What is it Like for You There?

Sanctuary
Jean Valentine
from Door in the Mountain

         People pray to each other. The way I say "you" to someone else,
         respectfully, intimately, desperately. The way someone says
         "you" to me, hopefully, expectantly, intensely ...

              —Huub Oosterhuis


You-- who I don’t know-- I don’t know how to talk to you

—What is it like for you there?

Here ... well, wanting solitude; and talk; friendship—
The uses of solitude. To imagine; to hear.
Learning braille. To imagine other solitudes.
But they will not be mine;
to wait, in the quiet; not to scatter the voices—

What are you afraid of?

What will happen. All this leaving. And meetings, yes. But death.
What happens when you die?

“... not scatter the voices,”

Drown out. Not make a house, out of my own words. To be quiet in
another throat; other eyes; listen for what it is like there. What
word. What silence. Allowing. Uncertain: to drift, in the
restlessness ... Repose. To run like water—

What is it like there, right now?

Listen: the crowding of the street; the room. Everyone hunches in
against the crowding; holding their breath: against dread.

What do you dread?

What happens when you die?

What do you dread, in this room, now?

Not listening. Now. Not watching. Safe inside my own skin.
To die, not having listened. Not having asked ... To have scattered
life.

Yes I know: the thread you have to keep finding, over again, to
follow it back to life; I know. Impossible, sometimes.

What Seems Holy

Each H (I)
Samuel Amadon
from Like a Sea

I could not sound like anyone but me,
not like who's interested in more than
where we worry, where we were

worried how to call that righteous, when
my father says we say
righteous call; I could not sound

like anyone, but wanted to
myself sound convinced
it was easy like I got this, don't

stress what's easy like the expression
"how it was all we could do
not to go down to" the piers,

see there are piers, we
understand their general function, but
how to specifically have at

them, well that them's the heart of what
we have not yet learned, such as
why the city seems both (see there

someone who decided to see
the city) the means of its rivers and like
in my interior, where what seems

holy is not by the decoration, but
that I had not chosen them (lamps,
blinds, furniture) myself.

Blunts or Sharpens, Colors or Discolors

It would be a gross exaggeration to say that I'm sick right now. I'm about to head out to Duane Reade for contact lens stuff, and I'm meeting a friend for a drink later this afternoon. Still--the unfamiliar tightening around the uvula, the wide net of malaise pulling me back to the couch. Not enough to do me in of course--I wrote a full scene this morning and might go back in again--but even the smallest cold seems to bring out the imaginary gauges and meters. You're not quite your body anymore but standing a little apart from your body. You're thinking about your friend with whom you shared that piece of cake the other night, and you're hoping she's taking her vitamins and drinking her juice. You're opening your mouth wide, watching that throat in the mirror, wondering if it's going to set you down, or bear with you a little while longer until body and mind can agree that moving around is a lot more pleasant than lying down.

Is there a better writer on illness than Virginia Woolf? Here are the opening sentences from "On Being Ill," which are next to impossible to extract from. Let's just say I had to stop.

From On Being Ill
Virginia Woolf

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that is brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth our and come to the surface in the dentist's arm-chair and confuse his "Rinse the mouth--rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us--when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no; with a few exceptions--De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater; there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust--literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane--smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes.

The White Deer

I can't exactly say why I went to church on Saturday for the five o'clock mass, but that's just what I did. I don't know why that feels like I'm confessing to some dirty impulse--maybe it's just that I'm still drawn to the liturgy--the music, the patterns of it--in spite of my exasperation with the Church. I hadn't gone to church by myself since my teens, and as I walked into the sanctuary, I thought, okay, I'm home. When I'm with someone else--for Christmas Midnight Mass, or a funeral--I usually feel some tug of loss, a loss I can't quite explain. But not this time. Maybe it helps that the church is a progressive church--many gay and lesbian parishioners, people of all ages and nationalities. Think of it as a Unitarian Church--but with communion.

I'm usually not so big on homilies. I usually think of that as the time when the celebrant makes meaningless noises in order to fill up some space; time to look at the songbook, but this was different. He was talking about hospitality--what does it mean to welcome the people we love? I was thinking on that, my arms outstretched on the back of the pew, when a line of his jumped out at me: "The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom." Every molecule in me was turned to him. He said it once more, as if he wanted it to sink in. "The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before his freedom." What on earth could such a thing mean?

