You do not get to stop.
You do not really get to stop.
When I went back inside I put on The Köln Concert, got a straw broom out of the closet, and swept the house. I sweated. The sweat came in torrents. As Keith built in intensity, departing and returning to his theme, an elaborately toxic water spilled from me. I brought in beer bottles and cans, glasses with crushed lime crescents, viscid residues, the tan remains of onetime ice; I wiped down tables and knocked out ashtrays; I did laundry — clothes, bedding, towels — watered plants, washed dishes, knocked grit from rugs and doormats, took out the trash. Because I am a person I did these things. This is what a person does. You make peace with the melancholy. You invite it in. You say goodbye — to friends, to lovers, to family who are dying. To stray moments of understanding and of being understood. You clean, you shop. You go for runs. Sometimes you cry. Sometimes you want to cry and can’t. You are too old, too big, the wrong gender; you have pushed away tears too long. There is a child trembling inside you but that isn’t enough. No one cares. No one has time to care. People’s lives are shot through with suffering, indignity, and privation you can’t imagine. You know this. We all do. And still to say “people” is to refuse to see the child.
Who sees the child?
In the days that follow, it is books and books alone that make me not want to die. At school there was a class called Poetry Will Save Your Life, which we laughed at a little for its pomposity — because so many other things come first, I suppose, because art is always being asked to apologize for its inutility and superfluity. But I think it’s true that poetry will save your life, if for no more than that I found it to be true that week, that literature was the only sort of arrival I could count on, an intimacy that wouldn’t desert me, that didn’t ask too much or fray fatally in the endless conflict of our competing needs, that permitted — or maybe simply was—the passage of experience back through us, our way of ravaging the endless ravishment of life. Heaven too is merely a dream of arrival, which we know from our inability to imagine anything ever happening in heaven.
So stop shortchanging poetry. Stop shortchanging art. Seriously. We’re sick of it. Art has nothing to apologize for.
It is sick of apologizing.
* * *
A comedy ends in a wedding, they say. A tragedy in death. An epic comes full circle to end where it began, but — oh, endings! — take your time, I say. Come late!
Back on the island, my grandfather is living. I am living. The woods are living. Bumblebees as big as a child’s thumb drift among living flowers. The harrumph of a lawn mower coming to life in the distance references the enveloping determination of growth. My aunts, lively in the morning, setting the coffee machine to burble, return from the garden with tomatoes, squash, parsley, chives, leeks, cabbage, zucchini, corn, thyme, rosemary, carrots, and beets, all of which, through the months of spring and early summer, feasting on the rot of soil, have slowly swelled. And if we are to believe Greimasian semiotics, bound up in any sense of dying must be living, along with the not-living, not-dying rock of the coast, oil-black here and grained like a pompadour, the roll of seawater, the nescient wind that laps the flag with its fanciful coat of arms, stretches the cupped palms of canvas sails, splits on bird wings, and touches off the texture of the bay.
I sit with my grandfather in the morning. The day is chilly, with dark gray clouds portending to the southwest. My grandfather wears a baseball cap and a windbreaker over his sweater. There is no discerning a body beneath the clothes.
“When we sailed…” It takes him time to get his sentences out. “Sometimes the propeller got … tangled … on seaweed, you know … and I’d — I’d dive down with a knife…”
“Yes,” I say, “and you’d cut the propeller free.”
He nods. “That’s right.”
I’ve heard these stories many times before. He had an Aqua-Lung aboard the boat, which he used for difficult jobs. Often, though, he just went in in his underwear with a snorkel and mask, a six-inch pilot knife, down into the frigid waters of a strange harbor while his family roused themselves in the morning haze off the ocean. At least once he got tangled up, unable to break free beneath the boat, and had to dive back down to find the line gripping him and cut it before he drowned. He had nearly died thinking of his family just above him, humming as they prepared breakfast, so close and yet unable to hear him on the far side of that insuperable medium. Things must not be so different for him now. But he hadn’t died that morning, of course, and he hasn’t died still. And I take his choice of topic, in its elliptical way, to mean he understands my foolish plan to go after the anchor, the impulse to pit one’s vitality against death, our heedless pursuit of what is always slipping beneath the surface. The first examples of writing, we are told, are inventories and accounts, records of the stores in granaries, the numbers in herds, trades, payments. Bookkeeping. A desire to keep track of things, to not forget.
I find Ruth in the study staring at an old computer, the monitor of which alone could flatten a corgi, and I knock on the doorframe.
“How do I turn a JPEG into an MP3?” she says.
“Hmm. I don’t think you do.”
“Francesca and Malcolm are coming tonight, you know.”
“Yes.” They are Ruth’s children, my cousins; soon the house will be teeming with the full extant family. Bill, Ruth’s husband, is flying in tomorrow from a work trip in Ireland. All these atoms of diverse energy, divergent lives and convergent genes, called together in these walls to confront the breadth of our mutual and utter incomprehension.
“I need you to take Denise to the ferry,” Ruth says.
“I know, I talked to Denise. For the record, I’m not a big fan of the whole ‘I need you to’ formulation.”
I expect Ruth to give me one of her lead-eyed looks, but her eyes are wide open and her face younger than I can remember it being in a long time. “It’s all just really hard,” she says.
“Do you want to tell me why you guys are still fighting?”
She shakes her head. “We forgot.”
I am stubborn. I have lived long enough to know that. My aunts are stubborn. My grandfather is stubborn. We are a stubborn family; we don’t agree, we disapprove, our esteem is hard to win, our affection hard to lose; our grudges linger even when we say they don’t. And yet, if on the surface the dispute between my aunts and their father drew on those stock issues of family and age, of control and the disposition of things, the deeper grievance, I have to believe, was what it always is — that our children are us and yet not us, that parents turn from gods to men and women at last to children, that in describing our nearest boundary with the world our families also measure the distance, the gulf, and that love always comes with conditions, even if these are only the limits of love.