On Summer Breaks

Lately, my mind has kind of emptied out. I’m dumb with summer is what I hope. That and I need to restock on library books (though the review process gets a little soggy and sorry sometimes. See Virginia Woolf on the tedium of reviewing). The feeling is loose but if examined there is the dread seed of permanence that lies there, barely buried. What to write on then? Two things have managed to stick in the gloss that is my current mental state: a beach camping trip (the source of peaceable emptiness) and a stunning essay I read in the most recent issue of Granta by Rachel Cusk.

First, Assateague National Seashore Park. A place to camp among wild ponies. Have you heard of this place – located on an island that spans the Maryland/ Virginia divide? The wild horses of Assateague live in two distinct herds – one rustled and sold by Virginia’s Salt Cowboys in an annual tradition known as the Chincoteague Pony Swim and the other minimally managed by the National Park Service. The latter live on the Maryland side of the Virginia-Maryland state line. These horses have evolved over time to become squat bodied versions of their sister tribe. They’re short legged and roughly haired, living among swarms of biting flies in the beach and marsh of the National Seashore Park. This weekend, I watched them clomp on sand and asphalt, around the stopped bodies of cars weighed down with gear and tourists who lean out car windows, cameras extended.

We camped. I’ve posted about camping before but beach camping (as this was) is an entirely different experience than woods camping. The elements are upon you and when the sun burns in the sand, plastic shoes cannot protect against what seems to be unending stretches of scorched and shifting ground. There is the ocean to take the burn off. And the ocean is a swelling, yawning, changing thing, glittering under the sun, wild and tossed and foaming with invisible undercurrents. I learned to swim in the ocean as an adult; how to manage the gaining waves, how to time entry and exit, when to dive, jump, float, when to swim against and when to swim with. Even now, a rough and crashing ocean will trash me.

The beauty of a (short) beach visit is that it can clear your mind by blasting all the bits of other things into an explosive, blinding, shine. I think I’ve implied this about woods camping but a beach visit does the job best. This ‘shine’ is the opposite of what Cusk writes of, at one point, in her gorgeous essay, Aftermath – and yet, like. Let me explain. First, Cusk:

“The point was that this darkness – call it what you will – this darkness and disorganization were not mere negation, mere absence. They were both aftermath and prelude. The etymology of the word ‘aftermath’ is ‘second mowing’: a second crop of grass that is sown and reaped after the harvest is in. Civilization, order, meaning, belief: these were not sunlit peaks to be reached by a steady climb. They were built and then they fell, were built and fell again or were destroyed. The darkness, the disorganization that succeeded them had their own existence, their own integrity; were betrothed to civilization, as sleep is betrothed to activity. In the life of compartments lies the possibility of unity, just as unity contains the prospect of atomization...”

A visit to the beach is not even remotely comparable to the fall of a civilization (what Cusk refers to here) but there is something apposite about the idea of unity vs atomization, of the integrity of the phase after fall that is betrothed to incremental rebuilding, that I believe these brief interludes, shining or dark, can give way to. While one is weighed with history’s lessons, with pain, the other is weighed with …nothing. "Mere absence" when it is total, when it replaces a cacophony of units, also has its own integrity. Perhaps the opposite of a fall is a state of mental, not bliss, but absence. And there is a type of unity in that blinding shine – call it what you will – where atomization can crackle to new start.