Twilight Love

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon these boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou seest the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death's second self that seals up all in rest
In me thou seest the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the deathbed where on it must expire,
Consumed with that which it was nourished by
          This thou perceivst, which makes thy love more strong
          To love that well, which thou must leave ere long

--Shakespeare,  Sonnet 73

Shakespeare on love and impending loss.  The best of his sonnets, in my opinion.

Hands and Feet

   "Mentally, it is tough cutting into the foot because I know how sensitive my own feet are.  Cutting into any part of my body could hurt, but there is something about the feet (as there was about the hands) that makes me squirm at every poke." 


---Marcus 


   "Today we did the hand.  Now I am on the crosstown bus back to the West Side, and I can't stop looking at people's hands.  I feel like tapping someone on the shoulder and saying, 'I know what it looks like inside there---it's beautiful!'
     What incredible organization:  it's simple and complex at the same time.   I strum the back of my seat with my fingers and try to visualize all that is going on inside, like which muscle groups are involved, which nerves, and the order of their electrical commands. I think of my son and how small his hands are and how everything is there functioning, but in miniature.  It's miraculous.  And then I remember backing into our cadaver's rigid left hand, splayed open, palm-side up at the end of his outstretched yellow arm."


---Michael

Journal entries from first year medical students in Gross Anatomy class.  Excerpted from
Anatomy of Anatomy: in images and words (2000)  by Meryl Levin

Memento Mori

"He drew open the two bottom drawers and found little of immediate interest.  There were boxes of writing-paper and envelopes, notepads, a wooden box containing a collection of ballpoint pens and, in the bottom drawer, two folded hand towels and a toilet bag containing soap, a toothbrush and toothpaste.  A smaller zipped bag held Venetia Aldridge's make-up, a small bottle of moisturizer, a compact of pressed powder, a single lipstick.

Kate said:  'Expensive but minimal.'


Dalgliesh heard in her voice what he himself had so often felt.  It was the small chosen artefacts of daily life which produced the most poignant memento mori. "


--P.D. James, A Certain Justice (1997)


Is it true that the most quotidian material objects most aptly characterize and memorialize a person?  Or is it the keepsakes and treasured objects?  Or is it those meant for public exhibition and display--the furnishings, paintings, hard-covered books?   While all such objects say something about a person, I suspect that murder mystery writer P.D. James correctly discerns that everyday material culture--particularly items such as toiletries which are most intimately in contact with a body--are the most revelatory. 


James also interestingly adapts the meaning of memento mori in this passage.  Typically, such "reminders of death" are meant to underscore life's brevity and to remind the living that they too are soon to die.  Memento mori as such perform a kind of leveling fuction as opposed to making one person distinct.  However, the half-used cosmetic or sundry item is one of the most powerful conveyors of absence, loss, and indeed, the brevity of life. 

Linear Danger Area

The Black Snake

When the black snake
flashed onto the morning road,
and the truck could not swerve---
death, that is how it happens.

Now he lies looped and useless
as an old bicycle tire.
I stop the car
and carry him into the bushes.

He is as cool and gleaming
as a braided whip, he is as beautiful and quiet
as a dead brother.
I leave him under the leaves

and drive on, thinking
about death: its suddenness,
its terrible weight,
its certain coming. Yet under

reason burns a brighter fire, which the bones
have always preferred.
It is the story of endless fortune.
It says to oblivion: not me!

It is the light at the center of every cell.
It is what sent the snake coiling and flowing forward
happily all spring through the green leaves before
he came to the road.

---Mary Oliver, "The Black Snake"

A Circular Staircase

Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

---Linda Pastan,  excerpted from the poem "The Five Stages of Grief" reprinted in On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays (Eds. Richard Reynolds and John Stone)

In this wry, and a certain points, satiric poem Linda Pastan exposes the less clinical side of the experience of grief.  I selected this poem because its final lines manage to convey the feeling of futility--the sisyphean experience of grief.  One vicariously senses not only circularity but falling down the staircase.  Here is the poem in full:

