At a Loss for Words

From "The Wives of the Dead" by Nathaniel Hawthorne

"Two young and comely women sat together by the fireside, nursing their mutual and peculiar sorrows. They were the recent brides of two brothers… The mourners, though not insensible to the kindness of their friends, had yearned to be let alone."

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Dear Alex,

Death of a long wish, mine.  My parents have consoled me.  Friends and sisters have cupped my tears.  Even my boss held onto me.  I cannot seem to get over it.  Rare opportunity lost and I was not chosen.  A year past I am still nursing my sorrows in secrecy, at times in spurts of fury, mostly towards myself, my failures, through massive consuming and purging as today.

Why rejected?   I asked God. And how do I move on when I believe with certainty and precision the lot should have been mine?

Mourning is a circus act.  It calls for immeasurable resilience to obscure grief in the costume of marvel.  The performance - you - must be pristine.  Alternate the sense of loss with the insensible comedy inherent in longing for what has not been granted to you.

This evening I seized a bit of the sky in a snapshot, an elegy morphing amorphously among clouds in cobalt blue.  The wind is howling and heaving now to resurrect morning soon.   I can hear the wrath of Winter through my double-pane windows.  No circus show tonight.

So thank you for saving a spot for me in your writing space among the dead of despair, through the cave, grit, spite, to land on fresh fallen flurry.

Yours, Kate

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Dear Kate,

I knew it was raining.  But you know how it is, that sometimes you would rather you know it wrong?

My house has an aluminum roof, one that should last for 50 years they say, meaning, supposedly the rest of my life.  But it is a source of my constant sorrow (more like pain but I stick to the music, you know) because it's not built all the way to the eaves, the edge of trouble falling.  The rubberized outer limits call for a gushing back when a roof, such as mine, is relatively flat and the falling heavy.

So I listened, first thing this morning, and I knew what I am about to face today.  But still I went for the light, I wanted to see to know for sure the extent of the troubling elements, first at a lamp post, then the headlights of my wife's car pulling out of the garage.

In his magnum opus on the achievement of Shakespeare, Harold Bloom argues the playwright not only invented the English language but also created human nature as we know it today.  I don't pretend to have read every word of this big book and I am sure Bloom hasn't spoken his last on the Bard.  I take Bloom to mean the great, "the greatest poet," gave human being a way to speak about ourselves.  "To be, or not to be..."

The quote you gave me today reminds me of, of course, the story of Ruth in the Bible.  Only that there are three "wives of the dead" instead of two.  Only that Ruth isn't given a Shakespearean tongue to speak about and for herself.  From the vantage of a modern woman the story must be terribly "repressive," to the degree of possibly being guilty of silencing "the weaker gender" (my apology to all PC police).

How interesting that the story of Ruth is being told at all, is, in today's language, most "empowering" to the "disadvantaged," yet it can also be taken to mean the exact opposite under different light.  Once I tried to imagine Ruth speaking like Alanis Morissette and I could see why her husband is dead.

Just because we don't hear many words from Ruth doesn't mean she doesn't speak at all or knows not how to or her tongue has been suppressed.  Her situation is compromised, yes, but she has not been compromised.  No one can do to us what we are not already doing to ourselves, I trust that is a conviction she knows well.

This morning I heard, I saw, and then I walked.  The hearing and seeing before the walking sometimes creates fear and sometimes gives me solace.  At the end none of that matters when you are hitting the road.  I am thankful for a tongue to speak about my walking.  But if I choose to not speak this way or that way or at all I am still walking and you could say that's my way to speak.

Yours, Alex