Drifting Downstream

Sitting with our faces now up-stream, we studied the landscape by degrees, as one unrolls a map, – rock, tree, house, hill, and meadow assuming new and varying position as wind and water shifted the scene, and there was variety enough for our entertainment in the metamorphoses of the simplest objects.

Henry David Thoreau

The sense of the passing days often confuses me, and I need more and more days in order to find out what they might mean. I must have forgotten the first time, I tell myself, or I must have missed something. I feel that if I simply repeat an act or an observation or a day, I will finally see it the way it is, see what I thought I saw once before, or what I should have or might have seen. I feel that if I probe a little further, learn other secrets, I might find the unchanging truth I must have been looking for

But repetition calls my bluff. My perspective changes every time I begin again. The more days I have, the less I know. Each day its own master, and my awareness of its nature fluctuates with the intricate interplay of light and shape, sound and texture and emotion. My mind, setting its attention to a particular memory or scent or interaction, is carried by associations to create a new physical and psychological landscape. A slight shift of the season or marker or mood produces an entirely different set of connections, with kaleidoscopic results, different patterns with truly uncountable combinations and colors, reforming, adjusting, reshaping at the slightest movement or change of view.

Like Thoreau’s persona watching “the landscape by degrees” on his trip down the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, I drift downstream, unrolling the map of the days in a way that disarms metaphysical concerns, in a way that reveals arbitrary bonds and ephemeral, instantaneous seasons. The hunger for repetition, teaches the river, is the deceptive hunger for permanence. Metamorphosis is terminal, it says, and the ride is the only thing.

Bill Felker