8 Years

At the Paterson Falls (acrylic, ink, pencil, papers)

Yesterday I photographed at the Paterson Falls. After all of the tumultuous storms we’ve been having, the falls were powerful, awe-inspiring. Being in Paterson, once again, had me remembering William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. I first read it in its entirety with Rob. Prior to that (like Joyce’s Ulysses) I read parts. Rob loved to read aloud and what I recall most about Paterson was hearing so much of the book. I went back to see if I could find a section that was in mind, but not recalled with fidelity. 

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
              formerly
                               unsuspected. A
world lost,
              a world unsuspected,
                               beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness     .

8 years ago today, Rob died. I will tell you that I never imagined what 8 years out might feel like. During those beginning years, placing one foot in front of the other took effort. The lines from Williams quoted here (from The Descent), remind me that in great loss, there is the possibility for new spaces to open up, in part because of the holes left by grief and loss, in part because the pulse to live is so very strong. At the falls yesterday, I thought of how some slim memories endure, while the greater majority of living and remembering the last 8 years flow with a force not too dissimilar to those falls after much rain.

#SOL17: Clay

Morning Light on Lake Como (M.A Reilly, Argegno, Italy, July 2017) 

Only Hope remained there in an unbreakable home within under the rim of the great jar, and did not fly out at the door.  - Hesiod

I.

Within--there's a new, strange feeling hard to name.  Alongside each breath, a slim sense of possibility plays. It seems to whispers, All things are possible and I lately answer, Yes. And by answering, I see the woman I have been and am becoming.

It has been so long since I simply have felt like me.

II.

Grief yields. Who knew? It felt so much a part of my blood. Cut me and I bled sorrow. Now the sadness, kindled within my own Pandora's jar, has given way to chancing, to looking down at fear by saying, yes, to life.

Friends, the antidote to grief is verb.

III.

Love as action is stronger than grief--stronger than sorrow.  I'll tell you this:

Once, on a snowy cold February morning, my husband told me a secret. He said, "You attract others to you. That's your gift. Live brilliantly. Don't you dare hide away."

And in the 18 months that have gone by since then, I have hidden and stood among others. Both felt unfamiliar until being among others, known and new began to feel comfortable.

IV.

John O'Donohue in Anam Cara writes,

"When you find the person you love, an act of ancient recognition brings you together. It is as if millions of years before the silence of nature broke, his or her clay and your clay lay side by side" (p. 45).

We are ancient, older than our bodies, unruled by matters of time. I recognize my husband in the march of life that continues.  I see him in the wing of a lone cardinal as it glides from view;  in the way morning light on Lake Como diffuses the color of the Alps, in the absolute chatter of birds an hour before sunrise, in the sound of the subway as it yields to the station, and in the way memory lives each time my foot still seeks his in bed.

V.

Months ago my son told me that his dad formed us. We carry him with us wherever we are. He's in us. And he is, but not in the way I first thought.  Rob would not have sought homage from his son or me, but rather dialogue. And perhaps that is one way to live brilliantly--to live in dialogue with the here and now, with you and those I have yet to meet or know, and to live with the ways our past (re)forms the present.

We are clay, ancient.

Ambiguity and Grace (#SOL15, Day 11)

Birds in Tree in Winter (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood, NJ, 2015)

I. 

I've been thinking about the problematic use of close reading as the de facto method for interpreting texts in grades K-12 and how the PARCC and other high stakes tests are designed to discern how well children closely attend to the minutia and substance of a text--as if each was worthy of our attention--as if each remained stable. We situate these results as prized namings of children's talents and needs as if truth might be gotten from a 3-day test.  

Could we be more foolish?

I was thinking about the problem with close reading and how we measure it this morning while rereading William Carlos William's "January Morning"--a poem that reminds me how being curious is its own reward. After more than two decades of reading this poem, I still cannot quite understand it and think, perhaps, that I'm the better for such lacking.  

There's little room for lacking at school these days.

The poem is divided into 15 sections and Williams provides a series of quick and quirky visual snapshots of the comings and goings that his speaker sees as he makes his way through Weehawken, NJ on a January morning. It is a mad celebration of the ordinary as different noticings are mentioned briefly and then abandoned. Oh, our good doctor, our fine poet surveys that world with certain exuberance and I find I cannot help but carry his sense of whimsy and joy into this feel good morning of my own. 

This is what it means to embody a work.

II.

Williams was a young man at the time of this writing (1917) and I wonder if at the end of the poem, the old woman he addresses is his mother. Or perhaps, the old woman is more muse than mother. Maybe mother and muse are one.  Let's take a look.

XV.

All this --

                was for you, old woman.

I wanted to write a poem 

that you would understand.

For what good is it to me

if you can't understand it?

                But you got to try hard --

But --

Well, you know how

the young girls run giggling

on Park Avenue after dark

when they ought to be home in bed?

Well,

that's the way it is with me somehow.

