“Now it is my knowledge…”

The domestication of death. The knowledge which was foreign and has become personal — though still foreign, still inarticulable.

A friend told me: “Welcome to the club of motherless daughters, where words fail us daily.”

Elizabeth Barrett Browning: "I never mistook pleasure as the final cause of poetry; nor leisure, for the hour of the poet. I have done my work, so far, as work… and, as work, I offer it to the public, feeling it's faultiness more deeply than any of my readers."

How can be held responsible for this knowledge, for what grief asks of the self?

A few years before, in April—

It rained for three days and then stopped.

The yard was smothered in pine cones, tree legs, bark, and spring leaves.

The granddaughters wanted to help with Bunica’s yard. They went through a phase where helping was important to them.

She laughed from driveway as they swept the sidewalk with brooms fashioned from fallen tree limbs.

The granddaughters sang a song as they swept:

I’ve been working on the railroad
all the live long day
I’ve been working on the rail
road
just to pass the time away

Repetition; vertigo; mother’s role in making myths for children

Autopoiesis, or self-production, tries to explain why the identities of living systems remain constant despite incessant change. I am interested in how humans continue to produce a self after loss.

The image-idea of ourselves in art discourse.

The mythography of the self as narrated to others — and the memorial form this mythography assumes after someone’s death.

A myth applies to a culture, but families are their own countries, their own terrains of sustaining myths.

I keep saying the same thing to my kids, and yet this thing is simply the softer version of the true thing I wish to say to them. Will this true thing every be said? Can they discern it from the softer version?

Why am I so afraid of leaving them with the wrong words?

Robert Calasso:

"The mythographer lives in a permanent state of chronological vertigo, which he pretends to want to resolve. …The mythical gesture is a wave, which, as it breaks, assumes a shape, the way dice form a number when we toss them."

There is mythography in Julio Cortazar’s play, The Kings, the first piece Cortazar published under his own name.

Begin with the statement: “I find everybody takes what they have and invents a history from it.”

And then a mirror.

Minos: “There’s something behind it. As there is in every mirror. There’s always someone who knows and waits. “ 

There is always someone who knows and waits. I just needed to say that aloud to my self in this laybrinth.

Minos: “Mothers don’t count. Everything Is determined by the burning seed that chooses them, and uses them. You’re the daughter of a king: Ariadne, the feared one; Ariadne, the golden dove. He is not ours. He is a construct. Do you know whom he is the brother of? His own cage, his own stone prison: the labyrinth.” 

Ariadne: “To hear something spoken out loud is not the same as to know its meaning in your heart. To know something without words, and have it stay in our hearts, protects us from our image of it like a piece of armor.”

Minos: “You persist in seeing a resemblance between us, where there is only a shared destiny.”

Apheresis: a medical treatment with roots in a Greek word that means to take away.

"I am not my own idea as I'm falling," Dan Beachy-Quick says of the sailor who tumbles from the ship's mast into the water below.

When falling, I am the thing someone else has seen. Or this is the way I have found to think about what falling means.

Falling from a mast is like falling off a cliff: one is finished. We are speaking of finitude.

“Even the song of the lark is pitched without rumor…”, Jack Heflin writes in his poem, “Amnesia.”