Last week, looking out the kitchen windows into the gardens in the backyard, I saw that what Edna St. Vincent Millay said about April is true: it had indeed come “like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.” But amid that exuberant fertility I also saw the clogging mass of dead leaves that I somehow never managed to find the time to clear out back in autumn. And so, I raked.
Raking is my contribution to the ongoing garden project, begun some seven years ago by my wife Kathy. Two gardens: one large and open to the sun, featuring a dogwood, a Japanese maple, and a butterfly bush; studded with flox, wild geraniums, English roses, irises, ferns, hostas, daylilies, impatiens, liatris, and bluebells; and, for added visual interest and for its calming gurgle, a small waterfall; the other smaller, designed more as a nook of shade, a cranny of retreat under the latticed spread of a red bud tree, the space under it carpeted with vinca and filigreed with tulips, impatiens, and hostas. I do not garden myself; I can grow nothing but tired trying to grow anything. But I have two arms and a back that are still relatively strong, so I clear and neaten. I rake. I prepare the way for Kathy to transfigure these plots of earth into conformity with her aesthetic vision of them, to create a floral architecture of astonishingly beautiful living things. I enable the natural to receive the artful. Gardens are middle spaces, positioned halfway between the fecund inventiveness of nature and human ingenuity. That combination of creativities, the seeming miracle of it, motivates me to affirm it the only way I am able. I rake.
I have noticed that raking takes on the rhythm and expression of the raker’s personality. Beta rakers, in keeping with the restive churn of their minds, use short bursts of vigorous strokes. They find raking tedious, a usurpation of time that could be better spent. Their goal is to finish quickly and be about other, more important, business. Alpha rakers use slower, longer, languorous strokes. They relish raking as time well spent, as an opportunity for reflection perhaps, or for mental waywardness, for cognitive drift. Alpha rakers pay attention to what thoughts may come. They attend to what their minds are hailed by. They are mindful. I am an alpha raker.
During a recent raking, for reasons I cannot explain, and for which I seek no explanation, I suddenly thought of an article I had read some time back about feral parrots, escapees from imported shipments that formed communities of wild parrots and managed to adapt themselves to urban environments as diverse as Brooklyn, Miami, Austin, and San Francisco—bright shouts of exotic color in the otherwise drab familiarity of the cityscape. Wild creatures, torn from their native surroundings, shipped overseas to languish in cages in well-appointed rooms in tasteful houses, they refused to go gentle into that good life—for a well-appointed gulag is still a gulag--took flight, and returned themselves to the wild. I’d like to imagine some parrotudinous intentionality at work here, or perhaps some impulse-imbued psittacidae act of spirit and courage. They refused to relinquish the title to themselves. They refused surrender to an incapacity for change. I found the thought, and the urgency of feeling it signified, somehow whole and gladdening.
Likely the very rhythm of my raking, the incantatory motion of it, summoned this thought, and others like it, from their deep-brained slumber and put them in play. But whatever the reason, I consider this spillway of unrefereed, ungatekept thought an intrinsic good. I do not analyze why wild parrots came to mind. It came to mind, and I am content with that, content that it simply emerged, gestated, from some shadowy cortical annex, content to be immersed in it, content that a small mystery has arrived and unspooled itself, content with the plenitude of it, content to know that some kind of neural algorithm yielded something of me to me.
But the good of raking is less mysterious as well. My raking matters in the observable world. It is an achievement, and one of the few activities where the good of it is so immediately present in the moment of its ending. So much of what we do is of doubtful issue, is contingent or provisional, subject to variables, its effects deferred. Educating, raising children, choosing a career, donating to charity, praying—have we done well? Have we made a difference? The answer too often is not immediately apparent. Our hopes for so much of what we do seem set on a time delay. But my raking is a discernable accomplishment; I made a difference, an empirically evident difference. The garden is decluttered, restored; it is ready to be reoccupied, reworked; ready to once again floresce into an eruption of beauty.
And who knows, perhaps the order I long to restore signals a good beyond the provocation of it, a good more ineffable than the felt experience of it. Perhaps the order I desire and make, small and rather insignificant creation that I am, points beyond my littleness to a larger and more significant order, to the whole of creation itself, an ordered whole, a whole in order. Is it an emblem? Is it, in a minor key, the faint melody of a first principle? Do I dare to make such a transcendent leap? Is it a blind intuition merely, more a yearning than a concept, more a wish than an insight? I don’t know. But for now, here, at this time and in this place, the raking itself is enough.
