Nathan Dixon

Field Notes

For Ben and Phil

I might begin with the idea of the rhizome: Walt Whitman rolling naked through the green flag of his disposition, Deleuze and Guattari’s thousand intertwined tongues slithering among the fresh clippings, prayer flags fluttering in the kudzu along the field’s fringe, imprinted with Robin Wall Kimmerer’s note about Sweetgrass thriving “along disturbed edges,” and Arthur Sze’s affirmation that “In the circumference / of a circle the beginning and end have no end.”  I might begin with a photograph of a plain of grass on a clear spring day, a circular plateau above Georgia’s classic city that contains within itself a thousand plateaus.  Or with an epigraph by Jake Skeets: “Time doesn’t pass, time builds. Time builds and leads to an open field.”

I might begin with my finding this field during the spring in which the virus sprung.  After Caroline and I flew to Miami and conceived a child in a stranger’s bed, we came back home to a dog named Clover that we still thought we were only dog-sitting.  I started taking long walks with this shaggy creature during the hollowed-out, stay-at-home days, telephoning the long-distance people I missed the most.  On the bright day of discovery, I was talking with my mentor from my master’s program, carefully probing after any potential jobs at the HBCU where he had trained me.  He was not-so-carefully advising me to look elsewhere. 

Beyond the dead-end of Satula Street stretches a footpath—a shallow canal between the banks of grass—that reminded me of my youth on Big Spring Mountain, beyond my grandparent’s cabin, walking the woods with a stripped sapling in hand, picking blue-and-blackberries with my grandmother, chasing cows down the valley toward the Calhoun’s place, hunting arrowheads with my brother in the packed dirt of the mountain top.    

Yes, I might begin with this trail that bent around the back of the buzzing electric substation, the transformers vibrating cancer into the afternoon, the kudzu-run-amok—choking the trees until their constricted fingers fell off, leaving monolithic giants rising phallic from the dirt to wave their amputated limbs at one another.  We hadn’t told anyone that Caroline was pregnant and wouldn’t for a few months yet.  The earth, though, was bursting at the seams.  It felt providential.  I lost reception immediately.

The path led downhill—through tunnels cut into the kudzu, past busted plastic buckets, syringes, and bundles of shredded clothing braided into the vines, half buried in the dirt—to the train tracks where I found rainbow colored water seeping from a silted concrete pipe.  Puddles crystalized and shattered, witness to the passing of hobos along the tracks that continue up under the highway where teens declare their love for one another by spray-painting the pylons with hearts and obscenities.  Their names in garish colors to prove they exist, survival itself become their raison d’être. They cannot choose but be ascetic, celebrating themselves only as they are excluded from society.  Not “much reason to be cheery,” writes Philip Roth, when “the American reality . . . is continually outdoing” the talent of fiction writers.  I wonder if this essay is any more than me saying: I am.

I might begin instead with my turning back, retracing my steps, and hearing someone cursing and coughing behind the nodding purple thistle.  Or sighting the almost-invisible trail leading straight up from the single track.  Clover the dog and I climbing up on all-fours to find the field like an embrace, swallows swooping through the golden air above the grass.  We both took off running, though it felt like we were flying.  I spread my arms like an airplane like a child.

I might begin with how I boasted about my discovery of the field to anyone who would listen.  Or how the only friends willing to make the late-night trek from the viral front-porch drinking sessions were Ben and Phil.  The three of us initiated into a brotherhood that first night as we groped our way through the darkness, clinging drunkenly to the vine that ate the South, the vine that has been used for millennia to treat hangovers and alcoholics on the other side of the world.

Or else I might begin with the field becoming a Thoreauvian holy land, every walk in that direction beginning as “a sort of crusade.”  We pilgrims go a-sauntering under the black cloak of inebriated nights toward our altar hunched like an owl above the neighborhood.  Above the town, the state, the crumbling nation, the world always falling to pieces below us.  With nothing but ourselves to offer, we spill into the grass.  Then make our way to the stand of stunted lacebark elms, where we smoke and drink, then drift—blimp-like—back into the meadow, unburdening ourselves beneath the faltering milky way.

We have neither paid our debts, nor made our wills, nor settled all our affairs, yet we become free men after the last scud of day, coaxed to the vapor and the dust, beyond the runaway sun, to slide through the sleeping neighborhoods in lacy jags, to bequeath ourselves to the dirt as we escape into our field and grow.  Grass-like.

