Mom report: April 26, 2011

Is the heart of poetry a stillness? At the telephone's other end, I'm here and then she's not. Just shut up and listen! Jimmy Stewart yells on her television.

--Have you eaten, Mom?

--No.

--How's the weather?

--

--Are you there, Mom?

--

--I love you, Mom. I love you, Mom. I'll call back soon.

--26 April 2011

[Increasingly, I find that two projects, Dementia Blog & Memory Cards, converge. And how could they not, since at their centers are concerns with memory & its loss? So here is a memory card that riffs off a line from Clark Coolidge in The Crystal Text, that is also a report on my mother.]

[Here is a site where you can find information on Alzheimer's, including a new report by the Alzheimer's Foundation on Baby Boomers & the disease]

King Lear enters _The Little Prince_

[After the social worker who visits my mother once every two or three weeks wrote to say she'd been showing mom a pop-up version of The Little Prince, I ordered one. Over the past few days I read the book, which is as gorgeously made as it was written by Antoine de Sainte-Exupery, alongside King Lear. And then a small character with a yellow scarf came to tell me the story of how King Lear entered the little prince's world . . . Much language is taken from Ste-Exupery and Shakespeare. The mistakes are all mine, as we say in acknowledgments.]


It took me a long time to understand where he came from. King Lear, who asked so many questions, never seemed to hear the ones anyone else asked him. It was things he said quite at random that, bit by bit, explained everything. For instance, when he first caught sight of an airplane . . . he asked: "What's that thing over there?"

When told that the plane had fallen out of the sky, he asked what planet it was from.

"Of course," he said of the airplane, "that couldn't have brought anyone from very
far . . . " And he fell into a reverie that lasted a long while. Then, taking a sheep out of his pocket, he plunged into contemplation of his treasure.

"You see me here, you gods a poor old man
As full of grief as age, wretched in both."

Something about his daughters was amiss but he would not draw them, nor even the castles they lived in. Another, I suspected, was houseless, wandering in a foreign (oh hard-to-spell!) land, exiled in more than word.

Lear liked the fox and the flower, but not the drunkard or the vain man who looked only and ever for approbation. He was vain, but he was also wise like the fox, lonely like the flower; his sense of place was a dark planet ("cerebral and dark," according to Netflix) on which he propped himself, bare and unforked. The drunkard and he could have talked story: what is it about shame? I'd have asked them, but neither drunk nor King could look beyond his bottle or word hoard. For a demented man, Lear sure seemed to carry around a lot of language. Paranoia's a fertile muse, but she also enters the drought years, rendering earth a cracked slab unbefitting to a sovereign's looping locution.

But the master sees himself not so. "Here I stand your slave, / A poor, infirm, weak, and despised old man." He cannot count the stars, nor possess them, because he owes them his jangled moods, his love of piercing light, his debt to eyes that stay in his head. Sad news about his buddy Gloucester: the dead holes in his head, the failed (if ably assisted) suicide, the inability to die even when you or he ordain it. If to be sovereign means you get to choose, then neither Lear nor his friend are so.

Enter the lamplighter. We more than suspect he's Edgar, playing another's self (ragged beyond nounship), cold in the vog of a farther micro-planet. He cannot not light his lamp; his lamp cannot not go out in the dark. Does Gloucester know this? Gloucester cannot see, but Edgar is a more than able narrator. "Father, for you are that, this planet's always on the limn of darkness, save the man who cannot sleep for lighting the lamp."

Lear abhorred snakes, took refuge on mountaintops. He fancied himself a thinker, unprovoked by daily needfulness. But the snake kept slithering, and two daughters passed notes from desk to desk, conspiring havoc. They were not flowers, at least not those he wanted on his nightstand. So many thorns, as if they needed protection from him. From him? He was just a sojourner, a man who gave things away, making inheritance while the sun shone on his white beard.

The railroad seemed one way out, though it hardly crossed the planet borders without enormous slings. Bad engineering made them slingshots, and trains transgressed the very skies, bearing screaming children, angry commuters, releasing coal as acidic rain in tunnels between stars. Don't tell the businessman; he might become more generous with his constellations.

Lear got off at a distant station. No one worked in the building. A water fountain had died long ago. The filing cabinets were full of old teaching aids: How the Pilgrims Came to Plymouth Rock, The Pioneers in Wagons, one with a picture of a sad chief. This did not seem right, nor did it satisfy any thirst he had. He left the station and its paper heaps and walked out into sand fields. A pilot appeared, accoutered in cap and leather flying bag. He too was lost.

