My current chiropractor, a literate, charming lesbian who wears tortoiseshell horn-rims and demonstrates a real sophistication about the delicate mysteries of alignment, does her best, then sighs and suggests a massage and rest. The swollen and throbbing muscles of my sacro-lumbar region (I like it being called a region, some part of me as distant and full of mystery as the precincts of the moon) are, clearly, intractable; they are not ready to be adjusted into anything like their proper positions.
And I am miserable. The condition’s chronic, but it’s been in abeyance—perhaps because I’ve had to be strong, able to pick Wally up, in the days when he could still be lifted to wheelchair or commode. Later, when he was immobile, it just wasn’t admissible for me to get sick; on some level I think I ordered my spine to remain in alignment. The vertebrae obeyed so well, in fact, that I seem to have locked them up altogether, in a rigid stance, prepared for disaster, that’s led to a disaster of another sort. Twinges first, which I stupidly ignored and kept on acting as if I had a strength or reserve of energy I didn’t possess. But the spine won’t be ignored. The twinges continued, a little worse, sudden neuro-flares going off at odd moments. Then, in the car, complete mutiny; reaching my left arm out the window to take cash out of the chrome drawer of the drive-up bank machine, I feel something near my lower vertebrae tear.
It all simply goes out of my hands, things going wrong in ways that I feel I have no capacity to do anything about. There’s no strength in my lower back at all, and I feel incapable of supporting myself, as if the muscles just won’t hold things where they belong. I slip, dangerously, into a skewed posture, an Expressionist angularity with potentially devastating consequences. To say the back “goes out” is an odd but apt expression, since one feels that its usually unnoticed capabilities have simply gone someplace, leaving the body helpless, prone, making it painful to do things such as, say, lift a telephone receiver, or bend over the sink to brush one’s teeth. I begin to imagine never being strong or upright again, becoming dependent, compromised. There’s nothing for it but bed, ice pack, ibuprofen, reading: nine days thereof, punctuated by hobbling walks to the chiropractor’s office and a trip to the masseur. Everything helps a little; nothing helps enough. I’m grateful to my friends for bringing me dinner, walking the dogs, and quickly begin to resent them for being ambulatory, just as I can tell they don’t really want to hear one more request from me for, say, the Sunday Times.
The nine days wear on. I read and read; I spend days living in Elizabeth Bishop’s spirited and observant letters even though the book is too heavy for me to hold up and I have to keep shifting around to find different means of supporting it. Elizabeth Bishop has a life of travel and change, Nova Scotia to Brazil; I feel I will never go anywhere again, except, if I am lucky, the kitchen. I start dramatizing things. I read Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses, a book I am supposed to review, a huge compendium of arresting facts about the pleasures of smell and touch and etc. Diane Ackerman goes all over the world tasting strange and delicious things; she rhapsodizes about vanilla beans; she puts bats in her hair; she kneels in a grove of eucalyptus and tags migrating monarch butterflies. I think if I am very lucky I may be able to drive to the A&P next week. I begin to hate Diane Ackerman; I hate her pert attitude, her perky enjoyment of all the possibilities for pleasure the world holds out. I hate my life. I begin to enjoy the pitch of my self-pity, even though now I think that self-pity’s just a mask for a deeper abjection. I am in pain, up against my limitations. This is the worst my back has ever been.
All spring it’s been coming. Right after Wally died I began going to a yoga class; I’d been ready to forget the idea, but a friend more or less forced me to go, saying he wanted someone with me all the time—Wally’d been gone only a few days then—and he wanted a break from me, so please would I go. The first minutes of the first class we were sitting on our knees on our mats, in the floor-wax and sweeping compound atmosphere of the elementary school cafeteria, with its pink metal tables folded into the walls and its stage masked by a blue velvet curtain. We’d begun doing breathing exercises, listening to our own in- and exhalations, feeling the breath expand in us as we paid attention to it, and the teacher said, “Here you are, in your body. Feel what it’s like to be in your body.” I knew then I was in for it; the tears started to roll down my cheeks. I kept breathing and moving, sometimes calming inside, sometimes crying again. Releasing tension in my arms, especially, which had held and held and held on. Stretching them out above my head, pulling one arm and then the other back behind my neck to feel the muscles opening released another wave of grief.
