The Best of Pickering

Messing About

Messing About AT THE BEGINNING OF KENNETH GRAHAME’S The Wind in the Willows, Water Rat said to his friend Mole, “there is nothing— absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” Instead of sculling through experience in hopes of exploring new psychological lands, the animals played. In contrast, Huck Finn sailed down the Mississippi River with Jim, the runaway slave. Rather than traveling north, Huck headed south into the frightening world of slavery. The trip tested Huck and Jim, and the journey became a progress heavy with signi‹cance. When Mole and Ratty went on a picnic , they stayed near home. When Mole upset the boat in his eagerness to row, nothing profound was meant. Wildly happy and excited as a child with a new toy, Mole just lost control of the oars. I have reached the stage of life in which I agree with Ratty. Nothing seems half so much worth doing as messing about. Indeed I think Hell to be a place where everything matters, a world where belief so shackles people to purpose that they spend their lives bent like slaves in the hot sun, chopping and hoeing action into signi‹cance, so ginning events that they force others into peonage, transforming them into moral and intellectual sharecroppers. When I was young, mathematics seemed to re›ect life itself. I thought hard work would enable both individuals and societies to solve problems. Much as a geometrical theorem could be proved, so truth existed. The study of mathematics created the illusion of order. Below the chaotic surface of things lay not only axioms and postulates, theorems as regular as equilateral triangles, but reason itself. Nowadays instead of mirroring life, mathematics seems matter for a sideshow at a county fair: swimming in a tank, a ‹sh-eating calculus; a trigonometry, cloudy in a bottle of formaldehyde; and on a shelf stuffed, a spotted algebra, one of its linear equations purple, the other orange. Unlike ‹nite mathematics variable English now seems to re›ect life. Not only is language a chaos of idiom and de‹nition, but rules of speech and gram-
41 mar seem more whim than law, reducing the attempt to write “good” English to linguistic messing about. Completing the square may solve quadratic equations, but parsing sentences will not explain the workings of good prose. The real roots of ‹ne writing lie outside formulaic scratchings. Over the years beliefs and proofs I once thought truths have unraveled like the snail whose body peels into slime as he crawls. When Mole tumbled out of the boat, Ratty rescued him, grabbing him behind the neck and pulling him to the surface. Meaning didn’t accompany Mole’s return to land. Wet, not reborn, Mole did not push off into pools of signi‹cance, and smiting the tinkling current, seek “a newer world.” Instead, he went home, and putting on slippers and a dressing gown, sat by the ‹re with Ratty. As snails crawl through time out of existence, they leave behind glistening trails. The trails are shallow; yet I enjoy seeing them wrap the ground in silver ribbons. I have grown comfortable with surfaces. Actually I think only ‹ctions lie beneath appearances, delusions forced upon picnickers and swimmers by narrow overseers intent upon cultivating crops of meaning. Much as rats don’t associate with poor farmers, so critics leave me alone with the super‹cial, preferring instead to mine trails of signi‹cance which they imagine lurk golden under sentences. Everything is ›eeting, of course, particularly meaning. Coker Knox, speaker of the Tennessee House of Representatives, traveled to Carthage last week to dedicate the Horton Sevier State Park. Half brother of John Sevier, one of the founders of Tennessee, Horton Sevier made a fortune trading with Indians. For a hundred years or as long as histories of Tennessee have been manufactured, scholars believed Horton’s trading post was located near Castalian Springs in Sumner County. Six years ago, however, while searching for Jeddry, his mule, Loppie Groat discovered a mound in the woods behind Battery Hill. Thinking he had stumbled upon Bluebeard’s treasure, Loppie returned at night and opened the mound. Instead of chests glittering with pieces of eight, he unearthed a handful of beads, two buckets of shards, and the rusty barrel of a long ri›e. Since money was not involved, Loppie described the mound to the crowd at Ankerrow’s Café. Not long afterward the University of Tennessee at...