[Image: “Rooftops and Trees,” Charles Demuth (1883-1935), National Gallery of Art, Corcoran Collection. Image is in the public domain.]
Funny how even a house you aren’t spending much time in still continues to need minding. Dust gathers. Bugs crawl in. So do bigger things, sometimes. Hinges stiffen. Frames tilt. Weird smells proliferate.
If you’ve ever moved into an older place that sat empty a while before your arrival, you know all about it. Or if you’ve ever had circumstances that kept you away unexpectedly—you were gone for whole days and nights, only to come back hoping—what? That the dishes and the crumbs wouldn’t be exactly where you left them?
Early on, here, I brought up Marilynne Robinson’s novel Housekeeping. This novel marks the one exception to my general allergy to most “domestic” fiction: not only on account of the quiet brilliance of its prose but for its relentless revelation of the way the alternative to housekeeping is house-losing. House-forgetting. Homelessness, but on an existential as well as a literal level, ending in a gnostic separation even from the transitory home that is the body. It illustrates how, as an Alice Munro story directly reminds us, “the alternative to loving [is] disaster.”
Then sometimes you get loving and disaster together, and nothing can be done about it. This inevitability has been much on my mind since losing a daughter to complications of a genetic condition last summer. I won’t talk much about that here. Can’t, really. Enough to say that though her body is not here, though she spent so little time in that body too small and frail to make a home for a soul—a body that breathed for not quite seven hours, a body whose limits were set from the moment one cell split in a way that was just a little off-center—even so, she continues to live.
She continues, by way of the life of her soul, to live. And in this act she calls my attention to the core character of the earth as not-home for humans. If it hadn’t already been easy enough to see that this world starts out inhospitable to us, that it is never inevitable that we will choose to make it more hospitable for ourselves and for each other, her not-here-ness in her body teaches me this afresh every few breaths.
This space for essays, I keep on saying, is not really built as a space for personal essay. At the same time, it’s impossible not to notice the emptiness my daughter left behind her when she went out of the world. It’s relevant to the central questions we’re pursuing together only when I must acknowledge I can’t always see inside of that emptiness, can’t find the light switch in some of these unaccustomed, shadowy rooms.
So I keep on trying to move out, to get in the car and drive away, hoping it will all look different upon return. Yet there the emptiness stays, refusing to be filled with anything else. Every time I have to open the door and step back inside, the place yawns, cluttered with debris that has to be sorted through to make space for any hope of focus or peace. Grief is a house that demands to be kept, whether we desire to or not. The alternative is the loss of any star worth steering by. When I can’t write around the mess, I will have to write through it.
This recent Ekstasis piece has been worth returning and returning to, in this connection. I’ve shared it with a few other people who have borne similar losses.
I re-read George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo recently too, either a brilliant or a devastating choice for a parent missing a lost child. I can’t say what it would do for anyone else, only that I did it and I found it oddly consoling even though my vision of heaven, or “the afterlife” (strange phrase), does not chime deeply with this novel’s. Soul and body and their relations look much different in my tradition. I say a little more—though off the cuff, and insufficient—about this felt disconnect in my remarks here. (Summary: The novel’s aesthetic project, while worthy in itself, bears marked differences from the project of contemplative realism which I want to pursue.) Still that novel can travel a good way along with the reader: first because of Saunders’ powerful craft, but also because its penumbral supernaturalism still taps into some deep realities—the stubborn harm that can be done by self-deception; the cleansing power of truth; the depth and endurance and, finally, insufficiency of human love.
Welcome, new subscribers. That may have been a lot all at once. Well, now I guess we know each other a bit. I’d love to find out where all y’all are coming from.
Housekeeping note, apropos enough: Because In Real Time posts are meant to be more meditative than discursive, comments will be turned off to discourage random drive-bys. But comments will always be on for the main series, and I am always happy to hear from you. So if one of these posts should spark something you want to share, please feel free to write, either by hitting reply within your email or directly: katycarl (at) substack (dot) com.