by Amy Weiss
The force of the slamming door is not as strong as the force of love. It cannot push the soul from its body. It can, however, push a candle on its side. The flame takes a bite of the tablecloth, finds it delicious, and devours the rest. Its appetite is stupid, indiscriminate. The table, the curtains, the house, the husband: all go in its mouth.
The woman is unaware of this, for by the time the fire nibbles and licks the wires that the husband attempts to revive, she is inside the barn. By the time the house becomes newly alive, crackling with all the power that moments ago it had lacked, she is crouched down in the mare’s stall. By the time her hand is on its leg, knitting its pieces back together, the legs of her house are splintering into shards. And then they can bear no more weight and, with a terrible crash that brings her running outside, they collapse. She does not know it—and then all too soon she knows it, and will never un-know it—but what she is hearing, along with the death of her house, is the death of her husband. The sound of him blazing, unfolding, transforming. She sees only the smoke, does not notice the sinuous plume of spirit that rises above it.
The fireflies and stars are there to guide his passage too.
In an instant she also exits her body. At least that is what she feels as she rushes toward the once-house, toward the once-husband, who is already wending his way up the summer sky. Surely if she were still inside it she would be able to feel her legs, which seem to have become as feeble as the mare’s. Each time she tries to run they give out, and soon she can no longer move from the grasses at all. It occurs to her that this is what happens in her nightmares. A night, a mare—even words are coming undone.
That is all this is, she tells herself, a nightmare. It cannot be real. She will awaken at any moment, will discover that what she’d thought to be the blackout of her house was merely her descent into sleep. When the pain of a dream becomes too much, the eyes open, the blood floods with electricity and then relief. But there is no electricity, and the problem is not that her eyes won’t open—it’s that they are open, it’s what they are seeing.
She leaves her body for a moment. The husband leaves his forever. They are not the only ones.
Baby bones are built to withstand the pressure of love, not the pain of life. For that, they need time to grow. A mother’s misery deforms its little frame. A mother’s tears nip at it with hopeless mouths. What more damaging birth defect could there be than sadness? The child must not be blamed; its house is gone, its father is gone, and most likely its mother is too. It extinguishes its life flame, no gentle wisp like that of the father but a red-hot rash on the grass, deeper and darker than fire and just as hot.
Is it the smoke that causes the woman to lose consciousness, or the shock, or the complete destruction of her world? Whatever the cause, she has no memory of what happens next. It seems to her that the grasses hold her in their arms for hundreds of years.
LESSON 2
Dirge
The woman opens her eyes to find dawn sober and subdued, as though the night were contrite for having set itself on fire. What an embarrassing display of gluttony! And with what consequence: the house gutted, the grass burned to brown. But grass feeds on fire. It has not been destroyed; it will grow again with renewed force. The same is true of the husband.
For a moment—a heaven of a moment—she does not recall what happened. Then she remembers, and the memory is relentless. Her husband is gone yet the farthest thing from gone, taking over every thought, leaving no room for anything but him. And how could he leave her mind when the smell of smoke won’t leave her skin, when the very presence of her body reminds her of the lack of his?
It is one thing to lose love, and another to lose the possibility of it. In a matter of hours, all her selves have been ripped from her. She is no longer wife, no longer mother, no longer lover. What is left of her, then—simply soul? Though it is as if that too has escaped, has flown away to a place she cannot reach. That is what grief does. It steals the breath out of you, turns you as cold and lifeless as the one you mourn.
The earth beneath her is soaked with tears. Very well, she says to herself, I will stay here and drown in them. Despite her wish to cease existing, a being as small as an ant and buried deep within some remote yet vital part of her brain demands that she stand. The woman has never met this being before, this irritating creature that wants, above all, to survive. How can something so small and so far away overpower her? How can it even belong to her?
It may be little, but its strength belies its size. It forces her to her feet and makes her say good-bye to her child, who lies formless in the grass, never to be carried again. It makes her walk away.
