The Road to Digby Neck
I dream of journeys repeatedly – so begins Theodore Roethke’s visionary poem ‘The Far Field’, which I read for the first time over twenty years ago now. In the poem, what begins as a stringent, metered eulogy to landscape expands to end in a metaphysical meditation on infinity – on the transmission between its dimensionless glimmer, the land, and us.
I read this poem long before the dreams of journeys by plane, specifically not being able to fly because all air travel has been grounded; also dreams of planes crashing, usually while trying to land. In the dreams the planes were felled not by wind or mechanical failure but by wires, like telegraph wires.
Before my trip to Canada and the States that year these dreams had become more insistent. In them, over and over again I am stranded somewhere in North America because international aviation has been cancelled and there are no flights home to Europe. In desperation I board planes to Vancouver, to Toronto, but they are going in the wrong direction, or they fail to take off, and I can’t get home.
LHR-NYC
The flight takes me from London to New York; at Newark I will catch another plane and fly back up to Nova Scotia – a lot of back-tracking, but that’s the way the ticket works. After seeing friends in Halifax I must fly back down to New York; from there I will take a train to Washington, DC, where I will attend an academic conference. Then I will spend a week in early-to-mid September in New York City itself, having meetings with business and academic contacts.
We fly directly over Halifax, unmistakeable in the perfect visibility, with its neat peninsula bounded by the dark blotch of Bedford Basin, an extraordinarily deep former freshwater lake. The sun glints off the two silk threads of the harbour bridges, the MacDonald and the MacKay, strung between Dartmouth and Halifax. If only I could be let off here and parachute 29,000 feet down.
I sit on the right hand side of the aircraft. I have a perfect view of the Bay of Fundy. I see Digby Neck, a tendril of land strung above the hump of Nova Scotia’s back, bordered on one side by a gigantic bay raked by the highest tides in the world. The Bay of Fundy drains twice daily then refills, powered by a churning tidal gyre. During the 12.4 hour long tidal period 115 billion tonnes of water flow into the bay; in places the difference between high and low tide is 17 metres.
We are over the Gulf of Maine when suddenly the plane’s engines flare and we accelerate rapidly, banking to the left, heading out over the Atlantic. I flip up my windowshade, which I have closed in deference to the snoozing passengers around me, and find another plane, so close I can see the silhouettes of the passengers through the portholes, arching away from us. I estimate three to five miles separate us, wingtip to wingtip. At our groundspeed of 500 miles an hour we would have collided within seconds.
I look around me to see if anyone else has seen the plane, but the other passengers sit blindfolded by eye masks, or watching films. Should I knock on the cockpit door and ask the pilots, what’s going on – excellent visibility; don’t you have radar; what about the collision warning systems? I do nothing, because in part I want to believe that nothing has happened. There was no plane alongside us. I imagined the whole thing.
We fly on in the cosseting semi-darkness of the cabin. I keep my windowshade open, just in case. The rigid white light of late summer falls across my legs, but there is no warmth in it. The plane hums on through the stratosphere.
Sliver
Highway 217 is 95 kilometres long. It forms the backbone of that slim finger pointing into the Gulf of Maine. He would see it so clearly from the air in the planes he would fly years later, gliding over the narrow glacier-gouged province of his birth.
There is nowhere else in the world like the Neck, forged from a lava flow and shaped like the handle of a violin bow at its thickest, least itinerant point, before whittling to a sliver just over 3 kilometers wide that peters out in Brier Island. He will drive the Neck that night. He doesn’t know why, only that he is being compelled to arrive at the edge of things.
The tidal bore appears as a narrow silver wave; he can see it coming on the horizon, a twice-daily visitation by a miniature tsunami. On the mudflats sand pipers, clams, junebugs, sand worms, quahogs, mussels, barnacles lie in wait for the cover of water. Without it they are exposed. Overhead crows, hawks, bald eagles and seagulls sortie to spot the flash of sun on wet flesh.
He has to make a decision: whether to leave, or to stay.
Near the end of Highway 217 the spit of land fragments into three narrow islands. Here ferries must be taken, tiny engineless four-car floats, pulleyed across the sand banks on a chain. Once, not so long ago, the chain broke, and the ferry with its cargo of five cars and their passengers drifted out into the Bay of Fundy. There was nothing to be done except wait for the tide to deliver it back to shore.
He wears a lumberjack shirt, James Dean jeans. There is something louche about him with his narrow hips, dark hair, dark eyes, broad forehead. He has just completed a Masters in forestry – two years scrabbling in forests of tamarack, white birch, black pine.
It is late July. The water in the bay is a single tile of silver slate. He passes raw inlets, their charcoal-coloured rocks encrusted with molluscs wheezing, bordered by fireweed, black knapweed, wild iris. Much of the road is lined by tall sea cliffs. He is a fossil hunter, an amateur geologist. He can read this ice age landscape with its abandoned boulders, the spruce forest and its haze of angles, the soil whose parsimony so shocked our peat-weaned ancestors. The rock is Triassic basalt, formed at the time of the Lapteus Ocean, a body of water which appeared after the dissolution of Pangea and which had riven New Brunswick in two. In the basalt flows of North Mountain he scours for a shimmer of jasper, amethyst, quartz, zeolite.
In the time it takes to drive the Neck he will witness one and a half tidal phases, he will watch as the fishing boats are levitated 17 metres from their sandy moorings, buoying them level with the wharves. Then, a moment of poise, of stalled saturation, before the gyre starts to drain the water out again.
Clams
We are ten, eleven, twelve and we are swimming at Blomidon. At high tide the beach is nearly erased and we scrabble into the water over a perimeter of pebbles. I watch my fingers and toes turn blue; on emerging our lips have also taken on this mortuary hue, and our flesh is red with cold. We sit on the beach wrapped in towels, shivering, watching the water drain away to reveal the stranded cargo on the mudflats: salt-petrified oranges, driftwood in the shape of small dinosaurs, sun-bleached sea urchin shells.
The Bay is rimmed with pine islands. Roots of scrawny spruce trees grip their rocks like tentacles. I sink up to my knees in the suctioning mud of low tide. Under cloud the mud is the colour of thin coffee but a fleshy tone, a kind of pink-ochre in the midsummer sun barking overhead. The mud is dotted with air bubbles, signs of a thousand small mouths.
