I am beginning. I write this and I see at once that it is not true. I have been beginning for years; I am, perhaps, one of those who only know how to begin and never how to arrive. And yet there is a difference, I think, between the false beginning of a man who is not ready and the true beginning of a man who has finally seen the water and is now obliged to admit, to himself and to whomever will read this, that he stands before it.
I know the direction. This I can say with a certainty that surprises me, because I have rarely been certain of anything for long. The water lies that way, and not in the other, and I have been turned toward it for some time without having to look down at a compass. A man who has crossed once knows the smell of a real river from the smell of a painted one. He is not always right about smaller things, the year of his birth, the names of his neighbours, but he is rarely wrong about which way the water flows.
What I do not know, and what I sit down to write about, is how. With whom. By what means and in what company a man crosses, the second time, the depth he has already crossed once.
The first time, I went alone. I had to. There was no one to take me, and to be honest, even if there had been, I would not have known how to ask. The second time, I am told, is different. The second time one is supposed to take others. The vessel I have called myself by, the canoe, is not a thing meant to carry one. One can sit in it alone, certainly, but a canoe with a single passenger is a canoe waiting to be used. It is built for the carrying.
So the question is: whom. And the question after that, which is uglier and which I want to admit here at the start rather than smuggle in later: am I sure that I am the one who should be doing the carrying. A man who answers that question with a quick yes has not understood it. A man who answers with a quick no is hiding. The honest answer is to ask it every morning and not be too pleased with whatever comes back.
There are signs. I will not pretend there are not. Two systems that have never met, looked at the same chapter of my life and named the same star. A word in a language I do not speak settled itself on me without my asking. People who do not know each other have, over a span of months, used the same phrase about my work, the same one, with the same intonation, as if a wind had passed through three windows in three houses on the same evening.
I list these things and I hear how they sound. They sound, I will say it plainly, like the kind of evidence a man assembles when he wants to be convinced of something. I know what I sound like. I am a researcher by training. If a patient brought me this dossier and asked me to certify it, I would set down my pen and say, gently: tell me what you actually want. The signs you are bringing me are not evidence of the world. They are evidence of the question you are not yet asking.
And yet.
And yet I cannot quite dismiss them, and I will tell you why, though it will not help me argue the case in any court I respect. The signs are not the kind that flatter. They do not promise me success or audience or money. They point, all of them, to work that will be slow and that may not arrive in my lifetime. They point to teaching where I would rather be left in the laboratory, to speaking where I would rather be left in silence, to standing in front of a room where I would rather sit at the back. If I were inventing signs to suit my vanity, I would invent better ones. The fact that the signs ask of me what I would not ask of myself is, perhaps, a small indication that they are not coming entirely from me.
Or perhaps it is only an indication that I have read enough of the saints to know what kind of signs are supposed to be trusted, and have learned, like everyone else, to dress my preferences in the clothes of their preferences. I cannot tell. I do not pretend to be able to tell. I write this so that, if I am later wrong, the record will show that I knew I might be.
There is also, since I am being honest in this entry, a meeting I do not yet know how to read. I will not write about it directly, because I do not yet know what to write. I record it here only as a presence on the path, walking, as it seems to me, in something like the same direction. Whether that is so, and what one is supposed to do with such an apparent overlap, I do not know. I have learned, over the years, to be suspicious of meanings that arrive too punctually. I will sit with it the way one sits with weather, and write more, perhaps, when there is more to write, and not before.
So I sit at the shore. The water is in front of me. The direction is correct. The canoe is what I am, or at least what I have agreed to be called by, and I have no quarrel with the word. What I do not have is the certainty that the way I will choose to set out will be the right way, or that the people I will choose to carry, or who will choose to step in, will be the right ones, or that any of this will mean what I think it means.
I will start anyway. That is the only honest thing I have left.
I will start by writing here, in this place, what I see, week by week, as plainly as I can. Not what I have understood, that is too high a claim for the early days of any work, but what I have looked at. The dossier of signs I will keep, but I will not protect it from doubt; I will write the doubt into the same pages. If I am later proven to have been deceived, the deception will be visible. If I am later proven to have been right, the rightness will not have come from my having protected the question.
To whomever has come this far down the page: I do not know yet what I want from you. Probably it is not what you expect. It will not be many things, and it will not be quick, and it will not be free of error. If you would like to read along, you are welcome. If you do not, I understand.
The water is the water. The vessel is the vessel. The crossing is, for now, only a sentence I have written.
We will see.