Time on the Erie Canal

The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, and improved westward transit in a dramatic fashion that can today can only be expressed by imagining the simultaneous introduction of stagecraft, Freudian playwrighting, Method acting, Romanticism, the invention of the pathetic fallacy and the suspension of disbelief, and Shakespeare.
Its glory was brief.
Above, the Canal in downtown Syracuse.
For soon trains became faster and cheaper, and the Canal’s utility was diminished, and only the stout hearts of mad dreamers held that the vision of truth resided in the pace of bicycles, skiffs, and canal boats.

Persons who have always lived by canals have become accustomed to the visual ruse by which in the wooded horizontal scene shows the top half of a boat gracefully plying a canal the water of which is completely invisible and about which one had, while bagging dogshit or composing the first intuitive fragment of a poem, or placing oneself in one’s home environment of fishgates and bridges and fish ladders and outlets and inlets and feeder streams, altogether forgotten. Yet that abiding and ultimate familiarity also attunes one to the overgenerous beauty and wonder of boats on canals, which ply at their own speed – which is slow, slowness is beauty quoth Binyon– apart from the pattern of the housy streets and according exclusively to turmoiled hydraulics or runoff’s erosion or an engineer’s digplan, and provides a nerve-deep orientation to what may be felt as a pastoral and idyllic milieu of one’s own, one’s very own.

Frederic Moreau’s epiphany embraces and suffuses his moist skin and lyric memory while his feet are balanced against the subtlest gravity of a dear hull tipping in the seiche of canalriver water; trees perform a gracewalk past him at six miles per hour; the marvel and savor of the cucumber sandwiches and the gin drinks catch the delicious brack of water reeds and fishy excresis, and also a breeze that has cradled the aroma of lavender crops and cabbage leaves crossing summery flanderen fields. [Freshwater fish should be accused of breathing, each scale is the lung of a bellicose tyrant, a javelin flung toward the faces of the common man, those children who affect to be discomfited by malodorous wafts.]

Frederic Moreau’s revelation believes, as so must he, that the obscure object of his affection is experiencing correlative swoons, or even more than absolute, should such a thing be possible, swoons that are his very own, and therefore the channels or canals of synaesthetic sympathy are open to the most mad torrents of his any devising, as packets or barges pass in the opposite direction and wake a brief instability in her legs and his, only to rectify as not on solid earth to the identical bouyance and two-step challenged by the packet or barge boring someplace.

People on the shore are mudders, snipers, axolotls; wage-slaves, malefactors, underfed; meat, bearers, doormen. The very air I breathe adeck is charmed and pickled with my glory. In college many of my professors eventually allowed that it was I who taught them this book or that. A thousand ashrams are called Phil.

There is a place vaguely located in the soul of the body that responds to the passion that is sometimes called headlong just as herding dogs respond to a disorganized scramble of disorderly lambs, and that place is located vaguely mid the torso and the abdominal generality, with fluid pipes gushing chemicals inward and jetting pleural fluids outwards, with tides of the body’s organs’ liquors tinged with panic and longing harmonizing with the salt of the moon and the gravity of the surges of the seas, and in that place the very same too was flung upon the vortex the shambling soul of my Hart Crane.

If you are pleasure crafting from Syracuse to Rome, New York, sailing singlehanded includes time to leave the rudder and make coffee, maybe time enough for a nap, or for reading a chapter. There are long miles of the Erie Canal along which you will not see either another boat or a campcottage. This is where the cows often come down in the summer to stand to their elbows in the shoreyard. A narrow two-lane bridge crosses overhead. [Yon ago with time sedated to a mortuary state by fifty years, isolated by blood in the family ferry, other voices and other rooms will have been saying that I grew up on the Erie Canal and the lakes of sylvan New York, the dearest upstate valley lakes.] This incidence of perplexing non-interruption is less possible by several measures in France and Holland, where canals are treated with the royal respect of a pre-Revolutionary era. In Paris with my benighted cycling friends (despite picnics at the Musee d’Orsay, and long dinners mid sumptuous wicker and exquisite waitress-devils from Shanghai) I was unable to coerce them to join me on a cruise up the Canal St. Martin, murderous regrets they must now bear like benighted burros. Long leagues and shallow fathoms of the Erie Canal south of and west of Rochester are peaceful and farmy; yachtspersons hold to an opinion that nears the quixotic, and so they have been historically there displeased. And the stone locks hold mute and indifferent as the epochs came and the epochs went.

This summer has brought my band of opaque appreciations the warmth of radium, with the sunlights and rainshowers of the melancholy of farewell, and I have fired two thousand tiles bound for wally tile art murals, eternity, and the piquant twist of the memory for those addressing a lover standing in front of my Alfred Sisley, my Auguste Macke, my Tamara de Lempicka. I do not recall when exactly it was that I became aware of and interested in the sword in the stone of the futur anterieur, but thereafter holding close my dear Swiss guard chickens in its regard, I felt myself finally safe in the stalwart stone bosom of unassailable self-assurance, masked and basked in the sound of Miles Davis, blue and cool, certain William Carlos Williams poems, Merce Cunningham’s revelation of movement, together fundamentally in the topography and elevation of our water table. In a manner of rustication, in a manner of repose, I am soon verily to have taken a week to drive along and sleep by the canal, the Erie Canal extant, the Barge Canal not less hushed, reading and drinking coffee in canalside sidewalk cafes until the sun goes down, then eating and reading in canalside restaurants and bars, and then lingering with cocktails until there will have been the finding oneself tipping a view over the edge of the embankment toward the surge of the currents, the eight or ten hours before waking in sunlight in the camper van, and finding a café where I can taste coffee, and read, and watch the boats go by, and such current as there is, an almost imperceptible drift.