Friday, April 29, 2011
Sunday, April 17, 2011
The Missal
Rummaging through a box of memorabilia from my youth that my mother had collected and kept, I came upon the missal I used as a boy: the St. Joseph Daily Missal, the missal especially recommended for children and young adults. I remembered being endlessly fascinated with the contents of the gilt-edged pages that lay between its faux-leather covers, using the ribboned bookmarks to ease my way to the liturgical calendar, the table of feasts, the mysteries of the rosary, the holy days of obligation, the rogation days set aside to mitigate God’s anger and our waywardness and solicit His intervention in a troubled world, the stations of the cross, and various novenas, litanies, and common prayers. Most particularly, however, my fascination focused on the common, or unchanging part, of the mass, for on facing pages it was printed in Latin and English.
Prior to 1963, when the Second Vatican Council allowed the vernacular mass, the priest said the mass in Latin, and I recall eagerly listening to the priest’s words, then quickly shifting my eyes to the English translation right-hand page. I liked the sound of Latin, the roll-off-the-tongue rhythm and echoed lyricism in such phrases as “per omnia saecula saeculorum,” and “et cum spiritu tuo,” and “sit semper vobis,” and “qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis” And I learned a good deal of Latin, too, so much so that when I became an altar boy—a Knight of the Altar, as we were called—I already knew the responses and, thus, was spared the anxious chore of memorization that beset the other Knights-to-be. Indeed, when I was tracked in the Academic Latin college-prep sequence in high school, I pretty much found the four years of required Latin a meadowed stroll, though I did slip occasionally on the cowpies of the ablative case of nouns and the pluperfect verb forms in the subjunctive mood.
After 1963, however, the Latin, or Tridentine, mass gave way to English, and, for me, something was lost in the translation, something having to do with mystery, with moments unfastened from the ordinary and enchimed with a reverential allure, with gestures of awe and a quickening pulse of wonder and a deep-down tug toward some fundamental urge for transcendence.
As a boy I was especially receptive to the mysterious eventfulness of Church ceremonies. I felt a kind of embodied microdrama of holiness was unfolding, some kind of palpable presence, a fullness, some unseen, swarming, immanent meaning. I was transfixed by the Good Friday Station of the cross, the twilit luminescence inside the Church, the spiced pungency of vaporing incense, the priest and altar boys stopping at each of the fourteen stations, the priest beginning each with “We adore thee O Christ and we bless Thee” and the congregation responding “Because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world,” Christ falling three times, the imprint of Christ’s bloodied face on Veronica’s veil, the pain of the Virgin Mary upon seeing her suffering son, the nails driven through the hands and feet, the hapless Simon of Cyrene (I thrilled at the alliteration), an anonymous Libyan Greek, plucked from among the onlookers and forced to bear the cross when an exhausted Christ briefly staggered and briefly faltered in his progress toward execution. And the pomp and spectacle of my Confirmation, the music and flowers and brightly lit apse, at the center of which stood the bishop himself, who I thought, when the scapular was hung upon my neck, blessed me by saying, to my considerable confusion, “fox take ‘em” until my dad told me His Excellency had said “Pax tecum,” “peace be with you.” Much as the Plains Indians considered the ghost shirt, I considered that scapular a means of invulnerability, creating a kind of force-field carapace around me to repel even the most wily of Satan’s wiles.
And there was the radiant, numinous energy of the miraculous itself, the central mystery of every mass, the transubstantiation, those uttered words “Hoc est enim corpus meum”—This is my body—and “Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei”—This is the chalice of my blood—changing, right before my awestruck eyes, bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, propelling me, as I thought, back through history, into deep time, and setting me in attendance at the Last Supper—an inexhaustible vein of wonder, words drenched in astonishment and trimmed in purple velvet, words to light the way from the plains of Moab to the summit of Mount Nebo, beckoning words, summoning words, words dazzled in beyondness, words conjuring elsewhere, rhapsodic words, mood-saturated words, words that promised a veil lifted and a curtain undrawn, words that unpinned me from the minute and hour hands that clockfaced the radius of my experience, words whose seizing impulse pushed me beyond the circumference of the moment and myself, words that numenesced me, dilated me.
So it was to me as a boy, before I was ambushed by doubt, before my capacity for receptive acceptance gave way to a dialectic of interrogation; before I developed other allegiances and other forms of discernment; before the mystery of church rituals and ceremonies unraveled, unlurked, deglinted, seemed more accoutrement than palimpsest; before they lost their embodied allure, their piercing provocation; before their rich allusiveness, their vein of immanence, played out, became exhausted, and I fell away—unafterworded, unsecond thoughted, until I discovered my old missal.
