North: A Part of Summer — Adam Kosan

June, 2019

Preparing to move apartments, and now life assumes its yearly shape of a humid, vernal world. The air between buildings is blocked with green. In winter you can see far—the lower sky is all bones. But now the trees are so thickly dressed in their foliage that the true shape is concealed beneath what pleases the eye and there are few outward reasons to think of the bare final severity. The trees sleep in masses in the desire of their green.

1

Air Canada’s “Historical Fleet”

In the sky between Montreal and Québec City

Back a few weeks…

While on a connecting flight between Montreal and Québec City, I followed closely the amusing, disconcerting sights and sounds of our plane, which was just one of the many antiquities in Air Canada’s proudly-described “historical fleet.” Historical indeed. Their phrase seems intended to suggest enriching heritage. But “historical” isn’t the most reassuring adjective for an active fleet, especially when the appearance and sounds of its planes don’t immediately convince you that they meet modern standards. 

Well, maybe Air Canada’s phrasing is meant to be winking, more playful than we assume. It really is hard to know how intentional the aptness of corporate language is. Sometimes it aims for deniable suggestion, usually in bad taste, but more often it goes for blandishing sincerity and any aptness is accidental, not the result of literary wit. It’s not only that corporations aren’t known for self-awareness. It’s also that people who work for them, in delivering their employer’s messages to the public, risk absorbing so much nonsense that their own self-awareness is dulled or erased, at least while they are in character. Somehow this can remain true even as among their fellow employees they might develop some offstage irony about the employer’s claims…

But anyway, I have found Air Canada to be relatively decent and reliable—except, of course, when they pull one of their switcheroos and without announcement replace the large jet with modern engine that you were scheduled to fly on with one of their toy propeller planes. This has happened several times over the years. 

And so, here we were again, unexpectedly—though it could have been expected—on a prop about to take off from Montreal for Québec City, and I heard:

Luggage loading at the back of the plane, the gas tank filling, an unknown compartment also somewhere near the back—or maybe underneath—repeatedly opening and shutting, and before long all sounds merged into a single monotonous thudding, and now that they were indistinguishable, it sounded like a coffin being nailed up around us.

And then, as the props (yes, a pun, those aren’t real engines of flight) began to turn, continuing through liftoff and ascent and then up at the mid-sky main altitude, there was the droning funereal foghorn of the engines resounding across the plane’s metal underbelly and within its hollow body, where we all sat, twenty rows at most, tinned little serried cadavers, waiting for the eager hands of some god to pull back the top and begin its meal.

And I saw:

The bliss cloud-spot of my blasphemous manuscript fecklessly hidden in the overhead—

And I knew:

That this shining little blasphemy, burning up the air in secret, would also somehow protect us during the turbulence that was inevitable for such a light canister of a plane. G-d would be only too solicitous to preserve it, as the Lord takes more honor from such spiteful works than from acts of direct praise.

And finally, landing in Québec City, below:

The northern green riverine lushland of the St. Lawrence, where death is too, but death with a long memory, never quite forgetting, which is impossible in the flatter, vacant lands of America’s lower Midwest, where everything is soon dried up and gone. 

2 

Baie-St-Paul: 

An Idea of the Future

Baie-St-Paul, Charlevoix, Québec

It’d been a few years since we first stayed at the inn, and speaking with the owner, he reflected on the advancing age of his great dog Benoit, who had become noticeably older since our first trip. Half-jokingly our host said he was saving poor Benoit’s hair, to clone him some day. “The technology’s not there yet,” he added, and even if it was, right now it’d be too expensive. But one day it’ll be affordable and common. “Come back,” he said, “you’ll meet Benoit 2.” 

But why do I record this? It wasn’t just the casual talk of a near future in which physical remains—hair, skin, nail scrapings, etc.—allow for rampant, brisk, consumer-driven cloning. Something else our host said, something both eerie and accurate, caught my attention. He cheerfully imagined for us a reborn Benoit running around the inn’s yard. Then he smiled and qualified what he was saying: “But it won’t be exactly Benoit, it’ll be a little bit different.” A surprising admission within an otherwise utopian thought, an acknowledgment of that troubling reality best expressed by Sir Thomas Browne:

There was never anything so like another as in all points to concur: there will ever some reserved difference slip in, to prevent the identity.

If not for such difference, however subtle and small, two things would be the same—they wouldn’t be two at all. This is why likenesss—and not sameness—is abundant. And what is likeness? The entrancing, alluring mischief of G-d. It mesmerizes and disturbs us: a form has been repeated—oh no it hasn’t—one of these things is just like—but is not!—another…The awareness that nothing is ever repeated in all the minute particulars makes likeness a main element of the uncanny. Everything we perceive is the work of hidden irresolution, an insolubility that is the basis for distinct forms. The lines of figure are close, so close, converging and then—they’ve swerved imperceptibly away! So many boundaries have been transgressed, and many points overlapped, and yet ultimately there’s only a diminishment of apparent difference, not the erasure of actual difference. 