Later that night a friend told me about a white dog showing up at another friend's house. The other friend looked at the dog's tags--the address was three miles away, all the way on the other side of town. There were fireworks in town, extravagant fireworks, and it was likely the dog had run across woods, marshes, highways to get to the friend's house. The friend looked out the door and saw what she thought was a white deer. But it wasn't any white deer. It was a dog, a white fluffy dog, who walked right into her living room and dining room, muddy paws and all. The dog looked around a bit, submitted to the friend's petting, then slumped, turned on his side and fell asleep.

The friend called the numbers on the dog's tags. No one answered at the numbers. The friend left a message, and when she didn't hear back after a while, she started to get suspicious. Maybe the dog was hers, the mystery beast coming up the street in the dark, out of the briars, the woods.

The next day the phone rang. A terse, gruff boy on the line, and the story comes darker, clearer. The dog's human, his protector, his mother, drowned in the pool the night before. Did the dog see it happen? Did the dog jump in the water after her, try to rescue her? Was it a suicide, a heart attack, a slip off the side while she was heading back into the house with armful of dry clothes? The friend didn't feel she had the right to such questions, but she did ask the boy--the woman's daughter's boyfriend--if he'd be willing to let the dog stay with her for a while. "He seems so comfortable here," she said. And the boy agreed to that, if reluctantly. And who could blame the friend if she started to make plans, if she thought about driving to the store for dog food. Life with the white dog, the white deer--and wasn't she already relieved that she had a reason to keep herself from going so many places? A root in her midst. Finally, after so much running around.

I suppose I don't need to say that the family wanted the dog back the next day. I suppose I don't need to say that the friend was inconsolable, as the dog jumped in the back of the family's car, so grateful to be back with his familiars. Of course his mother wouldn't be there at the house when he jumped out of the car, but he didn't know that yet. And all the losses of the friend rose up before her like ghosts turning to flesh, needing to be dealt with.

Craig's Burning House

I picked the title The Burning House for my new novel knowing there were other works out there with that title. For instance, Ann Beattie's magnificent short story from 1982, which meant so much to me as a younger writer. I read it again and again and never tired of its pitch-perfect ending, the kind of ending only Ann Beattie knows how to write. It's an ending that both lifts the story and revises everything that came before it, in effect calling upon us to ask, on the deepest level, what do we know? Then last night, I came across another Burning House, in Craig Morgan Teicher's brilliant and elliptical Cradle Book. It's funny to think of how my Burning House parallels Craig's, even though one is a novel and one is a compressed piece. The emotional alignments are there, and it would be fun as a student to write and think about the two of them in tandem. Even more compelling to think of all the verbal burning houses flung out at different places and times, all speaking in the darkest tongues to one another, whether they're aware of it or not.

The Burning House
Craig Morgan Teicher
from Cradle Book

He was outside chopping wood when the blaze took hold of the house. He was standing some hundred feet away--a safe distance, far enough to escape the flames--when the fire rose from within and began consuming the wooden walls and then the roof. He had his back to the house, busy with his work, and so he did not see or hear the first flames growing. No, by the time he turned around, it was already too late to save the house.

Of course, his wife was still inside. She had just closed her eyes for a late morning nap--she was tired and a little sick--and a fire had been set in the fireplace to warm her. When the fire seized on some straw nearby, then hungrily spread from rug to curtain to chair to wall, she was thick with sleep.

You may be wondering what he did next. Did he run into the burning house to save his wife, whom he loved as much as most husbands love most wives? Was he already too late? Perhaps, if he ran back inside, he would find his wife dead and he would die in that fire too. Did he run away? Did he drop his knees and wail onto heaven? Is it true, as is said, that a bird in the hand is better than two in the bush? Or, is it even possible that, beneath the inward cries of his dreams and fears, he was happy to be rid of his wife, finally free to choose a new life, a new name, a new fate?

These are all very pressing questions, and there are many more that could be asked. Perhaps, someday, we will find answers amongst the rubble.

But you may be wondering, too, whether now, while the fire rages, we should waste our time with questions. But if we fail to ask now, when will we? Isn't one of our houses always aflame?

And Dredged Up Shining Things

It's odd: one can look at a movie and not exactly get it, but look at it again, not a week later, and see that it's already a part of the inner life, a sustained emotional state in which order gives way to chaos. I'd say that's true of Bunuel's El Angel Exterminador, which makes much more sense to me the second time around. It's as if the filmmaker has plunged both hands into a sea so cold it could scald, and dredged up shining things, still almost unbearable to look at--the blindfolded lamb nuzzling the human in his charge--but true to the most ruthless parts of consciousness.

