Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [61]
Now I could cry for myself—for the pain of it, for losing what I thought the rest of my life would be like—in a way that I couldn’t when he was alive, or even when my grief was stunningly new and I could only weep for him, not for myself. Self-pity, we’re taught, is the ugliest of indulgences, the one we’re not to give in to, our natures at their weakest. Here is Job, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation (Jean’s copy, the book I most need there, in the serenity of the blue bedroom), raging about the destruction of his life:
If only I could return
to the days when God was my guardian;
when his fire blazed above me
and guided me through the dark—
to the days when I was in blossom
and God was a hedge around me…
For “God” substitute “life,” “the world,” even “time,” whatever; what you call the power larger than yourself here doesn’t matter. Job is articulating what it’s like to be young; his definition of innocence has to do not with age but with the quality of being untouched, the sense of invulnerability with which we live until the world comes crashing in to challenge us.
The Book of Job enacts the most human and inevitable of tragedies. Job has love, wealth, solidity, community, certainty. And then his world is scoured, and the only purpose given for his harrowing doesn’t seem to even convince the great anonymous poet behind the poem. The poem’s a wrestling with a mystery, the ceaseless process of diminishment and loss.
For your lover to die is not to be guided by fire but immolated by it; to lose what you love, as Job loses his children, is to be entirely plunged into darkness, vulnerable, unprotected by any hedge. And we’re forced to the ultimate question of self-pity: why me? Why did I suffer? Why did I live to lose? Does this have any meaning at all, or is it merely the grinding down of ourselves, the grand arbitrary motions the spheres enact?
That’s what I didn’t want to feel: my own sense of smallness, rage, violation, my tiny life—especially against the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people with AIDS who’ve died or are dying—my life disrupted, wreaked havoc upon. Who was I to feel sorry for myself when I didn’t even have the disease? When it wasn’t me who’d been crushed on a wet highway?
But if I couldn’t allow myself to feel the pity and terror of my own loss, then my body would enact it for me.
Here is Job, adult bitterness incarnate, vessel of anger, eye to eye with the sheer uncompromising face of the dark:
Man who is born of woman—
how few and harsh are his days!
Like a flower he blooms and withers;
like a shadow he fades in the dark.
He falls apart like a wineskin,
like a garment chewed by moths.
This is the unmitigated voice of the survivor who is only able to deal with devastation this way, by hammering out the bleakest view of the human situation. Job’s losses are horrific, sweepingly total, and delivered to us in swift passages of prose as if to get that part of the story over with and get on to what matters, which is the sufferer’s negotiations with the nature of reality. A paradox: there is no consolation available in Job’s vision of the nature of things, and there’s something strangely consoling about this clear-eyed and sober assessment of what it means to be a man: “how few and harsh are his days.” Perhaps because such a stance doesn’t expect much. It comes after the long tears and groaning of deep grief, a bit numbed, utterly without self-delusion, beaten into a kind of ashen acknowledgment of our brief and difficult transit here. As if life in the world will be tolerable if we expect nothing of it. Here he