The night I lost you
someone pointed me towards
the Five Stages of Grief.
Go that way, they said,
it's easy, like learning to climb
stairs after an amputation.
And so I climbed.
Denial was first.
I sat down at breakfast
carefully setting the table
for two.  I passed you the toast--
you sat there.  I passed
you the paper--you hid
behind it.
Anger seemed more familiar.
I burned the toast, snatched
the paper and read the headlines myself.
But they mentioned your departure,
and so I moved on to
Bargaining.  What can I exchange
for you?  The silence
after storms?  My typing fingers?
Before I could decide, Depression
came puffing up, a poor relation
its suitcase tied together
with string.  In the suitcase
were bandages for the eyes
and bottles of sleep.  I slid
all the way down the stairs
feeling nothing.
And all the time Hope
flashed on and off
in defective neon.
Hope was a signpost pointing straight in the air.
Hope was my uncle's middle name,
he died of it.
After a year I am still climbing
thought my feet slip on your stone face.
The treeline
has long since disappeared;
green is a color
I have forgotten.
But now I see what I am climbing
towards:  Acceptance
written in capital letters,
a special headline:
Acceptance,
its name in lights.
I struggle on,
waving and shouting,
Below, my whole life spreads its surf,
all the landscapes I've ever known
or dreamed of.  Below
a fish jumps: the pulse
in your neck.
Acceptance, I finally
reach it.
But something is wrong.
Grief is a circular staircase.
I have lost you.

Botched

When I was a month pregnant, the great
clots of blood appeared in the pale
green swaying water of the toilet.
Dark red like black in the salty
translucent brine, like forms of life
appearing, jelly-fish with the clear-cut
shapes of fungi.

That was the only appearance made by that
child, the dark, scalloped shapes
falling slowly.  A month later
our son was conceived, and I never went back
to mourn the one who came as far as the
sill with its information:  that we could
botch something, you and I.  All wrapped in purple it floated away, like a messenger
put to death for bearing bad news.

---Sharon Olds,  "Miscarriage" reprinted in On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays (Eds. Richard Reynolds and John Stone)

I really love Olds' choice of words--especially "information" and "messenger" in this quote. But the most memorable part of this poem is the information offered at the sill :  " ...that we could botch something, you and I."

A Worn-Out Baseball

"When my father's father died in the French Quarter of New Orleans sixty years ago, the popularly accepted story was that on a humid night in mid-August, he had eaten a dozen bananas and then taken a cold bath.  He was a man of eighty-seven whose life had been a strenuous assertion of his appetites, and this explanation suited him, just as it suited his friends in the French Quarter.  It would be more satisfying to me, it would allow me to feel that I owned my illness, if my urologist were to say: 'You know, you've beat the hell out of this prostate of yours.  It looks like a worn-out baseball.'  Nobody wants an anonymous illness.  I'd much rather think that I brought it on myself than that it was a mere accident of nature." 

---Anatole Broyard, "Doctor, Talk to Me"

Today's selection is taken from On Doctoring: Stories, Poems, Essays edited by Richard Reynolds, MD and John Stone, MD (with Lois LaCivita Nixon PhD, M.P.H. and Delese Wear, PhD). This book is given to all first year medical students in the United States and includes literary works (plays, poems, short stories, excerpts) by dozens of well-known authors on the subject of doctoring and what it entails.  Some of these authors, such as the American modernist poet, William Carlos Williams, were doctors themselves and share their unique insights into the doctor-patient relationship.

Broyard is both wise and humorous in acknowledging the importance of fitting the diagnosis to the patient's needs and personality.  This does not entail misconstruing the illness, but rather shaping the narrative of that illness so that it is consistent with the life of the suffering subject. This is not a small distinction.  In the case of Broyard's grandfather who over-indulged, the tale of  the bananas and cold baths that brought him to his death is wildly improbable, yet nonetheless "fits" the character of the man.  His death, far from happening to him,  is cast simply as the natural culmination of a life lived at a high pitch.   

In the similar case of Broyard himself, it is clear that he desires agency.  He does not want the doctor's reassurance that his prostate cancer is not his fault, a mere chance or accidental happening. Rather, he wants to know that his prostate was expended--hilariously "beat" (got to love that verb choice) through over-use. As Broyard concludes, "If only the patient could be allowed to see his illness as not so much a failure of his body as a natural consumption of it."  

Mother Love

"At bedtime, instead of my charming boy, ... I found a lifeless corpse--laid out in the white robes of innocence and death.  Though I wept and pressed him, he could not look at me.  How could I endure it--much less compose myself--but by believing him gone to perfect rest and happiness.--there to wait for his father and mother."


