I slow down for falcons.

Falcons, eagles, hawks, cranes, herons, kestrels, all manner of large birds.

If I’m on the road, I pull over, stop the car, get out, and allow myself to be entranced.  If I’m at home and spot one from my office window, I abandon the keyboard, step out onto the deck, and stand transfixed, silently urging it closer even as it spirals farther away.

This is one reason I’ve been stretching the muscles of my mind trying to commit Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem The Windhover to memory — the first eight lines, that is, since the last six go all over-the-top Christ-our-Lordy and do nothing for me.

A mere eight lines should be easy enough, no?  It should be what my Irish mother used to call a doddle.  And yet while I think I have an excellent memory, this poem defies me, and has done so for well over a year.

Try reciting it out loud, slowly, rather than reading it fast and silently:

I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

    dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding

    Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding

High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,

    As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding

    Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding

Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

You see what I mean?  Wouldn’t you love to ring upon the rein of a wimpling wing?

This is one of the two most anthologized poems written by Hopkins, the closeted gay man who became a Jesuit priest and indeed kept his heart in hiding — except in his poetry.  The other is Pied Beauty, which you might know from its first line, “Glory be to God for dappled things,” but that I love for its seventh, which expands dappledness to “All things counter, original, spare, strange.”

The idea of beauty as counter, original, spare, strange is so damn beautiful, and yet it’s ‘The Windhover’ that haunts me, so much so that it comes with me everywhere I drive.  Physically comes with me, that is, nestled on page 468 of The Rattlebag, an anthology edited by Ted Hiughes and Seamus Heaney that has taken up permanent residence on the passenger seat of my car, jostling for room with the occasional human passenger.  Every time a drawbridge goes up (this being watery Seattle), I open the book to the dog-eared page and recite the lines a few times, eyes open sometimes, closed at others.  Yet no matter how I do it, nor how many times I do it, I find myself stumbling, and have to stop and look at the printed page, always discovering yet another transcendent phrase that’s escaped me.

‘The Windhover’ defies memory, at least for me, and this makes me marvel not only at the lines themselves — at each evocatively, even provocatively precise word — but at how Hopkins wrote them.  He has to have held the whole of the poem in his mind in order to write it, has to have each word following each word firmly in place.  And yet as a mere reader/reciter, I can’t keep track.  The poem seems to spiral away from me, to soar out of sight, leaving me thrillingly aware of the achieve of, the mastery of the thing!

It’s weird how a single scene from a movie can stay with you. Like this piece of American noir:

A fedora-hatted gumshoe walks into a Chinese eatery. He heads for the back booth where an over-sized guy with a bowl in one hand and chopsticks in the other is steadily shoveling food into his mouth. The gumshoe wants information, and tosses a banknote on the table. The other guy delicately picks up the banknote with his chopsticks, tucks it into his vest pocket, and keeps right on eating.

I so envied that nonchalant chopstick deftness. A mere thirty seconds of screen time, but it stayed with me even though nothing else of the movie did. I had no idea what it was called, or where I’d seen it (late-night TV?), or who was in it (Bogart?). So for years – decades – I recounted the scene over Japanese or Chinese or Thai food in the hope that someone would recognize it. And finally, a month ago, someone did. A New York friend who’d been on a noir binge in preparation for a course he was teaching sent an email titled “That movie.”

Pickup on South Street. 1953. Directed by Sam Fuller.   Starring Richard Widmark.

Yay! I found a copy, and I was right, it was a great scene. It was a wonderful damn scene. Yet while it was exactly as I remembered it, it was also not at all as I remembered it.

The chopstick magic was there – not once, but twice, as more money was tossed on the table until the overweight guy (going by the irresistible moniker of Lightning Louie) was persuaded to talk. But where the scene played in my memory with the camera full front on him, he was shown the whole time in profile, from the side. The camera was fronted on the gumshoe, seated not across from him in a booth, but cater-corner at a table.

And there was no fedora.  In fact there was no gumshoe. ‘He’ was she – Jean Peters, the female lead, playing the ballsy yet vulnerable dame trying to find a bad-on-the-surface/good-at-heart guy in trouble (that’d be Widmark, of course).

