Little Soul Begins a Month of Field Notes
First, it attempts to deconstruct
little. Not as in child. More like
background noise, backup singer on a stage
crowded with selves, girl-child
in a brace of brothers, bookish,
maybe timid, maybe muffled, maybe
content to be left alone
until ambushed and brought to its knees
by craving. For spotlight. For the world.
Impish? Sometimes. Voice of tickle
or mischief, lone firefly lacing the dusk.
Or still small voice, whisper in someone else’s ear
as counsel, old-soul wise, even as Little Soul
was put to bed too early
and was afraid of the dark.
Is it young? Has it been male
in other lifetimes? In this life, it has
no clue how to seek and hold dominion
(and no wish), or what rape
has to do with desire—no trace
of ancestral testosterone, warrior
anger, singular focus, life-risking prowess …
Has it ever been mother? In this life
it has kept its body to itself —
inclined towards unpeopled spaces,
plants that seed themselves
when tended, river stones
sun-warmed in the palm, shy
hooved and furred creatures.
* * * * *
Little Soul Comes Across Lines by George Seferis
… and the errant soul comes to the surface
holding shards of unearthed images, a dancing girl
with useless castanets, with feet that falter,
with ankles bruised from the heavy trampling
down where the annihilated gather.
Little Soul has no ancestral memory
but knows, thanks to MyHeritage, its DNA
is pure Ashkenazi, a lineage of wanderers
and damp wool, shtetls, ghettos, rag-shops-
turned-dry-goods, bootstraps to be pulled up by,
all from a splotch of Eastern Europe
where bigotry still thrives. It had hoped for a trace
of Viking or French trapper, an aftertaste of Renaissance
or upper-crust Vienna, maybe some Romany blood to spice things up …
The Selves were fashioned by parents, grandparents
and great-grands educated & assimilated
in melting-pot America, accruing layers
of amnesia they wore easily as tailored sheaths
& good pearls. Christmas. Easter. Pork roasts. Cocktails
before dinner, concerts at Symphony Hall, tennis
& bridge, slipcovers in muted tweeds, mahogany
credenzas & coffee tables redolent with
lemon-oil polish … No trace of cooking smells
from an Old Country. No raised voices, no folktales
or klezmer brass lingering in cobwebbed depths …
*
Little Soul can’t stop thinking
about shards of unearthed images
and wonders how to dig for them,
how far back, reaching blind
into a murk shared with Mintz, Zeifman, Preizler,
Rekhtman, Zuckerman, Hochberg, 5th cousins
from the 2nd cousin line scattered now through
the Netherlands, Belarus, South America …
Distant fabric of losses. Shattered windows.
Books burned. Fathers taken, children
wrested from mothers, spit and yellow stars,
spirits numb with beatings, whole families erased …
but that’s not it — not what happened
but how it felt. What does a soul carry forward
from life after life of being hated?
From relinquishments of place, of calling,
of being truly known? Inclinations. Propensities.
Recurring scripts and fears that baffle
modern parents and ambush grown-up selves.
Little Soul tends to hide
though it longs to be seen. Will move
heaven and earth to avoid being misunderstood.
Needs to be nice and is slow
to face anger. How did it feel?
Let the ghosts come forward
through image, through dream, through
meandering guess …
* * * * *
Little Soul and the Selves Attempt Revision
I learned to avoid …
Firecrackers and cap guns.
Undercooked eggs.
Having our hair brushed by anyone but us.
Letting our toes touch lake muck.
Acting like a girl — wanted our father
to like us.
Being misunderstood.
Criticism — how tenaciously it lingered, smoke
from a grease fire — and so many ways
to screw up! Too loud, too blah, hair
out of control, where’s your sense of humor?
wearing something unbecoming, too
serious, thin-skinned, not smart enough, not
fun, not agreeable, not enough …
Little Soul wonders who of the ancestors
might have hidden in wet fields and lived
on stolen eggs; who wasn’t taught to read because
she was a girl; whose wild hair belied
her tribe and led to exile; who wrote books
that were burned; who was stoned
for blasphemy or miraculous healings
or dancing with abandon; who learned to survive
by erasure, by solitude, by keeping silent …
Little Soul wants to re-wire the Selves
so schooled in caution: Maybe
it wasn’t about you.