I might begin with any of the long list of evenings that brothers Ben and Phil and I have lost together there.  Forgetting is a part of the process, our memories mown like the grass.  The weekends of the long pandemic blur through a cloud of smoke and snapping beer tabs.  Aimless.  Oblivious of any clock that might try to contain us, the family secrets come lumbering from the burrows of our mouths.  The tribulations of a brand-new fatherhood.  The fracturing of romantic relationships.  The anxiety of our utter lack of funding.  The inevitability that each of us will soon be flung farther afield as we fly from Georgia to embark on our so-called careers. 

Do we become children again when we ascend the wall of kudzu, fetching the grass to one another with full hands?  Secreting ourselves from our homes to gather in this pocket of suburban wilderness?  Talking over each other about the blade of the future: job ads and benefits, the rhetoric of the cover letter, the decorum of the interview, the prohibitive cost of daycare.  Then—in the same breath—refusing to pander to expectations, we begin structuring utopian communes in the grass, insisting on refusing to settle.  As if we were not already adults.

We find evidence of the night before in the treads of our tennis shoes.

I might begin with my recent worry that all my wandering has turned to walking.  The days become a tight series of scheduled undertakings.  Leisure: penciled into my calendar.  Gratitude: an alarm on my phone.  Like John Prine’s lucky man, I am having trouble remembering things.  Sitting in the parking lot of his favorite hot dog stand, the thirty-something-year-old musician mulls over whether he wants to do for the latter half of his life what he’s been doing for the former.  These are the questions of which we construct the field.  And I take solace in knowing the impossibility of telling a story the same way twice.

I might begin with my loping down Park Avenue one Sunday morning—a leashed dog leading the way toward the field—past Easy Street, toward Boulevard with an infant strapped to my chest, a shovel and a post-hole digger over my shoulder, a Styrofoam cooler balanced like a platter in my upturned palm.  On my way to dig a hole in a pitiful attempt to domesticate the field.  To bury a refrigerator of sorts beneath the lacebark elms. 

Or else begin with the stranger emerging from the margin just after I cut into the ground and realized it would look to anyone else like I was burying my baby alive.  Him squirming in the grass beside me like a little white worm as I stuck my shovel in the ground, raised my hand, and hollered a greeting to the silhouetted figure. 

“I’m just walking,” the boy answered, sounding afraid.  Skinny jeans and sneakers, a pale waif with a head-full of Robert Plant hair, he had surely seen the new KEEP OUT sign posted at Satula’s dead end, and I realized after our long encounter that he must have assumed that I was the owner of this field, and that my joking about digging my baby’s grave might not have sounded like such a joke.  He helped me dig, this Jake, and told me about dropping out of high school during the pandemic, about not wanting to start back in the fall, about not knowing what to do with his life as we bludgeoned the earth with our blunt weapons, bending the metal blades against the rocks.  When he announced he had to hit the road, I swore him into secrecy.

I have seen inklings of him since: the Styrofoam cooler full of melted ice and crushed cans, the bottle of Goldschläger all but emptied, yet returned to the red-boned upper clutches of the lacebark branches where it was hidden, plastic figurines of horses prancing along the roots, a water-clogged lighter, an empty Ziplock bag, a cracked frisbee in the center of the field.  He occupies another plateau.  We work in shifts at this shared orogeny.

I might begin with the shoes I found on the slope leading down to the tracks, or the man in the rumpled red suit between the rails down there, spreading his arms like Jesus Christ, his cock hanging from his church pants.  Or else with the whispered incantations I heard in the twilight brush, or the shivering nylon tent top in the far fringe that we felt necessitated privacy.  The sound of the lawnmower always evaporates to nothing by the time I sneak up through the kudzu.  Does this mower, like Marvell’s, have a Juliana?  Does he likewise sing a dirge of discord?  Do the unhoused visitors see green hopes in the glass of the grass of the field?

Bataille: The true luxury and the real potlatch of our times falls to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down and scoffs.  A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined splendor, and on the other, a silent insult of the laborious lie of the rich.

I might begin with last weekend when we brought the two girls both named Micaela up through the jungle and left them stranded beneath the elms as we wandered into the drunken openness of the field.  Or with brother Ben stepping on a fire ant hill as he pissed over the edge, then stooping down and removing his socks as Phil and I shined our cellphone flashlights on his ankles and he bent closer and closer, making himself a pretzel before finally picking them off one-by-one.  I pointed out how we must look like apes.  The field refuses taming, we agreed.  Half a football field away, huddled above the green votive candle that we lit but forgot to pray over, the Micaelas yelled at us from beneath the trees that they were being eaten alive. 

