This Weekend Edition of Ecstatic features Doug Basler
Glory be to God for dappled things –
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.— Gerard Manley Hopkins
When my English professor read us “Pied Beauty” by Gerard Manley Hopkins she warned us that she would not likely get through it. Her daughter has freckles. She made it through the “couple-colour” sky and the “rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim.” But, sure enough, when she got to “Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?),” she broke down in tears. I thought I understood why. Maybe I did, at least to the extent that a twenty-year-old was capable of understanding.
She was often moved to tears as she read passages of poetry or prose out loud to our class. Her pauses were not for dramatic effect but because she would get choked up by the writing. One of my seminary professors would do the same as he moved from a discussion about Greek verbs to a reflection on the grandeur of God’s grace. My pastor in Gloucester, Massachusetts would regularly need to stop mid-sentence during his sermon to collect himself as he fought back tears. I loved this characteristic in all of them, partly because I too know what it is like to be overwhelmed with emotion in the midst of preaching. But, also because I know their tears came from a well of gratitude. And genuine gratitude comes only when you understand the details of life as a gift, as grace.
Like Hopkins, Brian Doyle was a poet who savored language. He wrote essays and novels, but even in his prose he couldn’t avoid being a poet. I read his first novel, Mink River, this winter. The novel is intended to show the confluence of lives and events in the characters of a small coastal town in the Pacific Northwest. It is not a novel you read for the storyline. My sister-in-law told me she tried to listen to it as an audiobook on a road trip and quickly gave up. Like Hopkins’ poetry, Doyle’s prose invites itself to be read out loud but not as a page-turner. You want to savor each description, pause, and read them again.
Doyle introduces Mink River by claiming there is nothing exceptional about the town. It is “not an especially stunning town, stunningtownwise. . . but there are some odd sweet corners here.” He then introduces those odd sweet corners through the eyes of a soaring eagle:
And down the street goes the eagle, heading west, his capacious shadow sliding like a blanket over the elementary school, where a slim older woman with brown and silver hair and brown and green eyes is holding court over the unruly sixth grade, her eyes flashing;...
and over a lithe woman called No Horses in her studio crammed with carving tools as she is staring thoughtfully at a slab of oak twice as big as she is which isn’t very big at all; and over a man named Owen Cooney who is humming in his shop crammed with automobile parts and assorted related ephemera as his pet crow sits quietly on an old Oregon State University football helmet watching;...
and so many more stories, all changing by the minute, all swirling and braiding and weaving and spinning and stitching themselves one to another…
What unfolds throughout the rest of the novel is Doyle’s attempt to capture a few of the stories, “braided and woven and interstitched,” of the people and creatures of Mink River, Oregon.
As you can tell in the passage above Doyle is not concerned with adhering to grammatical norms. Call me old fashioned but I like quotation marks and a sentence break every once in a while. Still, his frantic unraveling sentence structure offers us a way to see the world, the stories of the membership of Mink River all flowing into and out of one another.
Doyle’s story is filled with nouns. Entire paragraphs are sometimes just lists of things—“their gear and tackle and trim.” The novel is a literary junk store of people, places, and things. Who doesn’t love a book with a hand drawn map in the opening pages like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth? The nouns are concrete and particular. It is not just a crow on a football helmet in Owen Cooney’ shop, it is a crow on “an old Oregon State football helmet.”
I am currently sitting in a Smoky Row coffee shop in the suburbs of Des Moines. On the table in front of me is my drip coffee in a for-here mug with a splash of 2% milk. My keys and phone and the camo-duct-tape billfold my kids made for me (fashionably decorated with yellow Minion stickers from Despicable Me) are resting next to my black Moleskine notebook because I don’t like sitting with stuff in my pockets. Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings lies on top of the notebook. To the right of the laptop is my backpack, red and worn, chosen because it has a built-in rain-cover for when I lived in Aberdeen, WA, where it rains 300 days of the year. The gray buckle on the sternum strap is missing a prong and so it no longer secures across my chest. My gray and black stocking hat sits slanted on the pack. We live in a tactile world and this is the gear and tackle of my trade.
One of Mink River’s members is a dying man. He is never named. Doyle first introduces us to him “as the man who has twelve days to live.” He resides in hospice care in the guest-room of the doctor’s home. With only six days to live, he has a conversation with Danny, a boy injured in a bike accident, who is recovering at the doctor’s house. He gives Danny a list of the objects he will miss as his life comes to an end. He says:
These are the things that matter to me. The way hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snow berries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife’s voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers. Her hair in my nose as we slept curled like spoons. The sinuous pace of rivers and minks and cats. Rubber bands. Fresh bread with too much butter. My children’s hands when they cup my face in their hands. Toys. Exuberance. Mowing the lawn. Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers. Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart…
The list continues for an entire written page. It wanders from “the postman’s grin” to “raccoons” to “cigar-scissors.” The list concludes with “My wife’s eyes, as blue and green and gray as the sea. The sea, as blue and green and gray as her eyes. Her eyes. Her.”
The list works. I have found myself picking up the book and re-reading this list all week. But it is not because I share the dying man’s affinity for furnaces or raccoons—no offense to either. It works because this is the stuff that makes up a life. You get the sense that this unnamed man with only six days to live has lived all of his previous days with wide open eyes and a wide open heart. Doyle’s list invites me to pay attention to the things that matter to me. What would I include in a similar list?
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