What had happened to my body—I hadn’t known it before, until my attempts at stretching made it obvious—was that I had been braced from my knees up to my solar plexus, like a football player, I imagined, braced for a body blow. I carried myself like someone who expected something to come hurtling right into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him, someone who didn’t want to fall down.
The class did release tension. Some nights I fell asleep right there on my mat while everyone around me moved into increasingly elongated, birdlike incarnations of graceful flexibility. Some nights I felt relaxation and a sense of relief. The postures began to provide me with another sort of metaphysical vocabulary—the steadfastness of “the Mountain,” for instance, feet firmly anchored on the earth, the spine elongated, pressing up from the crown of the head, body extending from earth to heaven. Sometimes when I wasn’t in class, when I needed to feel it, I could call upon the firmness of “the Mountain,” and recall in my body that stability and sense of scale. And I loved the noise-making: the forceful expelling of air from the gut into a HA, the loud sighs and exhalations which signaled muscles lengthening and letting go.
The class made me realize I had no idea then—maybe I still don’t—what it means to “let go” of a person. How can we, when someone is bonded to us, welded into the mesh of ourselves? The dead live on in our bodies, in the timeless flux of memory, inseparable from us. You’ve got to let go is the popular prescription for grief, but what does it mean, and how is it to be done? Whatever has been, we can’t undo it; isn’t every gesture we’ve ever made, every one that mattered, part of the stuff of selfhood? Isn’t the past the soul’s deepest possession? If I were to “let go” of Wally and Lynda, would they die to me again?
But I did learn to perceive tension in my body more clearly, to feel how I “hold on,” and to feel a muscle’s welcome lengthening and release.
But not enough. No amount of stretching seemed to defuse, finally, the pressure that was mounting in my back. After that unlucky reach out the car window to the ATM, I couldn’t even stand up straight. I’d hobble, face to the earth, hunched and clenched, unable to even straighten up enough to look at the sky. I feel more profoundly misaligned than I ever have, literally bent out of shape, my parts in a jumble of unhappy connections.
A week of rest and I am at least walking, slowly. Crunching myself into the position required to ride in a car, much less drive one, is out of the question, so I walk carefully to an appointment with my sweet masseur, Glen, whom I’ve seen a few times this spring to try to undo some of the winter’s icy block of tension and stress. I am making my way up my street when I run into a woman I know slightly, a health care administrator who’d known Wally. She notices my snailish pace—I am holding myself like a delicate construction of glass and string—and I explain.
“You know,” she says, “it’s all emotional.”
And I’m furious. It’s a thirty-second diagnosis, completely out of context. How does she know what’s going on in my body? She seems to deny the physical reality of my problem. She’s a representative (off duty, admittedly, but I am in no mood to let her off the hook) of that useless bureaucracy of “providers”—their own bland language, soulless as they sometimes seem to be—who have no call to be claiming expertise with something they don’t understand. I’m taken back to the kind of blanket, casual diagnoses Wally’s doctors used to make; confronting a symptom they clearly didn’t understand, they’d confidently say, “It’s the virus.” Or, in a phrase which became a kind of bitter joke with us, anything they didn’t comprehend and couldn’t treat they’d label “viral activity.” Wally’s life gradually became a stage for larger and larger forms of viral activity, for a kind of terrible possession his “providers” couldn’t do the first thing about.
