The Mountains of Instead

I kinda have a love-hate relationship with the poetry of W.H. Auden.  I almost wrote that I have a love-hate relationship with Auden himself, but I actually have no idea what he was like as a human being, so I'll zoom on to his poetry . . . which I think is beautiful, or pretentious, or obscure, or maybe all three.  

This is the little blurb I'm mulling over right now:

Clear, unscalable, ahead

Rise the Mountains of Instead

From whose cold cascading streams

None may drink except in dreams.

It's toward the end of a poem about beloved people who aren't here anymore, but also about trolls in the forest, and it hints at being deep and . . . mostly, I really don't like this poem.  But I keep coming back to the Mountains of Instead.  

For some reason, this keeps reminding me of airports.   So many times in my life, I've gotten to experience the dubious blessing of delayed flights -- bad weather, aircraft maintenance, unspecified snags.  And every time I get grounded, I play the game of trying to be the most cheerful person in the airport, which let me tell you, is way too easy to win.  

Part of the way that I play is to imagine in my head that I am in an alternative universe.  There was the other universe, the one where we passengers all got to board the plane, which took off on time---but then the storm hit, or the loose bolt came unfastened, or the over-tired crew made crucial mistakes, and as our plane plummeted toward the earth we all screamed and prayed and wished that the airline had decided not to let the danged plane take off in the first place . . . and now here I am, safely on the ground, in the universe where all those screaming passengers got their wish and the plane was delayed, and we grumbled about it but survived.

It's not like this is a perfect universe, the one that I screamed/prayed/wished my way into.  The pandemic is horrendous, and racism eats away at our society like acid, and my kid has diabetes, and my students are cheating on my exams more than ever.  But in that other universe --- the Universe of Instead --- my kids and my husband would still be facing pandemic-racism-diabetes, and my students would be cheating on someone else's tests, but they'd be doing it without me.  And I'm so glad, when I think back to the airports that have given me so much danged practice at the danged cheerful game, that I'm here to be a bit of a touchstone for my family in these crazy times.

There are so many other Mountains/Universes of Instead.  In 2014, I got two miles into the bike leg of my IronMan Triathlon when my tire popped.  I'd never successfully changed my own tire before, and I'd even thought about not bringing along a spare . . . but a good Samaritan ran over to me to help, and we got my new tire on and (mostly) pumped up, and about 3 miles later I found someone with a pump who got the tire fully inflated.   In the Universe of Instead, my tire popped and I'd spent months and months training just to stall out 4 miles into a 140-mile event.   But in the Universe I get to wake up into now, kind people fixed my tire for me and I get to think, wow, I did an IronMan Triathlon.  I did it.  I really did.  It's something I'm so grateful for.

And yet other Universes of Instead:  My husband crashed his bike in 2007 and broke his neck in three places (plus a few other bones to make a matched set), but somehow we both made it into the Universe where he didn't become a paraplegic, and so we have a house with stairs and we go for walks holding hands, and I think about how I could have been in the Instead Universe where stairs and walks don't happen; but I'm not, I'm here.  There's the Universe where I was too busy to join the book group on "an academic reading of the Old Testament", and my life would have been just fine in that Instead Universe; but actually I'm in the universe where I joined the book group, in which I met a person who introduced me to volunteering for Hospice, where I met a gravely ill patient who had a young child, and then that young child eventually became my own daughter; and it's so much better than "just fine" having her in my life.  

So, Wystan Hugh Auden: thanks for the poem.  And also for the one about How well they knew suffering, those old masters, that tragedy hits in one place while others keep toddling along doin' what they be doin'.  The poems are kind of depressing as all-get-out, but they do, in their own obscure, beautiful way, remind me about the many, many reasons I have to be content in the midst of gloom and hardship.