Inevitable Conclusion
by Paul Wilner
APRIL 12, 2011 TAGS:
“Everything we say about death is actually about life,’’ the Japanese-American poet and novelist Kyoki Mori writes in an essay about her mother’s suicide, included in the new anthology The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death.
The collection is edited by David Shields, whose previous work includes the well-received memoir, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow.
The idea of gathering some of the finest writers of our time – Mori, David Gates, Geoff Dyer, Joyce Carol Oates and Annie Dillard – sounds like a tricky conceit, the literary equivalent of a “concept album.’’
But damned if they don’t pull it off, struggling to come to terms with the Distinguished Gentleman awaiting us all, in a series of moving, but not maudlin, reflections on how to mark time before the final reckoning.
“Losing someone and ceasing to exist are two separate problems,’’ Mori notes unsentimentally. “We experience loss often enough, many of us from an early age; however painful grief is, it’s something we already know. Our own death – not the process but the result – is the one thing we can never experience, know, or understand.’’
In “Bayham Street,’’ novelist Robert Clark explores the death of his sister Patty, who was diagnosed as mentally retarded, made an astonishing recovery and then was killed in college in a head-on collision. The gods must be crazy.
The grieving author retraces her life, trying to find answers: from her therapist, with little success; in his dysfunctional family (“I first heard the idea that my mother was the author of Patty’s condition when I was thirteen’’); and finally, in a series of seemingly apposite trips, to Bayham Street, the scene of Charles Dickens’ boyhood in the blacking factory, to the ghostly, fire-bombed Dresden, and to the house where Nietzsche died, mad and miserable, in Weimar.
None of the journeys satisfy his longing for answers.
“Music – the forlorn ranting of Leonard Cohen – echoed from the sound system,’’ he writes from one hotel. “I felt lonely and grieving. I missed my family. I missed everyone I’d known, or known of.’’
After his long hejira, Clark finds what had long eluded him in his futile attempts to conjure Dickens’ spirit, and somehow connect it with his loss.
“After I came home, after it was clear there were no records, no signs or explanations of Patty – after I learned she might have been as imaginary or as real as Little Dorritt – I found out that Bayham Street had been renumbered late in the nineteenth century,’’ he writes. “Number 16 is now number 141. There is also, somewhere, a plaque, and I found a picture – a little hazy and ill-focused – of it…. I am looking for the boy in the garret looking out onto the fulminating world, calculating how he might make his way in it, how he could leave a mark upon it that someone much later, someone like me, might find.’’
Asserting his own literary ego in a remarkably selfless way, he offers an exercise in the rigors of homage, and of grief.
Overall, the quality of writing in this collection soars. An amazing piece by Kevin Baker deals with his mother’s progressive Huntington’s Chorea, being tested for the disease himself, and handling the unwelcome diagnosis. Sally Tisdale’s painstakingly meticulous essay, “The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies,’’ tries to reconcile the cruel life and death cycle of insects with her Buddhist training. Poet Mark Doty writes on the AIDS epidemic, the gay club scene of the ’70s and the transcendent connection between sex and death. And Greg Bottoms offers a photographic depiction of the homeless and the haunted he lived among.
“I have mental illness in my family,’’ Bottoms writes, after a brush with “Terrence,’’ who’s wearing “a gray trash bag over his dirty clothes, arms sticking out of two jagged, knife-cut holes’’ on a rainy day on Grace Street, in Richmond, Virginia. “Schizophrenia, biopolar disorder, depression. I get it better than most. I read a lot. I write. I can speak in metaphor.’’
It’s all the more impressive that these authors communicate so successfully in their chosen metaphors, since the project is built, to some extent, on a false premise.
“Whereas once one could frame mortality within the faithful ideology of an afterlife, now many can no longer speak with assurance about the immortality of the soul, the consolation of philosophy, or the ever-lasting reach of heaven,’’ the co-editors write in the introduction. “Here is an early-twenty-first century attempt to look at death from distinctly different points of view, by writers who see death as a brute biological fact that does not necessarily guarantee some passageway to eternal peace or punishment.’’
Fair enough, but the absence of the Almighty has long been contemplated by writers as diverse as Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. To their credit, however, the authors assembled here break free of the conceptual mold imposed on them (a mold that would benefit from biographical notes about the contributors) to prove, through words, that they are brave enough to deal with demons, and joyous enough to find angels.
“Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit, as everyone else does,’’ Annie Dillard writes, in the collection’s high-spirited final entry, ironically titled “This Is The Life.’’
“Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent, gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, birdwatching. Beyond those things our culture might specialize in money, and celebrity, and natural beauty. These are not universal. You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.’’
Before that, you live. That may be the hardest part, but, as these subtle, sometimes somber, offerings make clear, we have no choice in the matter. It’s inevitable.
Paul Wilner is a frequent Obit contributor who specializes in the arts and popular culture.
