books

Thoughts on a sunset, and Mary Oliver

My mother and I went to hear Mary Oliver read last night.  She read in the chapel at Wellesley College, which was full to capacity – hundreds of people, standing room only.  Katrina had described Mary Oliver as “elfin” to me and she is.  Tiny and sparkling at the same time, wearing plain black, she commanded the entire room from her spot at the front of the room.  The crowd was spellbound, mostly silent, but occasionally breaking into murmurs of emotion, particularly at familiar poems like Wild Geese.

The silence in the chapel had a tangible quality to it, like reverence, or grace.  Through the window behind me I could see the sunset, and I kept looking back, watching the sky grow more and more glowingly pink, sliced as it was into small pieces by the dark-wood-detailed window panes.  It was the kind of sky that I recently told a friend makes me believe in God, where the clouds are lit from beyond the horizon, by beams from a world beyond the curve of the one we live in.

Watching the incandescent world, the fall leaves blotted against the sky, alive with beauty, and hearing Mary Oliver read her words about ways that holiness inhabits the natural world, I felt something substantial settle deep inside me and something billow to life at the same time.  Somebody in the audience asked Oliver what the role of beauty in the world is, and she replied, simply, “Beauty gives you an ache to be worthy of it.”  And that was precisely what I was experiencing, right then, with the sunset and the words and the ineffable quality of the silence in that chapel.

Someone else asked her about her childhood, and whether she writes much about it.  She laughed briefly, and then said she had not written much about it but planned to.  She said, then, that she had not wanted to write about her childhood until she “took true title of her life.” This phrase has been with me for hours: isn’t that what I’m engaged in, here, in some ways?  Taking true title of my life, assuming ownership of my experience, growing comfortable asserting my own mastery over my own story?

One other question struck me: asked what physical conditions she writes best in, Oliver said that she writes often outside, always with paper and pen.  She said you can’t write poetry on the computer, because when you change a word you need to erase it and write over it.  This brought to mind the notion in painting of pentimento, and I wondered how it might operate in poetry: all the words that were thought of before exist, erased but still faintly visible, on the page beneath the final word.  What texture this provides to the final verse.  Is this true of our lives, too?  Do we still have, running through us, all the versions of us that preceded who we are right at this moment?  Aren’t we all made up, after all, of layer upon layer of personality, experience, loves, losses, the accumulated detritus of our years on earth?

Oliver read an assortment of poems, some old favorites and many from her new book, Swan.  I loved one new of her poems the best.  The room rippled with emotion, faint gasps, and wide-eyed wonder as she read the final line.  I share the poem in its entirety here.

Whispered Poem

I have been risky in my endeavors,
I have been steadfast in my loves;

Oh Lord, consider these when you judge me.

Half a Life

I was privileged to attend a reading/discussion last night with Dani Shapiro and Darin Strauss, talking about the art of memoir.  I had just finished Darin’s fantastic memoir, Half A Life, and we all know I’d walk to the ends of the earth for Dani.  The event was fabulous – my super-incredible writer friend who came with me even said it was probably the best writer’s event like this she’d ever been to.

Dani reviewed Darin’s book for the New York Times, which she’d mentioned to me, so I was predisposed to like it.  But.  Wow. The book took my breath away.   It is a spare, short, searing meditation on how what it means to live a life.  Darin, at the age of 18, was involved in a car accident that resulted in the death of a girl he went to school with.  Cleared of all guilt by the court systems, he spent the next 18 years trying to bury the accident, to get “over it.”  Finally, after writing three successful novels, he said last night, he realized this experience was getting in the way of his fiction.  He decided to write about it, initially just for himself, and it turned into this book.

Go, now, and buy this book.  You will read it in a day, turning the pages hypnotically, as I did.  I think the brilliance of Darin’s book is his ability to generalize from a very specific and tragic occurence to a much more universal human question: how do we live with what happens to us, and with what we do?  How do we incorporate the small and big moments, those anticipated and not, into the fabric of who we are?

It was a larger and more complete moment than simply the words that were like whitecaps on the surface of it.  All moments are like that.  But the rare thing is to have a clear sense of this depth, and to know another person is sensing it, too.

