Heaven's Coast

by Mark Doty

  Take, for instance, the salt marsh where I walk near Wood End Light, out beyond Herring Cove Beach. That marsh is perhaps my favorite place in the world; it feels inexhaustible to me, in all the contradictions which it yokes so gracefully within its own being. It is both austere and lush, wet and dry, constant and ceaselessly changing, secretive and open. I have never, in years of walks, grown weary of looking at it, perhaps because there is no single thing which constitutes “it”; the marsh is a whole shifting confluence of aspects. At low tide it’s entirely dry, a Sahara of patterned sand and the tough green knots of sea lavender, beach grass around the edges of the beds of the tidal rivers gleaming as it bends and catches light along the straps of its leaves. As the tide mounts, twice a day, this desert disappears beneath the flood. It is a continuous apocalypse; Sahara becomes sea becomes sand again, in a theater of furious mutability.

  Its lesson—or at least the lesson I draw from it today, since this teacher’s so vast and has so many possibilities hidden in its repertoire—is that what one can see is the present, the dimension of landscape which is in front of us now. But now is shaped by the past, backed by it, as it were, the way the glass of a mirror is backed by silver; it’s what lies behind the present that gives it color and sheen. And now is always giving way, always becoming. It is this progress into the future which gives things the dynamic dimension of forwardness they could not have were they composed solely of a past and a present. If past and present are the glass and its silver backing, then future is what is coming-to-be in the mirror, the image that presents itself, intrudes into the frame. I mix my metaphors with abandon, because I am talking near the edge of the unsayable, at the difficult intersection of what I can feel but barely say.

  Wally is in my body; my body is in this text; this text is light on my computer screen, electronic impulse, soon to be print, soon to be in the reader’s body, yours—remembered or forgotten, picked up or set aside, it nonetheless acquires a strange kind of physical permanence, a persistence. My friend Billy, hearing about what I’m writing, says, “long-term survivors, you’ve got to address long-term survivors.” It’s a message of hope he wants; hope is perhaps simply a stance toward the world, finally, a stance of participation, or inseparability. That which cannot be separated cannot perish. The world has one long-term survivor, which is the world.

  This is how I see through the wider end of the telescope, when my perspective’s wide enough to see us as part of this vast interchange of being, not its center. On other days, the water of grief—deep, impenetrable, dark, cold—pours over everything and I am lightless, unseeing.

  Whether or not I have faith in the future, whether there is a personal future for Wally or whether I am all there will be of us (and then those who might read or remember me later all there will be of me)—well, whatever I believe today, whatever my marsh and my study convince me of, the future does go on without us. The world doesn’t need us to continue, although it does need us to attend, to study, to name. We are elements of the world’s consciousness of itself, and thus we are necessary: replaceable and irreplaceable at once. Someone will take our places, but then again there will never be anyone like us, no one who will see quite this way; we are a sudden flowering of seeing, among the millions of such blossomings. Like the innumerable tiny stars on the branching stalk of the sea lavender; it takes how many, a thousand, to construct this violet sheen, this little shaking cloud of flowers?

  “Eternity,” Blake said, “is in love with the productions of time.” Perhaps, in fact, eternity inheres in the things that time makes; perhaps that’s all of eternity we’ll know: the wave, the flower, the repeated endless glimmerings and departures of tides. My error, which perhaps really does express itself in that pain in the fifth vertebra, lies in thinking the future’s something we can believe or disbelieve, trust or doubt. It’s the element we breathe. Our position in time—ungraspable thing!—is the element in which we move. Our apocalypse is daily, but so is our persistence.

  Part One

  COASTAL STUDIES

  Sweet Chariot: February 1994

  I grew up in two religions.