        ---Diary of Louisa Park,  qtd. in Robin Jaffee Frank's Love and Loss: American Portrait and Mourning Miniatures (2000).  Frank accredits Louisa Park's diary entries for Dec 14 and 24, 1800 (American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, MA) and  quotes from Nancy Schrom Dye and Daniel Blake Smith, "Mother Love and Infant Death, 1750-1920" Journal of American History 73 (September 1986), 332.

I have selected this quote from Robin Jaffee Frank's superb volume on portrait and mourning miniatures, a book that elegantly traces the history of this artistic and decorative form.  This particular quote does not reference the portrait (or the material culture of mourning) that are the subjects of Frank's book, but it does suggests the sentimental underpinnings of the early nineteenth century  that located comfort in portrait miniatures, hairwork, and other relics of the dead.  What draws me to this quote, however, is the way that it captures the univeral aspect of grief --the seeming impossibility of "enduring" loss.   The death of a child disrupts the natural order of things and cannot be fathomed.  The acceptance of death that marked an earlier era gives way to the more reassuring promise of reunion between mother and child. 


In my title, I tip my hat to the late blogger, Cancer Baby  who died from ovarian cancer in May of 2006 at the age of 33.  Her entry "(M)otherlove" a poem that documents her own mother's stunned --yet silent reaction--to her question, "What will you do if I die?"  comes to mind as I work through Frank's art history work. 

Adultery and Suicide

"His Wife had said: 'If you don't give her up, I'll throw myself from the roof.' He had not given her up, and his wife had thrown herself from the roof."

--Edith Wharton, "The Day of the Funeral" 

Leave it to Wharton to treat two taboo subjects with dry humor in the opening sentences of this short story which reflects on adultery and its aftermath.

Euthanasia

"La vraie morale se moque de la morale...
We perish because we follow other men's examples...
Socrates used to call the opinions of the many by the name of Lamiae--bugbears to frighten children...."


---Edith Wharton, The Fruit of the Tree (1907)

In Edith Wharton's The Fruit of the Tree a young nurse, Justine, administers an overdose of morphine to her friend Bessy, who has been paralyzed in a riding accident. Justine discusses Bessy's case with her doctors, her clergyman, and her lawyer--all of whom confirm that "human life is sacred" and that she must be kept alive at all costs.  Stumbling into the library at Bessy's estate, Justine finds these quotes (among others) carefully pencilled into a flyleaf in a volume of Bacon that belongs to Bessy's husband, John.  These little snippets, taken from Pascal, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius, provide her with the strength of conviction that she needs to euthanize her friend.   Yet, while Justine never doubts the rightness of her decision, she is made to pay the price for venturing outside the bounds of societal constraints and norms. 

 One of the book's most interesting twists is its entwinement of euthanasia with feminist politics---that a woman could make a rational (as opposed to emotional) decision to end her friend's life is thought to be the most disturbing aspect of the case.  The other characters are willing to let Justine off the hook if only she will confess to having made the decision while distraught over her friend's condition. But because she insists on defending herself by explaining her careful thinking, she is condemned. 


These quotes induce goose-bumps and provoke deep contemplation about how we arrive at our sense of what is right and what is wrong. The rules we live by are never so simple and so clear as we might wish for them to be.

Hair Part II: Pieces of Me

Today's quote for this multi-part series on Hair  is taken from Helen Sheumaker's fascinating study, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America. This study traces the rise and fall of hairwork (hair jewelry, wreaths, portrait miniatures including locks of hair) as an object of sentiment and devotion as the once hand-made fanciwork became increasingly commercialized:

     In the eighteenth century, the sentimental associations of hair were obliquely displayed; by the nineteenth century, hairwork and the sentimentality it conveyed was worn for others to observe. This practice revealed a paradox about sentimentality. While display of one's sentimentality was essential to being regarded as sentimental, that same exhibition could easily be construed as ostentatious, vulgar, and insincere. Fashion was constantly in flux, it was superficial, and it was self-aggrandizing. It opposed the sincerity that women in particular were supposed to possess. Fashion was expressed with goods, and therefore was opposed to the domestic sphere. Thus, those constant fluctuations in styles threatened to undermine the premise of sentimentality itself.
     Even as hairwork revealed the dissonance between genuine emotion and frivolous fashionableness, it attempted a remedy.  Hair's undeniable relationship to an individual asserted a sincerity of character that transcended the hypocrisy that fahionableness implied.  The mid-nineteenth century was the height of the popularity of hairwork perhaps because as fashion was criticized as being particularly hypocritical, hairwork's genuiness was being asserted.  On the one hand, hair jewelry was very much a commodity, buttressed as it was by marketing and salesmanship; on the other hand, it was exactly that which could not be completely commodified.  Hair jewelry provided a way to forestall the apparent effects of fashion in the market and in the social world" (20-21).