Darin writes gorgeously about the moments that define our lives, both in the living of them and in the ways that they reverberate, both forward and back.  Dani referred, last night, to samskaras, which is one of the most powerful motifs of her book for me, and one that I had in mind a lot while reading Half a Life. Samskaras are the moments, people, places, and losses of our lives that harden into little knots around which the river of our consciousness learns to flow … these little hardened rocks alter forever the path of our lives, perhaps imperceptibly, perhaps not.  Over time, as we know, a slight arc in a stream of water cuts into the bedrock beneath it, and we are changed irrevocably.

Half a Life explores this question: how do the things that happen to us shape our lives?  What arcs and shapes does chance, and luck, and happenstance carve into who we are?  We can’t know these things as we live them, and their ramifications play out over years, unfolding like a slow motion Jacob’s Ladder.  But the path that they trace is, in retrospect, understandable.  And there is power in this kind of mapping.

Darin speaks in his book about something he touched on last night as well: the performative aspects of grief.  I think this can also be extrapolated into the performative aspects of reality and life itself.  He says “I kept waiting to become more who I thought I should be,” with specific reference to the grieving boy in this story, but can’t we extend that sentiment to all of us?  I often have the sense that I am watching myself go through my own life, inhabiting a series of masks that are predefined and predetermined; the act of this is soul-draining, and Darin excavates what this feels like beautifully.

Ultimately, Half a Life isn’t about getting over tragedy, about closure, or about moving on.  It’s about acceptance, forgiveness, and humanity.  It’s about owning our own childhoods, our own trajectories, replete as they are with love, hurt, mistakes, and grace.  It is about learning to walk our own paths, and incorporating what happens to us as well as what we do to others along the way.  This book is about nothing less than what it means to live in this world, and I can’t articulate how it moved me.

It is fitting that some of Darin’s last lines refer to T.S. Eliot, the poet whose words so many readers have sent to me.  This is what Half a Life is about.  And I can’t recommend it highly enough.  Go, go, go, go now.  Read it.

Things don’t go away.  They become you.  There is no end, as T.S. Eliot says, but addition: the trailing consequence of further days and hours.  No freedom from the past, or from the future.


A Strong West Wind

This summer I read Gail Caldwell’s memoir about her friendship with Caroline Knapp, Let’s Take the Long Way Home.  I loved it – I found myself weeping and smiling, thinking of those few people I love best, and sharing it with my mother who knows what it’s like to lose someone so dear they take with them a part of you.  In fact, Gail’s story made me consider returning to my abandoned novel (which I call my project, much like Whit’s recent surgery was a procedure – it’s all about the nomenclature) because it, too, is about the loss of a best friend.

And then, impressed by Gail’s writing, I turned to her first memoir, A Strong West Wind.  Oh, my.  This one, like the wind of its title, blew me away.  Gail may be, in my opinion, the most gifted architect of the English language I have ever read.  Literally.  She’s an artist whose mind is her brush, words her medium.  But Gail’s sentences are not the faint strokes of Impressionism.  They are more like the bold movements of the Abstract Expressionists: Gail writes in a muscular style that manages to be unsentimental and deeply moving at the same time.  Somehow, even in her assertive, powerful voice, Gail evokes the fragility that exists at the heart of life.

I have never read someone with such a complete command of the canon.  The Canon.   Gail’s memoir is rich – replete – with offhand yet confident literary references.  I was dazzled by the way she can refer to Faulkner in one paragraph and Herman Wouk in the next, summon both Dagny Taggart and Lily Briscoe at will, demonstrating in all cases the casualness that can come only from deep familiarity.

Gail’s book is a hymn to her father and the Texan plains on which they both lived.  It is the telling of her reckoning with the ways that where she came from has rippled throughout her life.  This is a reckoning we all undertake, I believe, in our own ways, and there is much to learn from hearing those of others.  Particularly those as gorgeously told as Gail’s.

An introverted child, Gail sought refuge from the tornados that whipped across the plains -“all that God and nothingness” – in the pages of books, finding herself attracted to “writers who offered mysteries instead of doctrine,” instinctively drawn to the deep possibility of the written word.  Gail becomes her father’s sidekick, and through their adventures and his example he teaches her the fearlessness that will eventually take her away from him.  From his stories (Gail’s father fought in WWII) she becomes fascinated with war.  War as metaphor informs much of A Strong West Wind, and both WWII and Vietnam wind unavoidably through the story, coiled and dangerous, scarily unknown and unavoidably close at the same time.

