Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (29 page)

I missed my chance. I should have gone for the throat. I should have lunged for that streak of white under the weasel’s chin and held on, held on through mud and into the wild rose, held on for a dearer life. We could live under the wild rose wild as weasels, mute and uncomprehending. I could very calmly go wild. I could live two days in the den, curled, leaning on mouse fur, sniffing bird bones, blinking, licking, breathing musk, my hair tangled in the roots of grasses. Down is a good place to go, where the mind is single. Down is out, out of your ever-loving mind and back to your careless senses. I remember muteness as a prolonged and giddy fast, where every moment is a feast of utterance received. Time and events are merely poured, unremarked, and ingested directly, like blood pulsed into my gut through a jugular vein. Could two live that way? Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged, as falling snow?

We could, you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience — even of silence — by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn’t “attack” anything; a weasel lives as he’s meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity.

I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you’re going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.

Mark Doty

 

MARK DOTY
is the author of seven books of poems and four volumes of nonfiction prose, most recently
Dog Years: A Memoir
. His work has been honored by the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Martha Albrand Prize for Nonfiction, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.
Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems
is his most recent book of poetry.

 

It wasn’t my idea to go to Memphis. It was okay with me, if Paul wanted to drive through, and see if we could find the house on Ramses Street where I lived in 1959, the year I started first grade. We were heading from Houston to Cape Cod, a northward migration we used to make together every year, after my annual teaching stint in Texas. Memphis wasn’t exactly on the way, but it wasn’t wildly off course either, and if Paul thought that would be an interesting outing, then I was game to give it a try.

Or at least that’s the way I put it to myself, that morning in the car, driving north from the Mississippi motel where we’d spent the night. This travel had become ritualized; we’d become skilled at loading the station wagon with our computers, a couple of suitcases, the necessary books. The largest amount of space in the car was, in fact, given over to pets — the rear area for our two retrievers, who pass the time curled up asleep or sitting up staring out windows, awaiting the gift of a livestock sighting, a welcome occasion to perk up and bark. The two cats rode in carriers on the backseat, secure in their contained spaces, sleeping or sitting staring into space from their beds of our old T-shirts. It took at least three days, this long haul, and by the end of it both human and animal travelers were weary and spiritually diminished. Not much side-tripping or sightseeing; we needed to get there, get this pilgrimage over with.

But Memphis, well — that was a temptation. Or it had been, back when I’d been studying the atlas, thinking about the long span of freeway in front of us, and the red letters of the city had caught my eye. I hadn’t been to Memphis for exactly forty years. Though I felt I had. I’d been imaginatively revisiting the place not so long ago, in an early chapter of a memoir. The scenes of my life there — the peculiar paste and varnish and wet-jacket smell of Peabody Elementary School, my next-door neighbor Carol gleefully chopping a huge earthworm in half with a trowel, the sickly flap of skin on my father’s wounded foot, cut by a shard from a glass I’d broken when I tried to balance it on my head as if I were a model — well, all those scenes had arisen in my memory with a hallucinatory vivacity. My recollections had a kind of intensity that betrayed the way that imagination and memory had fused, which is what happens with our earliest memories — particularly when they concern places and people we can’t revisit, times and realms left behind. My family left Tennessee, one of the many places we would leave, when I had just turned seven years old, and so everything about that life remained for me sealed away, as if in a sphere of its own, a set of memories and impressions unrevised by experience, uncorrected by time.

Unrevised? Well, in a way. Ask someone who’s lived in the same house all his life what that house is like, and you’ll get the adult’s perspective, the point of view of now. But when you’ve left a house years ago, it only changes in your memory, and those changes are different — subtler, dreamier, the past gently rewritten in the direction of feeling. Memory erases the rooms that didn’t matter; locations of feeling become intensified, larger. The dream of the past becomes a deeper dream.

Nabokov addresses this in
Speak, Memory
, when he reconstructs a world that cannot be revisited because it no longer exists; the world of prerevolutionary Russia has been atomized, demolished. What exists of the history he knew lies in some photographs, some artifacts — like the traveling valise that becomes an emblem of all the Russian exiles — and in his gorgeous, hammered sentences. In a way, everyone’s past shares with Nabokov’s its irretrievability, but if there are such things as degrees of vanishing, then his past is gone to a greater extent — memory’s players dead, its country houses destroyed, its social fabric swept away.

Odd, then, to think that I’d written a memoir in which I chose not to revisit the places of the past, when, unlike Nabokov, I could. I could have found the sites of childhood scenes and interviewed relatives, seeking corrections or corroboration, but that wasn’t my book’s project. What interested me was memory itself, the architectures memory constructs, the interpretive act of remembering. There is a passage in a poem by Alfred Corn that says it beautifully:

 

The idea hard to get in focus

is not how things

Looked but how the look felt,

then — and then, now.

 

“How the look felt” was precisely what I wanted. I didn’t realize how much this was the project of my book until I was done. In one passage, I’d wondered about why my sister, who married as a young woman, wore a beige wedding dress. I imagined a number of reasons she might have made this choice, or it might have been made for her — and then, in the margins of the manuscript, a copy editor wrote, Why don’t you just
ask
her? (This was not a particularly sympathetic copy editor.) Then I wondered why it had never occurred to me to ask her, and immediately I understood that it simply wasn’t that sort of book; my inquiry was into memory, not history: how it was to be that child, as that child rearises in the mind, imaginatively reconstructed, reinhabited. Which is how the past goes on and on in us, changing, developing, its look and meanings built and rebuilt over time.

