How to Live. What to Do.

How to Live. What to Do.

Last evening the moon rose about this rock

Impure upon a world unpurged.

The man and his companion stopped

To rest before the heroic height.

Coldly the wind fell upon them

In many majesties of sound:

They that had left the flame-freaked sun

To seek a sun of fuller fire.

Instead there was this tufted rock

Massively rising high and bare

Beyond all trees, the ridges thrown

Like giant arms among the clouds.

There was neither voice nor crested images,

No chorister, no priest. There was

Only the great height of the rock

And the two of them standing still to rest.

There was the cold wind and the sound

It made, away from the muck of the land

That they had left, heroic sound

Joyous and jubilant and sure.

Wallace Stevens, from The Collected Poems

The other day, paging through The Collected Poems, I stopped when I got to this poem. Plainspoken and clear, Stevens describes the curative calm of an impersonal, natural world. The difference in the joyous call of the wind as compared to just a hint of disharmony in the muck of the land. Or perhaps I was thinking of being away this past weekend, away from distractions, dogged worries, and other little flies that cataract a clear view.

This past weekend, we camped with friends in Ohiopyle State Park in the Laurel Highlands. The place is recreational in the purest spirit of the word. The Youghiogheny River features largely in the Park’s draw. A few days before we arrived, the Army Corps of Engineers released the river’s swelling water; it had been pent up for weeks in an effort to relieve the Mississippi far downstream. Free, the water crashed, foamed, spit up on underwater rocks, bearing down in swift, single, current. Spilled into streams and pushed over cliffs into 20 plus feet drops, the Youghiogheny is a marvel. And the forest is no less dynamic. Hiking trails pull you out toward meadows and up towards cantilevered trays of flat rock. And always, the constant hiss of fast-moving river somewhere, even out of sight, just audible.

Part of the allure in outdoor camping is the process of simulating domestic life out of doors; the shared efforts of strangers unpacking their domestic vision in public green space. But most of it is being unseen, disappearing into the foliage, into a distinct geometry of elemental, inhuman life. We were closed in by crowding rhododendron, massive tulip trees that dropped pale leaves, and stands upon stands of pine. How appropriate that Stevens writes a poem that begins in so contradictory and conflicted a tone and delivers such scrubbed and sublime ending.

These past few weeks have been too filled. The outdoors and a poem that intimates a solution to the too-familiar and two-phrase puzzle What to Do. How to Live. is what I have been thinking of. Hopefully this will change. For now I will tell you that before we left the state park for home, we four hikers pulled up to an empty spot on the muddy shore and waded far into the cold brown current. We wore bathing suits and the water numbed us while the sun burned on.