Remedy

Ivor the engine driver— a remedy?

A cluster of articles, poems, and songs get caught in my head. For now, I can’t get past the opening proem of “Kaddish,” because of the way it resonates with other thoughts. How strange a resurrection (needs) must be.

Six years? Maybe it’s seven. It’s been a long time since my divorce. Daphne Merkin’s article in the New Yorker raised some good points. I can’t see myself among the categories mentioned either: the good enoughs, the enhancers, the seekers, the libertines, the competent loners or the defeated. I share her desire to find:

something to help me explain why I am lingering on the stage set of life after the curtain has come down and the others have got married, or died. Marriage and death have always been the two paradigmatic endings in Western culture, which raises the question of how to make sense of the havoc represented by divorce, as either an end or a beginning. Perhaps divorce is a way of living two lives for the price of one. Surely this is what the social historian Lawrence Stone had in mind when he noted that the remarriage rate in the seventeenth century was similar to that of today, with divorce replacing death as its precondition:

Indeed, it looks very much as if modern divorce is little more than a functional substitute for death. The decline of the adult mortality rate after the late eighteenth century, by prolonging the expected duration of marriage to unprecedented lengths, eventually forced Western society to adopt the institutional escape-hatch of divorce.

Two lives for the price of one? I must say that is closer to the way I’ve tried to look at it. When I climbed out the escape hatch, it wasn’t because I wanted to be alone. It took help to drive me into the change, a change that I still see as necessary and important. There were parts of it I wish I could have skipped, like being a subservient doormat to someone else (after my marriage, not during it). Mostly, I suppose I really hate thinking that I was just a quick one, while he's away.

But let’s have a smile for the old engine driver. While I might be called either a seeker or a competent loner, or on occasion be numbered among the defeated, mostly I strive to be true to my nature. As Blake said in the letter I put up a few days ago, “Perhaps the simplicity of myself is the origin of all offences committed against me.” If he learned one lesson during his time as William Haley’s lap-dog, it was this: “that a too passive manner. inconsistent with my active physiognomy had done me much mischief.”

The strange thing about my own particular mourning regarding my divorce is not that I think it was something that shouldn’t have happened, and indeed the end of my marriage seemed perfectly natural and peaceful, slipping away in the night due to natural causes. Instead, it’s the particularly violent loss of the life I thought I was escaping to, and I try to find solace somewhere. It was a loss, a trauma, not a death though I wish that there was some way I could say that she is dead to me now, and mourn it. As Ginsberg observes in the proem to Kaddish, “Death is that remedy that all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy.” And I turned back to those majestic stanzas that Ginsberg speaks of, in Shelley’s Adonais.

The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!—Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.

Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is pass'd from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.

That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.

The breath whose might I have invok'd in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.

My spirit's bark is far from shore. It’s not the death that bothers me, but the loss of a star to steer by. I walk along on that dome of crushed glass, and pick up a few pieces and write about them. These things are but stains to eternity, but they’re my stains. And I hate doing laundry, or looking for a remedy.