I’ll never forget his doctor’s single house call, in November, two months before he died. Wally was watching television from his bed; at some point TV had become simply what he could do. First it was a source of distraction. Undemanding electronic company, for many people of my generation, represents a certain sort of childhood comfort, a voice and energy and presence—something paying attention to us—that feels, for better or worse, like a part of home. Later I think there was just something comforting in that continual play of light and motion. Wally couldn’t tell, by then, if he’d already watched the same show that day; it didn’t matter, exactly. He was in the present, with laugh tracks and music and jumping electronic figures, energetic squiggles of light to fill his brain with something else, somewhere else. When Dr. Magnus showed up to see how Wally was doing—since by then getting him into the wheelchair and down the block to the clinic was out of the question—he didn’t stay long. He told me later, when I ran into him in the park, where he was out for a walk with his lover taking photographs of icicles, that “Wally seemed more interested in watching TV than in talking to me.”
It took me, as it sometimes does, time to get angry; a lag time has to pass in my head before I’ll give myself permission to really feel rage. All the doctor needed to do was to press a button on the remote control and switch off the set. If he had, he’d have seen Wally looking at him with the same kind of sweet openness—the self made permeable, expecting nothing, letting everything wash in and out—with which he looked at the screen, when he did bother to look at it. By then, I’m not even sure Wally could have switched off the remote control by himself.
Dr. Magnus wanted to be important; he wanted to be the center of Wally’s attention. Couldn’t he see past his own ego to read the face of a man with wildly increasing neurological damage? He wanted his questions answered, his importance as a “provider” validated—a kind of need I saw in nurses and doctors again and again, as if, as Wally became more ill, they needed to confirm their own importance. A larger man, a more generous man, might not even have needed to turn off the television at all. If he couldn’t do anything, he could pay attention to the man before him, with his gentle, tender, ruined face lit up in soft artificial colors by the light of the goddamned stupid screen. Why couldn’t he see that? His doctor’s sense of self-importance only allowed him to see, by then, a man who was indifferent to him.
Even I can tell the difference between brain damage and indifference.
He never saw Wally again.
And so this tossed-off assessment of my condition triggers a profound resentment, an anger which in itself feels like part of the pain I’m in.
Thus raising, of course, the possibility that she’s right.
Or partly so—if what’s residing in my back is held, pent-up feeling, couldn’t that hurt the muscles themselves, too? I imagine the emotional and the physical tumbling together like a pair of acrobats, two halves of a single somersault.
But what would I do about this—go home and feel? As if I hadn’t spent five months already weeping, desolate, incapacitated, able to function only in my own limited horizon? I’d just begun to be able to get out a bit more, traveling a little, doing my professional work. and then my back crippled me as my heart had earlier. And this was because I hadn’t felt enough?
So I decided to try something else, or rather it was as if something else were offered. As the most useful of Chinese proverbs says, “When you don’t know where you’re going, go by a way you don’t know.”
I’d met M. before, socially, and I’d known he did massage work because Bill had been his client since last summer, when Bill’s body had blossomed with KS lesions. Bill’s easy, bright attitude toward his illness was—shocking word, in this context—contagious; he was perfectly happy to go to the beach and let the sun wash over his body, where every week another pink-purple bruise seemed to develop. He would expose himself in a way that many men with KS would, understandably, find terrifying; there seemed something deeply freeing in his yielding his body to the sun, to scrutiny.
I remember Bill, that July, walking back from a session with M., passing my garden with a dreamy look on his face, and when I asked how he was he answered, “My whole body feels like a penis.”
By the time I encountered M., back in town after a while away—a failed affair, a dark season in the East Village—I was doing better, overall, though I still felt fragile and, most frustrating, was unable to sit for any length of time. No writing at my desk, no restaurants, no movies, only the barest minimum of driving. He gave me his card—Mind/Body Massage—and explained that his work was emotional as well as physical, focused on releasing emotion stored in the body.
Days later I was due for another trip to New York. I’d planned to fly, tried to make it as easy on myself as possible; I felt, if I was careful, I was up for it. But the morning before, ironing a shirt, I felt my left hip start to throb, a deep ache, and I knew I’d never handle the plane, carrying even the lightest bag, if I didn’t do something.
