Ken Arnold Books || Circle Xcerpt

An Excerpt from Circle of the Way
By Ken Arnold

Going South
Fog this morning
a wall around Manhattan
the way is clear

I drive to Virginia to visit some of the places that were important to me when I was younger. The trip was planned as part of a grander plan I've had to return to and write about the places that formed me, even the distant ones, such as Kyoto and Nicaragua. All of them pivotal in my spiritual formation. I have thought these visits might form the framework of a spiritual autobiography. I am beginning with Virginia because there are two important locations in the state that I can cover in two or three days and, not incidentally, see my mother, who lives in Madison, Virginia, and is worried about my cancer. Now the trip feels urgent, no longer merely literary, since in two months I'm having surgery to remove my prostate.

The places: Bel Aire, the neighborhood where we lived between my sixth and fifteenth years; and Lynchburg College, from which I had graduated in 1966 and where I had decided not to be ordained in the Disciples of Christ Church.

Driving south on the New Jersey Turnpike, a road that I have traveled the opposite direction hundreds of times, north from Philadelphia to New Brunswick, where I worked for eleven years. And over the years, many times north to New York and south to Delaware, to and from Baltimore, where I went to graduate school, to Washington, where I was born. Ugly and industrial in the north, the turnpick passes through the more bucolic south of New Jersey, but it is still just a way to go somewhere else. I pay little attention to the landscape as I drive. All of it is familiar in the way random memories are, flashes of recognition, not especially meaningful, momentarily present. The mind's busyness.

The turnpike splits
trucks right cars left
men reading newspapers as they drive

In Bel Aire, a suburb of Washington, DC: on the way in I drive past our old house, now a different color with added rooms, but there is nothing familiar about it. What mattered to me, the hedge along the side yard and the bush beneath which I spent many hours, are gone. I locate the creek in which we played in all seasons, sometimes spending entire days in what we thought of then as a wilderness. Packing a lunch in the morning for an all-day hike when I was ten or maybe younger. Much of the hike spent sitting on the bank of the creek or wading in it, collecting tadpoles and rocks. Looking downstream, into my own past, I see that nothing has changed. There I am. The creek bends gently into the cool woods exactly as it does in my mind's 1954. I feel thin ice break under my boot one winter day and the cold water on my legs as I race home fearing the spanking that awaits. I consider walking down the creek into the woods, but knowing that there is little of the stand of trees left--I don't want to know how little--instead cross the cul-de-sac to the park in which we played hide-and-seek most summer days until after dark. The entire neighborhood converged there. Smaller than it was back then, in fact or in memory--it was a huge expanse, it seems to me, almost a mountain--tightly constrained now by suburban ranches. Not much of that wild remains in which it was so easy to disappear. Now there's organized play: a modern jungle gym, sandbox, swings, benches for mothers to watch their children. None of it there before. We roamed a disorganized world when I was young among untamed grass and woods, with no mothers standing by, the fathers always gone. The park still holds at its center the pile of rocks enclosed by trees that I know I am seeking: my heart. I climb onto the rocks, into the foliage and deeply into the past, and sit for awhile, amazed that this part of myself has remained intact for so long. I play my flute, surprised and gratified by tears.

The maple splits the rocks
fifty years later
a bird sings breaker breaker

South of Washington, following another familiar path, Route 66 and 29-211, along which I traveled to and from college and in recent years less often to visit my parents, I stay in Madison with my mother for the night. Places on the way--Gainesville (where it has always seemed to me the South begins, the air changes), Brandy Station, the wayside store that sells canoes and guns, the bypass at Culpeper, the expansive pastures and farms after that, black angus cattle--the more significant for being ordinary and still here.

crepe myrtle at dawn
in my mother's yard
heavy pink bows low

In the morning I drive to Lynchburg to look for the small cottage in which one of my teachers and mentor, Sheldon van Auken, had lived. He was a massive man in a tiny house who drove a Morgan around Lynchburg and often taught his students from a four-poster bed at one end of his living room. I used to ride to church with him. He was a devoted Anglophile, a devout Anglo-Catholic who had been converted from intellectual paganism to Christianity by C.S. Lewis when he was a student at Oxford. There was a tragic story that everyone knew about the death of his young wife that made him irresistibly romantic. Living alone with her memory, he looked forward to joining her in death. Wide-eyed young women who wrote poems sat at his feet. The young men did too, fewer but equally wide-eyed, drinking beer in the evenings instead of going to chapel. But he preferred the young women, to most of whom he gave male nicknames. The cottage had been behind the library but when I get to the campus the new business school is being erected on the site. The librarian thinks the cottage has been moved but she isn't sure where. Crossing the quadrangle, I meet a security guard who does not remember the house but does remember the Morgan. "That was a great car," he says. Remembering the car reminds him what became of the cottage. When Van, as he was known, died a few years ago, the cottage was moved, along with its garage, and the Morgan sold. He was still driving it when he died, forty years after I was there. The guard takes me to the cottage, just off campus at the bottom of a hill that was the site of a thwarted attempt to lose my virginity in 1963. And take someone else's. Late dewy nights in Lynchburg. Situated in an incongruous bamboo grove, the cottage looks almost Asian, out of place as always in this southern town. It is still white with blue trim. Pushing aside spider webs, I peer in a window and see, as through the kind of sepia gauze that gives old postcards charm, the living room, furnished exactly as it was when I was a student, the big bed from which he taught now empty. The cottage feels like a shrine, maintained I learn later by a friend who sleeps here when he visits the city. I imagine a few other devotees return on occasion to look into this past. I kneel in the bamboo grove with my bamboo flute and play kyo rei-which means empty bell--for Van and myself and for all of the ghosts assembled.

Abandoned cottage still
furnished as it was
peeling white paint

Another night with my mother. The deck of the house she and my father built juts into the woods. In winter you can see the Blue Ridge Mountains through the bare tree branches. Across the valley a hound howls. The hummingbirds hover. My father's tool shed and garage, where all of his tools lie unused, is in my imagination a place where I live alone, the interior cleared and converted to a zendo. There I am like Thomas Merton or a Zen hermit dwelling apart with my cancer. It would be like living in that childhood pile of rocks in Bel Aire or Van's cottage, surrounded as here by others but invisible to them, seeing myself more clearly. Worshipping myself.

flute music in Virginia's woods
cicadas end their long silence

Back in New York, leaving everything in Virginia and in my memory as I found it.

Manhattan in August
hot streets empty
looking south from our bedroom