The first and last chapter of the memoir I’ll never write
Prologue
June, 1994
The invisible reader of this absolutely confidential journal may not know or care that there is still argument about the existence of the graviton. The graviton is a sub-atomic particle thought by most to be the inevitable explanation for the force of gravity. Isn’t that great to know? It’s a damn silly thing to care about, but I’m not in a particularly damn smart mood, so the invisible reader will have to either indulge me or stop being nosy and set this absolutely confidential journal aside.
The sub-atomic world was simple and easy to understand back in the early forties when all we needed for it to do was kill people, but it is now fairly crawling with newly discovered particles, all interacting with the same old four forces. Electrons have a charge but basically no mass; electromagnetic radiation, or EMT (which one could call light if one were trying to educate instead of impress) is photons, which they can’t even decide whether to classify as a wave or a particle; neutrinos have basically no mass and no charge and don’t interact with shit, and a zillion of them pass through my body every second and it’s the only thing on this planet I don’t have to care about; and then there are the protons, there are the neutrons; but now there are whole fleets of other particles—hadrons and leptons and quarks and anti-quarks and gluons and intermediate vector bosons—it’s enough to keep my mind happily thrashing for the rest of the night, and, given my historical inability to stay focused, it’s likely to.
Even on this night.
But listen: no being on this planet has ever laid hands on the graviton. Gravity is simultaneously the most far-reaching force in the universe and the weakest one. Isn’t that a fun paradox? It is the force that binds our planet to the sun, keeps our moon in our sky, makes our asses sag and keeps our whisky in our shot glasses, but keeping one particle bound to another is for a graviton the stuff of dreams. Its reach extends across the entire universe and holds our galaxies together, and will at some point—if you subscribe to the Oscillating Big Bang theory of creation—bring us all crashing back together for another Big Bang, where we will occupy, in that nexus between implosion and explosion, a space so small that it approaches the definition of a singularity. Mass without volume—try to wrap your mind around that one. Really, try it, it’s fun. Trust me—you don’t want to think about the other stuff. Think about the gravitons.
I am. That invisible, undiscovered particle would become a screaming relevance to me if I were to, for instance, shove eight inches westward from where my ass is perched on this concrete balustrade. I picture being suddenly hammered by a hailstorm of the tiny things. A graviton typhoon would take hold of me, and every atom comprising the planet Earth would suddenly make my exhausted, emaciated human body its primary focus, and I would feel the combined infinitesimal pull of giga-billions of the things in sudden perfect orchestration, and they would accelerate me, dear invisible reader, at thirty-two feet per second squared until held fast by wind resistance to 110 miles per hour, and roughly eleven seconds later (I worked this out) I would hit a bed of smooth granite river rocks and be instantly limp, extinguished, a pile of rags and carrion under the Bixby Creek Bridge on the Big Sur Coast in California.
I always wondered what goes through a man’s mind moments before he kills himself, and now I know. Physics. Naturally. I dangle my feet in space, sitting on the trailing edge of an inane life, and sure enough, my head is filled with inane thoughts. Listen to this: I know the reasons that the areas around my eyes and down my cheeks feel cold in this blasting night wind. It is a physical process used by many organisms to thermal-regulate, in which another flavor of electromagnetic radiation called heat is absorbed by water molecules which transmute the energy into kinetic motion and become, in their “excited” state—
Well, fuck it. I’d just call it evaporation, but I’m trying to impress you.
I know all this stuff because I used to have a life that had forces in it too, just like atoms do, and curiosity was one of them. That was a long time ago. Over a week. That was before I had my disaster. I had my very own personal disaster, just like Chernobyl did. I don’t want to think about that, though. I want to think about gravitons.
I dangle my legs over the vertiginous dark spaces below me. A powerful northwest gust buffets me, and I am amused to find myself gripping the guardrail in fear of—what? My life? I hear some physicist whose work I once read, maybe one of the Huxleys, saying pedantically, “We are destined to know the darkness beyond the stars before we know ourselves.” A wise physicist, that. I wonder if he killed himself too—they say wisdom is a painful thing to possess. Well, at least I say that. I guess I wouldn’t know, though. All I have is information. Lots and lots of information. I was forty-one when I discovered that there was a difference between information and wisdom.