There was a happy ending, at least for a time. Using dowsing sticks, they found a spot, unmarked by stone or twig, dug until they reached a vein of water. They drank from the same bucket, sharing more than the cold water. But then the daughters came, and their retinues, and their resentments, even the youngest one's recovered love. There were swords and bitter words, nothing water could wash away, not yet. Only the pilot escaped, muttering something about ripeness, about extremity, about trumpets. He took with him what memories there could be, left the stage a motley fool. What Lear had not already forgotten, forgot Lear.

And no grown-up will ever understand such a thing. Never.

























[See Old Women Look Like This for more experiments in which very old people are put in children's stories.]

Tinfish Retro Chapbook #2: Adam Aitken's TONTO'S REVENGE

Available May 1. The second in a series of 12.

Tonto's Revenge, composed of poems written by Adam Aitken during his term as Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa, is something of a Thai-Australian version of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger. The poet, masquerading sometimes as Tonto, sometimes as Charlie Chan, meets a Sheriff; they face off over everything from tourism to nostalgia to departmental hiring. Along the way, the poet meets the Rabbit Lady of Honolulu, laments the death of Danno (James MacArthur of the original Hawai`i 5-0), and gathers in many of Honolulu's voices off buses and from the city parks burgeoning with homeless persons. "You want to shout Fuck Tourism," Aitken writes, "but that would be nostalgic.”

Adam Aitken is a Thai-Australian living in Sydney, where he teaches Creative Writing. He was born in London and as a young child he was schooled in Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur. He has lived, worked and travelled widely through Asia and Europe, and was recently Distinguished Visiting Writer at the University of Hawai‘i-Manoa. His poetry has appeared in Poetry, Tinfish, Drunken Boat and Jacket. This is his fifth collection of poems.

from “The Day Danno Died (In memory of James MacArthur)"

The day Danno died

some old senators

and heroes of Pearl Harbour

last surviving ones

cried. They knew Danno

had done a lot for these islands.

The day Danno died

someone’s father entered

Harry’s Music Store

and bought his son

a Ukelele.

At Smiley’s Nails

someone mentioned in passing

that Danno had died.

Somehow, at Jimmy’s

Television Sales & Services

the owner thought

TV will never be the same,

now that Danno’s died.

Send $3 to Tinfish Press, 47-728 Hui Kelu Street #9, Kane`ohe, HI 96744 or order with credit card via tinfishpress.com (2checkout). Better yet, subscribe to the full series of 12 chapbooks we're putting out in 12 months, for $36! The first chapbook, Say Throne, by No`u Revilla, is still available for $3 or as part of a subscription. Each Retro Chapbook is designed by Eric Butler.

Mother report: April 16, 2011

--This is Susan, Martha's daughter. How is she doing?
--She's had a bit of a cold, but she's ok. Just had lunch.
--Is she up for the telephone?
--Yes.
--[It's your daughter, Martha; she's on the phone.]
--Hello mom! How are you, mom? Did you just have lunch?
I hear you have a cold. Are you there, mom?
--
--
--[It's your daughter, Martha, she's on the phone. Say hello.]
--Hello. (breathy whisper)
--Hi mom, how are you? What have you been up to?
--
--
--[Hello.]
--I guess she's not up to talking today. I'll try back tomorrow, ok,
in case she's feeling more like it.
--OK, sorry. Good-bye.

Springtime (in London) is for Alzheimer's

When is jet lag a lag, and when is it more a loop, like a scratched cd, or the mind when it's called upon to navigate the differences in time zones? It's from within that loop, or outside the time to which I've been assigned (8:43 a.m. Hawaiian time) that I'll write about my trip to London, April 5-12 (or 13th, if you include the flight lag on the last leg from Los Angeles). Kind of a flight log of lag. Stop me before this gets too silly. And forgive the errors, as they are induced by over 48 hours of travel in one week across a cumulative 22 time zones. Or so.

I went to London to attend the New Cultures of Ageing Conference at Brunel University on April 8 and 9. (The "e" in Ageing has a similar power to set my brain in a loop, so from now on I'll write "aging," which will ease my American mind.) The conference was smaller than most I attend, but also more interdisciplinary, incorporating oral history projects, reading group reports, histories of aging in England, demographic frenzies, discussion of organization and management, an "argument" between Will Self and Faye Weldon, and afternoon panels on literature. The focus was on narrative, but there were at least some calls for ruptured ones.

Which brings me quickly to a pivotal moment during my visit in Ealing with Giles Goodland and
his family, when Giles handed me a book by B.S. Johnson, entitled House Mother Normal, published in 1971, shortly before the author's suicide. I'd been telling Giles about my dissatisfactions with linear narratives about Alzheimer's. And suddenly I realized that this was the book I should be talking about, a book that belonged to Giles, a book I could not possibly read that evening and talk about the day after. The day after my talk, during which I mentioned my encounter with B.S. Johnson, a graduate student from Paris-Diderot, Karen Zouzouai, delivered a paper on Johnson's novel. A day after that, I bought Johnson's Omnibus from the London Review Bookshop at Russell Square. Two days thereafter I read the novel on the plane from London to Los Angeles. It's an astonishing text. While I'm still not capable of doing it justice, I want to begin to say why.

