The easy story is that I get lost, often.
An essay on names, violence and love.
Once, I lied to my mother. You should probably know this. My head was in her lap and the road was more pothole than anything and a single car’s red lights guided us into and out of deep ruts, like a cheerful wish. I told my mother I could see angels. I couldn’t see a thing past the smudged windscreen. I had been violently sick on the cement steps of a dynamic prayer meeting and we were going home. I knew I wouldn’t die just then, but I was the kind of child to think, if I do die, what story should she remember me by?
It wasn’t about kindness as much as a fascination with my own life seen from the outside, like a silver button I worry at in my pocket and occasionally pull out for strangers. The button isn’t my life.
I’m from beauty for beauty’s sake and staying close to the spring and it’s not purity of heart or simplicity, it’s how I cover my ears with whatever I have at hand – thick scarves, my palms, one ear pressed into a bus seat – anything that can muffle the world’s rattle. To limit it. On some days, I light a candle. On other days, I fall into the world’s mouth.
“What is my name?” I asked.
When I was a child, a boy rendered anonymous by memory told me that quartz looks like diamond but diamond is worth a million bucks and quartz is worth nothing.
Yesterday I slipped along the old gray stones of a labyrinth in the rain. The stones were almost entirely eaten by moss and I kept losing my way. At the centre of the labyrinth, where I arrived more or less honestly, I stood on white quartz, or maybe it was diamond, and looked up into the rain. “What is my name?” I asked.
Once, I walked the Petrified Forest in Arizona and touched trees flung by a flood into a deep sleep of sediment, until the trees became rock and shone with light. I gathered the chips and sparks of it. Is that my name?
When I left Arizona, the TSA agent pulled me aside and patted down my thighs for the tin of sadness hidden there. I thought it was invisible, buried at the backs of my knees. “The knee is a sensible joint,” my sister told me. At the time we were looking for beauty berries and green papayas and manatees – anything to belie the heavy brightness of the sky.
The violence I’m afraid of is a thoughtless one, the one that lives in the news every day. I’m afraid of my own thoughtlessness, crashing through the walls of a love I didn’t even know had been built for me. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been checking my hands for debris.
This morning, I sliced my thumb on the blender blade. It was a clean arc of blood. Later, I told you: my to-do list for today was, think about trees, and instead I thought about violence and the great pink crane arching over the skyline like a sensible knee broken. Why is it flamingo pink? Why is violence flamboyant? You said: “I love you.” These things did not happen in the order I’ve told them. What shook me most was hearing love. •
There is sunshine in Vancouver and tentative flowers on trees. The days are getting longer! I finished There Are Rivers In The Sky by Elif Shafak and loved the scope of research that was packed into it.
As I read it, I thought of how my uncles — and father — and brothers — and even myself when I’m paying attention, will walk into a house and instantly see crooked baseboards or drywall seams. There’s a certain delicious judginess that exists in a family familiar with construction. I’m increasingly feeling that way as I read historical novels — weighing the thing in my hands, feeling for the seams of story, trying to understand how it was put together and how solid it is.
And you might feel that way about today’s essay! This week’s essay gathers chips and pieces of writing over the span of months, and brings them into conversation. If you’re not really sure what emerges by the end of it, neither do I. It’s a little cliche to say that the word “essay” comes from the French word essayer, “to try,” but it does and this is a try at something.
I’ll bring you a poem next time, something short and possibly more straighforward (but no promises!).
Here’s three poems from the archives:
So much of this piece resonates with me right now. As always, I’m struck by the distances you travel all in one brief swath of prose. ❤️
In regard to this: "I’m increasingly feeling that way as I read historical novels — weighing the thing in my hands, feeling for the seams of story, trying to understand how it was put together and how solid it is." Just yesterday I was thinking of a sentence from a book reviewer (it may even have been Norman Mailer): "stilted to despair in its dialogue." I find myself reading the first few pages of a novel--historical or otherwise--and saying to Betsey: "I'll try to read this book, but it's phony."