That was when things started to go downhill for me.
* * * *
Later I wouldn’t remember the decision not to jump. If it was even something one could call a decision. I still don’t remember the act of swinging my legs back over the balustrade to repurchase the solid, gritty concrete of the walkway. All I would remember is being suddenly, incongruously, back here at my pickup on the north shoulder of the bridge in this night, in this blasting wind. That’s all I know, to this day. It’s all I ever seem to know. It’s my one crumb of unassailable Zen wisdom: here I am. I look out through the darkness toward an ocean whose surface I know must be a maelstrom of whitecaps, and a profound fear howls up the bluff at me from an abyss the size of the Pacific Ocean, and my insides are silently recoiling, cringing. What is this? I’ve never been afraid of the ocean before, heaven knows. I’ve been criticized by safety-conscious friends for not being afraid of the ocean. My rational self tries to ignore the voices and be here in the real world, here beside my truck, but I hear them anyway, and some whimpering childlike creature is screaming Oh god, the darkness, the darkness, please not the darkness! and another voice makes a pathetic run at rationality and says, What now, dude? You seem to still be alive…
I tell it to shut up and naturally it doesn’t, and naturally I refuse to answer, refuse to care what I do next, but I know that as long as I am drawing breath I am prisoner to the damned space-time continuum created, or at any rate described (if there’s a difference) by the damned physicists, and events will continue to barrel forward and something will for sure happen, whether I do anything or I do nothing, just ask any one of the pedantic bastards, and the next thing I would recall is charging hell-bent through the salt-stunted coastal chaparral of a precipitous, and I mean goddamned steep canyon wall toward the mouth of a creek 300 feet below, holding in my right hand the stern strap of the 18-foot bright red fiberglass ocean kayak that lives on the roof racks of my pickup truck. It skids in front of me as I run (too steep to stand still!), launching my body into great leaps elongated forever by a slope that plummets away beneath my feet, my teeth flecked with tears and bits of coastal sage, the bow of the kayak pitching up and down, cresting with familiar motions the rolling swells of ceonothus, coyote brush and monkeyflower, and me simply not stopping. I never stop. The ground miraculously disappears and the kayak and I tumble in near free-fall the last fifty vertical feet down an escarpment of grating-hard granite and land in three feet of cold creek water, and when I stand up I still don’t stop, don’t care whether anything’s broken, just straddle the boat there in the tugging current of the creek (what’s a guy to do, an ocean there, an ocean kayak here…), drop my butt into the seat, fold my legs into the cockpit, seal my spray skirt around the coaming, and start paddling. Hard. Downstream.
The outflow of the creek is not enough to dampen the surf at its mouth, and as I power toward it, I realize in a detached way that that’s because the waves are big. Bigger than I’ve ever launched through, but I have no capacity for, nor interest in, decisions anymore, and when the tossing current of the creek drops me caroming through the bowling-ball cobblestones of the beach and pitching through the soup between me and the break zone I just pour it on, crunching into my strokes with practiced ferocity and surging forward so hard the bow wake hisses and splashes in front of me and the icy wind dashes the spray back in my face, and I am not thinking or judging or timing myself to the waves or even caring, and just before the first one hits me everything goes into slow motion and the wave . . .
. . . eclipses the stars of the Pacific sky in monstrous silence above me, and then ghostly-pale foam hisses along its lip high above my head, and then the lip begins to curl, and I know that I am hitting the biggest breaking wave of my life at exactly the wrong moment—dead at its peak.
It is a vertical wall of water.