Prior to 1963, when the Second Vatican Council allowed the vernacular mass, the priest said the mass in Latin, and I recall eagerly listening to the priest’s words, then quickly shifting my eyes to the English translation right-hand page. I liked the sound of Latin, the roll-off-the-tongue rhythm and echoed lyricism in such phrases as “per omnia saecula saeculorum,” and “et cum spiritu tuo,” and “sit semper vobis,” and “qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis” And I learned a good deal of Latin, too, so much so that when I became an altar boy—a Knight of the Altar, as we were called—I already knew the responses and, thus, was spared the anxious chore of memorization that beset the other Knights-to-be. Indeed, when I was tracked in the Academic Latin college-prep sequence in high school, I pretty much found the four years of required Latin a meadowed stroll, though I did slip occasionally on the cowpies of the ablative case of nouns and the pluperfect verb forms in the subjunctive mood.
After 1963, however, the Latin, or Tridentine, mass gave way to English, and, for me, something was lost in the translation, something having to do with mystery, with moments unfastened from the ordinary and enchimed with a reverential allure, with gestures of awe and a quickening pulse of wonder and a deep-down tug toward some fundamental urge for transcendence.
As a boy I was especially receptive to the mysterious eventfulness of Church ceremonies. I felt a kind of embodied microdrama of holiness was unfolding, some kind of palpable presence, a fullness, some unseen, swarming, immanent meaning. I was transfixed by the Good Friday Station of the cross, the twilit luminescence inside the Church, the spiced pungency of vaporing incense, the priest and altar boys stopping at each of the fourteen stations, the priest beginning each with “We adore thee O Christ and we bless Thee” and the congregation responding “Because by Thy holy cross Thou hast redeemed the world,” Christ falling three times, the imprint of Christ’s bloodied face on Veronica’s veil, the pain of the Virgin Mary upon seeing her suffering son, the nails driven through the hands and feet, the hapless Simon of Cyrene (I thrilled at the alliteration), an anonymous Libyan Greek, plucked from among the onlookers and forced to bear the cross when an exhausted Christ briefly staggered and briefly faltered in his progress toward execution. And the pomp and spectacle of my Confirmation, the music and flowers and brightly lit apse, at the center of which stood the bishop himself, who I thought, when the scapular was hung upon my neck, blessed me by saying, to my considerable confusion, “fox take ‘em” until my dad told me His Excellency had said “Pax tecum,” “peace be with you.” Much as the Plains Indians considered the ghost shirt, I considered that scapular a means of invulnerability, creating a kind of force-field carapace around me to repel even the most wily of Satan’s wiles.
And there was the radiant, numinous energy of the miraculous itself, the central mystery of every mass, the transubstantiation, those uttered words “Hoc est enim corpus meum”—This is my body—and “Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei”—This is the chalice of my blood—changing, right before my awestruck eyes, bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, propelling me, as I thought, back through history, into deep time, and setting me in attendance at the Last Supper—an inexhaustible vein of wonder, words drenched in astonishment and trimmed in purple velvet, words to light the way from the plains of Moab to the summit of Mount Nebo, beckoning words, summoning words, words dazzled in beyondness, words conjuring elsewhere, rhapsodic words, mood-saturated words, words that promised a veil lifted and a curtain undrawn, words that unpinned me from the minute and hour hands that clockfaced the radius of my experience, words whose seizing impulse pushed me beyond the circumference of the moment and myself, words that numenesced me, dilated me.
So it was to me as a boy, before I was ambushed by doubt, before my capacity for receptive acceptance gave way to a dialectic of interrogation; before I developed other allegiances and other forms of discernment; before the mystery of church rituals and ceremonies unraveled, unlurked, deglinted, seemed more accoutrement than palimpsest; before they lost their embodied allure, their piercing provocation; before their rich allusiveness, their vein of immanence, played out, became exhausted, and I fell away—unafterworded, unsecond thoughted, until I discovered my old missal.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Perchance to Dream
Normally, I do not remember my dreams. Last week, however, I dreamed a dream that has remained stiletto-sharp stenciled in my memory. Now, I do not know if dreams represent displaced or distorted or symbolized wish gratification, as Freud said; or archetypal deposits in the human collective unconscious, as Jung theorized; or the integration of new knowledge into the memory system, or a janitorial service decluttering the mind, or a spontaneous mashup of memory and knowledge and emotion and sensation, or a random and purposeless neuronal firing, as various cognitive scientists maintain. I do not know if dreams are warnings, such as the one Joseph received that sent the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt to escape the paranoid Herod, nor do I know if, as Ecclesiastes asserts, granting dreams any credence whatsoever is to “catcheth at a shadow, and followeth after the wind.” I do not know if dreams are the touchstones of our natural character, as Emerson and Thoreau claim, or if, as Barbara Kingsolver believes, dreams are simply “made out of what [we] do all day,” in much “the same way a dog that runs after rabbits will dream of rabbits.”
