Vashon Island

            I used to dread the night. At a very young age I would throw personal tantrums in my bed because I did not want to sleep. Like a little maniac I would kick and toss and moan and squeal. I would cover my head with the blanket, kick the same blankets off, toss to my right, turn to my left, sit up, stare out the window across the street toward the single light bulb burning its filament in the window of the St. Aubin’s house. It wasn’t a childish petulance. I wasn’t protesting something mundane. Looking back, you could say that I was growing up.

I wasn’t all that old and there was no reason why I should have felt the way I did. But what does youth really promise other than naiveté toward the rest of the world? My panic was grounded in something real but it wasn’t grounded in anything permanent. Perhaps you, too, have felt something similar when the lights go out and every distraction has been taken from you. Perhaps you, too, have felt all of your weight, at once kept firmly in place by gravity, suddenly pushed upward as though you were weightlessly levitating off the bed, toward the ceiling, through the ceiling, above the treetops and out of sight.

On Vashon Island in western Washington state, childhood and nature have merged. A children’s bicycle, once sold in a shop or sold in a mail-order catalogue once, perhaps, given as a gift, handed down, given as charity, used to deliver papers, neglected, a cause of teenage angst or childhood longing, a memory, is now entrenched within a Douglas Fir. The tree, once itself a child, once itself a sapling, growing, forming, reaching toward the sunniest section of sky, encountered a bike, encountered aluminum or steel and spoke and pedal. No noticeable struggle occurred. It was as though the bicycle, itself, was weightless.

            The seconds and minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years all passed by and the tree grew and grew. Obviously the tree wasn’t going to stop growing because it would take the sun burning out or a nuclear holocaust or some human interference to stop it from doing so. It just continues to grow. The bike never truly changes but within the tree it does start to resemble something new. Or at the very least, it takes on new meaning. Or maybe it is the tree that takes on new meaning? Either way, together, both become a visual indicator of time passing. Either way, together, both become a visual indicator of a strong memory.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines permanence as “The action, fact, or state of lasting or remaining; continued or enduring existence or duration; continuation, persistence.” It’s hard to imagine permanence as anything but an abstract idea. The idea of permanence is much the same as the idea of eternity; both exist insofar as they are delusions we tell ourselves. Both exist outside of graspable logic. Yet, when I was young, suffering through my night terrors, it was because I was grappling with the stark truth that I was no longer permanent. Don’t you wonder what the act of permanence looks like? Or what the state of permanence is? The “fact” of permanence is a delusion, yet the “act” or “state” implies some construct whether it be mental, physical, or both. Milan Kundera wrote about this type of permanence in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But I would much rather use a less obvious quote from Vladimir Nabokov:

 

“I knew that I had fallen in love with Lolita forever; but I also knew she would not be forever Lolita.”

 

Which ultimately leads me to think “well, at one point you must’ve believed yourself to be permanent.” Either consciously or not, I felt as though I was in a state of lasting or remaining; that I was of continued or enduring existence or duration. It is a foolish human notion to think that we are permanent. To think that we are forever rooted into our positions on earth. Yet, I can think of several moments beyond my early childhood naiveté where I believed myself to be permanent.

Those moments of permanence, interestingly enough, seem to coincide with two juxtaposing human qualities: pertaining to love and to routine. The strange truth that connects the two is that the succession of days and the routine that they follow is always ruptured when you fall in love. The routines that I live by, whether it be going to sleep at a certain time (which I fault at repeatedly), eating breakfast in the morning (which I abide to or else I am very grumpy), or going to the gym (which rarely ever becomes a full-blown habit at all) are always tilted off their axis when infused with some form of love. What is it about the routines we live by that offer themselves up to be destroyed by love? Perhaps the routines are our way of instilling some permanence into stark, shucking, shifting weightlessness of our day-to-day lives. Grounded in routine, we perhaps feel closer to something that can never change.

I think that I have felt love. Which, according to my own assumptions, means that I have also felt permanent. It is always true that the tree grows. It is not the fact that the tree exists that makes the tree permanent. Even if the tree outlasts us, it is still obvious to us that the tree will die. It is not permanent. Maybe, just maybe, it is the act of growth. This, we could say, is the state of permanence:

A summer’s morning. Rolling out of the bed, scampering to the kitchen on the gaudy, dull, orange carpet that lined my big pink split-level house. The heat makes everything dank and sticky, The year is 1996 and I am now seven years old. The bowl of cereal doesn’t really taste all that great because the refrigerator is old and has a tough time keeping itself far below room temperature. I finish the bowl quickly and push the heavy rusty glass, sliding door to the side and find my bathing suit, crinkly and dry, across the railing of the porch. I run back inside, past the golden retriever and the border collie, into the bathroom, and put my bathing suit on. Running back outside, the pool is crystalline and sweet. It shimmers and dances with the rays of the sun. A diving board, a deep end and a shallow end. Pruning fingers and horseflies are the only concern. By 1998 this will all be a swamp.