On the way home we gorge ourselves at U-Picks, our mouths stained red with strawberry juice. Behind us the Bay empties and fills, the unsteady horizon rising to the sky and then draining out of sight. We are children, and so we do not yet know that we will not always be here. Time expands and we luxuriate in forever. Home is only that place where we work out our relationship to destiny.
The Drive
It’s one of those bulbous-nosed farm pickups. The gear shift sticks, the brake pads are frayed, butter-coloured foam bubbles through the passenger seat. Ahead he sees a ribbon of Nova Scotia tarmac, that distinctive sunbleached denim hue so unique that once, while watching an American film ostensibly set on Long Island, I was gripped by an acute homesickness. As the credits rolled I understood why: it had been filmed in coastal Nova Scotia. North America is an emporia of freedoms, one of which is to simply drive. You drive not so much to get anywhere, but so that you know for sure you are alive.
He has one hand on the steering wheel, another clutches a cigarette. It is the summer of 1968 and he is twenty-four years old. How can he know that some decisions we take loiter like spectres in our lives?
The lemon light simmers, then is replaced on the edge of the sky by a soaring plume of red.
Rossway, Gulliver’s Cove, Waterford. The names fit the geography of the Neck like a glove. He is more dissatisfied now with the narrow corridors of memory, with words like morals and choice. Today, he needs a future.
The sun hangs low over the Bay. Now it is sherbet-bright, but soon it will sink into tangerine, the persimmon beloved of the Algonquin peoples who once sleeked through these forests.
Centreville, Lake Midway, Sandy Cove. From the radio spill songs already passé elsewhere but which will be played over and over on Nova Scotia radio stations for years to come: ‘Harper Valley PTA’ by Jeannie C. Riley, ‘Mony, Mony’ by Tommy James and the Shondells. Whenever that summer’s hit, ‘Love Child’ by Diana Ross and The Supremes, comes on the radio, he switches it off.
He wonders why no-one seems to think: here, love, let’s rest and be content. Here we can be happy for awhile. No, we want it to go on forever. We are greedy for more and more future. He is an adventurer, perhaps; he has no talent for planning for the future, but then we don’t, as a species, even though it is the future which dazzles us, with its gassy expansiveness ransacked by possibilities. But the future is just like today: another day, then another and another. Most of the time, nothing much happens. Then, suddenly, it does.
The Crescendo
In late August 2001, two jets nearly collide over the Gulf of Maine. I am on one of them. Or it was only a routine encounter, and we were never in any danger, thanks to the excellent visibility, the radar systems? My father was a pilot, he would have known. My mother, unusually for a woman from the Maritimes and of limited means, also obtained her private pilot’s license. I am the only one of the three of us who cannot fly a plane.
An energy is gathering. I feel it, although not consciously. The days that deliver me to that definitive day are too bright, anticipatory. On September 9th, crossing Chesapeake Bay on an Amtrak train from Washington to New York I wonder why does everything look so crisp, so rooted in reality? The shy storks and herons standing in the brackish waters on the rim of the bay, the way the sunlight ricochets off the chrome of passing cars, the women sitting on tenement steps as we streak through Baltimore. Everything looks etched. It looks meant.
I register my suspicion, then dismiss it. I can’t know what I am intuiting. After all, no-one knows the future.
Sunset
Mink Cove, Little River. The old convenience store has been on this spot for a hundred years. The overall-clad owner tells him, ‘it used to be coaches and horses that stood outside, feed bags over the horses’ heads, them being drenched in water in the summer. I remember it myself.’ Then it was a day’s coach ride from Long Island to the mainland, down to Meteghan.
He buys a Baxter’s ice cream, chocolate (this will be my favourite flavour, too), peers amiably into the windows of old clapboard houses, sees the net curtains, old Singer sewing machines, doilies on cool lintels against the dusky orange heat. In darkened kitchens old women sit in rockers.
He makes his peace with the things he will never know. There are no ruins on the Neck; unlike me he will never see Rome, Athens, the great lost Mayan cities of the jungle. A man might pass through this new land and leave only footprints. But these are quickly swallowed by the tide.
Whale Cove, Tiddville, East Ferry. There are no whales in Whale Cove. At least not at the moment. Wrong season, or wrong time in the season, an old man wearing a lumberjack shirt tells him. ‘They’re down near Maine, feeding,’ the man says, as if he knows them personally.
Sunset on the peninsula, unaligned with neither the sky nor the earth. The sand like the flanks of racehorses heaving; underneath them, quahogs brew.
Long Island, Brier Island. Four bodies of water surround Brier Island: The Atlantic Ocean, the Bay of Fundy, St Mary’s Bay, Grand Passage.
Where am I? Fizzing into life in an incubation chamber. I have been given my coordinates, and they are set. I am very nearly ready for re-entry. I get the word from Ground Control: get ready. There will be a burning feeling, but don’t worry. We’ll catch you when you fall.
He is never closer to me than at that moment. He stands on a shore near Boar’s Head lighthouse in the darkening gleam of a Nova Scotia summer. An instant separates us. We might be ships, or planes, passing in the night.
A Refusal
8.35am. I am on the street in lower Chinatown when a plane roars overhead flying very low. The sound of its engines is more a tear than a roar, it takes up all the available space in my head. I look up but the slice of sky above me is too narrow, and the plane, which is slightly to my left, is hidden behind a building. But I do catch a glint of silver paint. I say to myself: that’s an American Airlines plane.
There is a loud thud, and the sound of metal and crashing glass – sheets and sheets of it. The ground beneath my feet shudders. There is no explosion, actually the sound is muffled, as if several trucks or other large vehicles had collided far away.
I walk south. Any moment I will turn the corner and be shown that the plane I glimpsed flying far too low over Manhattan has not crashed into a building, it was merely circling for La Guardia, and that the sound I heard, the thick dull thud, was some other accident.
The plume of black smoke comes into view, then soon after it the airplane-sized hole in the World Trade Center – I do not yet know whether it is the South Tower or the North, until now I haven’t really thought of the buildings as separate entities. It’s an optical illusion. I allow my brain to refuse its meaning. That is not real. My mind stalls uselessly in a serene rut. I insist on following my plan for the day. Will I have time to go to the Whitney between my first and second meetings?
What is happening in that moment is well documented in photographs, in bystander footage, in documentaries. But there is a chaotic and subjective dimension to personal experience which – no matter how vérité the style – the camera fails to capture. The way everything slows down and speeds up, for example, as if I am being paused and fast-forwarded through time. Or the stomach plunge of horror.
