Finding Loss
Trish Salah Wanting in Arabic has a piece the opens with a fateful sentence.
She awoke to an appetite for narrative.Notice she awoke "to" not "with". Notice also "narrative" not "narration" (the story vs the telling). The appetite might just devour her. A diegesis spoken by another threatens.
What is not told here has been shown earlier in the book with a poem sequence ending:
how like a boyNote the period marking ending.
to take the long view.
The long view may not find its ending until the very end of mortal coil. Which serpentine path may contain transformations. A life lived is not lived until it ends.
As a boy reader, I have been remembering lines from a song on The Pretenders album Get Close "Hymn to Her" and wondering how it is a boy can identify with the tripartite maid-mother-crone. And part of the answer is in the lyrics — an openness to continuity and change.
And she will always carry onWe are at once cut off from the "they" and imaginatively linked. Just as Salah's "she" is, via memory over pages of text, linked to the "boy" who by virtue of the poetic voice and its ironic inflection has but a long view in a longer sequence. Again we are called to notice not so much the narrative (the told) but the narration (the telling) which sets us, the readers, into intimate relation with what is an ongoing sequence that carries us away from the text into a consideration of our relations with other readers including ourselves at some future point. Lost and found.
Something is lost
But something is found
They will keep on speaking her name
Some things change
Some stay the same
And so for day 333
12.11.2007