What I do know is this: last week I dreamed I awoke and began my slow somnolent shamble toward the Mr. Coffee machine downstairs. As is my habit, I paused to look out the stairway landing window onto my backyard, only to see that during the night it had snowed. I was heart-stung and crestfallen. Despite the arrival of spring, of the urgent green impulse of April, of the balmier temperatures betokening Earth’s yearning tilt toward the sun; despite the fact that no snow had been foreseen by the dopplered devices of the meteorologists, a deep layer of snow carpeted my backyard, and in the light cast by the moon I saw the traversing tracks of dogs and cats and foxes and rabbits imprinted in the snow. And in my dream I had my usual fantasy about where those creatures were heading and why; about the purpose—for I always assumed their passing purposeful—that motivated their nocturnal journey, part of which led through my backyard; about the intention secreted in those tracks.
And in that magicked whisking that happens only in dreams, I was suddenly outside, following those tracks, and they led me to a small-creature-only tavern, open only from sundown to sun up, enclaved among a densely wooded area north of town. The music of Three Dog Night and Fleet Foxes and Steppenwolf and Cat and Fox and Stray Cats and Atomic Kitten and Cat Stevens filled the tavern, slipped out the open-just-a-crack windows, and echoed among the trees and against the star-gemmed night sky. I peered in a window and saw the patrons drinking Jackrabbit and Red Dawg beer, or, perhaps, a glass of Dog Point or Rock Rabbit or Zeller Schwartzkatz wine. They discussed Snoop Dog’s soon-to-be-released album, Doggumentary, the follow-up to his successful Doggiestyle, and the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, featuring Anne Hathaway as Catwoman—though most agreed Halle Berry was drop-dead, epically feline. Eventually, the talk turned to human beings, and it became scornful.
“Yet to be housebroken,” one dog said; “they soil the planet.”
“Mindlessly instinctual, subject to pack mentality,” said a cat.
“Impossible to train when they get older,” a fox observed.
“Always in the way,” a rabbit sighed, “always overhead.”
“And their Bible,” the dog exclaimed, “what’s with that `dominion’ thing in Genesis 1, and that `every creature that moves and lives shall be food for you’ crap in Genesis 9! Talk about your blood libel! What happened to the every seed-bearing plant and tree and fruit shall be food for you?”
“Yes,” said a scholarly-looking fox at the next table, looking up from his copy of All Creatures Great and Small; “Thoreau says ` No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.’ Humans! A rhetoric of discontinuity is all you can expect from them. All noise and forgetting. Armored in narcissism. Think prayer is a bullet point on an action agenda. Their metaphysics encompassed by the question , `Is there an app for that?’”
“Oh, they believe the craziest things,” the cat said; “space craft that will arrive to take them to paradise, or that guy with `the gaze,’ who can supposedly cure their ailments just by staring at them for a couple of minutes. I mean, jeez, back in the day, I was worshipped by the Egyptians.”
“Have you noticed how they use us as metaphors for things they find disagreeable or unpleasant?” the dog asked. “Take me, for instance: an unattractive person is a `dog,’ and there’s `a dog’s life’ and the `dog days’ of August. It hardly makes up for it when cool Randy Jackson says `Yo, dog!’”
“And what about `catty’ and `cat burglar,’” the cat said. “And that nine lives thing is a hoot. And you’d never find me on a hot tin roof.”
“Yes, and I’ve got to live with being considered sneaky and crafty,” said the fox. “Why, there’s even a play by this guy from Shakespeare’s time, Ben Johnson, called Volpone, or The Fox, and this Volpone is about the greediest, most devious guy you’d ever find.”
“Well, I’ve got `rabbit punch’ to live with,” said the rabbit. “My God, Stephen King uses the endearment `nuzzle bunny!’” “Plus, I’m like a label for being afraid and fearful. And they make fun of my, uh, propensity to procreate.”
“Sounds like sublimated envy to me,” said the scholarly fox at the next table.
“Thanks, Sigmund” the rabbit said.
