Sunday Morning Thoughts

"Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit up from within."
- Teilhard de Chardin

Nick Flynn quotes de Chardin in his memoir. He quotes a lot of people at the beginning, and then he shifts into his own voice. He mentions that catharsis, in Greek, is more of a practice than an event (282). I think that this might be the perfect description of grief for which I've spent three and a half months searching. I conceptualizer it as a Derridean event (my iPad does not know this adjective - it autocorrects to "deride and").

I open my window to air things out. I lie in my sunbeam, just my legs coated in its rays. I keep an eye on the cat, ready for her surgery 24 hours ahead of time. I know I need to get up, but I lie still a moment longer, and listen to the birds hiring, trying to turn this event into a practice.

Life Lessons from Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay

I sped through Sarah Manguso's Two Kinds of Decay over the weekend. It fits in with my grief and death books - the familiar atmosphere of a hospital, doctors who can't insert IVs, worried family members. The difference is that Manguso lives, and writes another book, which just came for me from the library.

The book is a fascinating study in the representation of illness. Other reviewers have pointed to Manguso's background as a poet to detail the lyricism of her descriptions and the litheness of her form. Often there is just as much white space on a page as there are words. Pairs of sentences stick together and stand out more, one thinks, than most sentences that are clustered together. What would writing be like if we adopted this convention? It fits poetic descriptions of illness and wellness and in between, but would it fit news? Book reviews? Financial statements?

Looked at through my lens of grief, some of her sentences grabbed me by the throat. From page 82: "I started listening to Oldies 103 because it reminded me that something had happened to me since I was sick, and that I was different. And that even if I forgot to stay that way, I'd keep the habit of listening to the new radio station, and it might remind me." I have taken on several new habits and interests in the three short months since my mother's death (spinning, composting, and, to my mother's certain chagrin, fancy makeup). My current favorite authors are ones I didn't know much about when she was alive (though she probably had read at least one of them). Manguso's take on beginnings and endings that center on a dramatic and painful event is more optimistic than mine. It helps me cut away at my tendency to over-memorialize, one which I've miraculously been relatively free of since Mom died, and one which would surely hobble my recovery. (The line between memorializing and fetishizing is a provocative one that I'd like to take on in another post.)

In line with my current interest in the conflict (and harmonies) between movement and stasis, Manguso says this: "I didn’t know it at the time, but I was paying attention. I was not hoping I would learn how to do it, or despairing that I might not learn how to do it. I was unaware that I was learning or practicing or doing anything" (109). The "it" she's talking about doesn't matter for my purposes (and you really should read the book anyway, so go sleuth it out!). I'm interested in the idea of not realizing that you are learning or improving or changing or even backsliding in the moments in which you are doing it. Such confusion is nearly constant - we all, as the cliche goes, learn new things every day - but there must be moments when it doesn't actually need attention paid to it - the point is the learning, not the fact that you know you're doing it. 

Since I'm thinking about the battle between anger and loving kindness anyway, this sentence struck me, too: "I’d have to do harder things before my self-regard lost the mean air that had inflated it" (137). How many of us can say that we puff ourselves up with niceness instead of jealousy or competitiveness or other negative forces? I think one of the common misconceptions about sickness is that it turns people into angels. My mother was a sweetheart, but she certainly got frustrated - less than she could have, in my opinion. Part of what Manguso is doing here is asserting her own right to a complex humanity full of power, fear, anger, meanness, love, and courage. We all have that - maybe it's time to start looking harder at the relative proportions.

Maybe these thoughts aren't life lessons for everyone, but they made me stop and think during a hectic weekend in which I was trying pretty hard not to do either. My mother was my calming agent. Now I have to learn to do it for myself. I'm thirty years old, and I'm re-learning to breathe and be still. 

The Great Bridge, History, and Hipsters.

I guess I've never really been one for reading history books. They're pretty popular in my family and among my friends, but I've always gravitated much more toward fiction and criticism. I was recently handed a copy of David McCullough's The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge and told that as a recent and fervent Brooklynite, I had to read it. 


I couldn't put it down. Now that I'm finished with it, I actually miss it. I wish there was more. My fuzzy memories of McCullough's work from high school history - and his more recent appearance on Colbert - don't do justice to his talent. (My fuzzy memories of reading history textbooks are even less useful, although I was proud of myself for recognizing the Taft-Hartley Act.)


I've been thinking about why I had such an enchanting time reading this particular book. I think part of it is McCullough's open, empathetic prose, and his scrupulous attention to detail. (As a literary critic who does no archival research to speak of, the hours he must have spent gathering his material boggle my mind.) He vividly brought an era to life, and several important figures in my city's history jumped off the page (in particular, John, Washington, and Emily Roebling, and Boss Tweed). Permit me to channel Captain Obvious for a second, and say this: history is magical.

And then there's Brooklyn, with which, to be honest, I am a little obsessed. (I should have moved here years ago, and I think about that on a daily basis.) I am still well into the discovery phase when it comes to my own neighborhood, and now I want to gather all the information I can about its history. 


And then there are hipsters.* When they** bike over that bridge, its history is almost invisible. Heck, it often is for me too, or at least was until I read the book, and I see it every day. But that confluence of modernity and history in one of the most (arguably) trail-blazing cities in the world is a force in which I'm really interested. I keep coming back to cities in a lot of my writing - in fact, I'm doing it right now in an abstract I'm working up right at this very moment. McCullough's book makes me want to keep doing it.


Perhaps I shall. 


*Maybe a tenuous connection. You have to admit that the alliteration with history is nice, and maybe also admit that it made you think.
**Or anyone, really.

Wow

"In another time and in what would seem another world, on a day when two young men were walking on the moon, a very old woman on Long Island would tell reporters that the public excitement over the feat was not so much compared to what she had seen 'on the day they opened the Brooklyn Bridge.'"

-- David McCullough, The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge