The marmot makes a show of chewing its dry weeds, its silver fur rippling on its perch on a rock. Long ago, I chose this species for my totem animaclass="underline" for its sweet whistle but mostly for its sluggishness and love of sleep. It does not keep score of its accomplishments. And it doesn’t need to keep a book of gratitudes because it’s grateful for every leaf it bumbles on.
We stand frozen, and the marmot doesn’t flinch, not even when a family comes noisily trooping down the trail.
“Hey!” they yell to us, and still the marmot doesn’t spook. “He was in that same spot hours ago when we passed him going up.”
Marianne Moore also includes the marmot in her poem, supposedly as a surrogate for her brother, after learning that her first choice, the badger (from Wind in the Willows) was not found on this mountain. The marmot’s whistle she describes as “the best wild music of the forest,” the marmot itself the victim of “a struggle between curiosity and caution.”
But our real marmot does not seem to be struggling with caution, and the only way we’d arouse its curiosity is if we held out a potato chip, which is against the rules. Moore quotes with condescension from the park rules of her day: “that one must do as one is told” and conform with the man-made regulations if one is planning to conquer the wilderness, the place where you’d think you’d be most free. Nowadays the most pointed example I can think of is that once you step onto the glacier to begin your travel there, you must carry down any waste you generate in a blue plastic bag. There are two methods, I was told: you either use the bag like a mitten or squat over it, making a direct deposit.
Two-thirds of the way through Moore’s poem about Mount Rainier, she suddenly brings up the ancient Greeks and their fondness for smooth and polished surfaces, their shunning of the disorder that more truly characterizes nature. Happiness is attained by willpower, she says, with Greek civilization
ascribing what we clumsily call happiness
to “an accident or a quality
a spiritual substance or the soul itself,
an act, a disposition, or a habit
or a habit infused, to which the soul has been persuaded,
or something distinct from a habit, a power”
Happiness comes through persuasion and practice, according to Moore: it’s an unnatural state of being that we can learn. As far as my own happiness goes, the first thing I have to learn in order to attain it is how not to envy healthy, hearty people like Marianne Moore — who poses in old photos with her gaiters and alpenstock.
The trip home was uneventful. Angus must have been even colder going down. At one point, as we drove the mountain road, the summit of Mount Rainier appeared through a hole in the clouds, a sight we had not seen all day. But when we pulled over, Angus signaled wearily for us to drive on. And a few days after our trip, he told me that as he shined the bike’s pipes and tightened its bolts, he realized he’d become indifferent to it. The motorcycle was just a surrogate, he realized, when what he really wanted was a woman.
(Sure enough, by the time I edit this, the woman is found and the bike is sold.)
As for Marianne Moore, I was surprised to read that on her second trip west she didn’t even go to Mount Rainier. The mountain wasn’t what she wanted, though I don’t understand it — how a healthy woman could not want the mountain. But she was content to study it from a rented cabin sixty miles away as she devoted herself to the geography she was most passionate about, which was the landscape of her poem.
Fear of the Market
Because I grew up while Vietnam burned, outside the garden walls of my young brain (a lot of hormone molecules in there, with carbon chains tangled like vines), I’m embarrassed to admit that for a while I was a cheerleader in high school. By chance I’d discovered I was good at jumping with my spine bent in an unnatural curl — people gasped at its severity. This caused me to experience, for the first time, the head-rush that results from getting admiration from one’s peers, a feeling that is not wholly pleasant to me, yet I have repeatedly chased after it.
We wore home-dyed panties underneath our skirts, their washed-out green color inspiring some magical thinking that they were not underwear after all. Once I absentmindedly jumped in plain white ones — to hoots and giggles. For the rest of the practice session I only simulated the jumps by rising from a squat in a bizarrely constrained way, swiveling one saddle shoe in a frogish kick.
To raise money for new wool jumpers, Miss Cropsey decided that we would sell Christmas candles, little votives whose holders were covered in red or green velvet with fake pinecones attached. We all received a box of samples and an order form: we were to lug the box from door to door. The road in my neighborhood was winding, its houses far-flung gothic structures in many of which I had never spied a human form. This absence left me free to imagine who lived there. And since the very idea of salesgirlship fueled my apprehensions, I drew customers from my worst dreams. I feared they’d take it as an insult if I tried to fob Christmas off on them. Their celebrations probably featured a goat instead of Jesus.
Indeed, the hags and warlocks were not interested in my wares (actually the only people I made contact with were cleaning ladies), and after some halfhearted dragging of the sample box along our desolate suburban road, I brought it home and stored it in the closet, from which it spoke from time to time as the weeks went by. It sat in the closet’s must and dark until the due date came for the order form, when my mother bailed me out by ordering three of each style of candle. And so for the remainder of the time I resided with my family, my failures were dug out each year and used to decorate the house. Over the years the velvet snagged more and more dust, until the merry colors turned to gray.
This is how it goes for introverted kids — whether we’re talking Christmas candles or Girl Scout cookies. Now when I see the Scouts staged at the post office exit, I wince on their behalves, though I notice that these days there is always a parent dispatched to mastermind the ploy. The adult launches the girls toward likely marks after having whispered come-ons into their ears. This sort of shilling works because it is embarrassing to all involved, and we’ll gladly pay the bribe so as to suffer through only its briefest form. And usually there is one girl who hangs back, clearly ashamed of the commerce in whose service she’s been charged to lend her body.
She is the one I buy my Thin Mints from.
What I really want to talk about is my attempt to sell my book of poems, an art form I’ve been practicing for long enough now that I can’t really speak of humiliation memories but rather. . what? Humiliation loci? Nodules? What I mean is that humiliation turns into an ongoing, inhabited state because writing itself is of this nature. It’s the flagrant narcissism that’s so humiliating — writers think their creations are worthy enough to be circulated and admired; they secretly harbor the pride of new parents who are annoying in their certainty that, out of all the universe forged by procreation, their own child rises above the rabble. Then print serves to cast one’s vanity in cement.