I watched the rest of Pickup on South Street as though for the first time. I had no memory of it, despite the great camera angles and a terrific cast of characters. Only that one cherished scene was familiar, told so many times to friends and drastically re-created in the process. In essence, I’d re-shot the scene, usurping Sam Fuller’s role as director.

I like to think I’m a good observer. As a psychologist, I should surely have a clear eye. I know how malleable memory is, how it has a way of adapting itself to desired narrative, to what we think should have or could have been. But here was proof positive that I’m no more immune than anyone else. I wanted the gumshoe. I wanted the fedora. And because I was entranced by Lightning Louie’s ability to pick up banknotes with chopsticks, I wanted him head on.

As a wise friend said, “we all write our own scripts.”

This is a long post, but then Shi Shi beach is long.  It’s one of the wildest, most forlorn, most beautiful beaches in the world, four hours by car and ferry from Seattle, and then another hour slogging through psychedelically viscous deep mud, ending in an ohmygod slither down a steep cliff, clinging to tree roots as you go, and then…  the magnificent wilderness of the Pacific Ocean.

Usually I come here in winter, after a storm, when the water wells up so high that you swear it’s going to swamp you like a tsunami wave.  The pounding of it makes the sand beneath your feet reverberate like an ongoing earthquake (seriously:  it registers on seismic sensors.)  With the wind high and rain flying at you, there’s no telling where water ends and sky begins.  Spume lifts in huge curtains off the tops of the waves;  giant balls of foam race along the beach as though propelled by some inner force;  the roar of the water drowns out anything but shouting.  To stand on Shi Shi at such times is thrilling and humbling and terrifying all at the same time.

The ocean tosses up whatever it carries here, and some of it comes back home with me.  Buoys torn loose from crab pots;  tangled nets and long lines of rope;  even, once, a blue hardhat that belonged to someone called Beata Riggo.  I know this because the name is there, carefully marked in indelible ink on the mesh webbing inside the hat.  A Norwegian name, I think, though I’m not sure.  The hat must have gone overboard.  But it wasn’t until last week that it occurred to me that its owner might have gone overboard too.

I was at Shi Shi on a sunny summer day, for a change.  Yet there was a certain overcast to the sun, at least in my mind, because now a different kind of flotsam is coming ashore.  The ocean has carried the debris from the tsunami that ravaged the eastern coast of Japan over a year ago, and now it’s beginning to arrive on the west coast of America, ten thousand miles away.  A fishing boat washed ashore this spring on Vancouver Island;  a floating dock on the Oregon shore.  And at Shi Shi?  I kind of didn’t want to know.

But the indomitable Jen Graves, art critic of The Stranger, was braver than I.   Like me, she’d been part of an kind of ad hoc temporary collective of art and tech types convened a couple of weeks ago to explore problems they might collaborate on.  The tsunami debris was identified as one such problem:  how to contain, it, how to handle it and collect it and dispose of it.  But for me, the problem was quite the opposite.  It was how to conserve it.

What Jen and I saw washing up on the Pacific coast is what remains of people’s lives.  It’s what remains of people who died.  There was stuff on the beach that day I’d never seen there before.  Nothing as dramatic as a boat or a floating dock, but small remnants of humanity like a piece of wood that might have been part of a broomstick, but with many layers of multi-colored paint on it, which made it seem somehow ceremonial.  Or matte black spheres that looked at first like mines, but turned out to be plastic floats from Japanese fishing nets.   Or – the bane of our oceans – Styrofoam, brittle and yellowed by salt and time.

This is only the beginning.  More will come.  I can see that it’s an environmental problem, of course, but surely it’s also a cultural one, even an existential one.  This is, after all, more than mere debris.  It’s testimony.  Testimony to other people’s lives, to the power of the ocean, to the conditionality of our own existence.  To treat it as a problem that can be “solved” seems to me insufficient.  Surely a group of artists and technologists could find a more creative “solution”?

An interpretable site?  A memorial?  An installation?  I don’t know.  But another country’s tragedy as our debris?  I think we can do better than that.  And perhaps we will.  We meet again tonight, this time open to the public, and I’ll be wearing Beata Riggo’s hardhat – not because I look good in it (in fact I look idiotic), but as a reminder, at least to me, that we need to conserve not only the environment, but also memory.  That we need to respect the power of the ocean rather than try to control it.  That we need to be thrilled and humbled and terrified all at the same time.