"Up!"

There is Command in the Word of the King;
Justice in the Word of the Law;
Reverence in the Word of the Scripture;
But Rapture in the Word of the Babe.

On this 6th
day of July
18 97

Baby Spoke its First Word

Saying

"Up"

---F. Scott Fitzgerald's baby book (entries recorded by his mother Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald)

Reprinted in The Romantic Egoists: a pictorial autobiography from the scrapbooks and albums of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Eds. Matthew J. Bruccoli, Scottie Fitzgerald Smith, and Joan P. Kerr with art editor Margareta F. Lyons (1974)

Unraveled, Mended, Unraveled, Mended

     "From a needlework book, I learned to cast on.  In the test piece, I got the gauge and correct tension. Knit and purl came naturally, as though my fingers had been rubbed in spiderwebs at birth.  The sliding of the needles was as rhythmic as water.
     Learning to knit was the obvious thing.  The separation of tangled threads, the working-together of raveled ends into something tangible and whole--this mending was as confounding as the groom who drives into a stop sign on the way to his wedding.  Because symptoms mean just what they are.  What about the woman whose empty hand won't close because she cannot grasp that her child is gone? 
      [...]
     Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep.
     Begin, slip together, increase, continue, repeat."

---Amy Hempel, "Beg, sl tog, inc, cont, rep"

In this story, knitting is a metaphor for the narrator's painful feelings of loss following an abortion--a symbol of her attempts at self-repair.  Knitting fascinates the narrator for its "compression of language into code," the shorthand instructions that only she and  others who study the craft can comprehend.   

Yet knitting is not merely a motif for loss within this story.  The knitting patterns  or "codes" also capture in microcosm the work of the short story itself---its compression and encoding of the human experience, line by line.  In the course of the story, not only yarn, but hair, pasta primavera, and tinsel, become fodder for the narrator's obsession with knitting. "That was the great thing about knitting," the narrator observes, "everything is fiber, the world a world of natural resources."  Similarly, ordinary happenings and tragedies alike become the substance of fiction which captures human unraveling at its darkest moments, yet also offers the glimmer of the possibility of wholeness (however piecemeal) as do the final lines of Hempel's story:

"K tog rem st.  Knit together remaining stitches. 
Cast off loosely." 

Thus the story is hardly limited by its subject matter.   Fiction compresses and encodes life--- the patterns are recognizable. 

Dementia

The word dementia has its root in the Latin dementare, meaning "senseless."  Yet I have found my senses heightened folllowing the loss of intellectual force.  My responsiveness to odor is so strong that sometimes I think I've become a beagle.  Intense spices---Indian, Thai, Mexican--feel exaggerated in their richness; I can become exhausted and confused by eating these foods.  My skin often tingles, sometimes for no discernible reason, sometimes in response to the slightest stimulus.  The same process that stripped me of significant intellectual capacity and numbed my mind seems to have triggered an almost corresponding heightening of sensory and emotional awareness.  Sometimes this can be a maelstrom, sometimes a baptismal immersion.  So when "demented" breaks down into "de" for "out of" and "ment" for "mind"--literally "out of mind,"---I interpret the verbal construction as having positive connotations. Not loony, but liberated.  Forced out of the mind, forced away from my customary cerebral mode of encounter, I have found myself dwelling more in the wilder realms of sense and emotion.  Out of mind and into body, into heart.  An altered state. 

--Floyd Skloot, "Wild in the Woods:  Confessions of a Demented Man" in In the Shadow of Memory (2003)

In 1988, Floyd Skloot contracted a virus that invaded and damaged his brain. Here he describes his loss of "intellectual capacity" in terms of a gain in "emotional awareness.""  Skloot's account is not a saccharine one, however, and his description of his enhanced sensorial perceptions and feelings (throughout the book as a whole) is at turns ironic, humiliating, surprising, bittersweet.  I love his attentiveness here to the etymology of dementia and the way that his reading of the word through the lens of his own experience draws our attention to the ways in which we tend to privilege the intellect.  If clarity of thinking illuminates our world, it does so only by limiting what we can perceive.