Reconstruction Vol. 13, No. 1
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Amplification / Rusty Morrison
Keywords: Literature; Ecocriticism; Cultural Studies
“There was a voice, a voice that no one had yet been familiar with seven weeks before, for it was not the voice of the Chamberlain. This voice was not that of Christoph Detlev. It was the voice of his death. For many a day, Christoph Detlev‘s death had been living at Ulsgaard, talking to everyone and making demands…”
The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge by Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Michael Hulse
<1> I didn‘t hear what I would call the voice of his death before my father died, or the voice of her death before my mother died. Neither did I hear it in the months after their deaths. I did begin to hear silence differently, but it wasn‘t a difference that I associated with death; it seemed instead that I was hearing more of every silence that was life.
<2> My parents, now that they were gone from the world, were not in this silence, but my awareness that they were now outside of life, as I understood life, made me listen at the edges of what they no longer could occupy; I found those edges in all the silences that life offered me. I felt what became a very large silence, large spacially and large sequentially, whenever I was alone. And that “largeness” in silence began to influence the way I listened, whenever I sat down to write. But this occurred after my parents‘ deaths, after I‘d lived through the first round of emotions that I‘ll call remorse and anger, which surfaced and receded into what I thought of as sadness. But calling it sadness was like trying to give it a taste or a smell. Once I realized it was silence that I was hearing, I could breathe again: and in breathing, I could feel as though I was inhabiting silence and letting silence inhabit me.
<3> But soon I realized that there was more than silence, or that silence was opening to something more than I understood it to be. During this period, whenever I would take a walk into a park or woodland area with trees where I was alone and it was quiet, even when I was on a quiet tree-lined street, I would find myself hearing something deeply akin to my feelings when I was with my father, during, and immediately after his death. But “heard” is inaccurate, since I was experiencing this with more than one sense. But “sense,” too, is inaccurate because I was not using my senses in any way I‘d understood before. I felt what I want to call a “force,” but this word isn‘t right, since what I heard was not outside me, but was already present in me, as well as around me. If this begins to sound uncanny, then I err in that.
<4> It was a feeling that was “more canny” than anything I‘d previously known. I seemed to hear, or sense or find in my awareness, what I could only call an “amplification” in a tree branch‘s stillness, in the turning brightness of leaves reflecting sunlight, and it was the intensity of this experience which took me back to the days I spent with my father as he lay dying in the hospital, when I‘d begun to accept that I was in a room where my father was dying, and could feel that the strangest part of this was simply that I was in a room with “someone” dying, and that I was alive in that room.
<5> In the weeks following my mother‘s death, I had a similar experience. I had sat in her hospital room for a long time with her body after she died. I wanted to be in the room with her face after her death, which I was surprised to see was different, whiter, calmer, more still, than the face I knew.
<6> I found myself recalling this so vividly when walking in nature at that time, and even now, more than a year later, when I am in a natural environment. That this feeling, the sense of amplification, is even more heightened now is something I‘ve found most surprising. But I should clarify this: her face, its calm, its whiteness, is not present for me in nature: not in clouds, nor is it reflected in the white petals of certain flowers. But her face, that last face, did hold for me the same powerful amplification that I can experience now when looking at clouds, or flowers, and I sense this as a conduit beyond what I understand, and beyond what I do not understand a mother or flower or cloud or tree to be.
<7> There is an amplification of stillness, and this seems to infuse the quality of my hearing the wind as the clouds move, my feeling of the texture of petals as I touch them, the scent of some trees and flowers. . .and I ask myself, is the heightening itself what I want to call “death”? But that word, “death,” is like a child‘s nursery rhyme for what I sense. I must be very open-handed, open-minded in the ways that I hold the word “death,” or its past meanings for me shut the motion of heightening, rather than call it forth. This awareness, which comes most powerfully in the natural world, and which feels so resonant with my experience of death, so aligned with death—even as that word‘s meaning evolves each time I use it in this way—this amplification certainly does not feel uniquely related to me or to my particular parent‘s deaths. It seems so much larger than that. But I do think that the only way that I, myself, could access it was through the actual, unique, and particular experiences that I had as I experienced their deaths, and as I experienced the enormous sense of loss that followed.
<8> And, maybe it is because this loss emptied me so completely that I then had the room within myself to feel the force of an amplification that perhaps had always been available to me, if I‘d only been attentive enough to feel it. But whether or not I could have found this sense of amplification in other ways, I do know that it has now become intimately associated with my practice of writing. At first, I found it easiest to listen for when writing about my parent‘s deaths. And I used my frequent returns to walking in the natural world as a guide, a rubric for seeking and renewing that sense of amplification. It comes so easily to me in nature and seems so intuitively to be kin to their deaths. Yet when I quiet myself and listen for this amplification in my writing practice, I‘ve found that it not only allows me to find more in those memories than I thought I understood, but it also has deepened my attention to everything that comes into my mind to bring to paper. I believe that cultivating this sense of amplification has allowed me to be more alive to the particular sensations and intuitions that are the poem forming itself, sensations and intuitions that may in fact not be about memory at all, but may be about the constantly shifting state of presence that is consciousness.
<9> Michele Serres tell us that “every form is draped in an infinity of adherences.” I have come to consider these “adherences” as discernible sensations that impact the construction of the sentence itself as it forms in my consciousness. I believe that the sense of amplification (which I have come to feel is infused with death) allows me to feel the spaces between “adherences” even as they are forming. It keeps them from clarifying too soon, from becoming too concretized in the ways of my logic and life; it lets the formative process come with more of death‘s intimate anonymity, into my awareness.
