75

and Writing

Well-Being T�mrrll'175 Spring/Summer 1989

Publication of TriQuarterly is made possible in part by the donors of gifts and grants to the maga­ zine. For their

and continuing support, we are very pleased to thank the Illinois Arts Council, the Lannan Foundation, the John D. and recent

Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Robert R. McCormick Charitable Trust and the National Endowment for the Arts.

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of planned gifts. Please write to Reginald Gibbons, editor.

Writing and Well-Being Edited by Reginald Gibbons and Susan Hahn

A special issue of TriQuarterly magazine Northwestern University 1989

Tri�

75

Spring/Summer 1989

Editor

Reginald Gibbons Associate Editor Susan Hahn

Managing Editor

Executive Editor

Kirstie Felland

Bob Perlongo

Special Projects Editor Fred Shafer Assistant to the Editor

Janet E. Geovanis

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Editorial Assistants Darren Cahr, W. Douglas Fitzsimmons, Amy Rosenzweig, Jo Anne Ruvoli

Advisory Editors Hugo Achugar, Robert Alter, Michael Anania, Cyrus Colter, Rita Dove, Gloria Emerson, Richard Ford, George Garrett, Gerald Graff, Francine du Plessix Gray, Michael S. Harper, Bill Henderson, Maxine Kumin, Grace Paley, Michael Ryan, Alan Shapiro, Ellen Bryant Voigt TRIQUARTERLY IS AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF WRITING, ART AND CULTURAL INQUIRY PUBLISHED IN THE FALL, WINTER AND SPRING AT NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY.

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Contents Introduction

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Cornelia Spelman

Stone Paperweight (poem) Michael Ryan

Recovering (essay) William Goyen

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Portrait of the Artist as a Lion Stilts (memoir) Paul West on

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Perri Klass

Keziah (memoir) Gwendolyn Brooks

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R. D. Skillings

Carnal Acts (essay) Nancy Mairs

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Writing from the Darkness (essay)

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Bell Hooks On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother (essay)

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Jay Cantor The Line of Words (essay) Annie Dillard

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Poetry and Self-Making (essay) Reginald Gibbons

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Menial Labor and the Muse (essay) Maxine Kumin

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Pollution, Purification and Song (essay)

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John Peck Interview with Paul Bowles Daniel Halpern

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The Eel (poem) Reynolds Price Contributors

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Inside and cover illustrations, and cover design,

by Gini Kondziolka

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171

Introduction Cornelia Spelman

The stuffed clown flies across my office and hits me in the head. "Use words," I say to my six-year-old patient, a little girl. "Use words to tell me if you're mad; don't throw the clown."

Part of the work of a psychotherapist is to help patients learn the power of words. Using words to teach and comfort, listening, I am witness and midwife to the slow, painful rebirth of people whom lan­ guage failed. For them, words had been used by others only to wound

and destroy.

A week later the six-year-old was carefully cutting paper. "This," she

announced, pointing to a hole she had made in a piece of paper, "is a Door to the Land of Change."

The essays and memoirs in this collection are about words as a door to

change, especially the change of healing-a door to the writer's or even the whole society's well-being. While writing need not be therapeutic to be good, good writing shares some things with good psychotherapy; both "confer visibility" on persons, as Allen Grossman has put it in Against Our Vanishing, "making persons present to one another in that special sense in which they are acknowledgeable and therefore capable of love and mutual interest in one another's safety." I would say that the warning Grossman gives to the writer applies also to the therapist: just as writing is not to be used by the writer only as an "instrument of private self-legitimation Poetry does not have as its beginning and end its author," so the therapist must not use the therapy to reflect ....

himself.

Some of the pieces in this collection are about healing, some are about

self-discovery, some are about using words as if they were sandbags built up against a flood of loss and some are about the use of language to 5

warn, protest, prophesy and provoke-to confer visibility on wounds or

damage on a social scale. Words also enable us to transcend our mortal bodies and all their limits. In Paul West's "Portrait of the Artist as a Lion

Stilts," he describes himself in the Intensive Care Unit: "I hung on, not a cut worm, or lightning-struck tree or a star starting to run out of energy, but a something somehow without a destiny." Partly it is lan­ on

guage that makes us different from a worm, tree or star-we must com­

municate to each other and even to ourselves that we are more than our

bodies, "a guest in the throne room of juices and sludges," as West puts it. He listens to his own body: "I have become a body-watcher, a devout auscultator, to whom every squeeze of peristalsis becomes a miracle of what Coleridge called is-ness, and every regular heartbeat an echo of the promised land, while every irregular beat ('an irregular irregularity,' my cardiologist says) seems an heroic elegy evocative of the mood that Stevie Smith pinned down so well: waving while drowning."

And because we are more than the sum of our body parts, our healing just at the cellular level but in that part of ourselves-the that recognizes, seeks and holds holy, love so that when West's

occurs not

soul?

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wife lies next to him in his narrow white hospital bed, it is her "intensive care" that seems more crucial to his recovery than the sophisticated and

impersonal machines. It is also a kind of intensive care, it seems to me, to listen to persons who have been rendered invisible by others' inatten­ tion to them. If the purpose of poetry is to "conserve the

image of

persons as precious," then so too is the purpose of therapy, for careful

listening to another's words "confers visibility."

"The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year," writes Annie Dillard in "The Line of Words." Because both psychotherapy and writing are dynamic processes, because both need opportunity and time in order to take place, discovery of both meaning and human relatedness cannot be hurried. And part of the discovery of writing, as of psychotherapy, is that one is not alone. The patient and the writer search for connection to others, for the knowledge that what they feel has been felt by others,

psychotherapy and writing, the "line of words" that is followed toward revelation must also, if it is to heal, bring about aware­ ness, mourning and forgiveness, to use John Peck's words. In "Pollution, Purification and Song," Peck, a poet trained in Jungian analysis, writes that "poetry of a certain kind deliberately pollutes the audience (pollution is mourning in ancient practice) so as to purify it." The too.

In both

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6

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mourning needs to be provoked in order to bring about the healing effects; and it is the poet's role to provoke it.

It is sometimes the therapist's role, too, to provoke. Provoking feeling, exposing it, using words to name it and speak of it, can begin the process of healing. I think here of a patient whose mother had called her, when she was a child, "The Thing" "Tell 'The Thing' dinner is ready." Speak­ ing of this, years later, she wore a slight smile. Part of our work together was to free her from that smile, to provoke her mourning and for the -

first time her grief and rage. Her recovery could not begin without such

"pollution."

The role of the poet, writer, therapist, in provoking mourning and awareness

both in individuals and in society is not of minor importance.

wrought out of unexpressed pain-as, for instance, against children by their parents. It's widely understood that it's usually the parents' own unheard childhood cries that cause them to hurt their own children. 1 think of a middle-aged mother whose arms and legs were covered with scars of cigarette burns. She was able to cry when she recalled being locked in her room, hungry, looking at pictures of food in a magazine; and she was able to be a loving and conscientious parent to her two children. Feeling her own pain, she could not inflict

Terrible violence

can

be

such torment on anyone else.

Writing and psychotherapy are processes of transformation, like that of glass-blowing-making something formed out of what began as simple

sand. Jay Cantor speaks of this process in "On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother": "[O]ne returns what was seen, loved, lost-and so pressed within one-to the world." But he says it doesn't accomplish transforma­

tion, doesn't make art, simply to mimic the experience. Cantor offers the example of the artist Arshile Gorky, who spent ten years copying the

remaining photograph of his dead mother: there is an "element of fear in such devotion-combined with the guilt of the survivor-as if Gorky feared what he might reveal of his own attitude to the subject if one

he deviated from the photo." Cantor says art requires what Rilke called

"heart-work." Referring again to Gorky's photograph, Cantor urges "that the mother be reborn in and through you, not as a photo would have

her, but as you alone can bear her." Writers, he says, must "learn the proper regard for facts, that facts must be mixed with one's own life­ blood."

The "facts

mixed with one's own life-blood" are what the psycho­ hears.

Someone tells his life, and is helped to begin to retell it, therapist ...

except this time as his own story. "I didn't know 1 could free myself with my words," one patient said to me.

7

When I was working at a community mental health clinic, a woman I will call Belinda was assigned to me. I was told, and her file confirmed

piles of evaluations from various hospitals, clinics and schools, that she was retarded "developmentally delayed." In addition, she had been born with severe physical disabilities that made her con, spicuous. The simplest tasks of life were difficult for her, and people often ridiculed and stared at her. Belinda was severely depressed, and

with thick

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had several times tried to kill herself.

Every week for a year and a half, she braved the Chicago trains and buses to come to my office and simply sit there. She sometimes said nothing in the entire session; usually she spoke only a few sentences, maybe one paragraph in all.

Having already learned that some patients, far from being "resistant," were silent because they'd never had anyone who wanted to listen to them, I tried to meet her silence with cheerful invention. I asked ques­ tions, and answered them myself, as though she were on the other end of a phone, being held hostage. I would guess at her answers, and confirm the rightness of my guess by her affect, or show of feeling. We might sit together in silence.

Trying to explain to her why we needed to communicate with each other, I once drew a picture of her and me together, arrows for words from my mouth to her ears; from her mouth to my ears. I drew colors inside us to represent our feelings, which we could communicate to each other with words, but which stayed imprisoned inside us if we didn't speak. I drew us as two identical female figures, and when she saw this, her tears fell. They fell off her cheeks and into her lap, and she didn't

wipe them-as though these were the first, and she didn't know what to do with them.

Sometimes I would sing, or read to her. I felt, from her eyes alive in her

otherwise frozen face that however simple these times together, she was finding something of value in them, and her repeated, long and difficult

journeys to our sessions gave me reason to hope so. It came to seem that what was happening was that I was holding the warmth of my words up to

her so that she could melt.

The time came when I decided to leave the agency. To my astonish, merit, at the end of our last session Belinda left me a letter. In the

extremity of our parting, she had written me six flowing pages, in beauti­ ful handwriting, and my astonishment was doubled when I read what she had written. They were not the sentences of one "developmentally

delayed," but of a woman acutely aware of her own pain and isolation, who needed to be close to others. I saw from the letter that indeed she 8

had been listening, and that now with her own words she could tell me what she had been thinking and feeling all these months, tell me rather than have me continue to guess. She had never been-might never be­ able to speak of her feelings, fears and wishes, but she could write them in sentences that were direct, clear and full of feeling. For her, words had

acquired a value previously unknown, for they had succeeded in making her visible.

9

Stone Paperweight Michael Ryan

I was napping as usual between our dinner and your bedtime

I would be alert working in the timeless hours before dawn

so

in which I become almost bodiless

because the world has black gloves on its touching agonies and beauties and leaves me happily alonewhen you broke into my dream before I woke with your lying down freshly naked against me in flesh cool as the stone I was dreaming you found at a shoreline,

flawless by water and sand, and gave me to weight my papers against the disturbing wind.

worn

10

Recovering William Goyen

The story-and travail-of two brothers has been on my mind: Jacob and Esau, twins. Esau was born first, "coming forth red and all his body

hairy, like a mantle," and Jacob followed, clutching onto his brother's heel. As though he wanted to hold back Esau, pull him back and go on ahead of him, "supplant" him. For this Jacob was called "The Sup­ planter." I suppose we've all felt the grabbing hand, the clutch on the heel as we were making our own natural headway, at some time or another; something-not good-pulling us back, stumbling us, even: a grasper, a potential supplanter. This is what Esau felt.

These brothers were, then, struggling brothers from the start, con­ tending, even, for very birthright and blessing, as you may remember.

Esau was a hunter and a man of the field, Jacob a quiet, indoors man.

At a time in their youth their brotherhood became murderous out of jealousy and disharmony as though they had been cursed; and Rebe­ kah, Jacob's mother, heard of Esau's vow to kill his brother and advised Jacob to leave home. Once, Esau, the red and hairy, had been so hungry when he came in from the fields that he offered his birthright to his quieter, domestic brother for some soup he was making. The brother, Jacob the Supplanter, accepted the bargain and so took his brother's birthright. And another time-this time by deceit-the wild, red brother -

This lecture was delivered at the Writer at Work Series, Gallatin Division, New York University, on April 13, 1983, sponsored by New York University, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the New York State Council on the Arts. The other speakers were Joan Rodman Goulianos, Joyce Johnson and Eileen

Simp­

son.

William Goyen died on August 29, 1983, in Los Angeles. Reprinted from

TriQuarterly #58, Fall 1983.

11

of nature lost his father's blessing to his softer, more cunning brother.

When the brothers' father Isaac was an old, failing blind man (he'd been

sixty when his twin sons were born), he craved some good venison soup once more before he died and begged Esau, his favorite, to provide it.

Esau's mother, Rebekah, whose favorite was Jacob, overheard the request and made the soup herself. Take the soup to your father, she urged, and thereby gain his blessings. A blessing was a powerful gift and coming from venerable beings or from certain people of unusual power was carried by the blessed person for a lifetime like an anointing, a protective benediction, a redemption, sacred. So Rebekah, Jacob's mother, hoping for the blessing oflsaac upon her favorite son, made this suggestion to Jacob. "But he'll feel my hands and see that they are smooth where my brother's are hairy," said Jacob, "and know that I am not his beloved

Esau: and then he'll curse me instead of bless me." "We'll

dress you in Esau's clothes and cover your hands and neck with the

bristling skin of an animal," the mother said. When Jacob brought the soup to his father, his father said, "The voice is Jacob's voice but the hands are the hands of Esau." So Isaac ate the venison and gave his

impersonating son the vaunted blessing: it said that nations might serve him and peoples bow before him, receiving obeisance from his mother's sons. Jacob, again the supplanter, had stolen his brother's blessing.

But soon came Esau with his dish of venison. "Bless me, father," asked Esau. "Who are you?" cried his father. "Who was it who has already brought me venison? I've eaten my fill and given that one my blessing, and on him the blessing will come. Thy brother, coming in disguise, has snatched thy blessing from thee." "He's rightly named the Supplanter!" cried Esau. "First he took away my birthright and now he has stolen my

blessing. Father," he implored, "have you no blessing left for me?" "No," answered Isaac, "I have designated your brother your master, I have condemned all his brothers to do him service; I have assured him of corn and wine; what claim have I left myself to make for you, my son?" "But," Esau pled, "have you only one blessing to give, Father?" Esau wept.

Then Isaac was moved and said, "All

thy blessings shall come from earth's fruitfulness, and from the dew of heaven. Thy sword shall be the breath of life to thee, but thou shall be subject to thy brother until the day comes when thou wilt rebel and wilt shake off his yoke from thy neck." Esau begrudged this blessing and made a plan to kill his brother as soon as his father died. When Jacob's mother heard of this threat, she sent her son Jacob away from home. Thus the hostile separation of the two brothers began, fed by deceit and jealousy and contention. But Jacob, the heel-clutcher, had got ahead of his brother.

12

Years passed and Jacob had seen the fruits of his blind father's mis­ placed blessing: he was very rich with cattle and sheep, wives and ser­ vants and eleven children.

He had not seen his estranged brother Esau

for a long time, but now a meeting was at hand. It was time to go home again, to reenter the promised land of home and to meet his brother, to make amends. Jacob was returning as a prosperous and successful man

and sent ahead to Esau gifts of abundance, cattle and sheep and camels and corn and oil. This returning home again is hard when there has been no increase, no fulfillment, no "success"; it is often bitter; as such a

empty-handed homecomings; but Jacob came back covered in glory. But his fear was great. He had wronged his returnee I remember well some

brother and was afraid of him and had amends to make. His brother had vowed to kill him. He hoped to disarm his anger with gifts sent

ahead, but he was going to have to face his brother whom he had cheated, deceived, swindled, impersonated, "supplanted."

The story, in the book of Genesis (32: 22-32), of Jacob's return home to meet his brother, encloses the ancient and beautiful incident of an angelic encounter by a river. It is concerned with the themes of loss and recovering of self, of wounding and healing, of discovery of true self through spiritual struggle. It is about an all-night, mysterious wrestling between two silent men, opponents; or one silent man, himself his own contestant: which is it? The silent wrestling is broken only by the approaching dawn, when each asks the other's name and by one wound­ ing, crippling "halting" the other in order to subdue him, and by the subduer asking the subdued to bless him! The passage reads: "The same night Jacob arose and took his two wives, his two maids, and his eleven children, and crossed the ford of the Jabbok river. He took them and sent them across the stream, and likewise everything that he had. And Jacob was left alone; and a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day. When the man saw that he did not prevail against Jacob, he touched the hollow of Jacob's thigh; and Jacob's thigh was put out of joint as he wrestled with him. Then the man said, 'Let me go, for the day is breaking.' But Jacob said, 'I will not let you go, unless you bless me.'

And the man said to him, 'What is your name?' And he said, 'Jacob.'

Then the man said, 'Your name shall no more be called Jacob, but Israel; that is, He who strives with God and prevails. For if you have held your own with God, how much will you prevail over men?' Then Jacob asked him, 'Tell me, I pray, your name.' But he said, 'Why is it that you ask my name?' And there he blessed him. So Jacob called the name of the place Phenuel (that is, the face of God), saying, 'For I have seen God face to -

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13

face, and yet my life is preserved.' The sun rose upon him as he passed Phenuel, limping because of his thigh."

Jacob's recovering his name and spirit, his redemption by the night river, is one of the most mysterious and enigmatic scenes of literature great deal to me in the experience of recovering.

Relating to my work it is direct metaphor. I've limped out of every piece

and has

meant

a

of work I've done. It's given me a good sock in the hipbone in the wrestling. My eyes often open when I see a limping person going down the street. That person's wrestled with God, I think. I don't know when I ever rose

from that contest as hale and whole as when I began. For me

every accomplishment of work has been a wounding that brought new

strength, new vision. I've always felt new, changed when the work was done. And in a new-or different-relation with life. Work, for me­ writing, that is has been that renewal through wrestling, that naming, -

that going home, that reconciliation with old disharmony, grief, grudge.

For me that was recovery. Now I am not here-thank God-to define

functions and meanings of literature, of the art of writing for anybody but myself-and that only by way of sharing my experience in living the life of an artist, in creating fiction (which is and has long been a way of life for me). I am sharing my own very personal experience in writing life, in recovering life. I am speaking of recovery of spirit where it had been lost, of finding again, as though it were new, fresh, what had been

thought to have gone; of renewed vitality where there was debilitation; of replenishment where there had been emptiness. That kind of wres­ tling. "Recovery" involves a transformation. It is not simply a dead replacement, a lifeless exchange of one thing for another. And the transformation I speak of is spiritual- of the spirit. Art recovers life through spirit-that is, not through physical action. Nostalgia, the use of flat memory, in recalling the thing itself, calling back what once was, and in self-pity, is not what I'm talking about when I speak of recovery,

of recovering life as art. In nostalgia, the element of lifeless longing is present, and so it is sentimental in that it wishes, yearns for things to be once

again the way they used to be, exactly-a dead transference from

then to now, stamped down. The Now, the present moment, the living­ ness of life, the world of "lived, ordinary lives," are dammed back, buried

by grieving over what was. I speak entirely from my own feelings and my own experience, from my own personal adventures. Everything is autobiography for me. Long ago I knew that another could not give me my life, only help to find it. I could only know life through myself, or recover it myself. I continue to be astonished by my own history. My own experience keeps justifying living. Others' experience in history has

over

14

supported and inspirited me; but finally my own has got me through.

The most I have been able to offer others and can now is this self­ consciousness, ferocious protection of personal feeling. I am astonished by

what has happened to me. More than anyone else, I am most curious about myself, my own hidden behavior, the secret services of my mind.

Of all people, I am the person closest to my own feelings. It is, above all, my journey, that long and close association with myself that has been the

signal value of my existence. The journey with myself is more

remarkable than any other journey I have ever taken. Therefore, writing life for me is (and has been) a spiritual endeavor, and is transforming and

redemptive. Wrestling and getting named and demanding "blessing," I limp.

In speaking of the writer recovering, one can ask, why recover? Why not just give back what was, as it was, what is as it is? Why recover? Why not just let everything alone? Why wrestle, why not surrender; why not die? The unhealed must think this. In the fifties there was a vogue of the unhealed and unhealable. The poet was mad and lost. Some feared that

"getting well" might mean the loss of poetry. If addictions were removed, by the grace of God, would art be removed along with them? Did a poet's songs live in speed and gin? These poets were exalted as lost and damned. Could writing heal them? Were poems cures? The recovering poet was the creating poet, the fertile, producing poet. I've sat in univer­

sity halls and listened to visiting unrecovering poets who could not be understood behind drunkenness and

dope. Could new poems heal

them? If they could again in clear head write their poems, would they get well? Could the will, the willingness to make new poems, heal them? Ex

opera operandis. In the power of the work itself, the power of the person.

The unhealed. I have not only known the unhealed but have been among them and

one

of them. The unhealed will not let go of the

sickness, that is, come awake. The unhealed choose the hypnotism of illness and will not only

not

wrestle with it but certainly not ask

a

blessing of it. But pain and affliction do carry a blessing in them, I believe. Illness is a spiritual condition. It brings us to see something we had not seen before-seeing the meaning of our suffering. Thus, being

healed-recovering-in this manner can cause great joy and even grati­ tude over having been sick. "Ordinarily, people feel sorry for themselves for having suffered," writes Dr. Thomas Hora in Dialogues in Metapsy­ chiatry; "but in cases where real healing takes place, there is a sense of gratitude for the experience because it has brought about a realization which is of great value to the individual. Once we understand the true nature of

healing, there is a valuable lesson in it for us all. If we have a 15

problem, we do not have to seek fast relief, or even a quick healing to get rid of the problem as soon as possible. We may embrace the problem and say the same thing that Jacob said: 'I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.' If we quickly get rid of a problem and find relief, we are missing an opportunity to learn something vitally important. The mode of being-in-the-world changes and our character undergoes a transforma­ tion. That's the greatest healing." I will not let thee go, except thou bless me.

Dr. Hora and others have shown me that in my stricken life and in

my recovering life there has been

a

deep change within me; I am no

longer the same person; I am somewhere made new. And I make new things out of this vision and out of this reality. In no longer holding onto my sickness in isolation and self-nursing, I have let go and have found new prowess, a new relationship to life and to others.

Which brings to mind, again, my friend the Greek archer: Philoctetes, about whom I have spoken before. Philoctetes was, you'll remember, given a bow of great power- a blessing in terms of what we have been saying. On a wild island where he and his fellow warriors had stopped to pray to a local god, Philoctetes was bitten by a snake. A person with a magical gift had been wounded, lamed, "halted." The wound was incur­ able, and what's more, gave off an unbearable odor, which drove the gifted youth's friends from him. More than that, seizures periodically rendered Philoctetes frightening- he looked and acted crazy. He was abandoned on the forlorn island. He hid himself further away from the world in a cave by the ocean. He limped.

Philoctetes was so concerned with his wound that he forgot his bow.

He knew utter loneliness. But he had his wound, morbid companion.

Years passed. Suddenly he was urgently needed by others: a crucial war

could be won if he would come again among his family and his fellows, return to his homeland with his bow.

But, the young man reasoned with

himself, there is this wound. Philoctetes refused to return; he was of no use.

A famous doctor was offered. He would heal the wound. He asked

alone; he rejected the healing physician. Philoctetes was now in position of power. A person with a handicapping wound and a price­ less gift in demand by his society! He could sleep on, in self-pity and sickness, or accept healing and come back to the use of his gift, doubly empowered by his long suffering, by the long contest with himself, by his wrestling. You know the rest of the story, or can find it. It is the to be left a

situation of the unhealed that serves us here.

For as I see it, the singer is the song; the poetry is the poet; the archer is the bow. In the power of the work itself, the power of the person. The two

16

conditions are inseparable. I do not mean that a person must be

wounded in order to use his gift. Isolate either the bow or the archer and sees life you have no whole, a fatal division, a fragment. A person who and others exclusively in terms of his own affliction is out of a literature we all know, and a seductive literature at that: we can name poets and

novelists who have lured us into the darkness, given us opiate visions that have seemed to be life itself. Exclusive self-nursing, tending the

"curse," the "difference" that separates, produces darkness, a sunless, festering creation. Exclusive magic produces sentimentality, heartless­ ness, silvery confection, a doll. At any rate, there is a conversation I must have with Philoctetes, my brother. For it is clear that he and I have met with the same choice, suffered together that crucial struggle, lain day after day, night after night, in the same haunted cave, "unhealable,"

dozing undelivered in the uterine glow, held by sucking death from pushing out into the explosion of life, heel in the grasp of a seductive supplanter. The deadly wound was all. The life-robber, the death sore, had taken over life. The radiant, the life-thrusting the bow -lay -

untouched in the darkness. But brother Philoctetes, your healer arrived,

the wound was closed, the bow won the battle; and 0 brother of the and the pain, I too have once again shaken free, flipped like a fish from the hand that stretches toward me; I kick towards light, but the cave

fingertouch is on my heel. Lend me your bow! Come before me!

From what I have said, it is clear that writing-recovering life-for me is a spiritual task. No matter what the craft of it, writing for me is the

work of the spirit. Style for me is the spiritual experience of the material of my work.

Art and Spirit endure together. Art heals, puts the precious bow in our

hands again; binds up and reconciles; recovers the dignity and the

beauty in us that keep getting wounded by the wrestling with the angel in us, with the God in us, or-in the absence of angels or God-with the mystery in each of us, waiting in the night by the river that we shall surely come to, on our way home to meet our brother.

17

Portrait of the Artist as a Lion on Stilts Paul West

I One lovely sunny morning in August 1984 I awoke rested and serene, but lazy enough to take my first cup of coffee in bed-or at least to try

My lips refused to drink, to move. Within minutes my entire mouth was numb and the right side of my face was paralyzed. I could not swallow or speak clearly; I looked at my face in the mirror and saw the whole of it sagging jowly yellow, my eyes bulging, my expression ghoulish.

I was in fact having a Transient Ischemic Attack (said fast as TIA) or a mild stroke. A clot, whipped up inside the heart during fibrillation, had blocked part of the blood supply to my brain. My pulse was 200, my blood pressure 200 over ISO-maybe all three even higher to begin with.

In the ambulance I found my speech coming back, but my left arm and hand becoming paralyzed. The clot was on the move. My heart's atria have continued to fibrillate ever since and they always will, spurred on by an electrical malfunction in the sinus node, where one's pulse begins.

I had probably been fibrillating undiagnosed for twenty years.

Four years later, rat poison thins my blood and keeps it from coagulat­ ing too fast. A quinine derivative keeps my ventricles from fibrillating when the atria do. A substance also given for migraine and stage fright (of all things) keeps my atria fairly calm most of the time and lowers my blood pressure, blocking the deadly hormones called catecholamines.

An amazing fudged-up contraption, I seem in some ways among the very lucky. Sometimes my speech will slur, but nobody notices. I now swim as much as three hours a day and have actually managed to thin down my to.

18

hypertrophied heart. The sapping fear of the first eighteen months has all but gone, replaced by a cliffhanger's high.

What got me into all this? Spending half a year in Arizona, I had felt so well that I stopped taking the half aspirin daily that had no doubt kept me uncoagulated for eight years; the stroke followed in the same year. There is also talk of rheumatic fever, undiagnosed when I was a child, as well as of too much coffee, liquor, cigars and so forth. I take no stimulants at all now and wonder why I took them in the first place; my brain is clearer, my mood sweeter, my stomach flatter. I have learned from children who laughingly correct their "funny feeling" (atrial fibrilla­

tion) by standing on their heads or splashing cold water on their wrists and necks. I regard my heart as a host regards an alien visitor trapped in his chest, but also as an irritable friend who has to be humored. Or else.

II I had always had a sense of being intimately linked with stuff that I was not, if indeed I knew where I began and stuff left off. Possessed of an

almost eerie sense of how different I was from earthworm, tree and star, all of them opaque, I had an even eerier sense of overlap with them, not so

much from reading as from primitive hunch. From my first chemistry

set, I knew that I

immersed in

a

was

world

an

not

experiment mine,

not

too.

I walked and breathed

made of me. With

seemingly

detached mind, I used a brain whose stuff was generally available. Some­

thing streamed through us all, and through other things, that was never itself, which is to say it had identities by proxy. It was permanent and we were expendable.

In Intensive Care, I who had never known a night in hospital found

myself not merely a part of all I had ever seen and known, as before; I was newly connected to it by wires, oscilloscopes, tubing and big drafts of chemicals whose nature I would eventually ponder and marvel at, like the medium contemplating his or her own ectoplasm. Dispossessed is what I felt: dispossessed of even that cozy old intimacy with nature. It had been a luxury, a mental game, and now it was being played out, proven, on my pulses, taken outside of me and blown up big on screens and charts. I felt as if my marrow was being sucked out of me and had only been on loan. Nothing belonged to me that could not be revoked here in this functional room with only a curtain for a door: things, they, you, came in and out at speed. The transits were fast and unimpeded.

19

The world outside the doorway, beyond the curtain, looked somehow

vertically down. I lay in a horizontal shaft that not far away bent at a right angle to dispose of me. I hung on, not a cut worm or a lightning­ struck tree or a star starting to run out of energy, but a something somehow without a destiny. The atoms that owned me had come into their own, loud in the squeak and ping of the big EKG machine close to my bed. I had ignored the fibers in the sinus node of my heart, and now they were thrashing in chaos. I had never even known about catecho­ lamines that could surge and boost my blood pressure to an almost

lethal level. Now they had done their massive, silent roar through me, and I was weaker for their dominance. I was what things within me happened to. I was a guest in the throne room of juices and sludges, and it was here that heparin, a substance my own stomach made, was fed into me nonstop through an IV needle. It was here that British pro­

pranolol blocked my adrenaline from reaching my sympathetic nervous system. It was here that, in need, the speeding ventricle calmed down after a long squirt of lidocaine, a liquid made from wood. It was a place in which you had only a backstage identity and became only the patient: the one who suffers, your first and last names all of a sudden become Atrial Fib. Why, fib sounded like a lie, but the straight truth was all around you as the EKG clamored when you made the slightest abortive attempt to move the bowels set all the bells ringing all at once, from the bearing-down, which I now understand move

and

an

affects the vagus nerve and can even be used to quell the fibrillating heart. In Intensive Care, the place in which, with whatever energy I could muster, I tried to take an interest in what had happened to me: the

pupil of my own mishap, asking the nurse to write out, for me to learn by heart, what propranolol is made of, and heparin, and coumadin, and quinidine, those prompters of my latter life.

On the brink of nothing I began to think of myself in the third person: Now the use is going from his left arm again and there is a runaway train in his chest.

But was too blurred even to maintain the consistency of that primal

decorum. Hooked up by chest and wrist, I waited for the bed to slide away down that chute beyond the curtain. Where was the pain, any­ way? The pain was in a recognition that I was lucky to be there, a thing

thinking about the thing I was, but might not be for long. It was like being shoved back into the prehistory of human kind, waiting for my cells to move me up a rung.

I was safe; but I was only faintly ticking over, stalled between idle and stop, in

20

a

tiny way craving something to read (I remember wanting

Malone Dies, for its outlandish appropriateness). I hovered. Sometimes I seemed to be levitating, whisked upward (or winched) while gravity

tugged the other way in silent fury. At other times I seemed all of me to be one wince, all one shrug, as if my body had heard something appall­ ingly sour and wanted to enact derision. The counterpoint to this sense of invasion or dispossession was not medical-or rather it was, yet not done by doctors. There, by my bed each day, was Diane Ackerman telling me, in a magnificent hyperbole of her poet's imagination, that I resting lion. No doubt of it, she insisted, I was a lion, and she brought me stuffed lions to play with, big pictures of lions to behold, was a

and I half-fancied I was Hemingway's old Santiago dreaming of them: in my case,

as

animations of an almost defunct body; picturesque extru­

sions from a ghost that had almost given up. In full view of the nurses, my lioness curled up on the narrow bed with me and persuaded me that

I could still get somewhere from there, if only I would try. Feedback had not

worked against the paralysis of my left arm, but I think it worked

against the mental slough my body had lured me into. Somewhere in the back of my mind an equation failed to take shape, but I had heard it,

something like it: three weeks flat on your back equals three years of aging. I couldn't recall it, but the phantom of it scared me back to my feet, off which I fell. Dizzy, blacking or graying out, I clutched at my lioness and the wall, ever on the point of knocking the IV out of my arm. A week later, still dizzy, I was walking the steps within the wing while the nurses monitored my heart by telemetry. I had survived to faint another day. I had learned, in irrevocable terms, that a mind stretched to a new idea never returns to its original dimensions. Was that why, only a few months later, there began the most sustained period of creativity (and reward) I had ever known? In my livelier moments in hospital I had dreamed of, and listed, the books I would or

write if I got the chance. Well, the chance came and, off all stimulants,

with a heart for once beating sometimes properly, and propranolol to

give me technicolor dreams as well as fend off migraine attacks, my brain worked better than before, I thought. No longer maltreated, it reformed and served me well.

I still have to sleep a lot, in some vague hope of nerve regeneration; I

supposed to swim just about daily; the rat-poison anticoagulant I have to take for life keeps my eyes bloodshot or pink; and quinaglute am

keeps my arrhythmias to a minimum. I cannot pretend I am unscathed.

Nor, oddly enough, in some moods, do I wish to be (in other moods I want to start afresh, of course, with a brand-new chemistry set to be myself with). I have become a body-watcher, a devout auscultator, to 21

whom every squeeze of persistalsis becomes a miracle of what Coleridge called is-ness, and every irregular beat ("an irregular irregularity," my

cardiologist says) seems an heroic elegy evocative of the mood that Stevie Smith pinned down so well: waving while drowning. On the not­ so-good days, when my unpushed blood pools away from my body's surface and I feel intolerably hot, I try a homemade maneuver: I "bear down," and this restores proper tone to the vagus nerve, which controls the heart's beat. Other maneuvers include coughing while holding my breath. When

they don't work, I try to accept a sweat-soak as my portion and fill my mind with images of icebergs and the accursed cold pools with which cheap hotels trick out the landscape of the winter south.

I will probably never learn the full extent of what I have been through,

through long before I had any idea that anything was wrong.

Four years after the stroke, my cardiologist informs me that recurrences usually come in the first few months: something I am glad he kept to himself. "Benign cardiomyopathy" he writes on my appointment slips, warning me that it isn't that benign: my life has been shortened, he says, and the heart will one day slip into a fibrillation which, far from being fatal, will become a constant in my checkered life; in other words, for what it is worth, and it is worth a paradise, my habitual alternation of lovely sinus rhythm and chaotic arrhythmias will go downhill into being only the latter, and I will not feel quite so good so often. Meanwhile, I reason, the Samarkand of drugs gets bigger and cleverer; I might cheat the odds even yet-if they can quell cholesterol with gemfibrozil, surely the perfect anti-arrhythmic is only just around the corner. This is a very American faith I have in progress and remedy: God-given maladies call up and out God-given remedies. The beloved chemistry set of my boy­ hood has come back to me; but, in order to play with this one, you have to put your carcass on the line. I do. Each day is a pageant, an experi­ ment, a ravishing communion. Death, as one of my students wrote, intending something quite different, is a plague for which there is no known anecdote. Perhaps. All I know is that not to have told the anecdote or story of it all, to oneself or to others, makes me feel less powerful than having told. We live in a precarious foison lent us. That is why the lion sleeps and roars.

or went

22

III Seven months after that frightening episode, my heart began to slow to

thirty beats a minute; for some periods it was inert for as long as seven seconds, and it would soon be inert for longer. I had been to see Dr. Obeid up in Syracuse, and had stayed there overnight so as to wear a heart-monitoring device called a Holter for the required twenty-four hours. I was home, cooking a meal of Chinese vegetables, when the phone rang. "I want you here in hospital tonight," Obeid said, unusually dictatorial for him. "I feel fine," I told him, "we're just going to have a Chinese meal. I'm cooking it right now." He told me to have my dinner and then get my body through the sleet and fog to the Crouse-Irving Hospital, where a bed awaited me. "You're in trouble." I refused. He spoke with Diane and convinced her and we were there by ten o'clock.

The only thing that cheered me up was Obeid's standing order to all hospital staff to let me sleep in, at least until 8 a.m. Unheard of, this fiat brought patients and doctors alike from all over the hospital, just to gawp at the enormous placard outside my door. Obeid believes in the usefulness of sleep, but also in pacemakers too: I needed one, he said, as soon as possible. It was the only thing to do.

I had various questions for the surgeon, Dr. Pradhan, and he breezed

through the answers, telling how many pacemakers he had implanted, in what kinds of patients, and where he had trained in Pakistan and the

United States, and with whom. What he said was as interesting as informative. He jibbed, though, when 1 asked him if he would recom­ mend this procedure for a member of his own family. Right now, he

said, there was no case to consider; he could not deal with the question in the abstract, but he certainly dealt with another 1 posed: "Are there times when it is utterly imperative to implant a pacemaker?" Of course there were. This was one, and he talked about heart block, a phrase that hadn't come up before, although I had become familiar with such gems of cardiological jargon as pulsus paradoxicus, the footprints of Wenck­ ebach, salvos and cannon waves, Mobitz 1 and 2, and bigeminal beats.

Indeed, I had a strong emotional interest in such jargon; its esoteric poetry

was

about what

went on

inside of me. I took

a

word-lover's

interest in such things and, in the superstitious way that seems peculiar to Western intellectuals from Faust on,

I wanted to find out how things

worked or did not work. If you have to go through all this, I reasoned,

you're entitled to the whys and wherefores; they give you that sense of minimal but not altogether abolished control. You feel less passive, less of a victim. An illusion? Probably so, as I was to discover.

23

Then I asked about the complications attending the procedure, all of course in the

interests of what I called knowledge for its own sake; but I also wanted to frighten myself to death, I suppose, and then prove myself to myself in setting such terrors aside and going ahead. With

expressionless candor, Dr. Pradhan, who had just been chatting about his daughter's desire to study creative writing at one of several universi­ ties, went down the list, from an air embolism when the lead is threaded into the vein to myocardial hemorrhage when it passes into the first chamber of the heart. Fibrillation was possible, he said, when the lead goes into the heart. The target tip might also migrate or be rejected. The

lead might erode. I might get an infection, or muscle spasms, or the

hiccups. He had never had a fatality or a severe mishap, but he had colleagues who had. Nothing precluded some complications, some of the most unanticipated interactions of unknown factors. For half an hour he just explained the mainstream snags.

"Do I really need the thing?" I asked, as if I were in for a bypass; but the realization had bitten home. A pacemaker was another alien presence, an invader once in never out. The probe would always be in that intimate red nest of the heart. Pradhan reiterated my cardiologist's bleak prophecy that, one day soon, I was going to collapse because my heart had paused too long. Or I was going to drop dead. That was the non­ answer that overrode all my questions and quibbles, at least as Obeid and Pradhan saw it.

All the same, a big piece of me wanted to squirm away home and risk it. I felt well. My blood pressure had remained stable without medica­ tion. My mind was working a treat. I persuaded myself that I could sense

when the wooziness was going to hit; all I had to do was sit down fast and wait it out. I felt chilled by Pradhan's unemotional recital of what

could happen to you in even the most expert hands, but he was citing the odds, the body of knowledge. There are always odds, even to the most at

trivial procedure, and I marveled even then, wrought-up as I was,

the human mind's capacity to want to know the unknowable, in

Macbeth's brisk phrase "to jump the life to come." In fact I grilled Dr. Pradhan good and proper, but in truth badly and improperly, as any

self-styled analytical mind might. He told Obeid he had never been so "sweated" in his life, and no doubt now avoids novelists like the plague.

Before he left, I agreed tentatively to go through with the procedure, but he himself insisted that at any point up to about two in the afternoon, tomorrow, I could back out, delay or cancel. His ego was not in the least

involved in my choice any more than it had been in my questions, and it would not come into play during the operation either. An appropriate 24

card went up above my bed and I was told, just in case I went ahead,

presumably midnight.

after

an

evening's thought,

not

to

eat

anything after

Around dinnertime, Dr. Obeid stopped by and in his gently impera­ tive way (He Who Must Be Obeyed, I call him) told me to pull back, to

stop trying to summon up, warts and refinements and all, a body of knowledge I had not been trained to understand. The answers to some

questions were useful to me, he thought; the patient is entitled to be vigilant and self-concerned; but the answers to many other questions were so recondite, so much involved with chance, that I had best leave them alone. Theologies, I thought, will give you various answers as to the nature of God; they don't hesitate to supply positive answers in the absence of evidence. But theologies do not go to the operating room, not in that sense anyway.

