Vicarious

identity photogr@aphy, via flickr.com

When I read things others recommend me, I connect words and passages to whomever suggested the book, try to find the pieces of their personality buried deep into others' words. It's puzzling. When I read Vertigo, by WG Sebald, I tried to connect it to my friend Beetle. 

It wasn't tough. WG Sebald traffics in the intangibles, the beguiling difficulty of memories. Nothing is ever linear; Sebald seeks more global truths and ideas about thought and perspective. That's Beetle, who works on projects and thinks and dissects her world into charmed pieces. That's truly how she is, and now I've glimpsed that through others' words.

Beetle tells me that it is like watching a movie you like with someone who hasn't seen it -- modeling it through their eyes is a form of enjoying it. She likes that part best. I agree. It amplifies the experience. 

When Beetle came to New York I took her to many of my favorite restaurants. I explained that it was like I enjoyed the experience because she loved what I loved. Our tastes intersected.

Beetle wondered -- because someone else suggested this -- if she should just recommend a book without saying exactly why, so that the person has a fresh experience. Afterwards they could maybe compare experiences, but the impulse, the why is too strong. I'm always asked why when I recommend something, because time is now so valuable that it makes no sense to read something without knowing whether it's good.

But sometimes it just doesn't work out. Tastes don't always collide, and maybe it's all right that whomever didn't notice the subtle good aspects of your miraculous find. 

But I do know that I suppressed a bad review of my favorite book a few years ago -- it was so dear to me then, and I couldn't bear anybody saying anything bad about it. That impulse seems stupid now. That book was The Shadow Lines. While its non-linear pronoun-confused narrative struck something deep within me, it also proved to be a frustrating read for most of my friends. Now I realize that this novel is not the same thing for everyone, but somehow that scene, where our narrator looks helplessly over at the woman he loves, stripping down in front of him, to know that he can never have that body but have him stand there shaking and helpless, seemed dramatic and amazing to me. My friend found it odd, a little sad, but mostly tedious. 

To the End of the Land

Poppies and Cream, by Shirley Novak

I know that I have dropped off the face of the Earth. The hurricane destroyed my laptop. It died as my friend's basement flooded. Of course I never said anything to her about my laptop. She lost her whole room, most of her wardrobe, many of her papers, books and DVDs -- so our losses are incomparable. 

Afterward, my parents lent me another laptop -- one that my father bought for business but hardly uses -- and I hated it.   I am spoiled. My fingers are difficult snobs. They prefer Steinways to Yamahas, Neutrogena to Jergens. They type lightly across a beautiful machine and expect that and only that. I guess it was better for my health anyway, that I stopped. I don't know. Instead, I've been reading. 

I'm somehow ploughing through David Grossman's To the End of the Land, and I can be seen crying everywhere. I don't even know why I am crying, except I feel a constant emotional onslaught because of the protagonist, and the author's experience (which ghosts each facet of the narrative). I am not used to coping with any grief, whether it's my own or that of others. And I know that trauma has some kind of value and I love the book. Still. Already the pristine copy is ruined with my tears. I never used to be a crier like this. I don't feel a crushing sense of dread all of the time, but something else happens when I read. I choose the wrong books. 

To the End of the Land's protagonist, a woman named Ora, preemptively flees her house when her son Ofer re-enlists after his required tour of duty in the Israeli army. She doesn't want to hear news of his death. She fears it like she's feared nothing else, and she can't remain in familiar surroundings waiting for the inevitable. To escape, she decides to take a hike across the Galilee with her friend and former lover, the damaged Avram. Avram, her son's real father, is a torture victim. Through story and words, Ora recreates her son for him as a way of reassuring herself of their quasi-corporeal connection. Of course, this resurrection has profound consequences for both her and Avram, and that's the story. (So far; it's hard to read more than twenty pages at a time.)

That she can prevent the death by subverting the news is a fit of what they call "magical thinking"; I have heard that phrase everywhere in the past year or two. I read A Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. Didion had written this after the death of her husband and during the wrenching moments of her daughter's sickness. (Didion's daughter, Quintana Roo, died after she published her memoir.) That, too, was hard to read. Throughout the book I kept imagining the worst. Hearing and waiting. Or not waiting. Being, like Ora had been, a "notification refusenik". How could I suddenly face the world? That was too morbid for me. I stopped reading it for long periods at a time. The book became an enemy, something unfamiliar, too full of truth. I know I sound dramatic. I don't care. I can't care. It feels so good to write this down. When I finished the book -- when Didion describes that last quiet, personal explosion, when she understands that this is an ache that never goes away:

I was crossing Lexington Avenue when this occurred to me. 

I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us.

I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. 

Let them become the photograph on the table.Let them become the name on the trust accounts. 

Let go of them in the water. 

Knowing this does not make it any easier to let go of him in the water.  (p 150)

I did not pick up another for a month. (My mother calls this the "shadow-punch"; she felt it after reading Tess of the D'urbervilles. "Depressed for days, and I couldn't figure it out," she said, "it was that. damn. book.") Again, I don't have the long history with my boyfriend that Didion had with her husband, but Didion -- and Grossman -- force me to imagine my boyfriend away from me -- gone somehow, because I can't say the word dead -- I imagine that my devastation would be so much worse and I can't bear it because I can't understand my distress multiplied by so much. What would it be and how would I face it?

I think Ora -- Grossman's protagonist -- asks similar questions. At once she questions her right to feel so intensely and on the other hand she takes ownership of it. She demands that other people feel as she does, or at least acknowledge her connection to her son. By doing that, by talking about him, by focusing on the memories she has of him she feels that she can keep him alive. This is the magical thinking, the belief that this is possible. Avram, Ora's former lover and Ofer's real father, cut off all ties with Ora once she refused to abort their son. (Ora, was at the time, married to her husband Ilan, and Ilan and Avram were best friends.) Their relationship is more complicated than what I can write here; as far as I can tell there's no jealousy but only sorrow. Now, twenty plus years later, Ora reconnects with Avram and talks to him about her son. They are the only two people who can appreciate her need to tell it. It kills Avram, who is still broken from the torture, but I can feel Ora's healing affect. Already he responds to her desire and pain; she heals him with her words, they are a soothing cry out loud, something more powerful and terrible for having been held back so many years.

Both Didion and Grossman cling to these emotional facts. They are, after all, what bind someone to life. Everything is in details -- visual, audio, olfactory, tactile, gustatory. Ambience, tastes, pleasures and loves. Love, mostly, is in the details. And those details are affecting, they always mean something greater than what they seem. By remembering, by reciting, by making others listen to these details, a memory is preserved and carried out. Even forensic pathologists thrive on these details; those details provide clues and causes but also insights into the deceased. 

Now I am reminded of the corpse Sailor's resurrection in Anil's Ghost; I once recommended this book to a friend, and she refuses to talk about it to this day. In Anil's Ghost, the titular Anil, a forensic pathologist, re-forms a man killed by the Sri Lankan government. her journey takes her through a whole host of damaged people; a shifty archeologist, his speed-addled physician brother, a widower whose wife disappeared on her way home. Discovering Sailor in death mirrors the discovery of every one of these people; what remains? What part of us gets to remain? 

How can we keep people with us?
Who would I choose to keep with me?

(Unaccustomed Earth will be posted shortly. I apologize.)