The trouble with the BIG life moments is that when I attempt to capture & contain them in language, I hear my own clichés rolling out like chicks and bunnies at Easter. Knowing this doesn’t stop me—although I have in my head Proust’s disgust at the weakness of language re-played—the way this disrespects the moment you are trying to revere.
A dear friend and Salon participant died a few weeks ago—died terribly fighting cancer in the vigor and passion of living. I am stuck trying to spin out words to contain this moment and our response to it: how sharply life shows in reflection of death, how the simple moments I hold of him suddenly become precious, easily lost gems, the rage of inequity, the meaninglessness that sneaks into the narratives I attempt to weave around his death.
My head is full of words—full of offerings of the best minds around the humbling moments of life and the meaning we seek in spite of the inexplicable horrors and random tragedies– those next to us, or in Lahore, Brussels… I am honored to read at the celebration of my friend’s life- and I choose a favorite passage from Ulysses that is deeply sensuous—infused with hope in the first passion of new love against the years of living that threaten to diminish those fresh, wild explosions of the heart.
I offer Joyce’s beautiful images in a voice strained through tears—and when I have made it- barely- through the reading—I am left choking and empty. How can we shape meaning in the vortex of dying?
But the words continue to hum in my mind, wrapped in the image of my friend—it was a strange choice perhaps for a funeral reading—but the passage evoked my friend’s incredible love for his life partner—and that ultimately was what I wanted to hold against the void.
Below are some quotes that speak to me just now as I move through the aftermath of the rituals of burial, of a weekend bursting with friends visiting from across time, from the daily struggle to wrest meaning from the simple and necessary acts of living in the blast of tragedy, the transcendent recognition of human connections and rituals– and the power of language in literature to try– against the odds– to say what we mean.
From Reflections on the Novel as Tool for Survival by Arthur Krystal
There is something “primitive” in the great issues that have traditionally concerned writers, Lionel Trilling submitted in “The Meaning of a Literary Idea.” Questions about the nature of thought and man “match easily in the literary mind with the most primitive human relationships. Love, parenthood, incest, patricide: These are what the great ideas suggest in literature, these are the means by which they express themselves.” Completing the thought, Trilling went on to write, “Ideas, if they are large enough and of a certain kind, are not only not hostile to the creative process, as some think, but are virtually inevitable to it. Intellectual power and emotional power go together.”
–from http://chronicle.com/article/The-Novel-as-a-Tool-for/235565
“Meaning is a shaky edifice we build out of scraps, dogmas, childhood injuries, newspaper articles, chance remarks, old fillms, small victories, people hated, people loved; perhaps it is because our sense of what is the case is constructed from such inadequate materials that we defend it so fiercely, even to death.”
And…
“Go for broke. Always try and do too much. Dispense with safety nets. Take a deep breath before you begin talking. Aim for the stars. Keep grinning. Be bloody-minded. Argue with the world. And never forget that writing is as close as we get to keeping a hold on the thousand and one things–childhood, certainties, cities, doubts, dreams, instants, phrases, parents, loves–that go on slipping , like sand, through our fingers.”
― Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991