M. could see me that evening, and said in fact he’d been wondering if I would call. My first session with him—initial encounter of a series which would change and deepen my life, entirely unexpectedly—was a revelation that happened unassumingly enough. I arrived at his cottage, at seven, a tiny place behind a huge emporium of tie dye and bongs and all manner of objects with skulls on them, one of the last remaining head-shops (in the world?) which has mutated into something less sweet and optimistic than the way I remember those places. No Donovan there; the prevailing mood is heavy metal. Down a little alley to one side of the building’s Boschian murals—Alice gone through the looking glass into the Garden of Earthly Delights—M.’s cottage was a single room dominated by the folding table of his profession.
He himself, in fact, also took me back twenty years—twenty-something, with shoulder-length hair, wire-rims, and a choker of beads, he looked like the men I used to hang out with in 1971, when I was first in college, and then—odd doubling—like my students look now, their retro gestures gleaned from—where? Old album covers? Deadhead tours? The culture reaches back toward a time which feels more innocent, now that it’s easier to edit out the past’s risky, disturbing edges. M.’s place—polychrome images of Krishna and his beloved Radha, incense burners and wind chimes—made me feel oddly at home.
He explained a little about his technique and study, how he’d begun studying massage in high school, traveled to ashrams and workshops, his own sense of vocation. And then, undressed and half-covered by a sheet in the warm room with its vague smells of incense and unguent, I began to surrender.
Touch, among other things, makes the body real to us; confirmed by another, making contact at the boundaries of our skin, we come back to ourselves, experience ourselves—contained, uncontainable—anew. Some lines of Lynda’s, about sex:
…making love was a way of saying yes,
I am here, these are my borders, hold me down
a little while. Make me real to myself.
Something about M.’s particular brand of touch—working at the muscles, pulling gently, opening out the closed spaces in the body—makes my muscles feel three-dimensional, awake.
And there’s some imperceptible descent, a process I can’t quite trace, through which the mind moves from awareness of the pleasure of being touched into a kind of effortless introspection. A paradox, that being stroked all along our edges should move us further inward.
The tension in my arms, beginning to loosen, makes me think how hard I worked, how long, to hold Wally in a space of relative safety, a zone in which it was possible for him to live as long and well as he could. My arms feel so tired, weary of controlling, protecting, lifting. M.’s touching my face, massaging the knots which have appeared on either side of my jaws. “That’s rage,” he says, though I can’t in fact feel it. Certainly I can register the clench, but not any emotional correlative.
He encourages me to breathe, to make noises—part of the “release”—if I’m so inclined. The firm and easy series of strokes, gentle but somehow driving, leading the experience forward, is punctuated by permission, injunctions to feel. He mentions how much I’ve been holding, he says there is so much grief in my body.
He arrives at my hips, my lower back. I am lying on my back now, eyes closed, and he’s lifting my legs and rotating the thighs in their sockets, pushing, circling, reversing the circles. He lifts my right leg in the air and pushes it toward the left side, so that my leg is crossed over my body, stretching out the muscles deep in the right hip, stroking the long tendon along the back of my right quadriceps with a firm, long stroke, his thumb pushing deep toward the bone. And I feel everything shift. My face contorts, involuntarily. Without any warning, with knowing first what I feel, I burst into tears. The grief, the knowledge of grief, isn’t in my head; the knowing is locked up in my thighs. What my body knows comes welling up, shaking me, deep quaking indrawn breaths and sobs. He keeps touching me, easily; he covers my face with a cloth so that I will not be ashamed. He enjoins me to let it out but I don’t need any more coaching. I couldn’t stop if I tried; a deep well of the darkest and most brackish water of myself has been tapped, an arterial spring held under tremendous pressure. Except that we think of springs as clear, pure water, and this is the fountain of sheer darkness, interior geyser of bitterness held at such depths it pours forth laying waste, burning everything in its path. How did I ever contain it? These great breathless heaving sobs are mine. I let them rumble and tear loose, rising up out of me into the air. I am literally and metaphorically naked, helpless, entirely vulnerable, and for some reason I feel completely safe, able to give myself over to this pouring out of myself. When we talk about being self-conscious, we’re really talking about being aware of others; to be self-conscious is to be afraid of being judged. What I felt was self-possessed, in the old sense of possession: fully entered and inhabited by myself, purely immersed in this body’s grief.
