Short Folk #23: Reading it Twice

Note: 

I think reading is special. It’s powerful. I think it can even change your personality. But there’s something more special than reading and that’s reading something twice. I’m reading Anne Carson’s Plainwater and I had forgotten that I had previously read it. I had read it 4 years ago for an assignment and I had read just this one section where Carson is giving these incredible daily reports from a pilgrimage she is taking thru Spain.  Well I just got to that section and reading it again brought back all the memories of where I was and who I was when I was reading it. That’s why reading something twice can be so moving. The text mixes with the memory of first reading that text, and lets you know how far you’ve come or how far you haven’t. 

So this story will probably be the most personal of them all so far. Because I’m going to write about myself from 4 years ago. Plus, Carson’s narrator is very open in her writing, so I’ll take a cue from that. 

Short Folk #23: Reading it Twice

I remember reading it before and then after a nap, but reading it better after the nap. On the bed in a chilly upstairs bedroom, where I had taken the duvet out from its cover because I couldn’t stand how it bunched down near my toes. It was early spring and things were just thawing out. I was pretty sure I was in love. Just that morning, driving, I saw two red herons, their long thin legs like arm bones, stalking through a field. I remember thinking they must mate for life, though I really didn’t know.  That spring I was always looking for signs of love being permanent. 

The heron’s made me want to read Basho and all his Haiku’s. Frogs that splashed in water, willow trees leaning in a wind, and the one that went “without my journey, and without this spring, I would have missed this dawn.” I think those were Basho, though I’m not sure.  So I read Haiku’s all morning, and the one that moved me most wasn’t by Basho, but Issa, after the death of his father, and it went “At Dawn, My father and I used to look out at green fields”.  Heron’s and Haiku’s and a good measure of put-on mourning. These are the things you think about when you’re pretty sure you’re in love.  

But what I remember most, what I was talking about reading at the beginning, was Anne Carson writing about a pilgrimage to Compostela. I remember it because I have just read the same book again, now 4 years later.  And again with a nap in-between. Back then the image that stayed with me “latest and deepest” as Whitman would say, was of Ximena kissing El Cid on the shoulder. What an intimate and confident movement! I longed to emulate it.  But not anymore. Now, what stays with me are more important things: A drowned dog floating in a river. A water bird standing on one strong leg. A dawn-golden horseman drumming furiously across the plain, coming for me. The message so urgent that he shouts it while still in the saddle, while still a far way off is “don’t turn around!”.