I’d been thinking of a story my mother used to tell, about how she’d come across a sodden pile of winter clothing in the basement belonging to my then 10-year-old brother. Apparently some years elapsed before he confessed that he’d fallen through the ice in a nearby pond and had somehow managed to pull himself to safety and sneak back into the house through the cellar door. I wanted an image for the secrets we all harbor without really wanting to, for the burden that withheld information represents.
“You won’t read about me / in the papers,” the poem says, meaning that the reader won’t ever get the full story, no matter how often or how carefully the poem is read. “I’m the child who was lost / and found his way back before his parents / missed him” — how willingly I embraced the masculine pronoun, wanting to distance myself from the entire experience, wanting to enter the universality of the metaphor rather than dwell on specific events. But of course this isn’t a poem about what happened, it’s about “what happened after.” All that can be found on the page are the physical and emotional aftershocks of an experience, not the experience itself. Even though my intent in approaching the writing of the poem was to conceal, I wanted to reveal everything about the physical desperation and the emotional desiccation that often follow a soul-shattering event. And the “ferocious embrace” with which the poem ends is a metaphor not only for the gratitude I felt for my survival but also for what I hoped the poem itself would achieve, which has little to do with understanding and everything to do with love.
That is from an essay, Writing the Unspeakable, by Sue Ellen Thompson in the collection of essays, Introspections: American Poets on One of Their Poems, eds Robert Pack and Jay Parini (1997). It’s here because I’ve been meditating on how and whether to respond to a long comment left by Felix Grant to my As Though It Is Possible post of a few days ago. That is not the first time that Felix has chosen to give us bits about his past life.
It has always been my default assumption that everybody has fallen through the ice at least once, and probably many times in their life. I believe that because we all have this in common we are at once intensely interested in and appreciative of any revelation by others; and highly empathetic of the difficulty or risk in such exposure — which, I think makes we who are listening ever careful about probing or asking for more than was offered. I (we) balance the comfort taken from knowing of shared experience against the discomfort or cost of that which is given. “Do unto others …” and all that.
This is especially true in a public space such as a blog or forum. Whatever is freely given is gratefully received.
I hope that this post is sufficiently oblique. That I don’t ask doesn’t mean I don’t care. Quite the contrary.
Here is the end of the poem, What Happened After, by Sue Ellen Thompson:
… You won’t read about me
in the papers. I’m the child who was lost
and found his way back before his parents
missed him, whose ferocious embrace
confounds them, who breaks every night
under the knowledge of where he has been.
In a similar vein, I have found the first-person accounts of late term abortion on Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish to be completely engrossing. They follow the murder of Kansas physician George Tiller. (No, I have never had an abortion, but I have friends and relatives who have.)
-Julie
