There was a
time when all I wanted was silence. Or, rather, silence enveloped me. I don’t
know if I chose it or it chose me, but I didn’t want to have to speak. So much
had been said already, enough that, surrounded by poems, I could just point to
express what I needed someone to know.
It was, of
course, the culmination of a habit of silence and observation, a lifelong
training in self-effacement, self-denial, shutting up.
Into this
silence Louise Glück’s work fell. I don’t know how I discovered her, but once I
knew of Ararat’s existence, it was a
book I had to have. I sent for it, on my student budget, a beautiful hardcover
from the US. It was searing, at a time when I felt wounds open enough to need
that kind of cauterizing.
Encased in grief,
Glück’s relentlessly harsh voice expressed for me sorrows and fury that I
didn’t dare let myself feel. It was like throwing my voice, from an interior
silence, from an unknown even to myself. Glück describes my experience better
than I can:
I’ll
tell you
what
I wanted to be—
a
device that listened.
Not
inert: still.
A
piece of wood. A stone.
Guck’s voice
is so sharp, it brings to mind cutting, and, as critic Dwight Garner points out, the fact that
her father helped invent the X-acto knife is a “cosmically sublime detail:”
I
am prepared now to force
clarity
upon you.
After or
before—I’m not sure of the chronology anymore—I memorized the book, my eldest
brother died of a brain tumor. I had traveled back and forth from Toronto to
Ottawa to be with him in the eleven months he lived after his diagnosis. I
remember him as calm, almost indifferent to his fate, though I know that can’t
have been the case. Still, our conversations were flat, mundane. He ate
chocolate against doctor’s orders. We went for walks in the woods, holding his boys’
hands. He had staples in his head. We got used to that. You can get used to
anything. You quickly adapt, make bargains: ok this. Here and no further. This
is ok.
But time and
disease are relentless in their advance. As Glück tells us, “there has never
been a parent/kept alive by a child’s love.” Nor a brother by a sister’s, nor a
friend by a friend’s. It’s a truth you discover every time in the experience of
loss. The longing to go backwards, the nostalgia for what seems like the worst
time—it was impossible to explain to my circle of friends, untouched then by
death. Glück understood, and her cold, harsh voice kept me company in my
solitary grief:
She
wants to be back in the cemetery,
back
in the sick room, the hospital. She knows
it
isn’t possible. But it’s her only hope,
the
wish to move backward.
When I wrote
my way out of my grief, there was no trace of Glück’s influence. My experience
of family, however difficult in the years of my eldest brother’s sudden
absence, was of a coming together, of support and of beauty, as my other
brother made, and kept, a promise to be there for my dead brother’s children,
his infinite patience and hard work holding us together. Despite their theme,
there was something sweet in my poems, written over a period of two months of
cloistered grieving.
It wasn’t Glück
who helped me out of my period of silence definitively, it was a therapist
whose ministrations of Reiki and an admonition to write, to just write, just
write every day brought me out of a deeper grief, out of a stopping up of guilt
and self-loathing.
What has
stayed with me from Glück, and what guides my writing like a distant star, is a
line from “Lament.” Like most of her work, it can best be understood in the
context of the whole poem, so I’ll quote it here:
Suddenly,
after you die, those friends
who
never agreed about anything
agree
about your character.
They’re
like a houseful of singers rehearsing
the
same score:
you
were just, you were kind, you lived a fortunate life.
No
harmony. No counterpoint. Except
they’re
not performers;
real
tears are shed.
Luckily,
you’re dead; otherwise
you’d
be overcome with revulsion.
But
when that’s passed,
when
the guests begin filing out, wiping their eyes
because,
after a day like this,
shut
in with orthodoxy,
the
sun’s amazingly bright,
though
it’s late afternoon, September—
when
the exodus begins,
that’s
when you’d feel
pangs
of envy.
Your
friends the living embrace one another,
gossip
a little on the sidewalk
as
the sun sinks, and the evening breeze
ruffles
the women’s shawls—
this,
this, is the meaning of
“a
fortunate life”: it means
to
exist in the present.
A fortunate
life means to exist in the present. To write from the blessings of love and
family, of being alive, a body in this particular time, the small pleasures of taste,
hearing and touch, to write about sex and children, with an awareness of life’s
fragility and the relentless cruelty of time. It’s not an easy project: an
aspiration.
Dominique Russell is an activist, teacher and writer. Her
collection, Instructions for Dreamers, will be published by Swimmers Group this
year.
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