  The first one—comforting, strange, rigorous, in its way—was comprised of an astonishing and lovely set of images. It was a religion given to me primarily by my grandmother, whose East Tennessee faith had the kind of solidity and rock-depth upon which Jesus must have intended to found His church. She was Peter’s rock, unshakable, holding us all up—or at least holding me up; I was too small to have much of a sense of what she meant to my parents or to her husband, my cantankerous and difficult grandfather who outlived her by twenty years. My memories of her are very particular ones: a day out behind our house when she and I picked dandelion and poke greens, sunlight filtering through the thin flowered rayon dress she wore—this would have been 1957 or ’58—and she showed me the right leaves to pick for the greens she’d boil with fatback to serve with the chicken she plucked and set to roast in a black graniteware pan sparked with a whole firmament of stars. In that house, where she and my grandfather lived with us, their room was a secret source of meaning and depth. I didn’t like him much but I liked his things: a drawer full of beautiful useless old fountain pens with marbled cases, cigar boxes full of rubber bands, stuff saved for the day it would surely be needed. I loved her with all my heart, and everything that was hers: the green rocking chair, a fruitcake tin filled with swirled peppermint candies, the Bible with the words of Jesus printed in red, like holidays on a calendar. She would set me up on her lap and, rocking all the while, read Bible verses to me. I’m not sure if I remember especially her readings from Revelation or if it simply feels to me now, whenever I hear someone mention a phrase like “last days” or “apocalypse,” that the scent of her—lavender, peppermint, and clean old dresses—and the texture of her clothes, the Bible’s leatherette cover and onionskin pages, are forever commingled with those words; some essence of her imbues them. It was she who presented me with my first religion, which was the religion of images, and they were given to me in Bible verses and in the songs we sang on the porch swing, summer nights: the sweet chariot coming to carry us home, the moon turning to blood, the angels sounding the trump so that all the dead would clap hands and arise, the thin veil of this world—thin as her sprig-scattered skirt!—parting at last and opening into a world we need not fear, though it would be awesome, a world made true and just and bright and eternally resonant as the songs we sang.

  I loved the word chariot. I couldn’t sing it without thinking of the cherries in my uncle’s orchard, which I’d seen once, and where my father had lifted me up into the branches so that I could pick the half-ripe fruit. Sweet chariot, sweet cherries, gold and red and green, a kind of glowing flush like heat on the skin of the little fruit, which was smooth and cleft and satisfying on the tongue as the word: chariot. This was the way the images invited us to dream into them.

  I don’t think I had any awareness of the second religion, the codes of explanation and prohibition, until after her death. I was five. She died of a heart attack, throwing her bedroom window open, in winter, and gasping for air. I remember most vividly being wrapped in a quilt, one she made, I imagine. I watched TV very early in the morning, at an hour when I wasn’t usually awake, and saw the minister come in his black jacket and collar, his odd flowery scent. And then gladiolas around her coffin, and again that sweet essence of peppermint and lavender, and little ribbons decorating the flowers on her grave. I dreamed that she came to see me, in the night, and stood beside a cane chair in a circle of lamplight to speak to me—very softly and intimately and comfortingly, though I haven’t any memory at all of what she said.

  My understanding of a more worldly religion began after that. One Sunday there was a sermon especially for children—I believe this was in a Presbyterian church in Nashville, or perhaps in Memphis—instead of the usual Sunday School Bible stories accompanied by big colored pictures. (What were they? I want to say chromolithographs, or engravings, perhaps
because the pictures and their sense of the world, an ancient and quaint exoticism they portrayed, seem so firmly of the nineteenth century.) This Sunday, no “Baby Moses in the Bulrushes” or “Joseph in His Coat of Many Colors.” Instead, the minister told us a story about the terrible dangers of desire.

