#SOL16: Seizing the Perimeter

At OBX (Reilly, 2016)

"...to the blue distance seizing its perimeter..." - Eavan Boland

I.


In geomorphic studies of landscape, scientists understand that landforms may be characterized as equilibrium, disequilibrium, or nonequilibrium (Renwick, 1992). Equilibrium is a constant relation between input and output or form, while disequilibrium is a tendency towards equilibrium without the necessary time to reach that condition. Nonequilibrium however, does not court an equilibrium state, regardless of time, but rather experiences frequent and large changes. All three are found in landforms and I am thinking about these definitions after reading, Candide by Simon Ensor. It's a raw post reminding me of the mass of energy necessary to steer towards order and the privilege it is to simply bear witness.

Voyeur (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

Experiencing feelings--mine and others--sometimes finds me feeling unsettled, voyeuristic--especially before Rob died. Even prior to his death,  I didn't necessarily trust the repeated story of the neat and tidy emotional life, but I mostly tended to ignore those stories or listen for what was not said. Before Rob's diagnosis, his death and this aftermath, I reacted strongly when others were more on the emotional roller coaster than off. Then I wanted to rush in and fix as if such a job were mine and the words I offered might be some type of balm. I simply did not know better.

But now I would ask, what do those words proffered actually assuage? Whose right is it to assume fixing is even needed? What happens when we transmit the repeated message, You are broken, here let me fix you? or worse, Shh, let's ignore all it and be happy?

II.

In the last year, I've become quite practiced at emotional surges and drops, the terror and beauty of free falls mostly. And I recognize this as being more necessary than not, more privilege than given. I have learned a type of silence that keeps me in good stead and to appreciate those who witness and don't try to fix.

I am broken. To lose what has been lost and remain whole is to practice deception. I am broken in ways I first gleaned from Yeats who told us, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold". And though he situates that falling apart as social disaster, I borrow that line to hold the place of what is necessary and intimate.

We tend towards disorder.

III.

What I am learning in this last year is that if you gather people who are living with permanent losses, you would witness frank conversation.

We want to talk about our dead. We need this like we need to breathe. We cannot pretend these losses have not happened.

We want to mention their names, keep them present through our stories, honor and testify.

We want to laugh and soothe, try to compose meaning, burn the necessary energy to right our heart and gather those bits of ourselves that have been flung beyond the limits of our first reach.

We have been lost.

I do not rush in when I hear another's grief, pain, or laughter. I merely honor it with a smile, by saying, Tell me more, by sometimes, keeping silent and just listening, by sometimes exchanging stories. And so when I read Simon's post, so brave with all its raw energy, I realized the circle of story makers is not limited to the bereaved alone, to those among us who have chosen to walk on after unimaginable loss of love. No, that circle, like the universe is always expanding and loss is more common than not.

We know that centers by their very location must break. They must. And this breakage, this center that cannot hold is an odd, yet important expression of love that deserves respect, requires not advice, but merely our witnessing--allowing others to seize their own perimeter. 

#SOL16: Two Futures. One Past.

I.

So I'm following a link Simon Ensor (@sensor63) tweeted and when I read the poem he has posted, I slow down. It's a poem about many things, the least of which is an accounting of the death of the speaker's father.

I don't want to follow the speaker up the stairs to where I know surely, death has happened. I don't want to notice what only can be known by experience. My time with Rob. My time watching my husband die is still so raw, so immediate and the details of a death at home and all that comes with it are ones I understand too well. But Simon's words are a traffic accident I cannot look away from and these words compel me to look, to notice, to do what is the most human of things--to bear witness to another's expression of grief. It is this, this bearing witness that makes us human.

Simon writes:

"It was autumn in spring perhaps.

It wasn't winter surely.

It surely wasn't summer.

I backed out of the room.

I walked along the corridor.

I passed the embroidery.

Saying nothing.

My sister and my mother were sitting on the sofa.

Were they sitting on the sofa?

We said nothing.

All was drizzle.

A corpse is a corpse is a corpse.

I never saw the corpse.

My father lives differently..."

And it is the present tense in that last line I have quoted that stops me. "My father lives differently." A corpse is a corpse is a corpse and a father is not. A father lives, like a husband lives, like a mother lives, like the ones we love so deeply live beyond the body through our art and talk and sighs and grief.


II.

The deepest despair blooms and that is a truth about time we can hold.  For time as we name it, know it is slippery, unreliable, and irrational.  It bends to our will and rejects our most deepest wants, our most private fears. We will all die and what that means is mostly informed by what we know of time as we name it now and how the body dies. For a corpse signals the end. What remains beyond the body is less known, less understood, less rational, less comforting in the aftermath of loss. We want the corporeal.

We have made time up and said it is the Truth and organized the story of an entire universe based on this single story. Time is an arrow moving forward. Once there was nothing then there was a bang and time began.

Time is an arrow. Boltzmann told us time flows forward. This morning like most mornings, the cream I pour into my coffee mixes with ease.  It does not unmix.  Here time moves forward.  But here is not the totality of possibilities; it is only the vantage point from which we hypothesize. Julian Barbour, Tim Koslowski, and Flavio Mercarti propose that the Big Bang produces a single past with "two distinct futures emerging from it." They write, "Any internal observer must be in one half of the solution and will only be aware of the records of one branch and deduce a unique past and future direction from inspection of the available records."

Where we stand frames what we know and in doing so, what we cannot know. Imagine that death is the movement from one future to another. Time then is never just an arrow. It is a slim truth we have concocted to organize what is irrational. We live here in these three dimensions and we call that whole and yet grief lives within and beyond that if we let it.

III.

Each death slays us as it opens us to other ways of knowing, being, loving. I know this now.  I know how Rob's death opens me to what is non-orientable, what is unnamed. We know more than we can say is a better truth than time moves forward, leaving those we have loved behind.

Some nights, I sleep in flannel pants he once wore. When it is cool and misting, I wear a flannel shirt of his when I walk outside.  It is the absence and odd clarity of memory that travels with grief that moves me most; makes me most humbled when I read posts like Simon's.  Wallace Stevens knew, like I do now that there's such courage in the saying out loud what we see in the dark.