Boundaries Part I: Hibernation

In this multi-part series, I will feature quotations from works of different eras and genres that share an interest in the blurry boundary between life and death, yet come to radically different conclusions about death's familiarity, permanence, and meaning. The first quote, taken from Anthony Doerr's short story, "The Hunter's Wife" is fairly recent and addresses this subject in the most direct manner. It offers an easy segue into the landscape of these two realms through a discussion of what we might call a death-like state of living....hibernation.

"As he watched, horrified, she turned and placed both hands, spread-fingered, in the thick shag of the bear's chest. Then she lowered her face, as if drinking from the snowy hollow, and pressed her lips to the bear's chest. Her entire head was inside the trees. She felt the soft, silver tips of its fur brush her cheeks. Against her nose one huge rib flexed slightly. She heard the lungs fill and then empty. She heard blood slug through veins. Want to know what he dreams? she asked. Her voice echoed up through the tree and poured from the shorn ends of its hollowed branches. The hunter took his knife from his coat. Summer, her voice echoed. Blackberries. Trout. Dredging his flanks across river pebbles."

--Anthony Doerr, "The Hunter's Wife" in The Shell Collector (2003)

Small in Stature

Insults for tall people will follow in another quote:


Hermia: "Little again? Nothing but 'low' and 'little'? Why will you suffer her to flout me thus? Let me come to her.


Lysander: Get you gone, you dwarf! You minimus of hindering knotgrass made! You bead, you acorn!

---William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream

Eidetic

"Listen, I will speak of the best of dreams, of what I dreamed at midnight when men and their voices were at rest."

--The Dream of the Rood, late 10th century

Wondrous Layers

Lawrence Wechsler begins to uncover the many layers of the Museum of Jurassic Technology. Object lessons prove more complicated than we might think:

"[David] was quiet a few moments, and once again the ironylessness seemed momentarily to crack. "You know, certain aspects of this museum you can peel away very easily, but their reality behind, once you peel away those relatively easy layers, is more amazing still than anything those initial layers purport to be. The first layers are just a filter..."
He was quiet another few moments, and just as surely I could sense that the crack was closing up once again, the facade of ironylessness reasserting itself inviolate.
I mentioned the stink ant. "See," he said, "that's an example of the thing about layers. Because at one level, that display works as information, as just this incredibly interesting case study in symbiosis, one of those adaptations so curious and ingenious and wonderful that they almost lead you to question the principle of natural selection itself--could random mutation through geologic time be enough to account for that and so many similar splendors? Nature is more incredible than anything one can imagine.
"But at another level," David continued, "we were drawn to that particular instance because it seemed so metaphorical. That's another one of our mottos here at the museum: 'Ut Translatio Natura.' Nature as Metaphor. I mean, there've been times in my own life when I felt exactly like that ant--impelled, as if possessed, to do things that defy all common sense. That ant is me. I couldn't have summed up my own life better if I'd made him up all by myself."
"But, David," I wanted to say (and didn't) "you did make him up all by yourself!"

--Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology (1996)

Form

Edward Said reminds us that form conveys content and in so doing prompts reflection on modern day reading habits. A culture of skimming--indeed, a culture which tends to gut sources simply for simple "facts"--overlooks the importance of the media form itself in conveying the message.

"The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability: Our literature in a certain very narrow sense is the elusive, resistant reality it tries so often to represent. Most literary critics in Israel and the West focus on what is said in Palestinian writing, who is described, what the plot and contents deliver, their sociological and political meaning. But it is form that should be looked at [...] In Kanafani's Men in the Sun much of the action takes place on the dusty streets of an Iraqi town where three Palestinian men must petition, plead, and bargain with "specialists" to smuggle them across the border into Kuwait. Impelled by exile and dislocation, the Palestinians need to carve a path for themselves in existence, which for them is by no means a given or stable reality. Like the history of the lands they left, their lives seem interrupted just before they could come to maturity and satisfaction; thus each man leaves behind family and responsibilities, to whose exigencies he must answer--unsuccessfully--here in the present. Kanafani's very sentences express instability and fluctuation--the present tense is subject to echoes from the past, verbs of sight give way to verbs of sound or smell, and one sense interweaves with another--in an effort to defend against the harsh present and to protect some particularly cherished framgent of the past. Thus, the precarious actuality of these men in the sun reproduces the precarious status of the writer, each echoing the other.
     Our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatim, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials, in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations, and its limitations."

---Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (1986)

Cornell Part I: Sweet Dreams

In Mary Ann Caws' superbly edited volume, the boundaries between Joseph Cornell's dream world and the space of the street begin to blur....Note especially Cornell's passive voice construction in his entry on March 1, 1947 which suggests his receptivity to his environment. This is the first part of a multi-part series which will focus on Cornell and his world....to be continued at a later date.


Feb 8, 1947


dreamed of vaults with all kinds of whipped cream pastries. Rich
day....layer cake~cherry Danish~calm feeling


Mar 1, 1947


~before going into library a pink icinged vanilla cream-filled
rolled cake had been observed~later when stopping by to purchase
some things its disappearance from its plate glass pedestal in
the window brought a real kind of regret of a delicacy that went
beyond the mere regret~lunch in a diner, banana creme pie, doughnut,
and drink


Feb 6, 1950


lunch of pancakes a complete sense of peace (rare) before leaving
for New York

--Joseph Cornell, Joseph Cornell's Theater of the Mind: Selected Diaries, Letters, and Files, edited by Mary Ann Caws (2000)

Material Memory

In this provocative article, Teresa Barnett defines a type of relic collecting that cannot be captured solely by the Victorian sense of material memory. She uses as her example the schoolteacher and collector Christian Sanderson whose home is now a museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania:


     [Christian] Sanderson's commemorations were more interesting when they dealt with time itself, when they found a formal structure, that is, which somehow encoded a piece of the lost time they were attempting to preserve. Looked at in this way, his relics, solid objects though they are, can be seen as bits of congealed time. And they are at their most poignant--and intriguing--when, in their reified form, they manage to reenact the vanished time of their making.
     To commemorate Woodrow Wilson's death, for instance, Sanderson saved the pages of a counting exercise his schoolchildren were working on as the school bell tolled for the funeral. That exercise may summon memory simply because it was literally "on the spot" at the significant moment, but in a twist that can be seen as a form of wit, it also summons memory through its simple mimetic form: "one, two, three, four, five," like the tolling of the bell itself, as if the children transcribed the knell of mourning onto the coarse paper of their exercise books. Looking at the counting exercise some seventy years later, then, is like summoning up a fragment of 1920s time.

--Teresa Barnett, "Tradition and the Individual Memory: The Case of Christian C. Sanderson" in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, Edited by Leah Dilworth (2003)

Gone

In Maile Meloy's short story, bodies and hopes fall away. Missing limbs--dismemberment--signify not only crippling loss but impotence. More quotes to come that feature missing limbs, amputation and bodily damage.


       Cort set his water glass down by the sink. "The baby's feet are falling off," he said. "One of them's already gone."
     "The tendon isn't growing back and there's nothing there to hold the feet on," he said. "Perfectly good horse except she's not going to have any feet." His voice cracked on the word "feet." He turned and rummaged through his kitchen drawer, beneath unpaid bills and Kite's registration papers, until he found two small keys on a ring that jangled in his hand. I watched him go into the laundry room, unlock the file cabinet there and bring out a pistol with a revolving chamber. The gun dangled awkwardly in his hand [...]
He made a noise that sounded like a sob but couldn't be; I'd never seen him cry. The baby was outside waiting, and Cort's hair against my face smelled like shampoo and hay. He put his arms around me and pulled me closer, and we sat there a long time, not saying anything, so the filly could stay.

---Maile Meloy, "Kite Whistler Aquamarine" in Half in Love (2002)

Mystic Gardening: Two From Jewett

These wonderfully rich and evocative quotes from Sarah Orne Jewett's masterpiece afford us a view not only of coastal Maine in the nineteenth century, but of alternative medicine during this period. Mrs. Todd's work is understood as an indispensable supplement to that of the town doctor and prompts reflection on our own contemporary commitment to seeking therapies outside of traditional medicine--a sense, perhaps, of the inadequacies of medicine as practiced today. But the pleasure of these passages comes from the sense it gives us of abundance, of a fragrant space filled with plants and people--a fragrance that signifies a human presence.

"Mrs. Todd was an ardent lover of herbs, both wild and tame, and the sea-breezes blew into the low end-window of the house laden with not only sweet-brier and sweet-mary, but balm and sage and borage and mint, wormwood and southernwood. If Mrs. Todd had occasion to step into the far corner of her herb plot, she trod heavily upon thyme, and made its fragrant presence known with all the rest. Being a very large person, her full skirts brushed and bent almost every slender stalk that her feet missed. You could always tell when she was stepping about there, even when you were half awake in the morning, and learned to know, in the course of a few weeks' experience, in exactly which corner of the garden she might be."