How my mind buckled and flexed, asserted itself and then cringed away. I wanted it and it alone to find out for me the right thing to do, to

be my surgeon and cardiologist in one, just like that. The last thing it wanted to do was trust blindly; indeed, I had been told that the state of the art of being a patient was to take an interrogative interest in what

Always ask. Now here was this top-notch humanist of a cardiol­ ogist telling me to take him and the surgeon on trust. "We do not want you to be an individual," he said, "not for such a purpose as this. We want you to be average, typical. It is no use making the surgeon nervous or over-cautious, feeling he has been put on his mettle and must prove himself beyond measure." I could see the sense in what he said, although part of me demurred. It was a bit like second-to-second compounding of interest: impossible because the instant occupied by any calculation went on.

made the calculation obsolete, and because with time, as with a crumb bead of water, there is no indivisible minimum. At any rate, what I wanted was as hypothetical as that, just as theoretical. All I could ever or a

get was

a

list of known mishaps, but my impulse

to

trifle with the

minutiae of chance amounted, I eventually saw, to morbid vanity. No

doubt the two doctors would trust my literary taste, but their lives would not depend on it, whereas, in theory at least, to trust them was to gamble just a bit with my life.

IV What shone in Pradhan's hands when he entered, shooting the white frost of his cuffs, was what I could have. At first I thought he had 25

arrived with a bola, the rope used in Argentina to entangle a steer's legs

the weighted ends coil around them. Then it seemed an anchor, a yo­

as

yo, a silver disk on a string. Very much a toy. Then I saw that he had

brought two of them. Maybe I didn't want to believe that he had brought the real thing, and I disliked the idea that something he could implant in my very own heart he could swing around in front of me with an airy playful motion that revealed his mystery, let him flaunt his wares.

I saw two pacemakers, each in convex titanium like small cigarette cases

from each of which curled a lead encased in pliable metal mesh

with, at the tip, a tiny version of the chimney sweep's brush: a probe with a few flanges sloping backward at forty-five degrees. These, he explained, would embed themselves in the wall of the ventricle, and, if we were lucky, make themselves permanent by building up scar tissue around them.

How many beats my heart skipped, or threw in extra, at the sight I have no idea. I felt sickened. He would slide the probe through a vein and the flanges would bend back along the lead, giving easily as the

probe passed from the vein into the left atrium, where most of my trouble was to begin with. Then through the tricuspid valve into the ventricle, the holy of holies. I fingered the flanges, wondering if they couldn't be made even more pliable, easier to smooth back as the probe slid ahead. Wouldn't they catch on something while going in? Once in the ventricle they were supposed to spring outward again, meant to snag the soft red pulp inside. Surely the lead would slip and then, like some zany metal butterfly waft around, touching off twitches and convulsions wherever it landed, scraping and abrading, making me gasp. Wouldn't there, won't there, I asked him, be a leakage when the tricuspid valve has the lead going through it? Good question, he said; but no, the pliable triple petals would mold themselves around it no leak. I asked other questions. Asking questions, you feel less powerless, yet you end up not -

much the wiser or even better informed. No, this had a lithium iodide battery, not plutonium, no longer much used, and it might last as long

depending on how much the heart demanded of it. This was a demand pacemaker, after all. as ten

years,

When, I wondered, would my mind stop going off at tangents, eager to escape a brutish truth? To me, the procedure seemed barbaric, although of course not to him, who put in one or two each day. What bothered me was not so

much the slit beneath the collarbone which would enable

him to slide the shiny shape into place amid the muscles and behind the subcutaneous layer, leaving me with only a bulge whose crest was the 26

sealed smile of the scar. At that I jibbed not much. The thing that set my teeth on edge was the slithering lead, when it went past the defenseless portals at my core, silver interloper where the sun had never shone and where there was never rest. My heart would be cuddling a tiny propeller forever. If it came loose, could they get it out, with what I thought of as the barbs going the wrong way? Surely they would catch. I fondled the flanges, forcing them forward toward the probe. Wouldn't they then tear

things apart if they had to come out again?

Then I realized that, instead of fending off all these images and tan­ gents, I must allow them full playas my head's means of getting used to the idea; my imagination was translating for me, the barbaric into the

tender, and I broke through to the palatable comparison that had been at the back of my mind all along. Instead of that chimney-brush lead, I was going to have the pink and velvet-gentle pistil of a hibiscus slid into my vein, with five red-spotted stamens in the vanguard, behind them the shank of the pistil and the tiny wire whisk of pliant golden commas which were the pollen. When the mind is desperate, it feeds itself some bizarre things. It worked, though, almost like self-hypnosis, and I felt very much outside myself, allowing them to do all this to someone else into whose most private thoughts and sensations I could peer. If I had to be implanted, then it would be with something like this, alien but somehow semi-friendly. If being imaginative is what scares you most, then use imagination to come to terms. I did. Once in, having graced its passage with an ocher talc, the hibiscus-pacer would merge at once with the just-as-soft mucosa at its destination, fusing heart of the flower with the heart of me.

At first I hesitated at almost every turn. Would the thing break loose

and tear me apart? I must not bump into things, and certainly (the doctors said) I must avoid body-contact sports, excepting for the only I cherished. I must not dive into the water anymore. Was I, like some possessors of this gadget, going to develop the so-called Time­

one

Bomb complex, in which I thought it would explode or begin to tick. I

had been told that, when it was functioning, I would perhaps feel a twitch or a tickle, a little throbbing, and I did. Indeed, even when it wasn't being demanded of, its presence might make my muscles spasm a

bit. If I could only get my mind off it for long enough, a week, say, and then even longer, I might learn to live with it. I had coaxed myself to

keep calm through the operation that implanted it, even though during it we had had an electrical failure and, at one hairy moment, an onset of ventricular tachycardia that made me feel as if I had a speeding dynamo in my chest that was going to break loose and scatter my viscera like so

27

many sponges. At another point, because my heart

kept kicking the lead pacemaker out, they had almost decided to cut their way through the front of my chest and install the electrodes directly on my heart. In the end, however, the tip of the lead bit and snagged, the ventricle failed

punch it loose, and the front of my abdomen stayed uncut.

I walk uneasily away from microwave ovens, though, knowing as I now do that only leaky ones can harm me, and I smile at the pseudo-Vlf

to

treatment meted out at

airports, where I go around the magnetic sensors

and get hand-scanned, braced ever for the litany that goes (often enough): "It wouldn't hurt you to go through, you know." They act with

solicitude, I concluded, not so much because the magnetic sensors might start my pacemaker off or halt it as because I would keep their buzzers ringing forever. I would never get through, I thought, even if alive, until I had pretended to be my own hand-baggage and allowed myself to be X­ rayed so that they could see clearly what had been planted in my chest, below the collarbone. They want to spare me all that bother.

After my first year of being bionic, I rather began to relish the lore of it all, always having a good chat about titanium when I left from Heathrow or Ithaca, N.Y., learning to laugh when the uninitiated (who should have been schooled in the matter of pacemakers) yelled to a colleague down the line "He's got a pacemaker, Frank."

"A what?"

"Pacemaker."

"Yeah. So what? What's that?"

"Pace-maker."

"You do him."

Any shred of embarrassment I ever felt in the beginning has long since gone. There was the woman security guard who said "Don't mind if I feel you up some?" She did. "You're used to doing that," I said as she stiffened into her tunic, looked sideways, and told me to put my hand over my pacemaker and keep it there. The guards who know least about this bionic business are at the TWA terminal, JFK; at Lambert Airport, St. Louis; and at Sacramento, California. At all three there is no space for you to "go around" through, not until they make it, and as they do so they peer at you as if you have leprosy; you don't look old enough for this prop of the elderly, whereas many children have them and wear them with aplomb.

I had no sooner gotten accustomed to the weekly or fortnightly blood test, to check my clotting time and thus my dose of Coumadin, than I had to get used to another rigmarole that tests the pacemaker by tele­ phone. With an electrode on each index finger, I transmit my pulse to 28

the master computer in my cardiologist's office one or two hundred miles away, and then pass a big blue doughnut of a magnet over my pacemaker, setting it off, and it goes cheep-cheep. Or it should if the

battery has not failed. If it has, my heart-block problems will recur and I will become dizzy in no time at all. After about ten years, the surgeon removes the old battery and implants a new one (it used to be only three years), which is bound to be smaller. If you last long enough, I presume, you ultimately receive a battery the size of a quarter and go into your grave with one of the cutest engines in the world frantically trying, in the very temple of your chest, to restart the arrested heart, as if it were

paddles and not just an accelerator. One almost senses a chance of immortality here, becoming a Frankensteinian metronome.

two

v Having come this far, I want to become as mechanically foolproof as I can; but in order to become that you need to have implanted in you a different kind of pacemaker that delivers a powerful shock sufficient to halt a fibrillating ventricle (the easy way to sudden death). People who have these in them go unconscious briefly, and fall, when the life-saving shock goes off, but they get up in good shape. I sometimes wonder how many contraptions I will need to have, how many I can have before they start getting in one another's way. My problem is electrical, and that is perhaps why I have come to dote on Mary Shelley's famous book, on all the spin-offs from it, but most of all on the passion to bring the dead back to life that dominated the fevered imaginations colluding at the Villa Diodati in 1816. New Doctor Frankensteins laid their hands on me when I was on the brink of being naught and engineered me back, not with

galvanometers and lightning conductors, but with little clever motors (and those other little motors we call pills). I wish Mary Shelley, and Percy, a pacemaker or two to play with, and I marvel not at the eyes in Mary's nipples (although in intensive care you believe anything) but at

the toy that tweaks me.

Most of all, of course, I have become acquainted with death: with how

casual it can be, sidling in to have you, just when you feel not half bad and think you are going to get away with it after all. Perhaps because 1

pain I felt better than 1 really was. 1 came close, I am told. I do recall seeing those who went into Intensive Care with me going out under sheets on gurneys, not in wheelchairs. 1 will never forget seeing was not in

how smoothly and omnipotently death operated in there, having its way 29

with us almost

random, without any bv-vour-leave or warning or without, I thought, even wanting any of us. It was just in a habit of taking us off. Death was a force with a tic .. An eerie smoothness was among us at no one's request, something mathe­ matical and implacable: no fuss, just naked and universal power, the power that comes to mind (oddly, maybe) whenever I have to explain to someone the most puzzling part of my condition: my pacemaker reme­ dies only the heart block, it does nothing to curb the arrhythmias; in other words, I am not going to keel over as Prokoviev did, because my heart isn't beating fast enough, but I am going to feel sweaty and claus­ trophobic from time to time because the ventricle is beating chaotically.

I wish there were some toy to put all things right; if there ever is, my hunch is that it will be a chemical similar to propranolol, which is good for half a dozen things.

There is a lethal context to all this wising-up, which you have to get accustomed to, much as you get accustomed to the color of buttercups or the rank aroma of narcissi. One's quiet mania says: After all that, I intend to get away with as much as I can for as long as I can; tread quietly and applaud my body nonstop for its ability to survive. Politi­ cians talk of the art of the possible. Doctors talk of the quality of life. I think about what my body achieved against the odds and what supports the rest of what I do: the art of the passable, and the high quality of that compared with the alternative. I keep managing to come to the end of another book, another essay (as now), and I marvel at the plenary gratitude the human spirit can feel after the Furies have had it and it has managed to slink away, back into the operating theater of words. at

overture. It claimed and claimed

30

Endings Perri Klass

Every person is a story, every patient is a story. When I admit a new patient to the hospital, I start writing the endings, in my head. Every patient is a story of one kind or another. In the emergency room, they walk in, off the street, and present themselves: my kid is throwing up, and he's my kid turned blue, my kid has transcarbamylase deficiency, getting a hyperammonemic crisis. We pop them into the little box exam­ ining rooms of the emergency department, each child waiting behind an equivalent uninformative door, and you have a whole anthology, seri­

quick and comic, another installment in the saga, the open­ ing chapter of a Russian novel. And if every patient is a story, then what am I, with my clipboard in my hand, my stethoscope around my neck­ am I the reader, am I the translator, maybe, or am I part of the narrative

ous, scary,

voice?

I'm always writing endings. And then the baby got well, and they all

lived happily ever after. And then the baby's brain turned slowly to mush, until he couldn't even swallow his own saliva, and so he drowned in it. And then the parents found out that if they ever had any more

children, there would be a twenty-five percent chance of the same thing happening again. And then the baby got well, and they all lived happily ever after. And she stopped wheezing. And his mysterious fevers went away. And it wasn't AIDS after all. And she never had another seizure.

And then he got better, and went home from the hospital, but somehow he was never quite the same again, and when he was five years old, he still couldn't really talk.

The happy endings I try to tell the parents: the antibiotics will take

nowadays, over ninety-five percent of children with leukemia achieve complete remission. In my head, I check over the

care of the infection

...

31

other plot twists, worry myself over what I'm not treating, not prevent­

ing. I cling, superstitiously, to the belief that bad things are less likely to occur if I have named them first, called them out of the darkness under the bed where they crouch, examined their evil, planned what to do if they should menace my patient. So endlessly, in my head, I write the bad endings: he got one dose of antibiotics and he was infected with

meningococcus, so after a few hours, all the bacteria died, and released poisons into his bloodstream, and his blood pressure dropped, and he went

into shock. *

*

*

Every patient is a story, every family is a story, every illness is a story.

Some I know, some I just walk through, or brush against. Before I go to sleep in my on-call room, I call the page operator, give her the number of the phone at my bedside, ask her to call me, rather than page me, if she'll ask anyone who pages me whether it's worth waking me up, and also because I would rather be anyone needs me-because this way

woken up by a phone than by a beeper. I fall asleep immediately, with the useful reflexes of the hospital, but I don't sleep deeply, another

hospital reaction; a nervous light sleep, waiting to be broken. After a couple of hours, the phone rings, and the operator says to me, politely, "There's an urgent on five."

Now, an urgent (or a code, or a stat page) is a common enough thing in an adult hospital, all those people with heart disease and lung disease.

But in a pediatric hospital, it's relatively rare, and always frightening. So I am out of bed, grabbing stethoscope and code card (my little printed list of emergency drug dosages), putting on my glasses and my shoes, running down the hall in my rumpled scrubs. Clatter down the steps to the fifth floor, ask the nurses where, which room. Go running into the room to find (to my immense relief, maybe my very slight disappoint­ ment) that there are three doctors and five nurses there already, that the little girl on the bed is almost hidden from my view by the amassed medical aid. She has a mask on her face and someone is bagging her, squeezing rhythmically on the black balloon, pushing oxygen in. And it's getting in; she's nice and pink. The monitor shows a heart rate of a hundred and sixty, no chest compressions necessary. The senior doctor standing by the bed turns and says to me (and to the fifteen other doctors crowding into the room behind me), "I think we have things under control here, thanks for coming."

As I leave the room I see a nurse escorting a woman in a nightgown, 32

close to hysteria, back to the head nurse's office: the little girl's mother, who must not be allowed to stay in the corridor and piece together random bits of information from what she may chance to hear. Some­ know what one will come and report to her as soon as the doctors assorted parents they're going to do with her daughter. A group of other and older patients also wait in the corridor, their sleep disturbed, won­

dering, has there been a death? Another nurse is trying to get them all to no persuading; I am back in my bed go back to bed. I, of course, need within minutes.

And that is alII know, or will ever know, about that child, whose bed I stood beside when she was somewhere not far from death. I don't know her name or her diagnosis-and the second tag, in the hospital, can matter almost more than the first. I don't know whether her mother has

been through anything like this before, whether she and the doc­ tors have been half expecting, half dreading, such a scene, or whether it came as a complete shock. I don't know whether this is a story of chronic

ever

disease, of a family life shaped by visits to the hospital, medications and diagnostic procedures, a saga of endurance and courage, a family trying to stand up to one blow after another. Or is this illness, whatever it is, an acute dramatic interruption, a sudden and unexpected plot twist in what was a normal childhood by hospital standards, an idyll, a -

pastorale.

And then there

are

the children I take

care

of for

days, weeks,

months, come to know in ways not necessarily open to their parents; quite literally, the details of their Ins and Outs. Can she usually suck well enough to take a bottle, has he ever had blood in his stool before?

What does his serum sodium usually run, what do her seizures usually look like? The doctor is like some obsessive novelist who insists on

composing full, minutely detailed biographies of each character, biogra­

phies which will never enter into the text of the novel, but will inform the actions of those characters, the phrases of their creator; the doctor tracks the innumerable bits of information, sorts them, checks them, looks for something which will help move the story along.

Some I know, some I don't. In the hospital, you intersect strangers right at their most dramatic moments, you charge into the room just in time for the denouement. Or else you hang on grimly, and see it through, scene by scene.

*

*

*

33

When we actually tell the stories, in the hospital, we observe a particular narrative formalism, both in language and in structure. Here is a tragedy for you: This was a previously healthy three-month-old white female, formerly the seven-pound, three-ounce product of an uncomplicated

full-term gestation to a twenty-five-year-old gravida-one, para-zero-to­

mother, normal labor and delivery, no problems in the nursery. The baby has been feeding on Similac and growing well and immunizations are up to date. Last night the mother noted some upper-respiratory infection symptoms, chiefly mild rhinorrhea, but no cough or fever, and the baby was feeding well. This morning the baby did not wake, as usual, for a six A.M. feeding; the mother went to wake her at eight and found her blue, cold and stiff in her crib. CPR was given both by parents and by EMT's but no pulse was ever established. No significant family history, including no history of SIDS, apnea, neonatal or early child­ hood deaths. And so on. So this three-month-old baby was found dead

one

in bed.

But that is really how I talk, in the hospital, how we all talk. It's how the story is told. And actually, if I had to write that down, it would

depart even farther from normal narrative; it would probably look something like this: 3 mo wf, former 7" 3' product nl IT P IL/D to 25 yo G1PO-+1 mother, doing well, IUTD. Last noc noted URI sx, esp rhinor­ rhea, s fever. And so on.

You tell the story this way for convenience, to provide the answers to

the questions you know will be asked, and sort the information neatly into the slots in which other doctors will know to look. You force the

craziness, the randomness, of life and death, into a certain formalism, and reassure yourself that at least you can impose an order. You can pick apart the story and rearrange it so that

at

least it makes sense as a

medical narrative.

Does it buy me a little distance, as I sit with the parents of the three­

month-old, trying to explain crib death, which no one understands anyway, in language they will find acceptable? Probably it does; my language is not theirs. My story would not match their story, the story they will tell their relatives. My story is providing answers to a specific set of questions, falling neatly into an informational form which assures answers to

the questions which determine the structure. And so I am

guaranteed a certain satisfaction, a certain narrative success. The baby's parents may be searching for a way to make this into a story they can tell-perhaps the hospital chaplain will help, or perhaps the bits of medical jargon that they get from me will be what they need. They have never

34

had such a need before. But me, I need to tell these stories all the

time, and I carefully do not tell them in any language I would use for the other kind of stories in my life, the stories of what happens to me, to the

people I love.

The formalism has other uses, too. It allows me to pretend to a control over events which really I am only chasing, always a few steps behind.

All the conventions of hospital language connive to suggest this control; for example, the doctor writes the orders, in the order book. This

military language might suggest that the patients are under our orders; in fact, the ones who obey the orders are the nurses, dutifully initialing them and recording them and carrying them out. But the nurses, like the doctors, are part of the hospital, imposed regime. The patients, and their internal organs, and their diseases, do as they please. *

*

*

I have other stories to tell. I can sit down and write True Tales of the

Hospital in normal language, stories to be read by normal people, not doctors. Or I can sit down and write fiction. I can escape. If I write True

Tales, then the temptation is always there: change the ending, make the bad doctor wrong and the good doctor right, make the test come out the way you predicted it would. But then they are not True, and so the uncontrollable spiraling chaos of illness intrudes there too, and regret,

fully, I have to let the baby die, if indeed the baby died, or let myself stand, helpless, ignorant and not heroic by the child's bed.

But not in fiction. In fiction, finally, I am in control. The proverbial writing student says to the proverbial writing teacher, but that's the way it really happened, and the proverbial writing teacher responds, so what? If it doesn't work as fiction, you can't use it in fiction. So when I turn away from the amoral workings of hospital stories, from the good who die

young and the undeserving who flourish, I can allow myself the luxury

of rewarding and punishing as I see fit. I can kill for the sake of pathos, or, greatest luxury of all, I can tell a story without

a

dying child in it,

think for a while about a world in which there are other exigencies than

fevers, labored breathing and all the rest. Fiction, however tragic, how, ever powerful, is sanctuary. In the hospital, even as I tell the formal stories, even as I write the alternate endings, I can sense that I am in no single sane imagination. The hospital is an eventful place, full of melo­ drama and disaster, but nothing happens for any recognizable narrative reason. No rules hold good; no nineteenth-century moral imagination is at work, no twentieth-centurv authorial esthetic. This is presumably true of life in general, but the hospital is so busy, so full of stories, so 35

ready for the climax, the high drama, the catharsis, that the lack of an intelligible underlying narrative structure is always with me there. And I retreat into the somewhat stilted but utilitarian formalism of the

so

doctors, as if these conventions of narrative would replace the gaps in the structure of events.

Writing is an escape. To write, I sit down with myself, I turn inward to what voices are there. Instead of the tremendous availability I feel all day in the hospital, connected by beeper, phone, overhead page, elec­ tronic mail, carrying out my business in a windowed room so the nurses can see where I am if they need me-when I write I sit down alone. No one else to pull at me or ask questions, interrupt one story with another, beg or demand, judge or plead. A resident in a hospital is constantly turned outward, constantly trying to meet a multitude of needs. Writing is healing myself, a little bit, reminding myself that there is in fact see

another way to turn, at times.

And so, perhaps, writing is a defense. I am defending myself against

the entropy of the hospital, the entropy of disease, degeneration, which is the enemy in the hospital, but also, inexorably, the ultimate victor. It is the entropy of reality, only made more intense; writing, the creation of my artificial universe, is my attempt to assert an order. Not the life-and­

death self-defense of the hospital jargon, the doctorly sentence struc­ tures and conventions I use at

work, but a more considered, solid, long­ term defense, an attempt to build something which will resist, at least a little, that entropy.

The final entropy the final, usually unspoken lesson of the hospital­ is mortality: this child is dead, you will die, I will die, everyone we love -

will die. The forms and formalisms of doctors are in part designed to

help us avoid this knowledge which is brought home to us so sharply every day. Very few people can bear reality at this level, this repeated reminder that yes, if you didn't get any oxygen for a while then you too would be stiff and blue, cold and dead, that your own precious body

(your child's body!) would look and feel like this dead baby's. And the doctor tries for separation, hiding behind language not to be applied to me,

to

my child. And offers cold comfort

to

the parents of the dead

baby: maybe if we do an autopsy, maybe if your child's death helps us understand, then maybe we can help other children. Offers it as a very

slight immortality, since such scientific immortality is part of the hospi­ tal ethos, part of the meaning we can try to find in all the deaths, in all the pain and misery and wastage.

But writing is also a defense against mortality, an attempt to do some­ thing which will stay behind. Our bodies are not permanent: the hospi36

tal makes it impossible to escape that knowledge, at its crudest and most

basic. So to write is to escape once again, escape the hospital, escape the

demands, and escape even myself and my own limits. And then, from this vantage point, I find myself reaching out, reaching back, thinking more and more of those patients, of their sto­ ries, of the endings I write, over and over. And promising those chil­ dren, those parents, in my head, more cold comfort, another somewhat dubious immortality.

entropy, escape the

37

Keziah Gwendolyn Brooks

On Tuesday, March 14, 1978, at eight in the evening, two weeks after her ninetieth birthday, my mother stopped.

Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks.

She had been healthy most of her life. She had been a fast walker, a joyously rhythmic little walker, most of her life. Most mornings, her

waking was with pleasure in the new prospects, pleasure in new plan­ ning. She was an alert contributor to the procedures of her milieu.

In 1976 she had published, happily, her book of memories, her impres­ sions, with a couple of fictions. She had insisted on calling it The Voice, and Other Short Stories. She had insisted on paying for its publication, out of her own savings. I gave her an autographing party at Chicago's South Side Community Art Center. Many attended, spoke in tribute to her. Her last sister, Beulah (killed by fire in her home in 19-), came from Topeka to assist her. Seven hundred fifty dollars worth of her books were sold. She gave a speech, reading it with precise distinctness, precise delight. (I remembered that, a few years earlier she had given an impressive speech at a Metropolitan Community Church celebration in a downtown hotel with no paper in front of her, amazing the throng with her self-possession and soft dignity.) She enjoyed the refreshments, the piano music, the flowers. And there was a wide big-lettered banner across the gallery: CONGRATULATIONS, MRS. KEZIAH BROOKS! Ke-ZI-ah. I have always loved my mother's name. ("Corinne" she had given to herself.) And I love her nickname, "Kip," which, strangely, she didn't care for.

38

There had been the sorrow of losing her only son, my brother Ray, mond, in 1974. But that sorrow did not prove flattening; it was not such

could persuade her to Resign; Hoke Norris's Chicago Sun-Times article on her reported her as saying she didn't have "a worry in the world!"­ this, at the age of eighty-nine. Interestingly and sadly, by the time that as

article appeared, on January 22, 1978, Hoke, novelist and Sun-Times book editor, had died, and my mother saw it, rather hazily, in the hospital. I taped it to the wall above her narrow bed at Michael Reese.

The Michael Reese doctors and nurses were impressed.

There had been the Robbery. That was almost flattening. That had happened on a particularly joyous Sunday morning in the spring of

1977. My husband and I had taken her to a nice restaurant for brunch, after a grocery-shopping trip. I remember her very special happiness. She couldn't praise enough the food which she ate with such delight, nor the attractiveness of the room; nor my "kindness," as she chose to call it, in

taking her on the financed shopping trip, although this was an almost regular happening. After the little festivity she considered restaurant visits singular specialties-we took her home. As a rule, my husband, on arrival at her door, would see her into and through the house. But on this occasion, because I was leaving, immediately, for the airport, with just enough time to make my plane, he saw her through the door only.

A couple of hours after my arrival at the campus I'd flown to, my agent called with the news that my mother's home had been robbed, during our brunch absence-robbed of all those articles a thief can sell easily: phonograph, radio, television set, electric fans, etc. I called my mother.

By that time, my husband had "secured" her with a repaired and barred back door and dining-room door. She was dazed. Such a violation! To think! Strangers moving around in Her House, handling Her Things!

She couldn't get over it! The police were called. They apprehended no one, although neighbors told us it had been the work of three brothers on the block, three brothers who subsequently went to jail for another robbery in the area.

-

Invasion. She couldn't get over it.

She never did get over it. We spelled her decline from the moment of that invasion. It wasn't long before she began to lose interest in food.

Although very slender all her life, she had loved food, selecting it, cooking it, daintily eating the products of the recipes she had collected over the years. But after the invasion, I might return from a lecture trip, laden with gift groceries, and find no evidence that anything had been eaten since my departure. I would find only the little gray-green sculp39

tured cup, from which she liked to drink water, on the kitchen sink. The

icebox would seem undisturbed.

"Aren't you eating, Mama?"

"Yes, I'm eating."

"Well, I went to Stop-and-Shop and got you some wonderful lamb

chops."

"Oh, thank you!"

But she got thinner and thinner.

Then one Sunday in October something happened that alarmed her as

well as ourselves. I had told her I'd go to church with her that Sunday.

Always, on such an occasion, she would be charmingly dressed and at the window watching for us, waiting. This time, I had to ring the doorbell, then knock knock knock at the door, and at the vacant win­

dow, repeatedly, before attracting her attention. Finally she came to the door in her nightgown and robe. She seemed bewildered, but when I mentioned church, and told her that Henry was in the car, ready to drive us down, she suddenly remembered what she had entirely forgot­ ten. She was abject, contrite. She couldn't forgive herself. She began immediately to "collect" herself, and in no time she was neat and ready to go. Yet, nothing like that had ever happened before, and she was truly alarmed.

That was the last Sunday she ever went to church.

Something else disturbed us. Always willing to be chatty, always responsive to what others had to say she had always listened atten­ tively to the ideas and opinions of others, and had responded with eager liveliness-she became increasingly silent.

I asked her over and over to live with me. My house was about thirty -

blocks south of hers. I told her I would expand my five-room cottage, so that she could have her own quarters, her privacy. She wouldn't come.

She loved her home. She wanted to live alone. She had stopped renting

"peace and quiet." Once, during this time, her furnace, tampered with by one of those profes­ sional tamperers, one of those roving "furnace-fixers" I had warned her against, exploded. Fortunately, my husband and I were visiting her at the time. It was a very cold winter night. We bundled her up and insisted, of course, that she come to our house, until I could get a new furnace installed in her basement. I'll never forget her poignant "I wish I could stay home!" as we helped her down the snowy steps.

I had a new furnace installed, and she came back to her precious home. She proceeded with her steady decline. She ate less and less. out

40

her second floor, because she wanted

Soon, she Wasn't Well. That is the way to put it. Yes, she was eighty­ nine, but for Keziah Wims Brooks to be Not Well was strange.

Because, although she was weak and, finally, had to stay in bed, except for going to the bathroom-two rooms and a rough road of strain away not

-

all we could observe, in the way of wrongness, was that she was

eating.

I moved in with her. I called the office of her doctor. Edward Beasley,

highly-respected pediatrician, was doctor to all of us. He had seen both my children through sniffles, measles and chicken pox. When many years before I had decided my heart was "failing," he had seen me through the fantasy. "He's dead," said a woman at the other end of the line. Very carefully, I gave my mother that news. "That's shocking," she said, with precise quiet. She meant those words exactly. It was, as they a

say, "the end of an era."

I had to hunt up another doctor. Val Gray Ward told me that a Fred

Daniels was willing to make house calls. Mama seemed to trust him. She allowed him to influence her into a neighborhood clinic,

a

clinic on

Forty-third Street near King Drive. She had told me she did not want to go to "any hospital." And she had written up a little document which stated "in no uncertain terms" (an old phrase of hers) that she wanted NO OPERATIONS. She was so weak on the day of her visit to the clinic that Henry had to carry her in. Dr. Daniels was able to convince her that she must go to a hospital for examination and treatment. She listened to him with polite concern. She looked at me, then, and said­ another poignancy- "Well-I'll just have to rely on your judgment."

Responsibility. I was, from that moment, entirely responsible for my mother- bills, care, chores, decisions.

She entered Michael Reese. A couple of days after she was settled in there I read to her a piece I had written on an Amtrak train Tuesday, November 29, 1977 Narrow in her narrow hospital bed, very still, she listened attentively to my assessment, clumsy and innocent (and criminally inadequate, as I later knew) of her voyages, her countries found. Then she said, with acceptance round and gentle, "That's nice." ...

...

*

*

*

I had always wanted a "simple" l-love-you from my mother. I never heard it. I have no memory of volunteered motherly hugs and kisses in any

department of our life together. In adulthood, I would hug her on arrivals and departures. She would respond with apparent pleasure and participation. But displays of affection were not spontaneous. (My own 41

children I squeezed, kissed, grabbed on sudden impulse. Even when she was

two, I was forever looping up my little daughter and carrying her

from one end of the house to the other; she was almost like a doll; "Why don't you put that child down?" my husband would say. And he felt I over-cherished my son.)

Yet my mother's affections, we all knew, were present and clear. As

daughter, as sister, as mother, as wife, as grandmother, as neighborhood friend, she was subscriptive and serious and yielding and warm.

After her death, I found in the treasured old desk she had inherited, from her brother Will, a notebook in which she had inscribed gift paragraphs to her eight inheritors. Her elegant handwriting! Nothing else was in that 101/z-inch by 8-inch, fifty-sheet blue notebook, called by its commercial creators "Sterling Quality." My gift, "To Gwendolyn," was:

Dear Daughter, I am truly appreciative of your many kind deeds. They

have given me much comfort and happiness. I hope your success continues and that you will be happy throughout life. Love, Mama. *

*

*

I have never been one to put much stock in dreams. But-how pleasingly

marvelous it is that we see, after their deaths, mother and father and

brother, and sometimes aunts and uncles, in our dreams. As well as the thousand-and-three monsters and gargoyles and strangers charming or wan! There they are, semi-coolly or warmly wonderful; physiques, as­ pects, expressions very much as usual. And INTERESTED in us.

So, I lost and shall never lose my mother. She turns up in dreams, again and again, her mother-eyes regarding me. She says a few words; answers a question; or looks-just looks. *

*

*

Here is the Amtrak-drawn testimonial which I read

to

her in the

hospital: In a little poem I have written about my mother, I have noted the

particulars of her character. The poem commends my mother's essential strength. Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks was and is a courageous woman.

It has never occurred to her that she should slink away from any of the

challenges of life. The challenges of life-the agonies, sorrows, the million-and-ten frustrations, perplexities, problems, reductions, domina­ tions and explosions-she has looked at with a calculating eye, has 42

judged, has cataloged. She has tamed what had to be tamed, what could, what should be tamed. She has adjusted to whatever rocks were super-ornery, determinedly smoothing the edges of such rocks so that she might sit bearably thereon. No fear, no fight, no fury has been so oppressive as to leave her weaponless. Even now, in her eighty-ninth year, with three months to go before her ninetieth birthday, which certain details of this New Time begin, shockingly, to seem unconquer­ able (home invasion, cruelty to the very old and the very young, our accelerating human coldness, she has thought of a way of redress: she is proceeding into the depths of herself, where it is warm and cozy, recep­ tive, comfortable). From these depths, into which her friends cannot follow her, she waves with a genial pleasantness, but she says very little, and she will not let us pull her out. Withdrawal, then, is her Last Weapon. So far as she is concerned, it works. It is a resource that works.

This change in her dates from October of 1977. The home invasion in the preceding spring had shaken her fundamentally. Her loved televi­ sion set, a gift from her daughter, had been stolen, her doors splintered in the forced entry during, luckily, her absence. In October, her heating plant failed, and even though assured it would be replaced, somehow her faith in her ability to control her environment began to waver.

About the new silences (due partly, 1 think, to fear of forgetfulness and partly to a willingness to learn from the busy-talk of others, and partly to 1 know not what) -I am reminded of some very wise lines of the Fu­

gitivist poet Merrill Moore: ..•

silence is not death.

It merely means that the one who is conserving breath is not concerned with tattle and small quips.

Poem: My Mother of Keziah Corinne Wims Brooks; of yesterday's strength

My mother sits in yesterday and teeters toward today and topples toward tomorrow's edge and panics back away.

Yesterday taught her to contrive to dreg-up and to thoroughlize.

43

-

Fitting her for Some reckonings

with the not-old and with surprise.

(December 1975)

Yes, my mother, born March 1, 1888, is a daughter of yesterday. She has always been, however, willing to sally forth, albeit cautiously, to test or question today's new thing, today's strange thing. She is even willing, as I've implied here, to topple toward an exhilarating, tentative, almost mischievous little combat with the hints, science, promises, problems and affronts of tomorrow; but, her steady intelligence tells her, the waters of tomorrow are indeed too deep, too deep for her, and she "panics back away," leaving the larger risks of tomorrow for the solving hands of the young. Even so, she has certain lessons to hand down to the young-certain positives that, she believes, were reliable yesterday, are

reliable today, and will be reliable tomorrow unless we humankind

are

going to start from scratch with new gods, new earth, new sky, new

exits and entrances, and an absolute revolution or reversal of decisions.

Yesterday taught my mother to go down to the very roots of things, the very roots of life, and to deal with those roots firmly, thoroughly. And it is that firm thoroughness, that dutiful calm determination to be Equal to this life, to this world, that has made it possible for her to face­ cleanly, deliberately, reasonably-with innocent and steady eyes­ whatever comes, whatever rises up before her.

My mother "brought up" my late brother Raymond and myself in the sunshine of certain rules. One: we must be clean of body. She scrubbed us vigorously until we children could satisfy her high standards of clean­

liness. That was outside! As for cleanliness inside, long before it was fashionable to consider diet with strict seriousness she was so inclined.

healthful, inclusive, attractive, controlled. Two: we must be dutiful. Dutifulness has always been her major concept. "Al­ ways do the Right Thing." Three: we must empathize with other people.

She was fond of quoting her own mother, Luvenia Wims "If you know yourself, you know other people." Four: we must respect ourselves. Our bodies were monuments of purity and beauty and we were not to poison them with filth of any kind, with disrespect of any kind. Our minds were clean and shining crystal, into which we were to pour only what was clean and bright and good. Five: we must respect the honor of Family­ in the smaller sense our Family of Four plus our scattered relatives-in­ the-large (although she would not have expressed it in this way), our Family of the Black millions all over the world. We must put no disgrace Our meals were

-

44

Family. Six: we must WORK for what we use and enjoy. To steal anything that is not ours-the merest match or marble or licorice switch-unthinkable! Other people's property is sacredly theirs. (And, it follows, OUTS is sacredly OUTS.) Seven: we must be polite and helpful to other people. This meant each of us must meet all, friend, stranger, with a pleasant face; a nod, a salutation. This meant, until such behavior in Chicago became perilous, allowing the hungry unknown to sit at table; or giving a dollar here, a dollar there-often ill-afforded. Eight: as long as we were children and controllable, we must go to church and respect God and Godliness. Godliness was a combination of decency, kindliness and the observance of Duty.

These mother-charrns-e aberted by my father's underwriting concern, on

protection and reliable love-are the substance to which I continue referral, and which I consider my continuing nutrition.

Thank you, Mama.

KEZIAH'S HEALTH BOOK

(When she was eighty-eight, I asked her to write anotheT book, a tiny book of health suggestions and other aids for the old. I gave her a beautifully decorated blank book for this task and I think she created

what follows with a kind of awed pleasure.

On the first page is the general title" Arti­

cles and Paragraphs"

which meant that she had intended to tackle other subjects -

Then comes the health instruction under the title "Beneficial Health Habits." too.

The entire ten pages are in her own beauti­

ful script.)

Beneficial Health Habits A long life is due to many good health habits. I have lived to be 88 and feel nearly as well as I did ten years ago.

One of my most important requisites has been an annual check-up by a responsible physician. My great concern is hypertension. Several of my rela­ tives have had strokes 50 I deem it necessary to be extremely careful; hence I am always supplied with high-blood-pressure medicine.

Eating proper food is my next important habit. I am so careful about eating and drinking things that are beneficial that a special diet is used daily.

I drink a cup of hot water before breakfast which consists of a dish of oatmeal and a glass of pineapple or orange juice.

45

My lunch is eaten about 4 hours after breakfast. At this stage of life, the meat I eat, the better I feel, so I eat a very small amount of meat, preferably lamb; but occasionally a piece of chicken is a substitute. Since I find beef constipating I avoid its use. I habitually have 1 or 2 meatless days a week. On these days I usually eat an egg. Since cooked eggs are constipating, I beat a raw egg and stir in 3/. cup of milk, one teaspoon of honey and flavor it with a fourth teaspoon of vanilla extract. This for me is non-constipating.

It is a good substitute for meat and makes a palatable drink that all partakers will enjoy. During my lunch I also eat an average amount of stewed vegeta­ bles which I prepare by cooking string beans, celery, carrots, tomatoes and zucchini together with several cups of water until tender. This is a very healthful food so I prepare enough for a few days.

My dinner at six o'clock consists of a half cup of V-8, diluted with a little water, a dish of stewed fruit, a piece of toast and a glass of milk.

The things that are most detrimental to my health are nuts, pork in any form, sweets, fibrous food, seeds and skins so I avoid the skins of fruits and vegetables, and never eat pork.

The only exercise I engage in is my housework, which I do without help.

The exercise I get from shopping tours is sufficient for my limbs. I tried some of the exercises recommended by experts but soon discovered that too much exercise is worse than an insufficient amount. I always keep witch hazel on hand for massaging my limbs in case a daily task exceeds the normal amount less

of work I do.

Senior citizens should be very careful about the excessive use of their eyes since all parts of the body weaken with age. My sight was the first part to

weaken. This happens at the age of forty. Before the morning of that memo­ rable day my vision newspaper. On

was seemingly perfect. I went to the porch for the reading a few lines of the first page I was surprised and

dismayed to discover I could not read the fine print and would have to use glasses.

