I walk my dog Isabel along this section of the river every day. I've been doing this for years; it's a routine. Lately Isabel has been getting older, and the walk—over 2 miles, and up a very steep hill to the top of the Palisades—is more difficult for her. It reminds me that no situation is permanent, despite the tradition and ritual that accompanies it. I believe in this person, and this dog—but there are many people, and many dogs. We won't last, but the dogs and the people will.
A good deal of the best poetry I've produced over the last three years materializes on these walks. Perhaps it seems a bit ridiculous to believe that doing the same thing over and over can bring anything new... but it can, can't it? Doing the same thing over and over isn't doing the same thing over and over; everything is constantly new.
This isn't to say that repetitious behavior is of necessity creative. Yet the age-old adage that insanity is the definition of expecting to do the same old thing and expecting new results is obviously false. It's not doing the same old thing that is a problem; it's my idea that what I am doing is the same old thing.
So it isn't the action, but the attitude; the action isn't one person and one dog. It's the attitude that's one person and one dog. In reality, every moment, there's a new person and a new dog; I ought to have some respect for that. But instead my attitude is nonchalant, dismissive: here I am. It's the same old me. And the same old dog.
Somehow, the creative energy that flows in this (for me) ritualistic tradition of the walk along the river transcends the same old me and the same old dog. There are moments when I see that nothing is the same, and nothing is old. The idea that things are the same is just an idea; the idea that things are old is just an idea.
Nothing is the same, and nothing is old.
Everything is right now, and it's just exactly where it is.
Moments like this go into the body like an electric shock. Not a violent one, that produces anguish and dismay; rather, an enlivening vibration, an unexpected sensitivity.
I see that there are rivers, and there are dogs. I'm here to see that. And there is something extraordinary about that moment, because rivers are not rivers, and dogs are not dogs. Even I myself am not myself. Something much bigger than all of this is going on.
What is it?
There's an emptiness in that question. There's a search going on; and when a poem arrives, it's only real if it doesn't contain what it alludes to—that's the essence, after all, of allusion. It can't mention, allegorically speaking, a dog and a person—but it has to leave plenty of room for many people and many dogs to walk around in it. This, I think, is the danger realized in a great deal of poetry; I put things into it, whereas what I ought to be doing is taking things out of it.
There is always something new on my walks; but it's only when I take myself out of it, when I am no longer myself, that there is something new there. So when I stick this thing called me into life, I can't see life. I only see me, seeing life. I don't see the dog: I see me seeing the dog. It's a koan; every walk is exactly the same unanswerable question.
I remember living on the banks of the Elbe River in Hamburg, Germany when I was a child. The Elbe and the Hudson are remarkably alike; the side of the river I lived on (near Blankenese) had a high embankment, like the Hudson, and the river was broad and wide at that point.
We'd drive along the river almost every day on our way somewhere or other my mother, my sister Sarah and I; and my mother would often remark to us in wonder that the river never looked the same way twice in a row.
There was something absolutely magical about its ability to transform itself, even in the midst of the mundane.
Rivers do that.
Maybe people can do that, too.
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