Walk to Mark the Silence

            Toward the end of 2009, I decided to start keeping a daily journal about taking my wife’s dog for a walk, as an exercise in defiance of a silence that had imposed itself around me (metaphysically, politically, culturally, psychologically – in short, in every way but literally, i.e. aurally).  It was not my expectation to dispel the silence: metaphysically it was necessary for a sense of self in the first place; in the other ways it was too powerful for me to do anything about.  I only hoped, by a wan gesture of protest, to mark the fact of its imposition, and to the extent that for an entire year I disciplined myself, after I took the dog for a walk (which I did almost every day), to sit down and write about it, I feel that I have been successful in fulfilling that hope.

            The journal bears all the scars of the exigencies of its production.  The walk and the writing usually occurring in the midst of a busy, noisy day, I often didn’t have time to write as much as I wanted, and seldom, if ever, the time to write as well as I would’ve liked.  Reflection and revision were practically impossible.  Such research as was needed had to be done in a hurry and was often incomplete.  Awkward phrases, clumsy transitions, redundancies, sloppy word choices, underdeveloped passages, slapdash punctuation, even misspellings – I haven’t had the chance to reread much, but these must be abundant.  The word “get,” I’m sure, must stand in frequently as le mot juste.  Such as it is then, the effort, the sheer commitment to the page and to the occasion, goes to being nearly everything; and perhaps the significance of what I’ve written – what’s interesting about it -- is solely sociological, if not medical.

            Nevertheless, there is content, a whole year’s worth, as much as anyone could want; and by happenstance, because I live near fields and woods, it turns out to be, somewhat startling to me, a nature journal -- however uninformed by any of the biological and geological sciences, and though less influenced perhaps by the roster of nature writers, from Henry David Thoreau to Rachel Carson, than by the de-naturalist perspective of Vivian in Oscar Wilde’s essay “The Decay of Lying” or the vision of nature de trop in the works of Samuel Beckett.  “The infinite variety of Nature,” Vivian says, “that is a pure myth….It resides in the imagination, or fancy, or cultivated blindness of the man who looks at her”: hence, day after day as I took Mwayla for a walk near my house, noting a shrub first bare, then in leaf, another still bare, the first now in flower, the second finally in leaf, the first suddenly bearing fruit, the second yet in leaf, both at last bare again, I felt not only that I was witnessing the change of seasons but also that, like a weak jazz musician, I was stumbling, chorus after chorus, through the chord changes of a difficult tune.  Walks with Mway I call it; the title should bring to mind John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, though the differences are striking.  Steinbeck travels with his poodle in a truck camper from Maine to California in search of America; Mway and I stay entirely within our property, and only go as far as one of the neighbors can hit a golf ball.

            Part way through, it occurred to me I should be writing it as a blog.  But how could I do something that I’d only heard about?  My wife, more computer savvy than I am, eventually steered me in the right direction.  I’m starting late, so I’ve proposed to at least keep things even, putting December 25, 2009, up on line on December 25, 2010, December 26, 2009, up on line on December 26, 2010, and so on through the days of the year until December 24, 2010, my last entry, goes up on December 24, 2011.  The effect will be like nothing except what occurs in science fiction: a man, stuck in the past with his wife’s dog, sending messages through time to the present to anyone in the world who might hear him.

            Good reading everyone,

           

            Sisyphus Gregor