--Helen Sheumaker, Love Entwined: The Curious History of Hairwork in America, (2007)

Boundaries Part VI: Inconceivable

In this final selection for "Boundaries" I offer you the gift of a poem by Donald Hall from his collection, Without, which documents his wife Jane Kenyon's bout with leukemia and eventual death in 1995 at the age of forty-eight. Today's quote is the third section of "Song for Lucy." It features an object--a tourmaline ring--that underscores the boundary between life and death, the material embodiment of their desperate hope.

     Alone together a moment
on the twenty-second anniversary
     of their wedding,
he clasped her as she stood
     at the sink, pressing
into her backside, rubbing his cheek
     against the stubble
of her skull. He gave her a ring
     of pink tourmaline
with nine small diamonds around it.
     She put it on her finger
and immediately named it Please Don't Die.
     They kissed and Jane
whispered, "Timor mortis conturbat me."

--Donald Hall, Without, (1998)

Boundaries Part V: Dead Bodies

Today's quote comes from Michael Sappol's study of the rise of anatomy as a medical discipline in the nineteenth century and its relationship to racial, gendered, and class-based identity politics. This study moves fluidly from the dissection table to the funeral parlor, dime museum, and literary works and treatises to trace the complex way in which nineteenth century persons located identity within the body. Here Sappol considers the role of funerary practice in securing the meaning of selfhood:

"If death was a haven in a heartless world, then here the anatomist and the grave robber willfully transgressed. Against the invasion of the body snatchers, the living struggled mightily to protect the honor of their dead, to safeguard the material integrity of their helpless dead selves, to narrate their lives and therefore their deaths. For them selfhood did not terminate with death; rather, death stripped away the duplicitous masks and inessentials of being, leaving an existentially pure residue. Post-mortem photoportraiture, which from the earliest days of photography emerged as one of the most popular genres of the new medium, was intended not so much for spectatorship, but to freeze the self into an iconic last frame--many of the pictures were tucked away as keepsakes, never meant to be displayed, viewed only infrequently or not at all. Nineteenth-century Americans of all classes took this very seriously: how one died fixed symbolically how one lived"(39).
--Michael Sappol, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Ninteenth Century America (2002)

Boundaries Part IV: Incarnation

Today's quotes come Myra Jehlen's essay "F.P." in which she recounts the death of a friend. The first quote captures her encounter with the permanence of death, something she discovers through the unmalleability of her friend's body:


"They said to choose clothes in which they would 'prepare' her. I thought, having had to die, she shouldn't have to undergo being prepared and said I would dress her, not knowing how difficult it is to dress a dead person. To begin with, I couldn't pull out the intravenous tube that still connected her to a morphine drip. The tube had been inserted into a catheter through which she had been undergoing a chemotherapy. When I tried to pull out the tube, blood seeped from the opening of the catheter. So instead I cut the tube and so doing saw that she was dead. I had wanted her to wear a favroite gray cashmere turtleneck, but I couldn't put it on her. She was too heavy, although she weighed less than eighty pounds, and too stiff, so I dressed her in a shift and pants. She looked terrible, yet fully and definitely herself. You're never so wholly incarnate as in death.
When I was dressing my friend, I expected her to help. The utter stillness of her arms and legs filled me with hopelessness."

In the second quote, Jehlen describes her own feeling of being "stuck" in the memory of a last excursion with her friend and "stuck" in the night before she died. But in an interesting twist, she juxtaposes another story of a woman who is "stuck" in the night of her child's birth. As Jehlen muses:

     "You get stuck, then, when you meet up with something that makes the limit of your perpetual motion just too obvious.

     Stuck, you turn back. My friend didn't appear to me, so I made her appear: one night, I dreamed she had come back to life, or rather that she hadn't died. At first, in my dream, she was as she was in the moments before she died. But, in the dream, as I bent over to see how she was, she grew better and better, until, in the dream, I called out to the doctor to do something, since something could be done."


