Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl who would grow up to become a writer was told by a gypsy, “You will be loved by people you’ve never met.” This is the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing. You have an intimacy with the faraway and distance from the near at hand. Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through to connect with people again in an unexpected way. It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so poor.
• • •
My own story in its particulars hardly interests me now. The incidents have dissolved into the dirt from which certain plants grew, and the blooms of those plants or maybe only their perfume on the air, the questions and ideas that arose, are what still signify. Or so I think, but maybe a moment in the dirt of that apricot summer is necessary. The apricots arrived in early August, and then everything with my mother began to deteriorate more ferociously.
The place she was living was not working, the people who were supposed to advise us were not helping, and the three of us were worn out from the constant attendance, constant anxiety, and lack of any good ideas about what to do next. We took her on long walks every morning in hope of sating her restlessness. When it was my turn, we walked around the pleasant stucco and wooden houses surrounding her residence while I remarked on colors, on porches, on gables and bay windows, on morning glories, lilies, sunflowers, hollyhocks, and foxglove.
Early in September she stepped out of a second-floor window onto the first-floor roof of the careless care facility where she was living, because she imagined that she was a prisoner making a break for it. The window had been open for some workmen doing repairs, and she menaced them as they tried to keep her from the edge and get her back in. The next day she bolted through the front door after a brief scuffle, one of several violent moments in that poorly regulated place. She disappeared for a day during which the police in that town had an all-points bulletin out for her. If nothing else, she was proving to be in excellent physical health.
My brothers were out of town so I dropped everything and drove over to monitor the situation and see what I could do. I went to the main library where my friend worked in case she showed up there and found a picture of her already posted on the front door. Anything might’ve happened; she could have been hit by a car, fallen in with some of the bands of street people, gotten seriously lost, gone on one of the several-mile walks that had ended with her being returned by the police. When my younger brother arrived late that afternoon, he figured out that she’d managed to hitchhike and take buses and show up back at her old house twenty miles away, like one of those animals in the stories of faithful return. It was wrenching.
What she wanted was not what she needed. She’d forgotten the thousand fearful crises of her last few years in her house, ignored the fact that she could no longer make a meal on her own or keep track of a key, and spoke of life in that shuttered gray-green bungalow as a golden age that might just have been remembering life before the crises of her brain disease. The house was still hers but there was no going back from the disorder. We were told to find a new place for her promptly and to hire full-time one-on-one caregivers in the meantime, and so came a succession of blue-collar women of color of varying calibers of kindness and competence, along with huge bills from their agency. Choosing her medications was left up to me. I put her on an antidepressant and then when the trouble didn’t cease, around the time of the incident on the roof and the running away, shortly after she broke the plate-glass door, added an anti-psychotic sometimes used for Alzheimer’s agitation and violence.
I think my last lengthy conversation with the man I was involved with then was about choosing the drugs. The crises with my mother had burdened the relationship, but the relationship had burdened everything else too. It was in trouble for various reasons, but everything had been becalmed for a few years because of my crises with my mother’s health and his or ours with his own. He’d been suddenly struck down by a disorder that inflicted constant disabling pain, that turned him from a long-distance runner into someone who walked as though on coals or across thorns. For the two years before the apricot summer I was sandwiched between two severely sick people whose needs flattened mine, and though it was clear that little or nothing could be asked of my mother it was unclear what could be asked of him.
He cited his pain as an excuse for everything, which it wasn’t, but the pain was real. He broke up with me by phone a week after the peak of the crises with my mother, and I was furious that he was not there for me after I had gotten him through so many of his crises. Then he changed his mind, but there was too much damage to restore, and I was too busy coping with my mother’s emergency. The particulars don’t matter now. There was bitterness but also relief that I was no longer responsible for trying to get him to make better decisions about his life and mine.
A young man who was transcribing the interviews for the book I was working on turned out to have a mother who was a great expert on Alzheimer’s and a kind woman. She advised me about our mother’s condition in the moment and as it might progress, and recommended the Alzheimer’s residence in which she’d placed her own father, praising it as the best place in the region. I called. We visited. They had openings. A week after the revelations from the man in pain, I was walking my mother around the lake in the city where the residence was, hoping to put her in the best frame of mind for the intake interview, when my phone rang.
The call was from Reykjavík, and the caller invited me to come to Iceland. I startled her by replying yes without hesitation. At that moment, Iceland, the remote unknown, the back of the north wind, sounded like the right place to go, and the call came like a magical rescue, the most unlikely intervention at the most arduous moment.
