The Crying Book. Heather Christle
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Название: The Crying Book
Автор: Heather Christle
Издательство: Ingram
Жанр: Биографии и Мемуары
isbn: 9781948226455
isbn:
A fall is elementary, primal, basic. It is, in the words of Anne Carson, “our earliest motion. A human is born by falling, as Homer says, from between the knees of its mother. To the ground. We fall again at the end: what starts on the ground will end up soaking into the ground forever.”42
The events then, of a life, could be reduced to a swift symmetry: fall, cry, fall. If we are in the mood for reduction.
On the moon, where the astronaut Alan Shepard cried, gravity exerts one sixth of the force it does on Earth. Tears fall, but more slowly, like snow. I learned this as a child at Space Camp, where I cried because I wanted to play the role of mission specialist in our mock flight, but was assigned instead to be the public affairs officer. Mine was not to do, but to describe.
In my first version of the sentences above, I wrote that it was Buzz Aldrin who cried on the moon, but my memory failed me. Neil Armstrong also did not weep, or at least his tears did not fall. Back in the lunar module, Aldrin photographed Armstrong with wet eyes. Would tears have dropped had they been here on Earth?
Aldrin triggers Neil Armstrong, but Armstrong does not trigger Aldrin. Theirs is an unequal marriage. After they returned to Earth, Aldrin drank his sorrows away, then two wives. The tears behaved according to tradition, falling like rain on the land.
Today again snow falls from not that far up in the sky. Inside me the baby is floating like a noun in space, but she can tell which way is up, which way down.
Almost as soon as movies were invented they flew a rocket ship into the moon’s eye, stimulating tears.
I heard a story of a young guy who used to go for walks with an older poet, a dispenser of lyrical wisdom. Leave the moon alone, he advised.
Paige insists this kind of advice must be ignored: “Don’t trust anyone who says ‘Poetry has had enough of these things.’ Because what they’re actually saying is ‘I have had enough of these things.’ & how could anyone who’s ‘had enough of the moon’ be right about poetry?”43
A person who “cries for the moon” wants too much—wants, in fact, more wanting—weeps into the lack. You can’t make a wish upon the moon.
Shirley Temple cried real tears when a classmate died, she writes in her autobiography, and they stained the page of the classmate’s yearbook photo. To the official caption, “She would give you the moon if she had it,” the actress made a small addition, “carefully ink[ing] one word, ‘Dead.’”44
Asked about the moon’s composition in 1902, children respond:
It is made of rags . . . or the man in it is stuffed with them . . . it is a picture with yellow paint . . . made of yellow paper . . . putty . . . gold . . . silver . . . honey . . . cotton . . . a lucky stone . . . a cake of ice . . . of many stars . . . air . . . brass . . . a plate . . . a balloon . . . clouds . . . a ball . . . tallow . . . a lamp, candle or gas . . . of light . . . of dirt . . . water . . . cloth . . . a bundle of sticks on fire . . . milk . . . butter . . . felt . . . lightning . . . made of dead people who join hands in a circle of light . . . some bright dish hung up . . . water and dirt like the earth . . . a dead skull . . . a water pail . . . it is God, Christ, or anyone else . . . is the face or head of some dead relative or friend . . . stuck through the clouds, or the body goes straight toward the sky and is hidden from us by the head.45
Their collection of answers acts upon me like a spell, leaves me enchanted, bewitched. It is a “heap of language,” a pile of moon dust. Or it is a house made entirely of windows, in every one a child’s round face.
This winter, if the wood from outside the supermarket was too damp to catch fire, we’d add Fatwood sticks from inside the supermarket, and this is civilization, which NASA says will come to an end in the article I won’t read, because today I don’t feel like crying.
We don’t need wood anymore. It is the first day of spring and I need daffodils, but they’re not yet apparent, so instead I look at the picture my mother sent me of her mother in a whole field of them. Kew Gardens, perhaps, the park just minutes from their flat. I think of William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Last Words of My English Grandmother,” which ends with a journey to the hospital:
On the way
we passed a long row
of elms. She looked at them
awhile out of
the ambulance window and said,
What are all those
fuzzy-looking things out there?
Trees? Well, I’m tired
of them and rolled her head away.46
Mr. Williams, I too had an English grandmother, but I don’t know her last words, only that she died in South Africa near her older daughter, who moved there with her husband, formerly a student of gardening at Kew.
We treat the dying as if they’ve lost their reason, as infants who’ve somehow misbehaved. We want them to be good. The dying want their mothers, СКАЧАТЬ