There is only one place to go.
The mare, hearing the familiar creak of the barn door, starts pacing back and forth in its stall. It had kept its cries to itself all night long, aware of the trial by fire occurring outside, the metamorphosis of both the husband and his wife. The mare knows this in the way that all animals know such things. They do not blind themselves to second sight, the way people do.
When it sees her, though, a cry breaks loose. I lost my family too, it says without words, for horses speak not in words but in images. The ones that appear now begin gold and glorious and then fade to black. I lost your husband, they tell her, and I lost the days when your children would ride upon my back into the orchards, and they would feed me apples, and I would feed them the wind. The woman, however, is closed off to visions, and even more so to compassion.
An injured animal will often lash out in anger, an anger born from fright: the wounded dog bites the hand outstretched in help. And so two shaken animals stand facing each other in the barn. One inflicts the bruises, the other accepts them.
“Had it not been for you,” says the woman, “I would have been inside the house. I’d have put out the fire, and my world would have gone on. My child would grow strong and my husband would grow old and my home would outlast us all. If I couldn’t have done that, so be it. At least I’d have died along with them, and we’d still be together. You have cost me everything I love.”
She feels fury. The fury is fear. Her blame is broad; it will settle on anyone in sight. It too is fear.
The mare hangs its head, offering the floor an apology. It does not need to look at the woman to see the cloud inside her, how it thickens with regret, how with each accusation she makes it wrests free from her body and enters its own. The mare allows it inside, because the mare loves her. It knows, in the way that all animals do, that anger is merely an attempt to discharge the cloud, and that both are equally insubstantial, and that both fog the sight. Besides, what she says is true. Hadn’t its complaints inadvertently yet irrevocably separated her from her husband? How could I have been so selfish, it wonders, and the cloud encircles its leg.
“Let’s go,” the woman says, although she has no idea where. She simply can no longer be where she is.
The mare hesitates, on account of its disability and also its knowledge, which the woman does not yet share, that once they leave the barn they are never to return. Nonetheless, it follows her. It is willing to hobble itself, to exile itself, as penance.
First it stops at the spot where, a day ago, the woman had unwittingly begun her first lesson.
“No,” she says. The music is lost. It has gone with the husband.
The mare stands firm.
“No,” she says again, more a plea than a statement, but the mare knows what needs to happen and gives her no other option: they will stay stuck in place, or they will move forward. It is her choice.
Grudgingly, she approaches the harp. Its body is carved from wood. That is what fires are supposed to eat, a meal more fitting and filling than man. “Why couldn’t it have been you that burned instead?” she asks, and as she does a fragment of her cloud affixes itself to the instrument, though to no lasting effect. The strings will transmute it. That is the alchemy of music: to take pain, that heavy, flightless stuff, and give it wings; to turn it into birds and release t
hem to the skies.
She would have given up her harp forever in exchange for her husband, would have sacrificed one true love for the other, would have surrendered all its notes for a single note of his voice. Her hands are on its neck. She could strangle it. Instead, to her surprise, they caress it, as affectionate as ever. Love can be unconscious that way, automatic, even in the dark.
Then there is the book, lying on the ground where her husband had placed it. To think that he’d tried to close the pages on the sound of sorrow, and now it is all that she has left.
She picks it up and reads.
THE DIRGE IS A SONG OF MOURNING, A COMMEMORATION OF THE DEAD. IT DERIVES FROM THE WORD DIRIGIRE, MEANING “TO GUIDE.”
LEARN THIS PIECE WELL, FOR IT IS THE FOUNDATION UPON WHICH ALL FUTURE LESSONS WILL BE BUILT.
PRACTICE IT NOW.
She slams the book shut. What nonsense! Death is mute; it speaks no wisdom, imparts no learning. To summon a song from its depths—that is magic, not music. She is tempted to return the book to the hay, to hide it for someone else, or from herself.
The antlike being has a better idea. It takes control of her hands, puts the book with the harp in the instrument’s case, and puts the case upon her back.