I find a paragraph by Frank Kermode that says it best, but only if you reverse its field, transposing Kermode's negatives into positives like a wide receiver running behind the quarterback and heading up the other hashmarks. Because what I find valuable about Johnson's House Mother Normal is its refusal to trump up a linear narrative about residents of an old people's home. Instead, Johnson offers us the residents themselves, each telling the same story, some in sentences, others (the ones with Alzheimer's) in words only, strewn across the page. So here is the regressive Mr. Kermode:

His [Johnson's] basic error arose from his belief that the truth of narratives was incompatible with the usual way of presenting them: that is, in books which by their very technology insisted on a spurious sequentiality. At the same time, he thought that the neglect of all manner of various typographic opportunities, long since exploited by Sterne and now shamefully ignored, was another enemy of the truth. That the material structure of books can affect their contents is of course true. The use of the codex in preference to the scroll made for a decisive difference between the Gospels and the books of the Hebrew Bible; the codex made easily available relationships between pages remote from one another, and these books, with numbered and turnable pages, may have influenced the writers and probably affected the early course of the new religion.

Johnson, it seems, was a fiction writer obsessed with "truth," one for whom the form of "realism" was not realistic enough. It was in the interest of telling the truth, getting at something authentic (a word I distrust, but seems right in this context) that he experimented, and it was his experiments that renders him a "forgotten writer," or--for this reader--simply an unknown one.

One of the moments in his book that provides access to the ways in which he enacts memory and forgetting is in the renderings of a song the nasty House Mother (hardly "normal") through the memories of each resident. Sarah Lamson, whose narrative is fairly straightforward (realism as a marker of an intact memory), records the first stanza of the song this way:

The joys of life continue strong
Throughout old age, however long:
If only we can cheerful stay
And brightly welcome every day.
Not what we've been, not what we'll be,
What matters most is that we're free:
The joys of life continue strong
Throughout old age, however long. (11)

"She is in her happy place," a nurse once said of my mother and her colleagues at Arden Courts. The myth of happiness is one held most firmly to by those who are witnesses to their relatives' decline. At Brunel, the elders would often intervene to point out that things were not so good, that old age was not simply an era for dispensing wisdom. That old age hurts.

Two residents later, Ivy Nicholls renders the song this way:

Throughout old age, however long:
If only we can cheerful stay
And di-dum welcome every day.
Not what we've been, not what we've done,
What matters most is that we're errrr (55)

By the time we get to George Hedbury, whose words are scattered across the open field page (ironically denoting a shutting in), we read:

No matter if the future's dim
keep right on and suffer hymn (143)

A final resident, the aptly named Rosetta Stanton, whose tablets are least recognizable as language (in the sense of language as a communicative vehicle, in any case), repeats nothing of the song, although her author (who comes out as such near the end of the book) does put sounds like "addurno" in her mouth (13), perhaps to remind us of the problem of the lyric post-Alzheimer's.

The nefarious "House Mother" gets many of the lyrics wrong, herself, proving the emptiness of her own propaganda. She shifts Lamson's "The most important thing to do / Is stay alive and see it through" (11) with the ever more cynical and deliberate, "The most important thing to do / Is stay alive and screw and screw" (187), which is what she does with her dog while the horrified residents look on, attempt to enunciate their disgust. That the House Mother's narrative is most tidy, most linear, spoken with the most clarity, most "in control," is only one of the ironies Johnson employs. The real truths, we sense, are on the pages that remain entirely blank (as with Rosetta's) or on which a fractured language scatters in islands.

Frank Kermode, in reviewing the biography of B.S. Johnson by Jonathan Coe, can barely bring himself to summarize the argument about House Mother Normal. "Coe argues that this makes the book ‘richly polyphonic’. The House Mother has the final word: she describes herself as ‘the concoction of a writer’ – another sop to Johnson’s conscientious objection to making things up." And so the arch critic demeans an author for trying to "get it right," because getting it right is so damn difficult. Earlier in this same review, Kermode the curmudgeon wrote it thusly: "Johnson was very serious about these innovations, but they kidnap the notion of experiment or estrangement by making it appear that the violation of narrative order in the interests of what he thought of as truth must be blatant. In fact these tricks simply prompt one to ask what the point of this sort of innovation really is. They distract attention from the novel, the true interest of which is independent of them." In the interest of his own version of "truth," Kermode asserts that the novel has a form divorced from forms, that it does not contain "tricks." I'll stop before spilling more bitter beans, but you'll see where I'm going--or, more importantly--where B.S. Johnson went in his forensic investigation of the "home" and its residents.

