Two Emails

I opened my computer to find emails from two people I had not heard from in years. The first was from a retired co-worker, an expert in maps, now living in Australia. She wrote to offer her sympathies on the death of my mother. I thanked her before offering my condolences in return. Some months before my mother’s death, this co-worker’s life partner had passed away. I had heard about it but had not thought to commiserate.

The tone of her note stood out for being both sincere and professional. I recognized it as one of those learned life skills, like elocution or penmanship. It reminded me of a line of mourners at a funeral: Timing is everything there. No one wants to look impatient, nervous, or too grief stricken too early. The trick is to let the formality carry you along until you are face to face with the family of the deceased. Then raw grief will do its trick, melting through steely reserve in the sympathizer to expose genuine emotion, which, rather than adding to the burden of the bereaved, comforts.

The second email I received was from a poet friend with whom I fell out a number of years ago after I negatively reviewed one of her books. This friend lives in a Newfoundland-centred universe and has two subjects: this place and its place in mind as expressed by the island’s distinctive idiom. She is also, like all real poets, a highly sensitive and embattled human being and therefore does not react well to criticism. My sense about her book was that she had ventured too far into language and in the process had lost her way in abstractions. She took me to task for my review, beating me with a stick.

The emails arrived within five minutes of each other. Coincidence strikes like premonition. It feels like pressure. It may have something to do with desire. But, of course, there is no such thing as coincidence. At least that’s my current working proposition.

Instead, it is the unconscious mind that affirms us. I know how that sounds, but in my experience, there is no getting around it. There is a mind within a mind. A hopper, in the legislative sense (and perhaps this was what Shelley meant when he described poets as the unacknowledged legislators of the world). Call it what you like: the slow cooker of inspiration and unhurried solution. It’s mysterious and therefore thought to be godlike, even by atheists.

Still, I wanted to explore the coincidence of these emails. Was there an obvious connection between my correspondents? What current had they tapped into that had led them (one situated in the northern hemisphere and the other in the southern hemisphere) to hit send at roughly the same time, when neither one, as I’ve already said, had been in touch with me for years.

I pulled out my laptop, and with my fingers poised above the keys I set my brain to do whatever it is I do when I write. But I had just finished another piece of writing, so my mind was already both elevated and tired, and therefore prone to fumes and phantoms. I knew I could easily go down a rabbit hole, not so much one of no return but the kind where the digging proves so easy that the second you hit bedrock, you see what you should have seen all along: That this was never untouched soil but rather backfill. And that it was you who dug the original tunnel.

My unconscious mind offered this metaphorical prompt to my conscious mind as a warning that some kinds of twinning lead to nothing, that a sense of coincidence may be evidence only of something forgotten, which may or may not have been worth remembering.

By the way, when I mentioned earlier that my poet friend beat me with a stick, I meant that figuratively, though there was a real stick involved: a small gnarled branch with a Y‑shaped tip, where the top twigs had been snipped. She called it her permission stick because only the one holding it was allowed to speak. The one not holding it had to listen and not interrupt. On that long-ago day, she did most of the holding as she pointed out the many ways in which my review of her book was inaccurate, some of which she was right about, but none of which I was prepared to withdraw.

I closed my laptop, daunted by the impenetrable thicket of connections that materialized when I thought about my inbox. Also, I was freshly tenderized from recalling that brutal exchange with my poet friend. So, instead of writing, I decided to go for a walk in the woods.

A fine drizzle fell as I parked my car near the trail. There were three other cars in the lot.

Opening the trunk, I retrieved my telescopic walking stick. I thought about bringing my snowshoes but decided against it. The drizzle suddenly got heavier, and I had half a mind to turn back before I’d even started. I had to remind myself that I have never — not even once — regretted taking a walk in the woods. Time alone with trees is always time well spent.

At the top of the trail someone had rolled two balls of snow (each about eighteen inches in diameter), placing one on top of the other. The overall shape suggested the classic snowman, minus the head. I stopped and with my walking stick poked two eyes into the top ball. Then, looking to point a nose hole, I jabbed too hard, and the top ball rolled to the ground and split. I left it there and walked on.

The portion of the trail that’s normally an ankle-twisting stream bed was packed with snow that had been tamped down since the previous week’s blizzard by countless boots, snowshoes, and cross-country skis. It was all downhill from the trailhead to the ocean. After I had walked for about a hundred yards, the drizzle stopped. It was as though a cloud had settled over the hill and I had walked out through its underside.

The trees on either side of the trail were heavy with snow. Some of the boughs were bent so low that I had to duck to pass under them. Each time I did this, I felt as though I were entering the scene anew, as if I had passed under a curtain.

My map expert friend once told me that maps, especially old ones, were notoriously inaccurate: roads marked where there were no roads, distances and elevations that were pure guesswork. I thought about this as I walked along a path that had been much improved over the years by way of boardwalks and small bridges over bogs and streams and with heavily shellacked pine-plank signage. The trail was now just one of many among the interconnected maze widely known as the East Coast Trail system. The core of the network is the original coastal tracks that people used for hundreds of years to walk between communities. They are like the old brain on top of which a new brain has mapped itself.