Another beneficial habit which some people neglect is to dress warmly in cold weather. A large percentage of pneumonia is caused by the lack of proper clothing. I often see bare-headed boys and men, with short hair, on the streets in cold weather, and wonder how they escape illness.

Another healthy habit to form is cheerfulness. Those who are around antagonists will find this characteristic hard to establish, but perseverance and a definite decision to let others have the last word will be well worth the effort.

Rest periods are predominantly important. A bed rest of one hour is perfect but if this amount cannot be arranged, a half hour is better than none at all. I learned from watching my mother that some tasks we ordinar­ ily perform while standing, can be much more restful in a sitting position, such as using a stool at the sink while peeling potatoes, apples, etc. One can also sit at the board while ironing some of the weekly laundry.

During the last year of my husband's life, my stooping position for weed­ ing my flower bed was relieved when he made a low stool for me by sawing off the legs of a high one, thus decreasing my tired feeling immensely.

46

When these helpful habits have been faithfully formed, supporters who escape accidents can expect long healthy lives.

After-note by "historian": On "page 2," right after "and a glass of pineapple or orange juice" is a crossed­ out passage, which went as follows==and a cup of tea. The beverage until

recently was coffee. My decision to make the change was a desire for my life to be prolonged. I assumed that coffee could have the opposite effect."

Near the back of the book was

a

slip of paper on which she had

tabulated her wordage per page. The total was 746 words.

Mama's ninetieth-birthday morning, thank goodness, was cheerfully sunny.

On what was to be (two weeks later) her deathbed, on what had been my father's deathbed, in the second room of her house at 4332 Cham­

plain Avenue (we called that room the living room, and the first room "the front room") she listened to me explain to her that I had brought her out of the hospital because I knew she wanted to be in her loved Home-that I wanted her to be peaceful. She "latched on" to that last word. She said distinctly "I am peaceful." And she looked at me directly, cleanly, as though she wanted me not to doubt the gold of what she was about to say to me-the gold contained in two words. "THANK YOU." How carefully she said those words.

And I knew that "Thank you" was for everything, for all of my smil­ ings, every embrace, every care, every Easter lily and Christmas poinset­ tia, every youthful achievement and childskip, every shopping trip and party-for-her, every box of chocolates, every introduction to a celebrity, every health book bought, and dress and coat and Stop-and-Shop lamb chop, for the trips to New York and California (she refused to accept my offer of a trip to Europe or Africa, although once she had said "When I'm ninety I'll go to Africa.")

That was the wholesome Thank You, the complete Thank You. In the early

afternoon, our old Champlain friends, Carter Temple friends, Ida Louise DeBroe and Kayola Moore Williams, came for a birthday visit. Merry Kayola had been one of my first Sunday School teachers. (Indeed, I can remember, as Sunday School teachers, only Kayola and sweet-tempered, tall, moral Mrs. Ida Barnett.) I "grew up" with Ida Debroe and her brothers and sister Charlotte on Champlain Avenue. We sat near Mama's bed and gossiped about old times and present assignations. It delights me even now to remember my mother, 47

weak

as

she

was,

softly chuckling and looking at us with suddenly

brightened and mischievous eyes! Two weeks before she was to die, and at the age of ninety, she could "rise to" good, spicy, "naughty neighbor" stories!

Before they arrived, I had been playing the piano for her. Many of her Carrie Jacobs-Bond pieces. I played "Just A­ in' for which all our family had always loved. I played "The Weary You,"

favorites-including

Scarf Dance" by Chaminade, the only "classical" piece I knew by mem­ ory. Mama listened contentedly.

In the early evening we had her birthday party. I had bought special

birthday-table covering and napkins, an exquisite cake, ice cream, candy, candles-everything. Mrs. Flossie McGhee, whom I had em­ ployed to nurse my mother when I could not be there with her, helped me dress her in radiant finery, helped me sit her at the dining-room table. She stayed up perhaps half an hour, and seemed aware that we were celebrating a Milestone.

Naturally, my husband's camera, brought over for the occasion, did not "work"; I have no pictures of a scene most precious to me. I've hated myself for not pre-stocking the house with five cameras.

When everyone was gone except myself (Henry gone, Nora gone, Mrs. McGhee gone), I turned on television and there was another birthday -

present for my mother: Artur Rubinstein was "in concert." She was able to enjoy some of her favorite music. She had always loved Artur Rubin­

stein's piano-playing. Once, I had taken her to Orchestra Hall to hear

him.

A last bow-ribbon on a very pretty day.

Mama Memories Mama at the south back fence in her fresh little cotton housedress,

listening to the gossip of Mrs. Mitchell. Intent. Marveling. Empathetic.

Mama at the back fence, north, listening to the woes of Mrs. Haddock (who was white-haired and Very Old, I thought-she might have been sixty-five or seventy at the time! and who later was famous in the neighborhood because she got "low-sick" and almost died but was saved by the vegetarian white woman doctor across the street, who came over several times a day, bringing juices and broths and fruit until Mrs. -

Haddock was well). Then there were all those other women on the block, who believed they could trust my mother, and regularly filled her ears

48

with wonderfully terrible stories about other neighbors, and about

their husbands, and about their children, and about themselves. They were right: they could trust my mother: she told their secrets to nobody but me. After any of those interviews, she would come in the house to me,

twinklv-eyed, mischievous

-

"You'll never believe

" ...

"You'll never

"

guess

...

*

*

*

Raymond and I, coming home from school, to cocoa and cookies and a clean little mother eager to be told the happenings of our day and eager to hear of our homework, and brightly ready to help us conquer it. *

*

*

Every-autumn trips downtown to the Textbook Store. To buy our own copies of schoolbooks-that-had-to-remain-in-school. Sping-spang new they were! Delightful to look at and hold. Ours. Both Mama and Papa were

determined that we should have these books at the beginning of

each autumn, for our very own. (Sacrifices were made; happily.) What fun it was, to rove among the aisles of that Textbook Store, inhaling the

fragrance of brand-new books, watching Mama make those purchases, and leaving, a little reluctantly, with those very special new possessions.

Even the arithmetic textbook, when sping-spang new, was tolerable. *

*

*

Summer Sunday School picnics. I liked only the getting-ready: helping to make the

peanut-butter sandwiches with crispy green lettuce, packing the fried chicken, the deviled eggs, looking at the white cake or coconut cake and devil's food cake with white icing. I did not like picnicking in

the populous park, nor the games, nor having to talk to the church­ members. *

*

*

Through the years I've had conflicting memories about our once-a­ trips to Riverview (Amusement Park). Nice. Not nice. What I did not enjoy was being in such crowds. The only scary "ride" I ever summer

went on was the Silver Flash.

What I did enjoy was something Safe: the

Merry-Go-Round, which Mama and I shared every summer. And the high point of the excursion, so far as I was concerned, was lunchtime: 49

hot dogs, popcorn, cotton candy, pop. (Lemonade?) Mama seemed to enjoy the whole day, although happy to come home in the twilight,

Riverview "achieved" and packed away for another year. How beautiful, our

regained 4332! *

*

*

THERE! A few further Mama Memories to add to those in "Report from Part One." To be exhaustive, "complete," I'd have to devote a couple of lives to the creation of an encyclopedia. And even then

so

...

The Ivory Tower R. D. Skillings

For a while there, 0, my Best Beloved, it seemed I was always doing one thing in order not to do another. I wanted to be a writer but I wasn't

how to go about it. After college I went to journalism school in Boston-mainly to escape the draft, but also to avoid academia. Gradu­ sure

ate work in

English looked like the direst danger life had to offer short of

staying home in Bath, Maine, and becoming a recluse, so I set up in Boston, midway between Portland the familiar and New York the unknown.

Professors of Journalism proved a raw contrast to the dignified inter­ preters of the great documents at Bowdoin. I soon fell under the sway of one

Hal Hoolz, a swashbuckling cynic in a shiny blue suit, the only real

tweedy colleagues in Communications Research, field just then coming into vogue. He had never finished high school and despised their degrees and abstract models, statistics, jargon and graphs no less than literature itself, which he considered newspaperman

among

his

a

effete as well as unprofitable.

For a small stipend from the department I graded his daily mountains of undergraduate news stories, wrote query letters to girlie magazines,

kept his desk supplied with gin and Pall Malls and confirmed his dates with the prettiest of his students, who wore a gold crucifix and never met

my eyes.

Fanatics both, Hal Hoolz and I were doomed to contend, though I was his only true protege. The others in his Advanced Feature Writing

merely smirked at our furious disputes, while the clock clicked away the entire class. They looked on free-lance work as a fool's dream: the big money was in advertising and public relations.

All Hal really respected was money made from writing. The enormous

course

51

salary from this his first regular job in twenty-five years, didn't impress him, and he intended to quit at the end of the term: work was simply too tame for him. He preferred to live by his wits and could generate ideas as fast as a Jasper Milvain. (He, 0 my Best Beloved, is an unscrupu­ lous, triumphant hack in New Grub Street, 1891, a novel by George Gissing about writers and marriage.)

Hoolz was ready to write on any subject whatever, no matter how little he knew about it, so long as he knew who his readers were. "First you analyze your audience, then you manipulate it," he would vehe­ mently repeat. "That's all there is to it, that's all anyone's ever done."

"Even Blake?" I said, incensed. I happened to be reading Blake.

"Exactly," Hal said. "Who he? And Shakespeare too."

The row that ensued was the occasion of my first banishment from his

class. He threw me out often thereafter because I always failed to follow his assignments.

His custom was to read the stories aloud and have the class comment on

them. "This is completely hopeless," he would say two pages into

mine-supposedly destined for The Golden Years, a retirees' magazine­ about two ragged filthy bums who decide to return to their families and freeze to death on the road in a spring blizzard.

The class would chortle. The two tall elegant Kenyans, tailored like English lords, who smoked Gauloises, wore tribal scars on their cheeks and never submitted a word, kept their benign expressions of insupera­ ble composure, but Hal in dudgeon would hurl my manuscript over his shoulder and thumb me to the door, like a fed-up umpire ejecting a protester.

We never mentioned these frays outside of class and I sat around the

day in his office. To him the worst that could happen was for some pages of his to earn nothing, never mind whether they ever saw print or won praise: it hurt his pride.

He showed me his latest, an article on how to write a How-To book, maintaining that the ultimate subject of all copy is the predilections of its audience, and concluding with a quote from Aristotle culled from Bartlett, edifying but at odds with his text. rest of the

I remarked on this.

"That's the point," he said. "It makes it palatable. Who can disagree with Aristotle? And anyway, by then, they've forgotten what I said."

He had a low opinion of the world of readers, but it didn't depress him. On the contrary; he was exhilarated. He felt like a lynx in the fold.

"When I'm not writing I can't fuck," he confided.

He liked to lament that I lived in an ivory tower. At some inevitable 52

point in our debates he always stopped me with,

"Who are you to say

cinched

what's true?" And while I searched for the answer he invariably the subject with, "You should get a job on a newspaper." one He left in the spring, my attendance at the university lapsed, and

had a

End

Gazette day I found myself adopting his advice. The South Arlie dusty one-room office on top of a Chinese laundry. Its editor, whole paper Vindage, was just rushing out as I arrived. He wrote the himself and yes, he would be glad of some help if I could fill the bill. He gave me a handful of past

issues and directed me to the nearest court­

house to get a story.

"Now you want to master my style," he said. "Pay strict attention to the way I write."

His glinting glasses flashed at me and then he hurried off.

That night, 0 my Best Beloved, after a day at a district court, I sat down to his exorbitant task. He wrote a rambunctious, rococo baroque, obviously his own, though endlessly contrary to the tenets of his trade,

often impossible to follow, purple, nay gory as Caesar's last tattered toga, obsessively digressive, fraught with personal asides, gargantuan in its sarcasms. Bum puns ran ribald through its tangled syntax, and howlers and ad hominems abounded. Withal it had a lot of color and surprises, and folly rewarded was his constant theme.

He loved assault cases, especially those in which the victim battered his assailant, or a wife her husband. Calamitous lovers' quarrels were a

favorite fare; also the shenanigans of alcohol and the downfall of thieves. He made everything funny, even the catastrophic. No one note­ worthy appeared in his pages, only the normally anonymous who came

public grief. He was much given to psychological speculation on people's motives, their calculations of interest, their expectations.

So I chose the most likely case of the day a Peeping Tom and tried to imitate him exactly, assuming he meant to subsume my words under his byline.

It was a long, hard, discouraging night. I kept giving up, but at ten the next morning I finished a draft that suddenly seemed a fair likeness.

Exhilarated, proud and amazed, I hastened to present my three pages.

He sat down to read. I awaited his impressed approval, and my first official assignment. Gravely, kindly, pointing with his pen he criticized the piece in a perfectly sensible manner, chiding the oddities I had written in, deploring my every deviation from plain prose. He shook his

to

-

-

head. "Another year of school," he said, "and then come back. You're on the right track."

Boggled, I went home to my room on Hereford Street and sat on my S3

stoop in the sun. The hours passed in their imperceptible majesty while I pondered what to do. My regular neighbors came in and went out, came in and went out. High overhead a cluster of stone gargoyles strained into space. I watched the clouds crossing their black silhouettes. As the days

became weeks I discovered I hardly need leave the block. Within a minute's walk were a deli, a bar, grocery, laundromat, drug-news-and­

variety store, doctor's office and funeral parlor.

I began to feel furtive. When I went home for a visit I did not tell my parents I had quit school, and when anyone asked what I was doing I learned to answer, "Nothing," rather than risk eliciting further questions

such as: "How many stories can you write a week?" or "How much do you make?" or "Where do you hope it will lead?"

I was continuously chagrined at how little most people understood

what I took for granted as prime: books, writers and the writing of books. The public notion of literature itself seemed to have died like

religion and been revivified in technical sects like westerns, science fiction, murder mysteries. To say one wrote short stories was to give the impression that when one grew up they would become novels. Full of doubts, I set out to paper my room with rejections. The size of a wall, the smallness of a slip-even the most elegant, embossed and tinted-soon

discouraged the romance of failure, and one glum day I forswore the ceremonial bonfire I had planned for them and put them in the trash.

That night I caught a glimpse of myself in my window-a rich man's decadent son killing time.

Worse was the fear that while I should be getting experience of life I

writing or reading.

My nearest friend, a medical student named Ned Stein, played devil's

was

advocate cheerfully.

"Art is obsolete," he would say, locking his fingers behind his head,

leaning back in his rocker. "What use is it anyway? It can't comfort. It's ugly as sin. Once we get control of evolution and environment there won't be much call for it, I imagine."

He lived in a room almost as small as mine and did nothing but study.

He could sleep any number of minutes at will, then wake up, propor­ tionately rested. He loved everything-skiing, fishing, books, his girlfriend but he lived in the future, his mind aswarm with ideas for research projects once he had graduated. To him all problems were solvable by the human genius, and he had an eager happy look I -

envied.

For

me

mere

words

were

becoming intractable

enactments

that

replaced the world, and thus the fear of putting pen to paper set in, for 54

things once written could only be revised, never essentially changed, nor undone. 1 would spend a whole day on a passage, and then, excited by nightfall, hopeful of women, 1 would type out a version that unexpect­ edly satisfied me. 1 would make haste to celebrate, and next morning awake, head hammering, stomach afire, pick up my page and realize that it was still unreadable. Every phrase sounded like someone­ Hemingway, joyce or Graham Greene-and my views seemed theirs too, in pidgin admixture.

I scanned the want ads, worrying what to do that didn't entail desk­

sitting, and got more form rejections from ever-more remote little maga­ zines with problematical names like lceburg or Baloney. Their editors 1

conceived as elderly sages gravely weighing each page till I received a

condescending note with a returned manuscript and sensed its author was

my age.

My French landlady would come in and dust around me. Once, digging out my wastebasket, always packed solid with balled paper like snow frozen to ice, she inquired, "Mr. Skillings, are you a deesparite man?"

I squinted at her.

"I ahrsk if you are a dis-par-erre man," she said.

"Par-dean," I said, guessing she meant separate.

"You are a disparate man, 1 think," she nodded firmly as if she well knew the type, and I understood with amazement that she was saying

desperate.

I could read only slightly better than I could write. Afternoons I sat on my stoop and drudged through the famous intellectual works I hoped

would explain the modern plight. Everything seemed true and contra­

dictory. I caught glimpses, but half an hour later could not relate to myself what I had learned. Nevertheless, mutilating them with margina­ lia, I read tome after tome with greedy haste and added them to my shelf like trophies.

One day, as I was struggling with Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday Life, a little black girl came skipping along the sidewalk and stopped. I ignored her, and after a patient interval she shot me with a water pistol.

I lowered the book to examine her.

"My name is Geraldine," she said.

I bowed slightly and went back to reading.

She shot me again.

"Enough!" I said.

"Huh?" she said.

"I want to read."

55

"Why?" I closed Freud and scowled at her. She was exquisitely pretty, though I couldn't judge her age. She wore a pink dress and her hair was parted in

the middle, pulled back in pigtails and tied with pink ribbons. Her dark eyes burrowed into mine disconcertingly. She giggled and covered her

mouth.

"What are you laughing at?" I said.

"You," she said and ran off.

Freud was trying to explain the commonplace forgetting of names and I read another ten pages and then found I couldn't remember a word of it.

The next afternoon, about the same time, Geraldine came skipping

along and handed me a bouquet of dandelions.

I was touched and embarrassed, but finally I got them lodged in my shirt pocket.

"I love flowers," she said definitely.

Thereafter she stopped every afternoon on her way home from school to pester me. I began to think of it as my recess. At two-fifteen I would go down to sit in the sun and wait for Geraldine. We considered the

world and agreed that fire trucks ought to be orange not red, that ten­

gallon hats could hardly hold five quarts, and especially that school was a bore. And we played a game we invented called Watch Out! I had to submit to a blindfold while Geraldine hid the blue stone. We

had found it in the gutter, presumably dropped there, perhaps by a bird.

It looked like it might have come from some tropical beach. It was the size of a bead, with a deep luminous glow as if it had a light inside. We

puzzled over it. It seemed perfectly natural, yet was so flawless an elipse, so smooth, pure and complete in itself, that it almost had to be human­ but made for what made, purpose? It didn't seem to belong in a ring.

When it was hidden she freed my eyes and I hunted for it. Sometimes it was in a crevice on the steps, sometimes on a window-ledge or in one

of the crocuses that had thrust up in a corner of the ragged oblong of lawn.

If I went in the wrong direction she danced around me impatiently

insisting, "Cold! Colder! You're freezing!" But as I got close she shrilled, "Warm! Warmer! Hot!" and when at last I was looking right at it, pre­

tending not to see, she would shout, "Watch out!"

I would jump back with consternation and say, "If it had been a bear it

would have bit me!" and she always shrieked with undiminished glee.

One day I took her to the deli, whose proprietor I had dubbed The 56

Robber Baron because of his girth and prices. "Your girlfriend?" he

inquired, always a wag.

"Yes," I said. "And we want two ice-cream cones."

"Two ize gream genes," agreed The Robber Baron.

"Vanilla," said Geraldine.

"Large," said l.

Puffing and panting he made up the cones and passed them over the counter.

Geraldine inspected dubiously the two lumps of ice cream. "Awful small for large," she said.

His eyes blinked twice behind his glasses. Then he sighed and took the cones

back and put an extra half-scoop on both.

"Thank you, Mr. Baron," said Geraldine.

"You're welcome, little girl," he said, blinking solemnly back and forth between us. "But my name is not Baron: it is Papazoglu," "You told me his name was Robber Baron," Geraldine said severely as we went out.

"I don't charge I don't live," he called after us.

We carried the cones back to my stoop. I couldn't stop laughing with

chagrin.

"He's a nice man," she said calmly. "There's my brother."

A black boy with a lunch pail was going by across the street with long strides. He seemed not to have seen us and she made no effort to catch

his eye, but kept steadily licking her ice cream, twirling and twirling the cone, until he turned onto Commonwealth Avenue.

"Put on the blindfold," she commanded. I handed her the kerchief,

disquieted by this mute encounter, and by her now-familiar, deft fingers tying the knot behind my head.

"Little girls can be quite sexual," Ned Stein said, sitting on my cot in his white uniform. He was doing a two-week stint at an asylum for those who ate their excrement or thought they were prophets or never budged all day.

"And then she's colored," he went on. "That complicates the picture. I

believe the ambiguous dark lady is a stock figure of American literature.

"Of course it's natural for you to identify with minorities, since you see in them a reflection of yourself as superfluous pariah. Every act, every

attitude, every human bond, no matter how ordinary, is symbolic. Of course one

has to interpret. That's the trouble with literature: it can

only describe."

"What's the meaning of our hide-the-stone game?" I said.

57

"

'

'

,"

"I d on 't k now, h e sal. id "That' 'L er s I 00 k at It, at s very mteresnng.

"We leave it outside," I said. "Well-hidden."

"Never mind, we don't need it," he said. "Obviously it contains a magic secret."

When he left I recorded our conversation in my notebook.

The next day I made a rare trip home to visit my parents. My heart sank to see their gratitude. Mother plied me with my favorite dishes and

complained that I looked thin and Father tried to pry out of me my plans. They had faith in education as the road to success, I was unwilling to admit I had stopped going to class, and pleading examinations I returned to Boston.

I brought a beautiful pale-green edition of Rudyard Kipling's lust So

Stories, illustrated by the author. It had been the first book I had read through by myself. Mother taught it to me, her voice thrilling wonder­ fully on the constant refrain, "Listen and Hear and Attend, 0 my Best Beloved," and I wanted Geraldine to learn How the Alphabet Was Made and Why All Places Were Alike to the Cat that Walked by Himself.

"I just got out of school," she said, downcast.

I began to read: In the sea, once upon a time, 0 my Best Beloved, there was a Whale, and he ate fishes. He ate the starfish and the garfish, and the crab and the dab, and

the plaice and the dace, and the skate and his mate, and the mackereel and the pickereel, and the really truly twirlv-whirlv eel ...

I read on till I came to the Small 'Sture Fish, the last fish left, which

kept out of harm's way, just back of the Whale's ear, and finally lured him in his hunger to a shipwrecked mariner on a raft, a man of infinite­ resource-and-sagacity.

"What's that?" Geraldine interrupted.

"That means you can do anything, no matter how hard or strange," I said, "even if you've been swallowed whole by a whale," and I showed her, at the end of the story, when the mariner steps forth upon his natal shore, Kipling's enchanting picture of the great Cetacean trying to take of the revenge on the Small 'Sture Fish hiding under the Doorsills Equator.

Geraldine's eyes grew wide.

For the next two weeks and more, 0 Best Beloved, we read a story a day, and the hide-the-stone game was forgotten. I hurried through,

thinking to try Moby-Dick on her next. When we finished I gave her the book. I wanted to inscribe it with something memorable, but all my 58

ideas seemed false, and finally I only wrote, "For Geraldine, with love," and signed and dated it.

She didn't come the next day or the next, but on the third day I found in the downstairs hallway an unaddressed parcel wrapped in newspaper

and tied with twine. Inside was the book. The inscription had been blackened out with a felt-tip pen. Geraldine never came again and I surmised she was taking a different way home from school.

I kept hoping to see her somewhere and carried the blue stone in my pocket. 1 rolled it between thumb and finger as 1 walked my endless

walks. In the dark of my room 1 ascertained that in fact it did not glow; only the sun's rays made it luminous. Then to my awful disbelief 1 lost it through a hole in my pocket, and though I looked for weeks I looked in vain.

I went back to reading in the afternoon. One day the locked door of the deli bore a death notice. A week later the Robber Baron's brother, whom I had never seen before, younger but familiar in figure and hag,

gard face, served my morning coffee, alluding to a heart condition that had undone an uncle also. My landlady's other tenant, the girl who lived at hall's end and never spoke, even in passing on the stairs, began to have nightmares, and late at night I heard her faint wails and cries.

The Boston Strangler kept killing, kept not getting caught, and May blew into June with a billow of flowers and soft winds.

I started to wonder what would become of me, besides a bum. The past was a ruin beneath trees by a river. The future shrank to a blank

period on a page. The daily tribulations of the desk, intermitted by moments of epiphanous euphoria, the invariable disillusions, my invin­ cible amazement that such convictions should constantly prove false, the permanent incompletion of everything, seemed at times no substi­ tute for a life.

At the summer solstice I went to a party at a mortuary owned by the

father of one of Ned Stein's classmates in medical school. These hardy souls studied night and day and caroused when they could.

We cavorted around the coffins in the showroom, to the tunes of a

portable radio, then descended with our wine and our antics to a lower level, where the cadavers were embalmed.

Ozzie our host revealed these gruesome mysteries, and then the party reveled more than ever, and the levity flew high.

Only I was alone and ill at ease. I touched the cheek of a corpse in a blue suit laid out in a voluptuous bronze and satin casket, which had been rolled aside, for burial on the morrow.

Ozzie knew nothing about the man, when I asked, not even his name, 59

but the strange formal dignity of his worn, swarthy, eye-shut face, the

pathos of his red tie and gold ring, filled me with pity and gloom. My companions belonged to the world, to the stethoscope and scalpel, but already I suspected the secret zero behind all things, and an intolerable fear beset me. Then and there I decided to get a job.

I spent the summer, 0 Best Beloved, working in a warehouse, a sort of respite during which I read little, wrote less, but achieved the long-held ambition of ending my virginity with the help of one who told her best friend, "He ain't worth a cuss."

And the first story I ever wrote, the most rejected, rewritten and despaired of, reappeared in my mail slot transmuted into galley proofs.

I was extremely pleased till I realized that it would be the only thing I had ever published.

In September Ned Stein returned to town with a celebratory pint of Scotch. He had been apprenticed to a laboratory on the West Coast, infecting mice with cancer. He saw no reason why all disease might not be banished, theoretically speaking.

"Well," I allowed, "I finally sold a story."

"Hey! Great!" he yelled, jumped up and pumped my hand. I was amazed at his happiness. By the time the pint was gone we were reeling with plans.

"And did you ever see Geraldine again?" he asked.

I admitted the doleful truth, without telling him about losing the stone.

"I enjoyed having her around," I said with bitter braggadoccio. "It gave

something for my notebook."

"You were afraid of the future," he said.

He spoke so offhandedly, as if of someone else, that I caught a glimpse of the conversion I had undergone, an imperceptible progress of pleasure in the notion that nothing lasted unless it was written, that blood dried to ink, that I should become my works, and my printed works only-a dedication, Best Beloved, which led to so many of my later follies and me

regrets.

60

Carnal Acts Nancy Mairs

Inviting me to speak at her small, liberal arts college during Women's Week, a young woman set me a task: "We would be pleased," she wrote, "if you could talk on how you cope with your MS disability, and also how you discovered your voice as a writer." Oh, Lord, I thought in dismay, how am I going to pull this one off? How can I yoke two such disparate subjects into a coherent presentation, without doing violence to one, or the other, or both, or myself? This is going to take some fancy footwork, and my feet scarcely carry out the basic steps, let alone any­ thing elaborate.

To make matters worse, the assumption underlying each of her ques­ tions struck me as suspect. To ask how I cope with multiple sclerosis suggests that I do cope. Now, "to cope," Webster's Third tells me, is "to face or encounter and to find necessary expedients to overcome prob­ lems and difficulties." In these terms, I have to confess, I don't feel like much of a coper. I'm likely to deal with my problems and difficulties by squawking and flapping around like that hysterical chicken who was convinced the sky was falling. Never mind that in my case the sky really is falling. In response to a clonk on the head, regardless of its origin, one might comport oneself with a grace and courtesy I generally lack.

As for "finding" my voice, the implication is that it was at one time lost or missing. But I don't think it ever was. Ask my mother, who will tell you a little wearily that I was speaking full sentences by the time I was a year old and could never be silenced again. As for its being a writer's voice, it seems to have become one early on. Ask Mother again. At the age of eight I rewrote the Trojan War, she will say, and what Nestor was about to do to Helen at the end doesn't bear discussion in polite company.

61

Faced with these uncertainties, I took my own teacherly advice, some­

thing, I must confess, I don't always do. "If an idea is giving you trouble," I tell my writing students, "put it on the back burner and let it simmer while you do something else. Go to the movies. Reread a stack of old love letters. Sit in your history class and take detailed notes on the Teapot Dome Scandal. If you've got your idea in mind, it will go on cooking at some level no matter what else you're doing." "I've had an idea for my documented essay on the back burner," one of my students once

scribbled in her journal, "and I think it's just boiled over!"

I can't claim to have reached such a flashpoint. But in the weeks I've had the themes "disability" and "voice" sitting around in my head, they seem to have converged on their own, without my having to wrench them together and bind them with hoops of tough rhetoric. They are

related, indeed interdependent, with an intimacy that has for some reason remained, until now, submerged below the surface of my atten­ tion. Forced to juxtapose them, I yank them out of the depths, a little startled to discover how they were intertwined down there out of sight.

This kind of discovery can unnerve you at first. You feel like a giant hand that, pulling two swimmers out of the water, two separate heads bobbling on the iridescent swells, finds the two bodies below, legs coiled around each other, in an ecstacy of copulation. You don't quite know where to turn your eyes.

Perhaps the place to start illuminating this erotic connection between who I am and how I speak lies in history. I have known that I have multiple sclerosis for about sixteen years now, though the disease proba­ bly started long before. The hypothesis is that the disease process, in which the protective covering of the nerves in the brain and spinal cord is eaten away and replaced by scar tissue, "hard patches," is caused by an auto-immune reaction to a slow-acting virus. Research suggests that I was infected by this virus, which no one has ever seen and which therefore, technically, doesn't even "exist," between the ages of four and fifteen. In effect, living with this mysterious mechanism feels like having your present self, and the past selves it embodies, haunted by a capri­ cious and mean-spirited ghost, unseen except for its footprints, which trips you even when you're watching where you're going, knocks glass­ ware out of your hand, squeezes the urine out of your bladder before you reach the bathroom, and weights your whole body with a weariness no amount course

of rest can relieve. An alien invader must be at work. But of

it's not. It's your own body. That is, it's you.

This, for me, has been the most difficult aspect of adjusting to a 62

chronic incurable degenerative disease: the fact that it has rammed my "self" straight back into the body I had been trained to believe it could, acts and aspirations, rise above. The Western

through high-minded tradition of distinguishing the body from the mind and/or the soul is so ancient as to have become part of our collective unconscious, if one is

inclined to believe in such a noumenon, or at least to have become an unquestioned element in the social instruction we impose upon infants from birth, in much the same way we inculcate, without reflection, the gender distinctions "female" and "male." I have a body, you are likely to A say if you talk about embodiment at all; you don't say, I am a body.

body is a separate entity possessible by the "I"; the "I" and the body aren't, as the copula would make them, grammatically indistinguish­ able.

To widen the rift between the self and the body, we treat our bodies as subordinates, inferior in moral status. Open association with them shames us. In fact, we treat our bodies with very much the same distance

and ambivalence women have traditionally received from men in our culture. Sometimes this treatment is benevolent, even respectful, but all

often it is tainted by outright sadism. I think of the body-building regimens that have become popular in the last decade or so, with the too

complicated vacillations they reflect between self-worship and self­ degradation: joggers and aerobic dancers and weightlifters all beating their bodies into shape. "No pain, no gain," the saying goes. "Feel the burn." Bodies get treated like wayward women who have to be shown who's boss, even if it means slapping them around a little. I'm not for a moment opposing rugged exercise here. I'm simply questioning the spirit in which it is often undertaken.

Since, as Helene Cixous points out in her essay on women and writ­ ing, "Sorties," thought has always worked "[t]hrough dual, hierarchical oppositions,"! the mind/body split cannot possibly be innocent. The utterance of an "I" immediately calls into being its opposite, the "not-I," Western discourse being unequipped to conceive "that which is neither 'I' nor 'not-I' "; "that which is both 'I' and 'not-I' "; or some other permuta­ tion which language doesn't permit me to speak. The "not-I" is, by definition, other. And we've never been too fond of the other. We prefer the same. We tend to ascribe to the other those qualities we prefer not to associate with our selves: It is the hidden, the dark, the secret, the 1. Helene Cixous, "Sorties," in The Newly Born Women: Theory and History of

Literature, Volume 24, trans. Betsy Wing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), p. 64.

63

shameful. Thus, when the "I" takes possession of the body, it makes the

body into an other, direct object of a transitive verb, with all the other's repudiated and potentially dangerous qualities.

At the least, then, the body had best be viewed with suspicion. And a woman's body is particularly suspect, since so much of it is in fact hidden, dark, secret, carried about on the inside where, even with the aid of a speculum, one can never perceive all of it in the plain light of day, a graspable whole. I, for one, have never understood why anyone would want to carryall that delicate stuff around on the outside. It would make you awfully anxious, I should think, put you constantly on the defensive, create a kind of siege mentality that viewed all other beings, even your own kind, as threats to be warded off with spears and guns and atomic missiles. And you'd never get to experience that inward dreaming that comes when your flesh surrounds all your treasures, holding them close, like a sturdy shuttered house. Be my personal skep­ ticism as it may, however, as a cultural woman I bear just as much shame

for my dark, enfolded secrets. Let the word for my external genitals tell the tale: my pudendum, from the Latin infinitive as

any

woman

meaning "to be ashamed."

It's bad enough to bear your genitals like a sealed envelope bearing the cipher that, once unlocked, might loose the chaotic flood of female

pleasure-jouissance, the French call it-upon the world-of-the-same. But I have an additional reason to feel shame for my body, less explicitly connected with its sexuality: It is a crippled body. Thus it is doubly other, not merely by the homo-sexual standards of patriarchal culture but by the standards of physical desirability erected for every body in our world. Men, who are by definition exonerated from shame in sexual terms (this doesn't mean that an individual man might not experience sexual shame, of course; remember that I'm talking in general about discourse, not folks), may-more likely must-experience bodily shame if they are crippled. I won't presume to speak about the details of their experience, however. I don't know enough. I'll just go on telling what it's like to be a crippled woman, trusting that, since we're fellow creatures who've been living together for some thousands of years now, much of my experience will resonate with theirs.

I was never a beautiful woman, and for that reason I've spent most of my life (together with probably at least ninety-five percent of the female

population of the United States) suffering from the shame of falling short of an unattainable standard. The ideal woman of my generation was perky, I think you'd say, rather than gorgeous. Blond hair pulled into a bouncing ponytail. Wide blue eyes, a turned-up nose with maybe ...

64

a

scattering of golden freckles across it, a small mouth with full lips over

straight white teeth. Her breasts were large but well, harnessed high on her chest; her tiny waist flared to hips just wide enough to give the crinolines under her circle skirt a starting outward push. In terms of personality, she was outgoing, even bubbly, not pensive or mysterious.

Her milieu was the front fender of a white Corvette convertible, sur, rounded by teasing crewcuts, dressed in black flats, a sissy blouse, and the letter sweater of the Corvette owner. Needless to say, she never

missed a prom.

Ten years or so later, when I first noticed the symptoms that would be diagnosed as MS, I was probably looking my best. Not beautiful still, but the ideal had shifted enough so that my flat chest and narrow hips gave

elegantly attentuated shape, set off by a thick mass of long, straight, shining hair. I had terrific legs, long and shapely, revealed nearly to the pudendum by the fashionable miniskirts and hot pants I adopted with more enthusiasm than delicacy of taste. Not surprisingly, I suppose, during this time I involved myself in several pretty torrid love me

an

affairs.

The beginning of MS wasn't too bad. The first symptom, besides the

pernicious fatigue that had begun to devour me, was "foot drop," the

inability to raise my left foot at the ankle. As a consequence, I'd started to limp, but I could still wear high heels, and a bit of a limp might seem more intriguing than repulsive. After a few months, when the doctor suggested a cane, a crippled friend gave me quite an elegant wood,and, silver one, which I carried with a fair amount of panache. The real blow to my self-image came when I had to get a brace. As braces go, it's not bad: lightweight plastic molded to my foot and leg, fitting down into an ordinary shoe and secured around my calf by a Velcro strap. It reduces my limp and, more important, the danger of tripping and falling. But it meant the end of high heels. And it's ugly. Not as ugly as I think it is, I gather, but still pretty ugly. It signified for me, and perhaps still does, the permanence and irreversibility of my condition. The brace makes my MS concrete and forces me to wear it on the outside. As soon as I

strapped the brace on, I climbed into trousers and stayed there (though not in the same trousers, of course). The idea of going around with my bare brace hanging out seemed almost as indecent as exposing my

breasts. Not until 1984, soon after I won the Western States Book Award for poetry, did I put on a skirt short enough to reveal my plasti­ cized leg. The connection between winning a writing award and baring my brace is not merely fortuitous; being affirmed as a writer really did embolden me. Since then, I've grown so accustomed to wearing skirts

65

that I don't think about my brace any more than I think about my cane.

I've incorporated them, I suppose: made them, in their necessity, insen­ sate

but fundamental parts of my body.

Meanwhile, I had to adjust to the most outward and visible sign of all, three-wheeled electric scooter called an Amigo. This lessens my fatigue and increases my range terrifically, but it also shouts out to the world, a

"Here is a woman who can't stand on her own two feet." At the same

time, paradoxically, it renders me invisible, reducing me to the height of

seven-year-old, with a child's attendant low status. "Would she like smoking or nonsmoking?" the gate agent assigning me a seat asks the friend traveling with me. In crowds I see nothing but buttocks. I can tell you the name of every type of designer jeans ever sold. The wearers, eyes front, trip over me and fall across my handlebars into my lap. "Hey!" I want to shout to the lofty world. "Down here! There's a person down here!" But I'm not, by their standards, quite a person anymore.

My self-esteem diminishes further as age and illness strip from me the features that made me, for a brief while anyway, a good-looking, even sexy, young woman. No more long, bounding strides: I shuffle along with the timid gait I remember observing, with pity and impatience, in the little old ladies at Boston's Symphony Hall on Friday afternoons. No more lithe, girlish figure: my belly sags from the loss of muscle tone, which also creates all kinds of intestinal disruptions, hopelessly humiliat­ ing in a society in which excretory functions remain strictly unspeak­ able. No more sex, either, if society had its way. The sexuality of the disabled so repulses most people that you can hardly get a doctor, let alone a member of the general population, to consider the issues it raises. Cripples simply aren't supposed to Want It, much less Do It. Fortunately, I've got a husband with a strong libido and a weak sense of social propriety, or else I'd find myself perforce practicing a vow of chastity I never cared to take. a

Afflicted by the general shame of having a body at all, and the specific shame of having one weakened and misshapen by disease, I ought not to be able to hold my head up in public. And yet I've gotten into the habit

of holding my head up in public, sometimes under excruciating circum­ stances. Recently, for instance, I had to give a reading at the University of Arizona. Having smashed three of my front teeth in a fall onto the

porch, I was in the process of getting them crowned, and the temporary crowns flew out during dinner right before the reading. What to do? I wanted, of course, to rush home and hide till the dental office opened the next morning. But I couldn't very well concrete floor of my screened

66

break my word at this last moment. So, looking like Hansel and Gretel's witch, and lisping worse than the Wife of Bath, I got up on stage and read. Somehow, over the years, I've learned how to set shame aside and do what I have to do.

Here, I think, is where my "voice" comes in. Because, in spite of my demurral at the beginning, I do in fact cope with my disability at least some of the time. And I do so, I think, by speaking about it, and about the whole experience of being a body, specifically a female body, out loud, in a clear, level tone that drowns out the frantic whispers of my mother, my grandmothers, all the other trainers of wayward childish tongues: "Sssh! Sssh! Nice girls don't talk like that. Don't mention sweat.

Don't mention menstrual blood. Don't ask what your grandfather does

his business trips. Don't laugh so loud. You sound like a loon. Keep your voice down. Don't tell. Don't tell. Don't tell." Speaking out loud is

on

an

antidote to shame.

I want to distinguish clearly here between "shame," as I'm using the

word, and "guilt" and "embarrassment," which, though equally painful, are not similarly poisonous. Guilt arises from performing a forbidden act

failing to perform a required one. In either case, the guilty person can, through reparation, erase the offense and start fresh. Embarrassment, less opprobrious though not necessarily less distressing, is generally caused by acting in a socially stupid or awkward way. When I trip and sprawl in public, when I wet myself, when my front teeth fly out, I feel horribly embarrassed, but, like the pain of childbirth, the sensation blurs and dissolves in time. If it didn't, every child would be an only child, and no one would set foot in public after the onset of puberty,

or

when embarrassment erupts like a geyser and bathes one's whole life in its bitter stream. Shame may attach itself to guilt or embarrassment,

complicating their resolution, but it is not the same emotion. I feel guilt or embarrassment for something I've done; shame, for who I am. I may stop doing bad or stupid things, but I can't stop being. How then can I help but be ashamed? Of the three conditions, this is the one that cracks and stifles my voice.