"At one side of this herb plot were other growths of a rustic pharmacopoeia, great treasures and rarites among the commoner herbs. There were some strange and pungent odors that roused a dim sense and remembrance of something in the forgotten past. Some of these might once have belonged to sacred and mystic rites, and have had some occult knowledge handed with them down the centuries; but now they pertained only to humble compounds brewed at intervals with molasses or vinegar or spriits in a small cauldron on Mrs. Todd's kitchen stove. They were dispensed to suffering neighbors, who usually came at night as if by stealth, bringing their own ancient-looking vials to be filled."

---Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896)

Managing

Joan Didion offers some insight into the elite class and its illusion of control:

One thing I noticed during the course of those weeks at UCLA was that many people I knew, whether in New York or California or in other places, shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice. The management skills of these people were in fact prodigious. The power of their telephone numbers was in fact unmatched. I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events. If my mother was suddenly hospitalized in Tunis I could arrange for the American consul to bring her English-language newspapers and get her onto an Air France flight to meet my brother in Paris. If Quintana was suddenly stranded in the Nice airport I could arrange with someone at British Airways to get her onto a BA flight to meet her cousin in London. Yet I had always at some level apprehended, because I was born fearful, that some events in life would remain beyond my ability to control or manage them. Some events would just happen. This was one of those events.

---Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)

The Difference Between Jealousy and Envy

In this quote, taken from his autobiographical work, A Small Boy and Others, James helps to explain the difference between two words that we often assume to be synonymous. James identifies his own state of suffering to be one of envy...the slightly less vile version of these two green-eyed evils.


...if jealousy bears, as I think, on what one sees one's own companions able to do--as against one's own falling short---envy, as I knew it at least, was simply of what they were, or in other words of a certain sort of richer consciousness supposed, doubtless often too freely supposed, in them. They were so other--that was what I felt; and to be other, other almost anyhow, seemed as good as the probable taste of the bright compound wistfully watched in the confectioner's window; unattainable, impossible, of course, but as to which just this impossibility and that privation kept those active proceedings in which jealousy seeks relief quite out of the question....It wasn't that I wished to change with every one, with any one at a venture, but that I saw "gifts" everywhere but as mine and that I scarce know whether to call the effect of this miserable or monstrous. It was the effect at least of self-abandonment--I mean to visions.

---Henry James, A Small Boy and Others (1913)

Meant to Be

It was not, Britomart, thy wandring eye
Glauncing unwares in charmed looking glass,
But the straight course of heavenly destiny,
Led with eternall providence, that has
Guided thy glaunce, to bring his will to pas:
Ne is thy fate, ne is thy fortune ill,
To love the prowest knight, that ever was
Therefore submit thy wayes unto his will,
And do by all dew means thy destiny fulfill.

---Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queen (1590)

Longing

Take note of Edith Wharton's use of punctuation marks and italics in this quote which captures the sharpness of intense longing and reunion:


"Do you know-- I hardly remembered you?"


"Hardly remembered me?"


"I mean: how shall I explain? I--it's always so. Each time you happen to me all over again.

--Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)

Grief

The Honeybee is fascinated by stories that make reference to sign language. Perhaps this is because sign language is at once very expressive and yet very limited in its pared-down status as an "informational language" that eschews details and  in some sense, defies nuance. But sign language as performance conveys a deeper message than a simple translation will allow. Perhaps we might consider it as a form of dance. Amy Hempel's story makes especially poignant use of sign language in this story, in which the simplicity of this performative language conveys the experience of grief in an understated way:

I think of the chimp, the one with the talking hands.
In the course of the experiment, that chimp had a baby. Imagine how her trainers must have thrilled when the mother, without prompting, began to sign to her newborn.
Baby, drink milk.
Baby, play ball.
And when the baby died, the mother stood over the body, her wrinkled hands moving with animal grace, forming again and again the words: Baby, come hug, Baby come hug, fluent now in the language of grief.

---Amy Hempel, "In the Cemetery Where Al Jolson is Buried," The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel, 2007.

