My father figures here.
My mother’s suicide attempts happened when I was eight, eighteen, and twenty-eight. Before she got it right.
I flunked out of college once, quit twice, then battled my way through to the telos of a Ph.D. Became a teacher of literary things. Whatever those things are.
I have been drinking scotch for twenty-six years. Balvenie, thirty year.
Off and on.
I was incarcerated the first time as a minor for eighteen months.
I was incarcerated the second time, of age, for eight months.
I was incarcerated the third time for eight nights.
I was a mother the first time for nine months, just nine, then the mother of a dead daughter. Now I am the mother of a son. Strange and alive boy.
I was depressed at age eight for one year, but it just felt like being underwater, which was familiar to me, the swimmer. I was depressed the second time at age eleven for two years, then again at eighteen for one more. Then I went under — depression — second self — and resurfaced violently. Recurringly.
Everyone I love is an artist. None of us knows what we mean. Oh, we pretend that we do. Some of us win prizes and lift strangely off the surface of things; others of us toil away, making our own labor into an overrighteous romance. Some of us have jobs, or tenure, or family; some of us are rich, others ride the grant trains; some of us are homeless or nomads, others addicts or recovering or lapsing. Aren’t we all just shooting for a life where art matters?
What a cast we make.
My brother the New York playwright, winner of American status, seizer of material wealth.
My now-husband the filmmaker, driven to create images for audiences who long for escape from that other movie, life.
My onetime lover the war photojournalist, image purist, traumatized by her own shooting star.
My friend the performance artist, generational do-over, her youth our only chance at passing something on. Fake legacy.
My dearest and fiercest friend, the poet, lover of women and sexual excess and language.
My ex-husband the painter, who held in one hand a brush he used to create new worlds, and held in the other the gun he tried to shoot me with.
We make art, but in relation to what exactly? All the artists we admired from the past came out of the mouths of wars and crises. Life and Death. We come out of high capitalism. Consumerist monsterhood. Even when our lives went to shit, they were still just our lives. Our puny, overdramatic, American lives. And where we are from — our so-called country, defined by the smell of a well-made latte, the silent hum of an all-consuming war machine, and the televised face of Oprah — are we for something? Against something?
All our artistic origins have been atomized. Dead fathers and brave mothers against the kitsch and speed of this glossy and disposable new century.
I love them all. I write them all. Does love make art?
What is the story of a self? What is chronology? The history of a life? Which story should I tell to make a narrator, an American woman writer at forty-five — which plot, which pathos? Because any writer’s life knots are embedded in whatever story they tell.
I have invented hundreds of selves. Men and women.
I have peopled the entire corpus of my experience with fictions.
Who is to say they are not I? I them?
And if I tell the truth, this once, will it be any different from all the other tellings? How? In what sense would it matter?
We are who we imagine we are.
Every self is a novel in progress.
Every novel a lie that hides the self.
This, reader, is a mother-daughter story.
The Violence of Children
When violence comes to the door of a child’s house it is not comprehensible to her. Even if she has some small awareness of the war or violence or danger surrounding them, the truth is that the faces and hands of the people in her family, the horses in the barn, the mouse she is secretly keeping as a pet, the potatoes frozen underground, the kick ball made from animal skin and straw and twine, the glass in the windows and the shivering walls of the house are infinitely more real to her. She cannot help it. The sound of a mother’s voice singing her to sleep, the alto of a father reading a poem, the smell of a brother’s skin just before dreams, the moon’s giant eye, all of these overshadow whatever violence is at the door. Think of Anne Frank writing about trees.
When violence came to the village near the girl’s family’s house, there was no stopping it coming to her door, her body, as well. The six-year-old body of a girl.
Seventeen times against the wall or in the barn: You move or scream or say anything I will kill them all. In front of you. First I will torture them and then I will kill them. Her eyes as dead as she can make them. Her arms as limp as she can make them. Her heart as hidden as she can make it. A soldier’s cock entering the thin white flesh of a girl, into the small red cave of her, the fist of her heart pounding out be-dead, be-dead, be-dead.
Counting.
In the world around them, violences became perpetual. Men were sent to icehouse prisons. Women and children were raped repeatedly. Children were bought and sold on the open market. Systemized violence became part of ordinary experience, so that it was not unusual to see — not blood and body parts, but displaced fear and horror in micromotions. The tremor of a hand or the twitch of an eye; bullet marks in the side of a house; women with scars around their eyes and mouths as deep as archeological finds; little boys who could not sit in chairs.
There were blood and body parts too.
And the end to reality every other day.
America — that great maker of realities — blind and deaf to all of it.
A story that never existed, since no one ever saw it represented.
And then, one day, her family was blown to bits.
An inconsequential blast.
Just an anonymous explosion.
Behind the girl, a photojournalist on a prestigious assignment. In that moment the girl’s mouth opened wide as a child’s scream, but no scream emerged, either in the instant of the blast or forever after. Her breath caught in her lungs like an animal’s. Her eyes locked, her skin blanched, bloodless, her hands and arms flying upward, without control.
There were people around on that day to whom she could have run. There were, of course, soldiers; surely even amid their brutality there was one kind heart, one man who could still remember his family and would at least send her to an orphanage. There were other people nearby, neighbors from the village, watching or hiding. And, without her seeing them, there were foreigners: underground photojournalists chasing the perfect image, reporters dying to lasso the story, “human rights” workers milling about in “safe houses.”
But she did not run toward any people. None of the people there had anything to do with her. When the blast happened, she ran to the woods. In her smallness and her quickness she disappeared, a girl’s body torn from the heart of love.
What luck for the photographer. To be so accidentally present. And what cocksure instincts, her editor would say. Right on the money. You can see how she got the assignment.
We think of children as innocent and helpless, she scribbled on a note to her editor, but really this is and isn’t true. Think of how many children survive the darkest atrocities and violences. Hundreds of thousands of children. Armies of them. Not news. She folded the note in two and sealed it in with the undeveloped film before handing it over to the press shipper.
In the moment of the blast, the girl could have died with her family.