“And then there’s Disney,” the dog said. “They humanize us, and our kids watch that stuff, and I worry they’ll become strangers to our species’ natures.”
“True,” said the cat; “though I got to admit I like the cat in Shrek. I mean, Antonio Banderas does the voice. He’s cool.”
The conversation waned, and their eyes shift to the screen of a TV mounted over the bar, where patrons can watch dogs trotting humans around an arena, cats playing Frisbee with lunging humans, an Iditerod race with human-drawn sleds, a lipsticked pitbull being interviewed by a fox with a thoroughly vulpine reputation for claiming FEMA has set up concentration camps, a bloviating pug with a propensity for alpha hypophamine uttering deranged nonsense about death panels and “Imam Obama” having no birth certificate, a wild-eyed screeching cat from Minnesota wants to sink her claws into un-American Americans, and a lachrymose, naugahyde-brown hounddog, sniffling and blowing into his hanky as he recounts his American Dream-themed rise from an obscure Ohio doghouse to leadership of the nation’s House.
And then, once again magicked whisked, I am back in my backyard, and I notice that among those animal tracks is stamped another set, immediately recognizable: the booted footprints of a human being During the wind-chilled night, someone, from somewhere, going someplace, for some reason it will never be given me to know, crossed my backyard. Those footprints. I struggle to understand their source or end or purpose. Those footprints. And I feel a string of familiarity, tugged, clenched, drawn tight. Those footprints. And for some reason I recall that the deepest circle in Dante’s Hell has no fire. It is all ice. It doesn’t burn; it is frozen. Those footprints. Straight-lined across my backyard. Left while I slumbered. Restless. Lonely. The urgent, ancient journeying, the insistent movement of creatures toward the end of etching the nebulous, half-locked away idea of themselves into a form they can identify as themselves. Those footprints. Tracings of a brief moment, a microhistory, undocumentable documents inscribed in the snow. Those footprints. Snow graffiti. Sheaves of evanescence. Citations that incite but don’t explain. Fragments, finally, unforged links of a pattern of meaning hidden to me, outside the range of my apprehension, perhaps, too, outside that of the one who made them.
Those footprints. And looking back, I saw my footprints leading to where I was standing. Looking forward, I saw unbroken snow. The night seemed to gather itself, to draw in its breath. It waited. And I awoke.
What I do know is this: last week I dreamed I awoke and began my slow somnolent shamble toward the Mr. Coffee machine downstairs. As is my habit, I paused to look out the stairway landing window onto my backyard, only to see that during the night it had snowed. I was heart-stung and crestfallen. Despite the arrival of spring, of the urgent green impulse of April, of the balmier temperatures betokening Earth’s yearning tilt toward the sun; despite the fact that no snow had been foreseen by the dopplered devices of the meteorologists, a deep layer of snow carpeted my backyard, and in the light cast by the moon I saw the traversing tracks of dogs and cats and foxes and rabbits imprinted in the snow. And in my dream I had my usual fantasy about where those creatures were heading and why; about the purpose—for I always assumed their passing purposeful—that motivated their nocturnal journey, part of which led through my backyard; about the intention secreted in those tracks.
And in that magicked whisking that happens only in dreams, I was suddenly outside, following those tracks, and they led me to a small-creature-only tavern, open only from sundown to sun up, enclaved among a densely wooded area north of town. The music of Three Dog Night and Fleet Foxes and Steppenwolf and Cat and Fox and Stray Cats and Atomic Kitten and Cat Stevens filled the tavern, slipped out the open-just-a-crack windows, and echoed among the trees and against the star-gemmed night sky. I peered in a window and saw the patrons drinking Jackrabbit and Red Dawg beer, or, perhaps, a glass of Dog Point or Rock Rabbit or Zeller Schwartzkatz wine. They discussed Snoop Dog’s soon-to-be-released album, Doggumentary, the follow-up to his successful Doggiestyle, and the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises, featuring Anne Hathaway as Catwoman—though most agreed Halle Berry was drop-dead, epically feline. Eventually, the talk turned to human beings, and it became scornful.
“Yet to be housebroken,” one dog said; “they soil the planet.”
“Mindlessly instinctual, subject to pack mentality,” said a cat.
“Impossible to train when they get older,” a fox observed.
“Always in the way,” a rabbit sighed, “always overhead.”
“And their Bible,” the dog exclaimed, “what’s with that `dominion’ thing in Genesis 1, and that `every creature that moves and lives shall be food for you’ crap in Genesis 9! Talk about your blood libel! What happened to the every seed-bearing plant and tree and fruit shall be food for you?”