Mad Talent

Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's study of Enron invites speculation on how competition manifests itself in the workplace. "Guys with spikes" almost seems to be a double entendre:

[Skilling] used to say that he liked to hire "guys with spikes." By this, he meaant that if an executive had a singular narrow talent--a spike--Skilling was willing to bring him into Enron and lavish him with money, no matter what his other shortcomings. Egomaniacs, social misfits, backstabbers, devotees of strip clubs: Skilling didn't really care about their foibles so long as they had a skill he needed. Nor did it much matter to him whether they were team players. "Jeff could care less whether people got along with each other," says one of his early hires. "In many cases, he felt it was better if they didn't get along, since it created a level of tension that he believed was good for helping people come up with new ideas." A former trading executive adds: "Jeff always believed pitting three people against each other would be the quickest way to assure the best ideas bubbled to the top. He wanted them to fight."

---Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron, 2003.

Glorious Amplitude

Lois Palken Rudnick's edited volume offers this rich nugget from Mabel Dodge Luhan....a celebration of one very large body that defies conventional expectations:

[In the summer of 1912] Gertrude and Alice came to stay at the villa. The year before, Gertrude had lived in Fiesole--and she had trudged down one hill and across town and up another to see us. She used to wear a sort of kimono made of brown corduroy in the hot Tuscan summertime, and arrive just sweating, her face parboiled. And when she sat down, fanning herself with her broad-brimmed hat with its wilted, dark brown ribbons, she exhaled a vivid steam around her. When she got up she frankly used to pull her clothes off from where they stuck to her great legs. Yet with all this she was not at all repulsive. On the contrary, she was positively, richly attractive in her grand ampleur. She always seemed to like her own fat anyway and that usually helps other people to accept it. She had none of the funny embarrassment Anglo-Saxons have about flesh.

---Mabel Dodge Luhan, European Experiences, in Intimate Memories: The Autobiography of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edited by Lois Palken Rudnick, 1999.

Degenerate Tourists

John Kennedy Toole's novel refers to hot dogs as "gimmicks." Oddly enough this portion of the pollen suggests the broader category of food and its strange manifestations in literature and elsewhere:

     "I'm gonna put you down in the French Quarter."

     "What?" Ignatius thundered. "Do you think that I am going to perambulate about in that sinkhole of vice? No, I am afraid that the Quarter is out of the question. My psyche would crumble in the atmosphere. Besides, the streets are narrow and dangerous there. I could easily be struck down in traffic or be wedged against a building."

     "Take it or leave it, you fat bastard. That's the last chance you get." Mr Clyde's scar was beginning to whiten again.

     "It is? Well, please don't have another seizure. You may tumble into that vat of franks and scald yourself. If you insist, I imagine that I shall have to trundle my franks down into Sodom and Gomorrah."

     "Okay. Then it's settled. You come in tomorrow morning, we'll fix you up with some gimmicks."

     "I can't promise you that many hot dogs will be sold in the Quarter. I will probably be kept busy every moment protecting my honor against those fiends who live down there."

     "You get mostly the tourist trade in the Quarter."

     "That's even worse. Only degenerates go touring. Personally, I have been out of the city only once. By the way, have I ever told you about that particular pilgrimage to Baton Rouge? Outside the city limits there are many horrors."

---John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980)

Night Drama

Here, Van Gogh describes the theatrical qualities of the cafe.  Van Gogh's Night Cafe is seductive, eerie, irresistible:

"In my picture of Night Cafe I have tried to express the idea that the cafe is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad, or commit a crime."



"Pale sulfur and greenish citron-yellow color"....a "night picture without any black in it"..."beautiful blue and violet and green"..."it amuses me enormously to paint the night right on the spot"..."A cafe, with the terrace lit up by a big gas lamp in the blue night, and a corner of a starry blue sky."

---Vincent Van Gogh, Letters to Theo, September 1888

Numbness

Jhumpa Lahiri captures at once the displacement of the immigrant and the enervation and ill-fittedness of modern motherhood:

His mother nibbled Mrs. Sen's concoctions with eyes cast upward, in search of an opinion. She kept her knees pressed together, the high heels she never removed pressed into the pear-colored carpet. "It's delicious," she would conclude, setting down the plate after a bite or two. Eliot knew she didn't like the tastes; she'd told him so once in the car. He also knew she didn't eat lunch at work, because the first thing she did when they were back at the beach house was pour herself a glass of wine and eat bread and cheese, sometimes so much of it that she wasn't hungry for the pizza they normally ordered for dinner. She sat at the table as he ate, drinking more wine and asking how his day was, but eventually she went to the deck to smoke a cigarette, leaving Eliot to wrap up the leftovers.

