by Mark Doty
What is the world but a tree too huge to see at once, known only through the shaping character of the particular aperture through which we see?
Jean’s window gave onto a world of windows, that wide bank of apartments revealing—as lamps were lit, blinds raised—ways in which people lived. This was the world I could not go out into, the exterior whirlwind. I could lie in her bed and look out into its various life, until my attention would float back to the ruin and collapse which was my own.
Journal entry, June 7, New York.
Could it be true, that the more I admit the anger and woundedness—the deep, sealed-off hurt long since turned in on itself—the more I’ll be able to move freely and flexibly?
Once it was important for me not to become bitter, a kind of survival skill. I didn’t want to be burdened, always, by the shadow of a difficult family; there was an energy in me that wanted to move forward, not be locked in contemplation of the past. But I’m forty, and my life’s at midpoint (hard to think, now, living in a battlefield, my friends dying at my age or younger, my neighborhood full of men who maybe won’t see forty) and I begin to think maybe there is a need for bitterness in adult life. Are we children without it, self-deluded? Is there something in disenchantment which strikes the balance, a darker chord in the self which lends us gravity, depth? A ballast, against the spirit’s will to rise?
Is the pain in my back the sharp, insistent, undiluted voice of my self-pity—as if my body itself were whining?
After my hour on M.’s table, during my weekend alone in my friend’s apartment on 110th, I could weep for Wally’s diminishment, the long bitter years of slow erasure, the losses gradual and little: not being able to go to the movies together, the slow decline of sexual life, not being able to share the events and concerns of my work. And then, headlong and tumbling, all of him falling down a long tunnel of loss, one aspect of self after another. I could cry about all this now in a way I couldn’t when he was alive, or in the first months after he died.
Now I could cry for myself—for the pain of it, for losing what I thought the rest of my life would be like—in a way that I couldn’t when he was alive, or even when my grief was stunningly new and I could only weep for him, not for myself. Self-pity, we’re taught, is the ugliest of indulgences, the one we’re not to give in to, our natures at their weakest. Here is Job, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation (Jean’s copy, the book I most need there, in the serenity of the blue bedroom), raging about the destruction of his life:
If only I could return
to the days when God was my guardian;
when his fire blazed above me
and guided me through the dark—
to the days when I was in blossom
and God was a hedge around me…
For “God” substitute “life,” “the world,” even “time,” whatever; what you call the power larger than yourself here doesn’t matter. Job is articulating what it’s like to be young; his definition of innocence has to do not with age but with the quality of being untouched, the sense of invulnerability with which we live until the world comes crashing in to challenge us.
The Book of Job enacts the most human and inevitable of tragedies. Job has love, wealth, solidity, community, certainty. And then his world is scoured, and the only purpose given for his harrowing doesn’t seem to even convince the great anonymous poet behind the poem. The poem’s a wrestling with a mystery, the ceaseless process of diminishment and loss.
For your lover to die is not to be guided by fire but immolated by it; to lose what you love, as Job loses his children, is to be entirely plunged into darkness, vulnerable, unprotected by any hedge. And we’re forced to the ultimate question of self-pity: why me? Why did I suffer? Why did I live to lose? Does this have any meaning at all, or is it merely the grinding down of ourselves, the grand arbitrary motions the spheres enact?
That’s what I didn’t want to feel: my own sense of smallness, rage, violation, my tiny life—especially against the lives of the hundreds of thousands of people with AIDS who’ve died or are dying—my life disrupted, wreaked havoc upon. Who was I to feel sorry for myself when I didn’t even have the disease? When it wasn’t me who’d been crushed on a wet highway?
But if I couldn’t allow myself to feel the pity and terror of my own loss, then my body would enact it for me.
Here is Job, adult bitterness incarnate, vessel of anger, eye to eye with the sheer uncompromising face of the dark:
Man who is born of woman—
how few and harsh are his days!
Like a flower he blooms and withers;
like a shadow he fades in the dark.
He falls apart like a wineskin,
like a garment chewed by moths.
This is the unmitigated voice of the survivor who is only able to deal with devastation this way, by hammering out the bleakest view of the human situation. Job’s losses are horrific, sweepingly total, and delivered to us in swift passages of prose as if to get that part of the story over with and get on to what matters, which is the sufferer’s negotiations with the nature of reality. A paradox: there is no consolation available in Job’s vision of the nature of things, and there’s something strangely consoling about this clear-eyed and sober assessment of what it means to be a man: “how few and harsh are his days.” Perhaps because such a stance doesn’t expect much. It comes after the long tears and groaning of deep grief, a bit numbed, utterly without self-delusion, beaten into a kind of ashen acknowledgment of our brief and difficult transit here. As if life in the world will be tolerable if we expect nothing of it. Here he speaks, in another passage:
Remember: life is a breath;
soon I will vanish from your sight.
The eye that looks will not see me;
you may search, but I will be gone.
Like a cloud fading in the sky,
man dissolves into death.
He leaves the whole world behind him
and never comes home again.
A characteristically Old Testament vision of human life: a breath caught between two darknesses, a difficulty endurable only through submission to God. Submission to power and law, the acceptance of our lot—an expected stance, and one which Job all at once bracingly, completely belies.
“Therefore,” he says, “I refuse to be quiet…
This is the opposite of acceptance. Job sees plainly and unflinchingly the unbearable human lot and says, No, I will not have it, I do not understand it, it is not just. Job and his friends need to believe—don’t we all need to believe?—the universe is sane, benign in its orders. Job’s upright friends—righteous men, good spiritual citizens—would have him accept that he must have sinned somehow, must have done something to deserve this. Or at least want him to accept, silently, an incomprehensible will greater than his own.
But Job’s humanity lies in his no-saying. No easy answer, no humble acceptance, NO—I rage against the excoriating process of loss in my life, I will not be silent in the face of it, I refuse to be quiet. I will look at the great black tree of the world through the window of bitterness, the window of misery, I’ll put my face to that dark, and I will say what I see. Silence is submission to the implacable order. For Job, silence equals the death of the self.
There is so much I don’t want to write. I can feel the interior pressure and turbulence, latent feeling opened and invited in—out?—if I begin to speak directly about illness, dissolution, the end of my heart’s desire, the wreck of love’s body, the failure of medicine. There is so much there to—I begin to write “dredge up,” but it isn’t at all like uncovering something from which I have recovered, something far in the past. It’s that there’s all that grief and anger right there and I’d rather not feel it than look at it directly, which isn’t really a choice, since if I don’t look at it my body will embody it. (What else does embody mean?)
To go on is to write out of, as it were, the pain in my back, the crashing within myself that seems multiple in its
parts. Feelings I had to back away from, for a while, in order to go on, which now want to be admitted—residual anger and bitterness, old and new. I had been moving forward, in this new and unfamiliar life, as if I had more strength than I did. And so my body insisted on a hiatus, a rupture, a period of reflection.
I have no choice but to open the door to the pain, but if I do so I feel as if I’m going to rage, to cry, endlessly. I want to be in control, I can’t be in control, I want to let my feelings flow fluidly, I want to stop holding it…
M. says, You don’t have to do anything. It’s that you stop doing what you’re doing, you stop holding on…
Depth charges of grief and anger detonating, down inside the muscles, way down in the heart/spine/brain, and the black smoke churning up, the feeling letting loose, wordless, as I think about bringing it to words.
Start at the beginning of this story, angel, help me to bring these words to light so that they don’t turn to acid in the dark.
The angel answers: They are acid already. How else could they be? Let them pour out, scalding, a hot black oil to steam on the street, coruscating bitter fluid. You’d keep that in your body? Up and out, let it go.
M. again: The only way to release tension is to feel it.
But I think, old histories surfacing here, that if I’m angry, bitter, negative, there’ll be damage, that it’s dangerous to feel so strongly.
More dangerous, says the angel, not to.
Now I think it is not Wally who has gone into the underworld, but myself—on a long spiraling journey of peril, of unpredictability, in which I must come to new terms. I must reinterpret my life, or lose myself. Have I already “lost myself”? Certainly I am lost. I awoke, in the middle of my life, in a dark wood…
Losing one’s self: is that it? Is the descent of the surviving into grief and incomprehension a death, too? I awoke in a dark wood…A descent above all into the unfamiliar, the known world made strange, all signposts gone, one’s sense of the predictable future shattered. Everything utterly different, though it looks the same.
In the months after Wally died I felt a kind of spirit with me that sustained me, even though I was miserable; it was strange how I could be in so much pain and feel, at once, somehow close to the heart of life, in a place of no little radiance. And then, the descent, the dying back into the world—a dark wood—where we are unguided. Lynda died and whatever shine seemed to leak out of the other world as Wally entered it left me. What my soul requires is this going down into darkness, into the bitterness of salt and chewing at old roots. In my heart I make myself ugly and bitter, I say cruel and harsh things, I spit on hope, I mock the bit of life which is tender beginnings, which is promise, which is hope. I will let myself be ugly, I will have a mouth full of darkness, a heart full of bile, I will be sour and hateful and old. I see the future burning, the oily rags of love going up in the black smoke of the torched body. In another time I would have wandered in the desert, I would have torn my clothing and walked in rags, I’d have smeared my face with dust and clay and refused speech, I would have hurled my body down into the dust and my soul into darkness, into nothing, utter free fall in the world of senselessness. Much as I want to hold on, want to cling to any perception which might be redemptive, any solid point, what is required of me is what I fear the most: relinquishment, free fall, the fluid pour into absolute emptiness. There is no way around the emptiness, the bitter fact, no way to go but through.
