This Is Where We Came In

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  The teacher didn’t seem to mind their nonparticipation, though. The teacher was happy to accept any halfhearted or faulty effort, even no effort at all. She had no standards, or perhaps had abandoned her standards when it came to wheelchair yoga. Unlike me, she had no longing to fix anything. She was an accepter. “Good, that’s fine, that’s right.”

  Marian, on the contrary, performed valiantly, especially given that she was dying of cancer of indeterminate origins, with fluid on the brain that made her constantly dizzy and nauseated; also, she could hardly swallow any longer. An aide had just brought her some grainy mush in a tiny paper cup: it was easier to swallow something viscous rather than liquid. Marian told her to set it aside, she’d take it later. Good, I thought. What was the urgency, after all? Had it been a martini, maybe she would have paused for a sip. At dinner, her one indulgence had been an extra dry martini, which she would order with great specificity—very dry, very cold. All her sensuality was concentrated in that martini, which she sipped slowly, making it last. But martinis were not on the menu here, though roast chicken and salad probably were.

  I used to tease her about the roast chicken she carried home in a plastic bag. “But what about the rest of the week? Always roast chicken?” To entertain me, she gave a catalogue of what she ate for lunch and dinner every day, and this catalogue resembled a comic monologue out of a Beckett play. Besides the heated-up dinners of leftover restaurant chicken, there were the lunches. Every Sunday night, she explained, she made two kinds of salad, tuna and chopped herring, and then made five sandwiches which she lined up in the refrigerator, removing one each day, alternating between the tuna and the chopped herring. “But don’t they get soggy, all week in the fridge?” “Not at all,” she said. They kept fine.

  I was intrigued by all her habits, not just the dietary; they were, to put it mildly, routinized. Besides getting up at five in the morning to walk or bike, on Tuesday mornings she got up even earlier and cleaned her whole apartment. On another morning, I forget which, she did her week’s shopping. When I asked if it didn’t get dull, knowing exactly what she would be doing when, she said no, that was exactly what she liked. Weekdays, after work, she would read, then go to bed very early, usually by eight o’clock. Sometimes when we’d been out to dinner on a Friday or Saturday, she would drive me home—she zipped around the city in a small, dark Toyota—and I’d invite her up to my place for a while. “No!” with a look of horror. “It’s already very late for me.” This was at about nine or nine-thirty. Then, grinning at her own eccentricities, she would rev up the little Toyota and charge off into the night.

  Every few years she replaced the Toyota, but the new car was always so much like the old one that I couldn’t tell when she’d made a change. She had formidable luck finding parking spaces on the streets of Manhattan. This, I was convinced, was because she was cavalierly optimistic about finding them. Those who expect success tend to find it, I’ve noticed. I envied the bravado with which she handled the car, but maybe bravado is too strong a word—there was nothing prideful about it, simply the same thoughtless ease I also envied in the better students in my dance classes. What a mordant twist, I thought, that after being so adept on wheels, on her bike, in her car, she should be confined to a wheelchair.

  I had to admire the yoga teacher’s ingenuity. Notwithstanding the wheelchairs, she devised movements that exercised every joint, even the hips. Still, it bothered me no end—it offended me aesthetically—that she didn’t correct the class’s flawed performance. Of course I knew this wasn’t a performance; it was a class. But I tend to regard everything done in public as a performance, and the fact that these students were old or sick or moribund did not alter this tendency. Had they no pride? It was all I could do to stay in my chair and not go around fixing them. I wanted so much to fix them and make them do it right, the way it should be done. But I could only try to make up for the shortcomings of their performance by my own excellent one.

  The class was scheduled to last an hour. About fifteen minutes before the end, when we had moved every movable part, the teacher had us close our eyes and again relax from the feet on up. To relieve the boredom, I peeked. All eyes were obediently closed. But was it true yogic relaxation or ordinary sleep? Could the yoga teacher tell the difference, and did she care?