Walter, Homing Pigeon

A few days back I was in Asbury Park, at an outdoor cafe on the boardwalk with my father, brother, sister-in-law, and niece. I'd come down to meet them for the afternoon, and while we were waiting for the check to appear, a pigeon stepped up to the table. He was an especially handsome pigeon, which made me wonder why we treat pigeons like crap. My eleven-year-old niece stood, stomped at the pigeon, chasing him away, which made me say, "Jordan, don't do that." I was startled that those words had come out of my mouth. I hadn't remembered when I'd last said, "No! or "Stop it!" or "Enough!" to anyone, much less my sweet niece, in years, and for a moment time swelled as if I'd slipped into a slow motion movie of myself. I watched myself and saw myself shrink to a focused bead of light.

But here's the best thing: once I said it, Jordan looked. I looked. We talked about the pigeon. We talked about the iridescent green of his throat, the violet shield around that patch, the hot pink feet, bright as bubble gum. We took note of the bands around his two legs (legs? do pigeons even have legs?) and then the waitress came out to say, "That's Walter. He's a homing pigeon. He's made his home here. Isn't he beautiful?" And all eyes turned to Walter, who stepped not one inch from my foot, unafraid. And I don't think I'm lying when I say for just that minute Walter turned to light.

Below:
Jordan kayaking at Anchorage Point

Two by Two, Two by Two

from the story "The Erlking"
Sarah Shun-lien Bynum

It is just as Kate hoped. The worn path, the bells tinkling on the gate. The huge fir trees dropping their needles one by one. A sweet mushroomy smell, gnomes stationed in the underbrush, the sound of a mandolin far up on the hill. “We’re here, we’re here,” she says to her child, who isn’t walking fast enough and needs to be pulled along by the hand. Through the gate they go, up the dappled path, beneath the firs, across the school parking lot and past the kettle-corn stand, into the heart of the Elves’ Faire.

Her child is named Ondine but answers only to Ruthie. Ruthie’s hand rests damply in hers, and together they watch two scrappy fairies race by, the swifter one waving a long string of raffle tickets. “Don’t you want to wear your wings?” Kate asked that morning, but Ruthie wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes they are in cahoots, sometimes not. Now they circle the great shady lawn, studying the activities. There is candlemaking, beekeeping, the weaving of God’s eyes. A sign in purple calligraphy says that King Arthur will be appearing at noon. There’s a tea garden, a bluegrass band, a man with a thin sandy beard and a hundred acorns pinned with bright ribbons to the folds of his tunic, boys thumping one another with jousting sticks. The ground is scattered with pine needles and hay. The lemonade cups are compostable. Everything is exactly as it should be, every small elvish detail attended to, but, as Kate’s heart fills with the pleasure of it all, she is made uneasy by the realization that she could have but did not secure this for her child, and therein lies a misjudgment, a possibly grave mistake.

They had not even applied to a Waldorf school! Kate’s associations at the time were vague but nervous-making: devil sticks, recorder playing, occasional illiteracy. She thought she remembered hearing about a boy who, at nine, could map the entire Mongol Empire but was still sucking his fingers. That couldn’t be good. Everybody has to go into a 7-Eleven at some point in life, operate in the ordinary universe. So she didn’t even sign up for a tour. But no one ever told her about the whole fairy component. And now look at what Ruthie is missing. Magic. Nature. Flower wreaths, floating playsilks, an unpolluted, media-free experience of the world. The chance to spend her days binding books and acting out stories with wonderful wooden animals made in Germany.

Ruthie wants to take one home with her, a baby giraffe. Mysteriously, they have ended up in the sole spot at the Elves’ Faire where commerce occurs and credit cards are accepted. Ruthie is not even looking at the baby giraffe; with some nonchalance, she keeps it tucked under her arm as she touches all the other animals on the table.

“A macaw!” she cries softly to herself, reaching.

Kate finds a second baby giraffe, caught between a buffalo and a penguin. Although the creatures represent a wide range of the animal kingdom, they all appear to belong to the same dear, blunt-nosed family. The little giraffe is light in her hand, but when she turns it over to read the tiny price tag stuck to the bottom of its feet she puts it down immediately. Seventeen dollars! Enough to feed an entire fairy family for a month. Noah’s Ark, looming in the middle of the table, now looks somewhat sinister. Two by two, two by two. It adds up.

How do the Waldorf parents manage? How do any parents manage? Kate hands over her Visa.

She says to Ruthie, “This is a very special thing. Your one special thing from the Elves’ Faire, O.K.?”