I am only dimly aware of others like me, sleepwalking toward the buildings, squinting into the light of a perfect Indian summer morning. I have approached the Towers in this mesmeric state, and am now only four blocks away. Very soon I start to see oblong black pieces of debris falling through the sky; but it’s not debris, yes, look at how the white sheet billows, no it’s a shirt. Where these people stood only seconds before, perched on the edge of a jagged broken building, flames now emerge, clutching at their vanished bodies. I do not avert my eyes. I do not have time to think, I have never watched anyone die before. I am transfixed by the sickening simplicity of their dilemma: because they are so high up, and cannot get down, they must die.
Between the canyons of the buildings another puzzle emerges. A jet appears. It is heading straight for where I stand. Then an explosion roars through my head. It is the loudest sound I have ever heard, much louder than the impact of the first plane, which had sounded so delicate and clinical, like a glass orchestra. The ground shakes.
What I feel is not panic, or fear, or dread, but the familiarity of it all. I have been expecting it. This was the first thing I think: oh, it’s here. It’s arrived. But what is it? The end of the world? World War Three? It had only felt like an increase in pressure, a crescendo, both inside and outside me. All that time it has been waiting to exist, and now it’s here.
Trans-Canada
It’s the 1970s and I grow up five or six hours away by road from where he lives, on an island of rustbelt towns, gaunt streets where only funeral parlours and the Liquor Commission do a thriving business. This is a town of houses painted mint green and which overlook a stewing sea and its foam of industrial efflux, nothing like his stentorian Valley town, its wooden palaces with corpulent verandas. But there are things we share: the gawky cawing of crows, the blue-sunk mountains, the evening sun disappearing into a garrison of black spruce and tamarack.
Once, we passed him on the Trans-Canada highway, although I didn’t know about it until much later, when my grandmother eventually divulged who she and my mother were exclaiming about that day – ‘is it him? I’m sure it’s him! – a figure in a checked shirt bent over the steering wheel of an old Dodge pick-up we overtook in our gas-guzzling station wagon somewhere near Truro.
In those years I never went looking for the residue of his existence. I was twelve, thirteen, fourteen and spent my vacations on Highway 104, driving from Halifax to Cape Breton and back for funerals, to visit relatives in lung cancer wards, the mental hospital, the detox. Radio stations played the same songs incessantly: ‘Working my Way Back to You’ by the Spinners, ‘Cars’ by Gary Numan. Then summers for me were a purgatory; it seemed as if time had not only stopped but had stubbornly gone into reverse, winding backwards through the ages: Quaternary, Triassic, Jurassic. You can hear the minutes hesitate, then decide to keep their counsel. The Spinners keep spinning.
A Dream Made Real is Still a Dream
Suddenly people are running in all directions, without looking where they are going. I will remember the woman who falls face-first on the asphalt in the middle of 6th Avenue; her shiny red nails claw at the asphalt, ripping her fingers open. I think I might faint from the heat and my impromptu sprint uptown, after the impact of the second plane’s explosion. I duck into a grocery store and buy a banana and a bottle of water. I am surprised to find the shopkeeper still there, as if I expected him to have deserted his post.
I walk out into the blaring sun. I am covered in a thin mist of sweat. I am shaking, but only slightly. My body seems to be trying to contain its responses.
I look at the burning buildings and think, they will last two hours, tops. I am not a structural engineer but I am very certain about this. And when the first comes toppling down the time of its dissolution – actually a slow process, relative to the planes – passes in an instant, and all around me people scatter as in cartoons where everybody runs in a different direction and all crash into each other.
I am not afraid, rather detached. I look at the deserted cross-streets and marvel at the camber of Manhattan. I hadn’t noticed how the island rose in the centre, how this hump tapered toward each shore. The only sounds are car radios blaring up-to-the-minute reports. Single words volley out: hijack, terrorists, Palestine. Bystanders and van drivers and businessmen expound wild immediate theories. The sky is ripped open above our heads. Instinctively I duck, just in time to see a fighter plane cruising down Fifth Avenue.
I remember the dreams of planes landing in cities, on deserted avenues. In the dreams the planes can’t get enough altitude, so the plane must land in the city, on the street, amongst all the wires. It is shredded, just like a boiled egg cut with one of those wire contraptions. I am in the plane. Sometimes I escape, sometimes I don’t.
The strange thing is, now that I seem to be alive within one of my dreams, I feel let down by my intuition (if that’s what it is). Having dreamt about this day, anticipated it perhaps on some cellular level, does not help me live through it. There is a bracing exigency to the real which I actually prefer. The dream was always far more fearful than the reality – not that I am not frightened, as I duck pointlessly in the tear of the jet fighter’s wake. What’s the point of intuition, never mind premonition? We may as well live blind, and perhaps this is the whole point: human beings cannot withstand knowing much future.
Night Messages
That night he will sleep in the truck, parked along the shore well above the tideline. First he buys a bottle of Coke and a pack of chips, his supper for the night. The convenience store is hot; inside the chocolate bars melt in their wrappers and the pop bottles are mired in a cooler full of tepid water. The store owner appears from a pantry in the back where she has been sitting in a rocking chair, fanning her face. Her eyes light up at the sight of him. At last, a handsome man has arrived at the end of the world. What can I get ya dear?
He parks his truck at the edge of a dune, where the grass will give him enough traction to drive out, looks out through the murky headlights clouded by the corpses of wasps, bees, moths. The road narrows toward the end, were there is only one lane. The hair grass is thin, resinous, like violin strings.
A message is congealing in the crystal river of time, around one of the bends we call the future. But for now he is twenty-four years old and his girlfriend of four years is pregnant. In September she will have their child. He knows what he must do: marry her, settle down here, give up dreams. Drive from Zellers to Canadian Tire, along hushed wooded highways, misted vaulting valleys. Perhaps one day, if he can stand it for long enough, he will take bring his daughter here to Digby Neck to watch the tide fill the Bay of Fundy, then retreat.
He will never leave Canada. I will leave the country at twenty-one and spend the rest of my life away. I will journey far afield and well off the beaten track, living for awhile in the Falkland Islands, in Antarctica, in the Arctic; in southern Africa in a city on a windswept cape. I will become an habitué of rim-named places and their turbulent, empty seas.
