In any case, Winnicott notably describes “the primitive agonies” not as lacks or voids, but as substantives: “fruits.”
In 1984, George Oppen died of pneumonia with complications from Alzheimer’s. Mary Oppen died a few years later, in 1990, of ovarian cancer. After George’s death, several fragments of writing were found pinned to the wall above his desk. One of these read:
Being with Mary: it has
been almost too wonderful
it is hard to believe
During our hard season, I thought a lot about this fragment. At times it filled me with an almost sadistic urge to unearth some kind of evidence that George and Mary had been unhappy, even if at moments — some sign that his writing might have ever come between them, that they didn’t understand each other in some profound way, that they had ever exchanged ugly words, or differed on major decisions, such as whether George should fight in World War II, the efficacy of the Communist Party, whether to stay in exile in Mexico, and so on.
This wasn’t schadenfreude. It was hope. I hoped that such things might have happened, and that Oppen, bobbing in the waves of bewilderment and lucidity that characterize a cruel neurological decline, would still be moved to write:
Being with Mary: it has
been almost too wonderful
it is hard to believe
And so, shamefully, I looked. I looked for evidence of their unhappiness, all the while repressing the fact that my search reminded me of a particularly dysfunctional moment in Leonard Michaels’s account of his tortured, explosive, and eventually disastrous relationship to his first wife, Sylvia. Upon learning that a friend had an equally horrible relationship with equally horrible fights, Michaels writes: “I was grateful to him, relieved, giddy with pleasure. So others lived this way, too…. Every couple, every marriage, was sick. Such thinking, like bloodletting, purged me. I was miserably normal; I was normally miserable.” He and Sylvia marry; a short, miserable time later, she’s dead from forty-seven Seconals.
Of course the Oppens fought and hurt each other sometimes, you said when I told you about my search. They probably just kept it to themselves, out of respect and love for one another.
Whatever I was looking for between George and Mary Oppen, I never found it. I did, however, find something I wasn’t expecting. I found it in Mary’s autobiography, Meaning a Life, which she published at the start of George’s mental decline. I found Mary.
When I looked up Meaning a Life on Amazon, there was only one review. It was by a guy who gave the book a single star, complaining: “Purchased this book hoping to gain insight into the life of one of my favorite poets. Very little about George and a lot about Mary.” It’s her autobiography, you fucking moron, I thought, before realizing my trajectory had followed something of the same course.
Before the birth of her daughter, Linda, it turns out Mary suffered several stillbirths — too many, apparently, for her to give a number — as well as the crib death of a six-week-old. About all this, Mary writes:
Birth … I think I am afraid to try to write of it. In childbirth I was isolated; I never talked about it even to George. He was surprised to learn that giving birth was a peak emotional experience and so entirely my own that I never tried to express it…. I would wish it to remain whole, and I have preserved the wholeness of my own experience of birth by not telling it; it is too precious to me. Even now, writing of the experiences of age twenty-four to thirty, I wish to encompass my isolation and the wracking devastation of loss, the sense of being a nothing on the delivery table, knocked out by anesthetic, only to regain consciousness and be told once more, “The fetus is dead.”
George and Mary are famous for living a life in conversation, in poetry. We talked as I had never talked before, an outpouring. But here, Mary is unsure that words are good enough. I never talked about it even to George. Her experience may be one of devastation, but she still worries that words might chip away at it (intolerable).
Nonetheless, years later, as her husband begins to peel away from language, Mary tries to tell.
In his epic treatise Bubbles, philosopher Peter Sloterdijk puts forth something he calls the “rule of a negative gynecology.” To truly understand the fetal and perinatal world, Sloterdijk writes, “one must reject the temptation to extricate oneself from the affair with outside views of the mother-child relationship; where the concern is insight into intimate connections, outside observation is already the fundamental mistake.” I applaud this involution, this “cave research,” this turn away from mastery and toward the immersive bubble of “blood, amniotic fluid, voice, sonic bubble and breath.” I feel no urge to extricate myself from this bubble. But here’s the catch: I cannot hold my baby at the same time as I write.
Winnicott acknowledges that the demands of ordinary devotion can be frightening for some mothers, who worry that giving themselves over to it will “turn them into a vegetable.” Poet Alice Notley raises the stakes: “he is born and I am undone — feel as if I will / never be, was never born. // Two years later I obliterate myself again / having another child … for two years, there’s no me here.”
I have never felt that way, but I’m an old mom. I had nearly four decades to become myself before experimenting with my obliteration.
Sometimes mothers find it alarming to think that what they are doing is so important and in that case it is better not to tell them. It makes them self-conscious and then they do everything less well…. When a mother has a capacity quite simply to be a mother we must never interfere. She will not be able to fight for her rights because she will not understand.
As if mothers thought they were performing their ordinary devotions in the wild, then are stunned to look up, and see a peanut-crunching crowd across a moat.
Shortly after returning to work after having Iggy, I ran into a superior in the cafeteria. He gallantly purchased me my “vegan comfort meal” and a Naked juice. He asked when my next book would be out; I told him it might take a minute, as I had just had a baby. This sparked a story for him about a colleague he’d once had, a Renaissance studies professor, who allegedly found her newborn so fascinating that for two whole years, her Renaissance research struck her as esoteric and boring. But then, after two years, her interest came back, he said. It came back, he repeated, with a wink.
Over time, I have come to suspect that my affection for Bubbles may have less to do with its endorsement of the rule of negative gynecology, and more to do with its ridiculous title, which it shares with Michael Jackson’s pet chimpanzee.