by Carole Maso
You say that language is dying, will die.
And at times I have felt for you, even loved you. But I have never believed you.
The Ebola virus is now. The Hanta virus. HIV. And that old standby, malaria. Live while you can. Tonight, who knows, may be our last. We may not even make the millennium, so don’t worry about it so much.
All my friends who have died holding language in their throats, into the end. All my dead friends.
Cybernauts return from time to time wanting to see a smile instead of a colon followed by a closed parenthesis—the online sign for smile. When someone laughs out loud they want to hear real laughter in the real air, not just the letters LOL in front of them. Ah, yes. World while there is world.
A real bird in the real sky and then perhaps a little prose poem or something in the real sky, or the page or the screen or the human heart, pulsing.
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
One world.
The future of literature is utopic. As surely as my friends Ed and Alan will come this weekend to visit, bearing rose lentils. As long as one can say “rose,” can say “lentil.”
Gary dying, saying “Kappa maki.”
You say, over. But I say, no.
I say faith and hope and trust and forever right next to wretched and hate and misery and hopeless.
In the future we will finally be allowed to live, just as we are, to imagine, to glow, to pulse.
Let the genres blur if they will. Let the genres redefine themselves.
Language is a woman, a rose constantly in the process of opening.
Vibrant, irresistible, incandescent.
Whosoever has allowed the villanelle to enter them or the sonnet. Whosoever has let in one genuine sentence, one paragraph, has felt that seduction like a golden thread being pulled slowly through one….
Wish: that forms other than those you’ve invented or sanctioned through your thousands of years of privilege might arise and be celebrated.
“Put another way, it seems to me that we have to rediscover everything about everything. There is only one solution, and that is to turn one’s back on American cinema…. Up until now we have lived in a closed world. Cinema fed on cinema, imitating itself. I now see that in my first films I did things because I had already seen them in the cinema. If I showed a police inspector drawing a revolver from his pocket, it wasn’t because the logic of the situation I wanted to describe demanded it, but because I had seen police inspectors in other films drawing revolvers at this precise moment and in this precise way. The same thing has happened in painting. There have been periods of organization and imitation and periods of rupture. We are now in a period of rupture. We must turn to life again. We must move into modern life with a virgin eye.”
—Jean-Luc Godard, 1966
Wish: that Alvin Lu might wander in the astounding classroom of the world through time and space, endlessly inspired, endlessly enthralled by what he finds there. That he be allowed to reinvent freely, revel freely.
My professor once and now great friend, Barbara Page, out there too, ravenous, furious, and without fear, inventing whole new worlds, ways of experiencing the text. New freedoms.
The world doesn’t end, says Charles Simic. Engraved on our foreheads in ash, turned into a language of stars or birdsong across a vast sky; it stays. Literature doesn’t end—but it may change shapes, be capable of things we cannot even imagine yet.
Woolf: “What is the phrase for the moon? And the phrase for love? By what name are we to call death? I do not know. I need a little language such as lovers use, words of one syllable such as children speak when they come into the room and find their mother sewing and pick up the scrap of bright wool, a feather, or a shred of chintz. I need a howl; a cry.”
Charlotte Brontë: “My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed in the blackest of the heath for her; out of a sullen hollow in the livid hillside her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear delights; and not the least and best loved was—liberty.”
The future will be gorgeous and reckless, and words, those luminous charms, will set us free again. If only for a moment.
Whosoever has allowed the language of lovers to enter them, the language of wound and pain and solitude and hope. Whosoever has dug in the miracle of the earth. Mesmerizing dirt, earth, word.
Allowed love in. Allowed despair in.
Words are the ginger candies my dying friends have sucked on. Or the salve of water.
Precious words, contoured by silence. Informed by the pressure of the end.
Words are the crow’s feet embedded in the skin of the father I love. Words are like that to me, still.
Words are the music of her hair on the pillow.
Words are the lines vibrating in the forest or in the painting. Pressures that enter us—bisect us, order us, disorder us, unite us, free us, help us, hurt us, cause anxiety, pleasure, pain.
Words are the footprints as they turn away in the snow.
There is no substitute for the language I love.
My father, one state away but still too far, asks over the telephone if I might take a photo of this bluebird, the first I have ever seen, because he hears how filled with delight I am by this fleeting sighting. But it’s so tiny, it flies so fast, it’s so hard to see. So far away. Me, with my small hunk of technology, pointing. With my nostalgia machine. My box that says fleeting, my box that says future.
