Who am I with when I'm alone? Driving around Atlantic Canada a week ago, I wondered about the experience of camping beside a river, on a bluff overlooking the sea, in an abandoned gravel quarry: I wasn't sending pictures and so in 'conversation' with people at home, but even so, I didn't feel lonely but rather intensely engaged with wherever I was.
My uncle, 95 now, suggested I was actually companioned by the traces of my life so far, the layers of my past being. So the Other was my former self or selves--who I had been up till that moment, each occasion then being the culmination of what had undergone to date.
It seemed to me that, rather than memory being my companion, I was instead accompanied by expressions of my perennial desires--the love of flowing water, for instance, in the form of river, or surf.
Was I with anyone, anything, at all? Was there in fact no companionship? Maybe I didn't feel lonely because I had no sense of exclusion or abandonment, and absent these conditions, I simply 'was', in a flow of consciousness that was busy with its own flow, as the the Machias river had been when I bathed in it my first day out.
I don't know why the question occurred to me except that sometimes I was aware of being where I was and alone, and that fact addressed in some way to someone, whom I never could tell.
Yet I remember my last evening out, alone in an old excavated site within earshot of the Airline, Rte 9, but completely out of sight of it, building a small fire out of the abundance of dry wood nearby, steaming 5 lbs of mussels in a stockpot I'd bought in Calais for the occasion, then eating the contents of shell after shell (and quaffing hard cider at the same time) as I sat in the evening sun on stool on top of a small hill looking down on my car, thinking 'This is a splendid moment and I know it even as I enjoy it,' and, from today's perspective, I was right.
My uncle, 95 now, suggested I was actually companioned by the traces of my life so far, the layers of my past being. So the Other was my former self or selves--who I had been up till that moment, each occasion then being the culmination of what had undergone to date.
It seemed to me that, rather than memory being my companion, I was instead accompanied by expressions of my perennial desires--the love of flowing water, for instance, in the form of river, or surf.
Was I with anyone, anything, at all? Was there in fact no companionship? Maybe I didn't feel lonely because I had no sense of exclusion or abandonment, and absent these conditions, I simply 'was', in a flow of consciousness that was busy with its own flow, as the the Machias river had been when I bathed in it my first day out.
I don't know why the question occurred to me except that sometimes I was aware of being where I was and alone, and that fact addressed in some way to someone, whom I never could tell.
Yet I remember my last evening out, alone in an old excavated site within earshot of the Airline, Rte 9, but completely out of sight of it, building a small fire out of the abundance of dry wood nearby, steaming 5 lbs of mussels in a stockpot I'd bought in Calais for the occasion, then eating the contents of shell after shell (and quaffing hard cider at the same time) as I sat in the evening sun on stool on top of a small hill looking down on my car, thinking 'This is a splendid moment and I know it even as I enjoy it,' and, from today's perspective, I was right.
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