As it always is. Undiscovered. Looking out over the undulating desert. In places, the land seems broken. Stitched up ravines, red with rock. Stitched up with more rock. In other places cut by the fluid snakes of arroyos that may wait hundreds of years for their water fix. The sparse grass remains invisible from up here, the scrub only the thinnest transparent border to the land.
Only wind speaks against the silence, sometimes wailing. The ancient forests lie beneath the earth except in those few places where the earth has eroded–worn away to expose stone trunks of former trees. Insect. Lizard. Bird cry.
Oh, the country can be anyplace. Undiscovered. And it may look different as countries do. It may rise ruggedly green with mountains rising into clouds. It may be storms, or ice, or water. Wood, pasture, or the faces of the changing sky.
For the country lies within us really. Within us. Ebbing and flowing within us all our days, and glowing like fireflies on margins of a deeper dusk. Gloaming. The gently deepening dark. Our own end a part and parcel of our beginning and our existence. No life without death. Crescendo and diminuendo, turn on turn, but never monotonous.
Even when death moves apart from the landscape, it remains part of it. Part of the land within us.
Confederate General Thomas Stonewall Jackson reportedly sat up on his deathbed to utter his famous last words, “Let us pass over the river and rest under the shade of the trees.” (1863)
The Blackfoot Chief Crowfoot’s last words also touch the land:
What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. (1890)
Matsuo Bashō, arguably the most famous of the haiku poets, looks to a landscape that is both external and internal:
Sick on a journey,
my dreams wander
the withered fields. (1694)
Of course, these few examples merely brush at a suggestion of the whole, the magnitude of stars, the inner plains rippling and extending, the inner skies bright under moons we have and haven’t seen. Yet, we will see them.
For we are all on foot, walking, trudging, running, dancing, limping, or crawling towards that subtle light that faintly outlines the ridge of the hill ahead of us. We are not, all of us Gatsby, and yet we are:
And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
Borne back, and borne ahead as well. The days melting and running on ahead until those sunlit afternoons, the hill walks, the summers that all came before brittle into cricket song, and we find ourselves wondering up at the great vault of night above us. Yet this earth, and the sea, and the high stars, these are all our home, and scratching the undiscovered reveals the origin beneath them all.
Again, Bashō says, “Every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”
Much is sometimes made of Bashō and, for that matter, of Sterne as well, because each undertook a journey when they knew they were dying. Yet the tradition of writing death poems–poems that were often written by Zen (or Ch’an) masters shortly before their death–is an older and a broader one than can be comfortably linked to one geographical area or to one tradition of thought. Tennyson did it, writing a poem that, while not his last, he requested be printed last in any subsequent collection of his verse (and most editors still observe the tradition of honoring his request):
Crossing the Bar
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For tho’ from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
Robert Louis Stevenson wrote his own epitaph, and it is carved on his gravestone:
Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me;
“Here he lies where he longed to be,
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.”
Striking how inseparable we actually are from the land. Even from that “undiscovered country from whose bourn/ No traveller returns”. Is this because we cannot envision anything beyond the familiar corner of the universe that we inhabit? Is it that we ourselves are intimate, promiscuous even, with the great beauty that sounds from the rolling breakers of the world? Do we find ourselves in the sound of a bird, in glowering storms, or the long slow speech of trees? Do we find ourselves in both the life and death, in the living and the dying that are so much a part of all one ineffable whole?
We consume the animating music of the cosmos, and it devours us, slowly and in blinks. Here and gone, the grass rolling away to the edge of the sea and sky, we breathe the air and then tomorrow comes as it will.
*Quotations from Bashō are from his Narrow Road to the Interior. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s quote is from The Great Gatsby. Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar is available in most collections of his poetry, as is Robert Louis Stevenson’s epitaph. The “undiscovered country” is, of course, from Hamlet (3.2. around lines 86-7 depending on the edition). Each of these authors, and each of their works, is well worth reading. They are treasures, and (in my humble opinion, as it is often said) well worth any time that you might put into being further acquainted with them.