My only problem with the novel is that Johnson moves so quickly from early or non-Alzheimer's into late-stage Alzheimer's. Missing is the stage where there is a lot of language, but little coherence; this was the stage I discovered here in my mother's home. (It might otherwise be termed the Modernist stage of Alzheimer's, as conceived by Gertrude Stein.) And his presentation of the House Mother's narrative at the end, which confirms all our suspicions about her perversity, offers perhaps too much sense to us, as if to close down the questions and to show us the awful answers, lest we not know. But these are quibbles. What is beautiful about the book is the way it illustrates the absolute necessity of the experimental in the face of Alzheimer's extremities.

Once the conference ended, I went on a two day traipse through London, finding old friends and inventing new ones (that sounded right, so I wrote it). The sun was shining and the English were getting sunburns. On the top deck of the red buses, young Sikhs were wearing traditional turbans, while negotiating cultures with American teeshirts and diamond stud earrings. The voices sounded in myriad tongues; no one spoke in a single language, but words danced in and out of Punjabi, English, African French, English, Hindi, English, Polish, English. Much as I love taking photographs, I would also want recordings of these voices, for that is the London I heard as I looked out if its bus windows.


____________________

Jacket2 is now out, published by the indefatigable Al Filreis with a staff of brilliant editors, including Sarah Dowling. It's all worth reading (and grows over time, rather than according to the usual schedules), but please check out the Pacific Poetries section, which I edited, and the introductory essay, which includes my usual Tinfishian spin (away from identities and toward conversations between them--if that sounds paradoxical, it is).

Eileen Tabios's marvelous project, Poets on Adoption has also launched, here. My offering is here. One of the many virtues of this site is how various are the perspectives offered by adoptees, adopters, and birth-parents.

Memory Cards from my latest series will appear in Eleven Eleven, among other venues. I've almost finished the Lyn Hejinian series, wondering where to go next, and thinking a lot about why nearly all the writers I've riffed off of are white (Albert Saijo being the only exception so far). Something about meditative poetry, the poetry of abstraction, as more possible (or, indeed, interesting) for white poets. To write about later, when the lag is o'er. And without assigning too much identity to their and my identities . . .

The next Tinfish Retro Chapbook is by Adam Aitken, called Tonto's Revenge. Announcement soon, here and elsewhere.

The problem with Alzheimer's narratives, part 3: Thomas DeBaggio's _Losing My Mind_ & more

Alzheimer's is like trying to describe air.


My previous attempt to write about Thomas DeBaggio's Alzheimer's memoir, Losing My Mind: An Intimate Look at Life with Alzheimer's (The Free Press, 2003), netted a collage poem rather than an essay, here. That poem collages the words of DeBaggio with lines from George Oppen's late poems; reading the memoir offered me access to the Alzheimer's in Oppen's writing, especially since DeBaggio's bad dreams so mirrored Oppen's. But now I'd like to look at Losing My Mind more critically, in the third part of a sequence, "The problem with Alzheimer's narratives." Part one is here; part two there. (Digression: Bryant asked me if I would write three blog posts on this subject, to which I responded that I was going to argue for chaos in a neat three part dialectic! Today is synthesis day at Tinfish Editor's Blog.)

My argument, so far, is best distilled in reading Rachel Hadas's reading of Emily Dickinson's poem, containing these lines: "Ruin is form--Devil's work / Consecutive and slow-- / Fail in an instant, no man did / Slipping--is Crash's law." In that last post, I wrote that, "Hadas reads this poem as capturing "the theme of the extreme insidiousness of the loss" [of dementia]; what strikes me is that the "failure" of the rhyme (deliberate as it may be) evokes insidiousness rather than merely conveys it." It's the difference between language and form as conveyance and as evocation that's at the heart of my argument about Alzheimer's narrative. While most such narratives convey from the point of view of the child or partner of the Alzheimer's patient what it means to live with the disease, I'm arguing for narratives that evoke the illness for the reader.

In a 2003 essay, "Looking back from loss: views of the self in Alzheimer's disease," Anne Davis Basting notes that "There are only a handful of published texts in which the primary author is the person with the disease" (88). Thomas DeBaggio's is one of these, published at nearly the same time Basting was writing her article about several other such narratives. DeBaggio was a journalist, one obsessed with the craft of writing, so his memoir is as much about writing as it is about his disease. Since there is no separating this disease from thinking, writing and illness dovetail in amazing passages about the difficulty of writing through Alzheimer's.

