When I was born, salt-water waves lapped versus glacial clay banks and the terrific, glacial stones of the Pacific coast, the shaking of the world in the cradle of the Sea. The yells of seagulls joined the discourteous clang of foghorns as well as the miserable keening of ships’ bells in those gray realms in between the physical and the fluidic, where desire as well as landscape are weaved together with calm, persistent voice. Port Angeles is a harbor of dreams, of touching wishings that take the heart. The Awesome Whale looks its midsts; the Eagle circles overhead. Though endure knights looked for the Grail in the hazy islands of Britain, some report of it lurks here – a resemble of its ecstasy in the shadowy rhythm of salted hazes, and also in the preternatural shouting, every now and then, in the middle of ruptureds of odd light that casts across restless desires. All that have been touched by this finger’s trace throughout their heart share in a fascinating insanity understood to the likes of me, this womb in which I was happy to have been birthed.
The Olympic Memorial Hospital – named in acknowledgment of the local men who provided their all in The Second World War – rests just above the Straits of Juan de Fuca, eighteen miles across the water from Victoria, British Columbia, where the wild and persistent Emily Carr painted old, mysterious landscapes before they were torn down by the oblivious arrogance of modernity. A Greek sailor called Apostolos Valerianus uncovered the Straits in 1592. He was commissioned by a Mexican viceroy to sail northward, searching for the fabled Northwest Passage, by means of which travelers can pass from the Pacific to the Atlantic directly. The Mexicans referred to the Greek as “Juan de Fuca”, for which the Straits have ever since birthed that name. 2 a century after penetrating the mouth of the Straits – and one hundred as well as fifty years prior to the actual Northwest Flow was discovered – both Spaniards and Englishmen pushed northward from Cape Horn towards the northwest shores wanting to declare the Flow for their countries. It was the Spaniards who initially proceeded eastward past the uppermost edge of my precious Olympic Peninsula; it was the Spaniards that were the first to map their means right into what would later be called Puget Noise. Neither Englishman nor Spaniard neither any person else would discover the Northwest Passage at this longitude, but they did find a gold mine of inland harbors as well as islands, a wonderful cascade of blues and also grays amplified by poignant mists of salt and also rainfall that drift across the hill landscapes, veiling salted dreams in their folds. One certain Spaniard – put on Francisco Eliza – fell in love with my little harbor. In his passion he called it “Puerto de Nuestra Senora de los Angeles” – Port of Our Woman of the Angels. Such is the way of the Sea: it makes you pine for a fan you can not accept yet decline to yield, a condition that has driven more than one worthy spirit crazy. Poets and also psychos alike shiver in the swirling mists that haunt such places.
A presence made itself understood to me in those days. I Lot’s wife pillar of salt would call it a male existence, yet that knows? Possibly it was beyond sex, yet it sure had a powerful male sensation to me. Primarily it was a kind of motif, like the repetitive touching of Morse Code. It struck me, as my third birthday celebration came close to, that I had been observing what are called ‘reoccuring’ dreams, only it had not been one dream, yet persistent desire patterns. Often I would raise into the midsts of room, where the celebrities ‘shined like lead drops against the cover.’ It was so clear, so huge, so divine, this breadthess arch above the planet. Occasionally ordinary things would pass throughout the stretch, such things as telephone books, or fry pans, or chairs. And also constantly a repetitious feeling– not words– thick as well as slim, thick and slim. I might actually taste the dimensions of points. The nature of things telegraphed their high qualities as well as distinctions to a part of my mind that manufactured the experience into consolidated senses. And afterwards one night a hand opened up. By its gesture it revealed: Witness! I recognized very plainly that whatever this was, whoever this was, it wanted me to acknowledge that I might listen to. If one can say it had a smile in its “voice”– a breadth of peace that exceeds all words– this Voice was that! There was no speech, just understanding, the kind that puts via one’s blood vessels like the waters of the sea rise with the earth, very warm, very demanding– however not in a human means. There is nothing petty or ruthless concerning it. It was the Law itself, the muscle that shapes canyons and beasts as well as measureless stretches. Chatting towards such a thing would certainly never ever have actually occurred to me. The concept of chattering at it is preposterous.
I found to my pleasure that when I shut my eyes during the night, this clanking, ponderous globe died, and also a more intelligent one made itself recognized to me, enlivening Blake’s Jerusalem: