On the Seawalla community gallery of new writing, art and commentary hosted by Ron Slate

When one thinks of the heart, one conjures the manifold unconscious associations one makes with the emotionality of its anatomy: from happiness, fulfillment, and pleasure — and its effusions such as “with all my heart” or sincerity “from the bottom of my heart” — to the depths of pain, heartbreak, and wounded heart, all signifying grief, disappointment, suffering, and the agonies of fearful separation. From the dictionary, the noun “heart” is first defined anatomically as “the hollow muscular organ in vertebrates that pumps blood received from the veins into the arteries, thereby supplying the entire circulatory system.” So the heart bleeds figuratively and literally, and what follows is somewhat surprising in emphasis — the logic being that the heart is located in the breast, and thought to be “the vital center of one’s being, emotions and sensibilities, the seat or repository of emotions.” Symbolically, the heart is identified with a heart shape, two symmetrical lobes, and with the color red. A person can be personified as the heart. We take all of that for granted, but beset with a visceral sense of a heart breaking from grief, the essayist Maddie Norris, makes a daring journey into the wounded heart of grief in her new book of essays on grief, The Wet Wound.

The Wet Wound was inspired by Norris’ ambivalent response to her father’s death when she was 17-years old. The essays chronicle her investigation into her anguish following the loss, something that Jacques Derrida characterizes as “intermittent grief” because unlike the cultural assumption that grief is successive and reaches an end, what we call normative mourning, Norris like most contemporary elegists is aware that we never get beyond mourning, that there is no end to it by finding a substitute for the lost object. The dead live within us, and they are resurrected in the very words that express, if not export, loss. As Norris demonstrates in no uncertain terms, elegy writing can assuage even difficult feelings like guilt and resentment — not by repressing them, but giving voice to sorrow. By making revisionary connections in the process of retelling the story of the loss of her father, Norris is able to integrate a past and present self, bringing the two lines of development into alignment. But extraordinarily, Norris takes this traditional arc of elegy (lament over the dead leading to consolation that the deceased lives on in the imagination or the next world) to a startling inquiry. Simultaneously, she unflinchingly examines the body’s preservation, immersing herself into physical pain — all related to how she works through her grief. By using the body as metaphor, she demonstrates that in the very tissues that form us, our love is so capable of wounding, and that healing a wound necessitates keeping it open rather than closing it, bringing the hearts of daughter and father closer together.

The book begins with Norris explaining the childhood memories that she identifies as determinative of her writing the book. She begins evocatively with an experiment in which the blood of 27 piglets was extracted, and that they breathed oxygen for 45 minutes before the blood was restored to them. As she writes, “In 1960, the year my dad was born, 27 piglets didn’t die.” As she explains the importance of dressing a wound and leaving it to be healed by oxygen, the wound can breathe, it can have its way, but the tissue surrounding it won’t die. Mourning is like this; its pain must breathe, not so much to cauterize the self from pain, but from dying over and over again, without meaning or understanding.

After her father’s death, she finds a 35mm slide showing a series of wounds that she projects in her course of seeing what her father saw: “the damage. Its wounds that expose life, that let us see the underpinnings. I wanted to look at pain made visible.” Her search for a concrete image or object that would explain feeling, physical and otherwise, is the objective of her work, and corresponds with what most theorists and clinicians concur about grief — since the pain felt by the mourner is now severed from the lost person, that pain has to go somewhere, and can’t be stifled or abreacted. It must suffer its way through a painful detachment. Norris goes a step further — when her father died, the body died, and by going through his medical notes, following his own words as a doctor, she is teaching herself how he saw the human body internally, as a system, a complex system of wounds. “Dad’s slides don’t show faces. Only injuries.” These are injuries are like grief — they will never heal — they are just there as instructive: how bad it can be, how unquantifiable the hurt. Norris doesn’t overwrite it — she doesn’t alert the reader to the profundity of the analogy. She just says it, the way the doctor sees it.

