Contemplations on Polytheism and Gods of the Land

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There was a lightness of being in my solitary walk to the library this morning, after yesterday's long-rumbling thunderstorms growling out of the dense haze and heat of the city.^[1] For the past two weeks I have been getting up early to hillwalk through the wooded park down the block, and even in the dawn hours everything hung heavy and damp, dark green, sticky, slick with heat, heat, heat. The pond was a low patch of thickening mud, the stream in the ravine a gully of trickling gutter-water between the tree roots. The mulberries from the neighbor's drooping tree were slowly fermenting on the sidewalk, and giving birth whenever someone walked by to a swarm of iridescent flies. This is not exactly unusual for July around here (certainly not as out-of-character as the hotter weather farther north). But the cloudless domed sky fading to muggy gray on the horizons unbroken for so many rainless days became a little disconcerting in a city centered on three rivers and so near a great lake, where the mountains rising to the east back up the westerly winds carrying their rainstorms over the land. We get a lot of rain here in Pittsburgh, but for the past two weeks it seems we've had nothing but hot, thick, hard-to-breate damp — sliced through with burning arrows of sunlight.

So yesterday was a blessing. An early twilight by midafternoon when the storms rolled in, and it was finally cool enough to fall asleep a few hours before midnight for once. For the first time I felt refreshed when waking up this morning, as if I had slept well and without that constant, unidentifiable anxiety that the body seems to absorb and store up from the enforced stillness of long, hot summer days. And the morning is beautiful. During long weeks of constant heat, coolness becomes a kind of abstract in a sun-fogged brain. Jeff and I kept talking about our upcoming vacation in cool, ocean-hedged Acadia National Park, and my trip soon after to Ireland — the misty green lands that my skin and bones remember, like a gift from my ancestors, without ever having been there — but I don't think I could really believe in these things or imagine them with any kind of realism.

Ah, but this morning I can almost taste the very first hint of crisp, cool autumn, sneaking in just after the high, bright peak of the solstice! Walking down the streets of my neighborhood, I had flashbacks to that feeling I used to get during the first weeks of a new semester back in college, when everything was light and fresh and free, with new classes (and, glory be!, new books to devour!) and new faces roaming campus, and a new year ahead. And in all of this, that special kind of solitude, the aloneness of stepping out and away from home, cut loose from routine or rather in the early stages of a new one when it still feels wide and spacious and full of possibility. It was as if heat had become my home, and I thought it would go on being home forever. It is hard to describe, but I could taste it like gentle sunlight — after two weeks I'd almost forgotten that sunlight could feel gentle and smooth, not always burning and oppressive — and light wisps of clouds that go skipping now from horizon to horizon in a cool lake of blue sky, awash in relief. And I am so thankful that my gods, if I have any, are changeable, full of movement and utterly beyond me.

The Blackout

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This past Thursday, the city of Pittsburgh experienced what the papers are now apparently calling a triple-hit of violent storms (which included dangerous "microbursts" and tornados), stripping trees of branches, flooding basements, shutting down businesses (including the restaurant where I work) and stranding up to 120,000 people without power for several hours (as of Friday morning, 20,000 to 34,000 were still without power, and as of my writing this, one friend of mine is still whistling--or in her case, going quickly through her store of beer and cigarettes--in the dark).

This wasn't as exciting as it probably sounds. A coworker of mine informed me yesterday at work that the local electric company was actually referring to it as a "natural disaster" situation, but for those of us who experienced the storm and subsequent black-out, it seemed mostly like more of the same (i.e. more f#&king rain!) and a gradual realization that the fridges and television sets wouldn't be kicking back on to rescue us anytime soon. The power in my apartment was out for approximately eight hours, from around 3 PM until 11 PM (11:04 PM, to be precise). When the second of the three storm-fronts hit, I had actually just left my house to walk to work and pick up my schedule for the week. I waited out the brief black-out (before our restaurant's limited back-up generators kicked on) and the rest of the storm in the dining room, sipping on a soda and watching my fellow servers explain to customers that there was a foot of water in the basement, so they had to turn the pilot light out and the kitchen was closed--but please, help yourself to our delicious salad bar of fresh, local produce! Then I walked home in the light rain that followed, surprised by the number of felled trees within only a few blocks.

Once home, I buckled down and finally started reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal Dreams that I'd been meaning to get to. As each hour passed (on my battery-powered IKEA wall clock), I turned to my trusty sky-blue pocket-sized notebook to jot a few thoughts down. Strangely, some of them ended up being rather interesting, and so I thought I'd share them with all of you.

The power's still out. It's almost 6 PM--it's been out at least since 4 PM, when I got home. Maybe the bookstore is open now and its power back on. In another half hour or so I'll walk down to see.

[The bookstore, incidentally, was still closed at 6:30 PM, and would remain closed until about 11 AM the next morning, when power was finally restored. And gosh darnit, I'd really been looking forward to getting that book on crop circles that I'd had my eye on!]

If I feel any more--if my capacity to really feel gets any greater--I think something bad might happen. I can't possibly meditate or practice opening--I have no safeguards in place for the subsequent disaster. But I think I'd make an excellent lover, the way Venus is an excellent lover--too close, unbearable and burning, but bright and liquid all the way through.

7 PM, still no power. No fans, no air conditioning, no light. The dusk is coming, and more rain.

8 PM, reading Animal Dreams by candlelight (though it's a bit of a strain--and it's only just twilight out still). Got myself a caffeine-free Pepsi and an applesauce from the fridge, though neither are all that cold. Worrisome. I'll have to empty the fridge this weekend when I have time. I wonder what's taking so long to get the power back. I can't remember the last time an outage lasted this long. Once it gets truly dark, everyone will start in on the sex. I wish I could call Ray [my best friend, out of town this week] and tell him I'm lonely, but my cell phone is down to one bar and I need it as an alarm for tomorrow if I still don't have power.