And not just the sorrow of grief. But the rage of it, too, the salty choking bitterness, the self-pity and incoherence and ferocious negation of it.
The freeing, fierce negation.
The massage ended in peace and stillness; one can weep so much, and then that purging leaves us exhausted, quieted. Some unidentifiable plant essence, odor of earth and crushed leaves (“Egyptian oil,” he later told me it was called) was held under my nose. A prayer to Shiva, god of destruction and dissolution; if the forces of the world dissolve people, dissolve what we love, then they also dissolve tension, pain, difficulty.
My pain—in the suddenly infinite, enormous room—dissolving into this music, some chant on the tape player. Then stillness.
I walked home deeply relaxed, enervated, exhausted. And after throwing a few things in a bag for the morning plane I slept dreamlessly, deeply, given a little hiatus from pain.
Which reappeared in the morning, an ache becoming more pronounced by the time I caught my second airplane of the day, a Boston to La Guardia shuttle, a pillow behind my sacrum, shifting as much as possible in my seat belt to keep the muscles loose. A taxi to my friend Jean’s apartment on 110th and Broadway—empty, since she’s married an Irish painter and spends half of each year there, though the space she’s inhabited is full of her calm radiant depths, her quiet—and then straight to bed, into a sleep from which I wake, early in the afternoon, to the strange sensation of having all of New York City around me, and no stamina to participate in any of its huge, indifferent, multiplicitous life.
What could I do? What felt right, that steamy May afternoon, was an easy walk. The cathedral, St. John the Divine, right around the corner, is a place I love, even more so because it remains unfinished, great theater of aspiration, lifetimes till it’ll be done. In fact the new plans for it continue to become stranger, more surprising: a design for a sort of greenhouse, high above the transept, will someday have the walker or worshiper below looking up through the great stone vault into trees.
Sacred spaces have enormous power, even when one doesn’t subscribe to the way their builders or users construe the holy. There’s something undeniably affecting about ritual actions performed in places that have been set apart and consecrated. Once, when Wally was ill, I lit a candle for him at an altar in a mission outside of Tucson, where Latinos and the Tohono O’odham people (who’d built the church, under the yoke of Spanish Jesuits, early in the 1700s) came to pray to a wooden effigy of St. Francis Xavier, pinning onto his pretty dresses and petticoats little metal milagros, images of whatever in their lives needed healing, from body parts to tractors.
I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t believe that my candle lit to Francisco Xavier was going to make a bit of difference in the progress of Wally’s illness, much as I might wish it. But there’s something in his spirit and in mine that was benefited, joined to our community of fellow pray-ers. Something in us, in this way, is honored and held up, lit.
I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John’s; it had seemed just a destination, a manageable whim. But my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space—like those spaces in dreams, or like Wonderland, whose immensity opens out from the tiniest passage—and walked without hesitating down the right-hand aisle, halfway down the enormous length of the cathedral, to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who’d died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards, a bank of candles. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there.
Because the black current that M. had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d grown just enough of a skin to function, these last months, but the strength I’d been feeling wasn’t, in fact, real. It was a gesture toward going on in the world, toward continuance, but I wasn’t ready to continue, I hadn’t finished confronting that deep internal sense of desolation. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse.
Which is what I did, some timeless tear-span of minutes sitting on a little ledge at the base of an immense column of naked gray stone. After a while, I could walk to buy a candle—a light, for Wally, his flame rowed with the others there, a double line of representative flickerings, so few of them really that each might stand in for ten thousand dead.
The candles are held in wrought-iron stands, in metal trays filled with sand to anchor the glassed votives and loose tapers people place there. In the sand, next to a vacant space, was a tiny stick of wick, nearly invisible now, a half inch of flame seeming to lick up out of the sand itself, all that was left of some man or woman’s light. I used that flame to light Wally’s fresh candle—new, the flame high over the rim of the glass, while others around it burned halfway or nearly to extinction. A little arpeggio of lights, each floating above its liquid level of wax, to represent countless and increasing vanishings. Kneeling in public makes me feel self-conscious, posed, but I got down on the padded rail anyway. Then I forgot my self as the floodgates opened again.