I can subvert its power, I've found, by acknowledging who I am, shame

and all, and, in doing so, raising what was hidden, dark, secret about my

life into the plain light of shared human experience. What we aren't

permitted to utter holds us, each isolated from every other, in a kind of solipsistic thrall. Without any way to check our reality against anyone else's, we assume our fears and shortcomings are ours alone. One of the strangest consequences of publishing a collection of personal essays called Plaintext has been the steady trickle of letters and telephone calls 67

saying essentially, in a tone of unmistakable relief, "Oh, me too! Me too!"

It's as though the part I thought was solo has turned out to be a chorus.

But none of us was singing loud enough for the others to hear.

Singing loud enough demands a particular kind of voice, I think. And I was wrong to suggest, at the beginning, that I've always had my voice. I have indeed always had a voice, but it wasn't this voice, the one with which I could call up and transform my hidden self from a naughty girl into a woman talking directly to others like herself. Recently, in the process of writing a new book, a memoir entitled Remembering the Bone House, I've had occasion to read some of my early writing, from college, high school, even junior high. It's not an experience I recommend to anyone susceptible to shame. Not that the writing was all that bad. I was surprised at how competent a lot of it was. Here was a writer who already knew precisely how the language worked. But the voice oh, the voice was all wrong: maudlin, rhapsodic, breaking here and there into little shrieks-almost, you might say, hysterical. It was a voice that had shucked off its own body, its own homely life of Cheerios for ...

breakfast and seventy pages of Chaucer to read before the exam on

Tuesday and a planter's wart growing painfully on the ball of its foot, and reeled now wraithlike through the air, seeking incarnation only as the heroine who enacts her doomed love for the tall, dark, mysterious stranger. If it didn't get that part, it wouldn't play at all.

Among all these overheated and vaporous imaginings, I must have retained some shred of sense, because I stopped writing prose entirely, except for scholarly papers, for nearly twenty years. I even forgot, not exactly that I had written prose, but at least what kind of prose it was.

So when I needed to take up the process again, I could start almost fresh, using the vocal range I'd gotten used to in years of asking the waiter in the Greek restaurant for an extra anchovy on my salad, congratulating the puppy on making a puddle outside rather than inside the patio door, pondering with my daughter the vagaries of female orgasm, saying good­ bye to my husband, and hello, and goodbye, and hello.

This new voice thoughtful, affectionate, often amused was essential -

-

because what I needed to write about when I returned to prose was an attempt I'd made

not

long before to kill myself, and suicide simply

refuses to be spoken of authentically in high-flown romantic language.

It's too ugly. Too shameful. Too strictly a bodily event. And, yes, too funny as well, though people are sometimes shocked to find humor

shoved up against suicide. They don't like the incongruity. But let's face

it, life (real life, I mean, not the edited-for-television version) is a cacoph­ onous

68

affair from start to finish. I might have wanted to portray my

suicidal self as a languishing maiden, too exquisitely sensitive to sustain life's wounding pressures on her soul. (1 didn't want to, as a matter of fact, but I might have.) The truth remained, regardless of my desires, that when my husband lugged me into the emergency room, my hair matted, my face swollen and gray, my nightgown streaked with blood

and urine, I was no frail and tender spirit. I was a body, and one in a hell of a mess.

1 "should" have kept quiet about that experience. I know the rules of

polite discourse. I should have kept my shame, and the nearly lethal sense of isolation and alienation it brought, to myself. And I might have, except for something the psychiatrist in the emergency room had told my husband. "You might as well take her home," he said. "If she kill herself, she'll do it no matter how many precautions we take. They always do." They always do. I was one of "them," whoever wants to

they were. I was, in this context anyway, not singular, not aberrant, but typical. I think it was this sense of commonality with others I didn't even know, a sense of being returned somehow, in spite of my appalling act, to the human family, that urged me to write that first essay, not merely speaking out but calling out, perhaps. "Here's the way I am," it said.

"How about you?" And the answer came, as I've said: "Me too! Me too!"

This has been the kind of work I've continued to do: to scrutinize the details of my own experience and to report what I see, and what I think about what I see, as lucidly and accurately as possible. But because feminine experience has been immemorially devalued and repressed, I find this task terrifying. "Every woman has known the beginning to speak aloud," Cixous writes, "heart beating as if to break, occasionally falling into loss of language, ground and language

continue

to

torture of

slipping out from under her, because for woman speaking-even just opening her mouth in public is something rash, a transgression."

The voice I summon up wants to crack, to whisper, to trail back into silence. "I'm sorry to have nothing more than this to say," it wants to apologize. "I shouldn't be taking up your time. I've never fought in a war, or even in a school-yard free-for-all. I've never tried to see who could piss -

farthest up the barn wall. I've never even been to a whorehouse. All the

important formative experiences have passed me by. I was raped once.

I've borne two children. Milk trickling out of my breasts, blood trickling from between my legs. You don't want to hear about it. Sometimes I'm too scared to leave my house. Not scared

of anything, just scared: mouth

2. Ibid., p. 92.

69

dry, bowels writhing. When the fear got really bad, they locked me up for six months, but that was years ago. I'm getting old now. Misshapen, too. I don't blame you if you can't get it up. No one could possibly desire a body like this. It's not your fault. It's mine.

Forgive me. I didn't mean to start crying. I'm sorry sorry sorry An easy solace to the anxiety of speaking aloud: this slow subsidence beneath the waves of shame, back into what Cixous calls "this body that has been worse than confiscated, a body replaced with a disturbing stranger, sick or dead, who so often is a bad influence, the cause and place of inhibitions. By censuring the body," she goes on, "breath and speech are censored at the same time."! But I am not going back, not going under one more time. To do so would demonstrate a failure of nerve far worse than the depredations of MS have caused. Paradoxically, losing one sort of nerve has given me another. No one is going to take my breath away. No one is going to leave me speechless. To be silent is to comply with the standard of feminine grace. But my crippled body already violates all notions of feminine grace. What more have I got to lose? I've gone beyond shame. I'm shameless, you might say. You know, as in "shameless hussy"? A woman with her bare brace and her tongue hanging out. "

...

...

....

I've "found" my voice, then, just where it ought to have been, in the

body-warmed breath escaping my lungs and throat. Forced by the exi­ gencies of physical disease to embrace my self in the flesh, I couldn't write bodiless prose. The voice is the creature of the body that produces it. I speak as a crippled woman. At the same time, in the utterance I redeem both "cripple" and "woman" from the shameful silences by which I have often felt surrounded, contained, set apart; I give myself perrnis­ sion to live openly among others, to reach out for them, stroke them with fingers and sighs. No body, no voice; no voice, no body. That's what I know in my bones.

3. Ibid., p. 97.

70

Writing from the Darkness Bell Hooks

I remember childhood as time in anguish, as a dark time-not darkness in any sense that is stark, bleak or empty but as a rich space of knowl­

edge, struggle and awakening. We seemed bound to the earth then, as though like other living things our roots were so deep in the soil of our surroundings there was no way to trace beginnings. We lived in the county, in a space between city and country, a barely occupied space.

Houses stood at a distance from one another, few of them beautiful; always a sense of isolation and unbearable loneliness hovered about them. We lived on hilly land, trees and wild honeysuckle hiding the flat spaces where gardens grew. 1 do not remember darkness there. It was the blackness enveloping earth and sky out in the country at Daddy Jerry's and Mama Willie's house that gave feeling and meaning to darkness.

There it seemed textured, as thought it were velvet cloth folded in many layers. That darkness had to be confronted as we made our way before bedtime to the outhouse. "No light necessary," Granddaddy would say.

"There is light in darkness, you just have to find it." That was early childhood. From then on 1 was terribly lost in an inner darkness as deep and thick as the blackness of those nights. I could not find my way or see the light there.

I was a child and his words had given me confidence. 1 believed with him that there was light in darkness waiting to be found. Later unable to find my way, I began to feel uncertain, displaced, estranged even. This was

the condition of my spirit when I decided to be a writer, to seek for

that light in words. No one understood. Coming from country black

folks, seemingly always old, folks with the spirit of the backwoods, odd habits and odd ways, I had no way to share this longing-this ache to write words. In our world there was an intense passionate place for 71

telling stories. It was really some big-time thing to be able to tell a good story, to, as Cousin 80 would say, "call out the hell in words." Writing had no such place. Writing the old people could not do even if they had been lucky enough to learn how. Folks wrote only when they had to; it was an awesome task, a burden.

Making lists or writing letters could anguish the spirit. And who would anguish the spirit unnecessarily?

Searching for a space where writing could be understood, I asked for a diary. I remember early on getting the imitation-leather red or green books at holiday times, with "Diary" written on them in bright gold letters, and of course there were those ever-so-tiny gold keys, two of them. Keys which were inevitably lost. Whole diaries gone because I refused to pry them open, not wanting what was private to be accessible.

Confessional writing in diaries was acceptable in our family because it

writing that was never meant to be read by anyone. Keeping a daily diary did not mean that I was seriously called to write, that I would ever write for a reading public. This was "safe" writing. It would (or so my was

parents thought) naturally be forsaken as one grew into womanhood. I shared with them this assumption. Such writing was seen as a necessary stage but only that. It was for me the space for critical reflection, where I

struggled to understand myself and the world around me, that crazy world of family and community, that painful world. I could say there what was hurting me, how I felt about things, what I hoped for. I could be angry there with no threat of punishment. I could "talk back." Noth­ ing had to be concealed. I could hold onto myself there.

However much the realm of diary-keeping has been a female experi­ ence that has often kept us closeted writers, away from the act of writing as authorship, it has most assuredly been a writing act that intimately connects the art of expressing one's feeling on the written page with the construction of self and identity, with the effort to be fully self­ actualized. This precious powerful sense of writing as a healing place where our souls can speak and unfold has been crucial to woman's development of a counter-hegemonic experience of creativity within patriarchal culture. Significantly, diary writing has not been tradition­ ally seen by literary scholars as subversive autobiography, as a form of authorship that challenges conventional notions about the primacy of confessional writing as mere documentation (for women most often a record of our sorrows). Yet in the many cases where such writing has enhanced our struggle to be self-defining it emerges as a narrative of

resistance, as writing which enables us to experience both self-discovery and self-recovery.

Faced with the radical possibility of self-transformation that confes-

72

sional writing can evoke, many females cease to write. Certainly, when I was a was younger I did not respond to the realization that diary writing place where I could critically confront the "self" with affirmation. At

diary writing was threatening. For me the confessions written there were testimony, documenting realities I was not always able to face. My response to this sense of threat was to destroy the diaries. That destruction was linked to my fear that growing up was not supposed to be hard and difficult, a time of anguish and torment. Somehow the diaries were another excusing voice declaring that I was not "normal." I destroyed that writing and I wanted to destroy that tormented and struggling self. I did not understand, then, the critical difference between confession as an act of displacement and confession as the beginning stage in a process of self-transformation. Before this under­ standing, the diary as mirror was a place where that part of myself I could not accept or love could be named, touched and then destroyed.

Such writing was release. It took the terror and pain away that was all.

It was not then a place of reconciliation and reclamation.

None of the many diaries I wrote growing up exist today. They were all destroyed. Years ago when I began a therapeutic process of retrospec­ tive self-examination, I really missed this writing and mourned the loss.

Since I use journals now as a way to engage in critical self-reflection, confrontation and challenge, I know that I would be able to know myself differently were I able to read back, to remember with that writing. Those years of sustained diary writing were crucial to my later development as a writer, for it was this realm of confessional writing that enabled me to find a voice. Still there was a frightening tension between the discovery of that voice and the assumption that, though expressed, it would then need to be concealed, contained, hidden and ultimately destroyed. While I had been given permission to keep diaries, it was writing that my family began to see as dangerous when I began to express ideas considered strange and alien. Diaries provided a space for me to develop an autonomous voice and that meant such writing, once sanctioned, became suspect. It was impressed upon my consciousness that having a voice was dangerous. This was reinforced when my sisters would find and read my diaries, then deliver them to our mother as evidence that I was truly a mad person, an alien, a stranger in their

times

-

household.

This tension between writing as an expression of my longing to emerge as autonomous

creative thinker and the fear that such expression and

any other manifestation of independence would mean madness, an end to life, created barriers between me and those written words. I was afraid

73

of their power and yet I needed them. Writing was the only space where I could express myself freely. It was crucial to my fragile sense of well­

being. I was often the family scapegoat-persecuted, ridiculed, I was often punished. It was as though I lived in a constant state of siege, subject to unprovoked and unexpected terrorist attacks. I lived in dread.

Nothing I did was ever right. That constant experience of estrangement was deeply saddening. I was brokenhearted. Writing was the healing place where I could collect the bits and pieces, where I could put them together again. It was the sanctuary, the safe place. Yet I could not make that writing part of an overall process of self-recovery. I was able to use it constructively only as an outlet for suppressed feeling. Knowledge that the writing could have enabled transformation was blocked by feelings of shame. I was ashamed that I needed this sanctuary in words. Con­

fronting parts of my self there was humiliating. To me that confession was a process of unmasking, stripping the soul. It made me naked and vulnerable. Even though the experience was cleansing and redemptive, it was a process I could not fully affirm or celebrate. Feelings of shame compelled me to destroy what I had written. Diary writing, as a record of confession, brought me face to face with the shadow-self, the one we spend lifetimes avoiding. I was ashamed that this "me" existed. I read my words. They were mirrors. I looked at the self represented there.

Destroying the diaries, I destroyed that shadow. There was no trace of her, nothing that could bear witness. I could not embrace that inner

darkness, find the light in it. I could not hold that being or love her.

Undoubtedly this process of destroying the diaries, and the self repre­ sented there, kept me from attempting suicide. There were times when I felt that death was the only way I could escape that inner darkness. I remember even now how much I longed to be rid of the wounded me, that secret shadow-self. In Lyn Cowan's Jungian discussion of maso­ chism she describes that

moment

when

we

learn

to

"embrace the

shadow" as a necessary stage in the psychic journey leading to recovery and the restoration of well-being. She comments: "[ung said the shadow connects an individual to the collective unconscious, and beyond that animal life at its most primitive level. The shadow is the tunnel, channel, or connector through which one reaches the deepest, most elemental layers of psyche." Confronting that shadow-self can both to

humiliate and humble. Humiliation in the face of aspects of the self we think are unsound, inappropriate, ugly or downright nasty, blocks one's

ability to see the possibility for transformation that such a facing of one's reality promises.

That sense of profound shame evoked whenever I looked at the 74

shadow-self portrayed in the writing was a barrier. It kept me stuck in the woundedness. Even though acknowledging that self in writing was a necessary anchor enabling me to keep a hold on life, it was not enough.

That shame had to be let go before I could fully emerge as a writer because it was there whenever I tried to create, whether the work was confessional or not. When I left home to attend college I carried with me the longing to write. I knew then that I would need to work through these feelings of shame. One of the early journal entries from that time

reads: Writing, and the hope of writing pulls me back from the edges of despair. I believe insanity and despair are at times one and the same. And I hear the voices of my past telling me that I will go crazy, that I will end up in a mental

institution-alone. I remember my oldest sister laughing, telling me that no one would visit me

there, that "girl, you ought to stop." Stop thinking. Stop dreaming. Stop trying to experience and understand life. Stop living in the world of the mind. That day I had sat a hot iron on my arm. I was ironing our father's pajamas. They were collectively mocking me. I asked them to leave me alone. I pleaded with them, "Why can't I just be left alone to be me?" I did not want to be molded. I was something. And when the hot iron came down on my arm I did not feel it. I was momentarily carried away, pleading with them. I stood there in the hallway ironing and even when the stinging pain was there I continued to iron. I stood there struggling to hide the pain and sorrow, not wanting to cry, not wanting them to know how much it hurt. I was trying to be brave. I know now that an anguished heart is never a brave heart. It's like some wounded body part that keeps bleeding, that can't stop itself. Writing eases the anguish. It is my connection.

Through it and with it I transcend despair.

Writing, whether confessional prose or poetry, was irrevocably linked to maintain well-being. I began writing poetry about the same time that I began keeping diaries. Poetry writing was radically different. Unlike confessional prose, one could use lan­ in guage writing poetry to mask feelings, to hide the experiential reality leading one to create. Poems on the subject of death and dying did not necessarily make explicit to the reader that I was at times struggling with the issue of whether to stay alive. Poetry writing as creative process was intimately linked with the experience of transcendence. Unlike the diary in my mind with the effort

writing, which became a space where I confronted pain, poetry was the way to move beyond it. I never destroyed poems because I felt there was

nothing revealed there about the "me of me."

Then and now I remain a great admirer of Emily Dickinson, often

marveling that she as living presence seemed always absent from her poems. To me they do not stand as a record of her experience but more

75

as expressions of what 1 believe she felt was a fitting and worthy subject for poetry. Her poems are masks, together creating a collective drama

where the self remains in the shadows, dark and undiscovered. It is difficult to look behind the poems, to see, to enter those shadows.

Poetry writing may have been just that for Dickinson, the making of an

enclosure-the poem as wall, a screen shielding her from the shadow­ self. Perhaps there was for her no safe place, nowhere that the unnamed could be voiced, remembered, held. Even if it is there in the poems, we as readers cannot necessarily know or find it. What is clear is that

writing was for Dickinson a way to keep a hold on life.

Writing that keeps us away from death, from despair, does not neces­

sarily help us to be well. Anne Sexton could confess, "I am trying a flat mask to hold my sanity up my life is falling through a sieve" and then "the thing that seems to be saving me is the poetry." I remember her, Sylvia Plath, and not so well-known black women poets Georgia Douglass Johnson and Clarissa Scott Delany, because they all struggled with dangerous melancholy and killing despair. We know that poetry does not save us, that writing does not always keep us away from death, that the sorrow of wounds that have never healed, excruciating self­ doubt, or overwhelming melancholy often crushes the spirit, making it impossible to stay alive. Julia Kristeva speaks about woman's struggle to find and sustain creative voice in the chapter "I Who Want Not To Be," ...

which is part of the introduction to About Chinese Women. There she addresses the tension between our longing to "speak as women," to have

being that is strong enough to bear the identity writer, and the coercive imposition of a feminine identity within patriarchy which opposes such being. Within patriarchy woman has no legitimate voice. Her voice is constructed in either complicity or resistance. If the choice is not radical then we speak only what the patriarchal culture would have us say. If we do not speak as liberators we collapse under the weight of this effort to speak within patriarchal confines or lose ourselves without dying. Kris­ teva recalls the Russian poet Maria T svetaieva, who hanged herself, writing: "I don't want to die. I want not to be." Her words echo my

longing to be rid of the shadow-self, the "me of me."

Writing enables us to be more fully alive only if it is not a terrain wherein we leave the self-the shadows behind, escaping. Anne Sexton

reiterated again and again in her letters that it was crucial that the writer

keep a hold on life by learning to face reality: "I think that writers must try not to avoid knowing what is happening. Everyone has somewhere the ability to mask the events of pain and sorrow But the creative this mechanism anymore than they have to in person must not use ....

76

order to keep breathing." A distinction must be made between that writing which enables us to hold onto life even as we are clinging to old hurts and wounds and that writing which offers to us a space where we able to confront reality in such a way that we live more fully. Such writing is not an anchor that we mistakenly cling to so as not to drown. are

It is writing that truly rescues, that enables us to reach the shore, to recover.

To become a writer I needed to confront that shadow-self, to learn ways to accept and care for that aspect of me

as

part of a process of

healing and recovery. I longed to create a groundwork of being that could affirm my struggle to be a whole self and my effort to write. To fulfill this longing I had to search for that shadow-self and reclaim it.

That search was part of a process of long inward journeying. Much of it took place in writing. I spent more than ten years writing journals,

unearthing and restoring memories of that shadow-self, connecting the past with present being. This writing enabled me to look myself over in a new way, without the shame I had experienced earlier. It was no longer an act of displacement. I was not trying to be rid of the shadows, I wanted instead to enter them. That encounter enabled me to learn the self anew in ways that allowed transformation in consciousness and

being. Resurrecting the shadow-self, I could finally embrace it, and by so doing come back to myself.

That woundedness which I was once so ashamed to recognize became for me a place of recovery, the dark deeps into which I could enter to

find both the source of that pain and the means to heal. Only in fully

knowing the wound could I discover ways to attend to it. Writing was a way of knowing. After what seemed like endless years of journal writing about the past, I wrote a memoir of my girlhood. It was indeed the culmination of this effort to accept the past and yet surrender its hold This writing was redemptive. I no longer need to make this journey again and again. on me.

77

On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother Jay Cantor

When I think about the story of my writing life, I like to use clinical names with

their somber consulting-room air and almost scientific pres­

tige. Hysteric, depressive, obsessive, schizoid. I try the names on my charac­ ter, the way one puts on astrological signs, or medieval humors or those brief descriptions of Chinese mythologies-born in the year of the Rat, you

should marry a Dragon-on the tea-stained placemat of the local

Szechwan restaurant. In the clinical names or the placemat's mythology, I'm looking for a clue to my fate-not who my wife should be, but what my next story should be, so that its theme might be mine, inevitably, to

write. I think of these clinical types were

as

if they named characters who

put under a curse by the uninvited guest at the christening, or the

troll who stole one's child in return for the secret to weaving flax into

gold. And, as in a fairy tale, the curse can be turned into a task-find the way through the forest, the name of the troll, the memory of the texture of your mother's cloth coat. The task of

answering the question

is one's fate-the story that is profound because you have to tell it-and so

the curse becomes a question; a fate, is, for a writer, a blessing.

Each clinical type, of course, has its own question to pursue, as it

wholeness? Health? Even to say "health" sounds too grand. Perhaps health is just to live one's own question fully, to find new moves towards

...

facets to one's question at each stage of life-and not, simply, boringlv, repeat oneself.

Let me show you what I mean by telling you the fairy tale of the hysteric, the character with which Freud began the creation of psychoa­ to

nalysis. Theatrical in the way he or she presents herself, the hysteric demands attention. (He or she-for Freud discovered that hysteria wasn't just a privilege of women, a matter of organs, of a wandering 78

womb, but a matter of fantasies about organs, imaginings that either men or women might have.) Perhaps the future hysteric's parents, that crucial out-of-town tryout for adulthood, weren't a very attentive audi­ ence.

So they made their mad gestures broader. Now the body is pushed

up; pumped out; low cut; heavily advertised. They mean to attract, but

if you are attracted, you find that the same drama simply repeats itself: their encouragement, your request, their refusal (but please, do, ask

again). If you do make love, you feel your lover isn't lost in the act, but performing. As in some theaters, you may feel the actor, the hysteric, doesn't, really, mean what he says. But that's wrong. He means to attract, but what he truly wants is not your company in bed, but your regard. For when he's not being looked at, he's unsure who he is, and he falls into a dark abyss of anxiety, of loss of self.

The French psychoanalyst, Serge Leclair, framed the hysteric's question-his theme-as "Am I a man or a woman?" The hysteric shills viewers into the theater, for they reassure, by their attraction, that s/he is a plausible man or women. But if, deeply attracted, you want to come backstage, then the hysteric's anxiety is increased. Intimacy might lead to his being called an impostor. (Who am l? What am I?) So an affair with a hysteric is rarely consummated.

There are elements of the hysteric's attitude in any artist's character, but the good artist has a small, cold margin of freedom that allows him to study his actions. Reading the book of himself, he gains insight into the ways characters might dramatize themselves; he learns something, too, about keeping an audience's attention. (Ah, if a reader looks away, that is truly awful!) But when a writer is trapped within his hysteria, then he deals in shocks only, and his habitual mode is a shallow melodrama.

We rush on from page to page, investing our attention, our emotion,

only to toss the book aside at the end, unsatisfied. Not because we want a good book to tidy everything up; rather, we want the questions the plot proposed, the ones that drove us on, to open into more questions, in an ever-widening context that interrogates us and our lives. A bad hysterical book brutally insists on its conclusions: This is the dead body; this is the murderer; the end. The good book becomes, in Wildean play, ever more involving, for the writer trusts the body of his material to sustain our interest. An ending, a consummation, isn't a conclusion, and the affair between writer and reader becomes a marriage.

The hysteric's question, "Am I a man or a woman?" is surely a great

theme for an artist. Who can ever know the final answer to such a

profound question? And this is an especially exciting era for an hysteric, for so many of us now share his quizzical uncertainty about gender. In 79

works like those of the photographer, Cindy Sherman, who disguises

and photographs herself in slightly off-kilter "fashion layouts," in "movie

stills," in "fairy tales," we begin to see the ways that being a man or a woman is a socially made construct-not a matter of organs but of what those organs are made, collectively and individually, to mean. (Is a phallus, a sword, a bridge, a way back to the womb? And what does a womb mean? And why?) The hysteric's question can illuminate the life we make together- if, that is, the artist can turn the question this way and that, be, playfully, sometimes man, sometimes woman (as his stories demand), and nothing forever. He can use the question, if he does not have to have the story come out a certain way, if he doesn't feel that his life depends on your taking him for his idea of a man.

But the character type that interests me most is the depressive.

(Beware-as Eliot wrote, when a poet writes criticism his real goal is to

justify his own sensibility.) We melancholiacs are the tribe that suffers the curse of perpetual mourning. We slouch slowly outside the festivals of life. For a moment we finish grieving, our mood lightens, we caper antic ally. Yet we forever find occasions to mourn anew. Someone has always just left us, or is about to leave, and faced with that loss-even an argument with someone we love, a flick of the eyes over our shoulder as

speak together at a party, a promised phone call not received-we are utterly cast down. The world, then, is well described by Kafka, as "a suicidal thought in the mind of God," and helpless, unprotected, we fall through infinite, empty space.

And your turning away (we'll be the first to admit) is our fault, and we feel awful about what wretches we are. We have a penchant in our life, and our work, for judgment (moral, psychological). Our self-judgment even has a warm, almost erotic quality, like the guilt of the characters in

we

Bernard Malamud's sour-rye stories.

Psychiatrists-I draw here on Anthony Storr's excellent, humane handbook for beginning clinicians, The Art of Therapy-conjecture that

the depressive may have had a long time of helpless dependence as an

infant, perhaps because of sickness. Perhaps, too, his parents were not always always, always, always! adoring. Sometimes they looked away.

Why have they looked away? What displeased them? And how can I possibly care for myself without them? To keep these gods' regard and protection, -

-

the child strives to be perfect.

And such parents must be gods. Or how can the child be sure they can protect him? The sickly child fears that he suffers by comparison with

others; without his parents' approval to buoy him up he finds it impos­ sible to think well of himself. Only a god's choosing him could make him 80

feel sufficiently special to overcome his sense of inadequacy. I am reminded, here, of my other tribe, the Chosen People-chosen by God

obey his difficult Law, making us alternately sublime and utterly worthless. Such hyperbole provides a temporary stay against depression, tools: a one that becomes part of any tribe member's (and any writer's)

to

way to insist that one has been

chosen to write, and that one's charac­

ters are worth the reader's attention.

But if one fails, writes badly, one is

worthless, abandoned by God and the reader, in an infinite, empty desert.

To keep his parents' good opinion, the depressive child learns to fulfill their half-hidden emotional needs. A useful lesson for a future writer: to his imagine what others feel, the nub of creating his characters. But, in loss of afraid so this talent, life, he may find himself imprisoned within that he not only feels with others, but is crushed by their feelings, by his need to restore what his loved ones have been denied. D. H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner" is a chilling metaphor for this: The story

little boy rocking desperately on his toy horse, manages to conjure the names of future winners for his unhappy parents.

Sometimes, the depressive feels so swamped by others' requirements that he flees, perhaps to his room, perhaps to write. There, in his imagined world, he is free. Characters he creates need not be placated; a whole town can be washed away by a flood if one wishes. In his dragon world, no longer helpless, he may accomplish satisfying prodigies of creation and destruction. Writing-just push the pages under the door­

becomes an almost safe way to connect with others, and, perhaps, win their oh-so-necessary golden opinion.

But only perhaps. To finish, to publish, leaves one open to judgment, to being found wanting. A work displayed means the most hidden parts of oneself-even one's awful anger-are revealed. The others may see how important they are to you; how very much loved; how very much

hated. Best not to finish! "When something is finished," the melancholy painter Arshile Gorky said, "that means it's dead, doesn't it? I believe in

everlastingness. I never finish a painting I just stop working on it for a while. The thing to do is always to keep starting to paint." One thinks of Virginia Woolf, so immensely vulnerable to criticism, and her name wraps a shroud about itself. Rather than suffer another attack of depres­ -

sion, she killed herself.

Freud's great essay on depression, "Mourning and Melancholia," begins in wonder at such black events. How, given our great self-love, is it ever possible to commit suicide? Why, Freud asked himself, does the melancholic call himself ugly when he is handsome, stupid when he is 81

smart, savagely berate himself even to the point of killing himself? His

accusations

against himself are, Freud writes, contrary to all sense,

because, really, they don't apply to him. It is the one he has lost that he truly disparages, the beloved who left. The melancholic has taken the lost beloved within himself, he has become her. He attacks her-within­ himself, even kills himself, as a way of destroying her. Such suicides, in Freud's view, are murders. Melancholia is a mighty black dog, tearing in confusion at its own viscera.

And the alternative, the task? I began to learn that from Rilke's great poem "Turning-point" {as translated by Stephen Mitchell}. Here, like the

melancholic, the poet takes the world into himself. He looks, and each time he looks, he imprints within, as a part of himself, all that he saw.

"Animals trusted him, stepped / into his open look, grazing, / And the rumor that there was someone / who knew how to look, / stirred those less / visible creatures: / stirred the women." But the world, finally, judges this looker. Painfully alone, in a hotel bedroom, the voices of all that he has taken into himself discuss "his heart, which could still be felt; / debated what through the painfully buried body / could somehow be felt his heart; / debated and passed their judgment: / that it did not have love." For merely to look, to imprint the world within oneself as the melancholic lover does the beloved, isn't enough. The lost beloved languishes inside one. More than languishes, she is punished, for one berates her for having left. So the world turns away from the looker. "{And denied him further comrnunions.) / For there is a bound­ ary to looking. / And the world that is looked at so deeply / wants to flourish in love." The looker is called to another task, and his very gifts will, as in a fairy tale, become a curse to him unless he takes up his task.

Which is, Rilke says, to return the beloved-all that is truly seen-with a different, wider life, in his art. In this "heart-work" even the anger one felt at her, can now be used for her, in the angry, difficult strain of making, of giving birth, giving form-the exact words that cut and form the flesh of the image. So one returns what was seen, loved, lost-and so pressed within one-to the world. "Work of the eyes is done, now / go and do heart-work / on all the images imprisoned within you; for you / overpowered them: but even now you don't know them. / Learn inner ...

-

man, to look on your inner woman, / the one attained from a thousand

/ natures, the merely attained but / not yet beloved form."

Why, I wondered, does Rilke speak so authoritatively of an inner woman? Perhaps it's because the first loved object lost was, for all of us, our

mothers, and each new loved object is the mother, almost, refound.

So each new loss, each turning away, becomes intertwined {for men and 82

both) with that first loss, and so with the feminine within each of us. In depression, one might say, the masculine, the imagined father, the mother­ as bearer of morality in the form of judgement, disparages seems himself within. No wonder the depressive's moral argument with around the family so horrifyingly familiar, even comfy: it is a scene dinner table. So the depressive's question, "How can I stop mourning, birth to my mother?"

I stop punishing myself?" becomes: "How can give (Of course, it is our mother, in memory, and as the very structure of our psyche, who holds us as we give birth to our mother!) women

For me, one great embodiment of this story is the life of the painter Arshile Gorky, who struggled from 1926 to 1936 to reproduce in paint a of his mother and himself, as a boy. Each drawing and small

photograph of this period bears marks of the difficulty and importance of this

canvas

task.

Gorky-whose given name was Vosdanik Manuk Adoian-chose his first name from the Caucasian form of the Armenian "Arshak," which in Russian translates as Achilles. This name reflected his melancholic dis­

position, and, I think, a special relation to his mother who, like Achilles, had granted both a great power and a great flaw. Gorky and his mother, Lady Shushanik, had been abandoned by his father and his sisters in

1916, when they fled the destruction of Armenia. Lady Shushanik, Gorky and his younger sister Vartoosh remained, with little food or money. In 1918, when Gorky was fifteen, Lady Shushanik died of star­ vation in her son's arms.

Gorky and his younger sister made their way to Watertown, Massa­ chusetts. In America, Harold Rosenberg writes, Gorky "took shelter in art from the strange continent upon which he had been cast." Art

became his world elsewhere within this big, accusatory world, this nearly infinite empty space. His studio was filled with paints, brushes, drawing papers, bolts of canvas, "as if he intended to hole up there for a

siege."

But the paintings of Gorky's long apprentice years in Massachusetts and New York were mediocre. Melancholiacs, in their weakness, tend to idealize their parents, feeling always a special need for their protection.

(Such parents must be gods, requiring, and worth, our adoration.) For

Gorky this meant finding the "protection of a master" for each of his paintings, doing them in the style of Cezanne, or Picasso, or Mir6. But the protection of the parent, or the master, is also a way not quite to declare oneself.

Gorky just begins to come out of hiding with the paintings-none of 83

them ever quite finished-of himself and his mother, canvases based on a

small photograph saved back from the destruction of Armenia, of his

family, of his childhood. This photo, probably from a neighborhood portrait shop, shows Lady Shushanick, seated, looking out full-face, almost a little coldly. She is attended by her eight-year-old son, who stands a little apart from her, holding flowers, as if as an offering.

Gorky-not yet ready to let the photo be reborn through him-made very few changes in transforming the photo into his paintings, only shifting a column in the photo's artificial backdrop, and giving a turn to the boy's right foot. Gorky apparently saw faithfulness to the photograph as his task, even, at one point, making the kind of grid amateur artists use, and copying the photo onto canvas square by square. I think there is an element of fear in such devotion-combined with the guilt of the survivor-as if Gorky feared what he might reveal of his own attitude to his subject if he deviated from the photo. (One feels this repressed anger, too, in the work of photo-realists, whose large machine-like copies of "reality" call attention to a monstrous world that repels human affec­ tion, that transforms us into mechanical slaves, capable only of copies.

An inner or outer world that we cannot truly transform, we are bound to hate.) Gorky's "master" here, protecting him from self-declaration, is photography, or, really-as there is no neutral mechanical reality­ whoever aimed the camera in that neighborhood flash studio. But heart-work requires some freedom-that the mother be reborn in and

through you, not as a photo would have her, but as you alone can bear her. So Gorky couldn't finish the painting, couldn't get it right.

The canvas, even in the texture of the paint, gives a full account of his

failed attempts. In all versions of the painting Gorky's technique is exact, painstaking. At several stages on each canvas, Gorky has let the

paint dry, then scraped the surface with a razor blade until it was smooth. He wiped away all excess paint and dust with a damp cloth and painted again. By the time he abandoned the canvas he had a picture thick with paint that hardly showed brush strokes. He had effaced his own hand, disguising his own involvement in producing the image. By this technique Gorky tried instantly to give the canvas the look of an old master. Gorky's surface, William Seitz writes, has "the soft glow of old marble or porcelain," with the effect of emphasizing the "hieratic

dignity and masklike intentness of the mother's face." Lady Shushanik becomes an icon, an adored Saint, though in that masklike quality, some sense of her indifference, and Gorky's unacknowledged anger may show through. Gorky intuits, I think, that his task is to let his mother, in himself, be reborn as his creation, but he still cheats his fate. The 84

composition is the photographer's, the texture is that of the old master's, or the monastery's devotional object.

Gorky will not yet bear his mother. But these paintings mark the beginning of the process by which he will become himself. He required one more phase of discipleship-to surrealism-which allowed him a freer communication with his buried childhood, its store of lost objects mixed with the feminine in himself. (Gorky, for example, identified his mother's butter churn as the basis of the boot-like object in so many of his later paintings.) Now he allowed his hand to move as it would, free­ associating, bringing up the past in his own manner. But this begins, Harold Rosenberg writes, in Gorky's regard for facts in these portraits of himself and his mother. One must add, he had also to learn the proper

regard for facts, that facts must be mixed with one's own life-blood, the images no longer distorted by the denigration of the feminine-within, or petrified by adoration-which are faces of the same coin. Still, these portraits, in their failed attempt to discover the facts not of "reality" but of memory, form the link, as Rosenberg says, to Gorky's great paintings, such as 1944's "How My Mother's Embroidered Apron Unfolds in My Life."

But one's fate is also made under conditions the world gives. In an

June 22, 1948, Gorky broke his neck and paralyzed his painting arm. In July his wife, Agnes, left with her children. This was a loss that he could not overcome through painting, nor could he make good the loss of the ability to paint. On July 21, he committed suicide. auto accident on

The figure of a melancholic artist unhappily pinned to a photograph reminds me of Delmore Schwartz's great story "In Dreams Begin Respon­

sibilities." Here the unnamed narrator (whom I will call Delmore) enters a movie theater, and finds the feature already in progress. It is the story of his father's courtship of his mother! His eyes fixed on the screen for -

what child wouldn't be fascinated by this primal scene-he sinks into his seat, into the soft darkness. "I

am

anonymous, and I have

forgotten

myself. It is always so when one goes to the movies, it is, as they say, a

drug." Schwartz's metaphor of a film for the depressive's untransformed memory has

a

decisive brilliance. It teaches us that if one does not

acknowledge and overcome one's angry fascination with one's internal­ ized parents, then one will unconsciously project them outward onto everyone one encounters. Projection of a scene isn't

heart-work, any­ copying a photograph is. Schwartz's mechanical metaphor is strikingly appropriate, for in unconscious projection one doesn't acknowledge that it is oneself that forms the pictures, making the world more than

85

for the unclaimed images of one's past. And one always projects what one unconsciously disparages, and what one will continue to dis­ a screen

parage then, as if it were the world. So one remains excluded from life,

watching shadows, as if in the womb of Plato's cave, or Loew's theater.

Delmore's parents-to-be meet in his grandparents' house, and his father makes small talk with mother's parents. Uneasy, Delmore's father

gruff with his mother, and this makes his grandfather rub his bearded cheek with worry. Is this man a suitable match for his daughter?

This concern stops the film. Will they marry? Will Delmore be born? But as "my mother giggles at my father's words, the darkness drowns me." She giggles; they will marry; he will be born. (Or will he, really?) grows

In any case, for the moment Delmore draws the womb-like warmth of the theater around him, and watches his parents stroll on a boardwalk

by the sea. She relates the plot of a novel she's been reading, and "my father utters judgments of the characters as the plot is made clear to him. This is a habit which he very much enjoys, for he feels the utmost

superiority and confidence when he approves and condemns the behav­ ior of other people." Delmore's father's relation to his wife and his world is impatient, judgmental, disparaging. All this Delmore has learned, for

his relation to what he watches is also that of judge. (Of course, art

requires some morality, some themes, just as it requires sensuousness and detail. But such themes aren't judgments; they're closer to the shape of questions than the steel of completed arguments. And in a work of art, that lovely hermaphroditic animal, that perfect marriage of mascu­

line and feminine, one can't always tell which is which, what is form, what content, what is detail and what is theme.)

As Delmore's

parents

stroll, his father boasts, exaggerating the week, though it "need not have been

amount of money he earned in the

exaggerated. But my father has always felt that actualities somehow fall short." Delmore begins to weep, disturbing the other patrons. Should they marry, should he be born? One is reminded of Heine's melancholic poem (translated by Robert Lowell): "Sleep is lovely, death is better still / not to have been born is of course the miracle." This false possibility haunts the melancholic's life and the lives of those who love him. Con­

sciously or unconsciously, he confronts himself with it over and over, as a form of self-punishment, a painless suicide. But his constant medita­ tion on this false choice is itself the suicide; by it, he remains outside life in his melancholy; not born; not living; not dead. As if watching a movie!

His parents stroll, go on a merry-go-round, have an expensive dinner.