Once, looking for a different area to hike, I tried to take a shortcut from where I had parked my car, through a section of woods, to where my map said there should be a trail. Within minutes I was turned around by densely packed spruce thickets, by felled trees, by enormous mossed-over boulders, by bogholes and marshes. I got hopelessly lost, beating through rough terrain until I emerged an hour later at the road, sweat-soaked and scratched, not fifty feet from where I had parked.

All maps are schematics. Being simplified, they offer seemingly direct routes to wherever it is you wish to go. You set out, and almost from the start a host of other conditions intervene. The map, which might have been half-baked to begin with, says nothing of the vegetation and how it can impede with action verbs: trip, lash, enmesh, stab, and garrotte. Maps can’t account for how the snowpack might alter the view. Their legends do not include summer temperatures or the density of blackfly and mosquito clouds. One learns to factor in such possibilities only by walking through the landscape, letting it redress your ideas about it, inscribe its gravity on your muscle mass.

What is at first familiar in landscape suddenly turns unfamiliar when you understand that you are lost. Then the process reverses in a way, becoming personalized as you find your bearings and that experience gets encoded into memory.

My poet friend understands that language maps both mind and experience like nothing else. Poetry is where the familiar becomes highly personalized and, in the process, unfamiliar. This is because the unconscious mind sets out to retrain the senses, offering them a chance to unlearn the ways in which they have been taught to see, hear, smell, taste, and touch.

A poem goes in search of words to map over experience. The reader takes the same journey as the poet, though never in exactly the same way, because the reader will map their own experience over it. If the maps overlap enough, there is evidence of culture.

Maps and poems gesture more than they pin down. But the gestures are both precise and evocative. They offer specifics, important details, and colourful glimpses. They offer a direction. They propose a way in. They say, Bring yourself along on an adventure.

For my first decade in Newfoundland, I lived in abstraction, which was a kind of freedom. During that time, I worked hard to map an idea of place onto a real place. It was complicated, because my idea of what a place should be was informed by the landscape and culture I had left behind, the only one I had known to that point in my life. For a long time, nothing fit. Disconnected, I futzed about in circles.

I’m not sure when I began to notice that the place I was trying to colonize with my conscious mind had an obstinacy about it. Philip K. Dick once described reality as “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” My new place was intractable. It was also tantalizing, just out of reach. I needed a different kind of language that would bridge the gap.

Eventually I hiked over the Southside Hills to the same area I would trek through after receiving those two emails. It was summer and beautifully warm that day. The long hard winter that underwrites all other seasons in Newfoundland was far from my thoughts. By the time I got home, my senses were overflowing, so I grabbed a pen and paper and wrote down what came to mind. I know it is a cliché to say this, but the process felt like nothing more than dictation:

Sitting back to read what I had written, I realized that for the first time in a long time, I felt something like solid ground under my feet.

This turned out to be another rabbit hole, a more sophisticated one, and after twenty-five years, I found myself at a dead end, at rock bottom, facing my poet friend across a restaurant table as she held in her hand a small stick. This new world turned out to be the old world, and I now understood that my excavations had mostly followed those already established — those that time and willful blindness had filled in or obscured.

But it wasn’t really so dire. Even as I entertained that depressing thought, I knew such wholesale dismissal was wrong. More accurate was this realization: the twenty-five years I had spent writing poems had been a most exciting adventure, during which I had several times stumbled onto something original. They had also grounded me in my person in a way that allowed me to voice my perspective, which is perhaps my only truth.

These days, I am less likely to walk in the woods in order to do my thinking. I go there when I want to change my understanding, jog it out of whatever groove it has carved for itself. Generally, I find that the farther into the country I go, the less abstract my thoughts.

On the trail that day, I slowly disengaged from narratives about the coincidence of two people I had not spoken to for years emailing me at the same time. I observed and let go my history with this place and my early unhappy struggles to be happy here. I became less interested in recording details that I might use later in a piece of writing: that beautiful tasselled shawl of ice over rocks in the stream; rabbit tracks that stopped abruptly at the base of a tree; a stump by the side of the trail, which I knew was the remains of a tree that only last summer sported a great pagoda of fungi; the family of four having lunch on the breakwater, who had earlier explored the frozen surface of the lake adjacent to them, their footsteps, seen from above, forming what looked like a giant thought bubble.

Soon my own thought bubble was full of frozen footsteps that reminded me of nothing; nor did the sound of my breathing lead me anywhere other than the sound of my breathing as I ascended the trail I had earlier descended. The sweat forming on my top lip and at the nape of my neck was salty and maddeningly delicious.

Back at the top, I found that the snowman I had knocked over was miraculously upright. It now had a base, a torso, and a head with what looked to be a tight hair bun on the top. The eyes were green spruce needles, the nose a short piece of stick, its mouth a round grey stone. It had only one arm: a long twig with a short fork at the tip. Someone had finished the work in my absence.

Why is this so important? Because there is another kind of existence into which experience ventures, which is non-existence. I am getting old, which means that death has begun to make itself known to me. I now see that it was here all along. I also understand that I knew this but purposefully chose to ignore it. I learned this and unlearned it. I felt it most acutely when I came to a dead end and had to turn back. These were moments of mourning. Moments in which I felt no resonance, no twinning, no meaning in a universe in which meaning was thought to be all of our own making.