Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [62]
Remember: life is a breath;
soon I will vanish from your sight.
The eye that looks will not see me;
you may search, but I will be gone.
Like a cloud fading in the sky,
man dissolves into death.
He leaves the whole world behind him
and never comes home again.
A characteristically Old Testament vision of human life: a breath caught between two darknesses, a difficulty endurable only through submission to God. Submission to power and law, the acceptance of our lot—an expected stance, and one which Job all at once bracingly, completely belies.
“Therefore,” he says, “I refuse to be quiet…
This is the opposite of acceptance. Job sees plainly and unflinchingly the unbearable human lot and says, No, I will not have it, I do not understand it, it is not just. Job and his friends need to believe—don’t we all need to believe?—the universe is sane, benign in its orders. Job’s upright friends—righteous men, good spiritual citizens—would have him accept that he must have sinned somehow, must have done something to deserve this. Or at least want him to accept, silently, an incomprehensible will greater than his own.
But Job’s humanity lies in his no-saying. No easy answer, no humble acceptance, NO—I rage against the excoriating process of loss in my life, I will not be silent in the face of it, I refuse to be quiet. I will look at the great black tree of the world through the window of bitterness, the window of misery, I’ll put my face to that dark, and I will say what I see. Silence is submission to the implacable order. For Job, silence equals the death of the self.
There is so much I don’t want to write. I can feel the interior pressure and turbulence, latent feeling opened and invited in—out?—if I begin to speak directly about illness, dissolution, the end of my heart’s desire, the wreck of love’s body, the failure of medicine. There is so much there to—I begin to write “dredge up,” but it isn’t at all like uncovering something from which I have recovered, something far in the past. It’s that there’s all that grief and anger right there and I’d rather not feel it than look at it directly, which isn’t really a choice, since if I don’t look at it my body will embody it. (What else does embody mean?)
To go on is to write out of, as it were, the pain in my back, the crashing within myself that seems multiple in its parts. Feelings I had to back away from, for a while, in order to go on, which now want to be admitted—residual anger and bitterness, old and new. I had been moving forward, in this new and unfamiliar life, as if I had more strength than I did. And so my body insisted on a hiatus, a rupture, a period of reflection.
I have no choice but to open the door to the pain, but if I do so I feel as if I’m going to rage, to cry, endlessly. I want to be in control, I can’t be in control, I want to let my feelings flow fluidly, I want to stop holding it…
M. says, You don’t have to do anything. It’s that you stop doing what you’re doing, you stop holding on…
Depth charges of grief and anger detonating, down inside the muscles, way down in the heart/spine/brain, and the black smoke churning up, the feeling letting loose, wordless, as I think about bringing it to words.
Start at the beginning of this story, angel, help me to bring these words to light so that they don’t turn to acid in the dark.
The angel answers: They are acid already. How else could they be? Let them pour out, scalding, a hot black oil to steam on the street, coruscating bitter fluid. You’d keep that in your body? Up and out, let it go.
M. again: The only way to release tension is to feel it.
But I think, old histories surfacing here, that if I’m angry, bitter, negative, there’ll be damage, that it’s dangerous to feel so strongly.
More dangerous, says the angel, not to.
Now I think it is not Wally who has gone into the underworld, but myself—on a long spiraling journey of peril, of unpredictability, in which I must come to new terms. I must reinterpret my life, or lose myself. Have I already “lost myself