The past is not static, or ever truly complete; as we age we see from new positions, shifting angles. A therapist friend of mine likes to use the metaphor of the kind of spiral stair that winds up inside a lighthouse. As one moves up that stair, the core at the center doesn’t change, but one continually sees it from another vantage point; if the past is a core of who we are, then our movement in time always brings us into a new relation to that core.

It was that sort of movement into “new relation” that seemed to make my book possible. As a young poet, I’d written about my family, but I can’t say in retrospect that any of those poems are any good. First I disguised them through surrealist means; I remember, at my first poetry reading at the University of Arizona, reading a poem in which I presented my parents as circus performers, my mother perched on an elaborate trapeze, my father juggling broken dishes. My parents, who were in the audience, didn’t know what to make of it, but I remember being so nervous that I stubbed out a cigarette and jammed it into the pocket of my jacket, and had to be told by a concerned audience member, after the reading, that I was smoldering.

Later, I wrote poems about my family that were, if not a by-product of therapy, directly influenced by it; I wanted to arrive at a kind of clarity about who we’d been and what had happened to us, and I wanted to take possession of my story; that’s therapy’s work, after all, the narration of a tale for the benefit of the teller. These were plainspoken, investigative poems; they were after the truth, and that was an important project for me then, but now the poems seem a bit unidimensional, their point of view finally not complex enough to satisfy.

But I was in my twenties or early thirties when I wrote them, and by the time I came to write a prose book about my family — one that wanted both to enter that child’s experience in a lyric way and spin a context around him and his upbringing — I was forty-five or so, around the age my father was when my book begins. I was standing, to return to my spiraling metaphor, on another tread on the stairs; I had a somewhat more detached (or at least differently attached) and inquisitive attitude toward the past. Or at least that was true some of the time; one of the first things writing a memoir teaches you is the startling elasticity of the self: how the perceptions of the seven-year-old and the anxieties of the fifteen-year-old are perfectly available, states of mind into which one can simply slide. Childhood, it seems, is in the next room from this one; adult detachment is gained and lost and gained again, and in the realm of memory, time and location spin like an old-fashioned toy, the kind where still pictures can be suddenly spun into motion.

Somewhere outside of Memphis, we turned to the radio for distraction, and a program began about African music of a particular sort: songs generated by ancestor possession. The singer, in trance, does not write the song but receives it. These are the words of the ancestors, and they must be repeated exactly; to change the song, to improvise, is to betray them. The songs are beautiful and alive, and the program resonates in my imagination on into Memphis. We stop for a street map of the city, and while I drive, Paul, who is fond of maps, searches and studies, turning the unfolded sheet every which way, but he can’t find my old street. We stop again, in a shopping center parking lot, and when I step out into the humid sunstruck atmosphere rippling over the asphalt, I suddenly know I want to be in Memphis, I want Memphis intensely, the heat and smell of it, the pressure of its humid air on my scalp, the scent of its leaves and mulch in my nose, its speech in my ears and on my tongue. And at the same time I am suddenly unsteady on my feet and ready to burst into tears: I have betrayed the ancestors, haven’t I, writing about them, I have done it the wrong way, I have mis-sung their music; I have, with my words, wounded the powerless dead.

Firebird
is a book very much concerned with performance and how experiences of performing lift one out of a self defined by others toward some more joyous, self-generated, more open identity. A series of performances provide structure to the story, and the first of these took place at Peabody Elementary School, in Memphis, when Little Miss Sunbeam, an emblem and spokesperson for the eponymous bread company, appeared at my school to what in memory is a rapt audience of children astonished by her beauty and accomplishment.

We are scouring the map, focusing on older areas of town. There’s an amusement park I think I might remember, and there’s the Pink Palace, a children’s museum I used to visit with my father, and — there! Peabody School. Evidence of the past, it seems, can actually be found. We leave the suburban shopping center behind and find the neighborhood — which doesn’t in truth seem all that familiar, though it’s interesting and lively: there are old storefronts getting re-made into galleries and cafés, a familiar urban dynamic. We try once more to find Ramses Street, but it’s no luck, nothing seems right, until we turn a corner and there is the school — limestone or some other yellowy stone, a handsome if somewhat self-important-looking building from the first half of the twentieth century, not a school anymore but a community center. We park, walk across the street, up the steps — and it is only there, when I turn around and stand facing the street, that the body remembers: suddenly it is very clear to me; what I need to do to walk home; I know the way, the turns to take, which had been so important forty years ago, my first long independent walk. It’s the strangest sensation, knowing the way on a level that seems to reside beneath thinking — and it leads us down one street (there were big trees there that dripped in the rain), a right turn, another onto — McIlhenny! That was it; the name of our street was never Ramses. I made that up, out of the memory of mummies in the museum, and the word “Memphis,” and the fact that our house had fat, tapering columns like diminutive versions of the pillars at Luxor. I loved archaeology as a child, and I’d have to be an excavator to find any remnant of our old house now — gone, torn down to make way for apartments, but all around it are the bungalows of a neighborhood I recognize. It’s become a black, working-class neighborhood now, which has preserved it, to some degree, since nobody’s had the money to make these houses unrecognizable: same columns and porch swings, same grassy lawns and delicate mimosas and live oaks with their big roots buckling the sidewalks. All vaguely familiar, none of them quite mine, and of course we aren’t quite welcome here, we don’t really make sense, two white guys in a Volvo full of pets — a car my memoir paid for, incidentally — driving around slowly, looking and looking.