Unbeknownst to me he has lived much of his life in Berwick, Nova Scotia, or maybe it’s Waterville – it’s not clear. I have never been to either, but I can imagine them: small Valley towns stupefied by heat in the summer, buried under snowdrifts in winter. I don’t know what happened, why I never met him. I’ve heard it might have something to do with the will of his pioneer maven mother, who wanted nothing to do with my mother, perhaps, and therefore me. I will never know if I would have liked him, or he me.
I do know he has more than a passing knowledge of physics, because he can fly a plane. So he knows there is no flow of time; there is no now creeping through the world. He knows that time is not a mathematical reality but an illusion of human consciousness. It might be grandiose and slow, as in geological time, or very fast, as in the time it takes him to lever himself off the ground in a glider, but it is perceptual: we have to be here to perceive it, or to think we do. Really time is an abstract entity.
Driving the road to Digby Neck that night for the last time he knows nothing of his future, nothing at all of the future marriage of my mother, her three children (apart from me), nothing of me and the lonely flat roads I will drive at the bottom of the world. Why is it that we can’t see ahead? Life is so gauged against our survival; if only we could see around corners, he thinks, we could protect ourselves from our futures, from our fates.
The Wire
A year before the day when I will make that trip to New York, I am in my office in London on a Friday afternoon trying to tie up work for the week, when an email arrives from my mother. I peer at the subject line: I don’t need to explain what you are about to read this Friday. LOVE & prayers, mommy. This is strange, because I have never called her ‘mommy’ in my life.
In the email is an obituary. I peer at the name, wondering if it is a distant cousin, a family member I haven’t seen in many years. The obituary says that the man died on May 22, 2000. Whoever he was, he was born in Salt Springs, Pictou County. Beneath the obituary is a short news article, pasted from the internet. I read on:
The victim’s glider was being launched by cable from a motorized winch when it crashed at the Stanley airport. “It’s extremely uncommon,” said Mr. Daly, who has been flying since 1972. “It’s the first I’ve been around.” RCMP from the Windsor detachment were on the scene Monday and the Halifax office of the Transportation Safety Board was sending a team to investigate the accident.
I realise who he is. The understanding is not gradual, seeping in from bits of information gleaned in the obituary; rather it falls on my head like a stone. Inside me is a strange cascading feeling. Something is running down me, or through me. I leave my desk and go to sit in the library. I stay there for a long time, until the light outside begins to darken to the blue pewter of a May evening in the British Isles.
Flightmap
I am on only the third international flight cleared for take-off from Newark. I am not allowed to take a bottle of water through security and two armed marshals are placed on our flight. These are easily spotted – huge men with black holsters slung over their shoulder. I have never been on a flight with men carrying guns before. We passengers are hushed. Many of us stand transfixed at the window looking over the Hudson at the smouldering heap in lower Manhattan.
Only five days – or was it six? – had passed since I had entered the intact city on a train from Washington on a burnished early autumn day. Yet it seemed like much more time had passed. The present moment had been elongated by what I had witnessed in downtown Manhattan, inflated until it had taken up all available space in my mind, evicting my dreamy preoccupations, pointless fantasies. And in the temporary lacunae when my past and future had disappeared, a window had opened, a kind of portal.
For a short period of time, fear permitted me to think about a few things I’d obviously been avoiding: Why, while he was alive, did I never try to find him; nor did he me, to my knowledge? I had never known my father, now I never would know him. The nevers were accumulating and at the same time the future was shrinking – this was another thing I’d learned, watching those people die, people who had gone to work and sat at their desks just a few minutes previous to the airplanes’ bizarre intrusion into their space-time, as if it were any other day. The future could retract itself so crudely. And suddenly there would be no more time.
On that day I rang my colleagues in London and my partner, who was at that moment cycling across Tower Bridge, took the call on his mobile. They were encouraging. They said: just get out of there. Do whatever you can to save yourself. I rang my mother. She said, ‘I’m sorry to tell you this, but there are more planes heading for Manhattan.’ I heard that note in her voice again, low and tremulous; the one I had been hearing for many years. It was hope. Not that I would escape the inevitability of the rain of fire those planes would pour on the island of Manhattan, but that I would not.
Years unwound in my head. Strange anger, no – rage, not conscious, but still, directed at me. The aerodynamic velocity of it, as if it were a solid silver thing. A suspended timeless awareness that my existence could be have been reversed – could still be reversed – by the singular will that is the mother. How I doubted I had ever existed. How the Bushmen of the Kalahari say: we are the Dreamer’s Dream.
I put the phone down and darted away from it. I thought, even if I have to swim the East River to Brooklyn, I’m getting out of here alive.
Many people, it turns out, believe that we are protected, that someone or something is looking over us, until it is time for us to go – the celestial equivalent of armed marshals. I wonder did these beings vanish on the day he died, hoiked into the air by a faulty wire? What about all those people who died that day not more than a few hundred metres, vertically, from where I stood, although so very far away – did their guardians conspire to desert them enmasse? Or did the ordinariness of the morning (I will never trust ordinariness again) fool these celestial beings, should they exist, into complacency?
On the flight home to London the crew are brusque. Watching in-flight entertainment feels wrong, and I notice I am not the only passenger who sits stony-faced with the flightmap on my personalised screen: Groundspeed, Outside temperature, Distance travelled, Distance to destination. It will take some days before the symptoms of an illness triggered by what I have witnessed that day in lower Manhattan set in: insomnia, inability to eat, vomiting, unpredictable spasms of anger, paranoia.
We skirt the coast of Nova Scotia. But this time I don’t pay attention. I have been trapped in North America for I’m not quite sure how many days and I only want to get home to England and to Europe, to put the smoking garrison of Manhattan behind me.
I can’t help but wonder, how much time do I have left? How many years before the inflight marshals leave my side?
The Far Field
He stands at the end of the Neck, the ignition turned off. Slowly, his headlights dim, leaving him in darkness.
On May 22 in the year 2000 – thirty-two years from now – a wire will break and he will come crashing to the ground. He will die at only 58.
Is there a second when his glider might, after all, snag and updraft and fly? In the moment after the winch breaks, the one before he is dropped with a crash onto the tarmac will he think: how I want to live! Will I live? Or no, there will not be time to think anything at all as the ground rushes toward him.
A week before his trip along Digby Neck he discovers Roethke’s The Far Field, which the poet completed just before his death in 1963. In the title poem Roethke describes a journey along a peninsula road as thin and itinerant as the Neck. The journey is not an ordinary one, though; it points to some sort of reckoning, to an endgame. It ends with the car hopelessly stuck in a sand rut where it stalls, its headlights fading into the night.