  At last, breaking the silence, she announced that she would go around to each person in turn to give a back and shoulder massage. I wondered if she would come to me, if I was considered part of the class by virtue of my earnest participation. I peeked again. She was standing behind one of the men and gently massaging his shoulders. I closed my eyes. I might as well relax along with the others: I had the train trip ahead and was planning to go to the gym once I got back to the city.

  She didn’t massage me. I was both disappointed and relieved. Disappointed because I felt I had earned the right to be considered part of the class. Relieved because I was spared the sense of awkwardness, even of bad faith, had I received her massage—as if to merit it I ought to be old or sick or starved for a human touch. Marian must have had a massage while my eyes were closed, even though she was not starved for a human touch, not one of those who languish alone in their last days. But everyone with a terminal illness is alone. This I learned from my watching, and Marian surely knew; she didn’t need Samuel Beckett to teach her that.

  Suddenly I was roused by applause and thank-yous. The wheelchairs were rolling; people were leaving the class. I must have dozed off.

  Marian and I agreed that we had had a good time. But she was worn out from the effort. She swallowed a bit of the stuff the aide had left and I wheeled her back to her room, where she fell promptly asleep. I read a few more pages of the mystery; no further bodies were found. Soon it was time for me to go. We hadn’t had much chance to talk, and I missed that. Her conversation was sustaining. Early on in her illness she had seemed confused—maybe it was the medication or the fluid on her brain—but lately, to my relief, she had recovered her lucidity; her analytic bent was resurgent. She was grimly articulate about how she felt. “Terrible,” she would say each time I asked. “How are you?” seemed a foolish question at this point, but it’s hard to break the habit. Terrible, and she would launch into a vividly detailed account of being helpless and sick and facing death. Though she never spoke about death itself, only of her illness. What she feared, she said, was what further sufferings and limitations and indignities it would force upon her. That unknown frightened her more than the unknown of death.

  But that was only a small part of what we talked about. Often she would ask if I’d seen any good movies or read any good books since my last visit; she wanted to hear the plots. The week before, I’d told her about a droll French film called Intimate Strangers: a woman walks into a lawyer’s office thinking he’s a psychiatrist and begins to unburden herself, and soon a close relation develops between the two, based on this misconception. That was the sort of story Marian loved, and she listened with some of the old radiance in her eyes. Intimate Strangers was the last movie I got to tell her about. I had also seen Spider-Man, but when I mentioned it, she laughed as though it were beneath consideration, which incidentally I thought too.

  I couldn’t make it to the nursing home the next Wednesday so I called a good friend of Marian’s and told her, “In case you’re there on Wednesday, go to the yoga class at two. She really liked it. So did I.” But as it turned out, Marian wasn’t strong enough to take the yoga class the following Wednesday or any of the succeeding Wednesdays. Ours was her first and last yoga class, and if she hadn’t been so sleepy she would have liked talking about it afterwards. No wonder, then, that I’m writing this with her in mind. She of all people would have appreciated what I have chosen to include and exclude. She wouldn’t have been put off by how I describe the students in the class, and she would have understood my discontent with the yoga teacher, though she wouldn’t have shared it. She would have been accepting. She would have nodded in her wry way and offered a smile o
f amused understanding, the smile that hung on when nearly everything else was gone.

  It happened that I took another yoga class a few weeks later, with ordinary ambulatory students, and as usual in those circumstances, my performance was mediocre. I could only excel at wheelchair yoga, amid the moribund, and I finally accepted that, along with all the rest.