  A little girl’s mother had baked a particularly beautiful pie, and set it on the dining table to cool, saying to her daughter, “Make sure that you do not touch this pie.” The girl thought about this, and tried not to touch the impossibly attractive thing. But after a time, overcome by her longing, she simply could not resist anymore, and she decided that if she snitched—that was the word he used, snitched (a particularly pinched, ratlike little word, it seems to me now, full of disdain and pettiness)—just one little piece it would be all right. So she did, taking the little bit of pie into the closet and eating it in the dark where no one could see her. The morsel eaten, she was still filled with hunger; the pie was so good, she wanted it so badly. So she would snitch just one more piece, and eat it in the dark surrounded by the comforting wool of her parents’ coats. But, of course, that didn’t satisfy her either; once a contract with appetite had been entered into, there wasn’t any turning back. And standing in the dark, her hands and lips covered with the evidence of her need, the little girl felt, suddenly, seen. She was watched and she knew it, and so she turned her face upward into the dark from which that sense of witness came, and there, floating above her, was the eye of God: enormous, missing nothing, utterly implacable.

  My parents told me that when we came home after this sermon, I hid under my bed and wouldn’t come out. I don’t recall that now, but I do remember inventing a new game, which I used to play alone, since my sister was ten years older and I might as well have been an only child. We lived that year in a big old farmhouse on a horse farm we rented. The horses used to wander on their own business—nameless, cared for by others. In my new game I marked off some portion of the yard by the abandoned chicken coop and named it Hell, and I’d play devil, racing about the perimeter with my pitchfork, poking at souls, meting out punishments, keeping them in line. With a girl who lived down our road I’d play a game in which we took turns dying and going to heaven, which I imagined as a kind of garden with a maze, a rose garden, where I would meet a blond and milk-pale Jesus. I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses…But that game, which was soon forbidden to us by a relative who said, “You mustn’t play that, it might come true,” was a game of images, of peace and stillness. My game of Hell was an enactment of energy and ferocity, of power and defiance. I think I have responded to the religion of prohibition in this way ever since.

  Perhaps if my grandmother had lived, and if we’d stayed in Tennessee, my two religions would have merged, and I would have grown away from the images I was originally given, or felt oppressed by them. But because I was split off from that world, the landscape of my childhood and of the songs seems permanent to me, sealed, untouchable, a mythic landscape of hymns, with their rivers and flowers, their cherry trees and blood and moons. We moved away from my parents’ families, on to suburbs in Arizona and Southern California and Florida, and into a succession of increasingly polite Protestant churches which finally evaporated into a bland social gesture which was easily set aside. My mother, late in her life, found a religion of imagery again in an Anglican church so high and so influenced by the architecture and pageantry of Mexican Catholicism as to be a kind of spiritual theater. I came, after a while, to seek the images of comfort and challenge and transformation in art. My mother, with her love of painting and music and beauty, had helped me to look there, but I think I understood intuitively that there was no sustenance for me in the religion of explanation and prohibition.

  The explanations were never good ones—the world as trial by fire, proving ground to earn God’s love or His forgiveness for having been human—and it was apparent to me even at an early age that the notion that anyone around me actually understood God’s will or could articulate it was patently ridiculous. There’s a wonderful line in Charles Finney’s quirky book, The Circus of Dr. Lao, which I read as a kid, an Americanized version of a speech of Hamlet’s: “There are more things in heaven and earth, madam, than even a lifetime of experience in Abalone, Arizona, could avail you of.”

  The prohibitions were worse than the explanations. They suggested that the divinity had constructed the earth as a kind of spiritual minefield, a Chutes and Ladders game of snares, traps, and seductions, all of them fueled by the engines of our longing; the flames of hell were stoked by human heats. As if desire were our enemy, instead of the ineradicable force that binds us to the world.

  I cannot be queer in church, though I’ve tried, and though I live now in a place where this seems to be perfectly possible for a great many people. Here in Provincetown we have a wonderful Unitarian church, with a congregation largely gay and lesbian, and it pains me a bit to have to admit that when I have gone to services there I have been utterly, hopelessly bored. There’s something about the absence of imagery, an oddly flaccid quality of neutrality in the language of worship. I long for a kind of spiritual intensity, a passion, though I can certainly see all the errors and horrors spiritual passions have wrought. I don’t know what I want in a church, finally; I think the truth is that I don’t want a church. My friend Phil has sweetly and politely informed me that it’s a spiritual experience for him to be in the company of his fellows, worshiping together at the U.U., and that my resistance to it is really a sort of aesthetic snobbery, a resistance to its public language and marriage of spirituality and social life. I don’t want to judge anyone’s way of finding a soulful commonality, but nothing puts me less in mind of ultimate things than the friendly meetings held within my local church’s square-boned New England architecture and flourishes of trompe l’oeil.