The tide is charging in; soon this place will be more water than land. The edge of night is on the sky. He jumps into the truck. He will get gas, food, water along the way. He will drive until he becomes the poem, and the poem becomes his life, until the poem delivers him to his answer:
The pure serene of memory in one man, –
A ripple widening from a single stone
Winding around the waters of the world.
The Ninth Wave
(extract)
‘Two large ships sink every week on average, but the cause is never studied to the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to ‘bad weather.’ When a huge wave strikes a ship, several things can happen. The ship may take on so much water that it sinks, or it may simply be overturned. If the wave strikes the ship end-on, one end will first dip down into the trough of the wave before being abruptly raised by the wave. In a large ship, this can produce forces strong enough to break the vessel’s back.’
*
We set sail into an autumnal southern ocean. We still say this: ‘set sail’, but it is the ship’s four engines and a type of diesel called Marine Gas Oil which propel us through the water.
We inch out of Stanley Sound, then curve northwards, leaving winter behind us. Only 6204 nautical miles (11,490 kilometres) to go. It will take us four weeks to get home – home being, in this case, the Galician port of Vigo. That is where we will change crew and then fly to our real homes in England. We are twenty-nine people; officers, crew, and two ‘supernumeraries’ listed on the ship’s manifest: the doctor, and me.
Moving off on a ship always feels like an emancipation and a reckoning. Ships are not meant to stay still, or not for long; movement is their only function. And so we set to sea powered by purpose. As for the reckoning, no new input will come into our world for four weeks. There can be no happenings other than those we fear – breakdown, accident, storms, or any combination of these. At times we will feel unsafe. There is no getting out of this scenario, and because we cannot walk away, minor annoyances and difficulties are magnified. ‘You have to keep a perspective,’ – the officers on board say this over and over again, like an incantation.
Immediately there are safety drills to be conducted: man overboard, fire, lifeboat drills. In the open ocean we are our own fire crew, our own rescue. ‘Stay with the ship,’ the Captain tells us. ‘If anything happens, the ship is our best lifeboat.’
I have been to sea before, in waters more treacherous than these (although that’s the thing about the sea – you never know when it will rise up and overthrow you). But I’ve never been at sea for so long, traveling so far. I see myself, for maybe the first time, as a speck in an immensity. In my head I appear as a red dot in a GPS readout, inching up the planet.
Above the Argentine Abyssal plain seagulls ride the waves. A grey sea, no swell. Today, wind will increase to 40 knots from the southwest. But this is behind us, blowing us along. The ocean – we are moving through it, across it, on it. What is this entity? At sea just as in planes, if rarely, when flying at tropospheric altitudes 42,000 feet and above, you can see the curvature of the planet and realize: I really do live on a sphere. We are only balanced on its meniscus, crushed between the skies and the sea, two flatland horizons.
*
Let’s call it the ship The Inevitable. Usually ships such as this one, a research vessel, are named for the long-dead heroes of maritime and polar exploration.
Why do we have so few words for the future? Here is the dictionary definition of the future as a noun rather than an adjective: 1. the time yet to come. 2 undetermined events that will occur in that time. Synonyms as a noun: time to come; hereafter. As an adjective there are many more synonyms – forthcoming, approaching, coming, destined, eventual, expected, fated, impending, in the offing, later, prospective, subsequent, to be, to come, ultimate, unborn.
Technically the future is the territory that begins beyond this moment. Beyond this moment wherein I sit at my desk writing on a rainy Saturday morning in Stoke Newington, watching a silver car disappear into the trees overhanging the southbound oneway system, one year and three months after I returned from our trip up the Atlantic Ocean. This moment passed twenty seconds ago, owing to the delay it took me to write it. I stop typing to find I am already living in the future.
*
Off the coast of Rio Grande do Sul we pass through the most violent thunder and lightning storm I have ever seen. On the bridge, whitecaps leap out of darkness at eye-level as bolts of lightning cut the horizon like ‘the signature of God’, as Damon Galgut writes in his collection of novellas, In a Strange Room. It’s this book I’m reading as we inch up the coast of Argentina and Uruguay. I am soaked in its claustrophobia and unease, its minute observations of the way people give themselves away.
Bolts come so fast that on the bridge we are strobe-lit. Peals of thunder are indistinguishable from water hitting the ship: they thump and spray, thump and spray. The bow slews down into water, and we are left tilting on our feet at a twenty degree angle – this is called pitching, a roller-coaster type motion. It rarely feels worrying, even as it sends us skittering across the bar much faster than we intended, like participants in some weird village gymkhana where the objective is to run head-long into the bar while still drinking a pint.
Rolling is different. The ship’s tilt from side to side threatens to upset our belief in the uprightness of the world. We are no longer moving forward. In its violent arc, somewhere, tilts the word capsize.
That night we sit talking in the bar. Bad weather invites conviviality. We talk about the cruise ship that had its bridge window blown out by a freak wave in the Drake Passage and had to be towed to Punta Arenas. About the Endurance accident; ‘the ship came that close to sinking’, says the second Engineer, his thumb and forefinger held a centimeter apart. A hole in the pump valve the size of a glass tumbler was the source of the near-doom. We have the full story on DVD, so we watch Endurance nearly sinks episode 1, closely followed by Endurance nearly sinks episodes 2 and 3, as the giant subtropical rainstorm sluices down our windows.
I am not sure I believed that the Atlantic ocean existed, or quite like this: that this roiling grey mass outside my porthole turned surly by autumn southwesterlies really does just to go on and on. Until I started spending time on polar research ships I’d thought of the open ocean as simply the space between continents, as filler.
*
‘Between 1969 and 1994, giant waves are estimated to have sunk some 22 supercarriers, with the loss of over 500 lives. An unknown number of smaller ships will have suffered the same fate. Computer modelling shows that outsize waves could be formed when slow-moving waves were caught up by a succession of faster waves moving at more than twice their speed. The two sets of waves merge, producing slower, larger waves. However, we cannot yet predict when and where such waves are likely. There are a number of physical processes that might cause them, and these depend on the winds, currents and geographic features in a particular place. Certain currents, for example, can focus waves as a lens focuses light.’
