Relay: Circling Round To the Truth

I’m only, so far — ahem — a certain middle age, but sometimes it seems like many of the things I’ve done and places I’ve been are part of a long-ago dream, a narrative of memory threaded with story, and I can’t always pick apart which is which.

When Daniel Berrigan, the peace activist and Jesuit priest, died the other day, for instance, I recalled — I think — spending a weekend at a poetry workshop that he helped lead years ago in a looming stone manor along the Hudson River somewhere upstate. 

Or was it only that his presence was conjured by Carolyn Forché, the poet and activist, who told tales at that workshop about Father Berrigan and his brother, the late Philip Berrigan?

I knew them from a book I cadged in high school, still on my shelf, about the Catonsville Nine, the group including the Berrigan brothers that used napalm to burn draft records in a protest against the Vietnam War. Proximity to them — people who acted courageously, from their conscience — was, for me, like meeting a celebrity.

I didn’t dare assert on Facebook, as I’d wanted to, moved by Father Berrigan’s death, that I had once met the man, because what if I was wrong? 

But who cares, really? The truth is that — like so many things I’ve internalized, either from reading or imagined or actual experiences — Father Berrigan is a part of my story, my memories, someone meaningful to me. 

I do remember clearly from that upstate weekend Carolyn striding up and down some dark and monkish room reciting her gut-puncher of a poem, “The Colonel,” which describes an ordinary-sounding dinner with a Salvadoran official who then issues her a warning, spilling a sack of human ears onto the table.

I heard it again recently at a workshop on the poetry of witness, the phrase Ms. Forché coined. “Something for your poetry, no?” the colonel says in the poem. 

I don’t remember much about that weekend along the Hudson — did I sleep in a single cot in an upper-floor cell in the drafty manse? — but I have a picture in my head of a walk down a rocky slope to the clear and churning river on a coldish day.  

I know that the workshop did occur, because Carolyn remembers it. We met again a few years ago in Washington State. I was on another romp in the way-back machine, my first return to my college stomping grounds, some 30 years hence, to take another class.

Back to the woods of the Olympic Peninsula, to the shipyards in gritty Olympia, to the house on the blackberry hill where much of the lore of my younger days was born.

The older I get, though I want to go forward, the more drawn I am to circling back. There’s comfort in following threads, finding them still woven into today and re-examining their origins. Does this mean I’m circling endlessly around the same track, or am I going deeper and creating something of this life? What I know now is both less and more than what I knew then. 

On my stop to reminisce at the Evergreen State College, I began chatting with a woman who remembered Willi Unsoeld, a brilliant, spiritual, and charismatic professor who taught the integrated course I took my first year at the nontraditional school. He had a great impact on all of us.

That year at Evergreen I joined hands with a huge circle of people singing to celebrate Willi’s life. Along with one of my classmates, he was killed in an avalanche on Mount Rainier during a climb for our outdoor education class.  

Instead of going to the mountain, my group had headed south in a big white van to study whales in Baja. We made it to somewhere in California, I think, never to Mexico, at any rate. Is there anyone out there who can tell me that story? Am I the only one with gaps, with a history that is beginning to blur into some kind of personal mythology?

Or maybe I’m confusing that with another trip down the coast when the car broke down and we never made it to San Francisco to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse play the Winter Garden. Maybe much of memory is conflation, the pieces reconfigured and realigned as we move around the circles again.

I overheard someone in the old Sandbar in Sag Harbor talking about Willi once. Then I discovered he was a friend of another mentor of deeper inquiry and understanding, who came to East Hampton to lead teachers through an experiential education program, Project Adventure.

I cherish my story, a real memory, I think, of how, after the eruption in 1980 of Mount St. Helen’s, Rainier’s sister peak in the Cascades, which spewed ash that piled deep like snow on my front porch — 36 years ago this month! — Willi, who was never recovered from the mountain, came to me in a fiery dream. 

More and more I need others to verify my past. Should I be scared about that? This is why the people with whom you’ve traveled through life become even more important as you go on. 

Do I remember buying a jar of hot sake from a vending machine in Kyoto in the rain, or is that walk through the back alleys following the rhythm of the geishas’ wooden shoes just something I made up in a poem? Did I truly dance with abandon, in daylight, to a 10-horn salsa band in Havana, knowing at that moment that for good or ill I was transcending my ordinary self? 

Sometimes I even want to remember the difficult things I’ve taken pains to block out. Because who doesn’t want at least a record, a story of their life to remain, once they’re gone? And those of us who are not great, in the biographer’s sense of the word, must curate that for ourselves.

Ed Hirsch, another great poet, said at a recent talk that that’s one role of poetry. To witness our ordinary lives as well as the great or tragic turns of history. 

I met Ed a hundred years ago at a workshop in Montana, and again at Canio’s in Sag Harbor, and at the Massachusetts Poetry Festival in Salem earlier this month, where I said to him only hello, not needing to outline for either of us the circle of life’s recursiveness.

With the blur of ordinary days erased, it’s the singular moments — real or remembered/created — that emerge as the path I took to get here. And where is here? Perhaps I can’t yet know until the narrative, in future, is told.

That weekend in Salem, I was surrounded by the city’s shtick, its tourism focus on its history of witch trials and its present-day saturation in the occult. Is it kooky to say I felt something there?

I don’t pay much attention to magick with a “k,” but I do try to follow my instincts. And so I went to see a tarot reader.  

She did a sort of double take when she looked at me. “Do you do this work?” she asked, saying that she sensed that I was tuned in, psychically, to things around me. 

Not really, I said. But maybe I do. Maybe we all do, if we just connect the dots. 

Joanne Pilgrim is an associate editor for The Star.