Carrying Mother
June 2016. These days I read memoirs: Anne Carson’s ‘Autobiography of Red’, Alison Bechdel’s ‘Fun Home’, David Means’ ‘The Old Man’. Means recalls two of his father’s jokes, the first having to do with the key to life and the second with his own death, the idea being that a person’s life can be summed up in about 10 jokes.
According to the old man the key to life is to stick with asking only those questions you can answer. The problem comes when you ask a question you simply cannot answer. I think of my own father and suspect he would appreciate this joke. The other joke is about his gravestone. The father wants the epitaph: I’m here and you’ll be here soon.
My partner and his sons have a similar joke between them as a result of a long and shared history of getting wood. This joke also has been mentioned as a fitting epitaph for my partner’s gravestone: It’ll burn.
An epitaph is essentially an epithet or adjective written on a tombstone. Anne Carson says nouns name the world. Verbs activate the nouns. And adjectives are in charge of attaching everything in the world to its place in particularity. They’re the latches of being.
In Homer’s world, being is stable and adjectives the means. Dawn is always rosy-fingered, women are white-armed or neat-ankled, men shining, knees quick, death black. Along comes the writer Stesichoros who undoes the latches and releases being with a long lyric poem where practically everything is red and dawn is used as part of an adjective.
Even though Homer’s stable world is long gone, I want some kind of stability when it comes to the dead. Something to hold them. Epithets. Jokes. Jokes are kind of tricky though as their nature is to destabilize, to unlatch the apparent from the actual.
The thing about reading Carson and Bechdel at the same time is that their characters merge and become somewhat Homerian. The mothers are all long-suffering, cigarette-smoking. The young women, women-lovers, the young and middle-aged men, men-lovers. And tragic. The men seem to die when they’re 44 or their autobiographies simply come to an end at that age.
I dream I’m with my mother and we’re waiting for an elevator. I turn around to see she’s not with me. Ah! But she is. Very low to the ground and reduced to a mere bust of her former self. I pick her up and carry her into the elevator. She is very light.
I bring Mary, Mother of God, into the collage and feel like a Stesichoros, unlatching her from her usual and fixed context. Instead of carrying us and interceding on our behalf, she is being carried. Does this amount to a kind of joke?
I wonder about an epitaph for my father. He was not a joker. There are other ways of summing up a life. The minister at the memorial speaks of him as a dutiful man. True enough, but that doesn’t make for a good epitaph. At any rate, I drive to the graveside and read the small print on the temporary marker. In loving memory.