9 PM, it's honest-to-god dark out now. Needless to say, still no power. I'm beginning to think television and the computer were rubbing me raw. Somehow, this dark is soothing, like a balm. So easy. I can feel, but it doesn't hurt so much. Maybe I'll make an effort to leave the computer off most of the time for the next week or so. At least until Ray returns. I feel kind of pathetic that I'd almost rather be a pet, a family pet who gets to sit and watch my lovely people move around and who nobody minds too much. I don't need to be anyone's girlfriend, not for now. For now, let me be a pet, is all.

10 PM, still no power. A little while ago, someone in the darkness on the street yelled something about light, and I found my heart pounding, feeling exposed and vulnerable with all my candles lit--as if they could see my one window barely flickering in the whole dark facade of my apartment building. As if I had stolen something, as if I had done something wrong. I am so much more afraid of human beings than I am of coyotes, of light more than darkness. Still, it couldn't have been more than twenty minutes ago, and already I feel safe and invulnerable again. And outside all is quiet. No rain. No people quietly talking. Not even the noise of sex. [The sex remarks are references to the fact that I have very... enthusiastic neighbors, even on nights with power, and they'd been at it earlier in the evening, around 5-ish, already.]

Almost 11 PM, still dark. I'm not so tired anymore and would like to keep reading, fairly sure there's no point in going to bed when I don't have to be up that early tomorrow. I know that if I had regular light, I wouldn't have to sit up straight and carefully hold the candle over my book--I'd drift off in ten minutes with the lights on. My body wants to lay down, but my mind doesn't. Reading Animal Dreams, I'm jealous of Codi--with a shit hometown to go to, people to watch come and go, a confused family history, a man who wants her to love him. I can't go home or stay put. Once you know the twists and turns of your family's history, there's not much more to do with it, is there? My mother will always be the mother she had, always hard-done-by and cold. She doesn't want to be filmed. She hides behind a camera because no one takes a picture of people taking pictures. Except me. I don't hide behind the camera, I want to be in two places at once. The best conversations are never caught. It hurts to look into a single candle flame, but I could stare into a campfire all night. I have so many thoughts in my head every hour, I sometimes wonder what would happen if I just got them all out, if I wrote and wrote until there was nothing left. How much uselessness could I generate? Reading a story slows my thoughts enough that they don't feel so overwhelming. A few a second, maybe, or vague intuitions and emotions only half developed. Reading someone else's story quiets me down, turns down the volume of my own living--which sometimes feels all tangled up in the living of every thing, so that it's just too big--and for a little while, I can feel human. A quiet, small thing conversing with other quiet, small things. Instead of a rushing vortex of noisy everything.

Everything just came on. It's 11:03 PM.

[The feeling, just as I finished writing the last sentence, was eerie and put me out of my skin with goosebumps for a split second. It's hard to explain the strange presence of everything familiar suddenly rushing back into awareness.]

11:04 PM, after I'd blown out all the candles and reset the clock, the power died again then struggled to come back on. I'm leaving one candle lit this time, so I don't stumble on anything... just in case.

Adrift.

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You wake up in the morning feeling like one of your limbs, which is really your heart, has fallen asleep beneath you and you cannot move it or feel it--it is white and bloodless and numb. As if it no longer belongs to you at all--your little heart throbs like a reflex, and that terrifies you because it moves all on its own, it is still twitching despite all common sense, and the prickling of returning blood begins and for a while there is nothing but pain.

Don't be so melodramatic.

Thank God for thunderstorms. I sat outside on my balcony for most of the day, and when the thunderstorm rolled in, I put my book inside and I stood pressed up against the wall, and the brick kept me warm as the rain just poured down, down and down, and there were tiny bits of hail that bounced off the railing and made the ground momentarily white and all rounded like a basket of marbles, and then even the hail was washed away and melting in the rain. And the sun afterwards... Ah, God, the sun. And once everything was dry, I went and got my book again and I continued reading, but mostly I watched the birds come out again, looking bedraggled and seeming surprised to find me sitting there, so that they would fly right at me and then suddenly veer aside. It feels so nice, to hold perfectly still and watch the birds' surprise. And then, there was a chickadee on the ground below who hopped the way I think infants or curiosity must hop. And a dove who flitted up to the roof of the garage behind my building and began to preen and shook its feathers out with such sudden resolution that I swore I saw a small cloud of dust drift away, and a single little feather of down drifted towards the ground and then was caught in an updraft and swung across the parking lot and all the way to land, gently, on the railing next to where I was sitting. This one little feather from this one little bird. It reminded me of the day I had been feeling ignored by God and had complained to Ray that, if I suffered, and suffered righteously, then maybe people would be more inclined to take my work seriously--and as we sat out on the picnic blanket, one little bird flew through the clear sky and *plop* one little bit of bird shit landed directly on the crown of my head. And I laughed and laughed at how God had his eye on me and his ear on me, how I had asked to be shit on and God had delivered, as if to say, "You think I'm not paying attention? You think I don't have my finger on the button?" And now again, here was the single feather the dove had shaken free, and it had come, seemingly at random and adrift, all the way to where I sat--as if to say, "You think these tiny things are meaningless and helpless upon the currents of chaos? You think there aren't patterns in the wind, invisible things at work?"

How silly we all are. How endearing, small and glorious our offerings, how amusing our surprise.