These needle-shaped craft can pierce your average wave if you hit it with some conviction and duck onto the deck as you blast through, but this one is too big, way too big, and in spite of everything I’ve been giving it, when I throw myself forward and the dark crystal wall smashes into me and explodes around me and smacks the top of my head and compresses my cervical vertebrae and buffets my body and my boat, I feel my bow rise inside the mountainous tonnage of wave, shoved inexorably upward by bouncy and the chaotic, washing-machine turmoil of an angry ocean until I am vertical, and I know I will go over backwards and be dashed casually like a jumble of driftwood against the cobble beach, but then I break out into the air, pointed at the sky like an 18-foot red fiberglass missile. I reach for the surface with a slapping brace to regain control, but there is only air. Finally we hit on our sides, my kayak and I, and I blow my brace, trip over my paddle blade and go under, capsized, and feel from the helplessness of below the dispassionate fury of the surges in a powerful surf zone. I seal precious breath within me and lean forward in the upside-down violence, clutching my kayak to my chest with my knees to keep from being pulled out of it by the turbulence, and in a rare display of cool, I find the surface and set up well for my roll and don’t screw it up, rear miraculously upright again, still facing the horizon and the next wave, heave over and grab deeply with my left blade and power forward, exuberant, yelling with new air like a madman, like a wheeling bird, in a voice neither joyous nor angry, just wild, primal, unthinking, all judgment gone, ripped from me by enraged natural forces, and I know then that I have a reason to live.
I will live so that I can launch through this surf.
So that I can feel the bite of water on a paddle blade, I will live. So that I can feel the burning of abdominal muscles, and make it through the next breaker, I will live.
So that I don’t die, I will live.
[Editor’s note: Deleted from this location 13 dreary chapters about a marriage coming apart and some sort of search for meaning (?). You need to be more brief, Randy.]
Epilogue
October, 1996
Through the vertiginous empty spaces among the slowly moving tops of 200-foot redwood trees, a small, pale-rust-colored moth with two white spots on each forewing navigates the night breezes under a half-moon, twenty miles south of Carmel, California in a land called Big Sur. The moonlight illuminates downy fur on her back between her wings and refracts from the multitudinous facets of her enormous compound eyes as she moves through the breathing and swaying redwood crowns, high above the secondary canopy of tan oaks and bay trees. Here and there, far beneath her, swatches of forest floor are visible in the moonlight, and down and to the right the waters of Rocky Creek gleam occasionally, where it is running quietly in its low autumn flow. Now and then there is the flickering motion of a small bat working the spaces lower down, hunting the smaller flying insects and leaving her, so far, alone.
Her flight path seems aimless at first, but over time describes a methodical and consistent west by north-west course through the arboreal airspaces she calls home. She is able to fly a relatively straight line by keeping the moon, the brightest object in her night sky, at a constant location in her field of vision. She is locked in on it, following a cue hardwired by eons of evolution into the tiny circuitry of what passes for her brain. She drifts between two elegantly tapered treetops on the shoulder of a ridge, and as the forest drops away beneath her and she catches an east breeze moving like a river down the canyon from the cooling peaks of the Los Padres, another light appears before her. It is more directly to her right, and lower than the moon, but it is brighter, it is very bright, and her focus shifts to it, her programming not equipped to handle two objects this bright in her night world. She changes course, now keeping the new light just off her right shoulder as she had the moon. But an odd thing happens: while the moon was for all practical purposes infinitely distant to this tiny flying creature, the new light is not, and by keeping it at a constant bearing, she flies a wide but slowly tightening spiral around it, looping downward past walls of foliage bordering a wide clearing on the mountainside, banking ever more steeply to keep the light off her right shoulder where it belongs, and within two minutes she is whirling in tight, frantic circles around the porch light where I am standing, gazing out vacantly, thinking about nothing in particular.
I love these little gibbosa moths, so pretty and luxuriantly furred, and as she hammers herself against the bulb I finally reach up and try to snatch her from her swerving flight path, but she also has some pretty good evasion responses on board, and she’s a lot quicker than me. Besides, I muse as I drop my hand and lean back against the deck railing again, if I walked off with her fluttering in my fist and tossed her into the night, she would just return. For a remarkably long period I stand watching her without realizing that there is a simple solution. Reaching around the doorjamb, I turn off the light.