At last, the mare moves. It is the woman’s turn. She takes a final look at the life that she once led, then heads in the opposite direction.
He is not there.
Each day she opens her eyes to this blunt fact. Once it was he who woke her, and now it is his absence. Sleep is a force she crashes into, a violence, yet also a respite. In the mornings, grief is less raw, more tender; there is something about the sunlight that makes it ripen.
The mare and the woman walk alongside each other, while the months follow behind them. The woman feels as though she is crawling, for she lives just slightly above the ground. Grief possesses gravity, and sadness is an enormous hand pressing down on her. It forces her into two dimensions, flattens her breaths into sighs. The hand has no mercy. Once it finds you, it pursues you for life.
The grasses of the countryside lengthen into the trees of the forest. Yellow wheat turns to moss of an obscene green. The sun becomes tangled in the canopy of giant oaks and elms, whose branches shred it into slivers. Dusk steals in and colors the space left behind.
The woman makes beds of silver-maple leaves on which she sleeps, her pillow the mare’s soft belly. The mare forages the ground for fallen berries though the woman eats little, for the loss in her leaves no room for hunger. It is its own fuel. It takes away the taste for food and gorges upon itself.
The mare winces from the pain of moving, the woman from the pain of existing. She begs the cardinals and starlings to silence their song; she cannot bear their stubborn hope. But the birds sing on, for birdsong is both impervious to pain and its antidote.
Autumn lights the forest on fire, and winter snuffs it out. The woman welcomes the frozen season. She understands what it is like to be ice.
She stops and lies motionless on the forest floor under the trees as the snow and weeks accumulate at her feet. Some days she can only look out from behind empty eyes, and nothing more. Some days the stupor wears off and she becomes the opposite, something far too alive. She is either freezing or bleeding, ice or fire, and neither is conducive to survival.
Some days she wonders if the end has come. This is not a fear. It is a desire.
To be alone is to lose language, for there is no one left to whom she can speak her thoughts. Thoughts grow wild in the mind with no one to hear them; they grow thorns. The woman listens to the rustle of the leaves, but they are talking to the wind, not to her. Words unheard will eventually dry up and stop making sound. If only her memories would do the same.
To be alone is to be a butterfly with a hole in its wing, every passing breeze a reminder that the beautiful part of you, the part that lets you fly, is missing. It is to lay bare the brokenness inside you, that wound which once was wing.
To be alone is to be a bottom-feeder, to dwell fathoms below the sea, where even the sun cannot reach. Where all that exists is wreckage; where all that surrounds you are old bones and other sunken sadnesses.
To be alone is to be dead while alive.
Spring arrives as an insult. The entire forest turns fertile. Life oozes in the mud, it squawks and grunts and croaks, it multiplies wantonly. The woman cannot escape this mockery of mothers and brides. Everywhere she looks, she sees fullness: the streams swollen with rainfall, the moon with stolen light. But she is full of nothing.
Even the worm in the dirt, which barely inches through existence, can give birth and give love. Who allows this of worm yet forbids it of woman? How can this lowly creature perpetuate itself again and again, and she not once? The worm has five hearts, so even if it were to lose a child it would survive. The woman had none to spare.
She wonders at this profusion of nature, at God’s unfathomable humor—to exalt bees as queens and caterpillars as monarchs, yet reduce humans to ashes, babies to blood. To design such a world. To force us to live in it.
She can glimpse, inside the animals, the thrill of creation, which had lived in her too and then gone up in smoke. She can do this because she herself has been reduced to animal, to instinct, and her sole instinct is to panic, to climb the tallest tree and hide from it all. At the same time, to be animal is to be animate, to possess that most primal form of life, and she is sure that whatever is inside her where her soul used to be, it cannot properly be called life.
Spring becomes summer, the worm becomes grandmother. The woman and the mare trudge on, for how long she cannot say. Suffering turns time elastic, turns hours into centuries, turns every night into that one night, to be relived over and over.
