Essays – …and other writing

Verse and Vertigo

Thomas Erickson

October/November, 2024

I wrote a poem yesterday. This is not usual behavior for me. An explanation is called for.

Now, it’s true that I’ve been paying more attention to verse lately. I’m taking a Shakespeare course and have become intrigued by the way he uses language. Faeries and other magical creatures speak in rhyming verse. Gentle folk often speak in the iambic rhythm of blank verse, rising into rhyme during moments of passion, and faltering into arrhythmia when in distress. Common folk speak in prose, of course, though it is sometimes inventively mangled for humorous effect. All this has raised my awareness of language and rhythm. Sometimes I’ll track iambic feet that trip along a sentence, I’ll read and with my finger tap, di-DAP, di-DAP, di-DAP, di-DAP.

But while it’s fair to say that verse has infiltrated a bit of my mental ecosystem, the poem I wrote had nothing to do with Shakespeare; nor was it motivated by any sort of poetic impulse. Instead, it had to do with geochemistry, and with memory. Still, the exercise had many points of interest.

Let’s step back in time, just two days, to lay out how this began.

I awoke to an episode of BPPV: Benign Paroxysmal Positional Vertigo. It sounds like a punk rock band, but it’s really an inner ear disorder. I have periods where I get dizzy when in a particular position: to wit, if I am lying in bed and roll over, the room starts spinning.

It is quite unpleasant. I find that I do not agree with the “benign” part of my condition’s name. But since “benign” presumably means that I’m not having a stroke or aneurysm, I should not complain.

On the Road Again

Thomas Erickson
June 2024; August 2024

The sky arches overhead in a dome, light blue at the apex, shading down into an ashen blue as it reaches the ground. Traces of smoke have drifted south from wildfires in Canada. Ahead, the road curves, cutting slantwise across the low rolling hills.

The car vibrates. The road unspools below me. Seams in the asphalt beat out a soft rhythm. The landscape ahead divides and streams by me, the nearby trees parsing the early morning light into an irregular cadence. Car and sky are fixed; the world flows.

The ancient navigators who traveled the south Pacific in their outrigger canoes experienced the world this way. Their canoes were motionless, a stable center, and the ocean and its islands moved past them. Though the islands were far beyond the horizon, they could feel their presence in the patterns of the waves, and in the clouds that floated above them.

I am on a road trip. I have a roll to nibble as I set out. A sandwich for lunch tucked beneath the front seat. A water bottle in the cupholder. My iPhone, on its mount, displays my route. I am no navigator, not so in tune with the patterns of the world that I always know where I am. But the patterns of the world fascinate me; I am trying to learn them.

I have a feeling. Could it be elation? It is quiet, joyful, light, quick. If it were a sound it would be high and clear, perhaps like Tibetan singing bells, stirred into sound by the movement of a finger. Perhaps, as the road moves beneath me, it sets me ringing.

A Straight Transect

Thomas Erickson
May 2020; June 2024

I am up to my armpits in a field of witch hazel. A thousand fingers pluck at my clothes as I push forward. The hazel obscures the ground and makes forward movement slow and halting. I can’t make out where I’m headed. I lurch through a furrow. Cold soaks my right shoe as I step into a water-filled depression. I slip on a charred bit of log. It is a hot, sweaty, claustrophobic experience. This is not what I expected from a course in Forest Ecology.

How does one design a new life?

Tunnel of Light

Thomas Erickson
March-April 2024

I close my eyes, as directed.

I am lying on my back. There is a pillow beneath my knees, and another beneath my head. My arms have been carefully positioned on their own supports. I am as comfortable as I have ever been.

Behind my head is a massive machine. It is all white, with rounded edges; it has indicator lights, and subtly designed controls labeled with alien glyphs. The machine is dominated by a circular opening that leads into a cylindrical passage filled with radiance.

Why I Hike

Thomas Erickson
October 2023; April 2024

Not long ago, during an email exchange, a friend asked me why I like hiking. He put “hiking” in quotes, indicating, I believe, that he was baffled as to why anyone would engage in such an activity. I began to write an answer along the lines of enjoying being out in nature, and being active, and getting into a somewhat meditative state – but found that I didn’t really believe my own words. Not that any of that was untrue; it just didn’t get at the ‘why.’ I deleted my response and told him I’d think about it.

I was soon to depart for a week of solo hiking in Yosemite and figured that would be a good opportunity to reflect on the question.

A few months ago I read the essay “Stickeen,” by John Muir, which describes his adventures during a trip to Alaska. He writes:

Aloha

Thomas Erickson
August 2023

I am free.

I have spent a week at a the Hawaiian International Conference on System Science. I ran a half-day workshop, and then a full day session in which twelve people presented papers. I welcomed people, introduced the session, introduced each talk, held up time cards as time ran out, shot meaningful looks at people who did not appear to be heeding the “stop” time card, and, should the audience sit mute at the end of the talk, asked the first question. As an introvert, I find all this quite exhausting.

Body Over Mind

Thomas Erickson
July 2023

For the first fifty years of my life I cultivated my mind.

I was raised to believe that learning was the path to having a good life. Learn to read. Do well in school. Develop social skills. Get into a good college. Find a profession where your interests and abilities overlap. Be curious; seek out new things; keep learning. And, as a consequence, advance along the career path: develop more expertise, accrue experiences, develop your work portfolio, expand your network of contacts. My body had little to do with any of this. Well, that’s not true. It is more accurate to say that it played a supporting role: possibly important, but by no means in the spotlight. I didn’t pay much attention to it. Yet I was not a sedentary person: I biked, to school and then later to work. I practiced a martial art. I hiked and backpacked and body-surfed. I kept a garden. And so on. Much of what I did for fun involved physical activity. But still, I took my body for granted.

The Mind in the Hand

Thomas Erickson
June 2023

I have spent the last six years learning piano.

I started late, just after I turned 61. I was starting almost from scratch – I knew the treble clef, and quarter and half and whole notes, but that’s about it. They say that one learns things – especially things like language and music and dancing – better before puberty. That may be so.

But what I lack in timing, I make up in other ways. Studies in the psychology of expertise tell us that practice swamps talent. Studies of students at piano conservatories find that the best predictor of how well students do – whether they go one to become piano teachers, concert pianists, or world-renowned performers – is simply how much they practice. The idea of someone with talent to whom music comes naturally… well, that may be true for a few months during childhood, but in the long run it is practice, practice, practice. Perhaps it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: tell someone they’re talented, and they feel motivated to practice more. But although I lack talent for music, I have an equally useful talent: persistence.

The Napkin Thief

Thomas Erickson
April 2023

I am cleaning out the closet in the mudroom. Things accumulate here: it is an ideal place to tuck things as we depart in a rush, or return in a wave of fatigue. Once tucked, however, they are apt to be forgotten in the dark, still space of the closet. Gradually, the well-ordered space is engulfed by an alluvial fan of detritus washed up by the wakes of our passage. Tucks become tosses, the angle of repose is approached, and soon thereafter I am forced into action.