Poetry and grief, pt 2: what we talk about when we talk at funerals

A curious side phenomenon of death in the family: for a while there I was surrounded by three distinct vocabularies.  There was the sterile, intensely neutral language of the medical world—stiff latinate ways to describe terrible things (hemiparesis, glioblastoma multiforme, cerebral edema) or else ultramodern made-up words for treatments that sort of help (dexamethasone, gamma knife, Keppra).  This is a form of comfort.  What is being experienced has a name, it is documented, it can be spoken of as an abstraction that exists outside your own story.  Ultimately you play a passive role.  This tumor behaves this way because tumors always do so.  The medicine will relieve these symptoms because its chemistry is designed that way.  The impression is of impersonal forces struggling somewhere only vaguely connected with the sterile room you're in. This vocabulary mitigates anger, makes it understandable when the impersonal struggle concludes with the familiar TV doctor's line: We did everything we could.

Contrast that with vocabulary #2, the clanging triumphalist imagery the evangelical church uses to speak of death.  Where medical jargon uses the passive voice, this is intensely active.  Illness is rewritten as battle, death as reward, the departed inevitably 'brave,' whether or not the speaker has any idea how they faced their suffering.  Because the personal narrative—I once was lost but now am found—is the driving force of evangelicalism, there's an intense pressure to put positive closure on tragedy, quickly.  We forget the pains Paul takes to remind us that death is the last enemy to be destroyed.  Hence the martial metaphors, mentions of glorified bodies and reunions in the afterlife, and ceaseless references to God's plan.¹  All of this encourages the crafting of a sentence whose fulcrum is the word 'but'.  Its crudest form goes something like, "life is hard, but God is good."  That little conjunction becomes a lifeline.  It marks the difference between sympathy and reassurance.  In nearly every conversation I had with someone from my parents' church, I felt a expectation to produce some variation on this sentiment, to add that 'but' clause.  And when I did, I imagined I could see my interlocutor's relief.  It was like resolving a dissonant chord.

These vocabularies are not, of course, universal, but there are always layers of language around death.  The actual raw data of the event is discussed (maybe) by the eceased's inner circle and by those outside it—"What happened?" "Really? Shit."— but never between the two.  Every other conversation is buffered, filtered through some narrative: the story the bereaved tell others, the story those others tell the bereaved, the story packaged for all involved by disinterested outsiders.  This last varies.  It could be and has been communal myths, rituals, orders, and liturgies.  Yet in America one type of external narrative is encountered by everyone but everyone, regardless of nation, color, or creed, in the third vocabulary, the flourescent pastoralism of the sympathy industry.  To interact with undertakers is to fall through the lookingglass into a place where everything looks like a (respectfully muted) Thomas Kincaid painting .  "Respect" is a big word in this world, as are "dignity," "fullness," "honor," "legacy," and so on.  Like the triumphal language of Evangelicals, this cant owes something to the military, or even better, to politics.  These are big words, they belong to a very public type of rhetoric, and as such they have been ballooned out to cover whole generations, people groups, and nations.  It is very hard to get them to shrink down again to the size of a single person.  They have lost whatever elasticity they might have once had.  They might work in a funeral oration in Shakespeare, but when a business applies them across the board² to people who by the nature of the enterprise could not have been known to them, well, it's like listening to a lush orchestration of "Chopsticks."  All of this is made more disconcerting by the constant back-of-the-mind fact that someone's making money from this.  The prayer card, for example, is obviously mass-produced.  You leaf through a book with about 200 options, each painting more saccharine than the last, the possible texts nauseating and false.³  You can see the focus group coordinator in her purple knit sweater: What words do you think of when I say 'memory'? How about 'compassion'? Can you arrange these pictures in order of most to least comforting? (We chose a simple picture of praying hands b/w Psalm 24.  They messed up and we got Psalm 23 instead.)  The really wild thing about this is that there are no other options.  Rules of supply and demand indicate that Kincaidiana is what I want, is the language I wish to speak in time of sorrow.

I'm unclear what was worse, the thick ironies that seemed to keep me from actually feeling anything during this time, or the fact that so many people around me seemed to feel this olla podrida of sentiments is totally normal.  Or the deep and gnawing intimation that I am somehow self-narcotizing, that I am truly missing something, not 'in touch with my feelings,' as the grief booklets say.  It is a source of tremendous comfort that Dickinson went down this road long before me.  But so at the time my mom died, those three vocabularies were clonking around attempting to lay claim to various pieces of my heart, and the whole thing started to feel like a bad postmodern dream, the ridiculous dining out on the sublime and vice versa.  That is to say, exactly like an Ashbery poem.⁴

[Footnotes after the jump, I'm experimenting with HTML.]