No matter what sameness you claim to find, allow enough time, the independent activity of some minor constitutional element will make itself known: there’s an off tone in that area of color where too much light seems caught, there’s a sudden crimp in the straightness of a line, a smile involves eyes that belong to other genes and have been superimposed on the otherwise familial visage you’re staring at—and what you’d believed was one is in fact other, a new metaphysical joke lands, the deft Comedian saunters about triumphantly, delivering to Himself silent universal applause, undoing this, assembling that, building up and then leveling according to the rhythm of setup and punch line. His materials are the basic elements of sensation, perception, understanding, memory: don’t get too comfortable in your chair, because in a moment it’ll be gone, pulled from beneath you by the supreme Joke-Teller, Who amuses some of us randomly at the terrible expense of others, and then randomly amuses others at our expense, Who guarantees that the supposedly known world of association and expectation remains a trickshow of fluid forms, Who won’t allow for sameness, oneness, anywhere in existence except in His Own Inviolable Circularbeing, keeping every individual thing not only out of union with others but also out of union with itself, so that the universal law is alienation, and existence is a condition of infinite forms, and we are all feckless seekers after harmony and reconciliation.

We will do anything to spare ourselves the pain of loss and emptiness. There will be a mania for cloning if some version of it becomes widely available. But what’s likely is that such a scientific consumerist experiment will exacerbate the melancholy of bereavement. Instead of resurrecting the dead, we will perpetuate three-dimensional shadows, forms of livid, substantial flesh and blood that are mere images of vanished originals: acute physical similitude fitting inexactly into the spiritual shape of vacancy, like an impersonator twitching in the impersonated’s clothing and, before the thought is even clear in your mind, you recognize that they are an imposter. This state of things will lead to the merciless reinforcement of separation, and with it an even sharper longing for what cannot be restored, a longing that for some will become dangerous, all-consuming. Who can say what they’ll do then? And over it all there’ll be the sustained hegemony of the Good Lord’s good humor. 

3

Fleuve Saint-Laurent

Somewhere on the water, near Tadoussac

Past Québec City, near Baie-St-Paul and beyond, further up 138 past La Malbaie and after at Baie-St-Catherine and Tadoussac, the St. Lawrence is the North American “river that flows nowhere, like a sea.” That is your river of rivers, a silent spectacle of wideness, a giant in its still-running bed. They don’t call it “rivière,” but “fleuve”—something more than river, we were told, somewhat like an ocean: having oceanic elements and yet not ocean. There on the wide Fleuve St-Laurent, a primalness, a beauty at whose mercy the population lives. Even today the river seems to be the origin of worlds. Charlevoix, formed by a meteorite! The lucid dream country of your hills.

The fleuve is fresh water south of Québec City, salt north. Up near Tadoussac, the Saguenay Fjord waters are fresh on top, salt on the bottom, and separated from the fleuve by a sharp natural boundary where their waters meet but somehow don’t mix: their different constitutions—different bodily lives—keep them from interflowing past visible demarcation. It’s almost supernatural, a spell of fluvial difference you might find in a Coleridge poem, where a part of the natural world has been enchanted and you come upon it by accident, waking to find yourself in a place that has overtaken, while you were off and thinking, the world you knew. Out on those waters there’s a sense of trespassing on ancient undisturbed things. Your presence might provoke retribution from below to make right the profanation and restore the primal quiet in which: the surrounding hills are undefilably green and the sky is gray and seems to shed itself over the water’s dark surface, giving the air long middle sections that are somewhat hazy and unreal and yet have the clarity of aborted storms. In this serenity whales roll through the water, so languid it’s as if they were turning over out of sleep to face the sky and roll up into it, but then, thinking better, they turn back to their darker underwater world.

4

Rapaces

Baie-St-Paul

On our last day in Baie-St-Paul we went to the Museum of Contemporary Art. The main show featured work by the Mexican-Québécois artist René Derouin, Rapaces: transfixing images made from black, bright brown, red, white, and some yellow—with a few alleviations of blue and green—earth tones, mud and body. Some of the pieces were quite large, nearly taking up whole walls. Throughout the gallery there was movement of color, shapes, and pattern: when you turned in place, the room was full of hectic, circling, threatening motion, frenetic inertia, discontent, panic.

