darkest night, something else happened. The subconscious took over and became the engine room. Often I woke with an idea about another ziggurat, thinking how to form the flames in a different way. There were many levels to sleep. I was glad of my tiredness at night.
I worried about Frank and me from time to time. I hoped that we would remain absorbed by our own attitudes and foolishnesses until there was nothing left of us. I hoped that we wouldn’t have that long waiting period to die, but that we would simply vanish at the end of our work.
I thought of my ziggurats as I peeled potatoes of an evening—they seemed terraces for a ziggurat. As I stirred the pan, I made concentric circles.
Journal entry, August 21: How hard to tell what a wild, rough, and stubborn wood it was.
—Dante, The Divine Comedy, canto 1
What happened to the children that used to run through the house? Where was the group of friends that gathered on the sofa and chairs on Sunday evenings to talk about The Divine Comedy? Maybe Frank and I had to work to forget it all.
—
My husband could spend the morning in his study with the smell of old books. His bookshelves covered the walls from floor to ceiling. If he had a new book, it soon absorbed the smell of the old. What was language? How many ways were there to say what he wanted to say? How could Scripture be interpreted? Over and over, until the language changed its meaning in a subtle way that was hardly noticeable until it was too late. Or if one sentence changed but another did not, a new way had to be configured to read their relationship to one another.
Why did we even need language to say what was needed? Meaning seemed to be in the image. The seen object. The object seen. The impact of the visual. Say, ziggurats, for instance.
I heard Frank and Uncle John Winscott arguing over some Biblical passage. I hadn’t even realized John had arrived. He seemed to appear like one of those mushrooms that came up unexpectedly on the lawn.
“Do you know what that means if you change one word—subvert it so that you don’t notice it at first? Can’t really, because your mind gives you what you think it should. That’s the enemy,” Frank said to John. “Not language. Not separate words. But the overall engine that gauges it. That weighs it. That subverts it. That is the master cylinder. The master changer. The human mind that is full of tricks. A magician.”
Well, it was better than the sad life of a traveling clown.
—
Often on Sunday we made it to church. Frank in the front row, always leaning forward. I was afraid he’d levitate to the pulpit. John, also a retired minister, was poised to follow.
Often, Uncle John and Thelma came to our house after church for supper. After the meal, we left the men to themselves. We shared e-mails from our children and walked through the leaves in the yard down the drive to the road.
—
“Should we go for a walk?” Frank sometimes asked. Should we drive to Fenton? Should we go to the store? Should we find a shore where we can collect shells? Should we try to live again? The answer was always no. We would rather work. A new ziggurat was coming. Another possibility for translation. We couldn’t be caught away from our desk and the table in the work shed. It was too risky. We might not be able to reconnect if we were gone too long. But we took risks each day with our work. We were made of risk. It was always inside our work shed and study, where the possibility could exercise itself. That was the main ingredient—the proximity to where the risk could unrisk itself.
Frank loved translation. English into English. That was no small task.
Language is wobbly at best. Because meaning rides upon it—communication and understanding—which is survival. It is absolutely devastating at worst. It can turn upside down. It can sit crosswise in the stream. It can confuse. Subvert. It’s a game of interpretation. At its deadliest, it is war.
Sparses
Once, we decided to have supper alfresco. In those days, it was still acceptable to use the fire pit in the backyard. We wrapped our potato and carrots and meat in tinfoil and baked them in the open fire. As we ate, I heard Daniel howl. In the dark, he was eating the tinfoil around his potato, which sent a jagged pain from the fillings in his teeth into his head. Warren and Winnie laughed. Frank gave Daniel a frigid lecture on how to unwrap the foil from a baked potato before eating. Daniel, in tears, ran to his room and stayed under the bed until sometime in the night.
Sometimes I woke from a nap with memories pasted to me. I made note of them to work into my ziggurats. The smell of burning leaves in the fall. The smell of woodsmoke from a house somewhere on the hill. The memory of summer heat. The museum of winter cold.
In grade school, girls wore dresses that barely covered the knees. In winter, it was a time of continually being cold. There were leggings when I played in the snow, which often became frozen rain. Maybe the houses were not well insulated. Or there were little spots of warmth from the furnace around which great spurts of cold prevailed.
Language becomes chapped with the cold. It is an image of restoration. Not restoration itself. A something to get at something else. A something that has to be used to get at something else that cannot be gotten at otherwise.
“A subversion of desire, a thwarting—a sublimation like marks I made in the sand, erased as soon as they were made,” Frank said to someone, maybe himself.
“‘Surrogation’ is another word that comes to mind, if it is a word,” I said.
—
Frank and his uncle John Winscott used to argue. Thelma, his wife, and I would stand on the porch until they finished, the children playing in the field or by the creek—Daniel, Warren, Winnie, John II, Lizbet, and Thomas.
John was only several years older than Frank. They were more like brothers. Thelma was younger, nearly my age.
“There’s a vacillation of language, and in its wobbliness, a direction of meaning of the highest order can survive,” we heard Frank say.
“Between the cherubim, I suppose,” John added.
“It’s abstraction that allows the other to be acknowledged, if not captured,” I heard Frank say. “There is little capturing in language. You go on a hunt. You may hunt all morning, and again in the afternoon, but the catch eludes you. You may hunt while sleeping. What is dreaming but a hunt?”
“That’s what I want to do,” I said to Thelma as we made a casserole for supper. “I want to hunt for the connectives there also. Mainly the land, which I feel when I play with the children in the clay. That’s why I like to travel to places. I get ideas,” I said. “But I don’t like graveyards. I don’t visit Civil War cemeteries. I remember being in England, visiting the graves of the American war dead, then leaving with a heaviness and sadness that stayed with me the rest of the trip. I felt their longing for life. Their grieving that they didn’t have a chance to live—maybe still carrying the pain, the maiming, the brokenness, the fear of battle with them. The tour guide asked if I was all right as the bus left. I told her I could feel their longings, and she looked at me with suspicion the rest of the trip.” I looked at Thelma, but she was staring at the potatoes as she peeled.
“Maybe it was the feelings of the families the soldiers left behind that you felt,” Thelma said, still not looking at me.