The weeping steadied, in a while, to a different rhythm, a more sustainable breathing, a stillness. People came and went—boyfriends, teenagers, a Hispanic woman who knelt alone at the altar, crossed herself, prayed, smiled at me as she rose. I asked her if she might have a Kleenex; she rummaged in her black patent purse and apologized for finding nothing.
I tried to leave then, but I couldn’t seem to walk out of the orbit of the altar, some magnetic pull in those ranks of candles, the unrevealing banners of appliquéd felt. I’d begin to walk away and some little spasm of grief would break free, as if floating loose from below, rising to the surface, choking, blinding. I sat back down on the column base, and in a moment there was a tap at my shoulder: the Hispanic woman, come back with—where had she gotten them?—the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.
So began my weekend’s retreat in Manhattan. Out Jean’s bedroom window a great wall of windows opened across 110th—panoply of lives, New York’s theater of stacked views, glances into the unknowability, variety, and immensity of human lives. When I was a first-grader, my family lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and my father used to take me to a museum called the Pink Palace. It was an unfinished mansion some wealthy man had commissioned to be built of smooth pink granite, one stone fitted carefully to the next, but the Depression or private ruin had wiped out his fortune and the unfinished estate became the property of the state, a museum for children. I can remember only one of its exhibits, which I loved: a large wall of little doors, arrayed from floor to ceiling, each with a tiny handle. Some I could reach myself, while my father would have to lift me to others. I must have worn him out with my desire to open and then close every single one of them. What was behind each door was a pane of glass, a window which gave onto a great—real?—tree, and each aperture revealed some different aspect of its life: nests, squirrels, spiders, stuffed birds whose glass eyes looked back with gleaming veracity. There was no way to ever see the entire tree at once, only the hundreds—were there?—of alternative perspectives the doors opened. This great curio cabinet, this museum of viewpoints, serves in my memory as a metaphor that resonates in many directions. The past itself seems to me like that tree, unseeable in its entirety, knowable only in its parts, each viewpoint yielding a different version of the story about what the whole might be.
What is the world but a tree too huge to see at once, known only through the shaping character of the particular aperture through which we see?
Jean’s window gave onto a world of windows, that wide bank of apartments revealing—as lamps were lit, blinds raised—ways in which people lived. This was the world I could not go out into, the exterior whirlwind. I could lie in her bed and look out into its various life, until my attention would float back to the ruin and collapse which was my own.
Journal entry, June 7, New York.
Could it be true, that the more I admit the anger and woundedness—the deep, sealed-off hurt long since turned in on itself—the more I’ll be able to move freely and flexibly?
Once it was important for me not to become bitter, a kind of survival skill. I didn’t want to be burdened, always, by the shadow of a difficult family; there was an energy in me that wanted to move forward, not be locked in contemplation of the past. But I’m forty, and my life’s at midpoint (hard to think, now, living in a battlefield, my friends dying at my age or younger, my neighborhood full of men who maybe won’t see forty) and I begin to think maybe there is a need for bitterness in adult life. Are we children without it, self-deluded? Is there something in disenchantment which strikes the balance, a darker chord in the self which lends us gravity, depth? A ballast, against the spirit’s will to rise?
Is the pain in my back the sharp, insistent, undiluted voice of my self-pity—as if my body itself were whining?
After my hour on M.’s table, during my weekend alone in my friend’s apartment on 110th, I could weep for Wally’s diminishment, the long bitter years of slow erasure, the losses gradual and little: not being able to go to the movies together, the slow decline of sexual life, not being able to share the events and concerns of my work. And then, headlong and tumbling, all of him falling down a long tunnel of loss, one aspect of self after another. I could cry about all this now in a way I couldn’t when he was alive, or in the first months after he died.