*
Election Day in England and Wales. But we are south of Rio de Janeiro and almost none of us has arranged a proxy vote, so this crew of disenfranchised sailors can only watch the drama unfold on the internet.
We have left the autumnal latitudes of Uruguay and the southern provinces of Brazil, and humidity is suddenly in the air. Last night, a velvet sky, a clot of stars and bioluminescence off the bow waves. We all went out onto the aft deck, groping in total darkness, to try to see it. By day we do circuit training in the science hold, so hot and sweaty now that we slip around on the grease of our hands. We do lunges, medicine ball lifts and star jumps in between crates, dollies, boxes of equipment, laser printer cartridges, the empty explosives locker.
The talk now is of King Neptune’s arrival, and the Grime-and-Punishment ceremony which awaits us on the other side of the equator, two weeks away.
At sea, we keep our own time. We plough through the time zones on our journey; twice a week we advance our clocks. The proper term for putting them back is ‘retard’. When you retard the clocks you get an hour extra sleep. But advancing them we find ourselves having breakfast at 6.30, 5.30, 4.30 am. Our body struggles to keep up with our march through time. Could this be shiplag?
At certain points in our journey we will be temporary visitors to lonely slices of time – hardly anyone lives in GMT – 2 for example, or the sparsely populated GMT -1, home to Senegal, Mauritania and no-one else, not even Ascension Island, which latitudinally should be its temporal neighbour, were it not for a major detour on behalf of Greenwich Mean Time, which sweeps out to claim it and Tristan de Cunha, distorting sunrise and sunset so that they take place at 7.30am and pm respectively.
We hug land, staggering from one outpost to the other. Why don’t we march across a genuinely lonely swathe of ocean? It’s not as if any of these places offer sanctuary: St Peter and St Paul’s rocks are volcanic outcrops inhabited by shags. True, we’d be able to tie up in Cabo Verde, in the Canaries. But like planes on their transoceanic routes we skirt land, keeping to established shipping zones, but also to give us something to look at.
Our aloneness ought to breed camaraderie, an esprit de corps. The able seamen get closest to it. But the rest of us, officers and supernumeraries, fracture. I don’t know why. The 2nd officer is one of those men’s women – suspicious and withholding with women but turns on the lights for men. The only other woman is the doctor. The doctors on ships these days are always women. The doctor and the second officer form a friendship; this makes sense, they are the same age. The doctor commands instant respect cue to her position. But she is fair, personable.
An almost comic choreography quickly establishes itself just before dinner dinner. The electrician, the communications officer, the purser, the second officer and the doctor eat at the same table. The efflux table is myself, the captain, the chief officer and the second engineer, an unpredictable character. The clique makes sure it sits together by leaving the bar at precisely 6.27pm, even though the salon is not officially open until 6.30. There is a nervous flutter among them around 6.25. A silent signal is sent out: if we don’t make a move now, we might end up sitting with the captain, or he with us! As if on cue they drain their gin and tonics and bolt for the dining room.
I’ve observed this before in Britain, or at least in British institutions – intelligent, able adults, well into their thirties and forties, behave like teenagers fighting over who will sit next to the popular kids in the high school cafeteria. Normally none of this juvenilia would matter, but here we are bound to each other. If we were all to be wrecked and end up in the water, would there be any solidarity, or would they just drain their gin and tonics, climb in the life raft and cut us adrift, leaving us undesirables to our fate?
+++
Tracking
‘Tracking’ is a body of work about learning to track animals, and more broadly learning to become a Trails guide – someone who takes people on guided walks in the African bush.
Some Days
Some days embed themselves in your flesh. Acacia days, thorns of hours.
Our days in the bush are decorated with event. But also the so much the same that time has lost its spatial dimension and no longer feels like time but a river.
The red and yellow barbet, its military parade jacket colours. The sand grass, hollows of rough-leaved shepherds trees. We roll through these hours, they envelop us. We are not insistent anymore that time be meaningful, that it dispense anything to us. We dissolve into minutes where nothing happens, until it does.
A hyena loping through the long grass, we see only its head, surfacing like a buoy on a grass sea. Walking through its paths and corridors, the lion occulted in the long grass, the African fish eagle who watches us, measuring our consumability, as we pass beneath it. The bush bristles with alarm. The gutteral blare of baboons, nervous chatter of vervet monkeys. The threat assailing them can be parsed from their position in the trees – if it is a Verreaux’s eagle they fear they perch close to the trunk; if a snake, they go to the end of the branch, ready to swing to safety.
Knowledge is a conscious effort, but also it is simply time spent. Every day we are learning, our minds are saturated with understanding. That is why we sleep so soundly at night.
Light and Shadows
The sun is a mitre dropped from the sky. It is early winter and it swings in a shallow ellipsis, pushing into the horizon early and fanning out into russet hours.
Days are blue-gold. The sky untraced by cloud. These are the scorching days and cold nights of the lowveld. When a warm front wings in, bringing marled grey clouds from the coast of Mozambique, the temperature rises ten degrees in an hour. It comes at night and in our sleep we fling off duvets and sleeping bags damp with sweat.
The evening is not grey or purple. I don’t know what colour it is. A series of oranges, maybe – tangerine, or watermelon. The solitary baobab which I now treat as a companion or oracle is bathed in silver then lead then mauve light, until it is dissolved in darkness. Of the night, there is no opacity. It is a bitumen night, thin and cold. It has the cold obsidian eyes of the mamba, a gleam around its edges.
Here there are gullies and culverts to the land, ridges and hillocks and fissures and flat dust-sand vleis – marshes – where nothing, not even pan dropseed grass, grows.
Signs
For hours under a blistering sun we puzzle over smudges, heads bent like penitents. Balloon toes of large cats, the narrow rodent prints of the dassie, cleft palette of the giraffe. We do this because we want the competence and knowledge that goes with tracking, to look at the substrate and read it like a text. We want to be free from regret. From the feeling of ghostliness. We are exhausted by our own insubstantiality, by the endless pattern of how experience gives birth to memory, and memory keeps us company, this lasting diffuse simulacra of the real. But our memories are growing in strength. Like unborn children, they need to come out, or they will rupture us.
We want to get control over our history. We don’t know why we thought it would help us to learn to read the bush like a text, to read the story of spoor and know what animals had passed by, what they were doing, whether they were walking or running under these stately skies. Why they wanted to come, why they wanted to leave. But we need to read the bush like a text of – what? Signs. Rumours. The dreams of animals.
