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"

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."

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)