• • •
The things that make our lives are so tenuous, so unlikely, that we barely come into being, barely meet the people we’re meant to love, barely find our way in the woods, barely survive catastrophe every day. Your origin is due to two people come together, by accident, whether wisely or not, by the attractions of similarity and difference, who survive each other’s fears and limits long enough to create the collision of the two cells from which you spring. A million sperm swim at every egg, and somehow the one that makes the journey all the way begets you in combination with that single maternal cell; the faintest rearrangement of that unthinkable coupling and someone else arrives on earth out of that maze inside your mother; or no one comes into being; or your mother neglects one moment in that terrifying vulnerability that is your first few years and you are snuffed out like a candle, drowned in the bath, choked on a button found on the floor.
Everyone has stories of the small coincidence by which their parents met or their grandmother was saved from fire or their grandfather from the grenade, of the choice made by the most whimsical means that led to everything else, whether you’re blessed or cursed or both. Trace it far enough and this very moment in your life becomes a rare species, the result of a strange evolution, a butterfly that should already be extinct and survives by the inexplicabilities we call coincidence. The word is often used to mean the accidental but literally means to fall together. The patterns of our lives come from those things that do not drift apart but move together for a little while, like dancers. They come together in those moments that are the coupling of unseen forces, a generative warmth, a secret romance between the unknowns that are also our parents.
The dei ex machina, the gods in machines used by ancient Greek playwrights to move the plot along or rescue a character, were not well regarded. The ancient critics felt that events should unfold from the acts and character of the central figures, not from outside forces. Perhaps there are people whose lives are as contained as a classical drama, in which the number of characters is set and finit
e, and nothing much wanders in to augment, disrupt, or rescue, but that’s usually just a formal convention, a literary rule. Trace the lineage of any significant event, and coincidences and strangers appear from beyond the horizon of the calculable, from out of the blue. The other evening my friend Carolina told me about a bull that escaped from a bullfighting arena in her native Bogotá, ran down the street, and, frightened by the urban chaos, dashed into an elevator, where he gored the man within to death.
Whether the man was at the height of his happiness, desperate for life to change, or just persevering day by day, the bull interrupted all that. Every day some bull gets on the elevator; or a shark eats the other person trying to bring back the first sooty tern egg; or the phone rings and invites you to jump ship for the unknown. The innumerable gods have all sorts of machines at their disposal. Illness is one, and a sudden onset of serious illness changes the landscape profoundly, and not because of character or fate, unless that fate includes postclassical details like genetic predisposition or the odysseys of viruses.
As a young man, Saint Francis turned back from a military adventure because of malaria, and while convalescing settled into his spiritual destiny. A mosquito had spiritual consequence. The dirty hands of the doctor who attended Mary Wollstonecraft probably imparted the puerperal fever that killed her and left her newborn daughter to a cold fate. The gods in machines are just outside forces, and they are only outside the tight knot of fate and character that classical drama deems its only ingredients. Pull back, see farther, and they are inside the patterns of which our lives are made. They are bulls, are terns, are mosquitoes, are germs, among the myriad forms.
Two years later when the women who brought me to Iceland were sitting with me in my kitchen eating apricot halves from that harvest direct from the jar, I came to understand how I’d gotten there. The invitation came at that difficult moment like a key thrown into a prison, a raft in a shipwreck. But in a sense I made the raft myself, and the gods turned it into their machine. I sailed to Iceland on a raft made out of a book I had written. I had been sailing away on books all my life and in my childhood had built walls and towers of books all around me to protect myself from an unfriendly world.
That people were walking out of my books and pulling me into their world was a recent development. My story intersected with the story of a young man I never met, a man who was dying as I was embarked upon my crises, but whose life would not be entirely over, because the consequences of his acts, a stone thrown in others’ waters, would ripple out for years, for lifetimes. He’s here with you now in some way, because without him this book would not exist.
• • •
Once upon a time there was a wolf, or a young man of that name, Úlfur, which means wolf in Icelandic, a very Icelandic young man, though his father was African American. The young wolf was stricken with leukemia when he reached adulthood. Neither the hero nor the villain of this tale, he is instead the match to the tinder, though his own flame was almost out and his own story of which I know so little must be worth telling at greater length.
He had been the first love of a young Icelandic woman named Elín, and then they parted ways but stayed close. She went on to become an artist who made installations of sounds and shadows and small nuances and large environments, experiments in the phenomena and pleasures of the perceived world. He came to see her in her new home in Berlin for what turned out to be their last time together, on his way to treatment in Sweden, the kind of treatment that is a last resort, that can kill you or save you.
We associate skeletons with death, but bones generate life, abundantly, prolifically. The femurs, the ribs, the sternum, and other bones we see dry and white after death, in life harbor the marrow that produces billions of new blood cells daily, a bright red river gushing forth from bone. The process is called “hematopoiesis,” from the ancient Greek words for blood and for making. Poetry comes from the same word, poiesis, and it belies Plato’s argument that art is only imitation. Our word for poetry is their word for all the making in the world, of chairs, of houses, of bombs, of books, of blood, of gods. Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.
