"Open outside!"

-for Morag

We'd agreed we'd do a mail exchange, a sort of "object writing;" we'd each send to the other an assemblage of objects designed to tell a story.   "Like messages in a bottle that are released into the ocean, [object writing reveals itself] to someone who is willing to unpack the sealed contents," read instructions we'd picked up from Anne West's book, Mapping the Intelligence of Artistic Work.

It had been raining for days the week I bundled my package off to Winnipeg, and so I didn't go outdoors, as I'd wished, to pick up leaves or twigs or stones or rosehips, or the fragment of a paper wasp's nest clinging to a bush that I'd wanted to send to my friend Morag. Instead, I cannibalized my office desk, the stickers and pictures and items I'd gathered there, along with a few printer's tools. I felt lost, divided, frustrated, separated from the air and earth and world, overwhelmed by duties and words. I imagined Morag would understand, if anyone would, how unhoused I felt, how astray.

As indeed she did.

A couple of weeks later, at my place at the table, when I arrived home, was a small bubble-wrapped package. OPEN OUTSIDE it said.  And so I did, although it was dark, and the stars too far off to see by.

After walking about a bit, I came back indoors with the dog to see what I could see, the scent of sea and wind and grilling sausages clinging to us.

Inside the package was another one, a clear plastic bag stuffed full of things. Crumbles of black earth fell out as I removed several items: a small cotton sack, a fragment of a poem, and a packet of items bundled together and tied with a knot.

I undid the knot and pulled out a pen, a seed pod, a bundle of roots, bits of earth, a small weaving that featured a few stitches at one end, a rough canvas swatch containing four needles, a strip of brown paper, a swatch of olive green fabric, a crumpled leaf, an unmarked label.  The writing was there, but what did it say? What would I say? I was stumped for a time.

The next morning I sat and read the fragment of poem--
(Oh people of the word, you always think words will save you.)

I was looking for a clue. What may I make of these disparate things? How do they speak? What did they mean?  I reread the words:

My heart is moved by all I cannot save

so much has been destroyed

I have cast my lot with those

who, age after age persevere,

with no extraordinary power

to reconstitute the world.

--Adrienne Rich

The message was clear, and yet for a long time I could not hear it. Could not understand it. Could not find my fate in these bits of earth or swatches of cloth, of needles and thread. Could not figure out what I was to do, ought to do, with this small collection of things.

Still, the packet haunted me and altered my imagination. Once it arrived I began to see differently, to mark form and shape and knot and handwork. Now and then, words failed me, but that wasn't a disaster. What I was after was a shape in the light, another kind of composition, a way of rendering aside from, instead of in words. 

Weeks passed.
I drew out the packet again. This time its message seemed transparent, lucid, manifest: 

Here am I. Take me, make something; make me; look at your hands.
What will you do now?

Hope angles this way--here, over there--outside!

Cast the seeds in the earth and then do other things.
In time you will see what comes up.
.
Why had I been so puzzled before?

I had had to take the time to see as if from the point of view of objects, not language. To be elsewhere, otherwise, to make some things, to go outside.

Thank you, Morag.

II. And again 

Here's something else those objects say (I hear them as they whisper in the dark):

We are newly rooted
no, we are uprooted
bound
unbound
lost.

The seeds have been 
severed from the root

Our earth is scattered:
these are the threads of my life.

I need someone else to stitch them
to write the words,
to persevere,
to hold fast to 
whatever is
outside. 

 

On Not Reading

A couple of weeks ago I tried an experiment--not to read for a week.  I didn't think of this on my own; I was under the influence of some ideas popularized by Julia Cameron in her famous (or infamous, depending upon how you look at it) program, The Artist's Way.

At first the idea struck me--as it will no doubt strike you--as ludicrous.  Give up reading?! For a week?  During the teaching semester?! IMPOSSIBLE. But then I remembered that over the summer, while on the boat and in the throes of repairs, though I felt terribly guilty about it, I'd sometimes gone days without reading.  I knew I could do it, so I decided to try.  The week before the week I was going to give up reading, I read relentlessly.  There were classes to prepare, things to find out, a sort of bottomless well to fill up before I ceased moving my eyes across print. 

And then, suddenly, there I was, in my week.  I resisted the urge to look at the paper in the morning, to log online and cruise the pages of the internet.  I avoided facebook, long letters, magazines, and peering over the corners of others' desks at the publications scattered there.  And with each gesture of "resistance" to the thrall of print, I became more settled and more relieved.  I sat and just listened to what others were saying around, their stories and jokes and worries and tantrums.  Sometimes I laughed, as if to myself.

Peculiarly enough, the week that I was to give up reading, I was also to go to Ohio, to celebrate my mother's 70th birthday.  That meant that I would spend long hours in flight and transit lounges (there's a euphemism--uncomfortable places where loudspeakers exhort you, repeatedly, to watch your bags, report suspicious behaviour, step carefully onto the moving sidewalk and other inanities) without print to distract me.  What was I going to do? 

