There are times when I feel like something's dragging me around by the nose.
Last week I drove to Oklahoma to spend Joey's birthday with my parents (he would have been thirty). Long drives, like long books, are meditative and they help me feel closer to Joey - especially on the stretch of I-40 east of Oklahoma City, which we drove many times, separately and together, and where stories or fragments of stories jut out like mile-markers along the route: Memphis, West Memphis, De Valls Bluff, Little Rock, Conway, Lake Eufala, Shawnee. Actually, I never spent any time with Joey in Little Rock, but I knew he'd gone there once to visit the Clinton Library and other things, and I remember him encouraging me to check the city out. In the last year I've stopped there a few times - it marks the halfway point between Nashville and OKC and makes a convenient motel stop - and have done a little exploring, but I've really never given the city much thought.
After I'd passed through Little Rock and Conway on Thursday morning I plugged my iPod into our new car's fancy stereo system (fancy because it has an iPod jack) and listened to an episode of This American Life that had been sitting unplayed in my podcasts folder for a few weeks. One of the two stories in that episode was about a troubled teenager in Little Rock and the social worker who tried to help him, and I thought, huh, Little Rock.
When I passed into Oklahoma I put on an album by James McMurtry, which our friend and fellow Okie-expat Adam had recommended to me. James is the son of Larry, the novelist with the bookstore in Texas
about which I've written, and I had listened to a few songs and knew that a lot of them were about living in this part of the country: one is called "Out Here in the Middle," and another is a long and goofy song called "Choctaw Bingo," about an Oklahoma family reunion on Lake Eufala. The part about Lake Eufala came over the speakers just as I was about to drive over that very lake, and I thought, huh, Lake Eufala.
(The next few paragraphs might look like non sequiturs, but please indulge me:)
For the past few weeks I've been dipping in and out of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's long poem, "In Memoriam." It's an elegy for a friend of his youth who died suddenly at a very young age. As with Little Rock, I had never given much thought to Tennyson (whom Joey and I had, from a very young age, always called Alfred Lloyd Tennyson); I believe I regarded him as a bit stodgy, although I had never actually read enough of his work to justify such an opinion. Then, a few weeks ago, another podcast to which I subscribe, the BBC Radio 4 program "In Our Time," happened to devote an entire program to the poem, and I decided to check it out from the library and give it a whirl.
Much of the poem is tangled and dense (although my library copy has good footnotes and someone has thoughtfully underlined important passages in pencil), but there is much about it that I like. There's an early passage about how inadequate it feels to write about grief - inadequate but necessary. It goes:
I sometimes hold it half a sin
To put in words the grief I feel;
For words, like Nature, half reveal
And half conceal the Soul within.
But, for the unquiet heart and brain,
A use in measured language lies;
The sad mechanic exercise,
Like dull narcotics, numbing pain.
In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er
Like coarsest clothes against the cold:
But that large grief which these enfold
Is given in outline and no more.
I know what he means about wrapping oneself in words like weeds, and I know what he means about the inability of words to fully reveal the soul. So I kept reading.
There's a lot in the poem to chew on (it's 100 pages long), and I'm considering buying myself a copy so that I can return to it from time to time over the years (Queen Victoria, a great connoisseur of grief, reportedly kept a copy by her beside next to the Bible). It is, among other things, the origin of the phrase, "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all," which has become a bit of a hackneyed platitude, of course, but within the context of the longer poem it still sounds fresh and penetrating.
