(LYRIC ESSAY)
ACCESS TO GRACE
RACHEL CHENVEN
Rain
Another day of rain. The cars careen and whisper, windows blacked in the midday darkness, melanoid tires spinning off silver flecks of water. If Annie Dillard is right that “beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them,” then a noontime rain is a test of our efforts at vision. “The least we can do,” Dillard commands, “is try to be there.”
I try to be there, but grace is a slippery fish.
The rain keeps up its odd announcements, now rattling the car’s rooftop in tinny clatter, now sucking itself back up into the gray-draped sky. Even as it dribbles down, some middle swathe of air is rinsed in sunlight, a lit liminal line between sky and ground, revealing a pale rainbow half-arced in the middle distance behind silent fir trees standing guard.
Within minutes, the clatter softens to a susurration, stops altogether, ceases, slides away in pockmarked plops down the wide front window. The rainbow fades, a faint misperception, six stripes of imaginary light, glowing away.
Stones
I have collected, over time, too many stones and dried bits of flora. I never bother to identify or otherwise explain to myself these bits and pieces. Instead of the categories as given to me by science, I make of them my own configurations. In one bowl I have only black rocks striped with white lines. In another, only stones with holes or pockmarks. In a third, rocks perfectly round, a fourth, rocks mottled with the composite color of some now-invisible geologic process of compression, material merging.
There is satisfaction when things fit together. The curve of one rock nestles perfectly into the cleft of another, though they were not formed together, but in distant regions of the earth’s disparate crust. These stones are the strata of earth’s sheddings, hardened into mountains and eroded back to pieces, plied for pressing aeons by gravity and weather.
Together, apart, together. Like this we create and are created.
Trees
It is that time of winter when the bare branches treat the sky as a muted canvas, making drawings in wet black ink. The effect is of a devastating Jackson Pollock, all crooked lines in fragmented intersection, a sinuous chaos. The trees know spring will come back, but the fragile branches, removed from the living green heart, reach out only toward empty air.
Yet a trunk is like the brawny shoulder of a grown man, an Atlas holding up the whole of the sky. Once, recently, walking in the compromised forest, a thin strip of oaks and firs ranging a meadow on the outskirts of town, I came across a felled trunk high as my head, and felt the sudden need to touch it as I would the arm of a beloved. I stood stroking the rough bark, feeling in my fingers the departed spirit of an immense forest, a tribe of broad and thewy beasts lumbering slowly across the land in their communal bulk, at a pace too primal to register in human perception.
Naturalist Loren Eiseley recounts an occasion of floating in a river and experiencing, for a short while, the vast history of all that floated with him. “I was streaming over ancient sea beds thrust aloft where giant reptiles had once sported; I was wearing down the face of time and trundling cloud-wreathed ranges into oblivion.” Surrounded by trees with my pale clumsy hand on the bark of one felled flank, I felt some of this history, some of this pulsing of life through ongoing time, some small portion of this connection to the incredible evolutionary accident of energy flowing through endless form.
Trees are the metaphor for everything: for human thought, with its branches of knowledge; for human language, with its ancient Babel of forked tongues; for the genealogy of life itself, with its emergence four billion years ago from some unimaginably slender common trunk. Roots beget branches beget roots.
Emergence
Time flows toward the future. Evolution flows toward complexity. We emerge from the origin point, some billions of years in our collective past, building our own bodies out of whatever materials come to hand, minerals, molecules, mechanisms we cobble into use and codify across generations, as much a form of energy in flux as any stable situation of matter.
From the intricately infolded molecular universe, life emerges. Everything else follows. First comes the structure, then its organization into systems. Or, like Plato’s forms, does the system come first, and only later does structure mimic that unreal reality, a billion times over imperfectly impersonating some mathematical necessity?
The current mystery is organization, molecules creating genes, genes creating bodies, bodies creating cultures. Over 60 years ago Teilhard de Chardin insisted that “every man...makes his own soul throughout his earthly days…” Here we are, creating our very souls out of the materials given to us--molecules, dust--and thereby transcending, in some very natural way, our own naturalness.
But transcendence is perfectly natural. The universe emerges every moment something more than it was the moment before, complexity expanding the qualities, the categories, the multiplicity of interpretations, the points of view; becoming constantly birthing still more becoming.
Still, there is being too. There is saving sameness, there is stillness, there is longevity--the rain, the stones, the trees. This dual nature, both formed and forming, opens up an infinite expansion of vision, or as de Chardin puts it, “evolution proceeds toward spirit.”
Grace
I keep waiting for grace to take me. Am I closed to it, that I wait and wait? Is it happening already and I just don’t know it?
I know so little, and perhaps want for myself all the wrong things, so that it’s easy to misinterpret what the world gives me. Maybe this is grace, this short shock of little life, gone as soon as it comes, yet so long and laborious in the living.