  Thriving on Hardship

  I met Hayden Carruth one summer in the mid-1980s. We were teaching at a writers’ conference at a university in New York State, the kind of conference where lots of workshops and heady talk about literature are crammed into a few days, and teachers are quickly exhausted, while students drift close by, awaiting the magical words, the revelatory secrets, that might be uttered at any moment. Hayden and I were both feeling discontented and estranged from what was going on around us—I jogged through a nearby cemetery each morning for distraction; I don’t know what he did—and our friendship germinated from that shared discontent. Fruitful grounds for friendship, as it turned out. We began corresponding—long, detailed letters that continued for years, punctuated by occasional phone calls and visits. Drawers full of letters by this time; sometimes he enclosed new poems. After a while the poems appeared in his books—a dozen or so books since I first met him (and almost a dozen before that)—but when I want to reread them I look for the manuscripts because they feel fresher and more intimate and were addressed to me, even if only on their envelopes.

  What I relish particularly in Hayden’s poems is how they revel in raw misery. At every stage of life his laments, whether raging, witty or somber, are so succulent, so vivid, so thoroughly and actively engaged in the wretchedness du jour. “Yes, William,” he writes to an imaginary friend,

  I’ve been

  God knows, a complainer. It was

  either that or silence. Poets

  are deprived of stoicism.

  They are deprived of stoicism because they must tell the truth as they feel it, emotional and intellectual accuracy, to Hayden, being a moral imperative, from the proper placement of a comma to the proper exposition of current political reality. (“Let us speak plainly,” he addresses the president in “Complaint and Petition”: You are / deviously and corruptly manipulating / events in order to create war.”)

  Sorrow and travail attended him faithfully throughout his life, and in return for their companionship, he portrayed them with the attentive, obsessive scrutiny that memoirists use for their close friends and relations. In midlife he reports,

  I am fifty-three going on fifty-four,

  a rotten time of life. My end-of-winter clothes

  are threadbare, my boots cracked, and how

  astonishing to see

  my back, like that figure in Rembrandt’s drawing,

  bent.

  But what time of life has not its own variety of rottenness? “The purposelessness of it all, of existence as such,” he tells us in Reluctantly, a collection of autobiographical essays, “had struck me at so early an age that I have no idea when it happened or how.” He suffered intermittently from mental disorders that had him in and out of institutions, as well as from alcoholism and the more commonplace sorts of anguish. Afterwards, he was devastatingly bitter or amusing and gave us some of his best “loquacious stammering” on the humiliations of old age.

  And yet this is the same poet who, in his rotten fifties, writes, “I can’t / help it, I have so loved / this world.” Who, decades later, having rediscovered love—genuine this time, he assures us and himself—exults in “the stupendousness / of life.” Who at age seventy-five writes a poem of gratitude:

  My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers.

  I live.

  . . .

  I prayed. Then on paper I wrote

  Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

  Even after his suicide attempt, recounted in Reluctantly, a rare happiness came over him as he returned from the “blackness,” death’s entryway, a place he found “not at all uncomfortable but quite the contrary: it was happy . . . in the sense of blissful, a replete contentedness. It was a state of mind I had never experienced before . . . but it was present in my mind clearly and strongly when I first came to. And it has been present ever since, it has become part of my being . . . I was high on life, my recovered life.”

  So he is a poet of contradiction, and a contradiction entirely natural and universal: despair coupled with the will to continue, disgust at what the world offers coupled with curiosity and hope about what it will turn up next, even when he had been at the point of saying farewell. The capacity to feel and acknowledge extremes of pain evidently coexists with—or engenders—the capacity for extremes of joy as well.

  At the close of the conference where we met, there was a big dinner for students and faculty. Hayden and I sat together, and next to us sat a young man who wrote fiction (and very shortly afterwards died of AIDS). He asked us what percentage of human experience could be expressed in language. Ninety percent, I answered thoughtlessly. Ten percent, said Hayden, grimly. I have always remembered this. When I read his poems I think of the ninety percent submerged—all that ineffability, intractable yet somehow evoked by the fraction on the page, like a scent, a vapor or effluvia rising from a few grains of a potent spice.