His father, carried along by his sense of well-being, surprises himself by 86

proposing. Delmore tries to perform "the miracle," and choose not hav­ ing been born.

"

'Don't do it,'" he shouts at the screen,

"

'It's not too late

change your minds, both of you. Nothing good will corne of it, only remorse, hatred, scandal, and two children whose characters are

to

monstrous.'

"

An usher quiets Delmore, and his parents walk on, stopping at a booth to have their photo taken, and it is, no doubt, just the sort of studio where Gorky and his mother had their picture done. Why this

repetition? Perhaps because until the heart-work is performed the memo­ ries of our childhood are just kitsch, badly staged, with false backdrops.

Photos like that attempt to cheat death, as if there could be moments outside time, outside the narrative that we ourselves must not only suffer but will, even as it effaces us and the people we love. Photos remain kitsch until we make them into elements of the consciously told story of our lives, aware of ourselves telling the story in anger and in love, showing the power of death in the laws and limits of form, and in the ongoing rush of the narrative.

Delmore's father becomes impatient with the photographer, 'Corne on, you've had enough time, we're not going to wait any longer.''' The unsatisfactory picture is taken. They walk on, and his mother wants to go to a fortune-teller. His father disapproves. "And then, in terrible anger, my father lets go of my mother's arm and strides out, leaving my mother stunned and [1] begin to shout once more Will she follow him? "'What are they doing?'" Delmore shouts at the screen. "'Don't they know what they are doing?'

[T]he usher has seized my arm and is dragging me away, and as he does so, he says: 'Why don't you think of what you're doing? do matters too much.' you [E]verything Delmore is cast out into the sun of his twenty-first birthday. Birthday?

But will Delmore ever be fully born, seeing this movie through to the end, and then truly retelling it himself, as his own story? Or will he continue to project his fate, rather than bearing it? In any case, Delmore Sch­ wartz, the writer, has given us a profound and beautiful metaphor for this quandary, in a story of stunning directness. Even the overwrought self-pity and self-hatred of the narrator succeed as elements of his tangle, showing the forces that must be transformed, used as the anger of making, if he is not to remain enthralled. The task is here at least begun "

"

...

....

....

...

in this naming of the task. "

[E]verything you do matters too much." 1 hear in this an echo of moral "choseness," that knife-edge hyperbole that aggrandizes, and terri­ fies. Allen Dow, the perhaps semi-autobiographical character in one of ...

87

John Updike's most moving stories, "Flight," counts the cost of this defense against depression. Allen is, one might say, enthralled to hyper­ bole. Without it, like many depressives and most teenagers, he feels inadequate. "At the age of seventeen 1 was poorly dressed and funny­

looking, and went around thinking about myself in the third person.

'Allen Dow strode down the street and home.' Consciousness of a special

destiny made me both arrogant and shy."

Allen has been granted his special destiny by his mother, herself a master of hyperbole. "[M]y mother's genius was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity. 1 was the phoenix. My father and grand­ mother were legendary invader-saints both of them serving and For my mother felt that she and her father enslaving their mates Allen's mother takes him to a alike had been destroyed by marriage hilltop to show him their small town, Olinger, the site of so much of Updike's best work. "Suddenly she dug her fingers into the hair on my .

.

.

....

"

....

head and announced, 'There we all are, and there we'll all be forever

Except you, Allen. You're going to fly.'

...

....

[I]t felt like the clue 1 had

been waiting all my childhood for. My most secret self had been made to

respond

" ....

Allen's gift for flight most definitely includes his own talent for hyper­

bole, a way of making things interesting. For as all writers know, actualities fall short. We require the glow that transference gives in our loves, and the spice of myth in our stories. But the writer must learn the technique of hyperbole, not drug himself with it, for a novel that is all hyperbole­ like the work of Anais Nin, say-is, in this secular age, unconvincing, too unironic. Human gods are, after all, unreliable as sources of chose­ ness. never

Allen's mother is "impulsive and romantic and inconsistent. 1 was able to develop this spurt of reassurance into

between us.

.

.

.

a

steady theme

'You'll never learn, you'll stick and die in the dirt just

like I'm doing. Why should you be better than your mother?'" For a parent often wants a child to fly beyond her, but hates it when he seems about to leave her earthbound, aging, mortal. So the young aviator feels

worthless if he fails, and grieves if he succeeds. Perhaps this accounts for the melancholy that haunts those who have gone beyond their parents,

the sadness of immigrants and their children, of progress, of America.

Allen must redeem all that his implacable mother has suffered, "the inheritance of frustration and folly that had descended from my grand­ that I, with a few beats of my grown wings, was destined to reverse and redeem." If he does not, she will withdraw his special fate-a chosen ness that also allows him, barely, to withstand the black mass of suffering, the family history that she has

father to my mother to me

88

.

.

.

transmitted, and that he must redeem. The power to realize his arnbi­ tion and the necessity for it both come from his mother.

In "Flight," Allen fails his mother by loving a high-school girl that she

finds ordinary. "Don't go with little women, Allen. It puts you too close to

the ground." Allen, too, disparages Molly even as he describes her.

"Except for a double chin, and a mouth too large and thick, she would have been perfectly pretty in a little woman's compact and cocky way."

Yet when he is with her, Allen can be a self rather than strut the one that, like an ill-fitting suit, has been given him by another. With Molly, he doesn't have to think of himself in the third person; she does not

require that he be a messiah. "We never made love in the final, coital sense," but "she gave herself to me anyway, and I had her anyway, and have her still, for the longer I travel in a direction I could not have taken with her, the more clearly she seems the one person who loved me without advantage. I was a homely, comically ambitious hillbilly

" ....

Which woman-which sense of himself-shall he choose? He vacil­ lates. "Every time I saw my mother cry, it seemed I had to make Molly cry

....

Even in the heart of intimacy, half,naked each of us, I would say "

But there can be no real contest. He something to humiliate her needs his mother's mythologizing to certify that he is special, and so protect him from that equally strong voice that says he is nothing, that he will stick in the dirt. Requiring her hyperbole as a drug against her sadness, he is a slave to her. Enslaved, how can he not be enraged by the feminine, and-as he so often does-denigrate it?

Which is to say, can Updike give birth to Olinger, to the feminine, without too much of the spice of hyperbole-like Gorky's overdone adoration-or the mud of denigration? He must bear his mother, and all ....

that is bound up with her, not as projection, but as artistic creation, not

something alien as sometimes Updike's female characters seem but as something one is connected to, has participated in giving birth to, like so much of the beautifully realized world in his work, the lovely multifo­ as

-

-

Hate details.

In the final confrontation Allen's mother requires a choice, a sacrifice.

"'Why do you torment the gir!?'

'To please you.'

It may be. I forget, you were born here.'

"In a dry tone of certainty and dislike-how hard my heart had become!-I told her, 'All right. You'll win this one, Mother; but it'll be the last one you'll win.' seemed to blot my senses In a "My pang of fright following this "

"'

....

...

....

89

husky voice that seemed to come across a great distance my mother said, with typical melodrama, 'Goodbye, Allen.'''

If Allen is to be free of her, then this must be an almost unmytholo.

gized story. Yet his mother is prodigiously good at mythologizing. The ending, one might say, shows a slight umbilical cord still (his mother not quite born), in its sentimentality, the words skewed by bearing more feeling than they can ever earn in others' eyes. Still, this gives a charm­ ing air of the ridiculous to the story's conclusion, all the unseen impor­ tance that family fights have, that Updike knows so well, "as if each generation of parents commits atrocities against their children which by God's decree remain invisible to the rest of the world."

I think then, finally, in wonder, of the great genius and great good

fortune of Isaac Babel, who was able to use the feminine not to dispar­ age, but to gain, the feminine. In one of the most charming of stories,

"Reply to an Inquiry," Babel recounts how he at once became a writer, and lost or overcame his virginity, during his first visit to a prostitute, named Vera. "Every evening she emerged in Golovinsky prospect and, tall, and white-faced, glided before the throng like the figure head of the Virgin Mary on the fishing boats. I stole after her speechless. I saved money and at last summoned the necessary courage."

That evening, in bed they begin to chat. 'Why do you sit there so Are you a downhearted like?' she asked, drawing me toward her.

-

-

"

'

...

thief?' "

'No, I'm not a thief, I'm a boy.'

"'I can see you're not a cow,' said Vera, yawning. She could hardly

keep her eyes open."

So, to keep Vera from turning away, he creates a story for her. «'A boy,' I repeated, 'a boy for the Armenians.' I turned cold at the sudden­ ness

of my own invention."

At fifteen, he continues, he became the lover of an Armenian named Stepan Ivanovich, attracted by his wealth-for Vera will appreciate that motive, and the young Babel has a melancholic's gift for feeling with

others, for knowing what his audience wants. Then, when the Arme­ nian lost his (imaginary) money, Babel, he says, left him for another rich churchwarden. "This bit I stole from some writer-it was the I began to blather about these people, invention of a lazy mind man,

a

....

about their roughness and greed a lot of nonsense I had once heard. ." But the nonsense moves Vera. "'Well, and have you had any -

.

.

women?' asked Vera, turning toward me.

'How should I? Who would let me go near them?'" "

90

Then Babel tells us of his night with Vera, "I will interrupt my story here to ask you, comrades, if you have ever seen a village carpenter building a house for one of his own trade. With what speed and strength

and joy the shavings fly from the log he is planing!"

And, of course, from her fellow workman, Vera will not accept pay­ "

ment.

'Want to fall out with me little sister?'

"No, I did not want to fall out with her. We agreed to meet that evening, and I put back in my purse my two gold pieces-the first money I ever earned for a story."

Freud somewhere says that the artist is able to use his daydreams to get fame, money and love. He should have added that it is sometimes by

giving birth to the mother within himself, the feminine world within himself, that the artist achieves these worthy goals.

Of course Vera, too, will someday turn away from Babel, and be pressed into him, to become him. There is always a new aspect of the beloved pressed into the self by the depressive, for the world, as it dies, slowly turns itself away from us; even our body, slowly effaced by time, abandons us; and to save the beloved world back, we make it part of our psyche. We must not turn against that inner world in anger for leaving us, but use that anger in our task, that the dying world might be reborn in our work.

91

The Line of Words Annie Dillard

Do not huny; do not rest.

-Goethe /'

The outline of a piece of prose is a leash. At the beginning, you calmly lead the work from it. Soon it pulls at you. Next it drags you into traffic.

Where does all this traffic come from, on a day like this? You cut the

leash to save your life.

The line of words is a miner's pick, a woodcarver's gouge, a surgeon's

probe. You wield it, and it digs a path you follow. Soon you find yourself deep in new territory. Is it a dead end, or have you located the real subject? You will know tomorrow, or this time next year.

You make the path boldly and follow it fearfully. You go where the path leads. At the end of the path, you look around. It is a box canyon.

You hammer out reports, dispatch bulletins.

The writing has changed, in your hands, and in a twinkling, from an expression of your notions to an epistemological tool. The new place interests you because it is not clear. You attend. In your humility, you lay down the words carefully, watching all the angles. Now the earlier writing looks soft and careless. Process is nothing; erase your tracks. The path is not the work. I hope your tracks have grown over; I hope birds ate the crumbs; I hope you will toss it all and not look back.

The line of words is a hammer. You hammer against the walls of your house. You tap the walls, lightly, everywhere. After giving many years' attention to these things, you know what to listen for. Some of the walls

bearing walls; they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is. Knock it out. Duck. are

You can waste a year worrying about it, or you can get it over with now.

Are you a woman, or a mouse? How many books do we read from which 92

the writer lacked courage to tie off the umbilical cord? How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag? Is it is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer

pertinent,

personally?

When you are stuck in a book; when you are well into writing it, and know what comes next, and yet cannot go on; when every morning for a week or a month you enter its room and turn your back on it; then the

trouble is either of two things. Either the structure has forked, so the narrative, or the logic, has developed a hairline fracture that will shortly split it up the middle-or you are approaching a fatal mistake. What you had planned will not do. If you pursue your present course, the book will blow up or collapse, and you don't know about it yet, quite.

You notice only this: Your worker-your one and only, your prized, coddled and driven worker-is not going out on that job. Will not

budge, not even for you, Boss. Has been at it long enough to know when the air smells wrong; can sense a tremor through boot-soles. Nonsense, you say; it is perfectly safe. But the worker will not go. Will not even look at the site. Just developed heart trouble. Would rather starve.

Sorry.

What do you do? Acknowledge, first, that you cannot do nothing.

Layout the structure you already have, Xvrav it for a hairline fracture, find it and think about it for a week or a year; solve the insoluble

problem. Or subject the next part, the part at which the worker balks, to harsh tests. It harbors an unexamined and wrong premise. Something completely necessary is false or fatal. Once you find it, and if you can accept the finding, of course it will mean starting all over again. This is why so many experienced writers urge young men and women to learn a useful trade.

You write it all, discovering it at the end of the line of words. The line of words is a laser light, flexible as wire; it illumines the path just before its fragile tip. You probe with it, delicate as a worm.

Few sights are so absurd as that of an inchworm leading its dimwit life.

Inchworms are the caterpillar larvae of several moths or butterflies. The

cabbage looper, for example, is an inchworm. I often see an inchworm: it is a skinny bright green thing, pale and thin as a vein, an inch long, and

apparently totally unfit for life in this world. It wears out its days in constant panic.

Every inchworm I have seen was stuck in long grasses. The wretched inchworm hangs from the side of a grassblade and throws its head around from side to side, seeming to wail. What! No further? Its back 93

pair of nubby feet clasps the grass stem; its front three pairs of nubs rear back and flail in the air, apparently in search of a footing. What! No further? What? It searches everywhere in the wide world for the rest of the grass, which is right under its nose. By dumb luck it touches the grass. Its front legs hang on; it lifts and buckles its little green inch, and

places its hind legs just behind its front legs. Its body makes a loop, a bight. All it has to do now is slide its front legs up the grass stem. Instead it gets lost. It throws up its head and front legs, flings its upper body out into the void, and panics again. What! No further? End of world? And

forth, until it actually reaches the grass head's tip. By then its wee weight may be bending the grass towards some other grass plant. Its davening, apocalyptic prayers sway the grasshead and bump it into something. I've seen it many times. The blind and frantic numbskull so

makes it off one grass and onto another one, which it will climb in virtual hysteria for several hours. Every step brings it to the universe's rim. And now-"What! No further? End of world? Ah, here's ground.

What! No further? Yike!"

"Why don't you just jump?" I tell it, disgusted. "Put yourself out of your misery."

I admire those eighteenth-century Hasids who understood the risk of prayer. Rabbi Uri of Strelisk took sorrowful leave of his household every

morning because he was setting off to his prayers. He told his family how to dispose of his manuscripts if praying should kill him. A ritual slaugh­ terer, similarly, every morning bade goodbye to his wife and children and wept as if he would never see them again. His friend asked him why.

Because, he answered, when I begin I call out to the Lord. Then I pray, "Have mercy on us." Who knows what the Lord's power will do to me in

that moment after I have invoked it, and before I beg for mercy?

Every morning you climb several flights of stairs, enter your study, open the French doors, slide your desk and chair through the French doors, and push them out into the middle of the air. The desk and chair are floating thirty feet off the ground, between the crowns of maple trees. The furniture is in place; you go back for your thermos of coffee.

Then wincing, you step out again through the French doors and sit down on the chair and look over the desktop. You can see clear to the river from here in winter. You pour yourself a cup of coffee.

Birds fly under your chair. In spring, when the leaves open in the maples' crowns, your view stops in the treetops just beyond the desk; yellow warblers hiss and whisper on the high twigs, and catch flies. Get to work. Your work is to keep cranking the flywheel that turns the gears 94

that spins the belt in the engine of belief that keeps you and your desk in

midair.

Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. Your freedom as a writer is not freedom of expression in the sense of wild blurting; you may not let rip. It is life at its most free, if you

enough to be able to try it, because you select your materi­ als, invent your task, and pace yourself. In the democracies, you may even write and publish anything you please about any governments or institutions, even if what you write is demonstrably false. are fortunate

The obverse of this freedom, of course, is that your work is so mean­ ingless, so fully for yourself alone, and so worthless to the world, that no except you cares whether you do it well, or ever. You are free to make several thousand close judgment calls a day. Your freedom is a by­

one

product of your days' triviality. A shoe salesman, who is doing others' tasks, who must answer to two or three bosses, who must do his job their way, and must put himself in their hands, at their place, during their hours-is nevertheless working usefully. Further, if the shoe sales­ man

fails to appear one morning, someone will notice and miss him. on which you lavish such care, has no needs or

Your manuscript,

wishes; it knows you not. Nor does anyone need your manuscript; everyone needs shoes more. There are many manuscripts already­ worthy ones, most edifying and moving ones, intelligent and powerful ones. If you believed Paradise Lost to be excellent, would you buy it?

Why not shoot yourself, actually, rather than finish one more excellent manuscript on which to gag the world?

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses-the imagination's vision, and the imagination's hearing-and the moral sense, and the intellect.

This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhila­ rates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The readers' ears, as it were, coming straight from life, have to adjust down to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

A wonderful entomological experiment shows that a male butterfly

will ignore a living female butterfly of his own species in favor of a

painted cardboard one, if the cardboard one is big. If the cardboard one 95

is bigger than he

is, bigger than any female butterfly ever could be, bigger than four female butterflies, he jumps the piece of cardboard.

Over and over again, he jumps the piece of cardboard. Nearby, the real, living female butterfly opens and closes her wings in vain.

Films and television stimulate the body's senses too, in big ways. A

nine-foot handsome face, and its three-foot-wide smile, are irresistible.

Look at the long legs on that man, as high as a wall, and coming straight

towards you. The music builds. The moving, lighted screen fills your brain. You don't like filmed car chases? See if you can turn away. Just try not to watch.

Even knowing you are manipulated, you are still as help­

less as the male butterfly drawn to painted cardboard.

That is the movies. That is their ground. The printed word cannot compete with the movies on their ground, and should not. You can

describe beautiful faces, car chases, or valleys full of Indians on horse­ back until you run out of words, and you won't approach the movies'

spectacle. Novels written with film contracts in mind have a faint but unmistakable, and ruinous, odor. I cannot name what, in the text, alerts the reader to suspect the writer of mixed motives; I cannot specify which sentences, in several books, have caused me to read on with increasing

dismay, and finally close the books because I smell a rat. Such books seem uneasy being books; they seem eager to fling off their disguises and jump onto screens.

Why would anyone read a book instead of watching big people move book can be literature. It's a subtle thing-a poor thing, but our own. In my view, the more literary the book the more purely verbal, crafted sentence by sentence, the more imaginative, rea­ soned and deep-the more likely people are to read it. The people who read are the people who like literature, after all, whatever that might be.

They like, or require, what books alone have. If they want to see films that evening, they will find films. If they do not like to read, they will not. People who read are not too lazy to flip on the television; they prefer books. I cannot imagine a sorrier pursuit than struggling for years to write a book which attempts to appeal to people who do not read in the first place. on a screen? Because a

-

You climb a long ladder until you can see over the roof, or the clouds.

You are writing a book. You watch your shod feet step on each round the rung, one at a time; you do not hurry and do not rest. Your feet feel steep ladder's balance; the long muscles in your thighs check its sway.

You climb steadily, doing your job in the dark. When you reach the end,

there is nothing more to climb. The sun hits you. The bright wideness 96

surprises you; you had forgotten there was an end. You look back at the ladder's two feet on the distant grass, astonished.

The line of words fingers your own heart. It invades arteries, and enters the heart on a flood of breath; it presses the moving rims of thick

valves; it palpates the dark muscle strong as horses, feeling for some­ thing, it knows not what. A queer picture beds in the muscle like a

encysted some film of feeling, some song forgotten, scene in a dark bedroom, a corner of the woodlot, a terrible dining room, that exalting sidewalk; these fragments are heavy with meaning. The line of words peels them back, dissects them out. Will the bared tissue burn? Do you want to expose these scenes to the light? You may locate them and leave them, or poke the spot hard till the sore bleeds on your finger, and write with that blood. If the sore spot isn't fatal, if it doesn't grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart worm

-

resorbs it.

The line of words feels for cracks in the firmament.

The line of words is heading out past Jupiter this morning. Traveling 150 kilometers a second, it doesn't make a sound. The big yellow planet and its white moons spin. The line of words speeds past Jupiter and its

cumbrous, dizzying orbit; it looks neither to the right nor the left. It will be leaving the solar system soon, single-minded, rapt, rushing heaven like a soul. You are in Houston, Texas, watching the monitor. You saw a simulation: the line of words waited still, hushed, pointed with longing.

The big yellow planet spun towards it like a pitched ball and passed

beside it, low and outside. Jupiter was so large the arc of its edge at the screen's bottom looked flat. The probe twined on; its wild path passed between white suns small as dots; these stars fell away on either side, like

the lights on a tunnel's walls.

Now you watch symbols move on your monitor; you

stare at the the sends transmits in own signals back, probe your tongue, numbers.

Maybe later you can guess at what they mean what they might mean about space at the edge of the solar system, or about your instruments.

Right now, you are flying. Right now, your job is to hold your breath.

-

97

Poetry and Self-Making Reginald Gibbons

1

Anyone who has studied a book by Curtis Bradford called Yeats at Work knows that Yeats could begin with a very unlikely draft of what would eventually be a great poem. In his late work there's an untitled quatrain, a kind of fragment: The friends that have it I do wrong When ever I remake a song, Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.

Does this little poem mean that because the poet revises his composi­ tion he inevitably changes his idea, his consciousness, of himself, also? Is

this change, this reconstructing of the poet's identity, a kind of side effect of writing poems? Or could such reconstruction be the very pur­ pose, even one of the supreme purposes, for Yeats, of writing and revis­

ing poems? Is this a narrower, writerly version of what Keats called Soul­ making? A recognition of the way we continue to evolve through stages of life, as Erik Erikson theorized? Whatever the reality of life-changes for most people, I am convinced that Yeats expresses here a fundamental truth of the writing life-that a writer's being can be shaped by the way that he or she decisively uses language.

Ten years ago I instinctively set this quatrain beside a fragment by

Osip Mandelstam that had been translated and sent to me in a letter by a poet friend, Kenneth Irby: 98

How the feminine silver burns

That's struggled against oxide and alloy, And quiet work silvers

The iron plough and the poet's voice.

Mandelstam's silver is "feminine." I think he must have thought of this as meaning that, not acting on other things, silver is acted upon, by a

tarnishing; but he saw also that it burns back against that dulling. In Mandelstam's poems, as he himself said of Dante's Divine Comedy, one metaphor often launches the next. Here the substance-the noun, So the silver-changes to an action, a verb: "quiet work silvers plough is pictured not as tearing through the earth (which would be "masculine") but as being polished to a bright shining (thus "feminine").

It is silvered by the softly abrasive, hissing sod through which it moves.

And then the last touch, which reveals what it was that sparked the metaphorical transformations, what difficult insistent notion it was that called for articulation: thus is the poet's voice like a thing polished, even silvered, as if changed from everyday iron to precious metal, by the softly abrasive work of writing, by the sod of language that goes by it and through which it moves, or is even dragged. Not farming, but the making of the poems is the poet's work, but like the realm of planting and harvesting to which the image of the plough sends us, the realm of poems is, by association, fruitful. Again, as in Yeats's quatrain, two related things are joined: (1) the poet's voice, which in the fullest sense is the poet's identity, and in another sense is metonymy for the made objects themselves, the poems that the poet harvests from his labor, and "

....

(2) the activity of writing.

Writing is a process in which we are engaged over time; how does our writing not only change all my available words into this particular poem, but also change me in the writing of the poem? I want to use these two little poems and some others to help reveal the relationship between what it is a poet, or more generally a writer, does, in writing and rewriting a piece of work, and who that poet or writer is and is becoming.

2 A poem's worked quality may show greater or lesser evidence of the

poet's impulse to control language and form; the interesting thing is not whether this evidence is superficially greater or lesser- as between poem written in

a

traditional

verse

form

or

one

in free

verse.

a

The

interesting thing is whether the poem gives evidence of having anything 99

underneath it or inside it or behind it (all of these are metaphors) that would require artistic control in order to be articulated in the particu­

larly intense way that (good) poems articulate feeling and thought. That is, a poem's complexity as an instance of language doesn't in itself reveal very much; a very poor poem can be full of tropes and highly organized rhythms and other complications or turbulences of language, and a very good poem can appear to be spontaneously uttered and almost simple.

But in many poems that we regard as good there is a sense, rather than of already worked language, of the active work of bringing feeling, thought and language into an unusual intensity of meaningfulness and into an especially responsive representation of what we are coming to feel and think; both writer and reader are discovering what it is that the language in the poetic lines is coming to mean. That is, part of a memo­ rable poem's power often lies in its conveying this work as if it were still going on, actively, in the poem as it comes into being once more in the reader's mind-or, often better, in the sound of its recitation in the present moment. This may be some of what Antonio Machado meant

when he defined poetry as "the essential word in time." When we sense such an active working of the language in a poem, we may prize it more, it may be more precious to us, partly because it welcomes us as readers

into that working, it gives us the chance to silver our voices as well. Let

give one example that I think is particularly pleasing and impressive, the opening sentence-the opening four lines-of C. K. Williams's me

poem, "My Mother's Voice": Until I asked her to please stop doing it and was astonished to find that she not only could but from the moment I asked her in fact would stop doing it, my

mother, all through my childhood, when I was saying something to her, something important, would move so

her lips as I was speaking

that she seemed to be saying under her breath the very words I was

saying as I was saying them.

complexity of the sentence is like a riddle it first makes apprehensible the complexity of the surprising moment Williams The syntactical

-

is portraying, and then, his mother's bizarre habit. The reverse order of

these two things heightens our sense of what Williams's present under­

standing appears to be in the process of discovering. A larger version of this drama of becoming conscious of a new idea or feeling is played out most effectively in "Combat," which is also from Williams's book Tar. What the writing of the poem seems to represent, in part, is the hunt for 100

a

meaning that can only be discovered if the syntax can appropriately

represent an evolving self-understanding.

This is not to say that all poets should place psychology at the center of their work or that they should imitate Williams's style-that's another What we may miss in a lot of poems, however, is the sense that

question. what is going on in the poem is the poet's endeavor to understand, rather than merely to refer to or represent, his or her own psyche, or that of someone else; to identify what he or she understands; to discover and articulate what feeling it is that prepared for, or rises out of, that understanding; and finally, and perhaps most important to our excite­ ment as readers, to create his or her identity out of that understanding.

(Perhaps in lesser poems all this is missing because nothing of sufficient importance is informing that artistic illusion of the present struggle to articulate. The poem is striving to master and control nothing of suffi­ ciently uncontrollable power to challenge either the writer or, subse­ quently, the reader.)

Now, if when I write I am struggling both to open myself to perception and feeling and to master my language, to free and to shape my thoughts and feelings in language, then I am writing partly in order to control or influence or determine in some way my own being, my being�in�language, by making visible and objective my own sense of language, by achieving a certain kind of victory maybe it's just a little one the evidence or result of which is a composed text.

From this it follows that, in writing, I am pursuing something not yet controlled or even controllable about my being and my being-in­ language that I feel I must discover- if not fully, then at least as well as I'm able. But of course daily life careens this way and that because of -

-

events, persons and forces that we cannot control. Out of this familiar

unpredictability of life there come riddles of being and, more important to me as a writer, of being-in-language, that I want to unriddle. One of the oldest poetic genres is the riddle, and many great poems strive to

unriddle-not explain-one mystery or many. (Explaining would only be a

kind of neutralizing of the mystery, even a way of repressing it once

but by unriddling I mean creating for the reader of a poem an active process of reading that answers or completes more with bland assurances;

the active discoveries of writing.)

101

3 A sense of active discovering does not depend on syntax alone. Here is a

riddle by Charles Causley, published in 1957 in his collection Union Street: 1 Am the Great Sun

(from

a

Norman crucifix of 1632)

1 am the great sun, but you do not see me, 1 am your husband, but you tum away.

1 am the captive, but you do not free me, 1 am the captain you will not obey.

1 am the truth, but you will not believe me,

1 am the city where you will not stay, 1 am your wife, your child, but you will leave me, 1 am that God to whom you will not pray.

1 am your counsel, but you do not hear me, 1 am the lover whom you will betray, 1 am the victor, but you do not cheer me, 1 am the holy dove whom you will slay.

1 am your life, but if you will not name me,

Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

The poem leads us into a surprising recognition in ourselves of the

figures of captive, child, lover and holy dove, all of whom we would abandon or betray; and in our own historical context-that is, in Caus­ ley's as opposed to the context of 1632-we are also led into surprise when we find we have turned our distrust of power and domination

against ourselves, for we ourselves are also the very captain, God, coun­ sel and victor from whom we shrink. The poem of 1632, if that's what it is, is very modern in showing me that I am divided against myself. Here the active poetic working of language is not in the complexity of the syntax, as in Williams, but in the formal parallelisms that organize the riddles

so

that they pile up on us faster than we can answer them.

Because this is a poem, rather than another kind of organized language, both the sense of the words and also the formal organization of the poem create the poem's meaning, for it is the formal organization that reveals that the apparent uniqueness of each riddling line leads in all

and the same answer. And in fact after we have assimilated the whole poem we see that the repeated beginning of each line, "I am," cases to one

102

is at one and the same time the beginning of each riddle and the answer to it.

Despite its elegance and extraordinary formal symmetries, the poem is clearly meant not to provide a satisfying answer but rather to lead us through repetitions as if they were a ritual, and to lead our intuition through a satisfying variety of ways of putting the riddle. Poetry brings ritual into our presence because its highly deliberate organization of language, even in less traditionally shaped poems than this, returns us to the language of song, prayer, chant and all other utterances in which repetition itself becomes a summoning and a fulfillment of feeling. Ritual is inherited, and may lose all connection with feeling or with the psycho­ logical reality which, in its oblique, riddling way, it so often represents or influences; yet it remains a scene in which the word and deed and word­ as-deed are firmly ordered in time, and thus, like poetry, it can bring into us language which subtly alters our own language, and thus alters us.

It can be used for good or ill. In Causley's poem, it seems to me, it is

used for good.

Riddles, puns, paradoxes and neologisms are most at home in poetry, of all the kinds of both oral and written texts, and nowhere are they more intensely concentrated than in the work of Paul Celano Even in one of his tiniest poems we see another variety of the restless working of language I'm trying to point out not only in the compound German word vorgesichten, for which there are many meanings, but also in how the poem is built on the way Celan, ordering the words strictly, draws a paradox out of a thing for throwing-the discus-which cannot throw -

itself:

WVRFSCHEIBE, mit Vorgesichten besternt,

DISCUS, with Foreseeings starred,

WiTf dich

throw yourself

aus

dir hinaus.

out

of yourself.

Figuring out what that word vorgesichten is doing is one riddle of the poem. Vorgesichten could mean "foretellings," "premonitions," perhaps a kind of clairvoyance: we know or see more than we can act upon. Is this

the answer to the riddle: that each of us is the discus that has no one to throw it, no matter what hopes or predictions or expectations we may

have of our lives? Does the poem suggest that we are inert things, and that it's impossible for us to make ourselves into more than inert things?

103

In this little arena which Celan constructed for our thought, he seems to

lead us toward a helpless inertia of self that is the opposite of Yeats's willed self-making. Yet at the same time, the intense concentration of

language makes the reading of the poem an active process of discovery that gives at least the illusion of a movement in our And if our thought. thought can move, can't we move our lives, also? Which is the final riddle.

4 It should be clear from the variety of these examples, so far, that no

particular poetics will provide a mastery of language and poetic form; shall we pursue the question of writerly self, knowledge in this light? One way into this question is through some of the familiar maxims of writers.

Take the hoary advice "Write about what you know." It only trivializes

deep truth about all artistic expression, which is this: although any subject totally foreign to the writer isn't part of his or her daily struggle to be and therefore isn't likely to be a rich ground on which to play out the struggle to write, nonetheless no voyage into the known is worth making if there is not some unknown toward which we are sailing. In fact, you can't launch a boat, anyway, without a body of water on which a

float it. If we are writers, our not icings and self-discoveries are the

to

ground on which we work with language, and language is the ground on which we make our way not only toward discoveries of self but also toward perceptions of what is around us-what is said to be around us, and what is "really" there. (I don't mean that a writer must be one whose aural rather than visual perceptions are paramount. After all, Joseph Conrad wrote that the writer's task is to pay the highest possible homage to the visible world.

But that homage is paid not in color and line but in

words.)

It has seemed to many writers

-

I think of remarks by Robert Frost and

E. M. Forster-that writing delivers us into discoveries of what, till we had formed

some

way

to

articulate it in

language, had remained

unformed, had been unknoMl to us, and that it must do this if it is to be at

all interesting to anyone-even the writer! The articulation becomes

the knowing; the knowing comes out of the process, and it refuels a

further effort at articulation. A sense of ecstatic fruitfulness, of rich discoveries, of voyaging, comes to us in the exhilarating moments of

being-in-our-work-in-progress. From this feeling comes a confidence not 104

only in our powers of intuition but also of deliberateness and in our command of artistic form, and because of this achievement, when we we return to the language of daily life, the language of all that time when are not in the middle of our work, we are somewhat, somehow,

changed.

There are a good number of writers, especially of fiction, who have described the creation of their first drafts as a kind of wild unleashing of whatever happens to come to them as they're writing-a free-associative sprawl from which, later, they will try to pick what is important, and then pursue its further articulation. Who knows, after all, what he knows? So there are any number of reasons why a maxim like "Write about what you know" is virtually worthless. Even on a superficial level,

if I say to a fellow writer whose short story seems implausible in some ways, "Don't write about this, you don't know enough about it, it sounds like you're making it up," it should be that I mean to turn the writer back to the familiar not because it is manageable, but because on the ground of the familiar all the deep discoveries of the unmanageable

and the unfamiliar are made. The sod is familiar to the plough, but the

seedlings that arise from the sowing always seem miraculous. So instead of "Write about what you know," perhaps writers should say to each other, "Write about what you write about." Instead of telling my fellow writer "Don't write about this, you're haven't got a handle on it," I should ask, "Why did you write about this? Why are you writing?"

5 Some of the literary conventions that rule us lead us to feel that a writer

should try to dramatize, to enact, to present, rather than to editorialize,

explain, to abstract; and so we say, and hear it said, "Show this, don't tell it." There's no question that keeping ourselves away from insipid or to

uninformed opinions is a good idea. We have all come upon awful sentences or lines in our own work, as we are revising, that are nothing but some kind of shortcut around the kind of textured, vivid, lived

quality that we want in our language. And we've tried to rewrite those passages in a more grounded, more realized or materialized way. But on the other hand there are lots of things in one's struggles both to live and to live-in-language that require a telling, not a showing. The conven­ tiona I wisdom of this little maxim makes it all too easy for us not only to get out from under the responsibility of having something to say, but also of having to say something.

105

A telling is first of all dramatic; it creates an intimate moment of relatedness between two persons focused intensely on each other, the one

who is telling and the one who is listening, as William Goyen often

said. Therefore it is a brilliantly lit arena of knowledge and knowing-of

others, of each other, of language. And in poetry as well as in fiction, there must be room for ideas and for ways of getting at experience and feeling that can only be found through the use of discursive language. So this maxim, "Show, don't tell," conceals and negates a deeper truth than the one it purports to reveal.

And if you look at a poet not spooked by these injunctions, the lesson to be learned is that while we may agree or

disagree with a writer's beliefs or opinions, nonetheless the presence of belief, conviction, philosophi­ cal statement or opinion, stated discursively, has a vital place in poetry.

A stark example from Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse": They fuck you up, your mum and dad, They may not mean to, but they do­ They fill you with the faults they had And add some extra, just for you.

When discursive language and belief are substantial, or themselves fresh, or when they help us to see with amazement the very conditions in the

midst of which we are living, they consort very well with the most verbal textures and the most vividly presented sense sensuous

perceptions.

I think that in passages of discursive directness, set against the textures

of imagery, figurative language, and the highly deliberate poetic organiza­ tion of sounds and syntax, the process of self-discovery makes its most impressive leaps. A strong example of this lies in Edward Thomas's "Owl": Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest, Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was 1.

All of the night was quite barred out except An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill, No merry note, nor cause of merriment, But one telling me plain what I escaped

And others could not, that night, as in I went.

106

And salted was my food, and my repose,

Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice

Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

The final statement of the poem, because of the modest self-describing of the earlier lines, accomplishes an identification and leap outward from the poem that redefines the person whom we hear speaking it to us. His personal loneliness and isolation are matters to be described and

presented in the first three stanzas, with all sorts of formal elegances of symmetry, syntactic deftness and one rhyme, especially, that ties his state of feeling to the auditory image of the owl's voice ("I" I"cry"). But it's the last stanza that discovers what it is to which he can meaningfully link his own feeling, how it is that his own feeling can be made meaning, ful beyond his own experience. That going out of himself is what carries

outward, too-not the description leading up to it. So for comment or commentary to be proscribed from poetry or fiction only guarantees that the work must remain at best oblique to the actual circumstances of life. Behind striking images and showy language, in fact, a poet may hide us

a

failure to seek any such engagement, or a lack of intellectual serious,

ness.

Sometimes to conceal our opinions is only to present our work as

something wiser than it is.

6 "Find your voice." Hmm as

As if it were there, waiting to be found? Or if it might be only a gimmick, a technique? In such advice I hear ...

neither true seriousness nor true play

both of which are essential to what we do as writers. After all, we cannot live a life that exists outside -

individual projects of living; our preoccupation with language is heart of the way each of us, as a writer, is continuing his or her

our own

at the

project. So you don't "find" your voice, you create it, you continue to create it out of yourself and your work, and this continued creation is what changes it-or silvers it, as Mandelstam wrote. If mostly it's the

voice, because of the continuity of normal existence, yet each experience of composition, each poem and story and novel, carries us forward into the discovery of different inflections, modulations and same

tones. What you

find, if you're lucky, is a sense of the live pace of change

in your own life and art, and therein, the reality of your feelings, the

reality or truth of your intuition, the authority of your imagination, the 107

words for what you

now

you want to say-to

see

paraphrase E. M.

Forster.

7 For Yeats, the motive for writing is in part to achieve a self-creation.

Emily Dickinson offers us an account of a related, equally large motive, which I'll try to uncover by looking at an apparently theological poem in which she metaphorizes mortality as a condemnation by a court of law (#412): I read my sentence

-

steadily­

Reviewed it with my eyes, To see that I made no mistake In its extremest clause-

The Date, and manner, of the shame­ And then the Pious Form That "God have mercy" on the Soul The Jury voted HimI made my soul familiar-with her extremity­

That at the last, it should not be a novel Agony­ But she, and Death, acquaintedMeet tranquilly, as friends-

Salute, and pass, without a HintAnd there, the Matter ends-

But of course the word "sentence" can also mean something quite different from a penalty of death imposed by God the judge-it can mean the sentence she is writing in a poem. Knowing the whole of her work, we can see a secondary reading. In the first stanza, she is asking if her expressive distortions of syntax are too difficult to be understood: I read my sentence-steadily­ Reviewed it with my eyes, To see that I made no mistake In its extremest clause-

The next line expresses her sense that the whole enterprise of her work, in any case, confronts her repeatedly with such failure that the poems are a kind of crime (and surely we all recognize this feeling): The Date, and manner, of the shame-

108

She implies, then, that there must yet be some merit cient, then still deserving mercy in her work:

-

even

if insuffi­

-

And then the Pious Form That "God have mercy" on the Soul The Jury voted Him-

(The "Pious Form" in this second context would be the hymn-meter of all her poems.)

