Mary Cappello/Plenary Address/June 20th, 2024

Oxford University

Timeless Dwelling: Imagining a Genre of the Yet to Be

 

“I must admit that I have produced only essays, an ambiguous genre in which analysis vies with writing.” –Roland Barthes

 

[SLIDE 1: opening remarks/excised]

 

SLIDE 2:

 

"The manner of shelving the books is meant to impart certain suggestions to the reader who, looking on the shelves for one book, is attracted by the kindred ones next to it, glances at the sections above and below, and finds himself involved in a new trend of thought which may lend additional interest to the one he was pursuing…"

 

–Gertrud Bing, assistant to Aby Warburg, describing the unique classification system of his library following the “law of the good neighbor”

 

I.              Plenary’s Address/a letter of sorts

7 minutes

Dear Friend,

A plenary is supposed to constitute a plenum, a completion round and full as the bellies that accompanied King Arthur at his table and from which the term derives. Forgive me, then, if I take my cue instead from the French, plein-aire, and invite from this podium an openness to thought and the pleasures of not knowing if we’ll ever really arrive together at an endpoint; more happily disposed, I hope, we’ll teeter precariously on the edge of speculation, steeped in the endless un-discovery that is the subject of my talk: the aim and end, the shape, the prospect of the word as verb and noun and genre, the thing called: STUDY.

Giorgio Agamben—in an essay as spare as it is voluminous on “The Idea of Study” writes that “those who study are in the situation of people who have received a shock and are stupefied by what has struck them, unable to grasp it and at the same time powerless to leave hold. The scholar, that is, is always ‘stupid.’” On one hand, he is astonished and absorbed, caught up in a suffering and an undergoing, he explains, while on the other hand, he is driven toward closure. “This shuttling between bewilderment and lucidity, discovery and loss,” he writes, “. . . is the rhythm of study.”

I recognize myself in the student Agamben draws, hovering in the space between a glimpse, a glow and eternal darkness, and I wonder if his depiction of student-hood speaks to you as well. If you’re not sure where to find me, look for me a la Bartleby in “a low-ceilinged room in all things like a tomb” where I agree to list and drift and hold steady for entire afternoons chained, if you will, to the most giddily obdurate anatomy textbook or the most gloriously impossible poetry or prose. Study’s roots in the salvific might explain its affiliation with the kind of stupefaction we associate with worship. One doesn’t, as one might suppose, according to Agamben, study in order to be made less stupid/stupefied, but to stew in stupidity’s juices as if to defy the time allotted to one. Temporally speaking, study is interminable; it knows no end. “Those who are acquainted with long hours spent roaming among books, when every fragment, every codex, every initial encounter seems to open a new path, immediately left aside at the next encounter, or who have experienced the labyrinthine allusiveness of that ‘law of good neighbors’ whereby Warburg arranged his library, know that not only can study have no rightful end, but does not even desire one.”

And since it knows no end, and those of us who have gathered here together are, I can assure you, the best of students, I can begin wherever I want to and know that you’ll stay with me because as students you enjoy the finely tuned ability to endure, postpone, suspend.  I promise to turn back to “study” a long way down my concourse’s field, to invite some speculation on the study as a literary form that does not yet exist, but I want to begin by making the ghosts of our inquiry present by inviting a different genre into the room, the genre that lurks today, it’s the genre famous for being a non-genre, the one that possibly haunts the questions that orient our inquiry—the ESSAY. Because I think that no matter what we call what we’re doing in creative criticism’s name, the essay has probably already done it, which doesn’t mean that we can’t emulate it like so many other forms whose day has yet to fully come.

The essay is the imp to every nonfictive perversion, and maybe every act of creative criticism, too. The essay: “a glorious thought excursion” (Philip Lopate); “a stroll through someone’s mazy mind” (Cynthia Ozick). Maybe a colloquium at its best is nothing more nor nothing less than making one another privy to the way each other’s minds work—when all too often those workings are pressed into the service of conventions that exclude the queer and unintelligible. I imagine the opportunity of our time together today to be a steeping in FORMs of attunement, no two alike.