  Perhaps my discomfort has to do, still, with issues of desire. Wind, glimmering watery horizon and sun, the watchful seals and shimmered flurries of snow seem to me to have far more to do with the life of my spirit. And there is somehow in the grand scale of dune and marsh and sea room for all of human longing, placed firmly in context by the larger world: small, our flames are, though to us raging, essential. There is something so polite about these Sunday gatherings of tolerant Unitarians that I feel like longing and need must be set aside. Isn’t the part of us that desires, that loves, that longs for encounter and connection—physical and psychic and every other way—also the part of us that knows something about God? The divine, in this world, is all dressed up in mortal clothes, and longing and mortality are so profoundly intertwined as to be, finally, entirely inseparable.

  My lover of twelve years died just last month. It astonishes me to write that sentence. It astonishes me that I am writing at all; I have not, till now, and I didn’t know when the ability to focus might come back to me. I haven’t yet been able to read, and there are many other things I haven’t even begun to approach, in the face of this still unbelievable absence. I will be sorting out and naming the things I learned from Wally for years to come, probably for the rest of my life, but here is one thing I know now.

  All the last year of Wally’s life, he didn’t stop wanting. He was unable to walk, since some kind of insidious viral infection which his useless doctors didn’t seem to know the first thing about gradually took away his ability to control his body. But he wasn’t ever one of those people who let go. Oh, he did, in the sense of accepting what was happening to him, in the sense of not grasping onto what he couldn’t have, but he lived firmly in his desires. From the bed where he lived all that year he’d look out onto the street at anything in pants walking by and be fully, appreciatively interested. I never for a minute felt hurt by this or left out; it wasn’t about me. It was about Wally’s way of loving the world. I think in his situation I would have been consumed by frustration and a sense of thwarted desire, but he wasn’t. Because his desire wasn’t about possession, and his inability to fulfill it wasn’t an issue; it was t
o be in a state of wanting, to be still desiring beauty and grace and sexiness and joy. It was the wanting itself that mattered.

  A couple of months before Wally died we heard about a couple in the city, one of whom was ill, who needed to give up their little dog, since they felt they couldn’t take care of him.

  Wally talked and talked about this until it became clear that what he really wanted was for Dino to come to live with us. We already had a dog, Arden, a calm black retriever with a meditative, scholarly disposition, but Wally had his heart set on a new dog who’d sleep next to him and lick his face.

  The day that I went to Manhattan to pick up Dino, Jimi and Tony changed their minds; they weren’t ready to let him go. Wally was so disappointed that I went to the animal shelter with the intention of finding a small, cuddly dog who’d fit the bill.

  What I found was a young golden retriever with enormous energy, a huge tongue, and a phenomenal spirit of pleasure and enjoyment. He didn’t just lick Wally’s face, he bathed his head, and Wally would scrinch up his face and then grin as though he’d been given the earth’s brightest treasure.

  Sometimes late at night he’d tell me about other animals he wanted to adopt: lizards, a talking bird, some fish, a little rat.

  I don’t know many men who would want a new dog, a new pact with domestic life, with responsibility, with caring for the abandoned, in the final weeks of their lives. There’s a Polaroid I took of Wally with golden Beau curled up and sleeping in our rented hospital bed beside him. He could barely use his hands then—our friend Darren and I would feed him, and give him drinks to sip through a straw—but he’s reaching over with his beautiful hardly functional hand to stroke Beau’s neck. That is how I will always see my love: reaching toward a world he cannot hold and loving it no less, not a stroke less.