I walked.  I looked at things.  I spoke to people.  I listened to more conversations.  And I did, I'll confess, grade my papers (all of them!)--something I'd already decided wasn't quite reading, but more like accounting (ah the flexibilities of redefinition!) Once in the bosom of my family, I resisted the thousands of books stacked and shelved and lying about the house. I sat quietly, sometimes, or took photographs, or talked with my parents and siblings and their spouses and children.  And I learned a few things--

Among them, that reading is often, for me and others in my birth family, a compulsive act of abstraction, a determined flight from the discomforts and disagreements so close at hand between us.  I also realized that if I had a bar against reading, then I wasn't compelled to read whatever was set before me...the airline magazine say, or other books lying about, the "extra" and never finished supplements to my classes, or one research project or another....I permitted myself, thanks to the fact that I wasn't reading, to imagine or observe other things while I was waiting, or sitting for a moment, or eating breakfast or dinner alone.  (Imagine simply eating! No words!)

I found I was happier, more at ease; I didn't feel guilty all of the time.  I wasn't forever accompanied by that awful incompleteness that reading seems to deliver, the threat or the promise of the forever more, the feeling of being out of time, out of step with myself, forever behind.

I'm going to try this experiment again sometime--as soon as I can get through this stack of books and articles and magazines on and beside my desk, the bed, beside the bath, on my other desk, the floor....

Days of Death II: Awake So as to Find Words

4:44 am

I cannot sleep.

The crescent moon has risen, and throws an hour-glass shaped path of light across the bay.  It's bright enough that a few of the islands are illuminated. 

Why am I wakeful?  I feel, somehow, a failure of words.  It's not just a failure in the face of death--though our neighbours' son's suicide, and the impossibility of saying anything meaningful to anyone or about anything in the face of such a yawning gap plays its part in this night.

Suicide is a break in the compact we make with each other to try to survive; it is this compact that keeps us alive.  We all see how the parents have plunged, themselves, into this brokenness.  We say, I don't know how they'll survive it.  And as we speak perhaps we mean that phrase metaphorically or psychically.  But it is also terribly literal, awful in its concreteness--the father speaks nonstop like someone drowning in waves of emotion beyond words--and he is.  The words keep him drawing breath; without them he simply gasps for air. 

I can't stop hearing his cry as he ran upstairs and paced the empty rooms: oh Sonny, Sonny, Sonny, why did you do it?  Anguish so large it spills over, laps around our necks.  I hold my head above it, but just barely.

Every heart knows something about such a cry.  --But not this, not this: the sudden shot to the head.  Who could know that? It's beyond knowing.

Just before he ran off and began sobbing, the father stepped over to me and asked, Is my eye bloodshot?  I feel like my eye is bloodshot.

No, I said.  His eyes were red-rimmed, but not bloodshot.

Well I think it's bloodshot, he said. It just seems bloodshot.

Oh my dear, I said, it's your heart that's bloodshot.  The words just tumbled out of me.  A truth.  Blood shot indeed.  And he ran off, gasping.

I feel badly about that, although I also know he probably barely heard what I said.  The wailing wasn't about what I'd said.  It was that his son was blood.  Shot.  Who knows? Maybe in the eye.  We've assumed it was the head.  Because for us, in part, it is.  Your mind just stops working when you think of such tragedy, such catastrophic collapse.

Words are dangerous.  They always say more (and less) than you think you mean.

Perhaps that's why I've been finding them such hard going of late.  I seem to be able to find a few right ones. A few wrong ones. And then pockets of silence, that's all.  Pictures hum more loudly, echo in my inner (bloodshot) eye.

I think of one of Paul Celan's last poems, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten") written not so long before he too committed suicide, unable any longer to count up the fragments:

All these sleep shapes, crystalline
that you assumed
in the language shadow,

to those
I lead my blood,

those image lines, them
I'm to harbour
in the slit-arteries
of my cognition--,

my grief, I can see,
is deserting you.

I know we cannot guard others' grief for them, or from them, no matter how wakeful we remain.  My wakefulness this morning will not have meant, I am on watch so another can sleep.  My watch relieves no one; it simply keeps me here, in the compact with other sorrowing souls. All it really can mean is that I, too, rise, dull before grey dawn--to continue, with the rest, as best we can.

Notes
 Paul Celan, "All those sleep shapes" ("Alle die Schlafgestalten"). First published posthumously in his final book, Zeitgehoeft (1976). In English in Poems of Paul Celan. Trans. Michael Hamburger. New York: Persea Books, 1988, pp. 336-7. 

In fact, however, I've quoted this fragment of Celan from American poet, Claudia Rankine's meditation on death, depression, loss, family, sleeplessness and hollowness of contemporary American life in Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. St. Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2004, p. 61.