When I think of who tutored me in essaying—the who and the what—I find myself going back to poets, and today is no exception: poets have always been my greater influence. And Performance Artists. Literary Theorists. Documentary artists (Gianfranco Rosi, Patricio Guzmán). And Art Historians (Griselda Pollock said it plainly one day in an informal seminar circa 1990: “women lack nothing!”). Poet, Susan Howe’s lecture one snowy Buffalo afternoon, at the time, a-work-in-progress on Emily Dickinson’s fascicles, was life-changing. I couldn’t have written my first memoir without Michel Foucault even if you don’t find him in the non-existent footnotes. And, photographers, Rosamond Purcell; or composers, recently the young, Caroline Shaw. But the truest source of my essaying is the voice of my mother who in conversation (when she was alive) could move between and among music (she’d often sing something), poetry (à propos to whatever we’d be discussing), painting, or film. She’d remark the state of her plants and the state of the world. She’d take the pulse of the day, she’d share her observations, she’d listen with humor, and she’d move among and between these forms with a kind of abandon moored by memory, the uncanny coalescence of whose fragments would create a magnetic charge that, though never pressed into the service of a lesson, would create a feeling of being [inspired and] guided by aliveness to life itself. [SLIDE 5] My mother may as well have been the embodiment of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of the lecture—the essay’s antecedent and sibling—(as) a “panharmonicon for variety of note.”

Have you found yourself wanting to up-end the forms that we’ve given you? I mean, even, panel presentations. They remind me of tribunals, and for this reason, I’ve never liked them. The essay might be the genre that, rather than speak into an audience creates an atmosphere for dialogue.

I reserve the right to be audacious and encourage the same in you.

I will not keep you on the straight and narrow, for the essay evinces “a peculiar energy” that only ever had to do for me with the tension between the line and the sentence, and it always will, between telegraph and story, always a form of song even minimally so and hum that wants to be teased out, thought especially thought and thinking, not ruminating, but contemplating: meditative movement that takes us, whether reading essays or writing essays, into ourselves or out of ourselves or into a world we could never have imagined.

 

II.            Letter-essay or essay letter? from my mother, in quarantine

2 minutes and 20 seconds

March 20, 2020

            Dearest Mary,

Thanks for sending the budlets.

 

Arose a few minutes ago, and all is well. Went to bed very late again last night, thus the late hour rising, but I am working on changing some old patterns. I am too addicted to Words with Friends.

 

“Patterns”: I never quite understood Sara Teasdale’s poem of that title. Will have to look it up. Decidedly, in these few days, we have had to form new patterns and that’s a massive subject.

 

The word “massive” makes me think of the large Neapolitan dog, the Mastiff. Truly a noble animal. Because talking with Lisa yesterday, of course she mentioned her huge dog, Harry, and what a good companion he is to her at this time. Imagine those having to be concerned about their pets at this time. He weighs more than she does, and I can’t imagine how much food she has to have on hand for him.

 

Anyway, the topics to write about are manifold and many, but first there are pills to be taken and oatmeal to cook.

 

It’s still overcast today, the sky looks like one large white cloud, but light blue is penetrating.

 

By the way, the first time I read “Streetcar Named Desire,” I was happy to note that Tennessee Williams colored the sky turquoise, the color of hope.

 

Besides writing, I have lots of straightening to do today, and at one point, will try out the new showerhead! Looking forward to that!

 

I know I’ve told you this before, but one of the singers I met at radio station WHAT was a very low keyed, gentle personality named Kitty Kallen. In your ongoing pursuit of researching all these names that are cropping up, she had a huge hit record called “The Little Things Mean a Lot.” I think it starts out, “Blow me a kiss from across the room,” which then reminds me of Sebastiano, Uncle Johnny’s father. I will have to dig out that article I wrote about him. Kitty Kallen had another hit song in “Dear Lady of Fatima.” She sang a duet with Richard Hayes in the first song; I don’t know about the second, if he joined her in that one as well.

 

I guess a collection that will be written at this time calls for a title, but I don’t like “Written While in Quarantine from the Coronavirus.” Ha ha! Maybe “Quarantine Poems.”

 

Have a beautiful day.

 

Love & hugs, oops, rather, tapping of elbows,

 

Madre

 

III.          The Question of Genre

five minutes and 38 seconds

 

Every genre is an affordance and a privilege, mapping out and marking who is allowed to travel in its name. How did this genre find me? How did I find it?

 

Perhaps genres then should be defined by the degree of pleasure or struggle the form yields, the demand it makes, what it animates, how it works on us (does it induce stupor; is it a call to act to nap, or dream?)

 

[SLIDE 6] take three observational approaches to the same subject: looking directly ahead, eyes open and steadied; eyes down at the floor (or however you interpret that) aka Buddha gaze; eyes closed. Examine your results.

