For a while now I've wanted to write about thunderstorms. I've never been in a hurricane or a tsunami or a typhoon or a tornado, nothing so violent and grand as that. Thunderstorms are the closest I've been to the real unrestrained destructiveness of nature, but it was a safe seat for the most part.
Last night (actually it was 2 a.m.) I heard the unmistakable grumblings of thunder. I got up and went outside. No one else was up that I could see, except for the occasional car. The air was still, yet not dead, not dead like the humid corpse that had lain across our nostrils all day. It was more tensile, like the diaphragm of an ear. A haze hung in the air, not-quite fog, a scrim; shadows from the streetlights fuzzed off into darkness instead of being sharply etched areas of light/no-light. The yellow glow of the mercury lamps reminded me of Victorian London for some reason (at least the London of Conan Doyle), or Beacon Hill at first snow, dully yellow sulphur made gelid by the tenseness in the air, the dim uncertainty making the air thick yet vibrant.
The sky to the east (the storm must have been coming in over the ocean) was smooth onyx, unseamed by a star or the wisp of a lighter colored cloud. It, too, seemed to have weight, yet not a weight that smothered; it was more as if it had a gravity all its own, as if by its mass and grandness it would pull everything into itself, smoothly destroying, quietly erasing.
The thunder was still far off, the lightning diffuse. The evening before we drove home from a long day trip into the embrace of a thunderstorm. As we sped down the highway, imperceptibly inching forward in the darkness, we watched the dendritic rips of the lightning in the clouds. At one moment there was unmarked blackness, thunderhead on thunderhead piling up for 40,000 feet. Then in a time quicker than it takes to say "Look at that!" a savage rend in the darkness, a coronal glow surrounding the sharp rational conclusion of a lightning stroke as it tied earth to sky with electric blood. Then darkness again. We watched this for fifty miles, watching a nature thoroughly indifferent to our watching.
Now, standing just outside the safety of the door, the wind full of sea smells and tang of ozone, I watched the storm congeal, saw the scattered gravities of tense air and desultory electricity and brooding clouds gather to an omega point. The leaves, like a chorus, announced with their sibilance the soon-to-come susurrations of copious and garrulous rain. The branches swung in idle semaphore; the electric wires and telephone lines whined in aeolian dissonance. Thunder followed on lightning until they overlapped like competing choirs. And then the storm, spreading its vast wings like a Mahler symphony, sailed into view, the storm not so much the collection of separate events, the sum of parts, as a creature all its own, as humans are more than brain and guts. It took possession.
And then the rain. The rain of a thunderstorm has an urgency to it no other rain has. It is driven, jousting, impatient to strike. It is a phalanx; or, in another view, it is the teeth that soften the hide of the earth into the supple leather of loam and roots and growing things. As it erases it also scores, erases by etching, changing the complexion of its winnowing floor, washing chaff and wheat indiscriminately into the grave.
Standing, letting the water stream down my face and body, pierced by its sudden unsummery coldness, my body drinking down the clarity of its single-mindedness like corn anxious to grow in the night, I suddenly, for a moment, meld into this storm. I become nothing more than rain or wind or the sullen darkness unraveled by the lightning's logic. I am a conduit for this storm's energy, a storm rod conducting a lost vitality to withered roots and socialized deadness. For a moment my mind no longer is an inquisitive burrowing animal; for a moment my helplessness in the face of death is denied; for a moment I am placed and succulent; for a moment I am what poetry cannot describe.
And then, as with all things to this conscious creature, I feel the chill of wet clothes: practicality invades again. I am as suddenly catapulted out of my egoless connectedness as I was drawn into it. What I would wish permanently, what peace I would want without the strain of work or ignorance, is suddenly denied me by the passing of time, by nerves reacting to cold, by a thousand mundane details that again take up their stations after having been, momentarily, forced to resign the field.
But for a moment. Such peace is rare -- there is a certain forgetting we must learn to do to achieve it. It is not an easy forgetting because it means erasing the self we have been taught to construct, that very fragile house of cards we call our ego. It means risking quietness, suing for peace, letting go in order to hold on even more strongly. The truths of life are usually contradictory, two dictions speaking against each other, each equally right, each equally incompatible with the other. Peace comes with the unity of the contra-dictions, with seeing the unity that binds the separateness yet does not violate the separateness and keeps each thing distinct and integral. For a moment I was a creature unified, and it is a moment that keeps me looking at the horizon, waiting for the darkgrey annunciation of a storm.