There is a critical moment when Norris asks herself about the interminability of mourning her father: “I tried to bring him up in conversations, but was met with stories about funerals for distant relations or pitying looks from people who ‘couldn’t imagine’ or I was met with nothing. Blank stares. Silence … Now I keep the pain to myself. When his name rises in my throat, I hear others in my head: Shouldn’t I be over it now? It has been seven years. What do I want people to say? What is there to say?” Indeed, there is much to say, and Norris has said it as an elegy. She raises an important point here in her understated style, going back to the renewed interest in elegy in the mid-20th century to today where the memorialization of the lost object, once the object of lament and praise, is resurrected through a rhetorical figure or symbol, notably taken from nature as an icon of eternality. However, in an age in which the traditional rudiments of grief in religious rituals or narratives have become scarce, grief and elegy take a more distinct place in canonical literature.

One of the major contributions to elegy studies by Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” is its distinction between “successful” and “failed” types of mourning. As a model of this “successful” mourning, Freud presents the game of fort-da, which Freud sees as a mental exercise for the child conditioning himself to the process of loss, detachment, and rediscovery. In The English Elegy, Peter Sacks adapts Freud’s theories to formulate a model of mourning that begins with a loss of the object, then proceeds to a renunciation of the object, and culminates in the mourner’s acceptance of the compensatory substitute as well as the very practice of compensatory substitution. On the other hand, Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning examines the ambivalence and irresolution of the failed or “melancholic” mourning of the modern elegies, which evince the astringency of modern death and bereavement. For Ramazani, melancholia, or a general resistance to the normative “work of mourning,” which characterizes Norris’ approach to her father’s death, and the diagrams of the heart that she reconstitutes in order to see pain, is what defines the modern poetic elegy. This “failed” mourning of not getting over it, but obsessing over it, constitutes a challenge to the consolatory promise which subverts the therapeutic function of the genre of elegy. Instead, it brings about in The Wet Wound a more fractured approach to mourning, and with it the conscious awareness of a distance that has always existed between father and daughter. But now, when she retraces the knowledge of wounds, grafting, and agonizing losses of body and soul, she recognizes how distant father and daughter were in life, and that distance may be crossed only through imagining and an acceptance of the unknown, since it is now only she who can speak for him through the objective correlative of the wounded, bleeding heart.

The book is structured in brief chapters that amplify the concept of grief over the death of loved ones, even in the realm of animals, who grieve as well: “Tahlequah carrying her child to grieve is not unusual. In fact, many animals while they can, warm their cold bodies, imprint the contours of the child into memories.” Significantly, she has reversed the process that she herself is going through with her father, which is imprinting his memory as her child into her memory. As she later writes: “Grief doesn’t end, but at a certain point, people outside the loss stop looking. Only those within it remain vigilant to the absence.” Of course, it is a present absence, because grief cannot imagine an absence, only the internal representation.

The next essays are devoted to loss outside of the personal dimensions of the father-daughter relationship, though the heart continues to come back to memories of her father near the end of his life as he is dying from  pancreatic cancer. Norris studies her emotions as they interlock with the physical body, how it works, what it allows to work. The essays proceed through various juxtapositions which allow her to fill in her own space as a person, rather than solely as a mourner.

The middle-book essays are autobiographical accounts moving backwards in time,  as well as forward in the writing. “Methodical Tenderness,” exploring autobiographical reflections, periodically returns to the anatomical structure of the body and traumatic injuries, including diagrams and illustrations from medical books. One account involves an early childhood memory of her father breaking down a deck with hammer and mallet and states, “This work enthralled me — how much damage the body can do.”  She studies the entrails of body organs, trying connect her emotions with what is happening inside her, the same self that we typically repress. How often does one think of one’s bodily processes as one goes through life, or acquaint one’s self with anatomy if not studying to become a medical practitioner? Where is the soul? As a child, she exhibited symptoms of tiring that prompted a visit to a rheumatologist. Most fittingly, Norris explains, “I started looking at medical illustrations, not to diagnose myself, not to discover the root of the problem, but just to feel my own body, understand how it worked. Leafing through Dad’s old books, I stopped to admire the images, their edges and curves … my fingers pushed in on my face, squishing down the doughy viscera and felt for my skull …” She then looks into her brain. And by looking, she finds his.

I see Norris as building on Freud’s notion of the painful process of withdrawing libido through a kind of hypercathexis, an intense and often anguishing remembrance of the lost object, and the ego’s refusal to accept it. The book ends movingly with her painstaking description of everything that she can possibly remember as if she were building him from the inside out, not missing a bone, a pore, a lid, a living resemblance. The dead brought back to life, the dead understood from a perspective where elegy never dares to go — the body itself, the capsule that contains us, the ticking clock.