A Catskill Eagle

If you have ever known anyone who has bipolar illness, you can feel their likeness in the weather of the Pacific Northwest. For the last few weeks, the weather has been alternating between grey rains that keep darkened wet leaves and limbs in the ravines held down, or days of winter sun that draws everyone outside for that blissful sight of orange, red and fuchsia that bathes the inner lids so soothingly.

Many artists have been blessed and cursed with an internal barometer that rises and falls for reasons that are obscure to themselves, as well as those who love and care for them. I don’t know if Herman Melville was one of these afflicted souls, but his writing suggests it. 

Long ago, my mother wrote down a passage of his, that reads like a poem, into a book of collected snippets of wisdom given to my sister and myself on our wedding days. It isn’t a verse from religious scriptures, but it could be, and it has stayed with me more than any other lines I’ve known.

In this same book my mother gave me is a quote from a minister, no less: “The theologians gather dust upon the shelves of my library but the poets are stained with my fingers and blotted by my tears.” And so as we go, we thoughtfully or unintentionally gather to us images, scenes, sayings, and writings of all sorts that find their way to the place in our imagining hearts that is waiting for them.

Ravines and gorges in a futuristic vision of "King's View of New York" by Moses King 1915

There is a wisdom that is madness, but there is a madness that is woe; and there is a catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges and soar out of them again to become invisible in the sunny spaces. -- Herman Melville

"Blue Savannah Song" by Erasure from their 1990 album Wild!

I like to think of Melville's Catskill eagle flying into Camus' invincible summer. This song is for my girl, the lullaby we sang to you when you first exploded onto the desert scene.