Catastrophic geometries. Chaos of greed and compulsion. These images featured perfect spheres—the planet—with a perfect balance of shapes and trajectories dividing and tracing each sphere’s circumference. Symmetry seemed to proliferate in destruction, giving the chaos a kind of mechanistic inevitability, as if these rapacious, intelligent forms were controlled by an extraordinary operation—as if, beyond the apparent blue insignificance of sky, there’s deliberate conducting of earthly upheaval and injustice. The assumption that nature is chaos is wrong, these scenes suggested—there’s a scheme to the violent disorder of the world: cycles of theft, exploitation, pollution, debasement, ruin, shame, helplessness, injury, madness, rage, suffering are all precisely stage-managed. And because this world of depravity is exact and total in its constitutional geometry, there’s no escaping it. Whatever you think and do, wherever you go, however you behave, no matter your efforts to arrange a place not subject to the forces of such a world, you are bound within it. To remove yourself is not only impossible, circumstantially, but impossible existentially. Those visceral lines drawn by sky-severing predatory movements go also along the blood circulating in your own guts. The universe is nailed down through the center of your body, held in place through that tiny locus of instinct and reaction. And if the universe is drawn taut in us, in what are we?  

G-d. 

The unforgiving, frantic cycles of flight and descent, fear and conspiracy and predation, represented by Derouin as the tyranny of revolving bodies, is in the world— through us—out of the breath of G-d. 

To be a thorn of G-d! 

We, delirious, full of vision, compulsive, incorrigible, are all fixed in that immensity. We seem alien to it, as if our beginnings were elsewhere and we were accidentally, unfortunately, caught in its skin. We protrude from that Body, never completely detached, never wholly incorporate, hardly noted. And we believe that the elaborate passage of sensation that we call life comes from our own self-generated motion and not the greater motion that carries us always in it.

5 

Cape Ann

Rockport, Massachusetts

Back in the States, we went to Cape Ann and walked around Bearskin Neck. Little stores close together, dense seaside streets, old fishing village histories, everywhere they were selling coffee, ice cream, lobster rolls. Full sun with a breeze, the sea enough in the air to keep things cool.

We sat on Front Beach to kill some time and read “The Dry Salvages” out loud, taking turns with different sections. Overall it’s the weakest part of The Four Quartets, but there’s this:

The sea has many voices,

Many gods and many voices.

The salt is on the briar rose,

The fog is in the fir trees.

The sea howl

And the sea yelp, are different voices

Often together heard…

We read those lines and looked at how far the bright green land, rain-rejuvenated, reached into the dark blue Atlantic. Near us on the shore, the water was gray and quietly crashing—cloudy with shells, silt, stones, sand, sea vegetation. But when you walked just a few steps into the water, the gray yielded to a greenish light blue, where thin reflections of sun ran in different directions, like tracks of invisible youthful gods. “Ionia, they still love you,” Cavafy says, and so it was. 

Further out, past the boats, beyond the tranquil half-circle of shore and barely-moving ocean, there was the endless light-pervaded darkness of the open sea, mesmeric and impelling beneath the bright blue cloudless sky, extending the horizon past several false endings, filling the eye with length and blue width: the out-there flat sheet of moving dreams, the giant calm disturbing intricate ties among things: 

…a time

Older than the time of chronometers, older

Than time counted by anxious worried women

Lying awake, calculating the future,

Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel

And piece together the past and the future,

Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception,

The future futureless, before the morning watch

When time stops and time is never ending…

We read and watched the various waters moving within that great solitary dark blue body. Moment by moment it seemed to darken further in the sunlight by mere adjacency to the well-watered green lawns. 

After a while we walked back to town, stopped for dinner, and then continued our walk, ending up in an antique dealer’s gallery. The instant we were through the door, an old woman shot up from her rocking chair, shot up out of sleep and greeted us, her attention immediately on R. I stepped back as they began to speak.

This woman, Aud, was, as she herself emphasized, “quite old,” playing word games with her name for several sentences before revealing that “old” meant 89 in human years. She somehow seemed to have been waiting for R, and now that R was there she spoke without pause, breathlessly covering long periods of time and far places of the world. Aud and her husband had lived all over Scandinavia, throughout Europe, in Africa, and at last, in America, first New York and now, probably finally, Cape Ann. She spoke several languages and had studied at the University of Glasgow. This made sense—her English sounded like she was Scottish, though she was born in Norway. 