Now, whereas in the first reading, the next four lines are the con­ demned prisoner's self-preparation for her execution, in this second reading which I'm pursuing, these lines summarizing her existential pro­ ject also express her credo as a writer: I made my soul familiar-with her extremity­

That at the last, it should not be a novel Agony­ But she, and Death, acquaintedMeet tranquilly, as friends-

In these lines the apparent subject of the whole poem (that all mortals are

condemned to death) and the hidden subject (Dickinson's sense of

why she writes) are fused and no longer represent one level of discourse that happens on close reading to reveal a less apparent one, but rather a single yet complex saying that is highly and characteristically metaphori­ cal. Knowing the "extremity" of her own soul-that is, its imminent confrontation with death and also the oddness, the difficulty, the uniqueness, of her own temperament and the conditions of her life, she has wanted to foresee for herself, in her multitude of poems written with little hope of gaining readers, all the visions and versions of extremity­ from grief to happiness-that she can imagine, so that the writing of the poems will extend her knowledge of feeling all the way to her sense of her own death. She was obsessed by this subject just as much as by her equally strong experience of isolated, ravishingly wonderful moments of life. She is a poet of the dizzying freedom of consciousness, a poet of the living of life and the living, as it were, of death-as in "I heard a fly buzz when I died" and many other poems, especially those in which con­ sciousness of death offers her the opportunity to be, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff calls it in her critical biography of Dickinson, "proleptic" that is, positing a condition that cannot be (her having died already), and speaking from within it.

The unfettered esthetic independence of her poems, and her repeated attempts in them to offer a symbolic reply to death, seem meant to -

-

109

accomplish a work on her own consciousness, upon herself. If Yeats wrote shaping his own temperament and person, Dickinson writes to extend (her) consciousness so that she might so thoroughly prepare herself for death that it would not be the terror which, against a small town of orthodox believers, she felt it must be: to take control of

I made my soul familiar- with her extremity­

That at the last, it should not be a novel Agony­ But she, and Death, acquainted-

Meet tranquilly, as friends-

Salute, and pass, without a HintAnd there, the Matter ends-

The sense of this is, "I made my soul familiar with her extremity [so] that at the last, it should not be a novel Agony, but [rather that] she and

Death, [already] acquainted, [should] meet tranquilly, as friends Thus the terror of the first eight lines is tamed not by solace or illusion but by courage.

Another curiosity about this paradoxical poem is that until Thomas H. Johnson transcribed the poems as Dickinson in fact wrote them, the poem had been changed by early editors to four quatrains following the regularity of the hymn-meter. But as Dickinson wrote it out, she length­

"

....

ened lines in what would have been the last two quatrains in order to make the poem come out to be fourteen lines long, and in fact she

employed as a rhyme scheme a variation on the Italian sonnet form.

Now, embarking on a sonnet is in the English tradition perhaps the most deliberate way for a poet to join a literary context of intense consciousness and self-consciousness, and of artistry carried to the level of the most highly-wrought (sonnets are not the form of spontaneity).

Therefore, frequently the subject matter and the tropes of sonnets are characteristically paradoxical, compressed to the point of the cryptic, and so on. The very rarity of such a poetic form in Dickinson's work

should alert us to her deliberateness in composing it; and in what better form could she have sought to express-as if for herself only-her own credo as a poet? The sonnet's characteristic volta, or turn, in feeling or

thought, occurs right on schedule at line nine, the credo I quoted above-Dickinson's answer to the "sentence of death."

When Dickinson offers versions of more commonplace ideas about

why poets write, they are also related to her acute consciousness of death. In poem #883 she constructs a modest consolation for herself,

imagining the life of poetry after its author is dead: 110

The Poets light but Lamps­

Themselves-go outThe Wicks they stimulate­ If vital LightInhere as do the Suns­ Each Age a Lens

Disseminating their Circumference

But Dickinson does

not seem

-

to

have meant that poetry is

at

all

ethereal; in fact, she insisted on language as a living, uttered medium of the poet's work, for example in poem #1212: A word is dead

When it is said, Some say.

I say it just

Begins to live That day.

And in poem #1651, probably dating from the last period of her life, when she returned somewhat to Christian faith after her early sustained

rebellion against the incongruities and injustices that followed logically from belief in a supposedly just and omnipotent God, she began with the Biblical creation of the Word made Flesh in order to suggest that all

language that is "breathed distinctly," such as a poem, can defeat death in some way, and would only be unnecessary if indeed God were to return:

A Word made Flesh is seldom

And tremblinglv partook Nor then perhaps reported But have I not mistook

Each one of us has tasted With ecstasies of stealth The very food debated To our specific strengthA Word that breathes distinctly

Has not the power to die

Cohesive as the Spirit It may expire if He-

"Made Flesh and dwelt among us" Could condescension be Like this consent of Language This loved Philology.

111

Perhaps all the sensuous linguistic texture of poetry is evidence of its connection not only to thought but also to body; not only to feeling­

that is, emotion

-

but also to feeling

-

that is, the perception of touch

and of being touched; not only to psyche but also to eros.

Poetry's

peculiar intensity of linguistic effect, and also of meaning, gives it the power to work on us as readers, and to change us as writers, as if poetry were a

material force confronting us. And Dickinson's phrase "A word

that breathes distinctly" -embodying language itself to suggest this phys­ ical power of poetry

-

was

echoed years later by Mandelstam, who said

that the language of Boris Pasternak's poems made them such powerful

breathing exercises that, if recited repeatedly, they could cure tuberculo­ sis. This is an intensely material way of saying that Pasternak's poems are an inspiration: they work his lungs, they shape the way in which he breathes, and therefore in which, as a poet, he lives.

One last point suggested by this poem: Dickinson writes, "[T]his con­ sent of Language / This loved Philology." This is to say, this gift as if from above us of a medium in which we can redeem ourselves, and this loved love of words. Our language comes to us from all who speak it around us. In our responses to it, in our choosing of whose language we wish most to hear and our resistance to language we dislike or distrust, we participate as writers in the social body in which we are formed and in which we struggle to form ourselves.

8 Dickinson is an extraordinary creator of metaphor, and one of the most striking aspects of her poetry is the compression and freshness of her of speech. I think our responsiveness to this, as opposed to the

figures

lack of responsiveness among her contemporaries, is very much a part of our cultural moment, and again implicates us in what we have inherited

from the spate of post-Romantic, early twentieth-century writers in vari­ ous European languages who in one way or another claimed that the function of poetry was to defamiliarize the familiar, or refresh the sense

perceptions, or, as Ezra Pound put it, to "make it new." One example: Walter Benjamin wrote of Brecht's epic theater that the art of it "consists in producing astonishment rather than empathy. To put it succinctly: instead of identifying with the characters, the audience should be edu­ cated to be astonished at the circumstances under which they func­ tion."

If I understand this correctly, it means that Brecht's plays, when sue112

cessful, make it possible for the audience to feel astonishment at the circumstances of their own lives, which the plays force them to see stripped of mystifications and habitual attitudes. What Brecht seems to have been after was a way to create not only fresh perception and astonishment, but also conscience. It may be, although I can only specu­ late, that the process of active self-discovery and creation of one's being­ in-language that I have been trying to point out in these poems has something to do, through some psycho neural connection we can only we guess at, with the responsive and responsible part of consciousness call conscience. This isn't to say that artistic activity can in any way infallibly re-create the artist as a more conscience-stricken person-there are many sad counterexamples among even great artists. But the activity of artistic making, especially when the medium is language, at least immerses the artist in that place where conscience is partly made, the realm of self-knowledge, self-acknowledgment, without which there can be little acknowledgment of others. In Dickinson's life, her paradoxical combination of reclusive ness and intensely solicitous concern for loved friends may be completely of a whole with the impression of a kind of

metaphoric vertigo of speed and discovery that we find in her poems.

What can make artistic life so confusing in our time, as it already did in hers, is that the language around us works against any freshness and cleanness of perception, against discovery, but steadily and relentlessly to strengthen the habits of thought and feeling on which commerce and power depend. Only in an illusory way does the commercial culture around us also prize the new, the novel. And it does so so superficially and insatiably that what we would try to refresh and "make new" with a word or an image can be immediately trumped by a crass advertisement, for purposes completely opposed to our own, even if those opposed purposes share with us certain rhetorical devices. For if indeed we find it

exhilarating to be renewed, to be refreshed, to return to work and family and artistic creation with a sense of recharged resources, yet around us the advertising culture by which almost all communication is tinged works tirelessly to create a thirst for the new only so that our efforts to

quench that thirst will never be satisfied, and we'll be thirsty again, and forever. Our "making it new," whatever that meant in Pound's day, is for us only an unintended echo of the driving mechanism of consumer culture, and we should give more thought to how to "make it last."

Perhaps this is why, in poetry, there is now a vaunted trend to return to traditional poetic forms- as if to say, with this gesture, that the poet

refuses to make the poem look like anything new at all. Such contradic­ tions make it necessary for us to think about how we write and why we

113

write in terms not only of artistic technique and craft but also in terms

of how we as writers shape our own lives with our work.

9 My last example is by Cesar Vallejo, and in it I perceive all the things I've touched on the deliberate self-making of Yeats; Mandelstam's sense of the poet's struggle with language as the ploughing that silvers us; Williams's emotional dramas of unfolding understanding; Celan's and Causley's riddling; formal patterns as ways of making meaning; discur­ -

sive statement; and Dickinson's mortal anxiousness to find a way in her

poems to address life and death. What I especially admire about Vallejo's poem is the way he unites his observations of the world outside himself

with his

self-questioning, to suggest that to remake his poems in

response to this world is to remake himself as well.

Among the untitled posthumous poems called the poemas humanos, the "human poems," this one meets head-on all the artist's bafflement of conscience in the midst of those conditions of daily life that can call into question the value of making art, and our motives for making it: Un hombre pasa con un pan al hombro.

,Voy a escrtbir, despues, sobre mi doble?

Otro se sienta, rc1scase, extrae un pio;o de su axila, matalo.

,Con que \lalor hablar del psicoandlisis?

Otro ha entrado a mi pecho con un palo en la mano.

,Hablar luego de S6crates al medico?

Un coio pasa dan do el brnzo a un nino.

,Voy, despues, a leer a Andre Breton?

Otro tiembla del fr{o, rose, escape sangre.

,Cabra aludir ;amds al Yo profundo?

Otro busca en al fango huesos, cascaras. ,C6mo escribir, despuis, del infinito?

Un albanil cae de un techo, muere y ya no almuerta. ,lnno\lar, despues, el rropo, la metdfora?

Un comerciante roba un gramo en el peso a un cliente.

,Hablar, despues, de cuarta dimensi6n?

114

Un banquero falsea su balance.

,Con que cara Ilorar en el teatro?

Un paria duerme con el pie a la espalda. ,Hablar, despues, a nadie de Picasso?

Alguien va en un enrierro sollozcndo.

,Como luego ingresaT a la Academia?

Alguien limpia un /usi! en su cocina. ,Con que valor hablar del mas aUa? Alguien pasa contando con sus dedos. ,Como hablar del no-yo sin dar un grito?

A man goes by with a long loaf of bread on his human shoulder.

And after that I'm going to write about my double?

Another man sits down, scratches himself, nabs a louse in his

armpit, then smashes it.

What's the good of talking about psychoanalysis?

Another has invaded my own body, with a stick in his hand.

So then, talk about Socrates later when I go to the doctor?

A cripple goes by with a boy, arm in arm.

And after that, I'm going to read Andre Breton?

Another man is shivering with the cold, he coughs, spits blood.

Will it ever be right to refer to the Inner Me? Another is looking for meat scraps and orange rinds in the mud.

How can I write about the Infinite after that?

A mason falls from a rooftop, he dies, and does without lunch

from now on.

And then I'm going to innovate tropes and metaphors?

A merchant cheats by one gram as he weighs out a customer's goods.

After that, talk about the fourth dimension?

A banker rigs his gold-balance.

Make a bawling scene at the theater?

An outcast sleeps with one foot behind his back.

And after that, not talk to anyone about Picasso?

115

Someone is on the way to a burial, erving.

How can one go join the Academy later?

Someone's cleaning his rifle in the kitchen.

What's the good of talking about the beyond?

Someone goes by counting on his fingers.

How can I talk about the not-I without screaming?

About Vallejo, what most appeals-because it gives a sometimes exag­

gerated, sometimes even threatening, edge to his poems is that in nearly all he wrote he is working to make sense of the disparity between the straining yet exquisite concentration of artistic making and the -

intractable raw experience

his own or others'

that was the stuff of his From the tilted lanes of his native poems. village in the Andes to the -

-

streets of Paris he seems to have carried this can sense in most

disparity in mind, and one of his poems how barely adequate a medium he found

language itself, when he worked to express the anger and the awe that such divided consciousness caused him. In many of his poems, the complex torsions of syntax, the dissonant chords he sounds by employ­ ing starkly different sorts of diction, the difficult representational pro­ gress of many poems (that is, the progress of reference of the material

images in his poems), all convey how hard it is not only to express

powerful feeling and elusive insight, but also to discover them through the maddeningly complex medium of language. While the course of his work is toward less of this expressive torsion and distortion, till in the

poemas humanos there is a greater simplicity of language, there is plenty of newness, freshness and active struggle inscribed in his lines from earliest to last work.

It's not that Vallejo frequently wrote poems about poetry or about

writing. But-to risk a definition-all poetry is language that is in some also about language. Because this is so, all poetry, even the most intimate, is also in some way engaged with our social being, since lan­

way

guage is the currency of our being with others. And because all poetry is in some way engaged with our social being, all writing is in some corres­

ponding way a kind of self-making. One of Keats's most endearing qualities is the naked earnestness of his youthful ambition to make a place for himself in the wider world, and his ambition to do so as a writer. In the

same

letter of 27 October 1818

to

his friend Richard

Woodhouse in which he wrote of "the poetical Character" that "it is not itself-it has no self-it is every thing and nothing," he also wrote, "I am ambitious of doing the world some good: if I should be spared that may 116

be the work of maturer years-in the interval I will assay to reach to as high a summit in Poetry as the nerve bestowed on me will suffer." These that Keats's idea of a poet connects an openness of statements suggest

being and becoming, with a preparation for some useful, even if post­ involvement in the lives of others. And in the famous letter of

poned,

1819 to his brother George and his wife Georgiana, written only a few months before his greatest, and last, poems, Keats said, ) I say 'Soul Call the world if you Please "the vale of Soul-making [ be intelli­ There an Intelligence from Soul as may distinguished making' but they are not Souls till they or sparks of the divinity in millions ..•

-

-

gences

acquire identities[.)

Keats's metaphor for the process by which an intelligence becomes a soul is that of reading-an engagement with language: I will call the world a School instituted for the purpose of teaching little

children to read-I will call the human heart the horn Book used in that school-and I will call the Child able to read, the Soul made from that school and its hornbook. [ ) Not merely is the Heart a Hornbook, It is the ...

Mind's Bible[.)

And because his own engagement with what he was reading, especially Shakespeare, so clearly fed his own artistic powers in this period of his

life, his experience of language must have been as rich and intense as any poet's has ever been.

In May of that year he wrote the odes to the nightingale and to the Grecian urn and other poems. In August he wrote in a letter to a friend, "1 am convinced more and more every day that (excepting the human friend Philosopher) a fine writer is the most genuine Being in the World."

And to another friend, "I am convinced more and more day by day that fine writing is next to fine doing the top thing in the world." His excitement is evident. About what, exactly? Given his sense of his own painful limitations both as an artist and as a person, his passionate commitment to writing, and the almost total lack of appreciation for his

work from readers of his time, isn't it hard not to see in these statements Keats's intuition that the intensely focused artistic powers that he could

feel ripening in himself, and which he poured into his greatest poems in these few months, had given him the hope that against his failing physi­ cal health he was working furiously to create a self that could survive indifference and illness? Keats's struggle to create himself fully before he died is a story in which the poems appear as the evidence of

even

the extraordinary changes through which his soul-making carried him.

117

The conclusion I come to for myself, after pondering these poems and

poetical, is that why I write, and why I want to write, is because I find myself preoccupied with being attentive with the instrument of lan­ guage to the life inside and around me. Maybe that's because I want to change that life. But maybe we write not first out of conscience, but first because the way it has turned out for us is that we're haunted by the sound of the language in our heads, in our own mouths, in the mouths of others, and obsessively we listen to it, ponder it, rework it; we're following a thread of linguistic clues to understanding what this life is good for. And so writing becomes our way of discovering and shaping our own understanding, and maybe thereby our own lives, and a way to share the self-empowering we gain from this preoccupation and artistic work with others. Out of my experience of that process, which strength­ ens me, I believe, in my artistic will the more I have of it, comes same sense of progress toward what it is I would like my work to become, and who I might have to be in order to write that work. As Yeats-with matters

whose opinions I'd argue, but whose great poems, and whose engage­ ment with others and with the artistic and social life around him, I admire-wrote to explain why he revised his poems so much, The friends that have it I do wrong When ever I remake a song,

Should know what issue is at stake: It is myself that I remake.

118

Menial Labor and the Muse Maxine Kumin

An all-day rain of the mizzly seductive sort, compounded by snow fog; twilight began this day and will mediate it until fully dark.

Before settling in at my desk I've distributed an extra bale of hay to the horses, making a quick trip from house to barn in my slicker and muck boots. The whole main floor of the barn is packed, this time of year, with last August's second cutting, a mix of timothy and brome grass,

mostly without the seed heads. The bales are still green, so sweet it makes me salivate as I inhale their aroma which cries summer! on the winter air. I have never understood why some entrepreneur has yet to capture the scent and market it as a perfume. Doesn't everyone melt, smelling new hay? I must have been a horse in the last incarnation or

had a profound love affair in some sixteenth-century hayloft.

A perspicacious student once pointed out to me that it rains or snows in a large percentage of my poems. She's right, of course, though I hadn't

thought of the connection.

Stormy days are my best writing days. The weather relieves me of my Jewish-Calvinist urgency to do something useful with one or another of the young stock, to longe or drive or ride the current two-, three -or four-year-old. Or, in season, to cut around the perimeters of the pas­ tures, work that's known as brushing out. Or clean out and re-bed the ever

run-in sheds and the central area under the barn my friend Robin calls

the motel lobby. No need to bring the vegetable garden into this, or the sugar bush of a hundred maple trees. We probably won't be setting any

taps this March. Acid rain and the depredations of the pear thrip that followed have weakened the trees to a possibly fatal point.

This year's wood is in, all split and stacked. Next year's is already on the ground, split in four-foot lengths to dry. It snowed before we could 119

get two truckloads of manure on the garden, though. Victor says we'll

have a thaw, that there is still time. He's still puttying and caulking as we button up for the hard months. Still is the wrong word, as there is no

beginning and no apparent end. Outside water faucets are drained and closed off, heating element installed in the watering trough, and so on.

Writing and well-being. In the most direct, overt and uncomplicated way, my writing depends on the well-being that devolves from this abbreviated list of chores undertaken and completed.

One set of self, imposed deadlines nurtures the other: something harshly physical each day, the reward being a bone-tired sense of equi­ poise at nightfall. A daily session at the desk even when, as Rilke warned, nothing comes. I must keep holy even disappointment, even desertion. The leaven of the next day's chores will redeem the failed

writing, infuse it with new energy or at the very least allow me to shred it while I await the Rilkean birth,hour of a new clarity.

The well-being of solitude is a necessary component of this equation.

A "Good! No visitors today" mentality isn't limited to snowstorms or Monday mornings. On the contrary, this feeling of contentment in isolation pervades every good working day. My writing time needs to surround itself with empty stretches, or at least unpeopled ones, for the writing takes place in an area of suspension as in a hanging nest that is almost entirely encapsulated. I think of the oriole's graceful con­ struction.

This is why poems may frequently begin for me in the suspended cocoon

of the airplane, or even in the airport lounge during those dreary

hours of layovers. There's the same anonymity, the same empty but

enclosed space, paradoxical in view of the thousands of other travelers pulsing past. But I have no responsibility here. I am uncalled upon and go inward.

My best ruminations take

can

place in the barn while my hands (and back) are busy doing something else. Again, there's the haunting appeal of enclosure, the mindless suspension of doing simple, repetitive tasks­ mucking out, refilling water buckets, raking sawdust-that allows those free-associative leaps out of which a poem may occasionally come. And if not, reasons the Calvinist, a clean barn is surely a sign of the attained state of grace. Thus I am saved. And if the Muse nous

120

descends, my androgy­

pagan Muse, I will have the best of both worlds.

Pollution, Purification and Song John Peck

in memory of Clarence Peck

An American man sailing a small boat to the back of Ithaka moored his craft,

reports a friend, and scaled the empty slopes on that side of the island. He finally entered a small village, which to all appearances layoff the beaten

path. In the single tavern he asked the keeper if he were native. "Yes." And then, if he knew ancient Greek poetry. "Yes." Homer? "Yes, by heart." Incau­ tious at last, the American invited him to recite, whereupon the tavern keeper launched into Pope's Odyssey.

Beyond the morals one might readily draw from this tale, I find one for my own reflections on a tricky theme. The archaic parallels I supply for some of the poetry written around the Vietnam War have a bearing which may already lie close at hand, twice or thrice mediated, rather than coming straight from the bardic mouth. The poets themselves would probably shrug at any such bearing anyway; and besides, the latter-day candidates for the bardic function have professed weariness with any form of it (there is Whitman's impatience with Greek and Roman epic, and before that Blake's decided preference for Hebraic inspiration). But I climb the old hillsides because I find that the parallels surface willy-nilly, like arrowheads working up through the soil, sometimes very close to the surface of the poetry itself, and that their patterns of feeling, rather than something christened, are the truly stubborn ones. This will come out in the latter parts of my exploration. But first I shall try a contrast between an American public occasion and one of its ancient proto­ types, a contrast which led me to my theme.

121

1 Thomas Merton: What is it like?

Thich Nhat Hanh: Everything is destroyed.

In October 1982 a three-day conference was held at Salado, Texas, on

the Vietnam War,

sponsored by the Institute for the Humanities at Salado and chaired by Dr. Harry Wilmer, a psychiatrist and psychoana­ lyst who has pioneered work with the nightmares suffered by Vietnam veterans. Addresses delivered at the conference have been published along with a summary of the event.· Reading these, we catch a familiar scene: the usual conference format, the panels of speakers, microphones handed to members of the audience for question and comment. And whether we are interested in the arts of history, healing or poetry, we can

place the emphasis where we choose. An unrepentant Walt Rostow

took part, as did retired General Douglas Kinnard in a quite different

spirit; Kinnard, turned historian, had George Herring as colleague, with journalist Philip Geyelin close by; Dr. Wilmer's work on traumatic dreams had its place; and Robert Bly reflected on the betrayals of younger

men

by their elders in the war, as well as reading from his

poetry about it.

At first, then, we recognize a scene. But it discloses a timeless back­ ground once we reflect on the copresence, at its tables, of the warrior­

strategist and the poet. Homer imagined this occasion at the court of King Alkinoos on the island of Phaiakia, where Odysseus, his identity not yet revealed, banquets as a guest. The strategos of Troy's downfall hears the blind court bard Demodokos chant two episodes from the Troad, the quarrel of Akhilleos with Odysseus and the Odyssean ruse of the Wooden Horse. Using a phrase which elsewhere gets tied only to Akhilleos, Demodokos calls Odysseus a "sacker of cities." The song to moves Odysseus to weep, and Homer's great simile likens his tears those of a woman seeing her husband struck down while defending family and city. The captor sees his victory again, but through the feminine victim's eyes. Poetry accomplishes this, not only by awakening about real conver­ memory but also by shifting the standpoint, bringing sion or metanoia.

*Vietnam in Remission, eds. James F. Veninga and Harry A. Wilmer (College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1985). Professor Lynda E. Boose includes in her summary of the conference audience of nearly 160 persons.

122

a

survey of responses

from the

Because Odysseus tries to hide his weeping behind his cloak, the king he is dis­ stops the performance and asks the unidentified guest why turbed. He adds, in an attempt to soften things, that the war at Troy was not

only the doing of the gods but also came about so that, in the end,

heroic poetry about it would hold the attention of later generations.

Because this remark comes in the course of courtly courtesy, it can be overlooked. Yet its key verb, spinning, for the work of destruction, not

only brings in the Fates (the infinitive names Klotho herself) but also, for the Greek ear, evokes a parallel name for song itself (hymn or "weaving"). King Alkinoos speaks of aoide or heroic poetry, but alludes to hymns that praise the gods while saying that the gods spin fateful ruin so as to inspire song. This startling scheme of justification rhetorically magnifies the actual powers of mnemosyne, which comes long after raw event to turn it into an enduring, fated pattern. I dare say "actual" because this archaic formulation has been far from exhausted of its

meaning.

The court of Alkinoos in Homer, like the court of Arthur in medieval romance, stood as a paragon institution, the summary of things matri­

lineal and ideal for the Greeks. Scholars have often seen in it a bridge between the actual world and an elsewhere zone; strikingly, the home­

coming to Ithaca parallels the arrival on Phaiakia, item for narrative item. And so, the poetry chanted each evening at the court of Alkinoos and Arete could impress a visitor as a revelation. While he was no Parsifal, Odysseus was changed by hearing Demodokos. This effect is what Homer himself attributed to sung epic, and is also, after all, what our

Yankee sailor vainly sought on Ithaca.

Who was the bard? His name touches both the life of the demos or

people, and then several roots which may prompt idle speculation. But one of these, the parallel stem of dokeo in a form indicating the telling of a dream or vision, may justify the etymological sport, because with it we come close to

Demodokos's role. In accord with the theme of compen­

sated blindness stretching from Homer and Pindar through the tragedi­ ans to Plato

and Callimachus, Demodokos is awake to a hidden reality

because in him the daylight world has grown quiet. "And poor old "

Homer, blind, blind as a bat, / Ear, ear for the sea-surge Although Robert Bly is a showman, by no means did he cast himself in a bardic role at the Salado conference. Anthropology and social psychology, those contemporary muses, stood behind his solidly conse­ quent performance, in which he called for rituals of mourning, imagined the primal outlines they might take, read a poetry designed to incite primary emotions, and provocatively attacked General Shoemaker and ....

123

Walt Rostow, sackers of cities and villages, to bring home his theme of

masculine betrayal but also to reopen wounds and further their healing.

The imagined Greek bard and the American poet remain dissimilar in

their intent. But the effect of song imagined by Homer equals the effect

Bly wanted to incite, although with a difference that remains to be seen.

Even so, my theme emerges: poetry of a certain kind-epic mnemosyne in Greek, confrontational recital in American-deliberately pollutes the audience (pollution is mourning in ancient practice) so as to purify it.

"The ear I catches rime like pangs of disease from the air" (Robert

Duncan, "Shadows, Passages II"). Fetched from the invisible, those lines, in the years when poisonous herbicide named for a sunny citrus fruit was going after a different hidden reality (at Salado Walt Rostow justi­ fied it as "a device to deal with an enemy that was exploiting deep cover in distant places"). If Rostow had been able to peer through the deep foliage of our actions to their distant meaning, he might have felt the kind of pollution I have in mind, the kind which signals the mourner by setting him apart. This kind of pollution is also what poetry can bring, although in our circumstances the transportation jostles and jars: the sharp edges in some of Bly, in most of Ginsberg, and the self-proclaimed "prophetic" thrust in much of Ginsberg and Duncan, are obvious. What they bring confrontatively, Demodokos, of course, brings gently, deco­ rously, in accord with that ritual attention to the stranger of which the Greeks took such care.

I suppose that we must feel them as if for the first time, the founda­

tional host-guest ceremonies of Greek culture. Yet after all, Demodo­ kos's song moves Odysseus's memory into grief for the suffering of the other and the defeated. The specific pollutions stipulated by Greeks for men returning from war to civil life have their bearing here: the disfigur­ tears of Odysseus bring home to him the domestic cost of

ing, polluting

his wily device. Yet how remarkably a bereaved woman, rather than another warrior, supplies the leverage into this heroic catharsis. Homer's

touch here carries far. Without that

particular completion, no real

mourning, no adequate healing, come within reach of the heroic

world.

With Homer's scene as my example, I lend poetry's emphasis to the virtual identity of pollution with mourning in the ancient social pattern, too an identity of which scholars who treat that pattern need not make much. With our eyes on poetry as the occasion for this mourning and its effects, that emphasis lets us see something of the necessity

healing

which poetry serves, serves much as the host gives room to that embassy

of fate, his guest.

At least through the Napoleonic wars, European poets acknowledged

124

this necessity as one of their art's deeper roles. Ugo Foscolo ended his long topical poem of 1806, "I Sepolcri," with a portrait of Homer point­

ing into just those depths. Foscolo's ruse in his great coda was

to imitate

prophecy: Palms, cypresses, the day will come when you'll see a blind beggar stray through your ancient shade, feeling his way into the tombs to take the urns in his arms

and have speech with them. Those secret vaults will moan and the house of death will tell the whole tale, how Troy was levelled twice and twice rebuilt in shining splendor over silent streets

only to burnish Greek glory for the line of Peleus taking its last prize. The poet, easing the pain of those souls with song, will make Greek princes deathless in every country touched by the fathering sea. And you, Hektor, will win the honor of tears wherever blood is held sacred

shed for one's native earth, as long as the sun shines down on the catastrophes of mankind.

The function in Homeric poetry which Ezra Pound derived from biogra­ phy ("and Homer was a medic") Foscolo attributed to Homeric poetry itself, the function most in keeping with the effect of Demodokos's song

Odysseus. Indeed, Odysseus is moved into identification with the Trojan dead. These dead are the ones whose pain is assuaged, as Foscolo has it, by the Iliad. His Homer burrows for inspiration among Trojan tombs, not Argive ones. It is more than a pretty idea to imagine that victims give song its theme in exchange for the balm granted by song to those same dead victims. Behind this idea, in stark simplicity, stands the idea in Homer's episode about the power of epic song: that song recon­ stellates and eases the pain of the victors by grafting it to that of the on

victims.

To work in this way, it seems that such poetic power must span several eras:

from Achaea, through the Greek migrations, to the Hellenic dias­

pora of Homer's audience. Across such

span, the mnemosyne

on

which song draws appears as a clarifying perspective rather than

as

a

direct, confrontative recollection. Mnemosyne sees summarily, and it judges. Writing of Homer's work and what it beheld, Eric Voegelin fashioned an expression much like the one I have used more narrowly to describe Odysseus's emotion at Phaiakia. In Homer's view, he concludes, the war "reveals a universal order-embracing both gods and men, both 125

Trojans and Achaeans-in decline and judgment. The misery of the vanquished will fall back on the victors."

Do the brief apex of American power, and its garrisoned decline, stand too close for the blind, farseeing gaze of mnemosyne to register them? The question is perhaps unwieldy. Salado has us observe, more closely, that confrontation came to be the poet's work. It is different when we read Foscolo's poem: one may plausibly imagine that his world of feeling still maintains contact with Homer's because the therapy of the Homeric chant imagined by Foscolo accords with what Homer himself

pictured at Phaiakia. But in hearing Robert Bly at Salado, the audience imbibed a stiffer medicine, strictly preliminary to grieving. They heard poetry that excavates crimes which we have conspired to bury, and that renews emotions immediate to the helplessness of onlookers rather than the actions of perpetrators. The ritual pollution that Blv leaves with his audience comes by way of shock ("I hate this section," he said before reading part of "The Teeth Mother Naked at Last") targeted on forget­ ting and denial. Bly compared our incomplete acknowledgment of war guilt to that of Germany after the Second World War (a comparison which the American face of economic rebirth in Germany renders all the more unsettling). At Salado's banquet, then, Bly sounded this note after declaring his distaste for it: But if one of those children came near that we have set on fire, came

toward you like a gray barn, walking,

you would howl like a wind tunnel in a hurricane, you would tear at your shirt with blue hands, you would drive over your own child's wagon trying to back up,

the pupils of your eyes would go wild-

1£ a child came by burning, you would dance on a lawn,

trying to leap into the air, digging into your cheeks, you would ram your head against the wall of your bedroom

like a bull penned too long in his moody pen-

1£ one of those children came toward me with both hands in the air, fire rising along both elbows, I would suddenly go back to my animal brain, I would drop on all fours screaming, my vocal cords would turn blue, so would yours,

it would be two days before I could play with my own children again.

Perhaps only flat irony (why two days and not two weeks or months?) could close off this encounter. Bly takes care in mid-passage to shift the targeting pronoun to himself, as well as to yoke the other you back in at 126

the end-a fitting strategem for this stuff, for as Professor Lynda Boose noticed in handling veterans' written reactions to the conference, curi­ disclose the unspoken demand by soldiers that

ously shifting pronouns

citizens share in their emotional burden ("Those of us who participated

did so with honor, dignity, and to the best of their ability with the understanding and information available to them [i.e., us]").

The met anoia in Blv's poem turns, not on a bereaved wife and mother, but on life still young and fate still embryonic. This child, naturally, preoccupied poets and publicists during the war. Both Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan reached back to St. Robert Southwell's visionary Christmas poem, "The Burning Babe," in order to register their own

shock. Duncan: This is not a baby on fire but a babe of fire,

flesh burning with its own flame, not toward death but alive with flame, suffering its self

the heat of the heart the rose was hearth of

•...

Both writers reach for Southwell perhaps to reassure themselves and us that "we" share an active cultural memory, even a christened one, some­

where in the depths (good luck). But they also write about the numbing effects not only of images mass-reproduced but also of accumulated

historical guilt "exceeding what we would know" (bull's-eye). Yet the photographic image as memento mori and memento esse noxius will never

through the moral numbing of our typically isolated lives in the mass. And so, fittingly Bly imagines a confrontation with the event itself. He whips it across distance and calls up only the images native to animal reflex. The child victim, the raw confrontation, the instinctual responses-he uses them all to reopen our crimes, crimes against life's potential by a people who get sentimental about children. He, and the weight of circumstance, also happen to draw on ancient cultural mem­ ory, that force in the Iliad which stands behind its most important single word: fire.

The scream imagined by Bly has been brought home to the victors. He cut

has not left the "mammal voiced howl" on TV, where it stays in Allen

Ginsberg's "Wichita Vortex Sutra." Raw though it be, Blv's step may be the first one that mnemosyne can take under our special circumstances.

Perhaps this scream lives so far down that it has to be unearthed. One about the difficulties of writing poetry to appreciate what Bly was attempting with his piece, and then with the public occa­ sion itself. How far from possibility, blind Demodokos dredging the bed must know a little

127

of the Troad for the reality that releases Odysseus into a

meaningful grief,

release that prepares him for homecoming. But Bly believes that he

must

get at things well beyond willing sight, lodged within suppressed

animal protests and instinctive reactions. Therein lies the real differ­ ence:

animal shock as a recuperative moral index stands far short of

mnemosyne as the pattern for judgment. Ours is a cruder unblinding.

As for

Bly's address, in its direct call for mourning, he imagined Lincoln keening on national TV like a Greek peasant widow. He also called for apologies to younger men by the prosecutors of the war. He told off General Shoemaker, present, and rebuked the strategos ("Walt Rostow will soon give his major address and he will lie to us again in his cool dry way. There will be no grief in his voice"). The direct with General Shoemaker

engage­

startlingly schoolmasterish. But had set out to teach the then, Bly preliminaries to grieving, knowing the persistence of old evasions and lies and what he rightly called moral boyishness. Reflectively angry, he was not out to make some general weep and cloak his face. But it happens that General Kinnard told the conference that it had moved him to a change of heart, resolving him to join active veterans' groups. And though some in the audience expressed sharp dislike for Bly's performance, at least one veteran was deeply touched by it and said so. Most moving, perhaps, was an agreement ment

was

worked out on the spot between veteran:

"Would it be possible

...

a

base commander and an urgent

to talk to some of your officers

....

I

would like to address them on some of the things I have been through"­ "We would be glad to have you anytime."

Metanoia, yes, but not from hospitable singing of the Troad. The poet

provoked the Captains. He chanted an indictment of infanticide with every rhetorical means, from irony

the wind pouring out of Canada?"

-

-

"Don't cry at that to black

-

I Do you cry at

logic. "It is because

...

we

have so few tears falling on our own hands I that the Super Sabre turns The Marines use cigarette and screams down toward the earth. I .

.

.

lighters to light the thatched roofs of huts I because so many Americans their own homes." No islanded Phaiakia, and no Chautauqua: the harsh prologues to mourning, not the long-delayed catharsis itself, set the menu at our banquet. The rage and unrelieved nightmares to which the veterans whom Bly himself quotes have testified are not ill served by strophes that fall back on animal cries. If the fathers won't supply, and cannot find, meaning for what they made the sons do, fury will short­ circuit memory into repetition. This memory cannot lead to full grieving by either combatant or onlooker, and that fact leaves poetry to strike the ground itself, dancing awkwardly, beating it for initial awareness own

128

rather than later crystallizations of experience. With this performance, we can entertain the curious claim that neither memory nor mourning has yet come within reach. In those circumstances, poetry turns aggres­ sively prophetic rather than cathartic, while recollection and grief be­ come

actions which it must anticipate rather than distill.

2 A ritual of purification? Where? When? For whom?

-Czeslaw Milosz, "From the Rising of the Sun"

As countersubject to my theme, let me now offer a few brisk theses.

First, the notions of healing and well-being already stand as premium

cliches in a society which devotes an impressive portion of its income to its own medical and therapeutic care, whether allopathic or homeo­

pathic. Personal recuperations experienced by writers, however germane to the act of writing, however keenly mythologized by writers and critics (as Saint Hippolytus or Blessed Horneoparhos), and however valuable to the writer, take on a peculiar pallor in this light.

Second, notions of healing cannot be aimed at by a given art, for the same reason that one cannot simply decide to be another William Blake or Mary Cassatt. The needs pressing on anyone, and any artist, from their time and place, spell out conditions whether acknowledged or not.

To know the way in which art should behave toward unacknowledged guilt and unconfronted grief may be to know more, or otherwise, than one's art can know in its own dark way, which after all may be wayless or aporetic rather than guiding. What are conditions now? What have they been for American poets in the past twenty years? The daylight answer would seem to be clear: an impressive number of celebrated people have been chanting explicit anathemas, exorcisms, charms against evil, and even quasi-magical declarations of transformation, from at least the time of the Vietnam War. The poet has donned the robes of the tribal therapist, sometimes the prophet, in response to collective impulsions: no

aporia there. Bly's performance at Salado, though remarkable for its

clarity and thoughtfulness, is far from singular. But Bly's address sharpens my question nonetheless: in putting on a strong show, in knowing and pronouncing a program of healing and so leading the collective response, is he refusing another responsiveness to his own art?

This other stance, no less alert to the moment but differently positioned, 129

would be that of the Swedish contemporary whom Bly has translated, Tomas Transtrorner, in "Allegro": I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:

"We do not surrender. But want peace."

The music is a house of glass standing on a slope; rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

The rocks roll straight through the house

but every pane of glass is still whole.

I am sure that Bly would have a way of removing the distinction, which

might seem to him false. But I raise it provocatively because the calming and stabilizing capacity of poetry is one healing function among others, less concerned than the rest to reopen wounds and stir up what Para­

celsus called "the wound blessings and their powers." It stands, it focuses the heart, it waves its little flag.

Finally, anticipating my argument, I glance ahead to koros, the ancient choral image which stands even in Homer for communal well-being.

Choreographed in time and space, this art, and any art which invokes

it, is answerable to those coordinates. When poetry remembers koros it

forgets the individual as the focus or beneficiary of well-being. By the same token, what might heal a choral poet would also benefit chorus and city. Like any other amplifying principle, this one can be wretchedly misused (routinely so in totalitarian setups). But for now it can remind us, from another angle still, that poetry free of a sterile individualism is not

free to call its own tune.

3 Anyone who has spent any time at war knows that there is no The object is not to remember clearly but to forget narrative. selectively.

Ward Just, "Vietnam-Fiction and Fact," ..

-

TriQuarterly #65, Winter 1986 The Iliad and memories of war do not lead toward what we call antiwar sentiments or pacifism, or to a glorification of war, al­

though both readings are possible in Homer. Nor are they histories.

They are written with the aid of the Muses, those daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne, Memory. They are created in the first instance by memories of the terror recalled, the loss of the dead, the realization 130

that survivor and viaim alike have passed through an experience that transformed them.

James Tatum, "The Iliad and Memories of War," -

Yale Review, Autumn 1986

The great god Mars tries to blind us when we enter his realm, and when we leave he gives us a generous cup of the waters of Lethe to drink.

J. Glenn Gray, "Remembering War and Forgetfulness," in The Warriors, 1959 -

Glenn Gray's book, from which Robert Lowell thieved an episode, is one of the lasting American reflections on what mnemosyne is in a world of violence. But let us stay with Homer and therefore with his

scholar, who sees far into an old literary distinction: Aristotle's observa­ tion that Homer was selective beside the historians. Memories of war

hold fast, not to analysis of sequence or the rationale of war aims, but to the irrationals of cruelty. "Pearl Harbor does nothing to resolve our

disquiet at Croft's execution of his prisoner [in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead]. Nor does the rape of Helen, or even the death of Patroclus, make it possible to deal easily with the way Lycaon dies."