  Over and over in the voluminous work of this self-proclaimed “language-driven” poet, for whom “appearance is nothing until it has been spoken and written,” comes the notion of the failure of words: “Insurmountable the uselessness of words.” In “On Being Asked to Write a Poem against the War in Vietnam,” he recalls earlier wars he’s lived through and earlier poems deploring them:

  and not one

  breath was restored

  to one

  shattered throat

  mans womans or childs

  not one not

  one

  but death went on and on . . .

  Besides the futility of words, he mourns their incapacity to render what he so desperately wants rendered. That doesn’t deter him, though, from attempting the most recalcitrant and necessary subjects, those least likely to yield to language, for example, the death of his mother and the death of his daughter. Near the opening of the poem about the latter, “Dearest M—,” a “gush of words, this surging elegy,” he frankly admits defeat:

  The immensity of what should be said

  defeats me. Language

  like a dismasted hulk at sea is overwhelmed

  and founders.

  That said, he goes on to conjure up his daughter Martha from the instant of her birth through her years of youth and beauty, her loves and her painting, her triumphs and the indignities of her illness. Language may be abysmally inadequate, but it is the single thing he securely possesses and inhabits, and so he deploys it not merely with technical skill but with valor: he wrestles with the inaccessible and wins, as far as that is possible.

  The pain he feels at the death of his mother is of a different sort. The agony is less pure, less unitary, more tangled in a skein of ancient griefs and grievances, moments of ambiguous intimacy and gaps of misunderstanding. His mother suffered terribly for three years, and his elegy, “Mother,” does not neglect the physical details. But what galls him most is her loss of language, the mystery of what she might still know, what form of consciousness might remain in her “half-dead mind.” “You in your language broken, stammering, whole aggregates of once-luminous words blown out.” Above all, “Was your damaged brain the same as a damaged soul?” This is the mystery whose sting does not relent, the essential riddle whose answer will never come:

  As if you were an animal somehow granted the power to

  know but not to think,

  Or as if you were a philosopher suddenly deprived of every

  faculty except

  Original fear and pathos. I cannot surmise a state of being

  more inconsonant

  With human consciousness.

  I like that “surmise,” that “inconsonant.” In the midst of p
assionate grief, the poet’s indefatigable intellect goes chugging on, prying at the enigma at the center of his own life and work. How much of what we know is in our words? What do we know beyond words, and how can we know or say it? How much can a mind without words comprehend? And finally, what is there to know? He has brooded on this always: witness an earlier poem, “Cowshed Blues”:

  in the mystery of the word

  is a force

  contained but not expressed

  spoken and unexplained

  for meaning falls away

  as the stars in their spirals

  fall from the void of creation

  Nevertheless, he has been the most prolific and articulate of contemporary poets; in the face of his own pessimism, he never stops returning to language, the unreliable ally that will not abandon him, that he can count on for ten percent of what he needs.

  Critics have noted the variety of Hayden Carruth’s work, in style, form, breadth and range of themes—love, rural life, war, jazz, the idea of community and its assault by the current “sanctification of avarice” are only a few. The work that draws me most, regardless of subject, is that of the last two decades, perhaps because it was written while I knew him. But more, I think, because it has the stamp and tone of ripened experience: a certain ease and confident looseness, a relaxation even when the poems are in a formal mode, as if the rigors of poetry have been so well absorbed that the poet writes effortlessly. Rigor is already part of his musculature and neural pathways; none of the usual barriers or anxieties interfere with the direct transference of emotion and thought into syllable and rhythm. Or at least they don’t seem to: Hayden compared the writing of poetry, on his dark days, to squeezing hardened glue from a tube, though the reader would never know it. Certainly not in “Agenda at 74,” a funny catalogue of an old man’s fragmented day spent in trivial activities (except maybe for “write President,” “write congressmen,” and “write letter to the editor”) linked by the repetition of “tap barometer,” a compulsive, futile checking to see what the weather—no doubt inner as well as cosmic—has in store.