Equilibrium

I was laid up with an irritated foot from walking around the Venice Biennale, La Coste sculpture park in Provence, and David Cholmondeley’s wonderful amalgam of ancient and modern wonders at Houghton Hall. Back in Hawaii, I felt there was a wall between me and the sea outside. I didn’t interweave with it; I was estranged from it. I couldn’t feel it.

I began to suspect that the pathetic fallacy, the bond I felt with nature was just surplus health on my part, now vitiated by the most minor of ailments, and not reflective of any actual linkage. I’d been making a lot of this supposedly innate balance for many decades now. An affiliation with nature had validated my own small overtures to it.

But I was a coalmonger trying to befriend a Queen. I had presumed, conceitedly, and assumed the mantle of the world, while being alien to it, a carpetbagger, an arriviste. The sky didn’t shelter me, the tide didn’t caress me, the sun didn’t shine at my insight.

The earth would possibly prefer to pass through its appointed cycles without the irritant of so many dust mites on it. When the wind rises and firestorms descend from the wrong direction, the sky a cauldron, as it was in Lahaina, you realize, too late, that nature has nothing human about it except the comforting myths we make up about it to assuage its uncontrollable enormity. And so my poem on my death became more a balancing act, where the tides are restrained from drowning us by the astral bodies of the Sun and Moon, not by any influence we might think we have. It is an unrequited love.

The equilibrium tide is the idealized tide assuming a landless Earth. As John Donne would say, without sharp north, without declining west. Without the electrons of nations, the irritation of emotions. Force without influence. A world freed from observation.

This was originally called “On My Death,” based on a poem I wrote for our gardener Teddy, who committed suicide in our house in Kahalu’u. The note to that poem provides more history.

I moved the poem from an impersonal lament to a poem about my own death, and then made it more universal.

Tides are caused by imbalances, impurities, inequalities among the gravities of planets and the forces of orbits. We all long for a life without those inequities, and our thoughts turn to worlds without words.

As Claudius said,

My words fly up, my thoughts remain below;
Words without thoughts never to heaven go.

To put more words in Claudius’s mouth, thoughts end up in words, as words begin in thoughts. In my end is my beginning. Without the fire of words, the planet might be eased.

To quote Richard II,

Nor I nor any man that but man is,
With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased
With being nothing.

We imbalance the world with our egos, our words. As Yeats said,

There’s more enterprise in walking naked.

Accepting the balance, the harmony of the spheres, involves all the frequencies, all the harmonies of the solar system, many different combinations of the motions of the Earth, the Moon, and the angles that define the shape and location of their orbits, as a basis for determining tides. This is called harmonic analysis. As a musical note has many associated harmonics, a fundamental tide cycle is not limited to a single frequency.

As Hamlet says to Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern,

You would play upon me; you would seem to know my
stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery;
you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of
my compass: and there is much music, excellent voice,
in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak.

The single strands of our dialogue with the world are inadequate to address the monstrousness of existence. And yet, despite glitches, more people survive disease and poverty each year. To ignore the pale blue hiding behind the darkest clouds is to miss the point of the day.

May 11th, 2024
Kaiholu