The semester is almost at an end, and it can't come soon enough. I recently listened to a story on the Moth podcast by Anthony Griffith, a comedian whose big break - a series of appearances on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show - came just as his two-year-old daughter was dying of cancer. When he wasn't rushing around to hospitals and going crazy with fear and rage, he was standing on the stage having to be funny. The audience couldn't know what he was going through, or the whole thing would fall apart - nobody wants to see a sad clown, as he put it - and they didn't. He made them laugh, launched his career, and went home to make funeral arrangements for his daughter.
I've been feeling a bit like that since the school year started in August. My livelihood doesn't depend on my ability to be funny (though I do rely pretty heavily on humor to keep the students engaged), but in some ways it's even more difficult to do what I do while grieving than it would be if I were a comedian. My classes, both from necessity and as a result of my own scholarly interests, focus pretty heavily on death - usually death of the earth-shaking, genocidal kind, but there are plenty of individual stories of trauma and loss that come up in readings, films, and discussions. I've taught and read about these topics (the Holocaust, the Armenian Genocide, the Irish famine, etc.) enough that I'm usually able to put a little intellectual distance between myself and the raw horror of these events, but it is a pretty unpleasant experience to be discussing a book on, say, Russian attitudes toward death (a book I had ordered for last fall's graduate seminar well before Joey's accident) or a film about the Irish Civil War in which one brother ends up killing another (the film was The Wind That Shakes the Barley, which I had seen years ago and about which I had forgotten a few crucial details) with an unsuspecting group of students. It's also difficult, sometimes, to muster the necessary enthusiasm that it takes to hold the interest of roomfuls of students for several hours a day, although I suppose it can also be a welcome distraction: invariably, eventually, I manage to get wrapped up in the material enough that the steady buzz of sorrow and disbelief that's been with me since July quiets to a whisper.
Still, it's exhausting.
Another reason that I'm looking forward to the end of the semester is that the summer will bring more time to write. You may have noticed that these blog posts have become rather infrequent - this is not because I'm running out of things to say, but simply because I haven't often had the time or energy to say them. Starting in early May, I'll be traveling to Oxford, Dublin, and Belfast for a little over a month, working on an academic research project by day and (hopefully) writing in a bit more focused way about Joey by night. I'm toying with traveling to some remote spot in Ireland or Scotland for a week or so to work on both projects, drawn by the idea of embracing my solitude (Kate will be visiting me for a weekend, but otherwise I'll be on my own) and seeing what sorts of words it enables me to string together. I gather that Evelyn Waugh sought solitude for every book he wrote, even if it just meant going across town to stay in a hotel. I like that.
Death is something people have been writing about for as long as there have been people who write - in fact, death may be the most common topic of all creative activity produced in any media whatever, written or otherwise - and I've been thinking a lot about why that is. Obviously, it springs from a desire to control and contain death, to fit it into some sort of structured narrative. It also is an effort to wring some sort of meaning from death, but I think that search for meaning is more of a motivating force for readers than for writers. For the person who writes about death, the act of writing is itself a form of meditation - it's a way of carving out a chunk of time in which to focus exclusively on death, as well as an exercise in molding a swirl of inchoate thoughts into individual words and sentences to be looked upon, turned over, and peered at from all sides. Yes, writing is therapy, in a way, but not so much because it enables us to communicate our thoughts to others as because the act of writing itself forces us into a particular mental and emotional state.
For some reason - probably just because I'm more alert for these sorts of things - I've recently been stumbling upon lots of articles specifically about the act of writing about grief. Most have been prompted by a new book by Meghan O'Rourke about her mother's recent death and another one by Joyce Carol Oates about the death of her husband. O'Rourke had an article in the New Yorker recently (here) on the topic, and she and Oates had a recent exchange (here) on the topic. Both books have received very good reviews, and a couple of the reviews themselves (I haven't yet read the books) have offered really insightful comments on the impulse to write about death. Deborah Jerome's review of O'Rourke's book (here) is brief and insightful, and she puts it as well as anyone when she says "Writing is a path out of the maze of one's aching head." Julian Barnes wrote a long, excellent review of Oates's book (here), which I'd strongly recommend. It reminded me that Barnes himself has a memoir about death, called Nothing to be Frightened Of, which I'd been meaning to read (Joey was a fan of Julian Barnes - one of the first books I ever bought him was England, England), and so I picked up a copy of it when we were in Austin. Several of these articles mention C.S. Lewis's memoir of his wife's death, A Grief Observed, as the gold-standard of grief memoirs, so I've picked up a copy of that, too.
I'm very much looking forward to the time, just a couple of weeks from now, when I can focus a bit more fully on all these things.
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