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"Staying Alive"by Mary Oliverexcerpted from the book, "Blue Pastures", Harcourt Brace & Company, 1995. We are walking along the path, my dog and I, in the blue half-light. My dog, no longer young, steps carefully on the icy path, until he catches the scent of the fox. This morning the fox runs out onto the frozen pond, and my dog follows. I stand and watch them. The ice prevents either animal from getting a good toe-grip, so they move with the big-hearted and curvaceous motions of running, but in slow motion. All the way across they stay the same distance apart—the fox can go no faster, neither can my long-legged old dog, who will ache from this for a week. The scene is original and pretty as a dream. But I am wide awake. Then the fox vanishes among the yellow weeds on the far side of the pond, and my dog comes back, panting. I believe everything has a soul. Adults can change their circumstances; children cannot. Children are powerless, and in difficult situations they are the victims of every sorrow and mischance and rage around them, for children feel all of these things but without any of the ability that adults have to change them. Whatever can take a child beyond such circumstances, therefore, is an alleviation and a blessing. I quickly found for myself two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature. These were the gates through which I vanished from a difficult place. In the first of these—the natural world—I felt at ease; nature was full of beauty and interest and mystery, also good and bad luck, but never misuse. The second world—the world of literature—offered me, besides the pleasures of form, the sustentation of empathy (the first step of what Keats called negative capability) and I ran for it. I relaxed in it. I stood willingly and gladly in the characters of everything—other people, trees, clouds. And this is what I learned, that the world's otherness is antidote to confusion—that standing within this otherness#151;the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart. The thin red foxes would come together in the last weeks of winter. Then, their tracks in the snow were not of one animal but of two, where in the night they had gone running together. Neither were they the tracks of hunting animals, which run a straight if tacking line. These would sweep and glide, and stop to tussle. Behold a kicking up of snow, a heeling down, a spraying up of the sand beneath. Sometimes also I would hear them, in the distance—a yapping, a summons to hard and cold delight. I learned to build bookshelves and brought books to my room, gathering them around me thickly. I read by day and into the night. I thought about perfectibility, and deism, and adjectives, and clouds, and the foxes. I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness. When the young are born, the dog fox hunts and leaves what he has caught at the den entrance. In the darkness below, under snags and roots of trees, or clumps of wild roses whose roots are as thick and long as ship ropes, the vixen stays with the young foxes. They press against her body and nurse. They are safe. Once I lay my face against the body of our cat as she lay with her kittens, and she did not seem to mind. So I pursed my lips against that full moon, and I tasted the rich river of her body. I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too. After a few weeks the young foxes play about the den. They are dark and woolly. They chew bones and sticks, and each other. They growl. They play with feathers. They fight over food, and the stronger eats more and more often than the weakest. They have neither mercy nor pity. They have one responsibility—to stay alive, if they can, and be foxes. They grow powerful, and thin, more and more toothy, and more and more alert. A summer day—I was twelve or thirteen#151;at my cousins' house, in the country. They had a fox, collared and on a chain, in a little yard beside the house. All afternoon all afternoon all afternoon it kept—
Once I saw a fox, in an acre of cranberries, leaping and pouncing, leaping and pouncing,
leaping and falling back, its forelegs merrily slapping the air as it tried to tap a
yellow butterfly with its thin black forefeet, the butterfly fluttering just out of reach
all across the deep green gloss and plush of the sweet-smelling bog.
—it kept running back and forth, trembling and chattering. Once my father took me ice-skating, then forgot me, and went home. He was of course reminded that I had been with him, and sent back, but this was hours later. I had been found wandering over the ice and taken to the home of a kind, young woman, who knew my family slightly; she had phoned them to say where I was. When my father came through the door, I thought—never had I seen so handsome a man; he talked, he laughed, his movements were smooth and easy, his blue eyes were clear. He had simply forgotten that I existed. One could see—I can see even now, in memory—what an alleviation, what a lifting from burden he had felt in those few hours. It lay on him, that freedom, like an aura. Then I put on my coat, and we got into the car, and he sat back in the awful prison of himself, the old veils covered his eyes, and he did not say another word. I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door— a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and thus, to come into power. In books: truth, and daring, passion of all sorts. Clear and sweet and savory emotion did not run in a rippling stream in my personal world—more pity to it! But in stories and poems I found passion unfettered, and healthy. Not that such feelings were always or even commonly found in their clearest, most delectable states in all the books I read. Not at all! I saw what skill was needed, and persistence—how one must bend one's spine, like a hoop, over the page—the long labor. I saw the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort. Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work. Deep in the woods, I tried walking on all fours. I did it for an hour or so, through thickets, across a field, down to a cranberry bog. I don't think anyone saw me! At the end, I was exhausted and sore, but I had seen the world from the level of the grasses, the first bursting growth of trees, declivities, lumps, slopes, rivulets, gashes, open spaces. I was some slow old fox, wandering, breathing, hitching along, lying down finally at the edge of the bog, under the swirling rick-rack of the trees. You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life. I don't mean it's easy or assured, there are the stubborn stumps of shame, grief that remains unsolvable after all the years, a bag of stones that goes with one wherever one goes and however the hour may call for dancing and for light feet. But there is, also, the summoning world, the admirable energies of the world, better than anger, better than bitterness and, because more interesting, more alleviating. And there is the thing that one does, the needle one plies, the work, and within that work a chance to take thoughts that are hot and formless and to place them slowly and with meticulous effort into some shapely heat-retaining form, even as the gods, or nature, or the soundless wheels of time have made forms all across the soft, curved universe— that is to say, having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life. Form is certainty. All nature knows this, and we have no greater adviser. Clouds have forms, porous and shape-shifting, bumptious, fleecy. They are what clouds need to be, to be clouds. See a flock of them come, on the sled of the wind, all kneeling above the blue sea. And in the blue water, see the dolphin built to leap, the sea mouse skittering, see the ropy kelp with its air-filled bladders tugging it upward; see the albatross floating day after day on its three-jointed wings. Each form sets a tone, enables a destiny, strikes a note in the universe unlike any other. How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away? So, it comes first: the world. Then, literature. And then, what one pencil moving over a thousand miles of paper can (perhaps, sometimes) do. The fox beside the icy pond had been feeding on an old frozen raccoon, a bad heap, bones and tallow and skin, but better than nothing. For weeks, on my early walk along this path, I saw the fox as he dipped into the dark dish of the frozen body, rasping and tearing. And now my old dog is dead, and another I had after him, and my parents are dead, and that first world, that old house, is sold and lost, and the books I gathered there lost, or sold—but more books bought, and in another place, board by board and stone by stone, like a house, a true life built, and all because I was steadfast about one or two things: loving foxes, and poems, the blank piece of paper, and my own energy—and mostly the shimmering shoulders of the world that shrugs carelessly over the fate of any indvidual that they may, the better, keep the Niles and the Amazons flowing.
And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is
mine, I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back,
someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.
The fox is sitting on a sandy rise, it is looking at me. It yawns, the pickets of its teeth
glitter. It scratches under its jaw, rises, and in slow, haunchy nonchalance leaps over
the slopes of sand, then down a path, walking, then trotting; then it sprints into the
shadows under the trees, as if into water, and is gone.
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