Something about the River

“Can I say something about… the river,” Dr. Michael Mack almost sheepishly interjects. “If I’m not mistaken, ‘the river is within us, the sea is all about us;’ that makes us the land.”

Perhaps we are the land, but I am not the land. If anything, I am a piece of dirt, a semi-stable thing only when packed close to other earthy things; but, dig me up, throw me in the air, or put me out to sea, and I am lost. 

Now lost, perhaps time will settle me again? No, time gives no consolations to the ragged soul: “Time the destroyer is time the preserver” (l. 115), and the moments of agony are perhaps more easily preserved than the moments of happiness. The second section of “The Dry Salvages” is about the “problem of the permanence of past pain,” Dr. Gregory Baker says. Pain remains even when we change. Agony is permanent: 

We appreciate this better

In the agony of others, nearly experienced,

Involving ourselves, than in our own.

For our own past is covered by the currents of action, 

But the torment of others remains an experience

Unqualified, unworn by subsequent attrition.

People change, and smile: but the agony abides.

(l. 108-114)

In remembering, I change the experience, and time can’t heal the agony if the “I” that suffered the pain is gone: “Time is no healer: the patient is no longer here” (l. 131). Time only heals by destroying who I was before, by reorienting myself around the past pain. Only the relationship changes, and “in navigable weather,” when the storm has subsided and life is calm, “it is always a seamark / To lay a course by” (l. 121-22). The moments of pain become the guiding moments, the memories that map the future and the past.

How can I understand myself if I am always changing? Even if I understand myself now, is that “I” that understands the same as the “I” that I sought to understand? I know myself with reference to the permanent moments that I know only as changing memories. The process is like coming to understand an enigmatic poem. One wades through contradictions, moments, pains, but Dr. Taryn Okuma reassures us that “that experience of accumulating all of these images and these experiences of negation and of contradiction does not wear you down to the point where it becomes meaningless, but it somehow does accumulate meaning.” Tension does not snap the chord, and a subtle shift does not displace the dirt. 

February 2022