The young man kept making, made music, worked on films, loved, was loved back, struggled, traveled, endured for a while. About a quarter million people a year are diagnosed with leukemia, the disease that impairs or alters the making of the blood. I did not know the young wolf who died of it, and I did not know of his existence until after I went to Iceland, but he became a key that unlocked a door of my life, and perhaps I an extension of his; and I’m grateful.
Úlfur and Elín, during the rendezvous in Berlin, went to a bookstore—he had a talent for choosing books, said Elín and her mother long after at my kitchen table—and they picked out a book because its title seemed so relevant to their uncertain fate. It was one of mine. Then he went north for his bone marrow transplant and then home to Iceland. The operation did not work. He did not die immediately but they never saw each other again, because when he commenced to die she was too far away and he went too fast.
She drank the book down in one long gulp and marked it up, though she was not a reader generally. Like a lot of visual artists, she mostly plunged into the difficult books through which you hack your way slowly. She gave the book the wolf chose to her mother, and her mother kept it for several months and then read it on the airplane to my city to which she had never been before, to see the opening of the exhibition of her friend Olafur Eliasson. Olafur too had read a book of mine and sought me out when he came to install his prisms and crystals and tunnels and lights and shades and images of Iceland in a museum in my city.
That summer, while everything else was falling apart, the far north came calling. I had been commissioned to write about the north, had begun rereading Frankenstein and Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams, and then this Icelandic man showed up trailing images and aspects of his country. I went many times to look at his tall wall of fragrant, thick Icelandic moss that gradually faded from green to pale yellow, his mirrored rooms, his big grids of photographs of Iceland, of islands in one grid, of horizons in another, his chamber of models of smaller crystals and faceted constructions, rooms of lights and shadows, a dark room of mist with rainbows glinting in it, an elemental world, an Icelandic world that was also the world of poesis, of making.
Olafur and Úlfur, Fríða and Elín, four people from a place I had never been to, a place I’d seen mostly in the pictures of a photographer I’d been commissioned to write about a dozen years earlier, whose images showed old sod houses melting back into a green landscape, threads of water streaming across black lava moss on stones, purity, and remoteness. Fríða landed in my town, went to her hotel, put on a black dress, and walked over to the opening reception for Olafur’s show.
I came to it too, walked up and said hello to Olafur just as Fríða arrived, so he introduced us and we fell to talking as he was taken up by other obligations. She was my age and my height and not far from my coloring, though she was leaner and more glamorous, with cheekbones you could build castles on and magnificent poise. And so we met and I said it was a pity that she was just in town so briefly and offered to show her the city, prompted by some affinity or resemblance or maybe by her foreignness and by hospitality, since she was in my realm I knew and loved so well. It didn’t hurt that she’d just finished my book. I also had a minor notion that someday it might be good to know someone in Iceland well enough to look them up for coffee, and Olafur had treated me with a courtesy that was a balm in those bad days.
I picked Fríða up the next morning and showed her facets of my city on the way to the airport as we talked about art, about books, about our parents with dementia, about light and seasons and weather. I told her that I’d always wanted to visit Iceland, but thought nothing of it until the other end of the month, when I was walking my mother around that lake, and the phone rang and Fríða asked if I’d like t
o be the first international resident at the Library of Water in Iceland, and I said yes.
Never turn down an invitation without a good reason, and I had every reason to seize this one with both hands. It was as though the book had become a door; people were entering the book and then stepping into my life and drawing me into theirs. And it was my ticket out of deep trouble. Iceland would for the seven months it took me to actually get there serve as an amulet, a window onto another world, a thought that there was some place far away from all my troubles, and that I would myself be far away from them there soon enough.
There was even a webcam on the roof of the Library of Water I would log on to sometimes, with a view of the other world that would relieve me of this one. It showed a harbor near a great rock to which a causeway had been built, the town of square separate buildings like children’s blocks, and beyond it the fjord full of islands and a sky sometimes full of clouds, sometimes of darkness. I watched it as snow arrived, as the days grew short and the webcam mostly showed harbor lights shining in blackness and headlights sweeping across snow. It was like a snow globe on my desk to shake in idle moments, but the world in it was real and awaited me. Like Wu Daozi I was going to step into the picture, through a door I had made myself, out of words.
5 • Breath
A sentence by the Marquis de Sade I read when I was young sometimes returns to me: “Ah, what does it matter to her hand, which is always at work creating, that this or that mass of flesh which today constitutes an individual biped may be reproduced tomorrow in the form of a thousand insects?” It matters to the individual biped, but the exclamation in the form of a question points out that what is ordinarily imagined as disintegration is also, or instead, metamorphosis.
The Faraway Nearby Page 6
