Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [135]
The three of us are people who’ve always depended on our work as a means of negotiating difficulty. A vessel for feeling, an arena in which we give shape to emotion and see it reflected back to us. How lucky, not to have the ability to work desert us. Work is our intangible property, one thing that we individually control. One thing that doesn’t disappear.
This book begins as separate essays, pieces written for collections about AIDS and about religion, written because someone invited me to write them. But soon I was impelled, soon I was writing for myself. Writing, in a way, to save my life, to catch what could be saved of Wally’s life, to make form and struggle toward a shape, to make a story of us that can be both kept and given away. The story’s my truest possession and I burnish and hammer it and wrestle it to make it whole. In return it offers me back to myself, it holds what I cannot, its embrace and memory larger than mine, more permanent.
Always, always we were becoming a story. But I didn’t understand that fusing my life to the narrative, giving myself to the story’s life, would be what would allow me to live.
Bitterness
Gridlock in New York; the President’s in town and his cordon of vehicles has Fifth Avenue closed, so there’s some kind of chain reaction all the way to La Guardia. The taxi driver wants to take an alternate route, so after I agree we wind up on some side street in a particularly beat part of Queens. This would probably help matters except that it seems every other taxi driver in the universe has had the same idea, so that this sad little retail neighborhood with its on-the-skids businesses and wildly graffitied walls is totally choked with yellow taxis, all of them idling and cursing and champing at the bit. Nobody’s moving.
Which allows me a really good look at the guy on the corner, a middle-aged black man in shabby clothes, too many layers of them for the weather. He’s standing right on the curb, rocking back and forth a little, surveying the air above the cabs, the gridlock, me, and when he speaks, loud as a street preacher, his judgment seems to take in us all.
“The world,” he says, “is shit.”
It makes me laugh, as well as scaring me a little—he’s right outside my window. But all he wants to do is pronounce.
And in fact I know how he feels. Because grief has taught me that bitterness is itself a strange kind of consolation, that clear-eyed, sober bleakness that sees right through the sentiments of consolation, that knows better than all the things that fail to console. Time, for instance; my friend Renate, her husband dead three years, saw the wind rocking the chair on the deck where her husband used to like to sit, and the movement of the empty chair tore her apart; she felt, in fact, that her grief had gotten worse with the passage of time. Is the way that time “heals” us simply that it encourages us to turn away?
Or memory. People love to say, “Your pain will fade and you will be left with beautiful memories.” But my memories are also a narrative of pain and of diminishment, and that history’s vivid to me, too.
Sometimes all that would help would be to allow myself to feel ferocious, to feel like a raging fire burning up the false offerings of consolation, burning right at the dark heart of things. We need, sometimes, to consign it all to darkness. We need to look at the world and proclaim it shit.
Whose ignorant words, says the voice in the whirlwind in Job, smear my design with darkness?
Ours. Because everything around us races toward disappearance. Our brief moment’s a flash, an arcing flare which itself serves to illuminate the face of death.
Aren’t we always on the verge of vanishing? Isn’t the whole world nowhere’s coast?
Sometimes all that helps is a deep, bracing breath of emptiness.
The Present
I’m writing in the wild glamour of an early Italian spring, smoke of olive wood drifting up the hill from the grove. This is a world of fragrance: Parma violets, in the shade of the woods, and on days it rains something