The collection is edited by David Shields, whose previous work includes the well-received memoir, The Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, and Bard College literature professor Bradford Morrow.
The idea of gathering some of the finest writers of our time – Mori, David Gates, Geoff Dyer, Joyce Carol Oates and Annie Dillard – sounds like a tricky conceit, the literary equivalent of a “concept album.’’But damned if they don’t pull it off, struggling to come to terms with the Distinguished Gentleman awaiting us all, in a series of moving, but not maudlin, reflections on how to mark time before the final reckoning.
“Losing someone and ceasing to exist are two separate problems,’’ Mori notes unsentimentally. “We experience loss often enough, many of us from an early age; however painful grief is, it’s something we already know. Our own death – not the process but the result – is the one thing we can never experience, know, or understand.’’
In “Bayham Street,’’ novelist Robert Clark explores the death of his sister Patty, who was diagnosed as mentally retarded, made an astonishing recovery and then was killed in college in a head-on collision. The gods must be crazy.
The grieving author retraces her life, trying to find answers: from her therapist, with little success; in his dysfunctional family (“I first heard the idea that my mother was the author of Patty’s condition when I was thirteen’’); and finally, in a series of seemingly apposite trips, to Bayham Street, the scene of Charles Dickens’ boyhood in the blacking factory, to the ghostly, fire-bombed Dresden, and to the house where Nietzsche died, mad and miserable, in Weimar.
None of the journeys satisfy his longing for answers.
“Music – the forlorn ranting of Leonard Cohen – echoed from the sound system,’’ he writes from one hotel. “I felt lonely and grieving. I missed my family. I missed everyone I’d known, or known of.’’
After his long hejira, Clark finds what had long eluded him in his futile attempts to conjure Dickens’ spirit, and somehow connect it with his loss.
“After I came home, after it was clear there were no records, no signs or explanations of Patty – after I learned she might have been as imaginary or as real as Little Dorritt – I found out that Bayham Street had been renumbered late in the nineteenth century,’’ he writes. “Number 16 is now number 141. There is also, somewhere, a plaque, and I found a picture – a little hazy and ill-focused – of it…. I am looking for the boy in the garret looking out onto the fulminating world, calculating how he might make his way in it, how he could leave a mark upon it that someone much later, someone like me, might find.’’
Asserting his own literary ego in a remarkably selfless way, he offers an exercise in the rigors of homage, and of grief.
Overall, the quality of writing in this collection soars. An amazing piece by Kevin Baker deals with his mother’s progressive Huntington’s Chorea, being tested for the disease himself, and handling the unwelcome diagnosis. Sally Tisdale’s painstakingly meticulous essay, “The Sutra of Maggots and Blowflies,’’ tries to reconcile the cruel life and death cycle of insects with her Buddhist training. Poet Mark Doty writes on the AIDS epidemic, the gay club scene of the ’70s and the transcendent connection between sex and death. And Greg Bottoms offers a photographic depiction of the homeless and the haunted he lived among.
“I have mental illness in my family,’’ Bottoms writes, after a brush with “Terrence,’’ who’s wearing “a gray trash bag over his dirty clothes, arms sticking out of two jagged, knife-cut holes’’ on a rainy day on Grace Street, in Richmond, Virginia. “Schizophrenia, biopolar disorder, depression. I get it better than most. I read a lot. I write. I can speak in metaphor.’’
It’s all the more impressive that these authors communicate so successfully in their chosen metaphors, since the project is built, to some extent, on a false premise.
“Whereas once one could frame mortality within the faithful ideology of an afterlife, now many can no longer speak with assurance about the immortality of the soul, the consolation of philosophy, or the ever-lasting reach of heaven,’’ the co-editors write in the introduction. “Here is an early-twenty-first century attempt to look at death from distinctly different points of view, by writers who see death as a brute biological fact that does not necessarily guarantee some passageway to eternal peace or punishment.’’
Fair enough, but the absence of the Almighty has long been contemplated by writers as diverse as Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche. To their credit, however, the authors assembled here break free of the conceptual mold imposed on them (a mold that would benefit from biographical notes about the contributors) to prove, through words, that they are brave enough to deal with demons, and joyous enough to find angels.
“Any culture tells you how to live your one and only life: to wit, as everyone else does,’’ Annie Dillard writes, in the collection’s high-spirited final entry, ironically titled “This Is The Life.’’
“Probably most cultures prize, as ours rightly does, making a contribution by working hard at work that you love; being in the know, and intelligent, gathering a surplus; and loving your family above all, and your dog, your boat, birdwatching. Beyond those things our culture might specialize in money, and celebrity, and natural beauty. These are not universal. You enjoy work and will love your grandchildren, and somewhere in there you die.’’
Before that, you live. That may be the hardest part, but, as these subtle, sometimes somber, offerings make clear, we have no choice in the matter. It’s inevitable.
Paul Wilner is a frequent Obit contributor who specializes in the arts and popular culture.
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