Where Mark's brain has been, pt 1: The mooring of starting out

Jacobs has talked about the blog form as an opportunity for writing essays in installments.  I want to try something along those lines:

---

When my mom died, around a year and a half ago, I started reading a lot of poetry.  I hadn't done much of that for some time.  But I expected poetry to be a source of solace, and it was, and still is.  Maybe, initially, it had something to do with the fact that many poems are short, and thus look suspiciously like Easy Answers.  But the exact source of solace I ended up locating, or at least a home for the confusion and anxiety of grief, was a surprise: I started reading a lot of what you’d maybe call difficult poetry.  By which I mean poems of seeming anti-meaning that don’t yield their secrets easily if at all.  Not the bleeding experimental edge, mind you.  No, the stuff I'm dipping into is relatively tame; stuff that's always threatening to coalesce into meaning or melody—Wallace Stevens, Jorie Graham, Kenneth Koch, and most of all John Ashbery.

One would expect the mourner to look for poems rife with clear Truths, gentle cycle-of-life meditations about the Body Of The World and the Overwhelming Splendor Of It All.  Poems of comfort.  Things like this, or this, or this (all picked, I swear, at random from last few months of WA archives¹).  So much of the language my family heard from friends and cards seems to hustle us in that direction, to offer alchemical formulae to transmute loss into meaning, and pronto.  But the poems I read and listened to (courtesy of the magnificent Penn Sound Archives) don’t seem particularly interested in catharsis, or even legibility—they don’t give a fig about my personal grief.  Their starting point here is—well, I don't know.  Sounds, yes; arresting juxtapositions in the surrealist tradition, sure; certain ideas about the act of artistic creation, probably.  But there's no embarking from any spontaneous overflows of powerful emotion, and if something is being recollected, it is difficult to discern whether from a state of tranquility or what. Still, like the creation myth where the world is made of scraps idly swept from the gods' table, these guys write such dense stuff that certain lines and half-lines can't help but cloak my own rejected thoughts in alienated majesty.

For example, take the delightful moment in Ashbery's very, very long poem "The Skaters" where he announces, "It is time now for a general understanding  / of the meaning of all this."  In a 1964 recording of the poem, this line is received with laughter.  It is hilariously straightforward, but perhaps the laughter contains a little relief as well—if he's making a joke about meaning, he must know that this poem is difficult.  Up to this point, we were worried that maybe, just maybe, we were missing some point that was obvious to everyone else.²    Of course what follows is only an explanation of why he won't explain anything, and it's not easy even to get that out of it.  But then there's a startling sort of aside:

...Except to say that the carnivorous
Way of these lines is to devour their own nature, leaving
Nothing but a bitter impression of absence, which as we know involves presence, but still.
Nevertheless these are fundamental absences, struggling to get up and be off themselves.

I do not believe Ashbery intended to evoke the feeling of grief's tapering off, the guilt at sliding back into normal life.  Nor was he trying to describe the anxiety that I'd forget my mom's face and voice.  But when I hear these lines, I can't not feel those things, rendered as crisp and perfect as if Raymond Carver had done it.

Which sounds a lot like I've snuck the sympathy cards’ grubby scramble for Meaning into the avant garde, doesn't it? What a hermeneutical faux pas, especially in a poem that, if it's about anything, is about 'skating' blithely across the surface of meaning.  Hypocrite lecteur! Surely this is a shallow and limited way to read a poem, just naked projection, right?

If there's a defense of this method, it's that the fractured and dense nature of the poems I'm talking about keep these moments from coming too easy or too often.  Any measure of comfort is found, paradoxically, because the poet isn't generally offering any comfort.  There's some scrounging on my part to find it, there's no takeaway in big pastel script.  And in that it seems so much more like messy real life than any tidy, epiphany-driven 'grief' poem.  What I wanted in the months after mom died wasn't kindly sages to illuminate my path—that feels (to me, which may reveal more about my attitudes that the poets') patronizing and facile.  Instead I found myself looking for fellow-travelers, other voices in the dark to articulate and give texture to its darkness, as Brecht describes:

In the dark times,
Will there also be singing?
Yes, there will also be singing.
About the dark times. 

¹While the Keilloriana of Good Poems has been kind of a drag, some of the hoariest bits of the canon have come crawling out of high school anthologies to make new sense: Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins; even musty old "Dover Beach" and its midnight anti-epiphany turned out to be kind of profoundly moving when I read it after mom's funeral while my wife slept beside me.
²If we do miss the point, we're in good company: Auden awarded Ashbery the Yale Younger Poet's Prize, then later claimed not to have understood a word of the manuscript.