Stillness

I’ve been thinking about the silence in the house at Jokers Hill, and the stillness I experienced walking there that late afternoon—how it settled me and stopped my mind’s usual restless roving. I was stilled—and refreshed—free for a while to ignore the list of tasks that seem some weeks to be all that a life is. Then it’s as if my life has become an endless to-do list … If that’s the case, it’s time I made a to-do about it. Or maybe it even calls for a tantrum, it’s no way to live. What is all the busyness that marks our lives now, that makes us on the one hand feel so important and on the other leaches away energy and delight? Some mis-sense of time rules us.

On Wednesday morning last week I went down to Harbourfront and The Power Plant to spend another hour at “The Clock,” Christian Marclay’s mesmerizing movie collage of scenes from films that show a clock or a watch, moving minute by minute throughout the 24 hours that make up a day*—and that match the precise time at which one is watching. I’m not sure why it’s so compelling.

Well, there are several reasons, I suppose—film is itself compelling; there’s the extra little frisson that comes when you recognize a scene and know the movie it comes from; watching for the clocks takes you out of yourself away from the regular course of your day; and then there’s the way in which the mind (my mind, anyway) tries and tries to make a continuous narrative out of the disparate scenes unfolding one after another. I found myself thinking about Italo Calvino’s If on a Winter Night a Traveller, a book I love for its simultaneous invoking and refusal of stories, its stance against conclusion.

My hour there was neither silent nor still, but it did let me forget my preoccupations, and was refreshing. Though not as refreshing as the 20 minutes or so when I stood by the lake watching and listening to a small flock of long-tailed ducks. There was no wind. The morning fog had thinned but was still present enough to make Toronto Island a blurred grey line in the distance, a darker grey than the sky and the water surrounding it.

                                    

 The ducks were feeding, diving and surfacing on either side of a dock, and calling. They utter a lovely muted call—it’s described as a yodel in the bird books but is softer, to my ear (and I like yodeling) more musical. I stood just listening. 

Then they were close enough for me to photograph, and to watch them diving.

                                    

One went under quite near me and I was startled and delighted when I then saw it swimming underwater, its movements and the pattern of its plumage quite visible. I hadn’t thought the water in Toronto Harbour would be that clear.  At home I was startled again when I discovered a trace of that underwater image in one of my photographs. You can just see it surfacing in the lower right corner of the photo below.

                                    

When long-tails dive the movement is both sudden and smooth, elegant. I wanted to capture that moment but missed it every time—though once I got the splash, that little turmoil it left behind as it went under.

I keep going back to those few moments of watching and listening and my own stillness in them, thinking I want more of that in my life.  

On second thought, maybe I also want that little turmoil (the image or idea that comes suddenly) with the smooth stillness of the lake stretching out around it (the space to linger with it, let it grow).

*Here's a link to a New Yorker essay on Marclay's work: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/03/12/120312fa_fact_zalewski