---Jhumpa Lahiri, "Mrs. Sen's," Interpreter of Maladies (1999)

Body Parts

This new exhibit at Houston's Menil Collection assembles a wide range of representations of fragmented bodies, including reliquaries, surrealist paintings and sculptures, and tribal arts that meditate on this theme.  Upon entering the exhibit, the visitor encounters a set of mirrors installed at an angle that produces a fragmented reflection.  The visitor is thus made a part of the displays in a manner that underscores the centurality of identity and selfhood to any discussion of bodily fragmentation:

Exaggerated scale is also deployed in a fifteenth-century French reliquary that contains bone fragments. Depicting an erect and over-sized index finger, it speaks to the continued vitality of the body, even after death, from which the bones issued. Similar themes can be addressed through a reduction of scale...In one photogram, Light Borne in Darkness, ca. 1951, the artists' hands appear ethereal and weightless. This, combined with the hands' diminutive scale, would seem to allude to those immaterial aspects of the subject--intentionality and consciousness--that cannot be captured by its physical boundaries.

--Mary Lambrakos, Curatorial Assistant, Menil Collection. From the exhibition pamphlet for "Body in Fragments" on display at the Menil from August 21, 2009--February 28, 2010.

Gifts

Julia Glass only hints at the significance of bodily gifts in this quote from her National Book Award winning novel Three Junes.  The novel focuses on several different love relationships, including the one featured below between the intense NYC bookstore owner and art historian, Fenno, and his (temporary) partner, free-wheeling Tony: 

Among those charms was Tony's talent for random gifts. A linen shirt the perfect cobalt blue of hyacinths. A beautiful if battered reliquary shaped like a miniature foot (a lid where the ankle would be, a primitive glass window over the metatarsals, because it had once purportedly held such a bone from the foot of a saint). A first edition of William Carlos Williams's Journey to Love (its title, I guessed, more a tease than a promise). Each gift presented without fanfare or occasion, wrapped in want ads or not at all, handed over as we walked along the street or sat together in a taxi, stalled in traffic. ("Here. Picked this up for you.")

---Julia Glass, Three Junes

Absent Parents

Micky Thompson continues to show himself as charming child, with cheerful disposition, good manners, and excellent health. Enquiry reveals that he is an orphan, which does not surprise me in the least. Have often noticed that absence of parental solicitude usually very beneficial to offspring.

--E.M. Delafield, Diary of a Provincial Lady

Material Things

In this superb collection edited by Gary Schmidgall (sort of a commonplace book of Whitman) we begin to understand the deeper impact of everyday material things on the act of composition:

Whitman explains his preference for Mammoth Falcon quill pens: "I find I get to like the vast pens: they give me something to take hold of: they encourage me to write spacious things. There's a spiritual side: more than that: a spiritual outcome." A few days later: "it makes a great difference what sort of pen...I am sensitive--I especially hate the little bits of pens--the dwarf ladylike pens: I don't seem to be able to do anything fullsized with them: they interfere with my ideas--break my spirit."

---Taken from Intimate with Walt: Selections from Whitman's Conversations with Horace Traubel 1888-1892, Edited by Gary Schmidgall.

On Mortality and the Inevitable

True, 'tis an unhappy circumstance of life, that love should ever die before us; and that the man so often should outlive the lover. But say what you will, 'tis better to be left than never to have been loved. To pass our youth in dull indifference, to refuse the sweets of life because they once must leave us, is as preposterous as to wish to have been born old, because we one day must be old. For my part, my youth may wear and waste, but it shall never rust in my possession.

--Congreve, "The Way of the World," Act II, Scene I

On Creativity

Constructiveness is as genuine and irresistible an instinct in man as in the bee or the beaver. Whatever things are plastic to his hands, those things he must remodel into shapes of his own, and the result of the remodeling, however useless it may be, gives him more pleasure than the original thing. The mania of young children for breaking and pulling apart whatever is given them is more often the expression of a rudimentary constructive impulse than of a destructive one.

--William James, The Principles of Psychology

On the alchemy of composition

The bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram. Even so with pieces borrowed from others, he will transform and blend them to make a work that is all his own, to wit, his judgment. His education, work, and study aim only at forming this.

--Michel de Montaigne, Essais, "Of the education of children."