The nights emerge like rogue ice cubes—un-blended—in a frozen margarita. 

I remember the first time the train cut through the valley, and we rushed to the edge to watch the moon of the headlight approach.  And how—as the engine disappeared into the roots of the mountain below us—we became lamps ourselves, the light projecting yellow from our open mouths as we ran in circles, singing barbaric yawps over the roofs of the world.

The nights emerge like forks and tin cans unearthed by a shovel in a stranger’s hands. 

I remember the tail end of our mushroom trip, the sunlight streaming through the saw-tooth leaves.  Then slithering into the field.  How Phil said “tripping picks you up”—plucking himself from the plane of his open palm—“and puts you down somewhere else”—leaving himself dangling in the air.  We talked again about the surface of things, watching the skin skate over our bones.  Three dimensions become two, then three again, as we re-hashed our earlier conversation about the natural world’s repoussoir, remembering the way the willow branches framed the flycatcher curlicuing above the creek, laughing about the boy on the bike who skidded to a stop beside the river and demanded to know if we’d seen any snakes.  We talked about OK Computer, watermelon slices, the Turkish rug.  We talked about Ben tipping backward like a felled tree in the hallway and Phil nursing him back to consciousness from the other side.  What was it like? I kept asking him.  Where did you go?  Why are you crying? 

I pray for no shame between these boys that I love as we try to gather meaning in the grass.  Which one the orchid?  Which one the wasp?  Which one the pink panther against the pink sky?

I might begin with one of us falling down the slope every time we descend in the dark.  A gleeful tumbling, somersault, and slide.  And though I have seen in the daytime the knees and elbows of brick and concrete jutting from the earth beneath the kudzu, we always come up unharmed and laughing. 

In the living room, our baby Otis Bird refuses to stay on the spread quilt, rolling always toward the edges where he snatches tufts of dog hair and rug fiber to stuff into his drooling mouth.  Where he pulls books from the shelves and leaves from the plants.  Where he tips candles from the coffee-table and bats at bottles of beer.  Always babbling and smiling.  Always remembering.  Forgetting.

The nights emerge like clouds cutting through the moon, spilling aqueous humor upon the upturned faces of three hysterical men become boys.  Become white ponies prancing in the grass.

I might begin by asserting that the field is a feeling.  That lost and found coexist up there where we find ourselves grounded.  Then unearthed.  Our bodies filling up with the helium of some unnamable nearness.  Or instead, I might begin by asserting our shared ownership of the field.  Then begin again, admitting the obvious: it is rather the field that owns us.

Skeets: We can see the field.  We see the plants and maybe a few flowers.  Depending on our experience, we may see a stream or river.  We may see mountains.  The field is both ours and not.  There is a field, we know that for sure.

I might begin with my hope that the hole in the corner of the cornerless field one day harbors a time capsule beneath the cooler of warm beer, and that we eternally return here, entangled, ensnared, enamored, whispering that the time has come to wander into the night.

Or perhaps begin with yesterday when I found a leviathan cross guarding the entrance to a refuge in the thicket beyond the field where unhoused Satanists ply their prayers of protection against predators who have done them wrong.

I pray along with them for vengeance.  And likewise plan to cut up these field notes along with a thousand more and shake them in a rusted tin can, chanting “dada, dada, dada.”  Then remove them arbitrarily to make poems of our presence.  I hope brothers Ben and Phil will do the same.

Olson: (We now enter, actually, the large area of the whole poem, into the FIELD, if you like, where all the syllables and all the lines must be managed in their relations to each other.)  It is a matter, finally, of OBJECTS. . . . Objectism is the getting rid of the lyrical interference of the individual as ego, of the “subject” and his soul, that peculiar presumption by which western man has interposed himself between what he is as a creature of nature (with certain instructions to carry out) and those other creations of nature which we may, with no derogation, call objects.  For man himself is an object . . . the more likely to recognize himself as such the greater his advantages, particularly at that moment that he achieves an humilitas sufficient to make him of use.

Although we try to balance the egg of our shared time in this holy place, I fear the field is already falling from our hands, and that—as we wander toward the fringe—we will never be able to put it together again.  I wonder if this essay is anything more than me asking: Are we? 

“There is nothing in a field,” writes J.D. Ho, “if not the capacity for new life.”  Perhaps someone will find these scraps and tie them with string to the lacebark elms, and all our beginnings will drip with the rain to water the grass with our memories.

Lauren Camp