DeBaggio divides his book into three sections; these sections weave together, rather than move in linear sequence. He explains them in the Author's Note. "I call the first narrative the Baby Book," he writes. This is the repository of his long-term memories from early childhood until the early 1970s, or some 20 years before he began writing this book. "A second narration intersects the first, relating stories of humiliation and loss." This narrative occurs in the present, which is full of "memory lapses and language dificulties [sic]." It also occurs in italics, and is more meditative than the other sections. The third narrative is factual, relates the results of recent Alzheimer's research. He ends the note by noting, "All this is mixed together, as it is in the brain, and follows a pattern of its own" (xi). What he does not say up front is that the book also repeats itself. The Discussion Guide's question number 6 seems disingenuous, when it asks the reader: "Losing My Mind has passages that are repeated at times, particularly in the second half. Do you think this is intentional?" (212)

Or maybe it's only half-disingenuous, because it's here one senses that the book comes to us from both an author and an editor who work at common and sometimes at cross-purposes. The repetitions, which come to us toward the end of the book, sound like odd echoes, except they require a new term, since echoes can be heard as repetition, whereas Alzheimer's repetitions cannot. A writer who hears her own echoes edits them out. At the moment when DeBaggio repeats the story of finishing Catcher in the Rye as an airplane lands, then "looking for 'phonies' and easily [spotting] them tangled in their insecurities," we witness this repetition-effect-affect. It causes the reader confusion at first: why am I hearing this sentence or paragraph again? What could it mean? Does it mean anything? Like the author himself, we are searching our minds for something that may or may not be there. We rifle through the book looking for the repetition; it becomes something that we've (if only momentarily) lost. Back on my figurative feet, I wonder what role the editor played in this: were these Alzheimer's echoes in the original text? Are they staged to perform Alzheimer's? Does it matter? How many such repetitions were admitted into the final text, how many removed? How strong an effect was the editor willing to permit in the book?

I admire the publisher for including these lapses-that-are-not-lapses but integral moments in the illness. But I wonder about the rest of the text; even as DeBaggio devotes a lot of time to inventorying his difficulties in writing, the book is largely "clean" of error. Here are just a few moments where he remarks on his problems in writing:

I am being gobbled up in time. The words are under control but the letter that form the words squirm in their own directions. (20) (italics his)

Words slice through my mind so fast I cannot catch them and marry them to the eternity of the page. (27)

[And less grandly, not in the italics that indicate the wisdom stream of the book:]

Writing sometimes becomes difficult. Words vanish before they reach the page. Most of the time the biggest drawback is my plummeting typing accuracy. So far there are few words the spell checker cannot correct. (31)

My ability to remember words is diminishing rapidly and I can often see the subject but its name eludes me, and this makes me angry and frustrated. (73)

I have just spent five minutes struggling to spell the word "hour." (105)

More and more I am unconsciously mixing words that have similar sounds: our and out, would and wood, me and be, to name a few. This leaking alphabet of reality is something I might have expected in speech, not in writing. (181)

Almost every minute of the day is destroyed by the struggle to reclaim lost words in my search to communicate. It is a losing battle, but I will sing until no word is left. Alzheimer's is making me mute. (187)

The struggle to find the words, to express myself, has become insurmountable. I must now be done with writing and lick words instead. (207)

While the repetitions folded into the text, unannounced as such, evoke the Alzheimer's effect, other effects are only announced. As Basting writes about another Alzheimer's memoir, "Although [Diana Friel] McGowin describes the symptoms of Alzheimer's, she does so in language cleansed of the disease--spelling, grammar, and memory of dialogue and events are pristinely intact" (89). While I want to think that the misspelling of "difficulties" in his Author's Note ("memory lapses and language dificulties") is left in to acknowledge the difficulty, I suspect that this is an ordinary typo (the book's own dementia, which it shares with every other text I've ever read!). For the rest of the book is free of the disease. What are typos to us--mistakes, in other words--are intrinsic functions of the illness. They are not mistakes; they are worse than mistakes. They bear witness to a mind's self-loss. The one page of George Edwards's handwriting that Rachel Hadas offers us is worth a hundred pages of typo-free text about the author's problems spelling words! This is where I want to tell the editor to edit less, let in more of the dificulty [sic].