* * * * *
Little Soul and the Selves Diverge on the Issue of Masks
The Selves are proud of their knack for protective
coloration: in Paris they managed to “casually” drape
a scarf and were thrilled when a man in a Citroen
pulled up to ask directions; in Bogota they wore
shell earrings, carried a purse of coarse woven yarns
and no one took them for an easy mark; wore black
in Milan; embroidered shirts in Oaxaca; on the Altiplano
a poncho that still smelled of llama. The trick: to not
dress American, just as in college they sought to not
look Jewish, grateful for blue eyes and a harmless
surname, and in grad school full of edgy, tormented
writers they kept their mouths shut about their lack
of debt, lack of lovers, and still-married parents.
Lately Little Soul and the Selves spend their
not-home time in masks — patterned cloth, blue pleated
paper, and once a contraption fashioned from half
a vacuum cleaner bag. They agree on this gesture
of civic fealty, along with the reduced chance
of spreading or receiving something akin to
what their father called the screamin’ crud.
None of them minds being taken for Democrats
because they are. The times call for renegotiations
between Self and World — Little Soul and the Selves
are ready to engage. And to be conversing
freely with each other during this time
of no travel, no girls’ nights or house guests
— which is why Little Soul feels, for the first time, expansive
behind its mask. More four-cornered every day. Lit
with small revelations. Less masked.
* * * * *
Little Soul and the Selves Reread The Moviegoer
after a long interval, their first copy
having fallen apart, annotated
and underlined and loved so deeply
the Selves tried to teach the novel to
freshmen at a small Baptist college before
they knew better. Imposters in front of a class
for the first time, the Selves thought
sheer passion for the novel might
carry them through. But the students, trained
in trap-door faith, had no way to relate to
so much digression, the choreography
of a well-made sentence, or the articulate malaise
of existential thought. They might as well
have been reading Sanskrit. The smarter ones
shut down. The Selves found themselves
alone in a room full of minds that had never
been taught to play with an open question
the way young animals like to wrestle and
chase things, or the way Binx Bolling
could stare at dust motes floating
in a beam of sunlight, forget he was
paid to do something else, and find himself
bewitched by the presence of the building.
A reluctant visionary, he appeared to sleepwalk
though everyday life, making money
in spite of himself, while his mind ricocheted
with a diffuse awareness that sizzled with the infinite
singularities of time and place. No wonder
the Selves, groping their way towards
their own bandwidth, read their first copy to shreds.
* * * * *
Little Soul and the Selves Wander In and Out of Lines by Louise Glück
— from Faithful and Virtuous Night
As to the mystery of my silence:
I remained puzzled
less by my soul’s retreat than
by its return, since it returned empty-handed —
At first we didn’t know it had gone — that’s
the way of a three-year-old held in the lightness
every child brings into the world, babbling
without restraint, trusting all that can be touched
or tasted, fused with the universe of Self.
We had no way to comprehend a sudden onslaught
of weight — how tenacious the downward pull —
how swiftly it absorbed that lightness, another word
for Soul. Shadows lengthened over the yellow sill,
the parents laughed less, night outside the crib
was no longer friendly — so the world began to withhold
its welcome. We ceased savoring our own vowels.
Learned to shrink and sometimes vanish.
For years we had no memory of that lightness — later
no word for the small glints of its return — and no way to
reclaim or even seek what had retreated
until it was given back its name.
*
Perhaps it is like a diver
with only enough air in his tank
to explore the depths for a few minutes or so —
then the lungs send him back.
But what if, in those minutes, each foray
offers up another shard, another memory, another
glimpse of what went dark when we turned
towards the partial world that was offered us,
the rules and rewards we took over half a lifetime
to recognize as a limited source of light?
Light. Lightness. Perhaps getting older
is like learning to hold one’s breath under water
and having it get easier — more backlit space
behind the eyes, more room in the little universe
of the lungs — isn’t this how we began?
Seeing in the dark. Breathing under water.
/ / / / /
George Seferis, “The Blind Man,” translated by Jennifer R. Kellogg
Louise Glück, “Faithful and Virtuous Night,” title poem from collection of that name