Solvitur Ambulando
We walk for seven or eight hours a day carrying backpacks and rifles. Walking – there is a blank automaton quality to this everyday habit. But somehow it gives us a pattern, in its simple two-step, to solve a self-alienation.
The Latin proverb means, it is solved by walking. What is it we seek to fathom? The ancient treaty between the self and the land. An antidote to longing, the exact terms of the covenant between desire and grief that seems to structure much of our lives. To feel whole, the separate elves we have lobbed off reconciled. To leave behind cold constraints of the self and to replace those with the constraints of the natural world.
In walking we might reconnect with our principles. Also our errors, the greater unities beyond the people we love or the things we have experienced. A search for synthesis. We are together here moving through this land and we have no memory of this place and its gauzy horizons. We are rearranging furniture inside ourselves, this is how it feels. Who will we be when we leave here? We may struggle to remember ourselves – who we loved, what we wanted – before we came here.
There must be a force behind geography, we think. These abrupt rains, heavy humid sky of a winter warm front. This place where we are least and most at home.
Apparitions
Adam drills us on our tracks. He is strict, almost severe. There is a brisk pedantic note in his voice as we stop to consider endless smudges on the ground. These marks effortlessly assume the shape of playing cards – hearts, the Ace of Spaces (most antelope), or club-like balloons (buffalo, eland). The thug-toed, canine (hyena), the three-padded Australia-shaped palms of the cats, ringed by satellite claw-less toes – the only cat that cannot retract its claws entirely is the cheetah. Also the two-pronged inscrutable stabs of bushpig, warthog and the Vs of vervet monkey feet, the tell-tale tail drag of their prehensile tail, like a hairy snake. The porcupine with its complex Lego foot, seven or ten pads in all, and the wire-brush scuff of its quill marks on the sand.
My brain struggles with shapes, with visual information of any kind. At first the tracks we see imprinted on the sand, in month-old mud, on grassy dustlands, are no more than rivers of inscrutable symbols. Animals moving this way, pursued by their future attackers, animals moving that way, to or from water. The dinner plate spoor of elephant who carve their own avenues in dense bush, landscaped by the stepping stones of their dinner plate feet.
We circle in the mopane scrub, trying to pick up the trail, a group of amateurs pursuing a professional. With a lion or an elephant the great prize at the end is a glimpse of the animal, live, in the act of walking through the world. But also a ribboning satisfaction: we’d caught up with you. These sightings take on a transport. They are visitations, hallucinations. They are moments. Once unleashed on the world we live in their wake vortices.
The Lives of Animals
‘Animals first entered the imagination as messengers and promises.’ John Berger writes, in an essay titled ‘Animals as Metaphors’. He argues that we share much with them – ‘Animals are born, are sentient, and are mortal. In these things they resemble man.’ The rampart between us is built of language. ‘The animal scrutinises [man] from across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension,’ Berger writes. There is no language. There is a lack of even the possibility of language. Only Orpheus, who could talk to animals in their own language, knew of their lives, their hopes, their fears. Animals are an intercession between man and our origin, they are our charges, our reprieve from the garrison of the human.
Encounters
This is what we call our meetings with dangerous game: encounters. We tot up our encounters in our Dangerous Game Logbooks – elephant 10, buffalo 8. A more evasive term than meet, with its slippery noncommital quality. Encounter means two creatures who recognise each other’s power but shy away from testing it out. It is often employed next to the word sexual, and in this sense it is the right term. There is a savage intimacy in it, a recognition that we share the same moment, are stranded even, have been driven by the same hungry current to a reckoning.
An encounter is more than the meeting of ourselves in a radically unrecogniseable but mirrored form in which we finally understand our serene dislocation from each other. It has in its sound a refusal, even a reprisal. We are not willing to understand each other. We are not willing to do the hard work, to continue. We fear each other. We are animals, agents of our separate nights.
Muscle Memory
We are walking in single file as we do in the bush. I am near the back of the line. Four or five people in front of me ascend the ridge.
I am beginning to plod its slopes when we come to a sudden halt. I hear a crack, but not loud enough to be a bullet. Max’s ‘Gandalf stick’ – his walking stick, repository of his twenty years of sage bush knowledge – lies on the ground. He has thrown it a buffalo, shouldered his rifle and yelled Fuck! in the same instant.
It is a textbook example of an encounter that could go badly wrong. The animal does not know we are there, we do not know he is there. Surprise ensues. A surprised buffalo is just as likely to run for you as to run away. Your only option may well be to shoot.
But this buffalo ran away. Ahead of us, Max lowered his rifle.
When you are fully trained, you find that you have shouldered, chambered and fired before you know what is happening. You won’t even remember having done it later, Max tells us.
After lunch in the shade cast by the dining platform I do dry practice, loading the rifle with doppies and practicing just this sequence of moves – swing round on the back foot, put your weight on the front, rifle swung up to the shoulder from the left arm to the right shoulder simultaneously working the bolt to chamber a round, finger away from the trigger until I am ready to fire, rifle in the shoulder held tight not too high not too low, the stock tight against my cheek. Finger on the trigger and squeeze. Once this is all committed to muscle memory I will make no further mistakes.
Bull Elephant
We came around a tree and nearly ran into his backside. The elephant was facing away from us. His ears billowed back and forth slowly as he grazed, using his trunk to tug up clods of grass and sod. These he inserted delicately, almost surgically, in his tent-shaped mouth.
We sat down, unnoticed still, on the grass. We stayed there a long time. So long I had to adjust my posture twice to save my knees from seizing up – not easy to do when you have a rifle in one hand and you are not allowed to let the butt rest on the grass.
The elephant came closer and closer until he had consumed everything in our field of vision. I wonder what will happen, I thought, as the elephant’s trunk edged toward us. He hadn’t seen us; it was twilight and their vision is particularly poor in these interstitial times of day.
As the elephant’s forefoot came within five metres of us, my heat pounded out a single alarmed beat. I felt my hand tighten around the stock of my rifle.
We will have to do something now, I thought. It’s only seconds before the elephant is upon us. I looked at Adam. His face would tell me what to do. He was framed in twilight. His eyes had deepened from blue to khaki green. His profile was etched, then, dark, certain and uncertain.
He took off his hat and scratched it in the grass. The elephant stopped, one forefoot off the ground. He turned his head, to angle his vision better. He paused, his ears a slow breeze around his head. Adam continued scratching in the grass with his hat.