For years Gail is leaving where she came from.  In particular, her description of the women’s movement in the 70s impressed me.  I could imagine my own mother, herself a participant in those early, heady days, standing beside Gail in the marches and sit-ins she describes.  Though I sense this is not true for many of my peers, I still feel very keenly the passion of the generation that came before me, acutely aware of the changes their efforts wrought in the landscape I grew up facing.  Reading Gail’s first-hand account of the experience was moving.  Her summary made gasp:

For all its external conflagrations, the women’s movement gave us something that couldn’t be legislated, condemned, or even taken away: some core balancing point, a plie that sheltered and enhanced the spirit.  And this, more than anything else, was the movement’s seminal legacy and greatest threat.  Feminism redirected the narrative.  It was when the story, for a million protagonists, finally stopped being about somebody else.

The fearlessness that Gail learned from her father finally made real her desire to leave Texas behind.  Gail follows a clear and firm sense of where she wants to go, though we know that clarity is hard-won from the spiritual wandering that marked her early adulthood.  As she reflects, Gail recognizes and names the sadness that lingered around even a journey so hotly desired:

I had yet to understand that striking out for the territory is inherently a sad enterprise, though the fact is often neglected in the adventure tales we tell ourselves.  It is always hard to leave: a home, a drama, a way of life, a life.  So I sat there warm and safe that night, held by the sea and a good man and my own good fortune, victim and witness to all the transitory sweetness, like Gatsby’s dreams, that stood before and behind me.

Woven throughout Gail’s story is a respect for where she came from.  She describes a bald get-the-heck-out-of-dodge impulse, but simultaneously evinces an affection – sometimes even a reverence – for her familial roots.  This is a delicate balance, describing a desire to leave so powerful it propels her across the country while still appreciating the place she left, and she manages it with grace.  I suppose hindsight helps here.

A Strong West Wind is also a meditation on the power of the story:

But then stories have always been the hymns of history: From the grandest Homeric epic to a guy on a porch with his shotgun, they organize our dreads alongside our desires.

The strongest hidden narratives act as divining rods, ordering your life path without even bothering to show you the map.

As she looks back on where she came from, the place she left, Gail tells stories from her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.  These stories all inform her present life, just as her current understanding of the world refracts how she sees those long-ago days.  As such, Gail brings to life the dialog between past and present and the ways in which this interchange affects both.  She reflects with affection and compassion on her parents, both on their relationship and on the individual impact they each had on her.  She also describes other relatives – notably her uncle Roy and her aunt Connie – whose lives echo through her own.

Gail’s memoir closes in her father’s hospital room at a VA hospital, where his roommate, a Vietnam veteran, is the embodiment of grace.  This man – really, a stranger – treats Gail’s father gently and warmly, and watching the two men together she feels the two wars that circumscribed her life and ran through it pulsing still, but more gently now.

Close to the end of the book Gail writes two paragraphs that seem alive with her wishes for her story.  A Strong West Wind evokes the meaning of the empty space and elucidates many of the mysteries she lists.  This section also seems, to me, to call to Caroline, whose loss Gail has already suffered but who does not appear in this book (other than in the acknowledgments).  Having read Let’s Take the Long Way Home we understand the ways in which Caroline’s absence howls through Gail’s entire life.

Loneliness, the mystery, the empty space, loss, the mundane and divine truth of our tread on the earth: all breathe in the words of this stunning book.  Enough of my lumbering words; I’ll leave you with Gail’s poetry.

What we have of anyone is so slight: the timbre of a voice, the leftover stories, the smell of a hunting vest.  And yet so much of life is about the empty spaces; I finally learned that much from all that land.  The vacuum will always define its opposite: prayer in the void, or hope encased by despair, or the languor of a silent, precious day.
Here, for instance, I have left out the river at dusk in autumn, the hard taste of loneliness about which you can do nothing, the view from the far rise.  I have left out the elegaic presence and great consolations of the dead, who are always with us and who become the mirroring pool into which we gaze.  And I have left out the way loss changes one’s tread upon the earth, as though gravity itself were affected.  But these are the mysteries for which there is no story; they are the air that circles the breaths we take, and they shape our lives as surely as winter, war, God, or luck.