Part Two
THROUGH
Descent
Wally died of a viral brain infection, PML, which stands for progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy, a condition in which an ordinarily harmless virus that most of us carry around in our livers is able to migrate, due to the suppression of the immune system, into the brain. There it multiplies unchecked, causing certain areas to become inflamed, unable to function. Typically—to the extent that anything is typical, since this is a rare opportunistic infection which affects perhaps two percent of people with AIDS—PML leads to a gradual paralysis, symptoms rather resembling those of someone who’s had a stroke. One side of the body is usually affected more than the other. Difficulties with speech and comprehension develop gradually, along with loss of movement and feeling. Leading, at worst, to complete paralysis, which was my deepest nightmare for Wally, the scenario I tried not to let myself imagine, that he might be awake and aware but unable to move or to react.
PML: hard, unyielding acronym. Another constellation of letters, in themselves meaningless, full of negative capability. We could imagine into them further because they were so empty, so devoid, in themselves, of content or suggestion. Like “AIDS” itself; if the disease had a name, a real word, would we be able to attach so many cultural meanings to it, freight it so heavily with values and associations?. AZT, DDI, DDC, PML: troubling recombinations of letters. A bad hand drawn at Scrabble, letters which we can figure and refigure and still make nothing. PML literally makes nothing; where someone was, where clarity and spirit and intelligence and movement were, erasure. As if the self were written in chalk, then powdered away.
If, in fact, PML was what we had. (I write that “we” unconsciously at first, automatically, as though it were my illness too, I lived with it that closely, it consumed my life that completely. I know I can’t know what it’s like even to be HIV-positive, but there is a way in which people have illnesses—especially terminal ones—together.) The only way to make a positive diagnosis of PML is a brain biopsy. If that test did yield a positive result, then there was nothing to be done. The single experimental treatment we heard about—holes drilled in the skull, the brain flooded with AZT—sounded like a medieval torture, and Wally could never tolerate that drug anyway. And no one even much believed in it anymore, though it’s still the first thing prescribed to the HIV-positive.
So, if it was PML that erased Wally’s ability to use his legs, there wasn’t anything to be done about it. And if it wasn’t that, what was it? “Viral activity,” that mantra of ignorance, a vain attempt to gain power through description.
Wally’s progress, on the one hand, seems simple now, a gradual decline, a weakening and fading, a body increasingly unable to cooperate with the dictates of his will: a will that softened, slowly going out of focus, quieting, easing away. But on the other hand, like Bill, he seemed to become more and more himself, or some original, underlying portion of self, as if he were scoured down to bedrock. What remained, despite the diminishment, was the pure and irreducible stuff of character.
“Who needs the full story of any life?” James Merrill wrote in his memoir, A Different Person. And who needs the full story of any death? Scenes imply the whole, delineate it. We’re raised on film, and movies leave out the continuous, getting-from-here-to-there tissue of experience that holds the heightened moments of life together. All we need, as an audience, are essential gestures.
But how to identify, looking at one’s own life, the signifying moments? Now the years of Wally’s illness seem to me an avalanche, but at the time they felt more like a descent so gradual as to often be imperceptible, especially early on, before the course of things became clear. How could we know then what was happening? How distinguish a symptom of changing brain function from depression from a reaction to a drug? Then, in the final year, suddenly there we were: in chaos, in hell, and through what passageway had we arrived? Gentle Dante, to imagine hell as terraced—so that the descending pilgrims might have time to acclimate, to walk a little at the pressure of this new depth, before the ground falls away again.
For many people, there’s a clear line of demarcation which marks the crossing from being HIV-positive to having AIDS. That’s a telling grammatical distinction, the difference between being and having, between a condition and a possession. AIDS is a possession one is possessed by. Often the signifier of change is the first KS lesion discovered on the sole of the foot, the inside of the thigh. Or the first bout with pneumocystis.
For Wally, nothing was ever so firm and cle
ar; it seemed a kind of gliding downward, his process of change, moving forward by such subtle degrees that, when one day I’d recognize how much he’d changed, or see a new limitation made clear, I’d be shocked. When did all the tiny increments add up to this loss?
At nine o’clock on a weekday morning, late in May of 1989, the public health care worker who’d come to tell us our test results blasted the world apart. I can’t say I remember the experience all that clearly, so much did it become a kind of whirlwind. She was poised on the edge of the couch, practiced, friendly in a rather formal way. She told us our results. Me first, then Wally. I remember going and standing behind him; he was sitting in a wing chair, I don’t remember if he was crying, but I remember the stunned aura around him, the sense of an enormous rupture—not a surprise, but nonetheless a horror, an announcement fundamentally inadmissible, unacceptable. Shattering, but not a surprise, for had we been thinking of anything else? And though she must have told me my status first in order to deliver good news, before the blow, I remember thinking it didn’t matter which of us it was, that his news was mine.
At that time testing was offered by the state, and after a three-week wait one arranged to meet the caseworker someplace—often secretively, in parking lots or cafés, to protect the identities of closeted people, to avoid the brand of difference and contagion. I think she offered us a few phone numbers—a clinic in Burlington, the phone number of Vermont CARES, the fledgling support group forty miles down the road. The phone numbers and information flapped in the void, little wings in a great tornado. Where were we then, in air, in limbo, in a not-knowing more darkened by contingency than anything we’d ever known?