Travel from Pittsburgh [again] / Writing the Versions: A Recurrence of Variation
“Living as we do in a broken world, essays are bound to become more broken, fragmented”
— Hilton Als, Introduction, The Best American Essays 2018
1.
January 11-12, 2019, in a Midwest snowstorm, I drove 840 miles from Pittsburgh to Kansas City in 17 hours. East of Effingham, Illinois, I saw a haze that was the beginning of the snow. It continued to snow until I reached my house in Kansas. I don’t often drive that long at one time. But it was too hard to get off the road. I stopped for gas up snow-packed exit ramps, and that was it. 40 miles an hour for the last 250 miles across Missouri— St. Louis west to Kansas City. I couldn’t see the line on the highway because the road was covered with snow. But the warning grooves at the side of the road growled if I got on them. I felt I was driving in the sky. There were times I felt my car leave the road where another world moved. I could not do much else than keep my hands on the circle of wheel in the geometry of driving.
2.
Driving in snow at night. The stars and moon had fallen from the cliff of the sky. The snow was their shattering. Their flakes covered the highway. It was as if it was in the beginning when people walked in darkness. The trees bowed under the weight of snow and the knowledge they carried fragments of the moon and stars on their back. The people made their way along the long trail of the road. There would be no light in the night sky but the people kept moving.
The earth itself moved forward even when it passed the same places it already had been. If only it could be made to know it was oblivious to the surroundings on its circuitous path around the sun.
On a long drive over the road a driver kept driving and snow kept falling and the car kept moving into a country of suspension the driver hadn’t known was there. Until it was. All night the driver continued through the unknown knowing then it was there — when the weight of migration pushed the people onward in the remains of what was left. And the car kept following the tunnel of its headlights in the recurrence of a winter storm.
3.
Porism — In ancient mathematics a proposition that uncovers the possibility of finding such conditions as to make a specific problem capable of innumerable solutions.
Webster’s New World Dictionary of the American Language, College Edition, 1966
4.
A re-version of the journey —
January 11, 2019, I left Pittsburgh after my last class at Carlow University in a low-residency MFA program. The morning classes were over at noon. I didn’t stay for the rest of the day, but drove from downtown Pittsburgh to 376 west along the Allegheny River to 79 south to I-70 west at Washington, Pennsylvania, across a narrow slice of West Virginia into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, the border of Kansas. It was a road I was familiar with. I had driven it before. More than once before. By 5:00 pm in Illinois it was dark. East of Effingham I saw a haze in the headlights of the east-bound lane. It was snow. It was still snowing when I reached Kansas City at 5:00 am the next morning, January 12. I drove over the road with the slow patience of Job. Exit ramps were filled with snow— with a ridge to get across if a snow plow had passed. I got off only for gasoline. The snow coming toward the car was a circle of orbiting stars. Snow fell steady on I-70. Sometimes it sounded like sleet. Sometimes a brief respite. But it continued to snow. I crossed the bridge across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers at St. Louis. The Missouri River again at Booneville mid-way across the state. The limestone bluffs were white walls. It was a closed-in world. A terrain of white. Trucks and a few cars passed. A small caravan of Job’s camels from Uz. Some in the ditch ahead. The snow covered lane markers. But I knew the buzz of tires in the warning grooves at the edge of the road and the driver got back on the road. Slowly. And more slowly. 250 miles across Missouri at 40 miles an hour. Sometimes less. Never more. It was a time of cold and darkness yet the snow was lit as if by a dim nightlight. It was a time of slow momentum when the old world showed itself. I continued into the snow as though knowing always it was there to be taken to be used when the world I knew came to an end as maybe at the end of life when the driving was driving home.
5.
The old ones traveled with the car. I followed them through the snow. I knew they were with me. They were the car. The snow. The way through the snow. I heard their old stories in the voice of the snow. The brokenness held together with stories. They called the snow to hide the animal behind the storm. A terrapin walked with it. The storm was an old being. Many had walked in it. The cold is a predator. It stalks its prey. Biting first the toes. The fingers. Then working its way to the heart. The car is a hunter. The car is a spirit. I am the car that continues on the road. It is the old ones holding the car there. The car is an island in a white sea. The car is old migration trails. It is a sledge — not a hammer but sleigh or sled moving through the snow. How often words are at war with themselves carrying meanings that have nothing to do with one another. How often the car leaves the road and connects with old journeys. How often one meaning becomes many.
