Reading in the dark

I am pretty keen on moments of connection between people, I think this is pretty clear. Not only do they not happen a whole lot, but when they do, they usually don't last for long - and the only record that the moment ever happened is just the two of you, walking away and remembering. These moments as far as I know don't leave any indelible trace anywhere; they don't accumulate, don't build toward anything. And if we didn't have memory, it could be as if these moments hadn't happened at all.

Which is why I am always so startled when I come across a physical trace of such a connection, often between people who have never met and never talked, whose only connection is through me - as if I am the connection, and without me they might never have found each other, touched each other across the vast space. I will read something someone has written, and something about the thought or the way that it is captured or the way the writer tried to capture it but failed, something about the attempt strikes me in such a precise way as to pull me back instantly to another moment when I read something by somebody else, a piece of writing that made the same attempt.

It really makes no sense, how sometimes it takes so much effort to commit something to our memory, and other times memory works as if independent of our intentions. I just spent an hour studying words for the GRE, words I probably have mostly forgotten already, and yet I read a poem last night that made me immediately think of this other poem I read last summer maybe one time? The only reason I can give is that both writers were going for the same thing, something that burrows deeper than words; they were going for a feeling, and our capacity for remembering feeling is exquisite. Truth, as Anne Michaels says, must have an emotional dimension - we must feel it in the body. Appropriate, then, that the poem I was reading last night in bed was hers, and the line in question the following:

Rain makes its own night, long mornings with the lamps left on.

Which immediately and without warning drew the following line out of my memory, from a poem by Hart Crane:

Yet how much room for memory there is
in the loose girdle of soft rain.

Anne Michaels and Hart Crane could not be more different - one a young, rash, bohemian New Yorker from a world long disappeared, the other a twentyfirst century Earth mother, a bear-like woman with the voice and face of a girl. But I feel in these two lines that they are thinking the same thing, maybe not exactly the same thing but at least pretty close, and that the thought then comes out of their pen, is processed in a different way, results in a different line.

But the thought is the same. The thought has to do with the externalization of memory, the projecting of an inner state outward that happens to manifest in both cases as rain. In both poems, it is dark out - the Crane example is actually the second line of the poem, the first beginning "There are no stars tonight" - and darkness seems to accentuate the physical senses, makes us more aware of our bodies and what surrounds them; in essence, both authors dim the lights for us so that we experience memory as properties of feeling. For Michaels, it is through shadow, and through a childhood memory we all have of lamps lit during a dark rain; Crane, instead, manages it through sound. Michaels is usually the far more sensate poet; her poems are like a heat lamp before your face, a film of cold, hot, sticky, cool all along the outside and inside of your skin. But Crane, here, in the lovely visual of the loosened girdle, hides tiny flecks of rain-sound, gurgle in girdle and the ssshh of loose/soft. In the last line of the poem, when he returns to rain, there is the unmistakable pitter-patter of the line: "And the rain continues on the roof / With such a sound of gently pitying laughter."

While I am looking at Anne Michaels and Hart Crane, I might point out another uncanny connection, between the last lines of Michaels's first published poem and Crane's last. Here is Michaels in the last line of "Lake of Two Rivers":

The forest flies apart, trees are shaken loose
by my tears,

by love that doesn't fall to earth
but bursts up from the ground, fully formed.

And now Crane in, yes, "The Broken Tower":

--- lift down the eyes
That shrines the quiet lake and swells a tower…
The commodious, tall decorum of that sky
Unseals her earth, and lifts love in its shower.

What does this mean? I'm at a loss. Both have nature dissolving, the forest flung apart, the sky rending, and then an incredible inversion - love, which we associate instinctively with falling, here instead rising from the earth. Did Michaels read Crane? Does it matter? Here is a kind of connection - though not a connection by any definition we would ordinarily use - between two who tried for the same thing and left traces of their trials behind.

Questions

There is the life before your death, which belongs to you, and then there is the life after your death, which belongs to others. If you have made yourself heard, then they will gather in the empty moments just after your passing, when your life-before-death is no more and your life-after-death has not yet begun, to fill the space with memory and fabrication. They will construct you out of half-remembered wisps and unconditional generosities that may barely resemble you, but which are justified by a survivor's guilt and fear - and you will have no say over any of it. It is, after all, no longer your life to live. All the more reason to guard it jealously while it is yours.

