Read through a found treasure yesterday, Alana Wilcox's A Grammar of Endings, which had called to me from the shelves of my favorite used book store back home last weekend. The reason it spoke to me initially was because of the premise -- a woman trying to sort through the pain and grief of her breakup attempts to write one final letter to her departed, for closure, correction, forgiveness, forgetfulness. The letter proves elusive, words failing to encapsulate the scope of her loss, the depth of her sorrow, the power of her agony. And so the novel -- which purports to be fictional, but reads as viscerally and raw as leafing through someone's journal -- progresses as she works through the various iterations and attending emotions. Wilcox uses a medical condition of absence to start each chapter -- avulsion, alethia, anaphia -- each representative of the emotional impairment being grappled with within. Avulsion, a tearing away or forcible separation; alethia, an inability to forget past events; anaphia, the absence of the sense of touch. It's an incredibly potent construct, and the difficulties the narrator has surmounting them rang true, especially as her frustrations and desperation to do so mount:
"I will take one word from each book here that reminds me of you, I will cut them out with scissors and drop them into a white envelope. You will open it and they will fall onto your desk, landing assuredly into the perfect sentence."
"I would love you like a book. Symmetrical, unpredictable. Pages pressed flat together, words deep and fleshy through the thickness. Letters immutable and sequential; I would love you with the certainty of the other side of the leaf. Indelible as ink. Irrevocable as binding, as reading. The strictness of page numbers, the gentle sound of a page turning. I would assemble the indices of every book ever written and bind them together and this would be my letter to you."
"Perhaps I can sing you this letter, notes clear and long in place of my discordant words. The sincerity of perfect harmony; the impermanence of song...I open my mouth and begin to sing to you, and in the instant between the hard push of breath and the sound of the first note there are all the ways I tried to love you and all the ways I tried to forget you, and then there would be music. True and loud and clear...some perfect note that is everything I have ever wanted to tell you...And when I finish singing this to you, it would be over. There would be no trace of it. My love, my grief, my regret would have dissipated with the last echoes of my song. There would be nothing to reread on a sad rainy afternoon, no record of its success or failure, nothing to touch. There would only be the memory in my lungs of the breath that held you, and some quiet melody that might haunt me in my deepest sleep."
Wilcox wields these attempts with the lethal precision of a brain surgeon and intersperses them with love letters of other famous writers -- John Keats, Henry Miller -- which only compounds the lesson: there is no simple end to this. Your situation is not unique, yet history and the experiences of others cannot help. You seek only to write a letter, yet renowned authors will provide no inspiration. You bear the symptoms of emotional and physical impairment, yet identifying the medical corollary will offer you no cure.
You are in this, and it is yours alone. There is no succor, no evasion, no quarter.
It's a devastating read, particularly for someone in my situation (so close as it is to hers), but well worth the anguish. I plowed through it in one sitting, teary-eyed and injured in my favorite little roundabout yesterday, torn open time and again by her self-awareness and honesty:
On recovery: "Going on a date with him, with anyone, would mean that this grief is not insurmountable and is weaker than I thought, or that I am stronger, or that I loved [him(her)] less than I thought. It would mean I was getting on with my life, as though life were something independent of this love and this grief.
On seeing them again, as ordinary strangers: "How I will have to talk to you as if you were just anybody else, how I will have to push the sound of your sobs from my mind if I am not to cry myself. How I will have to pretend not to know everything about you; how I will have to stop myself from touching you without even thinking about it... How the divergence of our lives will be reflected in your eyes.
On memories fading and the fear of moving on: "I was trying to visualize your legs but I could only see them like a photograph, textureless and unreal. This failure of memory disturbs me. It suggests that I didn't love you well enough to remember, or that it is so important to me that I have no choice but to forget...I have stopped saying your name aloud. Sometimes I try to use it but when I reach for it I can't find it, because there can't be one word that is you. And sometimes it comes up to my lips and I seal them tight to keep it from escaping. As though there were some finite amount of the sound of you, that every time I speak your name I lose a little more of you.
Like I said, a devastating read, but a beautiful one as well. For we've all been there before, to varying degrees and frequencies, and while it may reopen some old wounds ("you, always you, only where I never expect to find you;" "gestures like one-way streets") it may help provide clarity -- and in time, closure -- too. A great read.
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Two quick musical additions to the arsenal from albums that have been getting a lot of play lately. First is from Adam Arcuragi, a Philly-based folkie whose songs are of my usual fixations, love, loss, and overlooked beauty, all wrapped in warm acoustic guitar. He's only got two albums under his belt, including this year's I Am Joy, but his first one has been the one on repeat of late, 2006's self-titled debut. Check out this one slice of prettiness, emblematic of all its neighbors, "1981."
The second one comes from the debut album of The xx, a band of London high schoolers that will wow you with its simplicity. With its boy-girl vocals, electro-drums, and simple new wave guitar parts, it sounds like a mix of Interpol and Stars, and is a great album of mood music. There's miles of open spaces here, with the hushed vocals and chilly guitar riffs giving it a cool, intimate feel, like uttered confessionals in the back a speeding car. Check out "Islands" from the self-titled debut:
Until next time, mi amici...
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