My pleasure machine. My weeping machine that dreams: keep.
This novel that says desire and fleeting and unfinished.
Unfinished and left that way. Unfinished, not abandoned. Unfinished, not because of death or indifference or loss of faith, or nerve, just unfinished.
Not to draw false conclusions anymore. Not to set up false polarities. Unfinished and left that way, if necessary.
To allow everyone to write, to thrive, to live.
The Baltimore oriole returned from its American tropics at the edge of this frame now. I wait.
On this delicious precipice.
And nothing replaces this hand moving across the page, as it does now, intent on making a small mark and allowing it to stand on this longing surface.
Writing oriole. Imagining freedom. All that is possible.
April in the country. My hands in the dark earth, or the body of a woman, or any ordinary, gorgeous sentence.
Whosoever has let the hand linger on a burning thigh, or a shining river of light….
Whosoever has allowed herself to be dazzled by the motion of the alphabet,
or has let music into the body. Or has allowed music to fall onto the page.
Wish: to live and allow others to live. To sing and allow others to sing—while we can.
And hurt not.
Fleeting and longing moment on this earth. We were lucky to be here.
I close my eyes and hear the intricate chamber music of the world. An intimate, complicated, beautiful conversation in every language, in every tense, in every possible medium and form—incandescent.
—-for Alvin, Barbara, and Judith
1 June 1995
Like the clarinet with the flute, like the French horn with the oboe, like the violin and the piano—take the melody from me, when it’s time.
25 April 1995
Germantown, New York
A walk around the loop and I notice the bloodroot has begun to bloom. A bluebird, two bluebirds! The first I’ve ever seen, over by the convent. Before my eyes I see an infant clasping a small bird as depicted in Renaissance painting and sculpture. The world begins again. In this vision. In the words bloodroot and bluebird. And the goldfinches too are suddenly back. Today I saw three enormous turtles sunning themselves at a pond. The bliss of being on leave from teaching is beyond description. I recall Dickinson when someone mu
sed that time must go very slowly for her, saying, “Time! Why time was all I wanted!” And so ditto. Blissful time. Writing, walking every day. I am keeping depression at bay, mania in check. All private sufferings and hurt are somehow more manageable here in solitude. The moment seems all now. The imaginative event, the natural event (two wild turkeys in the woods), the sexual event, and the constantly changing and evolving forms in language for all of this. John sends a note to remind me that my essay is due for the Review of Contemporary Fiction on May ι, but that I may have a small extension. I should be finishing up Defiance, but all I can think about are my erotic études—again feeling on the threshold of something amazing and out of reach. I’m extremely excited—hard to describe—my brain feels unhinged…
I must make a note as to where to move the daffodils, the iris. The earth in my hands. A wand of forsythia like a light in my hands. I think of Barbara an hour away, the glowing glyphs coming off the screen in her study. The whole world—luminous, luminous. We were lucky to be here. Even in pain and uncertainty and rage and fear—some fear. In exhaustion.
Too much energy has gone into this Brown/Columbia decision. Where shall I end up? I have only partially succeeded in keeping it all in its proper place. I’ve had to work too hard to keep my mind at the proper distance. It takes its toll. I’ve needed the space to think, to dream other things. It hardly matters today though; another étude brews.
The RCF essay now in the back of my head. What to say? What can be said? How to use it to learn something, explore something I need to explore. When thinking of literature, the past and the present all too often infuriate me: everyone, everything that’s been kept out. The future won’t, can’t be the same and yet…one worries about it. What I wonder most is if there is a way, whether there might be a way in this whole wide world, to forgive them. Something for the sake of my own work, my own life I need to do—have needed to do a long time. Perhaps in my essay I will make an attempt, the first movement toward some sort of reconciliation, at any rate. If it’s possible. To set up the drama that might make it possible.
This breakable heart.
April. How poised everything seems. How wonderfully ready. And I, too, trembling—and on the verge…
Acknowledgments
THE AUTHOR WISHES to thank those that published these essays, sometimes in different form: Conjunctions, American Poetry Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Seneca Review, A Place Called Home: Twenty Writing Women Remember (St. Martin’s Press, 1996), Reclaiming the Heartland (University of Minnesota Press, 1996), and Tales from the Couch: Writers on the Talking Cure (Avon, 2000).
And a special thanks to Bradford Morrow.