Now I could cry for myself—for the pain of it, for losing what I thought the rest of my life would be like—in a way that I couldn’t when he was alive, or even when my grief was stunningly new and I could only weep for him, not for myself. Self-pity, we’re taught, is the ugliest of indulgences, the one we’re not to give in to, our natures at their weakest. Here is Job, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation (Jean’s copy, the book I most need there, in the serenity of the blue bedroom), raging about the destruction of his life:
If only I could return
to the days when God was my guardian;
when his fire blazed above me
and guided me through the dark—
to the days when I was in blossom
and God was a hedge around me…
For “God” substitute “life,” “the world,” even “time,” whatever; what you call the power larger than yourself here doesn’t matter. Job is articulating what it’s like to be young; his definition of innocence has to do not with age but with the quality of being untouched, the sense of invulnerability with which we live until the world comes crashing in to challenge us.
The Book of Job enacts the most human and inevitable of tragedies. Job has love, wealth, solidity, community, certainty. And then his world is scoured, and the only purpose given for his harrowing doesn’t seem to even convince the great anonymous poet behind the poem. The poem’s a wrestling with a mystery, the ceaseless process of diminishment and loss.
For your lover to die is not to be guided by fire but immolated by it; to lose what you love, as Job loses his children, is to be entirely plunged into darkness, vulnerable, unprotected by any hedge. And we’re forced to the ultimate question of self-pity: why me? Why did I suffer? Why did I live to lose? Does this have any meaning at all, or is it merely the grinding down of ourselves, the grand arbitrary motions the spheres enact?
That’s what I didn’t want to feel: my own sense of smallness, rage, violation, my tiny life—especially against the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people with AIDS who’ve died or are dying—my life disrupted, wreaked havoc upon. Who was I to feel sorry for myself when I didn’t even have the disease? When it wasn’t me who’d been crushed on a wet highway?
But if I couldn’t allow myself to feel the pity and terror of my own loss, then my body would enact it for me.
Here is Job, adult bitterness incarnate, vessel of anger, eye to eye with the sheer uncompromising face of the dark:
Man who is born of woman—
how few and harsh are his days!
Like a flower he blooms and withers;
like a shadow he fades in the dark.
He falls apart like a wineskin,
like a garment chewed by moths.
This is the unmitigated voice of the survivor who is only able to deal with devastation this way, by hammering out the bleakest view of the human situation. Job’s losses are horrific, sweepingly total, and delivered to us in swift passages of prose as if to get that part of the story over with and get on to what matters, which is the sufferer’s negotiations with the nature of reality. A paradox: there is no consolation available in Job’s vision of the nature of things, and there’s something strangely consoling about this clear-eyed and sober assessment of what it means to be a man: “how few and harsh are his days.” Perhaps because such a stance doesn’t expect much. It comes after the long tears and groaning of deep grief, a bit numbed, utterly without self-delusion, beaten into a kind of ashen acknowledgment of our brief and difficult transit here. As if life in the world will be tolerable if we expect nothing of it. Here he speaks, in another passage:
Remember: life is a breath;
soon I will vanish from your sight.
The eye that looks will not see me;
you may search, but I will be gone.
Like a cloud fading in the sky,
man dissolves into death.
He leaves the whole world behind him
and never comes home again.
A characteristically Old Testament vision of human life: a breath caught between two darknesses, a difficulty endurable only through submission to God. Submission to power and law, the acceptance of our lot—an expected stance, and one which Job all at once bracingly, completely belies.
“Therefore,” he says, “I refuse to be quiet…
This is the opposite of acceptance. Job sees plainly and unflinchingly the unbearable human lot and says, No, I will not have it, I do not understand it, it is not just. Job and his friends need to believe—don’t we all need to believe?—the universe is sane, benign in its orders. Job’s upright friends—righteous men, good spiritual citizens—would have him accept that he must have sinned somehow, must have done something to deserve this. Or at least want him to accept, silently, an incomprehensible will greater than his own.