The elephant turned elegantly, swinging on his hindquarters, and slowly walked away. He stopped on the other side of the umbrella thorn that had partly obscured us, and toyed with one of the branches.
Pretending to feed, Adam whispered to us, his eyebrow raised. It was the first we had spoken in ten minutes.
The bull carried on, swinging wide around us, and began to feed – this time for real – on a tree nearby.
We moved in formation across the opening the bull had just vacated, and drew up to our vehicle. Wonder and delight moved through us. We had been so close and so easy with this giant creature, who towered even more convincingly over us as we crouched on the ground. We had held our nerve.
‘I let him know there was something there,’ Adam explained. ‘He thought it was a small animal, a warthog maybe. Enough to give him a sense that another animal was feeding, but not enough to frighten him.’
The elephant growing and growing in front of us, like an exercise in visual perspective, the night shrinking behind him as darkness gathered and his bulk seemed to absorb the night, becoming full and dark and more dense. Adam’s profile, etched against this same night. The look in his eye so strange, an alloy of pleading and command. How I had thought his eyes were blue but saw now they were green, or vice versa. Suddenly he was more than I had taken him to be – braver, crazier, denser with knowledge. He has the mind of an animal or knows enough about the mind of an animal to be one himself, when needed. Through him I might be able to get somewhere. He could be the conduit.
Trees
Lala palm, Transvaal saffron, Baobab, Weeping boer-bean, Sandpaper raisin, Large fever berry, Flame Thorn, Sjambok Pod, Black bitterberry, False marula. Heartbreak names. The Leadwood which takes a thousand years to die, skeletal against the dawn and its cargo of white-backed vultures who perch there like Christmas baubles. Wild teak. The way Adam said it: wild teak. An automatic note in his voice, a teacher’s tone. Magic guarri, Common bride’s bush, White seringa.
Impala
On game drives we look through them as if they were grass, keen to spot one of the more dramatic and violent animals. Impala are sprinter-lissome, a gaggle of fifteen year-old girls putting on makeup in front of the mirror in a highschool locker room. They are all legs, flinty abdomen, eyes, sleek and demure. They never live long enough to become crusted and bitted by age.
They protect themselves by dissolving into a blur when threatened by a predator. Everything wants to eat them. At times I think they have been input into our simulation only to satisfy the appetites of their pursuers. The impala are the most successful antelope, numerically, in Africa. They have a mysterious metatarsal gland on the bottom of their fetlocks, a black spot which functions either to secrete hormones or as a visual ‘follow me’ signal when they explode in deliberate confusion to avoid a predator.
One of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in the bush: looking out my tent at four in the morning, hearing the roar of a large pride of lions. I couldn’t see the lions but I did see their quarry, a huge harem herd, hundreds of green eyes (this is how impala appear in the beam of a torch) vaulting logs and brush, floating in an organised detonation through the night.
Light and Shadows 2
Hills sunken purple coated with russets, yellow, pallid gold of late autumn. A sinking is happening in the land, but where. We intuit the presence of the deep gorge, the sluggish river serpentining through it, the impassability to the north, south, to the east, that cordons us off from the known world. We are in the wilderness and he is our guide. We trust him with the abandon generated by necessity. He is on his own with us, we are his charges. He is leading us toward knowledge, self-discovery, toward the green garrison of mopane that ensnares us.
This land is enigmatic. It does not have a single version of itself to offer us, to project. It is not the desert or the savannah, a monochrome immensity which instantly commands our attention. It is furtive, sly, forgotten. Several life zones collide here an the vegetation and animals and birds are all in a confusion.
We are tantalised by the rare sighting of a Palm-nut vulture. We tear off in search of him, binoculars balanced on the dash board. The Palm-nut vulture belongs in tropical coastal forests and we are 70 kilometres away from that. He is off-course in the off-season. He is lost.
Lost
We tracked the rhinoceros through Hutwini gorge, then lost him. We scrabbled around in the undergrowth, in the mopane maze, looking for the tracks. We could see them even when the animal moved onto the crushed leaves and twigs that litter the forest floor in autumn. But then they disappeared. We’ve lost them, we said. We all split up and started walking in revolutions, staring at the forest floor like Archimedes, as if it could deliver an essential truth.
Later, after we had given up, I picked out the game trail over the ridge even though I was disoriented by the landscape and was not sure what direction to go in. The paths lead down to the pan. Animals know where the water is, Adam said. Their stalkers know where to find them. Their thirst and blind habitual nature and their bulk conspire to betray them. The rhino we were tracking had less than two days to live. Forty-eight hours later they were killed.
The Land
Dark begins to solidify at five. This is the hour I stop running, the hour the lions are resurrected from floppy outsize dozing cats to nightmare hunters, the hour that fixed depthless look floods back into their amber eyes. Across from my verandah, beyond the outer firebreak, is a single baobab. It is like most of these trees, leafless, its truck bloated with cellulose. At five the colours of the day sink into the baobab, turning it steel, then mauve, then a dead-fish grey-silver, then a silhouette of itself. There is no swerve to the night at this latitude, at this time of year. The winter tilt of the planet forges a bone cold that can only be dispelled by fire. The nights we have no fire or braai are forlorn. We eat in silence and then go to bed immediately – the sleeping bag is the only other refuge. To have no fire is a dark impoverishment.
Fever Tree
Mint. Branches furling into a vein-like canopy. We walk in green-gold afternoons through slow explosions of butterflies called brown-veined whites and rest in pools of shade. Fever trees are not strong. They careen over in thunderstorms or under the pressure of a single wind. They grown quickly and die quickly. They are acacias, but lack the thorn-studded bushy aspect of most acacia trees. Their flimsy plasticity is part of their appeal. Unlike other trees, the fever tree has chlorophyll in its bark as well as its leaves. Fever of the body, fever of the mind. He says, ‘I am an African, I have lived here all my life, but I still feel a thrill when I hear the word ‘Africa’.’
Tracking
Tracking is pursuit. We are stalkers, although disinterested. We are not hunting the animal. We seek only a glimpse of it, in all its lonely integrity, pinioned between thorn trees and the jaws of the eventual predator that will consume it. Even the apex predators have no gentle exit from this life; lions consume lions, wild dog will rip an injured pack member to shreds. We follow these animals to know only this: that they exist, and we, their shadows, also do, by association. For once the animal is more extant than us; we pursue it in order to confirm our unreality.