Retrospective 2023: To Sing as a Seagull Should

We don’t live right on the water, but it’s less than a ten minute walk, from our house, from our still new-enough house. New England beaches are a punchline to some, but ours is a perfect ringed stretch, pleasantly unremarkable, riveted with a few prominent rocks that stand proud in low tide or in high, and there’s a faux-wood boardwalk that groans with the appropriate inflection as you maneuver your way along it, each step falling and rising in pitch as you plod past the unsullied white noise of a place where the sea meets the sand but produces no surf. You could easily imagine a lively little beach community there, but you do have to imagine it. New Haven Harbor is dead enough to harm its city but lively enough to keep everything to the east industrial. (Poor Connecticut. So far from God, so close to New York City.) To the west are expensive houses, too many of which are chopped up into Airbnbs. You pay a million to spend your golden years in front of a fire, head craned for the ocean, and then there are no neighbors to meet, only Manhattanite families peculiar enough to pick Connecticut for their summer destination and townies who pooled money for a sick Memorial Day weekend party house. Here, though, in my place, uniquely and forever mine, there is this unmarked cubby of a shore, there is a beach.

There are two kinds of seagulls here, or there appears to be. I remain blissfully unaware of whether the divide is one of sex or one of species. The big ones are burned brown on the sides, just exactly like a lovingly toasted marshmallow, twisted on a long stick unnecessarily far from the flames by an anxious person slowly inhaling campfire smoke into their lungs and hair. The other kind are smaller and look just as the picture in your head does when you read the word “seagull,” white bodies, grey wings, yellow beaks. There are no clam shacks here, no fibrous French fries, no soft and manipulable tourists, so they do not approach, but instead remain skittish and aloof, the proud salt of the seagull earth compared to your Coney Island seagull, who hustle as every New Yorker hustles, busy and shameless in pursuit of their bread. These gulls pull shellfish from the sandbars and then fly above the rocks, dropping them from enough height to break them and reveal the fruit inside, low enough that they can still descend in time to eat before one of their peers snatches their prize. They work for a living, and I do too.

There’s also some sort of egret or falcon or generic bird of prey that fishes down by the boardwalk; in the marshland across the street from the coast there’s a big platformed birdhouse, and I imagine it’s meant to house these predatory birds, but I’ve never seen any of them settled there. Out in the water sit drab lines of stone, protecting our local port. I will not research the birds (it brings me great joy never to know them by either their Latin or their vulgar names) but I must know what the queer distant stone lines are. They are breakwaters, as they are disconnected entirely from the shore. Were they jetties, they would start on the coast and then jut out cheekily into the ocean, and if they sat humbly on the coast, they would be seawalls. Those I can taxonomize, number, name. Dedicated readers will know that this has been my preoccupation this year, to name the many creatures in the great chain of being, to number the stars, to tell each from each, one from another, each from each. Why then not number the birds? Because I choose not to. I choose instead to pretend that time is not passing, to imagine that the rivers cut from the world’s great flood truly are forever, that they indeed do come from “the basement of time,” and shall remain. I walk every morning; I have traded an urban park, green and verdant, filthy but immaculate, for a stretch of coast, little loved compared to most, but still expensive.

A few weeks ago there was a visitor who could not be said to be to be unnamable - a lone bald eagle, fat and stooped, looking down on the busy veterans memorials below with animal indifference. For a time in my grad school years in Indiana I rented a place right by the Wabash river, a molding one-bedroom in a stooped and constantly-flooding apartments cozied up against a modest inlet, the size of a basketball court. Great Blue Herons ruled the place year-round; I once watched one stalk, spear, and eat a chipmunk. But for five weeks or so in early winter that inlet was ringed with bald eagles, which sat like a glowering parliament in leafless trees and, at odd intervals, would swoop down to take their meals. Fish swim into the inlet and can’t find their way out, so the eating is good. A yellowing sign nearby taught me that there are paddlefish in those waters that break 200 pounds. The eagles seemed content to take smaller game, swooping down and fishing exactly how you would think a bald eagle would fish - a sudden takeoff, homing in with the grace of a limber dancer, a frozen beat of wings, then claws tearing the water’s surface, and thus God makes another ex-fish. But this eagle near home only studied his surroundings; he looked both vigilant and bored. A man walking an obese black lab told me he had come around the year before too, but his vigil felt like a rare and wild moment, and the next day he was gone.

