A Writer's Ruminations

"At a certain moment for the person who has lost everything, whether that means a being or a country, language becomes the country. One enters the country of words."

— Hélène Cixous, “From the Scene of the Unconscious to the Scene of History”

"When the pain blazed in his chest,
I want to believe he saw
only light as he melted into it.
You know where your father’s
life is now? my friend asked
and gave me without a pause
these words, It’s in you."

— Margaret Gibson, from “Elegy For My Father”

"

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead.

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

"We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all."

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

"People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist’s office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning of the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them."

— Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

"Long ago, there was something in me, but now that thing is gone. Now that thing is gone, that thing is gone. I cannot cry. I cannot care. That thing will come back no more."

— F. Scott Fitzgerald , Winter Dreams  (via seabois)

(via feuille-d-automne)

"Everything we love fails, I didn’t tell my students,
if by fails we mean ends or changes,
if by love we mean what sustains us.
Language is what honors the vanishing.
Or is language what slows the leaving?
Or does it only deepen what we know of loss?"

— Jacqueline Berger, from “The Failure of Language” (via ahuntersheart)

"As my father’s breathing fails,
the transparency of the windowpane
reminds me that outside there is the world.
I contemplate the brightly lit city,
the cars going by,
the teenager who meets
his girlfriend on a corner,
the passing bicyclist,
the athlete running across the park meadow.
Pondering the fragility of time
I contemplate the world,
the window again,
the reunited family,
and I am thinking that my father no longer speaks
or sees or hears,
that his dead senses
are beginning to perceive the theater of the world
through us,
that the only memory of his life
is what lies in the fragments of our memory:
an immense puzzle with missing pieces.
what must he be thinking about as he leaves himself behind?
My mother’s skin?
Newsreels from the Second World War?
First communion and the commandments?
The tumors spreading through his body?
My father, stammering,
says he has a stone in his throat,
it won’t fall,
he’s going to fall with it,
To where? In what place?"

— Manuel Ulacia, from “The Stone at the Bottom” (translated by Reginald Gibbons)

"You’re irreplaceable. And because you are,
the life you gave me is condemned to loneliness."

— Pier Paolo Pasolini, from “Prayer to My Mother” (translated by Norman MacAfee and Luciano Martinengo)

"We are against forgetting the dead. We are against recovery and healing. To ‘heal’ is to entomb, forever, the sickness. To that end we are bringing the dead back, not to haunt, but to remind us that we are always in the presence of their absence."

— Heidi Julavits, The Vanishers

"I was asleep while you were dying.
It’s as if you slipped through some rift, a hollow
I make between my slumber and my waking,

the Erebus I keep you in, still trying
not to let go. You’ll be dead again tomorrow,
but in dreams you live. So I try taking

you back into morning. Sleep-heavy, turning,
my eyes open, I find you do not follow.
Again and again, this constant forsaking."

— Natasha Trethewey, from “Myth”

"Why did I write it down? In order to remember, of course, but exactly what was it I wanted to remember? How much of it actually happened? Did any of it? Why do I keep a notebook at all? It is easy to deceive oneself on all those scores. The impulse to write things down is a peculiarly compulsive one, inexplicable to those who do not share it, useful only accidentally, only secondarily, in the way that any compulsion tries to justify itself. I suppose that it begins or does not begin in the cradle. Although I have felt compelled to write things down since I was five years old, I doubt that my daughter ever will, for she is a singularly blessed and accepting child, delighted with life exactly as life presents itself to her, unafraid to go to sleep and unafraid to wake up. Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with some presentiment of loss."

— Joan Didion, from “On Keeping a Notebook”, in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays” (via mitochondria)

(via inaliums)

"All will go
And one day
We will hold
Only the shadows."

— Carl Sandburg, from “Losses”

"I acknowledge my status as a stranger:
I found it in the wash, the orange
shell I picked up on the beach
that last time. One of my girls—
the one named after you—

must have found it in my room
and wanted it. Clean calcareous
curve, a palm open to nothing,
reeking of sunshine

and your death. For years
I didn’t know what to do with it.
You would have liked
this story: how a child

slips grief into a careless pocket.
Breaks it to pieces. Lets it go."

— Harriet Brown, “Shell”