She talked about the duty of shop owners in seaside towns to stay open late for tourists out walking after dinner. A few quite-American families with young kids, in workout clothes and showing by the glow of their skin that they had money and lived lives of enthusiastic consumption, came in, did a minute tour of the shop, then fled from its atmosphere of dust and faded red and silver and doilies, repulsed by the air of trinkety decay and eager to be out in the sea air again and probably to eat ice cream. One of these glowing families walked up the ramp with their bright hedge of a golden retriever, at the sight of which Aud’s voice turned harsh: “No! No—dogs!” she shouted, bringing her hand down like an official signaling to the executioner, kick the stools!—and all the bodies fall, the ropes catch, they’re swinging in the aftermath. 

“Where was I?” she asked R and turned back to us, the glowing family now out of sight. She had mild disdain for the things she sold in this semi-retired phase of her career. A “licensed antiques dealer for a long time, because I am very old,” she spoke of serious traders and buyers in New York and Washington. Asking why we were in town, and hearing that it was for a concert, she scoffed and told us to save our money and go to London if we wanted to see real concerts. We didn’t try to explain to her who we were seeing, but smiled and allowed her to assume that it was chamber music. She encouraged us to look around, but also wouldn’t let it happen—her words kept us at the front of the store, where she swayed over stiff legs and swollen blue ankles. They seemed to have been without blood for years. 

She wore a yellow lamb’s wool cardigan, a long skirt, clogs. Her short white hair was clipped to the side in an almost girlish hipster way. Her face was deeply-lined and dark beige, as only a face that has been in a lot of sun can be, but agile and alert and primed to its speech, not stiff leather like a mask. Her husband had built this house forty years ago. Her shop was on the first floor and their home was above it. She spoke about the length of her marriage—and twice during the conversation a door in the back opened slightly and a sliver of cautious frail face looked out—a man’s, checking on Aud, or maybe looking to see if she was ready to come in for dinner. 

It was now about 7:30 and we had to start walking toward the venue. R thanked Aud and then we did a brief turn through the shop—it seemed that nearly everything was from England or Ohio. R asked me about some China, holding up a demitasse and small plate. “Sure, “ I said, and then R, “It’s probably full of lead,” and then, “Let’s go,” I said, touching her hand. Aud’s showroom was mostly plates, glass, tea service, chairs. But: bizarre and unsettling in the corner, as if the eyes of the room, there was a dazed, possessed-looking black doll in a blindingly white dress and bonnet. 

Aud took a ladle and clanged the side of a punch bowl, which made a clear and full-toned, chest-striking ring. The fullness of sound faded slowly, and even after it was gone, the air still seemed to vibrate—“tat is tha sound of rreal crrrystal,” Aud told us, “yuh can always tell rreal crrrystal,” rolling each “r” emphatically but relaxed. Strange sudden pride for a woman who moments before had a sneer for her inventory! 

While she was talking, we moved minimally, adjusting our feet in a shallow circle as if under a spell—the spell of politeness. Behind her, past the sales counter, there was a square window showing the sea and horizon. No boats, nothing alive and moving, nothing showing a populated world, not even rocks. Just sea, sky, the yellow rose of the sun setting, reflected across the air and making the sea shine. An amazing view, we would later say after leaving, imagine looking at that every day. How time must be essentially different in such a life, at the end of so many years and with that presence of sea beside you. How it must move in your thoughts, your memory, anything your heart remains capable of. How it is both a fitting final image and risibly too grand, too empty, too beautiful and unrestrained, how it is an immense comically exaggerated breath of our own being and completely alien to it. How it is the chest of an austere, tyrannical G-d, and you ache to lie on it, carried up and down by—listening closely to—its “soft swell and fall.” Yes, “To feel forever its soft swell and fall”—to still be troubled by dream and desire even in the abundant sleep of old age, to still feel the trouble of animation in your blood even within a mostly still body, even then to have restless motion be part of you—the mockery of unexpungeable yearning in such decline! The sea rocks each of us in an obscure cradle. We are capable of so much and can even seem transformed by time into bearers of wisdom or figures of endurance, and yet each of us in the final heart sits bewildered, whispered to and entranced by prodigal motions we can’t translate into common speech, which leave us senseless, stunned with conviction. My mind was full of imagined old lives—sea widows who lived alone on the edge of human existence, their husbands disappeared beyond that edge, sitting and watching at the end of land as if above the “most mellow, most musical” abyss, watching it move, and the heart forming unfathomable things. The weary hypnosis of enduring such time, the subdued prolongation of loss. You cannot leave—away from that silently hysterical shore, instantly you would die. You are there only and no other thoughts come to you but this, a murmur, such time will never end. 

***

Adam Kosan's writing has been published in The Fortnightly Review, Chicago Review, Prelude, and The Quarterly Conversation. He's directed a live performance of Christopher Logue's All Day Permanent Red and an opera, Productions of Time, for which he also wrote the libretto.