Notes From A Bottle Found On The Beach At Carmel by Evan S. Connell

 There are books that change lives.  Evan S. Connell’s book, Notes From A Bottle Found On The Beach At Carmel (North Point Press, 1962) is one of them.  First, there is an epigraph from Euripides:

“There be many shapes of mystery and many things God makes to be, past hope or fear.  And the end men looked for cometh not, and a path is there where no man sought.  So hath it fallen here.”

From that mysterious beginning, we discover a bottle of cryptic notes of found wisdom, the loose poetry of life and the universe.  The book is truly a remarkable piece of literature.  Is it poetry?  A religious tract?  A meditation?  It is fragmentary and rife with non-sequiturs, yet read together, preferably in one sitting, one is struck by the sheer breadth and insight offered in its totality.

We are travelers in this land of wakefulness and dreams, but our world is one out of joint.  “Each life is a myth, a song given out of darkness,” Connell writes, “a tale for children, the legend we create.  Are we not heroes, each of us in one fashion or another, wandering through the mysterious labyrinths?”  Why do we travel, and why does the legend of the traveler cross cultures and histories?  It is the consequence, Connell tells us, “of unbearable longing.”  He equates the traveler with one on a pilgrimage, one who is always the alien, the outsider.  One who seeks knowledge and wisdom in the face of what is essentially unknowable:  who are we and what is our place in this multiverse?

This is a book of poetic imagery and feral beauty.  Connell argues we must look at the world as it is, with its mysteries intact.  We must understand evil as a creation of God who invented everything in the universe.  It is part and parcel of the creation myth.  Nothing is as it seems, meaning that dualities exist in every atom.  Connell writes that “Suffering is of itself neither good nor evil.”  Suffering is, and it is the lot of all people and creatures to suffer.  He redeems the darkness of the message by also repeating several times in the book that all is possible for those who believe.  “Now is the time for a dreamer,” he writes.  Connell tells us repeatedly in the book that dream life and real life are the products of the same mind.  We dream ourselves into waking life and pass from waking life back into a dream state.  Behind it all, we recognize that existence in this realm ends, but not our essence.  Connell says that “There is a chain of fate that links us irrevocably to our own destruction.”

In many of the found notes, Connell reveals that there is a thread connecting all things.  “Myths, art, and dreams are but emanations from ancestral spheres,” he writes.  His evidence crosses species.  Honeybees die of loneliness.  Amoebas, if given a choice, turn to the light.  A Capuchin monk, pausing on his morning walk to hear a bird’s song, finds when he returns to the monastery that no one remembers him because he has been gone so long.  It is a mystical, magical world.  He believes that nothing exists that may be lost and all that will exist, exists now.  We are all part of a vast continuum.  Time is not linear because all of time is now.  When a note argues that journeys end and that even the beautiful must die, that seasons alter us, and that “Nothing escapes my notice, except the passage of time,” he speaks of the transitory nature of the universe.  Our lives change but do not end.  Our essence goes on.

What exactly will remain of us?  In a note, an artist tells us he has agreed to “paint a narrative on the city walls.”  He has been at it for several years because there is so much to be told.  Our stories survive us.  Existence is a long novel with many settings and characters.  Our mistake, another note tells us, is one we must avoid:  “Arbitrarily we circumscribe reality, choosing to limit the universe to the bounds of our apprehension.”  This rings of Hamlet’s lines to Horatio: “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”  The notes reassure us that time was, time is, and time will be.  We cannot escape these parameters.  Yet “Nothing is born that does not pass away.”  Life is a paradox of intersecting journeys and encounters, endings and beginnings, and we must be open to them all.

Evan S. Connell presents us with a beautiful, poetic meditation on our existence.  The book defies classification, like most significant works of art.  His notes from the metaphorical bottle on the beach tell us this is a magical existence, and all things radiate wisdom and light as well as darkness.  The world is a teacher.  All we have to do is pay attention.