finding home
by
Douglas Messerli
Rebecca
Goodman Aftersight (New York:
Spuyten Duyvil, 2015).
Rebecca
Goodman’s most recent book, Aftersight,
is correctly described on its back cover by writer Stacey Levine, as a
“disassembled keen,” a dirge or death song. Yet this highly poetized writing is
also a fascinating psychological portrait of mourning, and essay on how those
left behind must learn to cope without the missing loved one.
From the very first page of this work, in
fact, we know we have entered a world of blurred identities in which a narrator
is unable to separate herself from the
subject of her
work, her mother, Suzanne. “She went out into the streets looking for poetry.
She never spoke again.” Is the “she” the
mother or the poet herself; obviously the narrator is speaking, so it must be the mother who lost herself in the
voyage with illness and death. And in the very next line, we imagine a kind of
burial “She lay beneath the tree until spring.”
But even here we wonder whether the “she”
being described is, metaphorically-speaking, the mourner or the mother. For
very soon after the narrative observes: “When the fire consumed the woman, she
couldn’t watch.” Was the mother cremated, or is this burning woman another
image the narrator has half-observed which, as she puts it, replaces “the image
of her mother?”
And who is the “he” who promises to
explain “the meaning of her dreams” in the morning, her mother’s husband or the
narrator’s own husband speaking to her? Even the act of calling her father
results in complete displacement, “the number dialed another number, another
father.”
In short, we have immediately been thrown
in a world without boundaries: mother becomes daughter, father becomes husband,
which, in turn, become other women, other men. Indeed, in the very next section
of this book divided into small multiple gnomic intervals, the writer observes:
“The world exists between the meaning of being.” Without the being other, we
can surmise, there is no meaning; as the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe put
it, “things fall apart.” When a part of the self disappears, so too does that
self begin to disintegrate. As the author philosophizes: “Entire structures
rest on the provision of self.”
For me, the power of the small poetic
fiction—a fiction of a very real death—emanates from Goodman’s Stein-like
maxims which help to make sense of what is clearly, in her now fragile world,
without sense, without meaning. For example:
The first day is more
difficult than the next. Or should I
say the first day is more difficult than the
last. The why
of nothing is never an aspect
of becoming.
I’m
not so sure I completely agree (thinking back upon my difficult father and his
death, I was much more able to cope in the first few weeks than I am perhaps
today, when I still have dreams of him, some negative, others quite loving),
but it is through these assertive statements that the author is able to
gradually regain meaning, to build up an understanding of something after
which, apparently for months, she had difficulty in even surviving in a world
in which, suddenly, “speech is meaningless and returns to the time when all
thought reverts back to having been,” when the self cannot even comprehend its
own being. Yet even here, we see the mourner gaining strength in the maxim:
“Nowhere is a place we imagine.”
Even “the tomatoes [are] not as red today
as they were yesterday.” Color fades; “the orange was less than orange….” “All
existed now through the amber liquid that vision takes on in the hope that
seeing is the moment of understanding.” But death, the author suggests, does
not permit understanding, and the vision is also blurred.
As outsiders, of course, Goodman’s
readers must forebear with her, forgive her sometimes endless sorrows and
attempt to refocus them on their own lost loved ones or simply to imagine what
it might feel like to lose someone whom they so deeply love. I think,
accordingly, that this is not a book for very young readers who have not yet
experienced death. To remedy this, somewhat, Goodman transforms the tale from a
story about herself into a kind of folk-tale or even fairy tale:
He said he would banish all the mirrors in the kingdom. Beyond
the aspect of reflection the image
would not reveal itself….
He hid the mirrors. He
covered them. He refused to relinquish
the code that would allow them to
reappear. She kept asking for
that memory. The numbers the dates
the symbols. Where had he
hidden them—those sentences that spoke of
recovery. Charged
with the energy of subtle frenzy.
She searched for them. In every
corner of every space. In sleep
she dreamt about them. Those
frail images—the surface of
belief.
Employing
the Jewish tradition of covering all the mirrors in one’s house after a death,
Goodman transforms her experiences into a kind of mythic story that also
represents her attempts to heal herself. By trying to find the mirrors, she
displays her own desire to come back to see the world as it is reflected upon
us.
And
in the very next section, we begin to see a kind of magical recovery, projected
upon a fictional “him.”
In the village. The first words
that came to him. Walking down
the street. Early spring, Birds.
Sage. Lemons. Words came to
him fragments. Today. Only today.
What could this mean.
If the center does not quite hold for
long, peace and meaning come gradually through language, the very language of
Goodman’s book, and does begin to restore the narrative voice back to life. By
the end of Book 2—itself a kind of colloquy of short maxims and fragmented
observations—the “hero” has begun to sleep and move forward:
Begin, sleep, he says. even when
dreams replace your nights.
even when dreams replace you.
written agreements in the
courtyard. blossom.
How do you leave the space
you’ve walked in.
The
answer to that implied question is “to carry the voice,” to speak a language
that “is no longer the image of i.”
By the third section, finally, “the garden
renews itself.” As she lays in the garden reading the book, the narrator
finally invites the reader to “join her. sit. hold the book.” The private sorrow has turned into a public act.
And Goodman embraces the reader, asking him to “remember the girl. turn the
page. look at the image. feel the page,” to even answer her question, “what
must the girl do.”
This gifted author ends her work in a long
prose poem titled “Night Garden,” answering, like Molly Boom, “yes,” to the
voyage into darkness, a kind of dream garden “full of green.” She can now truly
“go home.” But her final sentence suggests the dilemma of her long voyage
through sorrow, “Where, I ask.”
Perhaps it is not accidental, that during
and soon after the writing of this book, she and her husband moved from Los
Angeles into a new house in the town in which she and her family had long
lived, Orange, California.
Los Angeles, June
10, 2017
Howard
and I knew the mother of whom Rebecca Goodman writes, Suzanne—not particularly
well, but enough to have experienced her joyous personality and the good food
she cooked. On several occasions we joined Rebecca, her husband Martin,
Rebecca’s father and other family members at Jewish holidays, and utterly
enjoyed their company. After Suzanne’s death, I got to know Rebecca’s father
quite well when I spent nights with him at local Orange restaurants and the
Nakell home during the weeks I taught, replacing Martin, suffering from operations
for Parkinson’s Disease, at Chapman University. I love even today his witty
observations and our shared admiration for Bombay gin. In many respects, I now
feel to have been part of Rebecca’s loving family.