I take a deep breath at the end and wonder more about the way it is somehow and what exactly does Williams mean by that?  Some mornings I think I can gather that ambiguity and hold it in my hand like cool water that is a balm.

Let it settle there. Soothe me.

                 Only to feel it slip 
                                                     free, again and again and again. 

See, it is the instability, the not knowing that I most want to emphasize here. Meaning is never stable. Never. Why, even Williams's speaker is contrary. 


III.

Reading is a full body experience and we ought to broaden how learners come to (re)name the texts they read. It's foolishness to believe in the singularity of close reading in schools as if the New Critics knew the only way to read a text. 

I hope on this March morning that you want more for yourself, more for your child.

What we privilege and fail to privilege at school matters; deserves our attention.  It is the uncertainty of meaning making that we most need to make room for at school. For is it not important for learners to be able to recognize when a more accurate understanding of a text is attainable and when the complexity of a work eclipses that felt need?  

To become easy with ambiguity is to touch grace. 

I'm not sure what Williams intended or if even his intentions can be named. The possibilities are of interest more so than the certainties. 

This is the way it is somehow. We are never standing still.

Mary Ann's One Little Word for 2015

Possibilities (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

"Quien canta, sus males espanta"

"He who sings scares his woes away"  - Cervantes 

I.

Last week I opened my Facebook stream to see a photograph of my dad staring back at me.

A surprise, that.

A cousin had posted my father's image--one made while he was overseas in England during World War II.  My father is dead--a decade now this last November.

There in that pixelated bit of magic, he's beautiful, unmarred, anticipating perhaps his return home where he will marry my mother and they will adopt three kids from Ireland, take them across the country to camp, sing to them, and show us by action what it means to live deliberately, what it means to love deeply.

These are lessons I carry with me--ones that formed my bones.

I study the image as if some secret might reveal itself and even though the image is not in color, I still see his hazel eyes clearly, perhaps more clearly here than I did in life. I hear his voice, the songs he sang.

And here, now, my Da has done the impossible: Returned from death and is now several decades younger than me and somehow this juxtaposition of role, this slight of hand, this trick of time has me thinking about being open to possibilities.

II.

I know almost nothing and am the better for it. I learned this early.

My Da told me that when I first came to America I was afraid of him.  At 6' 2" tall, he towered over me. I had just turned 2 and the only man I was told I had seen while at the orphanage in Dublin was a doctor who stuck needles in my upper arms--most likely the inoculations I needed to enter the United States.  My mom had gone to church the Sunday morning after I arrived and I cried at her leaving, curled myself by the front door waiting for her to return, curled myself away from my father who sat in his chair in the living room--the chair that sat angled by the back windows. He told me he watched me and waited until cried out, I fell asleep. He then walked across the room, picked me up, and sometime later I woke up in his arms, safe, present, and perhaps I began to learn the first definition of home I would know.

I like to think that this is why he used to play this game with me--one I'm sure he must have tired from and yet he did it night after night.  He would sit me on the edge of his knees as he sat in his over sized chair and then open his legs quickly and I would fall through giggling, climb back up as he lifted me and fall through again and again and again until the call of my mom from the kitchen signaling dinner ended our game.  And each time, each fall was slightly different, slightly unexpected, something to anticipate. The very definition of possibilities.

He did this while he sung to me the same lyrics over and over:

For it is Mary, Mary
Plain as any name can be
But with propriety, society will say Marie
But it was Mary, Mary
Long before the fashions came
And there is something there that sounds so square
It's a grand old name

I thought he had written the song for me, just as he had named me, and I loved how we blended our voices together to sing with such dramatic flair:  It's a grand old name.


III.

We were a family who knew music, not by what we had been taught, but rather by what we felt--a tacit way of knowing--one we could not bear to code. There was always a radio on in the kitchen. There was always a piano in the living room and now and then fingers to tickle the keys. Later there would be guitars, recorders, flutes, 8-track tapes, an Irish drum.

But above all, there was the human voice.

Only my Da who would call my mom, Kate.  He said it with such affection. And sometimes he would sing to her too and I would join in thinking the song with its repetition of sounds was so funny.  We would serenade her:

K-K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy,
You're the only g-g-g-girl that I adore;
When the m-m-m-moon shines,
Over the cowshed,
I'll be waiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door.

IV.

I am told that there are thirty-six muscles that are used in breathing for singing. Without these muscles air can't enter or leave the lungs.  I learned early that dwelling was its own type of song. And I wonder how I ever could have forgotten so quickly that it was my Da who sung often, who sung daily.  How I needed this image of him to shake loose another memory.

We forget more than we know.

My one little word for the year is possibilities.  It is woven to this memory of my father and me singing.  As I make my way through this new year, I want to remember how possibilities are present alongside each breath I make, each breath I expel.   Today, here, now, I breathe in and feel the air settle low, exhale the old breath, and at the onset of sound, I sing out.





*Note, I saw this type of post over at Two Teachers blog and thought I would have a go of it.