So one way I've been marking Joey's birthday is by driving and another is by reading. A third is by exploring. On Saturday I went down to the Wichita Mountains, hoping to take advantage of the recent cold front (which had knocked us down to the other side of 100) and do a little exploring among the boulders and buffaloes we had visited as children. I was a bit pressed for time - I had a lunch engagement - so it wasn't as leisurely as I would have liked, but still I managed to see some prairie dogs and buffalo and to get out and walk along a hill for a few minutes. In fact, I gave myself precisely thirty minutes to walk along a path I'd never walked before, hoping that it would lead up a nearby hill, and I became a little discouraged as, nearing the fifteen-minute mark and the point at which I'd need to start walking back, I found myself skirting the bottom of the hill instead of walking up it. Then, at about thirteen-and-a-half minutes (I get very precise about time when I'm on a schedule), I rounded a bend and saw a series of giant boulders leaning upward into a small peak. It wasn't the hill I'd hoped to climb, but I clambered up it anyway, using the boulder-clambering skills that I'd first developed with Joey among identical rocks on nearby mountains in our youth, and sat at the highest point for a few minutes to catch my breath and take in the modest view. Had that small mound been just a little further along the path, I believe I would have turned back before I saw it.
Later that day, back in OKC, I read a bit of the Tennyson which considers the possibility that we're all part of a universal soul, where we will encounter the departed again someday. That idea has always seemed pretty namby-pamby to me, but I read it anyway:
That each, who seems a separate whole,
Should move his rounds, and fusing all
The skirts of self again, should fall
Remerging in the general Soul,
Is faith as vague as all unsweet:
Eternal form shall still divide
The eternal soul from all beside;
And I shall know him when we meet:
And we shall sit at endless feast,
Enjoying each the other's good:
What vaster dream can hit the mood
Of Love on earth? He seeks at least
Upon the last and sharpest height,
Before the spirits fade away,
Some landing-place, to clasp and say,
"Farewell! We lose ourselves in light."
Those last few lines made me think of my modest perch atop the boulders in the Wichitas. If I were looking for evidence of some such thing as a universal soul, or if I were trying to show that the energy of the departed dissolves into the world and manifests itself in other forms, then finding that boulder at the last minute seems like decent circumstantial evidence, at least.
Circles within circles, one thing points to another, which points to another. My mother and I tried to go to the Full Circle Bookstore on Joey's birthday yesterday (I was planning to buy a copy of the Tennyson as well as a great big Dickens novel), but we got there just a few minutes after they closed. We had time to kill before meeting folks for a birthday dinner, so we went across the street to the mall, and then I suggested we pop by a discount clothing store so that I could buy some shorts. They didn't have any good shorts, but as we were wandering the aisles we found a single box of Peanuts mugs, most of which had Snoopy on them and one of which had Sally saying, in a speech bubble, "Nobody ever tells me anything!" This phrase was Joey's mantra for years - mostly because we often did, in fact, forget to give him important pieces of family-related information, and partly because he enjoyed playing the martyr. So I bought the mugs, on the theory that they were a sort of compensation for not having been able to buy books that day at Joey's favorite bookstore. After a delightful dinner with family and old friends, at a restaurant that used to be another restaurant in which a little baby Joey had long ago thrown a famous temper tantrum, we distributed the mugs as party favors.
The other thing I've been reading lately is
Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann, which is built around the French dude who walked across the Twin Towers on a tightrope in 1974. I didn't realize this when I started it, but it's mostly a collection of stories about grief, specifically stories about the people who survive another's death and somehow manage to keep making life happen. And I'm pretty sure there's a metaphor there with the tightrope walker who, surrounded by death on all sides, nevertheless manages to hop and wave and feel transcendent up there in the air.
I finished the novel just a couple of days ago, and at the end McCann includes an author's note indicating that the title of the book comes from a Tennyson poem. I read that and thought, huh, Tennyson. The author's note also says something that I quite like: "Literature can remind us that not all life is already written down: there are still so many stories to be told."
One more thing. Most of the novel is set in New York, but toward the end we meet a character who lives in the South (in 2006) and is working with survivors of Hurricane Katrina. She lives, in fact, in Little Rock, and she spends a paragraph or two in an area along the river, on the outskirts of that town, called the Natural Steps. I'm passing back through Little Rock on my home in a day or two, and I'm thinking, huh, Little Rock.