Over the snowy terrain now frozen into sleet pecking at the windshield trying to get into the car — asking for a ride— just one ride to warmer landscape — out of the ten to eleven inches on the back-side of the storm.
A highway is a book of many versions. A highway is a book of many warnings.
Beware of hostiles in the atmosphere. Tell the snow its whiteness will tarnish. The road does not stay white for long. The snow turns brown with passing traffic.
In snow and the unraveling of steady travel the woo woo bands at the edge of the road — the shoulder rumble-strips warn to get back on the road. The animal behind the snow will get you.
6.
A few days later, I am driving again. This time in Texas, without the storm. At one point the highway made a curve. Almost before I knew it, I was in the inside lane headed for the edge of the road, but was able to turn the car back to the road. How easy to leave the road in an instant — to let the car go its own way in the momentum of forward travel. To relinquish movement — to turn — to guide — to steer. As if it was not an animal on the open range, but something I had to do to stay on the road.
I have a small house in Kansas. A smaller place in Texas. On my son’s property in the country just south of the Red River. In a Butler building. In a part of the barn that is a Butler building. I travel back and forth between Kansas and Texas. The 482-mile trip takes 7 ½ hours. I stop half-way at a Mexican restaurant in Blackwell, Oklahoma.
7.
A few nights later, January 20-21, 2019, there was a blood wolf moon. It was a back-lit maroon like the snow at night I drove through in the dim nightlight from the other room. The blood moon reflects the earth’s umbra — the sunsets and sunrisings which culminate around the earth. Our shadow is a dark red haze. As if the earth was a slow-burning ball of peat. In the wide sky above Texas anyway.
8.
The mathematical term, porism, transposes to writing. Because I asked it to. It is the stories the old ones tell as they travel. They unravel a story. They cover it with snow. The early people told stories to lessen the hold of their circumstances. Later travelers in the snow could hear it — if they knew to listen.
Language is both the creator and the world it creates. Language is the revealer and the revealed.
As the word made flesh — John 1:14 — Jesus the creator and the world his words created — the preacher in a fundamental church in Texas would say. As language makes the world and is the world it makes.
9.
I am interested in the arrangement of shapes. Especially the forms of thought. A solid geometry of sorts.
Euclid described properties of the square car, the round earth, the line of the road, the point of the meteor that hit the blood wolf moon during the eclipse. The driver deduced the round head, the needful line of vision, the blunt point of impact if the car would hit.
Einstein’s theory of relativity offers Euclidian geometry abundance and breakage from restraint. Therefore, other possibilities than impact appear on the highway.
Porism offers the possibility of finding such conditions as will render certain problems intermediate, or capable of innumerable solutions. The car will stay on the road. The driver will drive without sleep. There is a way through the storm if the driver continues.
But the definition is slightly inaccurate because the proposition actually states the conditions rather than affirming the possibility of finding them — Porism is a mathematical proposition or corollary, in particular the term porism has been used to refer to a direct result of a proof, analogous to how a corollary refers to a direct theorem — Wikipedia.
Nonetheless, the driver discovers supposition and the slippage of possibilities in porism as the structure of the world in which the driver drives.
The driver likes the oppositions in the ancient use of porism. Possibilities can be both. Neither. Or parts in one of both. Further, if not in actuality. In theory at least.
In the end, the innumerable solutions of porism reduce to one— keep driving— even at a terrapin pace.
10.
[At times] I could not discern the form thereof — Job 4:16. Therefore, the driver kept driving through the hours of the night from Pittsburgh to Kansas.
The driver could not cross the Missouri River in Missouri without thinking of the 1804-06 Lewis & Clark Expedition, which the driver researched in the past. L&C mostly drove west to find place, to name and claim what they found— creeks, rivers, mountain ranges, plains. Their journey just as tenuous. Actually more so. Without interstate and bridges to help across. Without enclosure of car to protect from.
Past travels are present in the present ones. The whole interstate an overlay of then and now. With the opposition also of stasis and momentum. The land moving. The land in place.
In travel, there is a transfixation of timespace in the variation of story.
Travel is a country of suspension in which the driver, the land and the travel across it become one. After all, porism is a relation that holds for an infinite range of values — but only if a certain condition is assumed — Wikipedia. It is possible to drive through snow moving on the road only if snow is there in the storm to drive through.
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“Travel From Pittsburgh [Again] / Writing the Versions: A Recurrence of Variation,” is excerpted from Island of the Innocent: A Consideration of the Book of Job. Copyright © 2020 Diane Glancy. All rights reserved. The work appears here with the permission of Turtle Point Press.