<10> In the poems that make up my book After Urgency (Tupelo Press, 2012), I‘ve attempted to follow the sentence beyond the first drapings of meaning that would envelop it. I find the use of revision essential, since it often takes many versions and shifts of language to follow the force of amplification to where it will yield the most resonance. But I should say that this is as much a physical experience as intellectual. I follow the sentence with my skin, I listen for what makes my skin prick up.
<11> Henri Bergson, in his essay “Laughter and the Meaning of the Comic,” reminds us that we laugh at a joke before we cognitively, logically, appreciate why it‘s funny. In the same way, I can feel the amplification of an idea surfacing in a sentence before I consciously know its value. I listen with my skin for a shiver, as well as with my inner ear for the kind of amplification I know best in the natural world. If the language does not give me these sensations, then I‘ve not yet undraped the work successfully.
<12> In After Urgency, there are a number of poem series, and each navigates the use of the sentence differently. But, in most of the series in the book, I‘ve been writing long sentences, which is a very different approach than I used in my previous book. Sinuous sentences have let me deepen into a more dream-like state and follow the work beyond my usual limitations. While all the poems I am writing now are not obviously travelling in the landscape of death, all of the work seems, of its own accord, to be drawing me toward an enlarging awareness of what it means to me to seek amplification and express it in language. Here is one poem, as an example of this work, which is one long sentence in length:
After urgency
How to draw the constantly shifting selves together around an object of scrutiny and let
this simply be the way that it‘s raining again outside, so lightly, hardly more than fog,
so that I leave behind my umbrella, open the door, then decide to just stand at the very
edge of the front porch, neither immersed in, nor protected from the suffusion in the
air of nearly imperceptible rainfall.
<13> I‘ve begun to ask myself: does the act of writing have the aptitude to “hear” death? an aptitude that I have only begun to attempt to cultivate in my writing. Is an awareness of death physically a form of listening with more of my body than I thought possible?
<14> Very young children are actually able to hear all the sounds in all the world‘s languages before they begin to learn their own language. Even the most subtle and complex sounds are available to them. Their ears and minds can recognize those differences. But once language-learning begins, their listening becomes increasingly specialized, and their ability to form those sounds also becomes increasingly specialized. For example, a child becoming fluent in English will no longer find it easy to discern some of the complex sounds of Chinese. Young children who are learning Chinese as their native language will soon find it very difficult to hear the ’r‘ of English—yet studies document that they could hear this sound before language learning began.
<15> As with a sensitivity to all language, maybe when we are very young, we still have access to hearing what I am calling “death”; maybe when we are children, death is in every instance of experience, amplifying it. But as we grow up, it may, like language ability, become imperceivable, or inaccessible, as “life” begins to fill with the more concrete meanings of our day-to-day lives.
<16> Does the heightened state of attention that is writing offer a way to listen for the sensory input of death, if I can let myself ignore the barriers that my mind has created around that word, that concept, that amplitude?
<17> Theodore Adorno tells us that it is in struggling with the problems of “form” that a writer works with her unresolved antagonisms, the unresolved issues of her reality. I have found that in the process of drafting a new idea for a new series of poems, a formal constraint will also arise for that series, which I then use to press against limitations I have not yet fully brought into consciousness. Perhaps I never will fully understand any given formal constraint, even as I attempt to work through it. Helene Cixous suggests that our borders make up the homeland, that they prohibit and give passage in the same stroke. For me, organically created forms are the borders that sustain my life in the poem, and they also create the limitation that I want to listen beside, and perhaps beyond. They create the edge, the unpassable border of the poem‘s life in language, which I also think of as death.
<18> When I resolve, or simply work to resolve, a failure of meaning that the form of a poem has unveiled to me, I do feel that I‘m moving, very closely, along the borders of my expectations of life, as I have maintained them. Since my experiences of living with death, I‘ve become more invested in trusting the very intuitive, often illogical process of writing at the borders of the forms my poems create for me. This seems kin to walking at the borders of the amplification I feel in the natural world. And it remains true for me that the natural world is where I find the energy that continually enlivens my writing practice.
<19> I believe that I‘ve always been the kind of person who pays a great deal of attention to her sense perceptions of the natural world. But, until my parents‘ deaths, I had no access to the force of the amplification that I imagine now is a growing part of my experience. I continue to be tempted to use the word “force,” but it is not a pressure; I feel it as much more anonymous than that. Maybe I can say that the death of my father first, and then my mother—that these deaths have un-deaden-ed me to this force, this amplification, which I sometimes think of now as the voice of death. But only if I could wash that word of everything but my direct experience, and then continue to watch and to write as that experience evolves.
<20> This desire to wash a word clean of its old relationships, so as to prepare to be fully available to the resonances that it will have for me, in my life and in my poetry—this is certainly not an unusual motivation for a poet. But a radical expansion of this desire is now compelling me, and it has changed the environment of mind that I enter, or that I aspire to enter, when I begin to write. And it has changed my way of reading back to myself what I have written. Now, rather than listening mostly with logic, my editor mind, I read my work to myself with an interest in listening physically for what I can best call an “echo”. If what I‘ve written will “echo” with the quality of amplification, then the lines of the poem have done the work that I have asked of them, or that they have asked of me. Maybe I can imagine that if a poem is working, then it will echo in my physical body, finding the hollows, the empty and opening spaces in which to resonate. It will cause me to feel what I might also call a “shiver” that is emotional and physical at once.
<21> If I feel the echo resonate along a corridor of listening that I continue to call “death,” then I can use the act of writing to continue to travel beyond the limitations of meaning that the word “death” has had for me. And so, I can‘t say that I heard “death” after my parents died. But I have found, from their deaths, a kind of listening that I hope will only expand for me, as my life expands, and as my writing expands its relation to the words I use to extend language‘s meanings for me. (originally published in Jan 2012 issue of THE VOLTA.)
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