Admitted to his house, I stood waiting in the foyer while he finished typing in a room he called “the cave of making.” I had seen the room once. It held a large table around which half a dozen or more typewriters sat silently waiting his attention, each holding a draft page of a project on which he was currently working. When he came out, we hugged, my arms not even coming close to encircling him while his easily wrapped around me, an unspoken camaraderie that ran deep, at what he would have called blood-level. There was conversation, good human talk on poetry and other vital subjects that mattered, not the silliness with which people in rural Southside Virginia, gathering for large swathes of time at Walmart, concern themselves—limited, and limiting, discussions of the weather, the football scores, the price of tobacco.
Page 186: I don’t know how to escape it. In “The Silver Lily” Louise Glück writes:
We have come too far together toward the end now
to fear the end. These nights, I am no longer even certain
I know what the end means. And you, who’ve been with a man—
after the first cries,
doesn’t joy, like fear, make no sound?
Secretly—I’ve never admitted this—I’ve always wanted The Man I Used to Live With to die in some sudden and tragic way (struck by lightning, hit by a train, choked on his own spit), so that I would never have to untangle these emotions, so that I could mourn him, and then move on. I’ve always thought there should be some easy way to just move on.
Page 186: A trap. a puzzle. a paradox. When speaking of paradoxes, philosophers and rhetoricians often use the term aporia, the English word derived from the Greek aporos, meaning literally “impassable” (a- meaning “without” and poros meaning “passage”): a blockage, a trap. It’s the state of perplexity, of bafflement, of doubt. Derrida in particular has used the term to describe a deadlock of incompatible information—how mourning and forgiveness, for example, are made impossible by the conditions of their possibility. How possibility requires impossibility.
The opposite of aporos—or a puzzle, a perplexity, a paradox—is poros, meaning “passageway” or “opening,” from which come words like the Latin porta, meaning “door” or “entrance” or “exit” or “escape.” From poros come words like port, passage, opportunity.
These two terms, poros and aporos, the opening and the impasse, are mutually dependent: each one creates the other. An escape without a trap leads away from nowhere forever; the closure without an opening merely suspends. The aporos requires the poros. For every impasse, there must be an opening.
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Page 191: White of forgetfulness. White of safety. Louise Glück, “Persephone the Wanderer.”
You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us
that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.
White of forgetfulness,
White of safety—
thank you
I am grateful to the editors of Pebble Lake Review, TriQuarterly Online, and Creative Nonfiction, where portions of this manuscript appeared over the span of many years, and in very altered form.
I am deeply grateful to my agent, Ethan Bassoff, whom I cannot thank enough for his time, energy, and tireless advocacy of this work; and to Masie Cochran, my editor at Tin House Books, whose insight and energetic vision are forces to be reckoned with. I am indebted to you both.
Thank you also to Jakob, Diane, Nanci, and the whole Tin House crew.
Thanks to the generous readers of early incarnations of this manuscript: Nick Flynn, Joshua Rivkin, Casey Fleming; and to the teachers who clarified my thinking about this book before it became one: Rubén Martínez, John Weir, Mark Doty, Claudia Rankine, Ann Christensen, J. Kastely, and W. Lawrence Hogue. Thanks also to the dedicated writers I worked alongside during this book’s infancy: Elizabeth Chapman, Annie Newton, Lucy Seward, Brian Wolf, Fariha Tayaab, and Allison LiVecchi. I love you with my whole, second beating heart.
I am grateful for the generous support of the Sustainable Arts Foundation; the Millay Colony for the Arts, where a portion of this manuscript was written; and the Inprint Brown Foundation.
And finally, thank you to my husband and partner in life, whom I’ll not name here, and to our children, whose love is so fierce and complete that it pulls me out of bed at night. More than anything else, I am grateful for that love.
The Other Side Page 13