I am overwhelmed by life’s reckless bounty. I am haunted by my lack of faith in continuity, in a little bit of rest for the weary. I am greedy: I have everything and still I want more.
So I go looking instead of just seeing, trying to whittle reality down to the explainable, though the remaining mystery is the beauty that I want most to witness. Grace has brought me again and again to the brink of this god, and I have hoped instead for some kind of closed system, some solid answer.
The only way out of this cycle is the only way in: the rain, the stones, the trees, the nature of the emerging world in its earthly specificity as much as its gaseous universal generality. I have access only to this tiny corner, the rain, the stones, the trees.
Through which grace has access to me.
Rachel Chenven Powers lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children. Her work has appeared in Earthzine and Entropy. She has a master’s degree from the University of Chicago and recently finished her MFA at Portland State University, where she won the Tom Bates Prize for Best Essay in 2016.
Chila: This is a beautiful essay, Rachel. Lines like this: "Maybe this is grace, this short shock of little life, gone as soon as it comes, yet so long and laborious in the living." How long did it take you to construct this work from concept to completion?
Rachel: I wrote this essay in about a month. First it was a series of disconnected descriptions and vignettes--I distinctly recall writing one of them while sitting in my car in the rain waiting to pick up my son from school--but as I put them side-by-side they began to reflect on one another. After that a few weeks of intermittent editing helped me to refine the overall flow and coherence of the piece.
Chila: You've quoted a couple of my favorite essayists: Annie Dillard and Loren Eiseley. Who are your other lyrical influences and which of their books have you found most helpful?
Rachel: It’s always tough to name favorites! I think when I was writing this piece, aside from Dillard and Eiseley, I was reading other nature writers with a strong poetic voice like Edward Hoagland (Sex and the River Styx) and Barry Lopez (About This Life, especially the essay "Apologia"). I also found inspiration in the writings of Anne Carson (Decreation) and especially Lia Purpura, whose book of essays On Looking is dedicated to turning careful observation into eloquent contemplation. I am always enamored of writers who, as Kathy Acker puts it, “present the human heart naked so that our world, for a second, explodes into flames.” (“A Few Notes on Two of My Books” in Bodies of Work.)
Chila: Tell us what you find the toughest about writing essays like this.
Rachel: To my mind, the lyric essay is a cross between a poem and an essay: it should consist of equal parts lyricism and argument. The hardest part of writing a lyric essay is sewing these elements together seamlessly, so that the argument flows unpretentiously out of the poetry, and the poetry articulates and enhances the argument. My tendency is to go too far with making an argument so that the work becomes pedantic, or on the flip side, to get too purple with the lyricism. The challenge for me is to have a light but firm touch, to pare the prose down to beautiful rather than florid turns of phrase, and to say something meaningful while doing it.
Chila: This is a beautiful essay, Rachel. Lines like this: "Maybe this is grace, this short shock of little life, gone as soon as it comes, yet so long and laborious in the living." How long did it take you to construct this work from concept to completion?
Rachel: I wrote this essay in about a month. First it was a series of disconnected descriptions and vignettes--I distinctly recall writing one of them while sitting in my car in the rain waiting to pick up my son from school--but as I put them side-by-side they began to reflect on one another. After that a few weeks of intermittent editing helped me to refine the overall flow and coherence of the piece.
Chila: You've quoted a couple of my favorite essayists: Annie Dillard and Loren Eiseley. Who are your other lyrical influences and which of their books have you found most helpful?
Rachel: It’s always tough to name favorites! I think when I was writing this piece, aside from Dillard and Eiseley, I was reading other nature writers with a strong poetic voice like Edward Hoagland (Sex and the River Styx) and Barry Lopez (About This Life, especially the essay "Apologia"). I also found inspiration in the writings of Anne Carson (Decreation) and especially Lia Purpura, whose book of essays On Looking is dedicated to turning careful observation into eloquent contemplation. I am always enamored of writers who, as Kathy Acker puts it, “present the human heart naked so that our world, for a second, explodes into flames.” (“A Few Notes on Two of My Books” in Bodies of Work.)
Chila: Tell us what you find the toughest about writing essays like this.
Rachel: To my mind, the lyric essay is a cross between a poem and an essay: it should consist of equal parts lyricism and argument. The hardest part of writing a lyric essay is sewing these elements together seamlessly, so that the argument flows unpretentiously out of the poetry, and the poetry articulates and enhances the argument. My tendency is to go too far with making an argument so that the work becomes pedantic, or on the flip side, to get too purple with the lyricism. The challenge for me is to have a light but firm touch, to pare the prose down to beautiful rather than florid turns of phrase, and to say something meaningful while doing it.