Gaping

Tanka First Person memento mori

Facial massage—
I feel my skin
stretch over holes
that will soon
define me

George Swede from First Light, First Shadows

Soon but not yet.

And so for day 2420
29.07.2013

Anaphora in the Service of Memento Mori

Marsha Lederman, in reflecting on the announcement that Gord Downie from The Tragically Hip has been diagnosed with fatal brain tumour, closes her piece with a turn that opens as a return to the where and when she first heard the music and veers into a contemplation of life as "hard, huge and haunted".

This week, feeling something more sharp and painful than nostalgia, I pumped Fully Completely at full blast. Nearly a quarter-century and thousands of kilometres from that Hamilton flat, the trees outside my Vancouver home were bursting green, obscuring the mountains. My past came crashing through the window as I contemplated life – hard, huge and haunted.

I thought about the years, so many years, gone by; people gone from my life, people gone from the world, people on their way out of it. What can you do? They’ve all gone. We’ll go, too.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/music/musics-link-to-the-brain-means-when-we-lose-an-artist-we-love-it-hurts/article30187841/

Go. Gone. Going.

And so for day 1629
30.05.2011

Imagining Endings with Wriggling

"At Thomas Merton's Grave" by Spencer Reece in The Road to Emmaus begins....

We can never be with loss too long.

And now an ending...

It is disagreeable, to tend your garden, on your knees,
With the sensation of tending millions of graves.

Douglas Dunn concluding "A European Dream" in The Year's Afternoon.

I like how the one brings us into a meditative space of lingering while the other promptly introduces an ick-factor. Although nothing in the words explicitly points to the dead (insect?) life found in rich humus and fertile soil I have seen many sowbugs and centipedes crawl so that any graves mentioned in a garden context are strangely animated.

And so for day 364
13.12.2007

Mortal Musings

Robin Romm's narrators interject into the telling miniature meditations on the nature of dying and the consequences of death for the surviving. These are not just of the memento mori variety. The story "The Tilt" which gives its name to the collection for example draws a fine distinction between fury and defeat and in so doing describes the pitch and range of emotion that is elicited from the situation and the niceties lead into the pain of interrogation.

But she's still here. She still makes jokes about the dog and gets angry with the doctors. She can't figure out how to use her cell phone or get the stains out of the grout in the kitchen. But when I touch her skin, the heat is different. There's a defeat and a fury right below the coolness of it and it's a frightening combination — defeat that won't do you in and fury that can't save you. And sometimes I try to imagine the silence that will fall everywhere after she dies. I call her now with offhanded questions about taxes or recipes and I think that soon there will be no answers. And the question mark will lose its curve, will grow and straighten inside of my ribs, getting so large and sharp and unwieldy that it finally splits my body in two.

Split we are led stylistically to believe between fury and defeat.

The mother is also the source of wisdom in "Fluency".

In your body when you're dying, my mother told me, there is a lot of talking. It gets stranger and stranger, she said, the talking, until you seem to know anther language. And when you are fluent, you have to leave.

Robert Glück in the back cover blurb to The Tilt reads this collection of stories as posing a question: "How can we contain loss and harm, so that we can live, when loss and harm are where we live most deeply?" Part of the answer lies in reading words shaped to a sharp fluency.

And so for day 332
11.11.2007

Memento Mori

Brillat-Savarin in the translation by M.F.K. Fisher pauses in the description of a turkey hunt to describe walking in the woods:

I wandered through it with delight, observing the benefits and the ravages of time, which both creates and destroys, and I amused myself by following every period in the life of an oak tree, from the moment it emerges two-leaved from the earth until that one when nothing is left of it but a long black smudge which is its heart's dust.

I like how he begins slightly past the acorn and ends beyond the stump. Undercuts the utilitarian.

And so for day 90
14.03.2007