“Yes,” said a scholarly-looking fox at the next table, looking up from his copy of All Creatures Great and Small; “Thoreau says ` No humane being, past the thoughtless age of boyhood, will wantonly murder any creature which holds its life by the same tenure that he does.’ Humans! A rhetoric of discontinuity is all you can expect from them. All noise and forgetting. Armored in narcissism. Think prayer is a bullet point on an action agenda. Their metaphysics encompassed by the question , `Is there an app for that?’”
“Oh, they believe the craziest things,” the cat said; “space craft that will arrive to take them to paradise, or that guy with `the gaze,’ who can supposedly cure their ailments just by staring at them for a couple of minutes. I mean, jeez, back in the day, I was worshipped by the Egyptians.”
“Have you noticed how they use us as metaphors for things they find disagreeable or unpleasant?” the dog asked. “Take me, for instance: an unattractive person is a `dog,’ and there’s `a dog’s life’ and the `dog days’ of August. It hardly makes up for it when cool Randy Jackson says `Yo, dog!’”
“And what about `catty’ and `cat burglar,’” the cat said. “And that nine lives thing is a hoot. And you’d never find me on a hot tin roof.”
“Yes, and I’ve got to live with being considered sneaky and crafty,” said the fox. “Why, there’s even a play by this guy from Shakespeare’s time, Ben Johnson, called Volpone, or The Fox, and this Volpone is about the greediest, most devious guy you’d ever find.”
“Well, I’ve got `rabbit punch’ to live with,” said the rabbit. “My God, Stephen King uses the endearment `nuzzle bunny!’” “Plus, I’m like a label for being afraid and fearful. And they make fun of my, uh, propensity to procreate.”
“Sounds like sublimated envy to me,” said the scholarly fox at the next table.
“Thanks, Sigmund” the rabbit said.
“And then there’s Disney,” the dog said. “They humanize us, and our kids watch that stuff, and I worry they’ll become strangers to our species’ natures.”
“True,” said the cat; “though I got to admit I like the cat in Shrek. I mean, Antonio Banderas does the voice. He’s cool.”
The conversation waned, and their eyes shift to the screen of a TV mounted over the bar, where patrons can watch dogs trotting humans around an arena, cats playing Frisbee with lunging humans, an Iditerod race with human-drawn sleds, a lipsticked pitbull being interviewed by a fox with a thoroughly vulpine reputation for claiming FEMA has set up concentration camps, a bloviating pug with a propensity for alpha hypophamine uttering deranged nonsense about death panels and “Imam Obama” having no birth certificate, a wild-eyed screeching cat from Minnesota wants to sink her claws into un-American Americans, and a lachrymose, naugahyde-brown hounddog, sniffling and blowing into his hanky as he recounts his American Dream-themed rise from an obscure Ohio doghouse to leadership of the nation’s House.
And then, once again magicked whisked, I am back in my backyard, and I notice that among those animal tracks is stamped another set, immediately recognizable: the booted footprints of a human being During the wind-chilled night, someone, from somewhere, going someplace, for some reason it will never be given me to know, crossed my backyard. Those footprints. I struggle to understand their source or end or purpose. Those footprints. And I feel a string of familiarity, tugged, clenched, drawn tight. Those footprints. And for some reason I recall that the deepest circle in Dante’s Hell has no fire. It is all ice. It doesn’t burn; it is frozen. Those footprints. Straight-lined across my backyard. Left while I slumbered. Restless. Lonely. The urgent, ancient journeying, the insistent movement of creatures toward the end of etching the nebulous, half-locked away idea of themselves into a form they can identify as themselves. Those footprints. Tracings of a brief moment, a microhistory, undocumentable documents inscribed in the snow. Those footprints. Snow graffiti. Sheaves of evanescence. Citations that incite but don’t explain. Fragments, finally, unforged links of a pattern of meaning hidden to me, outside the range of my apprehension, perhaps, too, outside that of the one who made them.
Those footprints. And looking back, I saw my footprints leading to where I was standing. Looking forward, I saw unbroken snow. The night seemed to gather itself, to draw in its breath. It waited. And I awoke.
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The Language of Grief
Grief agitates us in a spin cycle of sharply opposed desires. We yearn for the soothing presence of others, and we yearn for the detachment of islanded isolation. We resent that the world is disinclined to stop, and we pray that, like an engine low on lubricant, it does not seize. We covet meaning, and we know that meaning is annulled, an echo of a ricochet. But mostly we want words of comfort, words that will salve the raw wound of loss, words, like the balm of Gilead, unguent with curative power.
