Excerpt from North Enough

I ask myself why I find a landscape this damaged so beautiful, or at any rate so touching. Answering this question brings me to the lip of the abyss, to the eight years I chose to live under the whip of AIDS.

I no longer believe there will be time enough for what I want to do. That I can control many events. That my culture's standards of beauty are attainable or even desirable. How easy it is to stand outside my own body and watch it strain toward feeling, any feeling, at any cost! I have learned to find beauty in places where I never would have searched for or found it before?an edematous face, a lesioned and smelly body, a mind rubbed numb by pain. Pain. A burned-over district. Mortal lessons: the beauty of a ravished landscape. Now middle-aged, I find mortality doubly my possession, keeper and kept.

The diminishment of this landscape mortifies and disciplines me. Its scars will outlast me, bearing witness for decades beyond my death of the damage done here. Fat-tired ATVs and their helmeted riders lay the land bare, ream it continuously until it runs red and open, as disease has defaced the bodies of my friends. I learn to love what has been defaced, to cherish it for reasons other than easy beauty. I walk after the ATVs now, collecting beer cans and plastic leech tubs from the banks of the bass hole, tutor myself in the difficult art of loving what is superficially ugly. Beauty flashes out unexpectedly. I try not to anticipate its location, merely to trust its imminence.

Exceptions: Curving in a hook southeast of the cabin is a point crowned by a stand of ancient red and white pines beneath which time itself seems stilled. An eagle couple lives there, wheeling over the adjoining bog each dawn and sunset. The pines on the point survived the felling of millions of their fellows because they were too difficult to haul out, protected by a wide bog thick with the improbable creatures that live on its floating mat: tamarack, sundews, pitcher plants, leatherleaf, bog rosemary, Labrador tea.

There is no more lesson in the pines' survival than in why some people with HIV live for ten or twelve years while others die after only three. Survival no longer has much intrinsic meaning to me. These things happen. I have learned to be deeply suspicious of metaphor, resistant to the pretty conceits that once satisfied my need to explain pain. When I look south to the surviving pines, I try to abjure the lessons that spin so readily to mind, like files summoned from a whirling disk. If I choose to find meaning in any of this, I must remember it is my meaning, just as the comfort I drag from friends' death -- heavy, cold, resistant as wet laundry -- is for and by myself.

Copyright © 1997 by Jan Zita Grover. All rights reserved