Without distorting "that purest and loveliest of mirrors" (Simone Weil's image for the Iliad), we can carry the point further. First, still within the domain of writing, we see that Homer's mirror is permanent.

As a prototypical memory of war, it goes on showing why histories do

help or heal the hurts. In this mirror we see that war is the one subject that requires the turn, again and again, from history back to poetic mnemosyne. And then we can begin to account for the inade­ quacy of "memory" as a translation of mnemosyne, especially with re­ spect to war, by leaving the domain of writing and crossing into the marginless terrain of trauma. The mnemosyne of war beats on the doors of awareness driven by shocks not yet dissipated. How does one explain the murder of Lykaon? The question is simply set aside by nightmare repetitions of the event in the soul of one who has witnessed it. Repeti­ not

tion of the trauma, in primary form, is the first essay of mnemosyne.

In the long run, forgetting is its second essay. Mnemosyne's middle passage is amnesia, without which the durable anamnesis of song, like

the residues of grieving, could not come to pass. Both are what you come out

with when you finally come out.

But repetition offers no exit. Dr. Harry Wilmer's painstaking work with Vietnam veterans showed him that nearly half the insistent dreams which assaulted their sufferers were "actual" dreams, reproducing events 131

with veracity. As he went farther, Dr. Wilmer came to believe two

things

about these relentless "actual" dreams: that they are "perhaps our

only living uncontaminated record of the war trauma" (emphasis his), and then that their verismo quality itself is a matter which undercuts the depth mechanisms of psychodynamic representation. "I came to see these spec. tres of reality as the archetypal dreams of war there can be no basis for transformation because the reality image itself is the most powerful expression of the feelings involved. There is no antecedent human reo source that can mollify the intensity of the images." If these are mnemo­ ....

syne's first essay at representing war's trauma, then mnemosyne is Ho­ meric rather than Herodotean, showing itself in the way of Simone Weil's metaphor: the way of the mirror. This mirror stands within, even before it shines in song. The primary traumatic mirror inspires that song, the flashing secondary mirror, by always reflecting that for which no history can account, whether large or personal. War demands the turn from history to mnemosyne in the depths, long before the parties of Herodotus and Homer, or Homer and Liddell Hart, have gathered at Salado.

One veteran interviewed by Dr. Wilmer, who lost a foot to a grenade, dreamed the following reproduction of an actual event several times each week: We

are

on

a

search-and-destroy mission and going through a "friendly"

native village. A baby was crying in a hooch. No one was around anywhere.

A buddy went into the hooch where the crying was. The captain yelled: "Don't pick it up!" My buddy didn't hear the warning, and reached for the

baby. The baby was booby-trapped with a grenade. It exploded. There were only parts of the soldier and nothing recognizable of the baby.

The toying with the fisherman Lykaon by Akhilleos, or Croft's sadistic trifling with his Japanese victim, frame a parallel which this trauma shatters. But may the Homeric frame still hold it after a fashion? The attempt at an answer can suggest how far traumatic mnemosyne might pursue us.

The Iliad repeatedly contrasts the world of domestic life and its labors, through the similes for combat, with the fury of combat itself, because war has utterly removed men from the sanities of farmstead, pasture and

hearth. Those sanities are glimpsed through the similes as an unavail­ able refuge might be glimpsed through the intervals of a storm. Lykaon Croft's pursues his domestic trade where and when he should not, and victim is lulled into illusions of reconnection with home and family,

before both are killed. The two worlds are still contrasted in Mailer as 132

they are in Horner, with the irony of contrast held constant. But in this Vietnam episode, a prototype for one kind of guilt carried by Vietnam veterans,

the hearth itself becomes a place of ambush, and life's own

beginnings turn to fiendish sacrifices by an opponent who has chosen to make them his weapons, a terrible variant on first-fruits sacrifice. Dr. Wilmer again: "We know about the atrocities at My Lai and the shoot­ ing of children in cold blood. But do we know what was the real

problem in the killing of babies and children? The real problem was that one had to kill them because they were, or were thought to be, armed or booby-trapped."

Or were thought to be: still more reality rides on that qualifying phrase, and considerably widens the scope of "the real problem." Gloria Emer­ son brought attention at another symposium ("The Writer in Our World," TriQuarterly #65, Winter 1986) to The Winter Soldier Investigation into war crimes in Vietnam (Beacon Press, 1972), with clear-eyed ques­ tions about the fantasies entertained by American soldiers about Viet­ namese

children. The actual and various roles of children in the war

cannot be reduced to carrying arms and

being turned into living bombs.

But the actual behavior of our soldiers, from testimony in both the book

and at least one interview conducted by Ms.

Emerson, includes the

frequent hardball pitching of Ceration cans at the heads and ribs of children begging for food: an unholy marriage of sandlot skills with fabled G.l. generosity. Such gratuitous brutality was released by the fears fastened on Vietnamese children. Though Dr. Wilmer does not report on this, I suppose that it too played a role in generating the nightmares he records. Dr. Wilmer keeps his reactions to himself, as a doctor should. But Ms. Emerson allows herself a fantasy of revenge, in the public discussion at the symposium in which she took part: the fantasy of chaining Rostow and the generals to the Washington, D.C., Vietnam Memorial and compelling them to read aloud each of the inscribed names. She wants to believe that they would go mad. Her fury vents itself not on the sons but on the the coaches of that deadly fathers, Little League team. Her instincts, even to the imagination of madness, follow Bly's.

Such fantasies testify in a dark way to something forgotten: the heal­ ing powers associated with the tombs of heroes. For instance, Lucian describes the siting of a statue to Xenox latros, the Doctor Stranger, beside the grave of the Athenian hero Toxaris. Gloria Emerson's fantasy falls like shadow from a curative situation just out of

sight.

However we take the testimonies of soldiers about

booby-trapped

children, they command respect as testimonies, and take naive separa133

tions out of the picture. Placed in the contexts of Homer's similes,

they

would have the shepherd and his child no longer tend the abrogated elsewhere of human meaning and productive life, but join the battle,

leaving no domain elsewhere as a refuge from war.

Yet in the language of the American poetry against that particular war, this particular collapse of domains and diabolization of meanings seldom penetrated, odd as that may seem. That fact stood clearest, perhaps, when the child itself, the innocent victim par excellence, be­ came its subject. This poetry wished to mount a Blakean fury of judg­ ment, prophetic rather than cathartic, but the paradoxical child, at once victimized and armed, lay beyond its reach. Even Blake's own rock­ chained and crucified infants foreshadowed nothing of this odd fact, for after all he faced no such paradox. The children he mourned were British conscripts in the Napoleonic wars, under a Judgment he could derive nonparadoxically from the Bible and Milton, in a landscape of judgment which he could position directly behind the politics of false sacrifice: ...

mercy and truth are fled away from Schechem & Mount Gilead

Unless my beloved is bound upon the Stems of Vegetation.

And thus the Warriors cry, in the hot day of Victory, in songs. *

*

*

Bring your offerings, your first begotten: pamperd with milk & blood Your first born of seven years old, be they Males or Females: To the beautiful Daughters of Albion! They sport before the Kings Clothed in the skin of the Victim!

.

.

.

...

from Stone-henge & from Maldens Cove

Jerusalems Pillars fall in the rendings of fierce War Over France & Germany: upon the Rhine & Danube Reuben & Benjamin flee

...•

-Jerusalem, Chapter 3

The adaptations of Southwell's Burning Babe, and Bly's imagination of the polluting reality itself, diverge from each other rather than from

Blake, because the child whom they would mourn turns finally weird, removing victimized innocence from their grasp. The innocent also car­ ries the evil, replacing Lykaon with an incalculable figure. This prodigy, this demon, leads us full circle, and we trail the child at a deeper turn. A little paradox shall lead them.

134

I started again with reflections on remembering and forgetting, which

the novel pollutant

-

innocence armed as destroying victim

-

returns me

to, also at a deeper turn or twist. Just how a normal acknowledgment

and grieving will accommodate the novelty it seems impossible to fore­ see. The needs to forget it and to remember it claw at each other in hideous proximity, with paradox frustrating the outcome. But ancient practice may again throw a bit of black light. I choose the oracle of

Trophonius at Labadia, which functioned along the lines of the Ascle­ pian temples, because the legendary crime of Trophonius was especially terrible and intimate (beheading his trapped brother to prevent his own detection as thief) but particularly because those who consulted the oracle first had to drink from closely adjacent springs of Lethe and Mnemosyne. The first spring emptied them, while the second prepared them to receive new guidance, sometimes over long days stuck under­ ground. Once out again, they reported their experience seated on the chair of Mnemosyne. Records have it that no one who went through this business ever laughed. For us the suggestive facts may be that something unforeseen came out of it, that mnemosyne prepared its way as well as preserved it and that things began with the sharp proximity of the two springs and their cooperative powers. And then, too, the entire affair was "drastic and primitive" (Dr. C. A. Meier), much like the psy­ chiatric shock treatment to which we still resort. But with the oracle, the shock issued more clearly in

a

reintegration of whatever new thing

might come, through the readying and consolidating functions of mnemosyne.

4 Now there are tears in the summer house.

Helen weeps over Hektor's body For Helen.

-Richard Pevear, "Lvkaon"

Faced with the war's paradoxical child, how much easier to retire to

apparently higher ground and take aim at the strategist or policymaker.

And so Robert Duncan ranted against Lyndon Johnson in the "Up Rising" of his "Passages." Yes, it must be done, but its satisfactions are notoriously risky. Duncan later delivered a long speech on imagination and conflict, in which he circled around his poem again ("Man's Fulfill­ ment in Order and Strife"), discriminating his targets. Macbeth he could abide, because Macbeth could hallucinate the knife and its blood, awake 135

at least to his guilt. But Dean Rusk, walled off from any hallucinations of napalmed kids while sitting at his bargaining table, was beyond the

pale. Imagination cannot get to Dean Rusk, whereas we, we are imagina­ tive, we would never go so rotten as that. Suavely dialectical though Duncan's mind was, it is Bly who showed more sense here, for he assumed, when it came to imagining such stuff, that none of us really faces it. So, he imagined a different thing: brutal contact, suburban homeowner met by a living torch on his own turf. Dissociated con­ science is too fancy a business for Bly's plot. Trauma galvanizes the reptile brain and explodes the instincts, going behind guilty dissociation to the soul on all fours bellowing in the face of the real thing.

Of course, Bly ranted at General Shoemaker and Walt Rostow. But at least here he took away the moral differentiations that give anyone warrant

for ranting. He deepened the home truth that real mourning

defilement. This section of his poem has the candor of pre­ scription: a pollution by reality. Much poetry written around the war

exacts real

yearned for this pollution but stopped short of it, because the dissocia­ tions which it faced were not primarily those of guilty conscience but rather those of contact and connection, dissociations woven through the social fabric.

In the sanctuaries devoted to healing in antiquity, both death and childbirth were excluded from the precincts. The healing we have had to

however, goes into violent fantasies of death which sometimes turn on the newly born. Going with these is the corollary fantasy of violent self-sacrifice, for instance the self-incineration which Ginsberg court,

imaginatively indulged while driving through the Kansas of his "Surra" in early 1966, only months after the young Cistercian novice Roger Laporte had burnt himself alive in New York City, in protest against the Draft. Duncan's attacks on Johnson forget that people in government are also caught by it and need help in extricating themselves; Ginsberg's fantasy idly slips into helplessness against oneself. Neither impulse is of we find use in the new situation where, having violated every boundary, Both no Bly's sanctuary. that the suffering blows back against us, leaving erases bounda­ but in that are feathers wind, Bly and Ginsberg's poems ries with some knowledge of what he is doing and why, and we shall have need of that knowledge. a Shifting boundaries enter Robert Duncan's "The Fire, Passages 13" in large way. It is a curiously old-and-new poem. The ekphrasis on paint­ the language ings by Piero di Cosimo and Bosch is old-fashioned, as is aimed at political evil, but the frame is something else. The poem as a whole reflects on "the old language" of natural instinct, of identities 136

animal and human sliding through each other, and of Natural Signa­ tures, all under the moral shock of the war. The novel frame beginning and ending "The Fire" blocks out a field of disconnected words: a seman­ tic square resembling the crib-translation of a Chinese nature poem. But in its second appearance this field turns a quarter rotation and flips face­ over.

The language of nature shows a new orientation, in response, so it

through the forest of Piero di Cosimo's paint­ ing and through everything since the outset of the Second World War. Natural process, along with the tongues in which it has always seemed to speak to humanity, has gone through those furnaces, altered to our perception but still stably patterned. I would guess that this image, alongside Bly's image of primary contact and primal reaction, indicated some of the firmest ground which poetry found in those years. On it stood a blurred animal-human integrity, in part still instinctively trust­ worthy. And nature itself, elemental but glimrneringly dark, became the agent of change, the searing pollutant which might shift elements into

seems, to the fire gusting

an

altered framework.

And then there is memory again, simply but momentously: "Do you know the old language? / I do not know the old language. / Do you know the language of the old belief?" Coming after the initial square of natural terms and before the description of di Cosimo's "Incendio della

Foresta," Duncan's little inner colloquy alludes to an inscrutable syntax of process, of opposites in balanced conflict, and to an art still in corre­

spondence with these. Confessed in that exchange is the loss of such correspondence. Implied for me in that confession is a corollary, the loss of a dimension in poetic memory. This testimony is more valuable than even

the moral understanding which Bly's poem shows at work.

Perhaps I can get near this elusive matter by way of a traditional story related in Cicero's Tusculan Disputations. When Scopas of Thessaly hired Simonides of Ceos to chant a poem of praise at one of his banquets, Sirnonides honored his host but also the gods Castor and Pollux at the same time. Scopas meanly withheld half of Simonides's fee, taunting him with the advice to get the remainder from the twin gods. A messenger called Simonides out of the banquet hall to meet two men, whom Simonides searched for but could not find. At that moment the palace collapsed, crushing the ungrateful host with all his guests. So the gods indeed compensated the singer with his life. But Simonides performed a last service for the dead by identifying the mangled corpses; he found that he could name them by remembering their positions at table. The experience let him derive foundational principles for the art of memory, the mechanism of linked topoi or "places."

137

Yet what of those things in the legend which touch on life and death?

Topoi themselves have depth which can be seen in the story: such places mark the order of the dead, and through them memory inventories divine wrath or judgment. To remember who was there and what they were in that place is also to reconstruct the dispositions of fate. But that is not all. The twin gods Castor and Pollux bring the whole episode under the wing of healing, even though grief is the only cure remaining to those left on the scene. The Dioscuri were worshipped as healers in where later the Church erected a sanctuary to the doctor saints Rome, Cosmas and Damian. Among the Germanic peoples, too, divine twins regularly presided over healing powers.

So for several reasons, this tale takes precedence over what Homer imagined at the court of Alkinoos and Arete. Where Homer's singer brought about catharsis, Simonides is thrown back on the survival of song itself, its dignity calling down a judgment, a holocaust not without curative auspices, but which first calls for the mnemosyne of inquest.

The legend of Simonides is prior, positioning poetic memory at the very threshold of order with the promise of healing. In the aftermath of

disaster, before anyone can begin to think of mourning the dead, a justified mnemosyne must return to the scene and call the roll of fate. In Duncan's handling of the names of natural things and processes in "The Fire," and in his reminder that such "old" language is truly and deeply forgotten in the atomic era, I hear testimony to the priority of such mnemosyne, prior even to guilt and grief. So fundamental that it can be overlooked, this principle of humane, uncannily inclusive order is just what Odysseus at Phaiakia does not ignore. In praising Demodokos for the power of his poetry, he says, all in due order you sing the fate of the Greeks, what they did and endured and suffered, as

if you yourself were present, or heard it from another.

5 Spirit Spirit Dance Dance Spirit Spirit Dance!

Allen Ginsberg, "Pentagon Exorcism," 1967 -

To grieve is willingly to enter a condition that falls fatefully. One agrees to mourn facts beyond the control of will. This marks a passage between

life and death, for one is both fate's object and also a bereft actor.

Passive, active; dying yet alive-such is the experience designated by 138

the flesh, iron early cultures as the polluted zone. And so nails rake is knives slice the hair, as choruses in Greek tragedy have it. Pollution willed because loss is suffered, the animal cry a beginning. the Only so does aoide or heroic song lay claim to its high role, form the

passage chanting of fate patterns for archaic emotions that Demo' of the song life.

When and through death mnemosyne between him has it experience the dokos releases grief and guilt in Odysseus,

so other side of his action, the victims beneath Mycenean victory, and is this of shock the pro' taste the whole reality of it. In Greek terms, become a woman in order to return to himself. must hero the nounced; releases that which it never had or held. As Simonides saw after

Song

the disastrous banquet of Scopas, he had to turn codifier of order, of but divinely logos and residual nomos, in the face of death. Dishonored with the justified, he missed his fee but was granted his survival, along

gift and task of remembering the dead. Both facts are dispensations,

not

sheer acquisitions first of all. The holding power of song is open at both ends: primordial nomos and mnemosyne invade it, and then it releases under this aspect of things is already a species of their fruits.

Song

several of the mourning. In being possessed by song of this kind and been placed in Simonides's great European poets of our century have survivor-the but burdened as the singer is held, but -

justified situation, held open, by powers which enforce a releasing passage, but enforced between death and life.

figure of speech stemming from the situation in Bly's even though the song beating its ground -I take up again now,

An earlier poem

-

archaic pattern which it introduces is not obviously linked to Homeric Yet Homer himself has much to indicate about their kin' mnemosyne.

ship. The shield of Akhilleos pictures three scenes in human life-a marriage and trial, a full-scale war, and then a koros of young men women, sumptuously

and

clothed, dancing before the community. Current

scholarship has been pleased to find this arrangement duplicating the three functions found by Georges Durnezil in ancient Indo-European cultures, pleased because Greek myth and epic give scanty evidence of the triad. But the great shield clearly shows them: the roles of rule, war and nourishing well-being. That happy fantasy of scholarship is not my is pictured by concern, but rather the fact that a fruitful well-being Homer in choral terms. Yet the scholars tell us a remarkably specific thing: that such sustaining dance is strongly associated, in both Greek and Germanic traditions, with godly twins. A buried trace, then, runs from the Castor and Pollux of Cicero's story about Simonides, to the chorus which dances out the health of the community. Both rnnemo139

being for the living, are touched by the twin divine healers. The twinned nature of these sponsors has an everyday reflection in the two capacities themselves of poetic mnemosyne and choral dance. Under the cure

aspect of

they are cousins.

The choral image runs through the work of many in the sixties and

seventies; Charles Olson and Duncan might head the list, and Gins­ berg, often in the spirit of a Marx brother, makes a genial third. His writing against the war is full of it: Blue eyed children dance and hold thy Hand 0 aged Walt -"Wichita Vortex Sutra," 1966 Do the Buffalo Dance in the Jetplane over Nebraska! Bring back the

Gay '90s.

-"Chicago to Salt Lake by Air," 1968 ..•

poetry obsolete in tiny decades tho maybe slow tunes dance eternal-

-"Friday the Thirteenth," 1970 Old Indian prophecies believe Ghost Dance peace will Come restore prairie Buffalo or great White Father Honkie be trampled to death in his dreams by returning herds' thundering reincarnation!

-" 'Have

You Seen This Movie?'," 1970

It's a big dance, a festival, every instrument joined in the Yea Saying!

Who wouldn't be happy meeting Beethoven at Jena in 1812 or 1980! It's a small

world, standing up to sing like a beating heart!

Getting ready for the Ecstatic European Dance! Off we go on one ear, then another, Titanic Footsteps over Middle Europe-

"Eroica," 1980

With his running notations from the windows of automobile, bus and

airplane, Ginsberg registered (if we look from the perspective of mnerno­ syne) a potentially precious first essay: impressions of that fluid species of mild shock, the gliding panorama and aerial view which actualize nineteenth-century fantasies of comprehension. These can be subtly traumatic, though they also mimic, before the fact, the distant perspec­ tive of real mnemosyne. They map a common mood: the diffuse despera­ tion running through a setup which risks all on cynically peddled illu­ sions, boyish mortal gambles and flirtations with death, and which feels frustration at all of these. Playing Harpo to his own Chico, Ginsberg 140

wryly toes his choral and exorcistic dance steps through this dark terrain.

How so, and to what "slow tunes?" In the same year as the conference a study of at Salado, the scholar and poet William Mullen published

Pindar, midway through which he ventured an answer to the question of the presence, in Pindar's epinician dance, of the Olympians them­ selves. This archaic question, though it may stir nostalgias, just as likely still touch something actual. I quote from the third chapter of Mullen's Choreia: Pindar and Dance. may

The mystery I wished to confront was how mortal dancers, at a particular moment and on a particular patch of earth, might implicate in the pattern of their dance divinities of the sky bound by neither space nor time. That dancers put mystery was somehow of a piece with the process by which the their dance in contact with the dead, for ultimately it seemed to be one and the same axis that passed through the dance floor down to the ancient or recently installed inhabitants of the world below and up to the timeless inhabitants of the world above. Some of the burden of establishing such an axis fell, of course, on the words and music of the song, whose vibrations and meaning were expected to stir both the chthonic consciousness of the dead

and the mobile intelligence of those who existed in the pure aether. But it was not a matter of indifference where the singers were located as they sang, and in the choice of a sacred site-the agora with its heroion, or some sanctuary outside the precincts of the city the producers of the ode had -

already raised the question of arrangement in space, and hence of choreogra­ phy. For the most efficacious establishment of the desired axis, then, it remained only to pattern the chorda so that at certain moments of the ode a clear alignment of the worlds above and below might occur.

The system of correspondences pictured here, the coordinates of a world order harmonized, has been taking on poetic life for some time. Gins­

berg's festive hectic aside, already there are St. John Perse, and the essays of Heidegger, and the pre-fascist, formative Canto IV of Ezra Pound just after the First World War, which begins with a glimpse of Troy's smoking boundary stones followed by a Bacchic dance: Beat, beat, whirr, thud, in the soft turf under the apple trees, choros nympha rum, goat-foot, with the pale foot alternate Let us stay with Pound, as an example of the unchristened spirit which has usually come to animate the revival of this archaic image. No friend of Pindar (and a snatch of Pindar, "Lords of the lyre!" clangs among the same

lines), Pound nonetheless honors the choral impulse, in a primary 141

form, just as he registers the death of Europe. In Canto XXV a few years later, imagining the city fathers of renaissance Venice and Ferrara heav­ ily chanting their self-condemnation, he follows with a healing glimpse, as if from some renaissance fresco, of fauns in chorus chanting a medici­ nal charm {"And from the comb of reeds, came notes and the chorus / Moving"}. "The solid, the blood rite" is Pound's archaic prescription, not murkily Laurentian because always, along its margin, dance these satyrs and fauns. What kind of earth was Pound circling over as he beat the broken ground of postwar Europe? Across the grain of his epic lament for a dying world from the fifteenth century until the present, cuts this particular choral beat with its chants of desire. As it comes and goes, the ground beneath it is sometimes a hellish muck, sometimes the sacred earth of the Mediterranean fantasy. The air of pastiche, partly an histor­ ical accounting {"this is how it has been imagined"}, does not obscure the attempt at setting up choreia now, a trial tapping of the ground for re­ laying the foundations and their boundary stones.

The Venice-Ferrara cantos invoke a lover's medicinal charm, a private poem of healing, for ancient dancers whose context is contemporary civic life. The juncture of healing and choral dance can remind us of something usually forgotten. An axis much like the one which William Mullen describes so well ran between the chthonic and Olympian polar­ ities of Asklepios, the ancient god of healing, polarities which were kept intact in the books of Western alchemy. This axis of healing, along which the god was thought to ascend and descend, sited at given places of cult, formed the armature of cure. These cantos of Pound give evi­ dence of an immemorial association between this healing axis and the axis established by choreia. One might say that the power of cure comes into time and space through efficacious choral effort, brought into the living community by danced song that links the sky with the spirits of the dead.

The proper dialectical partner to Pound on this great theme is his respectful antagonist George Oppen. The first of "Two Romance Poems" in Myth of the Blaze from the mid-1970's,

a

poem retrospective of Op­

pen's commitments to radical political engagement, distills two images for that effort, images which also have to do with "saying" or writing. To say that these images allude to Homeric and Pindaric patterns may

be

adequate, for the moment, to describe their quiet weightiness, although I make no assumptions about what Oppen had in mind. But with one of them he may be taking back from Pound an image, early and late, for Homeric verse itself, and purifying it of epic ambition. This is the rhyth­ mic rattle of beach pebbles under the waves, the "sound outlasting all 142

wars" in The Pisan Cantos. It leads directly, in Oppen, to the memory of political work, but distilled into an arrangement that hints at the old

prototypes of civic space, the agora and the dancing circle. Sound of the sea and of time: he will not w�ite it, but he will allow himself to evoke it.

The detached radical affirms the eternal sound and action which stay

tragic in the despondent liberal's set piece, "Dover Beach." The restraints of personal modesty and political realism obscure nothing of the power in this fantasy, a power on the brink of choral impulse. Surveying our slim chances in mass culture, the veteran offers that romance: no false

enchantment, no dance beginning on the pavement, yet hints of archaic song run through the passion of that hope which Oppen allows himself to sustain:

bright light of shipwreck beautiful as the sea and the islands I don't know how to say it

needing a word with no sound but the pebbles shifting on the beach the sense

of the thing, everything, rises in the mind the venture

adventure

say as much as I dare, as much as I can

sustain I don't know how to say it

I say all that I can

What one would tell

would be the scene

Again!

power

of the scene I said the small paved area,

ordinary ground except that it is high above the city, the people standing at a little distance from each other, or in small groups would be the poem If one wrote it

No heroics, obviously

....

The gentle emergence of such a possible dancing ground falls beyond any echoes of Phaiakia within the occasion at Salado. The pollution of

song by fateful reality, to elicit the saving pollution of grief, long antici­ pates the emergence of any new ground for contact with the dead. But

with both, the appearance of archaic rather than christened patterns is

impressive, and possibly evidence of the depths to which communal guilt has sunk. Certainly these patterns strike deeper roots than those which feed song's end-time fantasies about itself; I think of that unlikely 143

pair, Yves Bonnefoy and Allen Ginsberg, the first in his inaugural address at the College de France sounding like the other in "In a thousand years, if there's History

...

"Ecologue":

/ epics on archaic tongues /

fishermen telling island tales." That end-time perspective is mnemosyne's fond toy periscope; the other patterns are its true mirrors. The choral

impulse is more remote and fundamental, the Trauma, Trauer impulse more immediate, yet both indicate venerable guilts denied and seeking the wrong vents in action. Mourning, and then the dance glimpsed far off, stand as elder and primary alternatives offered by mnemosyne to the tried paths of hatred.

6 And DatJid danced before the Lord with all his might; and DatJid was girded with a linen ephod.

And Daoid said unto Michal, It was before the Lord, which chose me before thy father. therefore will I play before the Lord.

And I will yet be more tJile than thus, and will be base in mine own sight -2 Samuel 6 .

.

.

.

.

.

....

If we hold to the archaic, unchristened patterns of feeling, then we would say that Bly's aggressively polluting, confrontative Phaiakian per'

formance, with its fantasy of Lincoln keening like a Greek widow, can stipulate only the awkward, helpless dance of suburban moral shock, since the very ground has grown opaque to the dead and to mnemosyne, resisting the choral intuitions that have groped over it seeking to beat out an

axis of communion and communication.

It happens that a recent American poem imagines a privately fash­

ioned ritual of expiation for war guilt, though the guilt, seen as if in the longer perspective of mnemosyne, is that of Europe for the First World War. Frank Bidarr's subject in "The War" is curiously Christian and

quasi-Pindaric at the same time. Among the same Swiss Engadin moun­ tain villages in which Nietzsche, confronting the fateful rope dancer in his Zarathustra book, began his descent into madness, a disturbed Ni­ jinskv feels himself called to serve as the expiator of guilt for the war, a self-designated scapegoat, for he too goes mad, in a dance fashioned around the symbolism of the cross. Born in the generation of the Second World War, writing about the First World War after Vietnam, Bidart would like to believe in the efficacy of such sacrifice and such art, but he 144

paints their tragic pathos. His impulse is like Geoffrey Hill's in the recent long poem about the self-sacrifice of Charles Peguv, although Hill's irony is bitterer. Bidart bears witness to the choral theme, cropping up again as if from the depths, but without benefit of a chorus, the communal participation that would make of the theme more than lonely and tragic agonism, more than the self-destroying madness which carries ritual pollution beyond bounds. His poem suggests that rituals addressed to such guilt, though long since needed, have remained unimaginable, leaving ambiguous martyrs to offer themselves up to the gap.

When Antoine Bourdelle carved Nijinsky and Isadora Duncan in low relief as Greek Bacchic dancers, he worked closer to the image for dance on Homer's shield of Akhilleos, where the ecstatic rhythms affirm com' munity. The isolated tragic dancer whom Nijinsky became indeed offers a profound subject. Let him guide me through a partial summary of the ground laid out by poetic mnemosyne and sited with its larger rhythms.

One primary fantasy that poetry has entertained about its own role is the fantasy of a pollution which eventually purifies, and evidence for its primacy runs from Homer's Phaiakia to the conference at Salado. But if this function is to live it must anticipate a full mnemosyne, which follows a long road from shock and repetition, through an ordered inquest, and through a preparation to receive divine insight, to a final perspective which forgets some things in order to complete and revalue others. Emotion tells us that this is the work of grief. Myths tell us that it is poetry at work upon fatal order (Simonides) and war (Homer). But in respect to the world of conflict, even Homer suggests, on the warrior's godly shield, that koros ties the role of poetry to the well-being of a given time and place. Koros has equal rank with that role because it grounds and harmonizes it. In other terms, a given pollution is called for, not superadded. One cannot simply decide to be artist X, of whatever de, sired kind. The ancient fantasy of choral dance keeps poetry in place and honest. The writing of Bidart's poem on Nijinsky, 1920 coming home to the 1980's, portrays the dead-end of one kind of full responsibil­ ity, an aporia. Nijinsky's self-sacrificial dance indicates (though this was not Bidart's chief thrust) what the absence of the chorus means. This sustaining corollary of poetic mnemosyne has come to a bent and sta­ tionary pause, a "stand" in the ode, with only the memory of choreia­ Oppen's poem serves as evidence-to get us by. Yet that memory does not

fade.

It is difficult to separate the tasks of poetry, under mnemosyne's as,

they get embraced. Those moods (a Yeatsian word that we might redemocratize) come from the poet, and pect, from the moods in which

145

may of course veer into prophetic rage, sometimes the questionable rage

which indicts us but points the finger at them. The moods must come

from the poet, but the tasks corne with song itself. For instance, pollu­ tion and choreia, both under the sign of healing. One asks that

grief be suffered (grief at least), while the other sustains through a celebratory kind of work. Auden invoked a related idea in his elegy for Yeats, when he yoked poetry to the labor of cultivation, "the farming of the curse." If

these tasks also rise to judgment, it comes to them much later, so to

speak; we can remember the great span which runs from Troy to Phaiakia in the Odyssey, or from Mycenean culture to Homer's actual audience. But such a summary omits the prospective dimension of mne­ mosyne, which stays entangled, in most lights, with the common nets of

fear and hope. Yet to disentangle this prospective thing might also be to

rarefy it, during a time when anticipations of disaster are realistic, and prophetic instincts dog all those who spare themselves illusions about the Garrisons (those weapons have been made to be used). For mnemo­ syne is preparatory also, as in the rituals of bloody-minded Trophonius.

To drink of Lethe (now, in order to forget our denial and naivete) and then Mnemosyne (to prepare to receive truth) is to care for the anticipa­ tions that are with us in any case, more necessary than judgment. Such preparation is the third task of song under the aspect of mnemosyne,

displacing our homegrown catastrophism and even prophetic wrath.

Ugo Foscolo imagined that Horner's song might heal the wounds of the dead. Can one honor Horner better? But our tasks are grittier, Bly's for instance at Salado. The turn to mnemosyne, prior to history or to grief, reins in any elevated notions about the role of poetry. And with the choral impulse that would finally join it, the turn to mnemosyne simply waits. "What will remain, within twenty years, of the huge and hollow poetic production of our time?" This was Oscar Milosz's question in the essay from some time in the 1930's, "A Few Words on Poetry," which also includes this observation: "The Great War, the last or next­ to-last leap of capitalism and imperialism, is still waiting for its bard."

Milosz died in 1939 before the outbreak of the Second World War, but neither his question nor his observation has been superseded. David

Jones's work ranks him as one of that war's bards, but Milosz's views respond to things deeply persistent. An essay like my own, simply be­ it peers at their dark persistence and cons some of their elder do names, is working up no nice little Baedeker. "We understand then

cause

encouraged Whitman, himself a veteran nurse. But how can we stroll with him through the same wards? George Oppen's work severely tests the ground surveyed so expansively by Whitman, and the late we not?"

146

"romance" poem by Oppen, by adopting its modest, respectful stance

towards its own generous passions and their prospects, gives no yea to Whitman's inviting query.

The prospective function of mnemosyne, because it extends continu­ ity, meaning and order forward into life, has much to do with the spirit

of fathers, and the Father. Betrayal by fathers was a large part of Bly's theme at Salado, but I suspect that his clear-eyed grasp of the theme still offers only a local instance of the forces at work. We no longer really believe in a humane order-that is one way of putting the larger picture,

another aspect of which might be put as follows: we feel the missing father, and the hidden God, chiefly as deprivations and negations. "0 hopeless Fathers and Teachers / in Hue do you know / the same woe too?" (Ginsberg, "Wichita Vortex Surra"). To be sure, despair over aban­

donment has been real. But need this mean that the hidden God and the absent father cannot be felt as near and present in their hiddenness?

To feel such nearness may let us also go on, go forward, rather than

constantly feel backwards into our losses of a sustaining, humane order-may let us know mnemosyne in its prospective thrust, which is also the Father's world. That world does not lie back of us, to be recov­ ered. And here I quarrel with part of the spirit in Rene Char's moving

directive on the eve of the Second World War: "Through long years the poet has gone back into the nothingness of the Father. Do not call on

him, all you who love him." Was he counseling consent to the condition, or further despairingly proud isolation? But particularly moving is his suggestion that the son, here the poet as well, also disappears. Char's humanism here seems to keep open a prospective attitude in spite of its explicit terms, for it stipulates a hidden sonship that must come up to the reality of the hidden Father. Both son and father- and this would confirm Bly's diagnosis-cannot be called on for the duration, until mnemosyne calls us forward to ourselves. When writers as dissimilar as

Ginsberg and Bonnefoy project the fantasied cultural conditions of ar­ chaic song forward into the distant future, I believe they are responding to the impulse of mnemosyne to father a humane order beyond rather than behind us, but are falling back onto the imagery of origins out of the poverty that we imaginatively share. Yet the order we believe with­ drawn to the origin point is present and prospective in its hiddenness,

however dark the ordeal of withdrawal: this is part of mnemosyne's

promise.

Among the episodes of weeping included by Homer in the Iliad, the greatest is shared by Priam and Akhilleos in the last book, when the bereaved king and father steals into Akhilleos's camp to beg the return 147

of Hektor's body. Both men are able to weep, Akhilleos for his neglect of his own father, Priam for the loss of his sons. But theirs are not the sorrows

which attend the broken reciprocal bond which Bly made the

subject of his address at Salado. In their conduct of the Vietnam War, the fathers have betrayed the sons and have withheld amends, while the sons, raging,

shame,

a

have not been able to weep. This must seem to us, in our

large step backward. But will it not compel both hidden son

and father to feel forward? Foscolo stands closer to Homer than we

stand to Foscolo, but the break, the separation, drive us on, into the nearness

of the hidden.

And if, in the meantime, our masters of nostalgia shell the next Lebanon or Nicaragua while escorted by the u.s.s. Bly and a carrier named the Whitman, shadowed by counterparts dubbed the Nijinsky and the Pasternak, we shall have learned not for the first time that no one

148

is safe from those people.

Interview with Paul Bowles Daniel Halpern

DANIEL HALPERN: Why did you first come to Morocco?

PAUL BOWLES: Gertrude Stein

suggested it. She had been here

three separate summers, staying at the old Villa de France, and she

thought I'd like it. She was right. I loved it. And I still love it. Less, naturally. One loves everything less at my age; also it's a little less lovable than it was forty years ago.

HALPERN: What is it that keeps you in Tangier?

BOWLES: It's changed less than the rest of the world, and continues to seem

less a part of this particular era than most cities. It's a pocket

outside the mainstream. You feel that, very definitely, when you come in. After you've been over to Europe, for instance, for a few days or a few weeks, and you come back here, you immediately feel you've left the stream, that nothing is going to happen here.

HALPERN: You were eighteen when you first left America. What lured you to Europe?

BOWLES: Everyone wanted to come to Europe in those days. It was the intellectual and artistic center. Paris specifically seemed to be the center, not just Europe. After all, it was the end of the twenties and just

about everybody was in Paris.

Reprinted from TriQuarterly #33, Spring 1975.

149

HALPERN: Did you know many writers and composers in Paris?

BOWLES:

Practically no writers. I met a lot but I didn't know them.

Composers? Naturally, Virgil Thompson, and Henri Sauguet and Fran­ cis Poulenc

...

Not very many, no.

HALPERN: Did you there?

see

much of Gertrude Stein while you were

BOWLES: I did see a lot of her in 1931. She had read some of the poems I had published, and she didn't like them. I went around in 1931, and I remember she mentioned Bravig Imbs, a poet at that time who wrote

for various magazines, and she said, "Yes, Bravig Imbs is a very

bad poet, but you're not a poet at all." She also had things to say about my music. I played her my music in 1931

and she said, "It's interesting."

And then I went back in 1932 to her country house in Bilignin and

played some newer music for her, and she said, "Ah, last year your music wasn't attenuated enough, and this year it's too attenuated." That's all she had to say. Except that she told me to come to Tangier. She was liking me at the time, which meant that I could trust her recommenda­ tion. The next year, when she was not liking me at all, she suggested I go to Mexico, adding after a pause, "You'd last about two days."

HALPERN: Was she in favor of your giving up music and devoting more

time to your writing?

BOWLES: I suspect she thought I had no ability to write. I remember we were sitting in the garden at Bilignin and she said, "I told you last week what was the matter with your poetry. What have you done with it

then, with those particular poems? Have you rewritten them?"

And I said, "No, of course not; they've already been published that way.

How could I rewrite them?" And she said, "You see! I told you you were since

not a poet.

A real poet would have gone up and worked on them and

then brought them down and showed them to me a week later, and

you've done nothing whatever."

HALPERN: What was it about writing that made you put composing aside?

BOWLES: I'm not sure. I think it had a lot to do with the fact that I couldn't make a living as a composer without remaining all the time in New York. I was very much fed up with being in New York.

150

HALPERN: When did you begin to write?

BOWLES: At four. I have a whole collection of stories about animals that 1 wrote then.

HALPERN: But it was as a poet that you first published, in transition?

BOWLES: I had written a lot of poetry (I was in high school) and had been buying transition regularly since it started publishing. It seemed to that I could write for them as well as anyone else, so I sent them things and they accepted them. I was sixteen when I wrote the poem they first accepted, seventeen when they published it. I went on for me

several years as a so-called poet.

HALPERN: What ended your short career as a poet?

BOWLES: I think Gertrude Stein had a lot to do with it. She con, vinced me that I ought not to be writing poetry, since I wasn't a poet at all, as I just said. And I believed her thoroughly, and I still believe her.

She was quite right. I would have stopped anyway, probably.

HALPERN: Were there any important early literary influences?

BOWLES: Well, I suppose everything influences you. I remember my mother used to read me Edgar Allan Poe's short stories before 1 went to

sleep at night. After 1 got into bed she would read me Tales of Mystery and Imagination. It wasn't very good for sleeping they gave me night, mares. Maybe that's what she wanted, who knows? Certainly what you read during your teens influences you enormously. During my early -

teens

I was very fond of Arthur Machen and Walter de la Mare. The

school of mystical whimsy. And then 1 found Thomas Mann, and fell into The Magic Mountain when I was sixteen, and that was certainly a

big influence. Probably that was the book that influenced me more than any other before I went to Europe.

