scraggly-haired woman in a rumpled dress who is looking up at me with a foolish grin.
I have seen her before, riding her rickety bike down the dirt road that leads to the beach, moving from one trash can to the next, searching for empty bottles and cans and scraps of food.
“I know who you are!” she says in a loud voice. “You’re the beachcomber of Miramar!”
It’s noon; the post office is crowded with people buying stamps, posting packages, sorting through their mail. They stop and stare. I want to flee. But the urge passes as quickly as it came.
“The beachcomber of Miramar?” I reply. “Yes, that’s exactly who I am.”
seventeen
ebb tide
I wake before dawn, pull on clothes, and go down to the edge of the sea. The wind is light, the swells huge, the phosphors sparking like dying embers in the luminescent curl of the waves. I am here alone, as I have been so many nights before. The waning moon floats down the western sky. Under its glimmering light, the deep sea rolls in ceaseless motion toward the shore, grinding rock and soil into grains of sand.
It wasn’t easy, this journey to Miramar. But I am here now, having crossed many rivers and many hills. What I desire more than anything else, sitting here on this moonlit beach at this moment, is to feel the slow, steady march of my existence, the continuum of my days.
I have lived a long life already; I am astounded how far back my memories go, how much the years contain.…
I am thirteen and I am strolling along a spit of sand where the Atlantic Ocean meets the Great South Bay. The tide is ebbing, as it is now; I am at the tender age of discovery, when every speckled shell conveys its own surprise. Razor clams, cherrystones, periwinkles, horseshoe crabs—they are strewn across the beach, and I have no way of knowing what I might stumble on as I wade through the shoals.
I see an airhole and carefully dig around it with the cup of my hand until I uncover a delicate soft-shell clam. I find twenty, fifty, a hundred, and I put them in saltwater pools exactly like the ones that surround me now. I let them wash for an hour. When I lift them out, they are a delicacy, cleansed of sand, ready for the steam pot.
In recalling that boy, I recall my former self, the child I pushed so far down into the base of my being when I became a man that I forgot he was there. Now, all these years later, I realize how much I miss him, how much I want him back again.
I glance anxiously over the crest of the waves. The images of my past appear before me, the people I have known, the places I have been, the sorrow of what once was and can never be again. My parents mated, then died before they were old enough to see me grown. I married; my wife and I raised children of our own before our marriage failed and we parted. I pursued a career that frustrated me; I quit and went off in a different direction, regretting the years I had wasted, the energy I had spent.
Why was I made to endure such loss so young? Why did I choose a woman so wrong for me? Why did I let finances determine the course of my career? Confused, I made my pilgrimage to Miramar, and now, at long last, I believe I understand.
Loss, waste, regret, sorrow, pain—these are the judgments of a man, not the concerns of a child. When I wandered the beach as a youth, I did not pass sentence on every step I took, every turn I made, every treasure I found. I accepted the events of my life, embraced them for what they were, what they are. I welcomed the unexpected, held fast to the unknown, moved in sympathy with the wind and rain. Only after I was grown did I try to give a name—life, death, good, evil, joy, sorrow—to the occurrences that mark my journey through this world.
The events of my life are like the rolling of the waves, the changing of the tide, the shifting of the wind—they contain no judgment. My parents’ death was not a tragedy, my marriage not a mistake, my career not a miscalculation. They were the course of my days, the pattern of my years, the flow of the life that was given to me, and the way I lived it.
I watch the dawn come slowly over the dunes. Offshore a string of brown pelicans soars so close to the water, their wings seem to touch the sea. They climb and circle; from the beach they look like miniature pterodactyls diving for prey. I have at times seen so many of them gathered overhead, crisscrossing and dropping through the leaden sky, that they appear as inseparable as driving rain.
More than a dozen are fishing; gulls trail every one. I single out one pelican and follow his flight; I watch him hover and plunge, twisting his body, tucking back his wings an instant before he strikes the sea. As soon as he surfaces, two gulls attack; they sit on his head and peck at his bill, trying to force him to cough up his catch.
The pelican raises his pouch, drains the water, swallows his fish, and takes off again, circling the sky with rhythmic wing beats, pursued by gulls. He knows they will be following him wherever he flies, taunting him whenever he dives, but he is undeterred. He soars, aware only of what he was meant to do. His purpose is to dive for anchovies; mine to comb the sand.
A jogger comes at me through the morning mist; I can tell by his gait he’s a bulldog of a man. As he nears, I see his neck is as thick as his thighs, which churn like pistons as he plows through the heavy sand. Ankle-deep, he sloshes by; twenty minutes later I hear him bearing down on me from behind and he passes me a second time. I chase after him; I want to find out if I can match his pace, but after a hundred yards I see a tanker far out to sea. I stop and watch it make its passage across the horizon, looking as if it might at any moment slip sideways over the rim of the world.
When I was a young man, I was consumed by practical considerations. I measured my progress by external matters: the balance in my bank account, the kind of house I lived in, my advancement on the job. I divided my life into compartments, commuting daily between work and play. I was striving, constantly striving, without even knowing what I was striving for.
Now I am weary of struggling; I do not want to struggle anymore. I do not want to please; I do not need the trappings of money, power, or success. I do not seek a trophy on my wall or a corner office with a potted plant. I do not desire a house that others envy every time they drive by. All I want is a life that is my own.
Somewhere within my being lies
an inviolate place, born of the sun, moving toward the sun all the time. It has been there all along, the sum of all I am and all I aspire to be, that aspect of my nature I call my soul. Silently this force within me has gathered its own momentum and led me here to Miramar.
My life, from its beginning to this very moment, has been a grand migration. Slowly, instinctively, I have been tending toward this time and place where I could shed the arbitrary boundaries of existence laid down by practical people and live my life.
The tide is out, all the way out, and the long, sloping flat, where waves washed a few hours earlier, is now exposed. I head back to my beach house, my bare feet sinking into the soft, wet sand. The freshening sea wind is in my face; the sun, halfway up the morning sky, is on my back. I think of pancakes. I quicken my pace; the craving increases with every step. I can go inside, mix the batter, and heat the griddle. I climb the steps to my beach house’s deck. Even before I open the door, I can taste the syrup.