The volume of the world turned up a notch

I read Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home yesterday in one long, breathless gulp. The book is an elegant evocation of a true friendship between women, a heartbroken eulogy, and an unflinching exploration of what life looks like on the other side of an unimaginable loss. Written in Caldwell’s absolutely glorious prose, Let’s Take the Long Way Home is also a set piece of and love letter to my home town, Cambridge.

There’s much to talk about in Caldwell’s book, but what I am thinking about tonight is the way she describes the initial bond between Caroline Knapp and herself. She describes her early observation that in Caroline’s voice there was “restraint that suggested wells of darkness behind all that mannered poise,” an image I adore. The women shared a host of similiarities, in both their temperaments and in their narratives, that bond them quickly and deeply.

On page 20 my breath caught in my throat:

For both of us, in different ways, the volume of the world had been turned up a notch. Whether this sensitivity functioned as a failing or an asset, I think we recognized it in each other from the start … She was so quiet, so careful, and yet so fully present, and I found it a weightless liberation to be with someone whose intensity seemed to match and sometimes surpass my own.

Oh, the shelter and immense relief I feel when I find someone like that. There aren’t many, but they are treasured. I’ve spent much of my life feeling that I ought to moderate my intensity, that my sensitivity is just plain annoying at best and an outright liability at worst. Later in the book Caldwell quotes an old boyfriend of hers who said, as their relationship neared its end, “You know, sometimes the light of you is just a little too bright.” I identify with this: not in the “good” sense of light, but because it reminds me of what my father has always said about me, that being with me is like drinking from a fire hose. It’s a question of being unable to moderate myself, my intensity. Sometimes I wonder if my shyness and quiet affect when I meet new people is a way of compensating for this, a way of hiding the firehose for as long as I can. After all, who would want to be drowned in the onslaught of my neurosis, observation, personality?

Caldwell describes another facet of Caroline that resonated very deeply with me.

When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response was to approach rather than to flee.

This makes blinding sense to me but it’s another quality that I’ve been both misunderstood and judged for. A friend once referred to an argument as a burning building and I said without hesitation that I would run into it. This quality can come across as confrontational, for sure, and it has led to some raised voices and heated conversations where perhaps none were merited. But it is a rare relationship in my life that suffers from an undercurrent of unresolved tension. As Caldwell goes on to say, “silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on-engagement.”

There is so much I want to say about this beautiful book. Tonight, though, at the close of a birthday that was somewhat sadder and more complicated than I would have chosen, its most reassuring message is its assertion that there were at least two women out there in the world who might not have shamed me for being intense, sensitive, and determined to resolve conflict.

That’s really what it is, now that I write it: shame. Shame that I messily emotional, unable to keep my sensitive skin shielded, to remember that it’s not all about me. Every intellectual explanation that makes crystalline sense in my mind crumbles in the face of the powerful emotional response of my heart. I think the task now is to identify the ways in which these weaknesses – that I even code them, instinctively, as such, speaks volumes – could be contributors to strengths. I need to find ways to numb slightly the intensity, sand down the edges of the sensitivity, though I wonder how to do this without simply blunting who I am.

There’s no neat conclusion here, only a devout and heartfelt thanks to Gail Caldwell for making me feel, in a very real way, less alone and less crazy. I am comforted knowing that women like she and Caroline are and were in the world. I admire their friendship, made up of such profound connection to and dedicated, patient witness of each other. Their lives ran together in a deep and sturdy way, and the loss that Caldwell experiences at Caroline’s death is the topic for another whole post. Most of all, though, I’m grateful to Caldwell for allowing me to believe that there are out there people for whom I am not too much: too messy, too intense, too brittle, too fragile, too sensitive, too, too, too much.

I can’t look at everything hard enough

Emily (softly, more in wonder than in grief):

I can’t bear it. They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old? Mama, I’m here. I’m grown up. I love you all, everything. – I can’t look at everything hard enough.

….

Emily (in a loud voice to the Stage Manager):

I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t even have time to look at one another.

She breaks down sobbing.

I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back – up the hill – to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover’s Corners … Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking … and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths … and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.

She looks toward the stage manager and asks abruptly, through her tears:

Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? – every, every minute?

Stage manager:

No.

– from Our Town, Thornton Wilder

Thank you to Martha for urging me to re-read this extraordinary play … I can’t wait to talk about it. And to Katrina, for your glorious essay whose timing cannot be a coincidence.