Susan Howe and others have written eloquently about Puritan women's testimonials, which were edited, hence altered, by male ministers. Emily Dickinson's wild texts were weeded and presented to the reader as lawns by male editors (the metaphor is mine). According to Susan Howe: "The issue of editorial control is directly connected to the attempted erasure of antinomianism in our culture. Lawlessness seen as negligence is at first feminized and then restricted or banished" (quoted in Schultz 148). Substitute the word "Alzheimer's" for "antinomian" and you have the argument I want to make here. (That Alzheimer's is largely a disease afflicting women--those who live longest--renders Howe's argument more uncanny yet.) While there's certainly a difference between religious awareness and illness, both their effects are strong, need to be presented "faithfully" in published texts. Do not edit out what makes Alzheimer's texts most powerful, most illustrative of the disease. Leave us undemented readers to struggle with the words, as the writer himself did. If it took DeBaggio five minutes to remember how to spell the word "hour," then it should take us time to read his dificulties, too. Making it easy to absorb DeBaggio's text does not offer us anywhere near a complete picture of what it meant for him to compose it. Absorption, as Charles Bernstein put it in a very different context, is artifice.

To hide Alzheimer's bad spelling is to hide Alzheimer's. And that's what our culture does. It puts sufferers in "homes" or leaves them in their houses to sit by themselves. Very few of us, unless we have relatives with Alzheimer's, are allowed to see the real, if altered, people who suffer from this illness. There are real walls between us and them. And then there are the editorial walls. They're just doing their jobs, I know, those editors. But sometimes the better course is to leave be. Let be be finale of seem, or seam, or seme.

Most Alzheimer's sufferers will not write a book; most of them will not leave the single, profound page that Edwards left for his wife to publish in her memoir. So the discussion I've just had about editing doesn't generally apply to Alzheimer's narratives. Most are and will be written by the well, the witnesses instead of those with the illness. Most will not evoke the illness's effects by using the authority of the "I" (first person knower) to describe it, even if that "I" is losing its authority day by day, page by page. So what then? How are the rest of us to write about Alzheimer's? How can we evoke rather than merely convey our experiences of the illness? And here I begin to repeat myself, as I've addressed this question elsewhere on this blog, and in Dementia Blog and Old Women Look Like This. (Somewhere in the thicket is this post.) And in that post is the kernel of the argument I'll deliver at the Brunel conference in early April, namely that "linear, diachronic narrative strategies assume a logic that the disease has already destroyed, and that we need to use other forms to get at the illness's chaotic thinking."

Appropriately, then, the argument I'm looking for has already happened, over and again, in this space. To find it, I have to hunt back through many posts over the past two or three years. But arguments, like memoirs, are noisy things. And the real crux of the Alzheimer's problem is not its noise, but its silences. When I wrote to Ben Friedlander recently to ask where to find Emerson's dementia in his late work, he responded ‎"@Susan: the two-volume Library of America edition that came out a few years ago is by far the best abridgment. But I occasionally check out the Harvard volumes for browsing, not to mention the notes. The dementia registers in silence: there is very little writing from the last years. Apparently the manuscripts of the late essays--which he couldn't finish on his own--include numerous and sometimes extended repeated passages, which is perhaps the best testament to what was going on. I'd like to see a transcript." There's silence from Emerson, and then there's the other telling silenc(ing), by editors--the helpers who finished for him--removing the repetitions, cleansing the text of his and its illness.

Silences, repetitions. Silenced repetitions. The Alzheimer's sufferer's repetitions are cleansed; the memoirist (like Franzen, like Hadas) leaves them out, writes over them, corrects their spelling. What I want to see are the writings of Alzheimer's sufferers as they were actually penned or pencilled or pixilated. What I want to see from the rest of us is an awareness that our confusions cannot be fixed through narrative or by way of poem. That we need to find a way to evoke these confusions, rather than solve them, or merely convey them. The conveyor belt of narrative has wonderful purposes, yes, but we need to put the knife to it. The Alzheimer's belt has broken. Our stories need to, too.

[The headnote is by Thomas DeBaggio; I'm saving the "click to look inside" from the amazon.com page for its many resonances]

Sources

Anne Davis Basting, "Looking back from loss: views of the self in Alzheimer's disease," Journal of Aging Studies 17 (2003) 87-99.

Susan M. Schultz, A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.

The problem with Alzheimer's narratives, part 2: Rachel Hadas's _Strange Relation_

Let me repeat the problem in writing Alzheimer's, as of my last post: Those from whom one wants to hear word cannot--beyond some point--speak. They cannot describe themselves or the situation in which they exist, just beyond the veil we catch on when we ask those simple questions, like "What's your name?" "Who is the president?" "What day of the week is it?" "Do you want to eat?" Those who write Alzheimer's memoirs, therefore, are not victims, but survivors: children, spouses.