Darkness. I’m so afraid of it sometimes. Even now.
My life has been re-invented. I live here in Big Sur with my girlfriend Susan in our coming-apart house in our redwood forest, and I’m finally starting to give the benefit of the doubt to friends who told me that time would heal. Perhaps it is doing that after all. There was a period, as the agonizing week-long days and month-long weeks ground by, when I was convinced it was a dirty lie. But there is one thing that time can indeed be counted upon to do: if it has not healed, it has at least passed. If there is not closure, there is at least distance. I, like the space-time continuum that imprisons me, have been moving. Moving haltingly. Moving tentatively. Moving, I suppose, on.
Still though, sometimes…sometimes when the lights both natural and contrived have proven too small and feeble to endure here on the edge of the visible universe, and the darkness finally prevails, I feel again the buffeting of the freezing night wind on the guardrail of Bixby Bridge. Still I feel the chilled wet streaks across my cheekbones, and the mysterious depths of darkness making their gusting and howling sounds below my dangling feet, and the great invitation, the siren call of the great forgetting. I guess that I will carry it with me forever. I seem to look at it only sometimes, like the picture in some locket.
But I suppose that I am here now, and I suppose, in a sense, that I am here by choice. Perhaps we all are—maybe some of us are just lucky enough to be shown our decisions.
It would seem that now I am supposed to realize that I have affirmatively chosen life by an act of free will, by the act of swinging my legs back over the railing. It would seem that I should sally forth into it with fresh ownership and joy, and spiritual rebirth. Sorry, but I have gotten no such exultation out of this. What I have gotten out of this, oddly, is that there was never anything to get. It was never the job of this universe to give me purpose or to please my senses. It was never the job of this universe to tell me why I am here.
I look at the walls of dark foliage, sensing the humming biological machinery within each redwood needle, the nutrients coursing up through the sapwood and the sugars down through the cambium, the water ascending silently two hundred feet up to the crowns, 167 feet higher than capillary action can explain. The trees are handling their affairs infallibly, tirelessly, thoughtlessly, bringing order into the entropy. That is their purpose and they fulfill it without question. To live in harmony with the universe, I tell myself as I lean on my porch railing, I need to do only two things: to exist among its objects and events; and to interact with them with freedom and awareness.
In short: to be, and to live.
I look over at the darkened porch light mounted in the shadows of the eaves. The moth is gone. Order is restored. I stand, empty and resonating in the darkness, and it seems, somehow, that I have it. In the absence of questioning, the answer is here; in the darkness of my redwood forest, the illumination is mine; and it seems so clear that it must be elemental in the universe:
I am here to enjoy this night. I am here to enjoy this life.
Copyright © 1994 Randy Fry
Epilogue
October, 1996
Through the vertiginous empty spaces among the slowly moving tops of 200-foot redwood trees, a small, pale-rust-colored moth with two white spots on each forewing navigates the night breezes under a half-moon, twenty miles south of Carmel, California in a land called Big Sur. The moonlight illuminates downy fur on her back between her wings and refracts from the multitudinous facets of her enormous compound eyes as she moves through the breathing and swaying redwood crowns, high above the secondary canopy of tan oaks and bay trees. Here and there, far beneath her, swatches of forest floor are visible in the moonlight, and down and to the right the waters of Rocky Creek gleam occasionally, where it is running quietly in its low autumn flow. Now and then there is the flickering motion of a small bat working the spaces lower down, hunting the smaller flying insects and leaving her, so far, alone.