The harbor nearby is the work of glaciers, which busily labored to enlarge the Sound only 13,000 years ago, while human beings were stumbling towards agriculture, civilization, towards eventual pathological anxiety and clinical depression, a hundred centuries before we slaughtered the last mammoth. Here the ocean is chiseled from the world’s vast form as if from stubbornly frozen Rocky Road, topography by way of an ice cream scoop, leaving behind lovely modest beaches, rocky tendrils that snake out into the placid waters, and indifferent birds. A mile up the coast those million-dollar houses are built on slices of land as wide as a parking space, an arm’s length from the neighbor’s vinyl siding, cartoonishly proportioned to do vertically what they can’t achieve in width. Here, in this place that belongs to me - before we reach the real money, you understand - there’s a busy kid-threatening road between the houses and the water, which drives down the price and drives up the acreage, but still they’re all forced to be cozy with the neighbors.

There’s a big tall weird mesa-like geological structure nearby, which they refer to as a rock, that’s ringed by a few sad signs that tell you not to climb it. They seem to know, these signs, that they exist to be disobeyed, and in fact climbing up there is as natural and easy a thing as you might imagine. There is just the briefest hint of exertion and then you feel, in a formal and legal sense, that you are Cresting a Rise, in a way that’s indifferent to the actual height of the thing. The number of nip bottles up there speaks to the powerlessness of the signs, and yet still every few weeks when I crawl up there myself I am alone. It can’t be taller than thirty feet, but the sight of the ocean opens up its arms to envelope you anyway, intent on holding you, caressing you, until you’re mesmerized, until you drown. There was a White City here, once - the Devil, the Thunderbolt, a Laughing Sal. The ocean rose up and took most of it in ‘38. Eventually, commerce took the rest.

They say that, eventually, the expansion of the universe will drive elementary particles so far away from each other that nothing that we could call a thing can continue to exist, the constituent elements of reality so disgusted with one another that they pull and pull away until there is only the presence of absence, the presence that marks the absence of presence. In the same wise words I waved at above, Maclean taught us that eventually, all things merge into one. You could be forgiven for thinking that these are contradictory fates, but I suspect they’re two perspectives on the same condition. Then again even if that prediction is wrong, in time entropy will spread the heat of the universe out across itself so uniformly that still again we will have an abundance of nothing, our galaxies starved of gas and thus unable to form new stars, which are the great order-generating machines of the universe and which make life possible, make a few of the universe’s innumerable planets ready for life to occur, and in so doing create the vast and mysterious reality-defining entity of our animal perception. (Let these words be my Broca’s area, let them by my Wernicke’s.) There will be nothing and there will be nothing and there will be nothing left that can comprehend the distinction between nothing and something, the something that is the absence of nothing and the nothing that is the presence of no somethings. Perhaps that will be the big end, a universe lit only by the bioluminescence of that which exists outside of everything we know to be existence, a reflection in a mirror with no one left to peer into it.

Our own nonexistence is coming, sooner than we think, sooner than we’d like.

2023 was, for me, a culmination of my strange ecstatic blessings, my permanent exile, my sacred luck, my privilege, my sorry. I published another book, and it did not sell poorly enough to be an embarrassing disaster, and it did not sell well enough to permit me to tell my critics to eat shit. In this I am like so many of you, caught forever between a life to apologize for and one which rebukes everyone who ever demanded an apology of us, and we are tragic, tragic men. It’s unclear if I’ll ever get to publish another book. Whatever juice the mystery of my instability had left to squeeze for me has been dutifully extracted, and all editors and publishers and audiences and the Imminent Will has left to apprehend is me and me alone. Now all I have left is the drab corners of my own mind, ever-shrinking, ever-receding, a birthday clown hired ironically by hipster parents. And yet now there is time for my purpose, and for her; if you had told me ten years ago that my one job would be to write the words, to share the transient longings of a confused and transient heart, I would have taken it. I know that I have other things to do. I also know that there are many out there, with the power that makes things happen, who look only for permission to like me and what I do. But nobody ever promised me anything. These days I eat my privilege and I feel sick from feeling full, and only you can decide if I deserve resentment for such things. In the end I can say goodbye to 2023 only as I greeted it, with the same steady longing, a want just exactly like the want for a woman on a restless late-summer night, the want for wanting itself, the desire for all that is delicate and painless in life, and I am still here with my purpose, my shallow and gorgeous desires - to leave the world to my endless regret, to my ecstatic gratitude, to the soft touch of my wife, to “let my poems be a graph of me.”