A quick facebook question from Chris McKinney allows me to refine my statement of the problem a bit. If the problem can be explained in terms of literary form, then it is two-pronged. On the one hand, the Alzheimer's memoirist uses the first-person pronoun, which makes him or her, not the person who has Alzheimer's, the central focus of the work. On the other, the form of the work, no matter what the genre, tends to be realist, self-contained, linear. It presumes that stories matter because they make sense, the kind of sense that leads the reader from a beginning to a middle and then an end. Between the first person pronoun, which presumes a singular identity, and the narrative, which presumes development of some kind, the very forms used by most writers about Alzheimer's fail in the face of a condition whose "progress" is regression, degeneration, falling apart. This condition fails-to-work on the level of the sentence, as much as on the level of memory, cognition, physical movement. What these texts offer (sense-making) is consolation. But Alzheimer's defeats literary consolation, as it defeats other forms of it, as well. The elegy demands an ending before it opens; Alzheimer's refuses to offer one. It's like Xeno's paradox, to which there is no apt marker.

My last post engaged Jonathan Franzen's essay, "My Father's Brain," along these lines (or tangles). That essay comes up in the next text I'd like to examine, namely Rachel Hadas's book, Strange Relation: A Memoir of Marriage, Dementia, and Poetry (Paul Dry Books, 2011). Early on, as she thinks about how mysterious is the onset of Alzheimer's, she quotes Franzen's essay. Like Franzen, Hadas has lived with a man (her husband, George Edwards) who never was communicative, warm, friendly; like him, she wonders when that natural interiority became the awful inwardness of dementia. She also cites Franzen's sentence, "I still needed him to be an actor in the story of myself" (21), as a marker of how we fail to see "anyone else's behavior as a whole" (20).

Like Franzen's essay, Hadas's book is written in straightforward (and in her case often beautiful) prose. The book is as much about poetry as it is about Alzheimer's; clearly, Hadas's primary refuge from the awful rigors of living for upwards of a decade with a man who is no longer who he was is to read and write poetry. These poems, like the book itself, are formalist: they follow clear, traditional rules. Even when the lines and sentences are about collapse they do their work. They are sturdy. There is nobility in this sturdiness, but there is also something missing from it. What often seems missing is George, the husband, the (or one) subject of the book. The terrible rawness of her encounter with Alzheimer's is written over, made smooth--even as the information she relays is awful. Too often (but oh so understandably) this poet who loves similes uses it to leave behind the situation she has thrown us in: "The one-way road, the slow train, the uncertain sky: all these helped me, if not to understand what was going on, then to understand how little I could do about it, and, with this understanding, to manage the ups and downs, the fitful bursts of sunshine succeeded by more clouds" (48).

On the very next page, Hadas tells us that George "virtually never used the pronoun 'I,' as in 'I'm tired,' 'I'm hungry,' 'I want...'" (49). Whether or not the lack of a personal pronoun indicates lack of agency or self is a debate I'll leave to the experts (linguists? psychologists? neurologists?), but this fact--his lack of an "I"--is moving. I feel an emotional and intellectual tug here. I want to stop, absorb this news, let it settle. But instead, this news leads to perhaps the most problematic passage in the book, where Hadas and her sister develop "similes" for George. "George silently drifted in from the living room and sat down opposite her at the table, eyeing her plate (as she said later) 'like a cow coming up to the fence'" (49). Hadas thinks this simile worthy of Homer; more in the Disney vein is the comparison of George to a "'giant hamster'" (49). "But everyone who heard it laughed," she reports; "it was funny, and right, and helpful. In the world of dementia, a laugh, like a simile, is something they don't write prescriptions for" (49). Let me tread softly here, because I also know how funny Alzheimer's patients can be, how laughter among the caretakers can ease many a traumatic moment. But in this paragraph, which I take to be well-meaning, "the world of dementia" exists for those who retain their "I's," not for those who do not. While the paragraph begins with George's lack of self, it ends with the humorous assertions of the non-demented self, making similes of the demented one's dis-ease. George is not literature; he suffers. I've told this story before, but when I gave a talk on Dementia Blog at the Center for Literary Biography in 2008, I said that Alzheimer's is like a neutron bomb; it destroys everything inside the body, but leaves the shell. The old woman who called me on that metaphor was right. There is more than shell, more than bumbling, to an Alzheimer's patient.

Hadas is honest in her admission that the book is as much--or more--about her struggles with the illness than with her husband's: "Much has been written about dementia as an insidious disease. Few writers, however, talk about the insidiousness of the way a person living alongside the disease is first blind to it and then grows used to it" (115). She is also honest in expressing the "bad" feelings she has toward his silences, his inabilities, about her own loneliness, and the doubts she begins to feel about their earlier, happier, life together. This aspect of the book, its raw honesty, reminds me of Jana Wolff's Secret Thoughts of an Adoptive Mother, a book that lays out an adoptive parents' fears in ways that most of us bob and weave to avoid saying out loud. Hadas says it by extending her simile: "There's the one-way road and the changeable sky; the cow at the fence and the tall hamster; and the prison house called marriage . . . Be careful what you wish for: Here I am, immured alongside him" (52).