One day, the sun disappears. She takes no notice of its absence; her world has long been missing warmth. The mare looks up and stops short, causing the woman, for once, to lift her eyes from the ground. In front of them is an enormous cave, blotting out all sky and all further progress through the woods. Its mouth is smeared with spider webs. She decides to enter anyway. The cave may be dim and stagnant, but so is life outside it. And she is tired of moving without actually going anywhere, of wandering the desolate landscape of loss.
Not so fast! A hound hurls itself out of the cave. Its eyes are bloodshot, for it knows no rest, only vigilance. A snake hides in its matted fur. The woman gestures for the mare to move behind her, though the mare needs no such instruction.
The hound lunges for them. Its jaws widen. The mare screams. The woman thinks, All right, so it’s death by dog. But here comes that infernal antlike being again, reaching for the harp, unsheathing it from its case, plucking a string.
The woman is stunned. More frightening to her than the prospect of mauling is the prospect of music. She has not touched the instrument since her husband died. Can she remember how to play after all this time? Can one even play without a soul, and what kind of sound would that make?
She does not wish to try it now—or ever. But the noise has stopped the hound from biting, and the impulse to stay intact supersedes the impulse to stay silent. Like the hound, music has teeth, needles that sink under the skin. Unlike the hound, its needles sew as well as slice. They break you open not to hurt you but to heal you.
First she strikes a flurry of notes, any notes. The hound retreats. A tune emerges. It is rusty, for she has not spoken music in a while, and the voices of the woman and the harp are hoarse from neglect. Even so, there is no forgetting her first language, one that is more basic than words, and more truthful besides.
She plays by heart, letting its broken chords bleed into the forest and into the song. The antlike being conducts a mighty, manic concert, declaring with each measure the exact opposite of what the woman feels: I want to live. Her hands move without consulting her mind, flying from one note to the next. They start to glow with white light. The strings on which they land are made of silk, but they are also made of light.
Without stopping, she leans again
st an oak, unaware that it is listening. Though the oak is a strong, stoic type, it is deeply moved by the woman and the gentleness with which she cradles the harp. It is mesmerized by the strange spell her hands cast over the wood: transforming a tree into melody, making it sing. It yearns to feel her fingers brush against its own body, to hear the sound she would coax from its silence. Leaves fall from its branches, flutter around her, surround her in a sea of longing. The cardinals and starlings perched in its hollows cock their heads and stare. They have never known the oak to cry; who has seen their house shed tears? Their songs are also made of light—a different one, a gilded one, which erupts from their little bird bodies when they can no longer contain its force—yet they are unfamiliar with sorrow. Only the mourning dove knows its dreary refrain.
The rocks beneath the tree are listening. The sound hovers around them until they submit to softening. Piece by piece, their boundaries melt away, and soon they are rock no more but the merest memory of something solid. The disintegration is not distressing; it is relief. The woman would do well to follow their example. Despair is making her hard, it is making her dark, it is making her smolder instead of shine. Fire and pressure are supposed to turn coal into a diamond, not a diamond into coal.
The mare is listening. It has heard the woman play only songs of love, not of loss. Indeed, it is just beginning to learn of loss. Images flicker before its eyes in hazy shades of sepia: the wisp of a man spiraling into the sky; the touch of a mother’s muzzle on its legs, urging them forward. My mother? The mare hungers for something that it had not even remembered and wonders where it has gone.
The hound is listening, sort of. It bypasses the sentiment in the woman’s song and goes right for the pain. It knows pain. It feeds off it. The performance puts it to sleep, where it dreams of blood and death and other red things.
The snake coiled in the hound’s fur is listening. The sorrow of the woman, the sweetness of the strings, the harmony that arises as the two twine together: they form an ache so strong that it pushes the snake out of its skin. In this way, art is like love, or perhaps art is love. The snake has not died, of course. It has merely shed its body in order to grow, just as the husband has done.