On Bittersweet
Every time I walk in the woods, most likely in a state park I have close at hand, I have this experience. At improbable rates, the sounds and sights I meet with seem meaningful, while never ceasing to be essentially drab. Each time one registers, I bring out my phone and record it, knowing that after a year, probably after a month, they will not say anything to me; more pictures of tangle, more swatches of far-off birdsong, taking up my storage space.
This is partially down to a lack of literacy, of not knowing where to start with questions – how to distinguish one alarmed call from another, one gray bark from the next. But what I see in the field is not only a passing distinction, but a moving shift in the norm I’m immersed in; I know I’m not grasping at everything. I notice that I tend to pick up on bittersweet where it gets thick, draped in loops way up over the hickory. If I am tempted to look past it, or spit at it and walk on, because it should not be there, because it has taken someone else’s space; because the sign nearby said that in the spring the chestnut flowers would have coated the hills white; I also get arrested by it in the middle of the upright trees, drawing itself with happy strokes as though with a charcoal lump. Maybe because I don’t know chestnut flowers well enough to miss them, or I suspect they wouldn’t be any more special than hackberries or beech leaves, I will take the bittersweet in their place.
Aesthetic experience is only the music made from context – how one mode of experience knocks against another, gently or otherwise. The sharing of aesthetic experience is distinct enough from the living of it to deserve its own name. Experience photographing things tells you that often you can only hope to luck into a good substitute, in a single frame, of the actual procession of experience; and that this capture is likely to be mistaken by all parties involved as a sample of the whole, when it can only isolate one band of its spectrum, the way it leapt in a flash from the parade. Seen that way, it is dismal how conversation, how the sharing of aesthetic experience, is out of true, and is ever deviating toward the metagame – toward human stories, toward specifications, toward the statistical record. I ask how you captured the egret on water, and leave out the cold dawn that led up to it. Poetic handling seems your best bet for zipping up the vibe and handing it on; but it has its own pull toward ornamenting whatever it touches, such that whatever you get on the other end has been passed over with a Midas touch, a tableful at hand of hard fruit.
A sculptured club of hollow trunk. The vision of a little stand of holly off on its own. A hollow dug in a gravel hill. Not nearly incommunicable, but each one its own little quagmire. Not rarity, not form, only the sense of a flash of tanager in the woods.
Maybe it isn’t odd that it seems more possible to make meaning in the field than to carry it out and share it. The rangers here have laid out a field to one side of the path that drops from the ridge, with a few benches along the edge – pointed at the path, not the field, in sociable Ohio fashion. I walk the straights laid out between squares of prairie restoration, and feel through tripping what I can’t even see from nearby – the field has been grubbed recently, and thick little cut trunks are everywhere under the grass, along with downtrodden rose canes. For all their faults, for all their overbuilt lookouts and yawning lawns, the rangers are responsible for making it maximally possible for many people to have the same unsayable experience in the woods, what we can only gesture at with the words “hiking,” or “visitation,” or (god knows) “forest bathing,” or “nature study.”