But Job’s humanity lies in his no-saying. No easy answer, no humble acceptance, NO—I rage against the excoriating process of loss in my life, I will not be silent in the face of it, I refuse to be quiet. I will look at the great black tree of the world through the window of bitterness, the window of misery, I’ll put my face to that dark, and I will say what I see. Silence is submission to the implacable order. For Job, silence equals the death of the self.
There is so much I don’t want to write. I can feel the interior pressure and turbulence, latent feeling opened and invited in—out?—if I begin to speak directly about illness, dissolution, the end of my heart’s desire, the wreck of love’s body, the failure of medicine. There is so much there to—I begin to write “dredge up,” but it isn’t at all like uncovering something from which I have recovered, something far in the past. It’s that there’s all that grief and anger right there and I’d rather not feel it than look at it directly, which isn’t really a choice, since if I don’t look at it my body will embody it. (What else does embody mean?)
To go on is to write out of, as it were, the pain in my back, the crashing within myself that seems multiple in its parts. Feelings I had to back away from, for a while, in order to go on, which now want to be admitted—residual anger and bitterness, old and new. I had been moving forward, in this new and unfamiliar life, as if I had more strength than I did. And so my body insisted on a hiatus, a rupture, a period of reflection.
I have no choice but to open the door to the pain, but if I do so I feel as if I’m going to rage, to cry, endlessly. I want to be in control, I can’t be in control, I want to let my feelings flow fluidly, I want to stop holding it…
M. says, You don’t have to do anything. It’s that you stop doing what you’re doing, you stop holding on…
Depth charges of grief and anger detonating, down inside the muscles, way down in the heart/spine/brain, and the black smoke churning up, the feeling letting loose, wordless, as I think about bringing it to words.
Start at the beginning of this story, angel, help me to bring these words to light so that they don’t turn to acid in the dark.
The angel answers: They are acid already. How else could they be? Let them pour out, scalding, a hot black oil to steam on the street, coruscating bitter fluid. You’d keep that in your body? Up and out, let it go.
M. again: The only way to release tension is to feel it.
But I think, old histories surfacing here, that if I’m angry, bitter, negative, there’ll be damage, that it’s dangerous to feel so strongly.
More dangerous, says the angel, not to.
Now I think it is not Wally who has gone into the underworld, but myself—on a long spiraling journey of peril, of unpredictability, in which I must come to new terms. I must reinterpret my life, or lose myself. Have I already “lost myself”? Certainly I am lost. I awoke, in the middle of my life, in a dark wood…
Losing one’s self: is that it? Is the descent of the surviving into grief and incomprehension a death, too? I awoke in a dark wood…A descent above all into the unfamiliar, the known world made strange, all signposts gone, one’s sense of the predictable future shattered. Everything utterly different, though it looks the same.
In the months after Wally died I felt a kind of spirit with me that sustained me, even though I was miserable; it was strange how I could be in so much pain and feel, at once, somehow close to the heart of life, in a place of no little radiance. And then, the descent, the dying back into the world—a dark wood—where we are unguided. Lynda died and whatever shine seemed to leak out of the other world as Wally entered it left me. What my soul requires is this going down into darkness, into the bitterness of salt and chewing at old roots. In my heart I make myself ugly and bitter, I say cruel and harsh things, I spit on hope, I mock the bit of life which is tender beginnings, which is promise, which is hope. I will let myself be ugly, I will have a mouth full of darkness, a heart full of bile, I will be sour and hateful and old. I see the future burning, the oily rags of love going up in the black smoke of the torched body. In another time I would have wandered in the desert, I would have torn my clothing and walked in rags, I’d have smeared my face with dust and clay and refused speech, I would have hurled my body down into the dust and my soul into darkness, into nothing, utter free fall in the world of senselessness. Much as I want to hold on, want to cling to any perception which might be redemptive, any solid point, what is required of me is what I fear the most: relinquishment, free fall, the fluid pour into absolute emptiness. There is no way around the emptiness, the bitter fact, no way to go but through.