One friend’s wife is dying and is already gone in a sense with vascular dementia. Another has just been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Another’s husband is very slowly giving way to dementia. My back has been hurting for months and months. I can only walk any distance by using a walker. I am sometimes crying inside but going on with it outside. So I’ll write you this, which is more personal than usual.
A friend just wrote a blazing, beautiful blog about her long-ago sexual assault, titling the blog “The Invisible Labor of Public Speech” . Which makes me want to talk about public speech, which may be all that pulls us through this terrible time in our democracy. There’s a time for tears, which are cleansing and releasing. Anytime is a good time for tears, actually. But the energy released in tears sometimes needs to be shored up and used to act. To speak. And to march.
The prose poems I’ve been writing, what am I doing? Not sending them out. I think I undervalue how much it matters to keep my voice in the world. Not necessarily a political voice, but always carrying my attitudes, my personal worries, my griefs, my best self. The point is not necessarily to protest. The point is to keep the very private, individual voice out in the world.
Joseph Stalin
Those who have put their voices into the world have sometimes died in labor camps, viz., Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938). This is the poem that got him in the biggest trouble. Which I find terribly pertinent at the moment:
The Stalin Epigram
Our lives no longer feel ground under them.
At ten paces you can’t hear our words.
But whenever there’s a snatch of talk
it turns to the Kremlin mountaineer,
the ten thick worms his fingers,
his words like measures of weight,
the huge laughing cockroaches on his top lip,
the glitter of his boot-rims.
Ringed with a scum of chicken-necked bosses
he toys with the tributes of half-men.
One whistles, another meows, a third snivels.
He pokes out his finger and he alone goes boom.
He forges decrees in a line like horseshoes,
One for the groin, one the forehead, temple, eye.
He rolls the executions on his tongue like berries.
He wishes he could hug them like big friends from home.
(from Against Forgetting, edited by Carolyn Forché, translated by W. S. Merwin and Clarence Brown, W. W. Norton & Co.1989.)
Back then, and it’s everywhere around us, right? Any expression of individual thought or dissent was seen as a threat to the state. Literature was to be a tool for propaganda.
Which is why I absolutely must shore myself up, we whose main activity is words must shore up and write stuff. Personal stuff. Stuff about pain and trees and mushrooms. Stuff about abuse and sadness. The object is to be human. When I listen to Trump’s cabinet praising him, I wonder where their souls have gone, what it must have taken to empty out that way.
What I mean by “soul”: the fragile, individual self, made of the miraculous, never-to-be-repeated combination of DNA from our parents, our ancestors, from the earth itself. What fed us from the universe, what nurtured our hearts. If it’s given away—out of fear, out of the need for power—we become a hollow replica of ourselves.
The P.S. . . . . . .
Two book launches coming up—Next Thursday in Bellaire, and Nov. 2 in Traverse City, Nov. 2, 5-7 at the Dennos Museum Center. Here’s the poster for the Bellaire event.
