Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.
———————————-——Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good”
A CURIOUS SCENE for my childless neighbor:
I’m out on the front lawn, a little patch I’ve overstuffed with a Cinderella crab apple, a trellis of morning glories, and, bordering the sidewalk, a few unruly weeds and flowers forming a fence of sorts, some bushy, some elegant, early-blooming irises and late coneflowers, with towering sunchokes, if that’s what they are, yellow bookends that will, it looks like, grow to six feet by late August. The kids measure their height by them. It is a Saturday morning. I guess I like to see what can be held within boundaries. And I suppose this communicates something like an artistic mind to sidewalk-goers—I’ve seen people stop and admire—but it also communicates disorder and chaos, and maybe a certain ease with how things turn out on their own accord. A family lives here, here things are a bit wild, yes, I’m trying to maintain, give me grace, please, look, there’s beauty in the attempt—and all of this is not only the subject matter of the yard, but the aesthetic, let’s call it, an aesthetic of too-muchness, or, as in a line from a poem I jotted down in my commonplace book, “the is-ful ah!-nesses of things.” One could call it that, or sloppy, or undisciplined, and it’s that too, and that’s me. I am my yard and why wouldn’t I be?
I’m weeding stray grass blades from the pots I’ve arranged around the door. Purple and green pots that Lowe’s sold one season and now I’m stuck with. They’re fine. The grass flares and is pretty in its own right, the way it fans out, and each clump I pull unsettles the dirt a bit, so I leave most of them there. Lou is calling for me from the second floor. The wind chimes are blowing, and it’s another cool day. June is wet. July will be too. July is the month we moved here, driving north through the mountains and the rain. It’s been a decade, gosh, and that was a kind of rain I hadn’t seen before, now right here at the very limit. Nothing could be the same here. Even the rain. We felt marooned. A colleague invited me to dinner and I bought flowers from a florist because I couldn’t imagine finding flowers in a grocery store, the way normal people buy them, because nothing could be normal here, so far north where it rained in the summer in the mountains like that. Julia cried. We walked through town the first night and she cried. It was purple, the sky. A bruise. Where are we? What did we choose? What have we done?
Of course, turns out, there were flowers. And people. Still, my yard may be a sign of being marooned. It is too much, as if to say: Here is the world I remember. Or the way it could be. Here, like this. Like this. Brought with me, just in case. Life, the way we think of it, can accompany us, but it takes effort. You speak it into existence until the perennials take root, and there we are again.
I’ve done it everywhere, this portable garden, once in a little patio surrounded by glass buildings in west Los Angeles, where we moved from, where we grew flowers and hung a Tibetan prayer flag. We were newly engaged. Just kids. Rats ate the flag and built colorful nests from it, and the bums in the alley took our trash right from our hands with a sense of decorum. This was the world, they seemed to say. Welcome, welcome, this is how things are, rats eat the flags and we take the trash, and through the walls at night our neighbor, a young man, or maybe there were two, screamed and spoke in different voices, cursing women, cursing life, a kind of possession that I suppose is called bipolar, or mania. There was only one man, it turned out, but it is something much different, and more, much more, when you attempt to live a life nearby, separated just by a thin wall. The devil as Legion, and all that. You get it. There was something exhibitionistic and knowing about the darkness he was moving through, the way he’d sit in his Mustang—how did he afford it?—in the sun, with his windows up, car off, no air-conditioning, screaming into a phone and ripping apart his headrest like an animal would.
That was Los Angeles, the place I had come for grad school. And it was the place that pushed me to breakdown. I was aimless. There were no markers, no flags, just ordinary time, and time was just colorful rat nests, and since what’s inside us corresponds to what’s outside us, outside me was this city, where I slept with women I didn’t care for, and lied, and cheated, which felt like a kind of invention. Or at least it felt creative, and improvisational, and cruel of course, a theater of cruelty. And I did this until Julia joined me, Julia whom I would marry, who would make me her husband, make me a father, with whom I have built a life, starting there, in Los Angeles. But how could it start here, and who was I? I was possessed, like the boy in the car, raging, raging, I was someone else, as Rimbaud might put it, which seemed an attractive enough idea in high school in a book of poems. You agree with many ideas before you live them.
That was Los Angeles, but there were other gardens, and in those gardens slowly, slowly I looked outward, forgot myself. In a house in Silver Lake there was foxglove, and there we’d walk in hills and say the rosary, and I’d meditate and host a Dada party where I drew for myself a little mustache and forgot myself, didn’t make myself another, but forgot myself. I played. I played guitar, and wrote, and sang, and forgot, or forgave myself, which is perhaps the same thing. That forgetting and forgiving, I realized early on, was the part of the sacrament of confession that made most sense. I could not forget, nor forgive, nor feel forgiveness, until I said it out loud, and the fiat, that let there be light, made everything light. I remember the light in the hills in the evenings as we walked, and how a great desire arose in me as I climbed the steps, how it felt like light and was light as light, the feeling that anything was possible not only here but everywhere, and not only now. I copied down the words of others in a book. I learned to think a bit more clearly by not thinking at all, tending to flowers, and then moving to graduate-student housing, where gardens burst with chard and Chinese graduate students hosted parents from the old country who would squat and smoke. Married, we made up, made love, in Malibu, camping, and we brought Isaac to these gardens, our beautiful baby boy with eyelashes that no one, everyone said this, no one could believe. I could. I did. I do.
Listen. Listen! (Now little Lou is shouting.) She calls down from the window. It must look to my neighbor, a lawyer on his way to work, now standing not far from me, like something scripted for him, a little girl calling down to the summer blue world and her father working his little garden. She will recite a poem from memory! She wants to! The center of all beauty, as the first poem in Frank O’Hara’s Collected puts it. And she will! But that’s how we encounter one another, in good and bad moments, little mise-en-scènes, and they help us, these little thumbnails, they help us position ourselves, who we are and how we feel. Would you believe that life is like this? Ordinary life? Kids are like this. My wife is like this. My neighbor is like this. This moment, of course, does not signify everything, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t signify anything. I write it down now so that it doesn’t remain hidden, to build a little wall around it so that I might remember and by remembering maybe even understand. There is, of course, as soon as I revisit it in these words, something liturgical in what I’m saying: This happened, my daughter on high, and two men attending in the front yard below, a kind of ritual repetition. But I only see that now, in this liturgy of the word that is this writing, this repeating for you, like the disciple who was eyewitness, who testifies so that you may also believe. Believe what? Believe only this.
Louisa whisper-sings down to us:
Pussy said to the Owl, “You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?”
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-Tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
This happened yesterday, the standing there in the garden, and through mass today I think of it, maybe because of all of the daughters: Jairus’s dying daughter in Mark, “Lay your hands on her that she may get well and live,” and the hemorrhaging woman (for twelve years!) reaching out for the Christ (“Who touched me?”) on his way to Jairus and the little girl lost. Women. A child. A woman bleeding since the age of twelve, twenty-four years old, say. These are all women, all women in these two women, crying women, dying women, dead children. My daughter is there too, rolling the dormer window, calling out, Dada! Listen! Listen!
I’m listening. It is Sunday again, and I’m listening.
Father John’s replacement is here today, Father Jude, from Nigeria, less smiling, but there is something about his face that looks out and beyond us. He speaks without notes, exploring something just beyond the certainty of sentences one writes down and gets to the end of. He makes no introduction, no hellos. It’s as if those things are not terribly important. Rather, “God,” he says, quoting Wisdom and the first reading, “did not make death.”
How calmly, as if it’s an ordinary thing, do we walk and breathe and even pray, when prayer, prayer here, at least, in the reading, in the world I know, is fear and trembling, where we’re bleeding, always bleeding. Will be for my Louisa, her chest soon its own walled garden. In the garden, in Eden, I read somewhere, adoration was easy, prayer was easy, ad-oration, ad-ora. We were to-the-mouth, mouth to mouth, as it were, at the mouth of God, eye to eye, close, breathing in. Close to what? Life and life’s source. “The relationship,” says Father Jude, “is life,” veering for a moment into Italian and then repeating, chant-like, Talitha koum (“Little girl, arise”). Father Jude, it feels like, moving between English and something else, is fashioning a way through speech to connect, to connect beyond speech. To what? With what? Life. What else?
Why do the Owl and the Pussycat find the ring at the end of his nose, his nose, his nose, my daughter? It’s fashioning from the animal, from the Piggy-wig, something more, something for proper praise, a wedding ring, a sacrament to link with and think with, to think beyond the here and now, this world full of death and bleeding. It is a poem about the sacrament, which is to say: the making sacred. Beyond time—“a year and a day,” which means beyond limits—beyond this world of death, and appetites, and fear, and hatred, and longing, and all that is only animal and lonely and abandoned in us. And this is what love can do, my daughter, my almost twelve-year-old daughter, you who will find yourself in the stream of time, hopelessly trying to clean yourself, wash yourself. You will find yourself, and soon, beyond the door, beyond this garden with its borders of irises and coneflowers.
To say your faith will save you doesn’t seem enough. No, of course it doesn’t, but faith (I’m learning this now even as I write), my Lou, faith is a new relationship with all that is human and connected and reaching, reaching out. Faith turns the ring at the end of the pig’s nose into a wedding ring. Faith is not beyond this world, no. It is this world. There is no other world, for heaven is not somewhere else but somehow else, my daughter, and somehow you will find in this world something that resides beyond death, beyond the rats that eat the prayer flags. You will call it love.
A riddle for my little one, who memorizes nonsense, from your father, who is only listening for the trembling of the spirit in words that go beyond our sense:
How did the man become a dead man?
How?
For his entire life, he kept searching for a killer to slay him.
God fashioned all things, my love, that they might have being. God fashioned all things. My love.
M.I. Devine’s Warhol’s Mother’s Pantry (Ohio State) won the Gournay Prize for Nonfiction. Cofounder of the avant-pop project Famous Letter Writer, he is at www.midevine.com. This essay is from Dadaisms, a new work supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
Photo by Gordon Chaffin on Unsplash
