The Book of Tears and Remembering

It's a Saturday, and I'm surprised to find myself doing what I used to do on Saturdays for years back in New York City, before I was a mother, before I had fully accepted my reversion back to the Catholic faith (and even then for a long time after), before I moved to the Bronx, a move about which a friend of mine said, "I thought people went there willingly only to die." I am sitting at the enormous sixties-era oak desk that I got for fifty bucks at the apartment sale of a divorcing Argentine woman in my old neighborhood, editing text while I listen to Jonathan Schwartz's weekly radio program on WNYC, on which I know he will play at least one song that will make me want to take to my bed in a paroxysm of tears -- probably something sung by Audra McDonald or Nancy LaMott -- and sleep until my heart is healed, a moment which, of course, will never really come.  In those days, however, most of the text I was editing was my own, and I was often longing for love, love either past or ambiguously present, and working against the feeling of shikata ga nai, the sense that everything I was doing was just to fortify my own very small world against the encroachment of despair, so I had better keep working.  And then, as now, I was constantly nagged by the feeling that I had to get up from the desk and go over to my little piano and start practicing already, because I probably had a gig or a university recital requirement right around the corner.

Back then, when I would hit the wall and not be able to read another word, I would push up from my mammoth desk and flee the apartment, letting the steel door slam behind me.  I would go out the side entrance of my pre-war apartment building and walk to Fort Tryon Park.  Now, I slink out the back door of my house and walk through my silent neighborhood, often meeting no one on the street except a young man with Down syndrome, like me an inveterate walker no matter what the weather.  Days like this, I miss everything about New York.  I miss the colors and the smells.  I miss seeing people on the street, even if I didn't want to talk to them, even if I hoped and prayed, as I did on many a day, that I wouldn't run into anyone I knew.

I know there must be a reason for my coming here, besides accompanying my husband to the place where he got a job.  When he got the job offer, he told me that if I wanted to stay in New York, he would turn it down.  But even I, with my more-than-occasionally faulty grasp of the theory of mind, knew that I couldn't hold him back from what was a step up.  Even I had a shred of humility large and sincere enough to swallow hard and accept that we would be leaving everything we knew and many of the things we loved, but that it would be willful and cruel of me to put my foot down and keep it in the city I love.

That was two years ago.  It's been a hard, lonely two years.  There have been many struggles, and few bright spots.  Sometimes it feels as if things are just getting more and more difficult, and as if none of my prayers are being answered in the way I want, not even what seemed like the inocuous-enough one for a friend.  I feel like my life is contracting, getting smaller and narrower, rather than expanding, which is of course what everyone wants to happen in their lives.

It is so hard for my prima-donna self to accept this smallness, this forced humility.  My heart aches when I think of what might be happening in my old neighborhood.  The plane trees are turning yellow and dropping their leaves to the sidewalks.  My friend N., the opera singer who lives on the other side of the building, is writing some software code for a design client.  My great friend F., who was my recital accompanist before he moved to England, is swinging his book bag full of bottles of Italian wine from Astor Wines and Spirits as he trudges with his idiosyncratic gait up the hill from the subway to his apartment, which is around the corner from mine, and from which he can see a sliver of the river and the bridge out of one window.  My beloved downstairs neighbor, Mrs. M., an Austrian refugee from World War II who died last year a month before her ninety-ninth birthday, is walking back from the hair salon, looking natty in a tweed jacket.

But all of this is long ago.  My friends are dispersed, and some are dead.  And if I remember hard enough, I will see M. on the street outside, waving to me over his shoulder as I stand in the window of our apartment, on his way downtown to work a night shift in a building that was destroyed in 9/11.  And then I will remember the day he stopped waving.

And then where will I be? At my desk in Appalachia, my heart aching, asking God that, if He's going to allow me to remember all of this, to let it be for a reason that will be helpful to someone else, even if I never know it.  As Pablo Neruda wrote, "Es tan corto el amor, y tan largo el olvido" -- love is so short, and forgetting is so long.  And now I really do have to go and practice.

Here's some music about tears and remembering on this lonely Saturday.

"More fit for gills than lungs"

How's this for a poem?

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

"The Thing Is" by Ellen Bass, from Mules of Love. © BOA Editions, Ltd., 2002. 

仕方がない

M., who was of Japanese descent, loved the novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1994.  A few months after being so honored, Oe gave a talk at the City College of New York, where M. was a student.  M. brought several books for Oe to sign, which he did graciously.

On a recent library trip, I found a book by Oe on the free table.  Oe's oldest son, Hikari, was born with severe brain damage, and much of Oe's early novels are fictionalized accounts of his attempts to accept the upheaval in his life occasioned by his son's disability.  The book I found, however, is not a novel, but a memoir called A Healing Family.  I've been reading it in snatches stolen from the big copy-editing job that's taking up much of my time.  Oe, who studied European and American literature at university, writes here about William Blake (from one of whose poems Oe took the title for one of his novels, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!):

[He] evolved an utterly original version of the world in [his work,] at the heart of which were two preoccupations.  One was his engagement in the crucial historical events of his period, namely American independence and the French Revolution . . . . The other concerned his role as a seer whose visions linked him to a tradition of . . . neo-Platonism . . . . Among the shorter of [Blake's "prophetic" writings] is a strange but lovely poem called "The Book of Thel," which tells the story of an ethereal being who dwells in the valley of eternal life but wonders about her existence there and seeks to find answers to her doubts by questioning a lily, a cloud, and a worm.  Finally, having consulted a lump of clay, she manages to pass through the gate leading to the world of men, but one look at this vale of tears sends her fleeing, with a piercing shriek, back to the valley of eternal life.

I found myself recalling this poem when my elder brother developed cancer . . . In plain, precise, and convincing words [Blake] is able to capture the desolation of the land of those doomed to die and the frailty of human flesh; he makes one think of all the hosts of people, with oneself among them, passing through this world only to fall victim to disease or to the ravages of age.  My brother's cancer . . . will soon kill him.  As if unafraid of this other reality, the two of us used to laugh and sing together once; but now it is another sound we hear -- the cries of pain that mark the true condition of our lives . . .

Then, in a less despairing mood, I go on to think that maybe in a way we are like Thels who ventured down to this world but didn't go crying back to heaven; who, when they made that now-forgotten choice, perhaps told themselves to "just get on with it."  In fact, the older I get . . . the more convinced I am that my soul, in that instant when it was first marked with the stain of mortal life, turned to face its fate with the same resolve.

This passage, expressed with Oe's typical modesty and elegance, offers a relatively more optimistic version of the Japanese ethos of shikata ga nai, which, written in Japanese katakana, is the title of this post, and which means, loosely translated, "there's nothing to be done about it." This implies that, therefore, one simply has to go on.  I learned about this too from M.