“O.K.,” Ruthie says, looking for the first time at the animal that is now hers. She knows that her mother likes giraffes; at the zoo, she stands for five or ten minutes at the edge of the giraffe area, talking about their beautiful large eyes and their long lovely eyelashes. She picked the baby giraffe for her mother because it’s her favorite. Also because she knew that her mother would say yes, and she does not always say yes—for instance, when asked about My Little Pony. So Ruthie was being clever but also being kind. She was thinking of her mother while also thinking of herself. Besides, there are no My Little Ponies to be found at this fair—she’s looked. But a baby giraffe will need a mother to go with it. There is a bigger giraffe on the table, and maybe in five minutes Ruthie will ask if she can put it on her birthday list.

“Mommy,” Ruthie says, “is my birthday before Christmas or after?”

“Well, it depends what you mean by before,” Kate says, unhelpfully.

Holding hands, they leave the elves’ marketplace and climb up the sloping lawn to the heavy old house at the top of the hill, with its low-pitched roof and stout columns and green-painted eaves. Kate guesses that this whole place was once the fresh-air retreat of a tubercular rich person, but now it’s a center of child-initiated learning.

Incomprehensible Sea

A time of staggering change, which insists on a touching back to one's past. I didn't grow up in Cape May and Wildwood but they were twenty-five miles down the road from the place I loved best. And here they are again, so many years later, the salt marshes, the phragmites, the trumpet vines, the Japanese black pines--not to mention the boardwalks (candied and carmelized) within view of that incomprehensible sea.

The Dream of Heat

The sun burned the soles of my feet through my sneakers. Words pump like hot taffy out the spout of a machine. It is 95 degrees in the living room. As to how the heat affects the reading mind? I could say: I want to read about glaciers, frostbite, boreal plains. Instead, here's something written with the crisp chill of precision. Here, the dream of heat isn't chaos or inertia, but beauty, movement, order, song.

from Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather

Consciously he slept late the next morning--did not awaken until six o’ clock, when he heard the Angelus ringing. He recovered consciousness slowly, unwilling to let go of a pleasing delusion that he was in Rome. Still half believing he was lodged near St. John Lateran, he yet heard every stroke of the Ave Maria bell, marveling to hear it rung correctly (nine quick strokes in all, divided into threes, with an interval in between); and from a bell with beautiful tone. Full, clear, with something bland and suave, each note floated through the air like a globe of silver. Before the nine strokes were done Rome faded, and behind it he sensed something Eastern, with palm trees,--Jerusalem perhaps, though he had never been there. Keeping his eyes closed, he cherished for a moment this sudden, pervasive sense of the East. Once before he’d been carried out of the body thus to a place far away. It had happened on a street in New Orleans. He had turned a corner and come upon an old woman with a basket of yellow flowers; sprays of yellow sending out a honey sweet perfume. Mimosa—but before he could think of the name he was overcome by a feeling of place, was dropped, cassock and all, into a garden in the south of France where he had been sent one winter in his childhood to recover from an illness. And now this silvery bell note had carried him farther and faster than sound could travel.

Les Diaboliques

Yesterday would have been my mother's birthday--or it was the second birthday after her death. Two different conceptions of time are caught in those sentences, and I'm not sure which one is more accurate to how I experience her now. Maybe I could say it's both at once. I think that that's telling the truth.

But the bewildering thing. A movie comes in from Netflix yesterday, a movie I had no hand in picking. I could say that Mark picked it, which is true on the literal level, but simpler than the story I'm about to tell. Mark says, Les Diaboliques came. And the title alone loosens something submerged from decades back. My parents' beloved movie, a movie they must have seen when they were first together, a movie they talked about, and even mimicked scenes from, well into my childhood years. The bathtub scene: the body rising from water. Then--never referred to again. Les Diaboliques.

Maybe your mother's saying hello, Mark said. Neither playful nor portentous. Just a shrug in his tone.

So how could I watch the movie without looking for a special sign in it? Or, at the very least, some sense of what might have thrilled my young parents back in 1955, some sense of what they might have been? A brute of a man, a boy forced to stand in the corner, two lovers: the brute's wife and his mistress, a confession, a hunger for punishment. A ghost. Sass, and more than a streak of dark humor. Simone Signoret, in black glasses, cigarette in mouth, looking more dominatrix than schoolteacher...

Maybe all that, and things I can't even see. Or simply the sight of the body, and the wonder of the gone body. Where did it go? Where did it go?