Similitudes

A Cadence for the Mind

Douglas Wilson

he gravel was rounded, light brown and ancient, not at all like the recently-crushed gray gravel in my drive at home. It was barely visible beneath the narrow stream, and up along the sides of each bank. Dank and matted leaves, leaves that used to be green, covered most of it. The glorious portion of a yellow and red autumn was past; a miserable prelude to winter had been drizzling here for several weeks. Overgrown and tangled trees lined each bank, and the wet boughs hung down so that I had to stoop as I walked upstream. It was awkward going, and I stumbled constantly. Figures , I thought.

The only path through the trees was traveled by the stream itself. The rocks large enough to step on were covered with a rich moss which made them slippery, but the water was shallow enough in many places that it didn't really matter.

I did not really know why I was there, why I was stumbling upstream. I had awakened that morning with a line stuck in my head, and then for some reason decided to try to find the spring on our property. I had the day off, so I told my wife that we needed to get the information for the county assessor, which was true enough. She packed a lunch for me and cheerfully sent me off on my autumn trudge. She had no idea what was happening inside my head. Of course neither did I really. Maybe I was trying to find the meaning of the line, get away from the meaning of the line, or possibly both. An ordered cadence for the stumbling mind. On the drive out to the property, my mind had twisted back and forth between trying to figure out what the line itself meant, and then trying to remember where I could have read or heard it. Nothing doing either way.

I took a half-hearted jump across the brook, slipped, and fell in the water. Jesus Christ I thought, and then panicked. I had not sworn like that for years. When we had married, my wife had insisted on joining the church, which I was willing enough to doshe was worth it. It was very easy to begin speaking the way all her friends did, and now after eleven years it was habitual. But why had I done this now? I thought about it some more, and then swore deliberately, with a kind of tentative and diffident rebellion. Jesus Christ . I didn' t feel any better.

Twenty minutes later I sat down to rest. Staring blankly at the chattering stream, I turned and looked into my mind. Gravel there too, with leaves rotting and matted, but there was no water. No spring. No sense looking for a spring. Nothing clean at all. Nothing to drink. Nothing to wash in. Ought to eat my lunch and head home. I angrily shook my head to clear it. The county didn't care if I had a spring in my headthey wanted to know if there was a spring on my property. Thinking that perhaps a warm smoke on a gray autumn day would help, I took out my pipe and began to fill it. The pouch was full of more dead leaves, and I put the pipe away.

A sigh indicated to me that I had gotten up, and was heading up the stream again. This is stupid. Life is stupid . We need to know the location of the spring so we can have our taxes adjusted. Pragmatism is stupid. I need to get it together so I can get more involved at church, and argue about the same things they do. How wet do you have to be to be baptized? Church is stupid . I was utterly lost, and I knew it. For six months I had worked this over in my mind. I knew that I could not even assert the meaninglessness of everything without assuming that my cry of despair was full of meaning. Nihilism is stupid . I walked on in despair. I couldn't even have the comfort of knowing my despair made sense. And then this morning ordered cadence . What was that? I knew what a stumbling mind was.

My entire life was ordered, well-ordered. My garage was organized. My car pool companions set their watches by me. I hadn't missed church since we married. The kids go to bed every night at eight. But all the order was inside my tidy and chaotic world. So here I was now, off in the woods, hunting for a spiritual metronome, a transcendent snare drumwhich I apparently thought I might find sitting on a rock along this stream somewhere. I shook my head. It does not happen this way. I have to go down front and sign a little card. Church is stupid, remember?

I looked up at the tangle of branches overhead. The sky behind the trees was still battle gray and full of a threatening and bellicose drizzle. That sky was also beneath the moon and part of the world inside irrelevant order, just like my thoughts. I slipped and fell again, but this time I didn't feel like swearing. I picked myself up, clambered up to a nearby rock, and ate my meaningless lunch. It was good. She always makes good lunches. I sat a while for no particular reason. Lord Jesus Christ, I thought. Spondaic and iambic . There's the ordered cadence. Lord Jesus Christ. And for the first time, I heard the sound of clean water.