finding home
by Douglas Messerli
Rebecca Goodman Aftersight (New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2015)
Rebecca Goodman’s most recent book, Aftersight, is correctly described on
its back cover by writer Stacey Levine, as a “disassembled keen,” a dirge or
death song. Yet this highly poetized writing is also a fascinating
psychological portrait of mourning and essay on how those left behind must
learn to cope without the missing loved one.
But even here we wonder whether the “she” being described is, metaphorically-speaking, the mourner or the mother. For very soon after the narrator observes: “When the fire consumed the woman, she couldn’t watch.” Was the mother cremated, or is this burning woman another image the narrator has half-observed which, as she puts it, replaces “the image of her mother?”
And who is the “he” who promises to explain “the meaning of her dreams”
in the morning, her mother’s husband or the narrator’s own husband speaking to
her? Even the act of calling her father results in complete displacement, “the
number dialed another number, another father.”
In short, we have immediately been thrown in a world without boundaries:
mother becomes daughter, father becomes husband, which, in turn, become other
women, other men. Indeed, in the very next section of this book divided into
small multiple gnomic intervals, the writer observes: “The world exists between
the meaning of being.” Without the being other, we can surmise, there is no
meaning; as the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe put it, “things fall apart.”
When a part of the self disappears, so too does that self begin to
disintegrate. As the author philosophizes: “Entire structures rest on the
provision of self.”
For me, the power of the small poetic fiction—a fiction of a very real
death—emanates from Goodman’s Stein-like maxims which help to make sense of
what is clearly, in her now fragile world, without sense, without meaning. For
example:
The first day is more
difficult than the next. Or should I
say the first day is more
difficult than the last. The why
of nothing is never an aspect
of becoming.
I’m not so sure I completely agree
(thinking back upon my difficult father and his death, I was much more able to
cope in the first few weeks than I am perhaps today, when I still have dreams
of him, some negative, others quite loving), but it is through these assertive
statements that the author is able to gradually regain meaning, to build up an
understanding of something after which, apparently for months, she had
difficulty in even surviving in a world in which, suddenly, “speech is
meaningless and returns to the time when all thought reverts back to
Past, present, and future, such as it
might possibly be imagined, becomes blurred, just as does the mother and
daughter. The daughter reverts to meaningless acts of the past, taking down and
playing a flute that she had as a child; reencountering the avocado trees, the
flowers, and other elements of nature that her mother so loved; recalling and
recooking her mother’s remarkable recipes; even cleaning up, which she often
did with her mother, after dinner parties—attempting, in short, to relive some
of the experiences that made her mother so remarkable when alive. But even
here, it is difficult to bring things back to life: “The garden speaks to you.
Not in the way you had hoped. In the way you have been given.”
Even “the tomatoes [are] not as red today as they were yesterday.” Color
fades; “the orange was less than orange….” “All existed now through the amber
liquid that vision takes on in the hope that seeing is the moment of
understanding.” But death, the author suggests, does not permit understanding,
and the vision is also blurred.
As outsiders, of course, Goodman’s readers must forebear with her,
forgive her sometimes endless sorrows and attempt to refocus them on their own
lost loved ones or simply to imagine what it might feel like to lose someone
whom they so deeply love. I think, accordingly, that this is not a book for
very young readers who have not yet experienced death. To remedy this,
somewhat, Goodman transforms the tale from a story about herself into a kind of
folk-tale or even fairy tale:
He said he would banish all the
mirrors in the kingdom. Beyond
the aspect of reflection the image
would not reveal itself….
He hid the mirrors. He
covered them. He refused to relinquish
the code that would allow them to
reappear. She kept asking for
that memory. The numbers the dates
the symbols. Where had he
hidden them—those sentences that spoke of
recovery. Charged
with the energy of subtle frenzy.
She searched for them. In every
corner of every space. In sleep
she dreamt about them. Those
frail images—the surface of
belief.
Employing the Jewish tradition of
covering all the mirrors in one’s house after a death, Goodman transforms her
experiences into a kind of mythic story that also represents her attempts to
heal herself. By trying to find the mirrors, she displays her own desire to
come back to see the world as it is reflected upon us.
And in the very next section, we begin to see a kind of magical
recovery, projected upon a fictional “him.”
In the village. The first words
that came to him. Walking down
the street. Early spring, Birds.
Sage. Lemons. Words came to
him fragments. Today. Only today.
What could this mean.
If the center does not quite hold for long, peace and meaning come
gradually through language, the very language of Goodman’s book, and does begin
to restore the narrative voice back to life. By the end of Book 2—itself a kind
of colloquy of short maxims and fragmented observations—the “hero” has begun to
sleep and move forward:
Begin, sleep, he says. even when
dreams replace your nights.
even when dreams replace you.
written agreements in the
courtyard. blossom.
How do you leave the space
you’ve walked in.
The answer to that implied question
is “to carry the voice,” to speak a language that “is no longer the image of
i.”
By the third section, finally, “the garden renews itself.” As she lays
in the garden reading the book, the narrator finally invites the reader to
“join her. sit. hold the book.” The
private sorrow has turned into a public act. And Goodman embraces the reader,
asking him to “remember the girl. turn the page. look at the image. feel the
page,” to even answer her question, “what must the girl do.”
This gifted author ends her work in a long prose poem titled “Night
Garden,” answering, like Molly Boom, “yes,” to the voyage into darkness, a kind
of dream garden “full of green.” She can now truly “go home.” But her final
sentence suggests the dilemma of her long voyage through sorrow, “Where, I
ask.”
Perhaps it is not accidental, that during and soon after the writing of
this book, she and her husband moved from Los Angeles into a new house in the
town in which she and her family had long lived, Orange, California.
Los Angeles, June 10, 2017
Reprinted from Reading with My
Lips (March 2024).
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