Small · 5:47am Mar 19th, 2014

I had to write something in class tonight and I have no idea where it came from.

Virgil, in the Georgics, will groan about weather, and when first I read them his complaints fell flat. Of course I understood, but at epistemic distance. Pray, farmers, for your winters to be short and rains to be enough and for the sun not to trip and hit his head, etc., world without end. But then I thought about how earnest and how frightened he was, or he seemed, or how these qualities were in myself that I read into him. It is strange to say.
And what I thought about was Yazoo.
It is perhaps fitting that the town of Yazoo chose a name that means death. It is both omnipresent and forgettable, and so for sake of both I have never thought such a grim name was wrong, even before the day when the wind rose.
But perhaps instead of Yazoo it is best to start with taking a walk in Madison, about thirty minutes up the road if you obeyed the laws of the land, which no one did after buckling up. I had expected nothing more than then the plebeian simplicity of human sidewalks and human lawns and human porches. I had hoped for the human comforts of a leisurely pace. A few years later, and I would have perhaps smuggled a pipe along, nose full of the promise of it and lips dry at the thought. What I did not expect was mountains, for my people are a small people living in a small land, and mountains are not small things.
The details do not matter, at least not the ones of walking and navigation. It is enough to say that I walked, and on the artificial beach, the shore of an aritificial lake, I looked up and saw deep heaven.
Whatever Kierkegaard may say of despair, I think that he has neglected the despair of momentary insignificance. If it is the falling out of communion with the self, then he and Burke have not prepared me or consoled me since, nor been able to speak about that moment, for words like self and communion are, after all, words, and they are not mountains.
In the sky I saw an array the likes of which I have never seen since, and had never seen before that very moment. It was not clouds only, but something beyond clouds. Day was giving over to night, bit by bit, like a retreating king before his raven haired barons. The stars were going to come out soon. I did not notice these things but catalogued them later and supplied them with the imaginative part of my memory which is not unique to me and which perhaps has destroyed the moment. The mixture of light and dark gave the sky a strange, alien, but perhaps noble purple hue, one I had seen before, no doubt, but in that moment could not comprehend.
Stretched above me were mountains. Clouds billowed. They were still and yet they were not still, so horribly not still, a great cyclopean moving that I could not comprehend nor could ever comprehend in its method or its timetable. In a moment I was no longer a little over five and a half feet, but rather a speck before some terrible god of storms. There was no lightning, because that would have been crass. There was a wind, a wind that blew with such force that my eyes watered in their weakness and wanted to close, but they could not. Closing my eyes meant losing sight of the mountain in the sky, the all-consuming mountain in the sky which had stolen all of my attention.
Of course, stepping back, we must acknowledge that repetition is impossible, and that memory is dubious at best. My memories are colored and corrupted by text and picture and sound and pure, unguided whimsy. Perhaps I have added. More likely, I have shorn the moment of any of its real meaning or glory or terror by artifice.
And even farther along from the moment let us concede that to many other people this would have been the best of all moments.
It was for me. The strangeness of a feeling of grace is that manufactured within the human heart it is a strange, sweet fruit that if eaten overmuch is unbearable. We cannot grow the threaded strain that sustains, but can only mimic in moments involving heavy rain and mountainous clouds and suspiciously divine light streaming through trees. The thing which makes it so human is that it destroys itself quickly. That if looked at, it will begin to tell all of its truths because it is human and humans are not as clever about their lies as they like to think--it is perhaps more true that they are just rather terrible at uncovering lies and so sloppy, guilty sinners are in no trouble.
It is true that in the presence of Presence, in the awed knowledge that there was something bigger than myself, there was a jolt of joy. It is inevitable. I was enraptured. My hands shook. My throat was dry. My eyes were full of tears. My heart was a cup that overflowed from someone’s overgenerous hand. Oh, but the evening could come and blot out all night because the Mountain had been there and it was good that it should come and it was good also that it leave because it had already done what it needed to do and that I carried within my subjective mind the memory of its momentous passing and known that I had felt some truth of scale.
But it is also true that I felt a panic that fueled joy. Panic sometimes does fuel joy. Panic to find the good in an inexplicable and alien face.
The causes of the spectacular sign are mundane in the wording, but not in the effect. I heard of them later, as I pondered these things in my heart. A tornado ripped through Yazoo and killed at least ten. The pictures filled the news for days. To my eyes, not yet out of high school’s grip, they looked like the end of the world. Grant come back to finish up the rest of the work. A lot of the city was flattened underneath that funnel like a child’s model under the foot of giant. There is little that wood and stucco can do against wind. Even less that humans can do, though they try anyhow. They run, and they hide. They hide in bathtubs and in bathrooms, away from the windows and the doors and the silverware. They dig into the warm, fecund earth and carve out little burrows of dark safety like wombs to wait out danger. They do all of these things and more, and still the tornado comes and everything is unmade as if the gods have declared reshelving day and everything must be reorganized. It is like piles of lego blocks, heaps of discarded materials by a child, needful but not as it is. Hundreds injured. The reports were hazy and lost in the crowd, as Mississippi is only important when something is dying or will die or when there is a story to lie about, and even then she is not quite interesting enough to be looked at more than a day or two, and so the news reports stopped playing and I was never sure. But I did know that the wonderful sight had in fact sprung from the same cause as the tornado that ravaged a city. Virgil is wrong, and no one is happy when they know the cause of things.
And one of those occasions, I sat and watched, and a girl who I dated at the time was there and texting me, and she said in a way that was almost poetic in its pathetic tone that it broken everything. Look, Joshua, it broke our swing, she said, and meant the swing she had played on as a child, and I knew that it did not matter that the tire swing was loved by a child because a child was smaller than a man and a man was smaller than the mountain, and it was not surprising at all. The large and changeless mountain was there in the room, except it was bigger than the room. I think now instead of some world hanging up above, dark and boundless and cold, and I think that perhaps that was closer to the reality of it, that I was never in the presence of something I liked at all. It didn’t matter if I liked it. It was large and I was small. I was not happy. I was not sad as much as I was faintly horrified, and so I stopped thinking about all of it like an animal shies from the campfire, and only later did I think that Grace was knowing you were small but not feeling that you were small because to truly feel it is only to need to die.