Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [60]
I tried to leave then, but I couldn’t seem to walk out of the orbit of the altar, some magnetic pull in those ranks of candles, the unrevealing banners of appliquéd felt. I’d begin to walk away and some little spasm of grief would break free, as if floating loose from below, rising to the surface, choking, blinding. I sat back down on the column base, and in a moment there was a tap at my shoulder: the Hispanic woman, come back with—where had she gotten them?—the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.
So began my weekend’s retreat in Manhattan. Out Jean’s bedroom window a great wall of windows opened across 110th—panoply of lives, New York’s theater of stacked views, glances into the unknowability, variety, and immensity of human lives. When I was a first-grader, my family lived in Memphis, Tennessee, and my father used to take me to a museum called the Pink Palace. It was an unfinished mansion some wealthy man had commissioned to be built of smooth pink granite, one stone fitted carefully to the next, but the Depression or private ruin had wiped out his fortune and the unfinished estate became the property of the state, a museum for children. I can remember only one of its exhibits, which I loved: a large wall of little doors, arrayed from floor to ceiling, each with a tiny handle. Some I could reach myself, while my father would have to lift me to others. I must have worn him out with my desire to open and then close every single one of them. What was behind each door was a pane of glass, a window which gave onto a great—real?—tree, and each aperture revealed some different aspect of its life: nests, squirrels, spiders, stuffed birds whose glass eyes looked back with gleaming veracity. There was no way to ever see the entire tree at once, only the hundreds—were there?—of alternative perspectives the doors opened. This great curio cabinet, this museum of viewpoints, serves in my memory as a metaphor that resonates in many directions. The past itself seems to me like that tree, unseeable in its entirety, knowable only in its parts, each viewpoint yielding a different version of the story about what the whole might be.
What is the world but a tree too huge to see at once, known only through the shaping character of the particular aperture through which we see?
Jean’s window gave onto a world of windows, that wide bank of apartments revealing—as lamps were lit, blinds raised—ways in which people lived. This was the world I could not go out into, the exterior whirlwind. I could lie in her bed and look out into its various life, until my attention would float back to the ruin and collapse which was my own.
Journal entry, June 7, New York.
Could it be true, that the more I admit the anger and woundedness—the deep, sealed-off hurt long since turned in on itself—the more I’ll be able to move freely and flexibly?
Once it was important for me not to become bitter, a kind of survival skill. I didn’t want to be burdened, always, by the shadow of a difficult family; there was an energy in me that wanted to move forward, not be locked in contemplation of the past. But I’m forty, and my life’s at midpoint (hard to think, now, living in a battlefield, my friends dying at my age or younger, my neighborhood full of men who maybe won’t see forty) and I begin to think maybe there is a need for bitterness in adult life. Are we children without it, self-deluded? Is there something in disenchantment which strikes the balance, a darker chord in the self which lends us gravity, depth? A ballast, against the spirit’s will to rise?
Is the pain in my back the sharp, insistent, undiluted voice of my self-pity—as if my body itself were whining?
After my hour on M.’s table, during my weekend alone in my friend’s apartment on 110th, I could weep for