This is a memory I have of my backyard swimming pool while I was growing up. In the winter of 1997, a branch fell into the pool and ripped the liner and exposed the earth underneath. Sometimes the longest distance between these two points, the pool and the swamp, can be no time at all. Since the day a branch fell, an ecosystem thrived. Year after year, rainwater would touch the exposed earth and create life. A cat o’ nine tail emerged from the uncalculated excess. Followed by another. and then other green plants in what became a reservoir of shallow, murky randomness. We never had the money to fix it so it just became something we accepted. The backyard swamp. The ensuing years brought frogs and water-bugs and mosquitoes and bats and the two dogs that would chase them playfully.

Interestingly enough, the memory of those mornings when the pool was in tact stay with me. The actual data of the memory doesn’t change but there is something different about it as time passes. The memory becomes stronger and stranger. It is like the rocks that get washed over by a tide: whether in receding or in welcoming, the rocks shuck, shift, and change positions, but they are never totally abandoned. I will even try to hang onto the memory of the pool as it exists in my memory today, yet I think I’ve become better at accepting that even my memory of that pool will continue to change.

Is it even possible to hold on? In order to hold on, one requires belief (perhaps we should call it faith) in the permanence of things. First published in 1879, Jakob Lorber’s collected writings entitled New Revelation was made up of a staggering 10,000 pages. His writing was inspired by a divine entity that channeled his body. Lorber may not have been his own muse; he merely functioned as a conduit. The pages he produced remain, but Lorber’s body was not permanent. He was human like the rest of us. Among his 10,000 pages of writing, there existed this one idea that man should begin planting trees into natural domiciles. That we should curate the growth of the trees to be our natural shelter rather than to chop them down. At some point in 1899, Lorber’s heart stopped pumping. He would never get the chance to see if his tree grew naturally into a home.

What is it about a heartbeat, always moving towards the next pump of blood, ceaselessly, until one day it stops? In some ways, maybe, the only thing permanent is what our heartbeat can’t eclipse. The foolish human notion that we are permanent and that nature is not. The heartbeat is our closest evidence of this. If the heart stops and the blood stops moving through the circulatory system, you’ve got a big problem on hand. By believing you you are, in fact, permanent, keeps you from having the patience to wait for your tree to naturally become a home. The irony is that you steal in order to grow. You strip the tree of its permanence and make it our impermanent home.

Yet there is still something about the natural world that beckons us. Is it a memory of what was once pure and true but is now strange and foreign? Or is it more like a never-ending heartbeat? A growing permanence? This same feeling rings true when you fall out of love. I felt permanent until one day I was not.

I like to think about the tree on Vashon Island with the bicycle encased within it. I like to think about every moment that happened prior to its current state and how the bicycle was lofted up into the air slowly. How it is held firmly by a tree that merely deviated its growth to accommodate for the foreign presence of the bicycle. The tree will continue to stretch toward the most sun, maximizing its potential for photosynthesis. And that bicycle was once something else, too.

I can say with a level of certainty that falling out of love is the most permanent of moments. It happens in a flash and what is left is the scattered and tattered semblance of your memories of being in love. Those memories of when you were in love end up fucking dislocated and disjointed. You were once something like one tree continually growing up and up and up. In a sense, each past tree-ring before the present one mattered just as much as the upcoming one. Each past centimeter closer toward the sun. This is why routine loses its significance. Because when you fall in love, the permanence is that the hearts keep beating.

Falling in love offers you new routines where all the routines you once held onto fade. The time is out of joint. A new permanence takes hold. Not one like a routine that you lie to yourself about or don’t truly believe but a permanence that you truly do believe. The routines evaporate and suddenly everything is charged with significance; life itself is infused with the instantaneous cataloging of every moment; the moments that you believe in your now-ephemeral yet gem-like heart are memories that will, as the saying goes, last forever. But at the heart of every tree is a history of what was once manifest at every moment before the present and sometimes the tree’s heart contains the petrified truth of a bicycle which can never be rechanged.