'After the Rain, Perhaps, Something Will Show'

Most of us are born with a brain but without a user’s manual. This soggy organ weighs on average about three pounds and contains 86 billion neurons. That’s our birthright, and we did nothing to earn it. We tend to operate our brains passively, ignoring most available perceptions. We “tune them out” – the electronics metaphor is nowadays almost inevitable. It’s easy to be lazy, coast through the ocean of data we dwell in and go on living. Paying too much attention to the world can be madness, as is paying too little. I become aware of this only when I’m looking for something lost or misplaced, whether it be a word or the car keys. It’s like adjusting a camera lens – looking at what’s there, not what we have already assumed is there. The Indiana poet Jared Carter describes in the title poem to his 1993 collection After the Rain the hunt for arrowheads in a farmer’s field once the rain has stopped: 

“They seem, like hail,

dropped from an empty sky,

Yet for an hour or two, after the rain

has washed away the dusty afterbirth

of their return, a few will show up plain

on the reopened earth.

Still, even these are hard to see –

at first they look like any other stone.”

 

I’ve often gone hunting for arrowheads, pottery shards and other Indian debris, but Carter’s poem reminds me of a visit to a dairy farm near Belfast, N.Y., run by one of my mother’s cousins and her husband. This was sixty years ago. The pastures were dotted with limestone rich in trilobites and other fossils. My brother and I filled a milk crate with chunks of stone and brought them back to Ohio. There we fantasized about the future paleontologists baffled by their appearance so far from their native range. Carter continues:

 

“The trick to finding them is not to be

too sure about what’s known;

Conviction’s liable to say straight off

this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay,

and miss the point: after the rain, soft

furrows show one way

Across the field, but what is hidden here

required a different view – the glance of one

not looking straight ahead, who in the clear

light of the morning sun

Simply keeps wandering across the rows,

letting his own perspective change.”

 

Impatience sabotages perception. Carter concludes his poem with these lines: “After the rain, perhaps, something will show, / glittering and strange.” I’ve learned to stop looking, especially for a word I know is out there – or in there somewhere – in order to find it.

“Finding” is an essay by Guy Davenport published in Antaeus in 1978 and later collected in The Geography of the Imagination (North Point Press, 1981). It may be the finest thing Davenport ever wrote, and it recounts the weekend expeditions his family took “to look for Indian arrows.” Davenport was born in 1926 in Anderson, S.C. His essay is a delicate balance of memoir and meditation on many things – family, lost time, the importance of attentiveness and the formation of sensibility. The essayist says he hopes the meaning of those childhood expeditions “elude[s] me forever,” that he will never find the meaning of finding but he can’t help speculating:

 

“Its importance has, in maturity, become more and more apparent—an education that shaped me with a surer and finer hand than any classroom, an experience that gave me a sense of the earth, of autumn afternoons, of all the seasons, a connoisseur’s sense of things for their own sake.”

 

We learn best by doing and by watching others do. Learning one thing (finding arrowheads) later may teach us another (reading texts, writing others). Davenport writes:

“I know that my sense of place, of occasion, even of doing anything at all, was shaped by those afternoons. It took a while for me to realize that people can grow up without being taught to see, to search surfaces for all the details, to check out a whole landscape for what it has to offer.”

 

As A.E. Stallings says in her poem “Arrowhead Hunting” (Hapax, 2006): “The land is full of what was lost.”