The form of Hadas's life becomes one of confinement, not chaos. As a poet friend said to me the other day, we see the world in the forms that are most natural to us. And so Hadas sees the world in poetic forms that I am suspicious of, forms that contain rather than forms that open out. She still believes--wants to believe--that poetry can contain the pain she feels. In describing the end of a summer vacation, through the words of Frank Kermode, she expresses her belief in patterns, forms: "People 'in the middest,' as Kermode observes, 'make considerable imaginative investments in coherent patterns which, by the provision of an end, make possible a satisfying consonance with the origins and the middle" (168). Hence, "No person could hold these strong feelings in suspension, give them a shape we can grasp, an articulation we can remember. No one person could. But sometimes poetry can" (121). The kind of poetry Hadas reads for meaning is graspable; its meanings come in boxes, containers, rooms (like the stanza's). There is not even the instability of the sonnet sequence, in which each poem only stays our confusion until the next poem re-opens the paradox, problem, wound, and tries--again--to solve or salve it. Perhaps closest to the tradition that makes sense (ironic, eh?) of this perplex is Dickinson's poetry. Hadas quotes the poem that contains this stanza:

Ruin is form--Devil's work
Consecutive and slow--
Fail in an instant, no man did
Slipping--is Crash's law.

But how devious is Dickinson here. Crash has a law, yes, but "law" only half-rhymes with "slow." The discomfort left by the near-rhyme evokes the discomfort one feels in thinking about Ruin or the Devil. Hadas reads this poem as capturing "the theme of the extreme insidiousness of the loss" [of dementia]; what strikes me is that the "failure" of the rhyme (deliberate as it may be) evokes insidiousness rather than merely conveys it.

This idea that the text should evoke and not convey thought and feeling leads me to the two moments in Hadas's book that I find most powerful. The first, which offers a half-rhyme to Jonathan Franzen's citation of a letter his father wrote to a grandson, but never sent, is a "stray sheet of yellow legal paper somewhere in his room" (160). She writes, "I seem to need to keep this piece of paper near me. Sometimes when people ask how George is doing I have the impulse to show it to them. If they are people I like and trust, sometimes I do show it to them" (160). And then she shows it. I would like to think that her trust in this one reader she does not know is earned:



As I proof-read this post, I realize that I have said nothing about this page. What is moving about it is that the composer of it has asserted himself (his name is at the top), despite great difficulty holding the pen; that he is trying with great, graphic, difficulty to get out thoughts he cannot compass ("in in a a less more sens sense in more less the less morre the my more the producte..."); that his language IS still eloquent (think Gertrude Stein, think the residents of my mother's Alzheimer's home, whose words I did my best to transcribe here); that he is still making something. I accept Hadas's gift of this page with tenderness and not a little anxiety. More than the rest of the book, this is mine to deal with as I can; I'm set out on the same skiff she's on, and I'm not sure how to steer it, if it can be steered. So it's not simply the form (yellow legal pad with writing on it) or the content (which cannot be ascertained), but some combination of them both that pierces through the narrative voice and the reader's eye/ear.

The other moment occurs at the end of the book. This is the final paragraph:

George tries to catch some of the bubbles we're blowing, and laughs. Other bubbles land with a silent plop on the pages of the coloring book I've brought out again with the paints, brushes, and a glass of water. I've just about finished the fish mandala, and for a change of pace I open the medieval tapestry coloring book Amy passed on to me. I choose a picture of Death riding a pale horse. I think I'll paint the sky an ominous, apocalyptic red. But for now, I twirl a small brush first in the green paint, then in the yellow, and begin to color in the leaves on the greens of the forest through which Death is riding. (199)

Bubbles, coloring book, mandala. All of these are beautiful, and none of them lasts. I can see George blowing bubbles, coloring; I can hear him laugh. He exists for me on this page in a way he has not lived on any page before this. Each object--bubble, coloring book, mandala--arrives at a form and then loses it. Each loss is as it should be. (Remember the little boy who destroyed a mandala in Kansas City, and the monks who then simply set about making it again, so that it could again be dissolved?) Death is riding, but that's an active verb, and the poet's attention is, in any case, not on him but on the "leaves of the trees of the forest" (199). Just after quoting Frank Kermode on "coherent patterns," (see above) Hadas writes, "Absent these imaginative investments in patterns, endings are always problematic." In this last paragraph of her book, she has found a way to invest in patterns, while accepting the problematic non-ending of her husband's illness. Form and formlessness, coming into being and leaving it, these mark the oscillations that will perhaps offer Hadas another beginning, another leaf on the tree that the horseman will, inevitably, pass by.



Next up: Alzheimer's and the editor