HALPERN: Before you actually begin writing a novel or story, what takes place in your mind? Do you outline the plot, say, in visual terms?

BOWLES: Every work suggests its own method. Each novel's been done differently, under different circumstances and using different methods. I got the idea for The Sheltering Sky riding on a Fifth Avenue 151

bus one day going uptown from Tenth Street. I decided just which point of view I would take. It would be a work in which the narrator was omniscient. I would write it consciously up to a certain point, and after

that let it take its own course. You remember there's a little Kafka quote at

the beginning of the third section: "From a certain point onward

there is

no

longer any turning back; that is the point that must be

reached." This seemed important to me, and when I got to that point,

beyond which there was no turning back, I decided to use a surrealist technique-simply writing without any thought of what I had already written, or awareness of what I was writing, or intention as to what I was

going to write next, or how it was going to finish. And I did that.

HALPERN: What about your second novel, Let It Come Down?

BOWLES: That was altogether different. I began to write that on a

freighter as I went past Tangier one night. I was on my way from Antwerp to Colombo, in Ceylon, and we went past Tangier and I felt very nostalgic I could see faint lights in the fog and I knew that was Tangier. I wanted very much to stop in and see it, but not being able to, since the boat went right on past, I created my own Tangier. I started by imagining that I was standing on the cliff looking out at the place where I was on the ship. I transported myself from the ship straight over to the cliffs and began there. That was the first part I wrote. I worked back­ ward and forward, as it were, from that original scene.

-

HALPERN: Where Dvar and Hadija stand on the top of a cliff and see

freighters going by.

BOWLES: That's right. Then on the ship, before I got to Colombo, I worked it out-the sequence of events, the patterns of motivations, the Again I decided to use exactly the same writing tech­

juxtapositions. nique I had used with The Sheltering Sky. To get it up to a place from which it could roll of its own momentum to a stationary point, and then let go and use the automatic process. It's quite clear where it happens. It's on the boat trip.

HALPERN: When you wrote the scene in which Dvar was high on majoun, the evening he had dinner with Daisy, were you yourself under the influence of kif?

152

BOWLES: No. The whole book was written in cold blood, up to that point. But for the last section of the book I went up to Xauen and stayed in the hotel there for about six weeks, writing only at night after dinner.

After I had worked for half or three quarters of an hour, and it was going along, I would smoke. That made it possible for me to write four or five hours rather than only two, which is all I can usually do. The kif gave me a much longer breath.

HALPERN: Are you in the habit of using kif in order to write?

BOWLES: No, I don't think that would be possible. When I was writ­ ing Up Above the World I smoked when I felt like it, and worked all day wandering around in the forest with a pen and notebook in my hand.

HALPERN: To what extent does the ingestion of kif playa role in your writing?

BOWLES: I shouldn't think it has an affect on anyone's writing. Kif

provide flashes of insight, but it acts as an obstacle to thinking. On the other hand, it enables one to write concentratedly for hours at a stretch without fatigue. You can see how it could be useful if you were writing something which relied for its strength on the free elaboration of fantasy. I used it only once that way, as I say for the fourth section of

can

-

Let It Come Doum. But I think most writers would agree that kif is for

relaxation, not for work.

HALPERN: Do you revise a great deal after you've finished the rough draft?

BOWLES: No, the first draft is the final draft. I can't revise. Maybe I should qualify that by saying I first write in longhand, and then the

day, or the next day, I type the longhand. There are always many changes between the longhand and the typed version, but that first typed sheet is part of the final sheet. There's no revision. same

HALPERN: Many critics like to attribute a central theme to your

writing: that of the alienation of civilized man when he comes in contact with a primitive society and its natural man.

BOWLES: Yes, I've heard about that. It's a theory that makes the body of writing seem more coherent, perhaps, when you put it all together.

153

And

possibly they're right, but I'm not conscious of having such a theme, no. I'm not aware of writing about alienation. If my mind worked that way, I couldn't write. I don't have any explicit message; certainly I'm not suggesting changes. I'm merely trying to call people's attention to don't seem to be sufficiently aware of. something they HALPERN: Do you feel trapped member of Western civilization?

or

at

a

disadvantage by being a

BOWLES:

Trapped? No. That's like being trapped by having blond hair or blue eyes, light or dark skin No, I don't feel trapped. It would be a very different life to be part of another social group, perhaps, but I ...

don't see any difference between the natural man and the civilized man, and I'm not juxtaposing the two. The natural man always tries to be a

civilized man, as you can see all over the world. I've never yearned to be a

member of another ethnic group. That's carrying one's romanticism a

little too far. God knows I carry mine far enough as it is.

HALPERN: remote

Why is it that you have traveled so much? And to such

places?

BOWLES: I suppose the first reason is that I've always wanted to get as far as possible from the place where I was born. Far both geographically and spiritually. To leave it behind. I'm always happy leaving the United

States, and the farther away I go the happier I am, generally. Then there's another thing: I feel that life is very short and the world is there to see and one should know as much about it as

possible. One belongs to

the whole world, not to just one part of it.

HALPERN: What is the motivation that prompts your characters to

leave the safety of a predictable environment, a Western environment, for an unknown world that first places them in a state of aloneness and often ends by destroying them, as in the case of Port and Kit in The

Sheltering Sky and Dyar in Let It Come Down?

BOWLES: I've never thought about it. For one thing there is no "pre­ dictable environment." Security is a false concept. As for the motiva­ tion? In the case of Port and Kit they wanted to travel, a simple, innocent motivation. In the case of Nelson Dvar, he was fed up with his work in America. Fed up with standing in a teller's cage. Desire for freedom, I

154

suppose; desire for adventure. Why do people leave their

native habitat

and go wandering off over the face of the earth?

HALPERN: Many of your characters seem to pursue a course of action that often leads them into rather precarious positions, pushed forward by an almost self-destructive curiosity, and a kind of fatalism­ for example, the night walks of Port, or the professor in A Distant Episode. Could you say something about this?

BOWLES: I'm very aware of my own capacity for compulsive behavior.

Besides, it's generally more rewarding to imagine the results of compul­ sive than of reflective action. It has always seemed to me that my characters act naturally, given the circumstances; their behavior is fore­ seeable. Characters set in motion a mechanism of which they become a victim. But generally the mechanism turns out to have been operative at the very beginning. One realizes that Kit's and Port's having left Amer­ ica at all was a compulsive act. Their urge to travel was compulsive.

HALPERN: Do you think that these characters have an "unconscious

drive for self-destruction"?

Death and BOWLES: An unconscious drive for self-destruction? destruction are stock ingredients of life. But it seems to me that the ...

motivation of characters in fiction like mine should be

a

secondary

consideration. I think of characters as if they were props in the general scene

of any given work. The characters, the landscape, the climatic

conditions, the human situation, the formal structure of the story or the novel, all these elements are one-the characters are made of the same material as the rest of the work. Since they are activated by the other elements of the synthetic cosmos, their own motivations are relatively unimportant.

HALPERN: Why do you constantly write about such neurotic characters?

BOWLES: Most of the Occidentals I know aTe neurotic. But that's to be expected; that's what we're producing now. They're the norm. I don't think I could write about a character who struck me as eccentric, whose

behavior was too far from standard.

HALPERN: Many people would consider the behavior of your char­ acters far from standard.

155

BOWLES: I realize that if you consider them objectively, they're neu­ rotic and compulsive; but they're generally presented as integral parts of

situations, along with the landscape, and so it's not very fruitful to try to consider them in another light. My feeling is that what is called a truly normal person (if I understand your meaning) is not likely to be written about, save as a symbol. The typical man of my fiction reacts to inner pressures the way the normal man ought to be reacting to the age we live in. Whatever is intolerable must produce violence.

HALPERN: And these characters are your way of protesting.

BOWLES: If you call it protest. If even a handful of people can believe in the cosmos a writer describes, accept the workings of its natural laws

(and this includes finding that the characters behave in a credible man­ ner), the cosmos is a valid one.

HALPERN: Critics often label you an existential writer. Do you con­ sider yourself an existentialist?

BOWLES: No! Existentialism was never a literary doctrine in any case, even though it did trigger three good novels-one by Sartre (Nausea) and two by Camus (The Stranger and The Plague). But if one's going to subscribe to the tenets of a formulated belief, I suppose atheistic existen­ tialism is the most logical one to adopt. That is, it's likely to provide more

insight than another into what attitudes to take vis-a-vis today's

world.

HALPERN: But you do share some of the basic tenets of existential­

ism, as defined by Sartre.

BOWLES: He's interested in the welfare of humanity. As Port said, "What is humanity? Humanity is everybody but yourself."

HALPERN: That sounds rather solipsistic.

BOWLES: What else can you possibly know? Of course I'm interested in myself, basically. In getting through my life. You've got to get through it all. You never know how many years you've got left. You keep going until it's over. And I'm the one who's got to suffer the consequences of

having lived my life.

156

HALPERN: Is this

why so many of your characters seem

to

be

asocial?

BOWLES: Are they? Or are they merely outside and perhaps wishing

they were inside?

HALPERN: Do you think of yourself as being asocial?

BOWLES: I don't know. Probably very, yes. I'm sorry to be so stub­ born and impossible with all this, but the point is I just don't know any

of the answers, and I have no way of finding them out. I'm not equipped to dig them up, nor do I want to. The day I find out what I'm all about I'll stop writing-I'll stop doing everything. Once you know what makes you tick, you don't tick any more. The whole thing stops.

HALPERN: You are against Sartre's taking life so seriously. Yet when you say about your life that you are just trying to get through it the best you can, it sounds to me as if you took living very seriously.

BOWLES: Oh, everyone takes his own existence seriously, but that's as far as he should go. If you claim that life itself is serious, you're talking out

of turn. You're encroaching on other people's lives. Each man's life

has the quality he gives it, but you can't say that life itself has any

qualities. If we suffer, it's because we haven't learned how not to. I have to remind myself of that.

HALPERN: Then life is a painful experience for you?

BOWLES: You have to keep going, and try at least to keep a pleasant

face.

HALPERN: Life seems to be inaccessible to many of your characters.

By their going beyond a certain point, past which they are pulled by an unconscious force, they place themselves in a position where return to

the world of man is

impossible. Why are they pushed beyond that

point?

BOWLES: It's a subject that interests me very much; but you've got to remember that these are all rationalizations devised after the fact, and

therefore purely suppositious. I don't know the answers to the questions; all I can do is say, "Maybe," "It could be," or "It could be something else."

157

Offhand I'd suggest that the answer has to do with the Romantic of reaching a region of self-negation and thereby

fantasy

regaining a state of

innocence.

HALPERN: Is it a kind of testing to find out what it's like beyond that

point?

BOWLES: It could be. One writes to find out certain things for one­ self. Much of my writing is therapeutic. Otherwise I never would have started, because I knew from the beginning that I had no specific desire to reform. Many of my short stories are simple emotional outbursts.

They came out all at once, like eggs, and I felt better afterward. In that sense much of my writing is an exhortation to destroy. "Why don't you all burn the world, smash it, get rid of everything in it that plagues you?"

It is a desire above all to bring about destruction, that's certain.

HALPERN: So you don't want to change the world. You simply want to

end it.

BOWLES:

Destroy and end are not the same word. You don't end a process by destroying its products. What I wanted was to see everyone aware of being in the same kind of metaphysical impasse I was in. I wanted to know whether they suffered in the same way.

HALPERN: And you don't think they do?

BOWLES: I don't think many do. Perhaps the number is increasing. I

hope so, if only for selfish reasons! Nobody likes to feel alone. I know because I always think of myself as completely alone, and I imagine other

people as a part of something else.

HALPERN: And you want to join the crowd?

BOWLES: It's a universal urge. I've always wanted to. From earliest childhood. Or to be more exact, from the first time I was presented to another child, which was when I was five.

HALPERN: And you were rejected?

BOWLES: It was already too late. I wanted to join on my own terms.

And now it doesn't matter.

158

HALPERN: And so now you alienate your characters, the way you were

alienated?

BOWLES: I don't think the judge would allow that question. Life is much harder if one is alone. Shared suffering is easier to bear.

HALPERN: Sartre says somewhere that a man's essential freedom is the capacity to say "No." This is something your characters are often

incapable of. Do they achieve any kind of freedom?

BOWLES:

My characters don't attain any kind of freedom, as far as

I'm aware.

HALPERN: Is death any kind of freedom?

BOWLES: Death? Another nonexistent, something to use as a threat to those who are afraid of it. There's nothing to say about death. The cage door's always open. Nobody has to stay in here. But people want freedom inside the cage. So what is freedom? You're bound by physical

laws, bound by your body, bound by your mind.

HALPERN: What does freedom mean to you?

BOWLES: I'd say it was not having to experience what you don't like.

HALPERN:

By the alienation that your characters go through in their

various exotic settings, are they forced into considering the meaning of

their lives, if there is meaning to life?

BOWLES: I shouldn't think so. In any case, there's not one meaning to life. There should be as many meanings as there are individuals-you assign meaning to life. If you don't assign it, then clearly it has none

whatever.

HALPERN: In The Stranger, Meursault is put in jail, which is a way of being alienated, and at that point he considers "the meaning of life."

BOWLES: Camus was a great moralist, which means, nowadays, to be preoccupied with social considerations. I'm not preoccupied in that way.

I'm not a moralist. After all, he was a serious communist; I was a very unserious one, a completely negative one.

159

HALPERN: What was it about communism that appealed to you?

BOWLES: Oh, I imagined it could destroy the establishment. When I realized it couldn't, I got out fast and decided to work on own hook. my

HALPERN: Back to destroying the world

...

BOWLES: Well, who doesn't want to? I mean, look at it!

HALPERN: It's one thing to dislike something you see and another to want to

destroy it.

BOWLES: Is it? I think the natural urge of every human being is to

destroy what he dislikes. That doesn't mean he does it. You don't by any means get to do what you want to do, but you've got to recognize the desire when you feel it.

HALPERN: So you use your writing as a weapon.

BOWLES:

Right. Absolutely.

HALPERN: And your music?

BOWLES: Music is abstract. Besides, I was writing theater music. It was fun but it's a static occupation. I always have to feel I'm going

somewhere.

HALPERN: Has your desire to destroy the world always been a con­ scious one?

BOWLES: Yes. I was aware that I had a grudge, and that the only way I could satisfy my grudge was by writing words, attacking in words. The

attack, of course, is to seem not to be attacking. Get people's confidence and then, surprise! Yank the rug out from under their feet. If they come back for more, then I've succeeded. way to

HALPERN: If they enjoy your work you have succeeded-in the sense that their minds have been infected.

BOWLES: Infected is a loaded word, but all right. They have been infected by the germ of doubt. Their basic assumptions may have been

slightly shaken for a second, and that's important.

160

HALPERN: And you don't think of your goals as being negative?

BOWLES: To destroy often means to purify. I don't think of destruc­ tion as necessarily undesirable. You said "infecting." All right. Perhaps those infected will have more technique than I for doing some definite

destroying. In that sense I'm just a propagandist, but then all writers

are

func­

propagandists for one thing or another. It's a perfectly honorable tion to serve as a corrosive agent. And there certainly is nothing unu­ sual about it; it's been part of the Romantic tradition for the past and ulti­ century and a half. If a writer can incite anyone to question facet of structure of society, he's per­ any mately to reject the present formed a function.

HALPERN: And after that?

BOWLES: It's not for him to say. Apres lui le deluge. That's all he can do. If he's a propagandist for nihilism, that's his function too.

HALPERN: To start the ball rolling?

BOWLES: I want to help society go to pieces, make it easy.

HALPERN: And writing about horror is your method.

BOWLES: I don't write "about horror." But there's a sort of metaphysi­ cal malaise in the world today, as if people sense that things are going to be bad. They could be expected to respond to any fictional situation which evoked the same amalgam of repulsion and terror that they

already vaguely feel.

HALPERN: Are you, as Leslie Fiedler suggests, a secret lover of the horror you create?

BOWLES: Is there such a creature as a secret or even an avowed lover of horror? I can't believe it. If you're talking about the evocation of horror

the printed page, then that's something else. In certain sensitive people the awakening of the sensation of horror through reading can result in a temporary smearing of the lens of consciousness, as one might if it's put it. Then all perception is distorted by it. It's a dislocation, and on

of short duration it provides the reader with a partially pleasurable shiver. In that respect I confess to being jaded, and I regret it. A good 161

jolt of vicarious horror can cause a certain amount of values afterward.

questioning of

HALPERN: Is that what you hope to accomplish through the horror you evoke?

BOWLES: I don't use horror. If reading a passage of mine

triggers the suspension of belief in so-called objective reality for a moment, then I suppose it has the same effect on the reader as if I had

horror as a device.

consciously used

HALPERN: I'd like to talk a little about your translating. are

convinced that the stories from the Moghrebi are

Many critics really yours.

BOWLES: I know, but they're not. That's critical blindness. If

they

mine, they'd be very different. They're translations. Each Moroc­ can writer has a different style in English because the cadence of each one's speech is different in Moghrebi. I keep the tapes. Anyone who listens to them and understands the language can hear the differences. were

HALPERN: Has your writing been affected by the translations you've done?

BOWLES: A little. I noticed that it had been when I wrote A Hundred Camels in the Courtyard. I was trying to get to another way of thinking, noncausal.

...

Those were experiments. Arbitrary use of disparate ele­

ments.

HALPERN: You did some translating of Borges's work, didn't you?

BOWLES: I did one short story, which I particularly liked, called "Las Ruinas Circulates" ("The Circular Ruins") back in 1944, I think it was. He

completely unknown in the United States. His cousin, Victoria Ocampo, was in New York. She was the editor of Sur, in Buenos Aires, and was the woman who eventually bought La Prensa and went to jail under Peron. She was a very spectacular woman. One afternoon she was

tossed me a book, which she said was a new work by her cousin (it was one

that she herself had published). It was called El Jardin de los Senderos

Que se Bifurcan. A marvelous book. Since then it has been translated as Ficciones. I had read some Borges four years before that, and already admired him. I think that was the first translation into English of a short 162

story by Borges. I don't know whether View, the magazine it was pub­

lished in, bothered to get permission from Buenos Aires or not, but I doubt it. They seldom did.

HALPERN: Did you have much difficulty in translating that story?

BOWLES: Well, Borges writes in classical Castellano, and the ideas are simply put; he's an easy man to translate. I should think the important thing would be to retain the particular poetic flavor of the prose in each story.

HALPERN: Do you feel there is any importance to the Moroccan translations you've done?

BOWLES: I think they provide a certain amount of insight into the Moroccan mentality and Moroccan customs, things that haven't been gone into very deeply in fiction. I haven't noticed many good novels about Morocco, so in that sense they're of use to anyone interested in the country. Literary importance? I have no idea.

HALPERN:

Why do you spend so much time on these translations

instead of on your own writing?

BOWLES: Because Jane, my wife, was ill, and to write a novel I need solitude and great long stretches of empty time; I haven't really had that since 1957. The summer of 1964, of course, I did go up on the mountain,

Monte Viejo, you know, and write Up Above the World.

HALPERN: Are you a great fan of Jane Bowles's work?

BOWLES: I am indeed. I've read Two Serious Ladies ten times-I think I quote most of it. Also, it was going over the manuscript of Two Serious Ladies that gave me the original impetus to consider the possibil­ ity of writing a novel. can

HALPERN: You

met

Jane before she started writing Two Serious

Ladies, didn't you?

BOWLES: Oh, yes. She begin writing Two Serious Ladies in 1938, in Paris, the year we were married. She wrote a few scenes that were later much modified, but still they were the nucleus. And then she went on

writing it in New York and finally in Mexico.

163

HALPERN: Was it difficult living with another writer?

BOWLES: That's hard to say, since I've lived only with Janie. She was the only writer I've ever lived with, and also the only woman I've ever lived with, so I don't know which difficulties come from her being a and which come from her being a writer. Naturally, you always have some difficulties with your wife, but whether these had anything to woman

do with the fact that she was a writer, I can't tell you.

HALPERN: Was there ever any question of competition?

BOWLES:

Competition between us? Competition's a game. It takes more than one to play. We never played it.

HALPERN:

Among your own books do you have a favorite?

BOWLES: Of published volumes I like The Delicate Prey the most.

Naturally that doesn't mean I'd write the stories the same way now.

HALPERN: Do you have much contact with other writers?

BOWLES: When other writers come through Tangier and look me up, I see them, yes. And I knew a few before I settled here. One of the first

Bill Saroyan, who came to New York with the script of a play for which he wanted me to write music. It was My Heart's in the Highlands, was

and the old Group Theatre produced it. About that time I met Auden. I always held him in great respect: he was erudite, and he had an unparal­ leled ability to use the English language. An infallible, like Stravinsky.

And of course I knew Isherwood and Spender. There was one spring when I used to have lunch with them every day at the Cafe des Westens

Although I never felt that I knew them, because they were English, and enough older than I to be intimidating. It was only much later, long after he had gone to America, that I knew Isherwood better.

And Tennessee Williams. Certainly I've seen a lot of him and in many different places: Acapulco, New York, Rome, Tangier, Paris, Holly­ It used to be I who was the traveler, but nowadays Tennessee wood he moves around a good deal more than I do. This is probably because whole a here for was doesn't refuse to take planes. Truman Capote summer, staying at the Farhar, and we ate our meals together every day during those months. Gore Vidal came, and Allen Ginsberg, and Angus Wilson, and Cyril Connolly. And of course Bill Burroughs lived in Berlin.

....

164

here for years. Even Susan Sontag came, although she didn't stay very

long.

HALPERN: What about Djuna Barnes?

BOWLES: Yes, Djuna came here to Tangier and took my house on the Marshan one year. She was writing a book she called Bow Down. Later she called it Nightwood. I used to see a lot of Carson McCullers when we lived in Middagh Street, and then we used to go and visit her up in

Nyack-spend weekends up there. And of course Sartre, who came to America for a while. We'd have lunch together and then wander around the poorer sections of New York, which he wanted very much to see.

That was the year I got the rights to translate No Exit. Later he was

annoyed with me in Paris, so I don't know him anymore.

HALPERN:

Annoyed about what, if I may ask?

BOWLES: He was annoyed because I was unable to keep the director of No Exit from changing the script. He considered that my province, which it should have been, but the point was that I didn't have a percentage in the show and he didn't know how Broadway works. I was simply the translator, so I had no rights whatever. He sent telegrams of protest from Paris before we opened, and I was obliged to send back replies that were dictated by John Huston. His anger should have been

directed against John, not me.

HALPERN: What about contemporary writers? Are there any you

enjoy reading?

BOWLES: Let's see, who's alive? Sartre is alive, but he did only one

good novel. Graham Greene is alive. Who's alive in America? Whom do I follow with interest? Christopher Isherwood's a good novelist. They're mostly dead. I used to read everything of Gide's and Camus's.

HALPERN: Let me have some opinions on the kind of writing that's

being done in America today.

BOWLES: There are various kinds of writing being done, of course.

But I suspect you mean the "popular school," as exemplified by Joseph

Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon-that sort of

thing? I don't enjoy it.

165

HALPERN:

Why not?

BOWLES: It's simply that I find it very difficult to get into. The means it uses to awaken interest is of a sort that would be valid only for the

length of a short piece. It's too much to have to swim around in that purely literary magma for the time it takes to read a whole book. It fails to hold my attention, that's all. It creates practically no momentum.

My mind wanders, I become impatient, and therefore intolerant.

HALPERN: Is it the content that bothers you or the style of the

writing? Or both?

BOWLES: Both. But it's the point of view more than anything. The

cynicism and wisecracking ultimately function as endorsements of the present civilization. The content is hard to make out because it's gener­ ally symbolic or allegorical, and the style is generally hermetic. It's not a

novelistic style at all; it's really a style that would be more useful in

writing essays, I should think.

HALPERN: Let me go back to the critics for a moment. Do you think they have missed the point of your writing?

They have, certainly, on many occasions. I've often had the impression they were more interested in my motive for writing a given work than they were in the work itself. In general, the British critics have been more perceptive; language is more important to them than it BOWLES:

is to us. But I don't think that matters.

HALPERN: One thing that particularly interests many who meet you is the great discrepancy between what you are like as a person and the kind of books you write.

BOWLES: Why is it that Americans expect an artist's work to be a clear reflection of his life? They never seem to want to believe that the two can be independent of each other and go their separate ways. Even when there's a definite connection between the work and the life, the If you pattern they form may be in either parallel or contrary motion. want to call my state schizophrenic, that's all right with me. Say my

personality has two facets. One is always turned in one direction, toward my own Mecca; that's my work. The other looks in a different direction and sees a different landscape. I think that's a common state of affairs.

166

HALPERN: In retrospect, would you say there has been something that has remained important to you over the years? Something which you have maintained in your writing?

Continuing consciousness, infinite adaptability of human consciousness to outside circumstances, the absurdity of it all, the hope­ lessness of this whole business of living. I've written very little the past few years. Probably because emotionally everything grows less intense as one grows older. The motivation is at a much lower degree, that's all.

BOWLES:

HALPERN: When you were first starting to write you were, emotion­ ally, full of things to say. Now that that has faded somewhat, what

springboard do you have?

BOWLES: I can only find out after I've written, since I empty my mind each time before I start. I only know what I intended to do once it's

finished. Do you remember, in A Life Full of Holes, the farmer comes and scolds the boy for falling asleep, and the boy says: "I didn't know I was

going to sleep until I woke up."

167

The Eel Reynolds Price

1 (25 luly 1984)

Mother, the name of this thing is the eel.

It is one foot long, thick as a pencil,

And lives in the upper half of my spine­ Ambitious now to grow all ways.

Every atom of me it turns to it Is me consumed.

Yet it's been here always,

Original part

-

which is my first news

For you in years. It came in the first Two cells of me, a gift therefore

From you or Father-my secret twin Through those hard years that threatened desolation But found rescue in dumb resort To inner company, a final friend Concealed at the core on which I'd press

Companionship, brief cries for help.

It helped. My purple baby convulsions That got more notice than a four-car wreck, Weak arms that balked a playground career And kept me in for books and art,

Toilet mishaps, occasional blanks-

Tidy gifts to aim and guide me.

168

I steadily thanked it and on we came,

Paired for service fifty years.

Now it means to be me. And has made huge gains.

I'm numb as brass over one and a half legs, All my upper back, groin, now my scalp;

Both arms are cringing weaker today, And I walk like a stove-up hobo at dawn.

What broke the bond, the life-in-life That saw us both through so much good?

Mother of us both, you left here Nineteen years ago-your own brain

Drowning itself, avid bloodAnd prayers to the dead are not my line; But a question then: have you learned a way, There where you watch, to help me kill This first wombmate; strangle, fire out

Every trace of one more heirloom Grinding jaws? Do you choose me to live?

Struggle to tell.

2 (26 July 1984)

Mother, this man is now all eel.

Each morning he's hauled upright to a chair And sits all day by a window near trees.

Pale leafshine honors the green of his skin,

The black-bead eyes. He wants no more, His final triumph having stoked him with permanent

Fuel for the years of wait

-

twitched

Only by drafts, damp rubs by his nurse, Or mild waves of gravity flushing the compact Waste from his bore.

He does not know you

Nor the twin he ate. He could not name The taste of joy, but he licks it slowly In his bone hook-jaws. He thinks only "Me. I became all me."

169

3 (26-30 July 1984)

Mother, this man will stay a man.

He knows it three ways. First, he's watched­ No dream or tale rigged for comfort But a visible act in a palpable place In which his wound was washed and healed,

The old eel sluiced out harmless in the lake.

Then a woman he trusts like a high stone wall

Phoned to say "You will not die.

You'll live and work to a ripe old age"­ And quoted Psalm 91's reckless vow, He will give his angels charge over you

guard you in all your ways.

Then he knows what a weight of goods rests in him, The stocked warehouses of fifty-one yearsWaiting for export, barter, gift: to

Lucid poems of fate and grace, Novels like patient hands through the maze, Honest memories of his own ruins and pleasures

(All human, though many blind and cruel).

Years more to teach the famished children Rising each spring like throats of flowers,

Asking for proof that life is literally Viable in time.

Long years more To use what I think I finally glimpse­

The steady means of daily love In daily life: the patience, trust, Suspended fear, to choose one soul And stand nearby and say "Be you.

Be near but you."

And thereby praise,

Thank, recompense the love of God That sent me, Mother, through straits of your Own hectic womb and into life

fight this hardest battle nowA man upright and free to give, In desperate need. to

170

Contributors

Cornelia Spelman, M.S.W., is a psychotherapist and has written about child abuse. She is working on a collection of essays entitled The Faint Sound of the Human Heart. * * * Michael Ryan's third volume of poems, God Hunger, will be published in August by Viking Penguin. He is completing a collection of essays entitled On the Nature of Poetry. Four

of his poems appeared in TQ #72.

*

* *

William Goyen (1915-83)

was one of the greatest contemporary American fiction writers. His last books were the novel Arcadio (Clarkson N. Potter, 1983) and Had I a Hundred Mouths: New & Selected Stories 1947-1983 (Persea, 1986). In addition to "Recovering," which first appeared in TQ #58, a large selec­ tion from his work and an interview were published in TQ #56. * * *

Paul West's twelfth novel, Lord Byron's Doctor, will be published by Doubleday in fall 1989. His other books include The Rat Man of Paris

(Macmillan, 1987) and The Place in Flowers Where Pollen Rests (Double­ day, 1988), a portion of which appeared in TQ #55. He is working on a new novel about Jack the Ripper.

Perri Klass received her M.D. degree from Harvard Medical School in 1986 and is completing a residency in pediatrics at the Children's Hospital, in Boston. She is the author of a novel, Recombinations (1985), a book of short stories, I Am Having an Adventure (1986) and a collection of essays, A Not Entirely Benign Procedure: Four Years as a Medical Student (1987), all published by G .P. Putnam's Sons. Her articles have appeared in Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Massachusetts Medicine and other periodicals. * * * Gwendolyn Brooks is the poet laureate of the state of Illinois. Her books of poetry and prose include Report from Part One: An Autobiography (Broadside Press, 1972) and Annie Allen (Harper & Row, 1949), which received the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Her 171

most recent

books are Blacks (1987), Winnie (1988), and Gottschalk and

the Grande Tarantelle (1988), all published by the David Company. She received the Robert Frost medal for distinguished achievement from the

Poetry Society of America in spring 1989. * * * R.D. Skillings has published three books of fiction: Alternative Lives (Ithaca House, 1974), P-town Stories (Applewood, 1980) and In a Murderous Time (Applewood, 1984). His stories have appeared in TQ #55 and #58, and TQ 20, the anthology of writing and graphics from the first twenty years of the magazine.

Nancy Mairs is the author of In All the Rooms of the Yellow House (Blue Moon-Confluence Press, 1984), Plaintext: Deciphering a Woman's Life (University of Arizona Press, 1986; Harper & Row, 1987), and Remembering the Bone House (Harper & Row, 1989). * * * Bell Hooks's most recent book is Talking Back: Feminist Essays (South End Press, 1989). Her other books are Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) and Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), both of which were also published by South End Press. She is an associate professor of English and women's studies at Oberlin College. * * * Jay Cantor is the author of a critical study, The Space Between: Literature and Politics (johns Hopkins, 1982) and two novels, The Death of Che Guevara (Knopf, 1983), and Krazy Kat (Knopf, 1988). He teaches at Tufts Univer­ sity, and was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1988-89. * * * Annie Dillard's book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek received the Pulit­ An zer Prize in 1975. She is the author of seven other books, including which American Childhood (Harper & Row, 1987) and The Writing Life, is excerpted in this issue and will be released by Harper and Row in fall 1989.

*

*

*

Maxine Kumin's

poems, Nurture

most

recent

books are

a

volume of

(Viking, 1989), and a collection of essays, In Deep have

(Viking, 1987; Beacon Press, 1988). Her poems and stories appeared in TQ #42, 59 and 63.

John Peck's books of poetry include Shagbark (Bobbs-Merrill, 1972) and The Broken Blockhouse Wall (Godine, 1978). His poems were pub­ lished in TQ #56 and #61, and a special section of his poetry and prose include appeared in TQ #72. * * * Paul Bowles's most recent books The Points in Time (1984), Without Stopping (1985) and A Distant Episode: Selected Stories (1988), all published by Ecco Press. * * * Daniel and Tango Halpern's books of poems include Seasonal Rights (1982) (1987), both published by Viking. He is the coauthor, with Julie Strand, Point of The Good Food: Pastas, Soups and Stews (Viking, 1985; North Antaeus. * * * Press, 1988). He is also the editor of the literary journal Award for his Circle Reynolds Price received the National Book Critics 172

novel Kate Vaidan (Atheneum, 1986), a section of which appeared in TQ #66. A long poem of his also appeared in TQ #61. His other recent books include A Common Room: New and Selected Essays (1987) and Good Hearts (1988), both published by Atheneum.

For nearly three years TriQuarterly has enjoyed the energy, intelligence,

organizational skills and keen sense of humor of Janet Vander Kelen, our Managing Editor. Now we wish to inform our readers that Janet is leaving TQ to pursue a career in television production. Thanks, Janet, and best of luck in everything. (And welcome to our new Managing Editor, Kirstie Felland.)

173

SPECIAL ISSUE OF

CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE Ford Madox Ford and

Guest Edited

by Joseph Wiesenfarth

the Arts, Summer 1989 The

Literary Life: A Lecture Delivered by Ford, Joseph Wiesenfarth

Ford Madox

-Ford on the literary life and the commercial value of

"Music for a While": Ford's Compositions

literature.

for Voice and Piano, Sondra J. Stang and Carl Smith

-Articles

on

Ford

as

com­

poser, art critic, poet, trans­ lator, and novelist.

Ford Madox Ford

as

Raphaelites, Joseph A.

a

Critic of the Pre­ Kestner

The Ash-Bucket at Dawn: Ford's Art of

Poetry, Joseph Wiesenfarth -A

secondary

source

ography, 1985-1988.

bibli­

The Art of Translation: Ford's

soldat," Sondra J. Stang and Maryann De Julio

"Le bon

Ford and

Madox

Ford, His Fellow Writers,

History:

Another Tale of Shem and

Shaun, Robert L. Caserio

Duality, Reading, and Art in Ford's Last Novels, Max Saunders The

Commercial Value of Literature: A

Radio Talk Given

by Ford Madox Ford,

Max Saunders

A Secondary Source Bibliography on Ford Madox Ford,

1985-1988, Michael Longrie

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RECENT CONTRIBUTORS:

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RonHansen � Tristan Tzara Ingrid Smith James Tate Jon Anderson Beverly Dahlen Charlie Smith T. Alan Broughton Heather McHugh Olga Broumas Michael Burkard David Foster Wallace Luci Tapahonso Barbara Cully Agha Shahid Ali Jackson Mac Low

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NEW FROM TRIQUARTERLY BOOKS: WRITERS FROM SOUTH AFRICA Based on the proceedings of a literary conference hosted by TriQuarterly magasine and Northwest­ ern

University in the autumn of 1987, Writers

from South Africa presents the speeches and dia­ logues of fourteen leading South African writers, poets and intellectuals. Bridging the distances

of

exile, race and gender, these participants open up the world of contemporary South African literary culture to American audiences, as they deal with such topics as censorship, worker poetry, the tradi­ tion of the imbongi or praise-singer and the place of poetry in society. Together they give us a view of writers in South Africa today-not only in the universities but also the detention camps, mines,

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THE MASSACHUSETTS REVIEW From recent issues

Interview with Anita Desai

Photographs. by Roy DeCarava Vietnam remembered, Richard Falk and Oliver Stone Battiing Siei- The Boxer as NaturalMan, Gerald Early

Fiction by Arturo Vivante Joyce Carol Oates

Special issue· Winter 1988-89 Desh-Videsh The South Asian Expatriate Experience .

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Contemporary Canada Literature· drama ·film aft .

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The Georgia Review, University of Georgia. Athens, GA 30602

rlheYale Review Kai Erikson, editor For over seventy-six years The Yale Review has been publishing the best in poetry, fiction. book reviews. and of essays general intellectual interest. And the tradition remains very much alive.

In the last several issues. for example. the Review has included:'

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The inaugural

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N.w frolll Duke University Pr •••

Stanley Fish Doi ng What Comes

Naturally Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in literary and legal Studies

Post-Contempo­ rary Interventions

Series

liN othing that Stanley Fish writes

can

be ignored. In this latest

work, he explodes all our comforting notions of unbiased,

Stanley Fish and

uninflected judgment in the pursuit of interpretotion."

Fredric Jameson,

-Anne"e Kolodny, Professor of English and Dean of Humani­

co-editors

ties, University of Arizona

115

tan

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sociology of knowledge, as well as in literary theory ltsell."

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Tradition and Innovation in Eastern European Literature: fiction

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#33

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�� CI().-an

.=.-ed Leeb.-()n

.

from ''Learning from the Tyrants, translated bJ! Rkbard Howard, MR43744

•

from "New life, MR43/44 In the evening

...

•

she

feigns falling asleep, and

To return to our

when he leaves the bed

friends, beyond the

and the apartment, she

reason

follows at a distance.

He starts with the small cans left out

invoked to get rid

of them, there exists another: they know our

in front of

limits and our defects

townhouses. He rips

too well

open their heavy green

(friendship

comes down to

this and

nothing more) to enter­ tain the slightest illusion

image we have of oursel­ And when they grant us a little praise, they in­

ves.

sinuate into it so many

more-over, to our promo­

dark hints and subtleties that their flattery, by dint

tion to the rank of idol

of circumspection, is

as to our virtues.

Hostile,

(to which public opinion equivalent to an affront. would be quite dis­ What they secretly long for is our collapse, our posed), determined to safeguard our mediocrity, humiliation, and our our real

dimensions,

bags and digs inside, sift-

they puncture the myth

ing through them like a

we would

boy playing with sand on

in our behalf, they keep

a beach.

us at our exact measure,

He takes out

ruin.

like to create

things and looks at them- denounce the false milk cartons and cereal boxes and animal bones.

Sometimes he puts them

Vau. Il()()ve.-

to his nose, but always

he throws them back.

from ''Apology/or the Senses," MR40/41

After a while, he pursues the street to an avenue

Everyone needs a good excuse,

of restaurants. Numbly,

like "I was driving with closed eyes,

she follows him.

thinking about your beauty, and I didn't see

Here he climbs into a

your husband sleeping on the road.

Sorry. It will never happen again."

heavy dumpster and dis­ appears. She hears him

giggling inside, like an in­ fant rolling in its crib.

He emerges with leaves

of garbage in his hair, only to dive into the next

People like such explanations.

They want to know how you goofed and what improvements you've planned.

dumpster.

MISSISSIVVI 12�VI�W .:.:.W.-itinu that d()e§n� make y()U w()u:d:ec::: ::::.,: ,,:::}}}}}}}:�:::�:�:�:�:�:�:�:�:�:�:� what'!l§ ()n TV ·.W

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Spring

1989

Douglas Hofstadter and David Moser on speech errors Bernard Agranoff, "Exploring Brain and Mind" Margot Norris "Painting Vietnam Combat" Edward Hirsch on Philip Levine plus new poems New work by Stuart Dybek, "Charlle-2" (poems on Vietnam combat), Temma Ehrenfeld, Sanjukta Bandyopadhyay, and Irvin Faust James Glndln new books on sports -

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Parnassus: Poetry in Review Volume 15, No. 1

Fifteenth Anniversary Issue Alice Fulton on Emily Dickinson Paul West on Djuna Barnes Marjorie Perloff on Susan Howe Ross Feld on Charles Olson

Jane Cooper on Muriel Rukeyser William Harmon on Strong Measures and In the American Tree Brenda Marie Osbey on Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde,

and Jay Wright Sven Birkerts on American Prose Poems

Calvin Bedient on Julia Kristeva William Burford on Edwin Denby and Lincoln Kirstein Amy Clampitt on Howard Moss Carter Revard on Native American Poetry Catharine Stimpson on Mary Daly's Wickedary Paul Christensen on Jerome Rothenberg and

Armand Schwemer And contributions by Justin Askins, Charles Rowan Beye, Mar­ cellus Blount, Guy Davenport, Rachel Hadas, William Logan, Sherod Santos, Willard Spiegelman, Gyorgyi Voros .

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