SAILOR ON HORSEBACK

“We may lose ourselves again,” said Nikita moodily. He was gloomy because of the intense longing he felt for the vodka; and the tea, the only thing that could quench that longing, had not yet been offered to him.

At the bottom of his mind, Vasily Andreyevich knew that the dawn could be nowhere near; but he began to feel more and more afraid and he chose to both deceive himself and to find himself out.
Leo Tolstoy, Master and Man

Look. Listen. When the longing comes, it is deep and vicious in the purest Russian sense. Yes, the Russians. The people who, in modern history, twice slaughtered the beasts of the fields, poisoned their own wells, and scorched the land to dust in the face of fear and oppression. Yes. Eat our dust you French and Germans. And so fear and longing are bred in Leo’s bones.

But we all have our advancing armies in the darkness, Churchill’s black dog, and the dull ache that strikes beneath the ribs. Where do they come from? How can they cut across the fields and track us down? What dog creeps with such silence and determination? Why does my heart tick over one day and thud the next? If I knew this place, this art, this malady, I would surely track, hunt and medicate my way through it, but as it is, I know only when it is too late and the clash of metal, lonesome howls and bitter taste of a penny under the tongue are upon me. This, friend, is when it is too late.

I told someone the other day that I was a sailor on horseback. It may have solicited much laughter, but it was no joke to me. No. I stole this moniker from a biography of Jack London. Jack London wrote more in 20 years than most men, and a damn lot of it was better than most men write in a lifetime. He had talent to burn and he burned every ounce of it to cinders before he dropped the pen (and the hammer) at age 40. There was a black dog scratching at the door when they found him. But he was a sailor on horseback, and had spent a life running. There are many places to run, and the sea and the range are two of the most trying, I think. Sea to sea, Korea to the West Indies, California to Alaska. He covered miles like words cover ideas. And then he stopped. Dead. So laughter is not appropriate. I said as much and promptly emptied 3 boilermakers at the bar. Fuck the laughter, I thought.

So I suppose I should get down to the nut of all of this. The longing. The Five W’s of it. What, where, when, who, why. The Five fingers of reason and being, dictated in order, because I am tired and I want to get some things straight. Longing to be what you can no longer be. Wishing to be somewhere where you aren’t. Trying to get back to when things were simpler and more pure and forward to when you can just sit back and the sun shines and maybe a fish splashes and you don’t have to look over your shoulder or even ahead, but just listen to wind and you breathe. The people who you miss and you love and you haven’t met yet. The wondering why it’s so hard to wake up in the morning and so hard to go to bed at night. This is longing, and maybe more than just I have felt it.

When the horrors of the Ministry of Love are dawning on Orwell’s Winston Smith, in anguish he cries out to his tormentor, “I understand how; I want to know why.” And that is the question that remains. Why this day or that, these people or those, this feeling or another? Why do I stand naked in the night drinking whiskey by the light of the streetlamp outside my window? Why read compulsively; with what hopes in mind? Why have I been piling up all these words since the day I was born and where am I going to put them? What am I waiting for and when will it come? Who will be left and who will be there when I find it? These are the things that the black dog sometimes says to me when she sits, her head upon my lap with dreaming brown eyes staring up into my mind. Sometimes we sit in silence, but after too long, she and I get restless and we walk. She always takes her place, content to trot at my heels, nipping at me from time to time.

But I said once that there were going to be better moments in this writing too, and I’ll be damned if there aren’t. So, that said, I will tell you that the black dog runs away from time to time, the shadow lifts, the clashing armies stand at bay, and the light shines just right. Sometimes it is in people’s eyes: you know who you are. Other times it is when the road stretches out and the wheel plays beneath the hands. And when the moon is right and the night is silent there are places you can find that you thought you had all but forgotten…And then, then you can look over your shoulder and there is the place and the person and the thing you were missing, and it is not the black dog, it’s something else, just back enough to be a white, warm blur. And you look and you smile and you feel that you are not alone and that there is a sense to the life that casts itself on you like a spell. The sense that all can be right and good and true. And it is a moment of essence, wonder, and hope; you are mortal but happy and you want to look again. But remember, as Tom Petty, a man who bleeds mortality once said, You can look back, but it’s best not to stare.