---Myra Jehlen, "F.P." in Raritan, Spring 2002

Boundaries Part III The Harlem Book of the Dead Part II

This third installment of quotes focusing on the boundary between life and death (and the second installment of quotes from The Harlem Book of the Dead) features a portion of the interview between Camille Billops and James Van der Zee conducted in his 91st year of life. Van Der Zee not only photographed dead strangers, but also his own mother (who died at seventy-five) and daughter (who died at the age of sixteen). If Van der Zee's responses seem strange to modern ears for their pragmatic viewpoint towards life and death, they also offer a strange comfort in their refusal to make too much of either of these states of being--or perhaps too much of a distinction between either state of being.


The conversation begins with this comment from Van Der Zee:

"Why should a spirited mortal feel proud, when like a swift, fleet meteor or fast-flying cloud, man passes through life to his rest in the grave?" They've asked me, "How do I feel?" I told them that there's nothing to it; you do things the way they ought to be done. I don't see anything to be proud about. It's pretty difficult for a man to feel proud when knowing as he does the short space of time he's here and all paths, even those of our greatest glory, lead but to the grave. So it is very difficult to feel proud when Death says this. You're here today and gone sometimes today."

His description of his feelings about the death of his one-year old son, Emile seems to illustrate a surprising detachment, and yet this word does not capture the whole of his sentiment:

"I think he came when we was living in the Victoria Apartments on Lenox Avenue [in New York City] at that time. He only lived a year, and I didn't get a chance to know too much about him."

Not troubled by his role, he relates a mildly humorous dream that he had about a photographic subject. The humor emanates from his own response to the curious behavior of the subject. But in referencing a dream world Van Der Zee's commentary also draws attention to a space that seems to reside between life and death...the surrealist dream world:

"One time I dreamed I went to make a picture of a dead woman who reached in her chest and took out her heart and threw it over here, then she reached in there and took out something else and threw it over there. I just waited to see if she was going to take out something else...but I wasn't scared or nothing like that in the dream."

And finally, his thoughts on death in general.

Billops: HOW DO YOU SEE DEATH, MR. VAN DER ZEE?


Van Der Zee: So when one more clean shirt lasts me the rest of time. When I pass out on this long journey that I shall ever make and I cease to soothe with soft words and song a heart in which there is an ache, I trust that tears will dim few eyes and those who do weep will soon forget.


Billops (editorial note): (At this point, Mr. Van Der Zee lights up his cigar.)



--Camille Billops, Owen Dodson, & James Van Der Zee, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

Boundaries Part II The Harlem Book of the Dead Part I

Continuing with the theme of the boundary between life and death, today's group of quotes are taken from Owen Dodson's captions for The Harlem Book of the Dead, an experimental documentary published in 1978. The work as a whole is comprised of commercial funerary images from Harlem of the 1920s and 1930s taken by African-American photographer James Van Der Zee, an interview with Van Der Zee conducted by Camille Billops, and, as mentioned, poems and captions by Owen Dodson. While it is impossible to fully grasp the power of this text without displaying the images, a few brief quotes offer a sense of its strangely pragmatic and yet poignant viewpoint towards death--and life.


Owen Dodson's startling poetic captions illustrate the rhetorical device of prosopopoeia,--revitalizing the dead by allowing them to speak again as in this quote, which accompanies a photograph of a dead man posed by Van Der Zee with the prop of a newspaper:

"I prayed that on the day I died
Nobody else prominent would be dead
The obituary page was supposed to be all about me today.
Florence Mills, the greatest, died on my day
Look-a-here Lord,
I was a faithful servant
Over many a money year."

In others, such as ones featuring parents holding their dead infants, the living address the dead with the hope of reunion:

"You'll always be my baby now, Johnella. Dream sometimes of Papa.
When you marry an angel boy,
The very best,
I'll attend your wedding."

Sometimes the dead speak to each other, as in this caption which accompanies a double funeral (and one of the most resonant of the work):

"We grew so far away from each other
And got lonesome. Please was
Our only vocabulary.
Now and again: Will you be with me please.
A word with a vegetable sound:
Please..."

Tomorrow, excerpts from Camille Billops' interview with Van der Zee...

---Camille Billops, Owen Dodson & James Van Der Zee, with a foreword by Toni Morrison, The Harlem Book of the Dead (1978)

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)

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)

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)