Her flight path seems aimless at first, but over time describes a methodical and consistent west by north-west course through the arboreal airspaces she calls home. She is able to fly a relatively straight line by keeping the moon, the brightest object in her night sky, at a constant location in her field of vision. She is locked in on it, following a cue hardwired by eons of evolution into the tiny circuitry of what passes for her brain. She drifts between two elegantly tapered treetops on the shoulder of a ridge, and as the forest drops away beneath her and she catches an east breeze moving like a river down the canyon from the cooling peaks of the Los Padres, another light appears before her. It is more directly to her right, and lower than the moon, but it is brighter, it is very bright, and her focus shifts to it, her programming not equipped to handle two objects this bright in her night world. She changes course, now keeping the new light just off her right shoulder as she had the moon. But an odd thing happens: while the moon was for all practical purposes infinitely distant to this tiny flying creature, the new light is not, and by keeping it at a constant bearing, she flies a wide but slowly tightening spiral around it, looping downward past walls of foliage bordering a wide clearing on the mountainside, banking ever more steeply to keep the light off her right shoulder where it belongs, and within two minutes she is whirling in tight, frantic circles around the porch light where I am standing, gazing out vacantly, thinking about nothing in particular.
I love these little gibbosa moths, so pretty and luxuriantly furred, and as she hammers herself against the bulb I finally reach up and try to snatch her from her swerving flight path, but she also has some pretty good evasion responses on board, and she’s a lot quicker than me. Besides, I muse as I drop my hand and lean back against the deck railing again, if I walked off with her fluttering in my fist and tossed her into the night, she would just return. For a remarkably long period I stand watching her without realizing that there is a simple solution. Reaching around the doorjamb, I turn off the light.
Darkness. I’m so afraid of it sometimes. Even now.
My life has been re-invented. I live here in Big Sur with my girlfriend Susan in our coming-apart house in our redwood forest, and I’m finally starting to give the benefit of the doubt to friends who told me that time would heal. Perhaps it is doing that after all. There was a period, as the agonizing week-long days and month-long weeks ground by, when I was convinced it was a dirty lie. But there is one thing that time can indeed be counted upon to do: if it has not healed, it has at least passed. If there is not closure, there is at least distance. I, like the space-time continuum that imprisons me, have been moving. Moving haltingly. Moving tentatively. Moving, I suppose, on.
Still though, sometimes…sometimes when the lights both natural and contrived have proven too small and feeble to endure here on the edge of the visible universe, and the darkness finally prevails, I feel again the buffeting of the freezing night wind on the guardrail of Bixby Bridge. Still I feel the chilled wet streaks across my cheekbones, and the mysterious depths of darkness making their gusting and howling sounds below my dangling feet, and the great invitation, the siren call of the great forgetting. I guess that I will carry it with me forever. I seem to look at it only sometimes, like the picture in some locket.
But I suppose that I am here now, and I suppose, in a sense, that I am here by choice. Perhaps we all are—maybe some of us are just lucky enough to be shown our decisions.
It would seem that now I am supposed to realize that I have affirmatively chosen life by an act of free will, by the act of swinging my legs back over the railing. It would seem that I should sally forth into it with fresh ownership and joy, and spiritual rebirth. Sorry, but I have gotten no such exultation out of this. What I have gotten out of this, oddly, is that there was never anything to get. It was never the job of this universe to give me purpose or to please my senses. It was never the job of this universe to tell me why I am here.
I look at the walls of dark foliage, sensing the humming biological machinery within each redwood needle, the nutrients coursing up through the sapwood and the sugars down through the cambium, the water ascending silently two hundred feet up to the crowns, 167 feet higher than capillary action can explain. The trees are handling their affairs infallibly, tirelessly, thoughtlessly, bringing order into the entropy. That is their purpose and they fulfill it without question. To live in harmony with the universe, I tell myself as I lean on my porch railing, I need to do only two things: to exist among its objects and events; and to interact with them with freedom and awareness.
In short: to be, and to live.
I look over at the darkened porch light mounted in the shadows of the eaves. The moth is gone. Order is restored. I stand, empty and resonating in the darkness, and it seems, somehow, that I have it. In the absence of questioning, the answer is here; in the darkness of my redwood forest, the illumination is mine; and it seems so clear that it must be elemental in the universe:
I am here to enjoy this night. I am here to enjoy this life.
The power of the now, the finding of the being that has no space or form, but just is! A wonderful journey you are on, celebrate in it……a thought from Barry