By rough estimate, 100 billion beings have graced this earth to date. It occurs to you that being alive is not a default state, as it seems to be when surrounded daily by the living, but an exceptional one. Differently: it is an absurdity that we are alive at all. The rich (I think) don't spend all their time agonizing over what it would mean to be poor, so why do all the living agonize above all over death? It's strange, no, that we obsess over something that doesn't fuss those who have it, and will presumably no longer fuss us when we have it too. There has never been such universal insecurity amongst the members of an elite class.

I would not presume to suggest how you should spend your life-before-death, but if I were to say one thing, it would be to wonder about the use of asking what life is while you are still a member of the living, and not yet a member of the once-living. What is life?, says someone who inhales, breathes out the words, fibres them with a heart's beating blood. I hope it is clear that the question is not a true question, if by definition a question must have an answer. Call it instead a bleat of loneliness, which issues from one so vastly wealthy he knows not what to do with his riches, and is ashamed that this is his greatest dilemma. We, in truth, are crushed by our fortune; we are unable to comprehend, much less survive, the world's ceaseless treasures.

While we stand waiting

Tonight, I was convinced of the separateness of art, thinking about art, and life, and their mutual irrelevance. Maybe I shouldn't say "convinced," though, since there is an air of fatality about the word. (The Germans have it right with "überzeugt," which carries a dimension of excess and over-doing, and reminds me of a happy German accident. I received an e-mail a few days ago from a Québecois whose signature bore the following quote: "Il n'y a qu'un seul endroit où le mot "succès" vient avant le mot "travail"; c'est dans le dictionnaire." The same is true in English, where success comes before work, but not for the Germans, for whom Arbeit - even in the dictionary - comes before all.) In fact, as convinced as I am tonight of this one fact, I am also convinced of another: that one day I will know the opposite to be true, I will come to be certain about the harmony of all those parts that now appear to me as unrelated children. But that's another day. We need to court extremes to make sense of things, and for tonight, this one feels right.

How did this come about? I saw a show today that resisted my efforts to think at it. Yes, at it - because I now see (or am now convinced of something I've suspected for a while) that thinking about art is inimical to art; when we think about art, we are actually thinking about thinking, and art is left alone. To pretend that we can figure anything out about how art works on us is dangerous and potentially blinding (maybe because art introduces things that resist sense into our organized worlds). I saw Anne Michaels at a panel the other day, and scribbled something she said hastily onto the back of my programme, which was roughly: To know something you have to feel it in the body. All knowledge, to be absorbed, must have an emotional dimension. This, aside from being transcendently wise, is also liberating; it allows us to feel things and not have to give an explanation. So back to today: I felt strong emotional reactions to things that made seemingly little sense, and when I came instinctively to that bubble of experience with sharp tools of thought, I found that I could not bring myself to do it. I am sure that thought would have been richly rewarded today, if my tools were up to the task; but instead, for better or for worse, I chose to ride the subway in a suspended state, the bubble left intact.

Understand, I felt such a strong compulsion to make sense of what I saw. That is a hazard of my trade, and for a few moments I wondered if the best professions might not be those that exercise the body and not the mind, like house-building or field-plowing. I wanted to push Experience through my alchemist's apparatus and come out with Insight; but I realized that, no matter what insight I arrived at, I could not preserve or alter the emotional reaction I felt - only, at best, create a new, separate experience. At that moment art and criticism felt very far from each other, and art and life even more distant.

What else to say? Maybe only that this distance can be liberating in a strange and wonderful way - a way that I had not entertained before tonight. I've been having doubts recently about the value of certain things - art, thinking about art - and wondering how all these parts, these unrelated children, can coexist in a meaningful way. I have no answer today; as I said, that particular truth is yet to come. Today I found truth in separateness, because the paradox of art that comes close is that it makes you feel utterly alone.

Normally I retreat after live events into myself, shield myself with my thoughts from the chatter that sprouts from eager, art-addled mouths. To tell the truth, I use art to block life. But tonight art erased itself, and thought went with it, so that only life was left humming in the people and the floors of the subway. I was alone. And I thought of the Stanley Cavell quote that sits at the top of this blog, and inverted it in my mind: Art separates people. But it also brings them together.