I have been thinking about the words we offer to those who have lost a loved one. Two years ago my mother was stolen from me before she was taken from me by Alzheimer’s Disease. She was the most hospitable person I have known, yet, in the months before she died, she remembered me only as the “nice man” who had brought her three chocolate chip cookies after a Fourth of July dinner at her assisted living facility. A bit less than a year later my father died from “failure to thrive,” or so the death certificate said, but what it meant, I suspect, was a systems failure entailed by old age. If so, it would have been, to my knowledge, the only thing my father failed at. Two funerals in two years, and at them many people spoke many words to my brother Dennis and me to pierce the ruthless grief we felt. I found that the discourse of comfort does not comfort. The language of condolence is too meager, too much a closed set of assertions that mean well but do not mean.
But how could it be otherwise? There is always a lurking moreness to the felt experience of grief that is resistant to words. How can we know the embodiedness of another’s grief? How can we compact ourselves inside the fractal experience of the grief that circumferences another? Our own affairs call to us, and, by necessity, we must turn to them. We cannot linger. Yet, we would be kind. We are unsettled by another’s loss, pained by another’s suffering. And so, we appeal beyond the moment, to the future, to the healing embrace of time. But time has not healed the wound of my parents’ loss. The grief abides, though it has attenuated, tapered to a slender shadow athwart my days. Still, the threads suturing that wound periodically tear open, and I must muster myself, resolve myself into an acceptance that I will be intermittently heart-stung. Our mourning is always, finally, a drama enacted before a house in which we are the only audience.
I am uncomforted by the thought that they are at rest in a better place. Perhaps they are. I don’t know. I find myself willing but, finally, right now anyway, unable to share that which is assumed, that which is gestured toward, by the phrase “a better place.” It tokens a sacred mystery, and I crave surety. That better place, for me, would be here, where I could again listen that loving banter and bicker of a couple married nearly six decades; where I could watch my mom make spaghetti sauce from scratch—“no damn Ragu in this house”—and tell me that when she married my dad she knew how to make only popcorn and fudge—“the fudge was great” my dad would say, “but she kept burning the popcorn;” where I could watch my dad in his furnace room workshop crafting cabinets and tables with the hand tools he had inherited from his father; where my dad told me how he worked his way through college taking horseracing bets over the phone for his Uncle John, a local bookie, how he was able to purchase a new car with cash, and how my mother made him quit when I was born. My mom and dad localized me, emplaced me, hailed me with their familiar address. Now that they are gone, I have found myself asking, am I still a son? Am I a motherless and fatherless child? How am I annotated? How much has their passing severed the ligatures that bound my identity?
I have the memories, I was told, and they will never die. But some do, and many fade, or become partial, or smudged by time’s passing, or fragmented by time’s shear. I feel a stab of guilt when the clarity of recall escapes me, when I have lost the continuity, the trace; when past time slips the fetter of remembrance and becomes a barely glimpsed shadow; when the beckoning, the summoning go truant; when the conjuring is malnourished by consciousness.
But some memories do remain, and will remain because I have made them narratives and pinned those narratives to two photographs I display on a bookshelf. Those narratives are my tea-saturated madeleines; they are my consolatory ceremony. In every telling they remaster for me the original experience. They are my counter-discourse to the pale language of grief. They encapsulate, for me, the essence of my parents, transform their thereness to hereness. There is my mother in her floppy gardening hat, holding a hand trowel, bent over the tomato plants she nurtured every year along the south wall of the garage, tomatoes that she coaxed to firm-skinned fruition, tomatoes that ripened richly red in the tendering warmth of her devoted attention and care, tomatoes that my diverticulosis-stricken father could not eat, but which I ate, like apples, like the love apples they were. And there is my father, dark and handsome and in the prime of his manhood, standing alongside the Little League team he coached, the team of which I was a member, an expansion team, a rag-tag collection of cast-offs from the other teams, a team my dad was told he should not expected too much of, a team he nonetheless led to the Little League World Series championship. My mother raised aspirations; my father defied expectations.
In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the 14-year-old protagonist the trauma of grief by making lists of the things that bring him joy: lists of his favorite foods, his favorite basketball players, his favorite books and people and musicians. His list-making is a small act of transcendence, a ritual of order and purpose to countermand the disordered and arbitrary. Those photos on my shelf, the narratives within which I’ve cocooned them—those are my lists, my ritual, my talisman, my arrested moments, my frieze of memories, my small act of suspending the finite, the contingent.
I have been thinking about the words we offer to those who have lost a loved one. Two years ago my mother was stolen from me before she was taken from me by Alzheimer’s Disease. She was the most hospitable person I have known, yet, in the months before she died, she remembered me only as the “nice man” who had brought her three chocolate chip cookies after a Fourth of July dinner at her assisted living facility. A bit less than a year later my father died from “failure to thrive,” or so the death certificate said, but what it meant, I suspect, was a systems failure entailed by old age. If so, it would have been, to my knowledge, the only thing my father failed at. Two funerals in two years, and at them many people spoke many words to my brother Dennis and me to pierce the ruthless grief we felt. I found that the discourse of comfort does not comfort. The language of condolence is too meager, too much a closed set of assertions that mean well but do not mean.
But how could it be otherwise? There is always a lurking moreness to the felt experience of grief that is resistant to words. How can we know the embodiedness of another’s grief? How can we compact ourselves inside the fractal experience of the grief that circumferences another? Our own affairs call to us, and, by necessity, we must turn to them. We cannot linger. Yet, we would be kind. We are unsettled by another’s loss, pained by another’s suffering. And so, we appeal beyond the moment, to the future, to the healing embrace of time. But time has not healed the wound of my parents’ loss. The grief abides, though it has attenuated, tapered to a slender shadow athwart my days. Still, the threads suturing that wound periodically tear open, and I must muster myself, resolve myself into an acceptance that I will be intermittently heart-stung. Our mourning is always, finally, a drama enacted before a house in which we are the only audience.
I am uncomforted by the thought that they are at rest in a better place. Perhaps they are. I don’t know. I find myself willing but, finally, right now anyway, unable to share that which is assumed, that which is gestured toward, by the phrase “a better place.” It tokens a sacred mystery, and I crave surety. That better place, for me, would be here, where I could again listen that loving banter and bicker of a couple married nearly six decades; where I could watch my mom make spaghetti sauce from scratch—“no damn Ragu in this house”—and tell me that when she married my dad she knew how to make only popcorn and fudge—“the fudge was great” my dad would say, “but she kept burning the popcorn;” where I could watch my dad in his furnace room workshop crafting cabinets and tables with the hand tools he had inherited from his father; where my dad told me how he worked his way through college taking horseracing bets over the phone for his Uncle John, a local bookie, how he was able to purchase a new car with cash, and how my mother made him quit when I was born. My mom and dad localized me, emplaced me, hailed me with their familiar address. Now that they are gone, I have found myself asking, am I still a son? Am I a motherless and fatherless child? How am I annotated? How much has their passing severed the ligatures that bound my identity?
I have the memories, I was told, and they will never die. But some do, and many fade, or become partial, or smudged by time’s passing, or fragmented by time’s shear. I feel a stab of guilt when the clarity of recall escapes me, when I have lost the continuity, the trace; when past time slips the fetter of remembrance and becomes a barely glimpsed shadow; when the beckoning, the summoning go truant; when the conjuring is malnourished by consciousness.
But some memories do remain, and will remain because I have made them narratives and pinned those narratives to two photographs I display on a bookshelf. Those narratives are my tea-saturated madeleines; they are my consolatory ceremony. In every telling they remaster for me the original experience. They are my counter-discourse to the pale language of grief. They encapsulate, for me, the essence of my parents, transform their thereness to hereness. There is my mother in her floppy gardening hat, holding a hand trowel, bent over the tomato plants she nurtured every year along the south wall of the garage, tomatoes that she coaxed to firm-skinned fruition, tomatoes that ripened richly red in the tendering warmth of her devoted attention and care, tomatoes that my diverticulosis-stricken father could not eat, but which I ate, like apples, like the love apples they were. And there is my father, dark and handsome and in the prime of his manhood, standing alongside the Little League team he coached, the team of which I was a member, an expansion team, a rag-tag collection of cast-offs from the other teams, a team my dad was told he should not expected too much of, a team he nonetheless led to the Little League World Series championship. My mother raised aspirations; my father defied expectations.
In Sherman Alexie’s novel The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, the 14-year-old protagonist the trauma of grief by making lists of the things that bring him joy: lists of his favorite foods, his favorite basketball players, his favorite books and people and musicians. His list-making is a small act of transcendence, a ritual of order and purpose to countermand the disordered and arbitrary. Those photos on my shelf, the narratives within which I’ve cocooned them—those are my lists, my ritual, my talisman, my arrested moments, my frieze of memories, my small act of suspending the finite, the contingent.
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