 

invent a genre for:

 

memories of things, exclusive of trauma, that may or may not have happened but that you experience with a kind of conviction that they had: I call such phenomena “dreamories”

 

invent a genre for:

afternoon snacks

 

cultivate a genre that makes you late for appointments, no matter how costly that might be. I call this day sleeping. Composing this plenary in my mind while driving to a physical therapy appointment, I find myself inadvertently going in an entirely different direction. Toward what you might ask? I'm still not sure if the route that I found myself mistakenly taking was one to a former yoga class (the plenary as a stretch fest) to the post office (the plenary as a letter I’d meant to send) or a donut shop (the plenary as an excuse to feast together on a devilishly exorbitant sweet)

 

for this portion of our seminar, the professor said, I am asking that we come together to “question the established ways in which knowledge is defined, produced, and taught.”

 

No matter how experienced or seemingly learned one becomes, learning how to ask questions is possibly what all learning is about. And it doesn’t stop in graduate school, the professor said. Just as I think it would be great someday to teach a class solely on the sentence, I think it would be just as great to teach (and take) a class solely devoted to the question. The shape of the sentence and nature of the question is everything: that might sum up everything we are trying to do.

 

Like most writers, I think, I experience the word “uncategorizable” as the highest form of praise, but I also don’t wish to be led astray by the misunderstanding of categories as traps. A restraint holds you back; a constraint makes something possible; a constraint is generative; a restraint chokes and gags. When “genre-defying” becomes the greatest good, I really wish we would slow ourselves down. Are genres like “women” in its sexist incarnation? “can’t live with them; can’t live without them.” Genre: the ground of possibility for every act of our creating and the thing we wish we could erase, deny, exceed, or transcend. Genre: the constitutive absence of our desiring. The other to our writing’s self?

 

In the history of art, form changes in concert with new questions and ideas. If, in academe, the questions that orient our inquiry have radically changed, why have our forms failed to change in turn?

 

to each career, its own ambitions, its singular swerves. If a new practice asks you to “leave your field” or even “leave the field,” rest assured that you’ve been trained in novel ways of seeing, and distinguished forms of listening; trust that you won’t be encroaching onto fields not your own but enriching them (and vice versa). Either that, or following Russian theorist, Mikhail Epstein, become a specialist in “alternative, virtual or non-existent disciplines”

 

dispel the fear of dilettante-ism and embrace your inner amateur instead: a dilettante dabbles; an amateur begins again; a dilettante flits, uncertainly; an amateur loves, enduringly

 

I wanted to call it, following Maya Deren, “a ritual in transfigured time,” I wanted to call it an “anti-chronicle,” but the publisher proposed we call it “my reply to cancer, my return to life”; I hadn’t called it anything, but the editor without my permission sub-titled it a “memoir/essay,” while the work by all the male contributors didn’t need a name;

 

my friend, James Morrison, called what I was doing, “lyric intellectual”; the interviewer called it: “sonic memoir” / “embodied criticism” / “critical memoir,”/“narrative cultural observation” /  “drawing the attentive reader into what we might call the queer corporeal idea” / she called it “experimental lyric poetry,” and even “e-mail.”

 

to ask ourselves if with our categories we are simply creating new names for what writers have been doing all along or inventing new forms that speak to the uniqueness of contemporary crises. Today’s autocriticism might be yesterday’s critical theory.

 

[SLIDE 7] As my former student, Penelope Cray author of Miracles Come on Mondays, once put it, it’s important not to become enamored with our chosen logic, but to write toward our own idiosyncrasies, come what may.

 

Is there anything more sublime than the mis-recognition of a great jazz riff? Aim for the most exquisite imitations and the most replete improvisations. Make the melody a ground for its own unheard-of precincts.

 

Allow the children [in our lives] to instruct us at every turn as when Joe Moshenska’s daughter Bea [Bé-ah]asks for a bedtime “story” “with nothing and no one in it.” Let’s find in ourselves our own marvelous requests.

 

I don’t aim to make order out of what I’ve been given—a life; instead, I try to arrange things if only to approximate their strangeness, their strange beauty.

 

I have always said my aim is to bring a poetic sensibility together with a scholarly ethos.

 

When we ask what a form can accommodate, we might also be asking what a life can bear.

 

IV: the idea of STUDY

12 minutes (?)

If you’ve read LECTURE, you know that I have an interest in how knowledge is received and conveyed, even what counts as knowledge itself, and in untold genealogies of the forms we take for granted [and submit to] from the syllabus to the panel, from the seminar to the public reading. Before being called to contemplate the lecture and its kin—the notebook, note, and nap—I had planned to follow an interest in STUDY by creating what I imagined as a suite of literary etudes. Though most of my unfinished projects are lost to file cabinets, for this one, I seem to have chosen a bag and a very pretty one at that [SLIDE 8]. Each year, for the past ten years, I’ve brought it to a cabin in Maine where the projects that apparently draw me are supposed to be fulfilled. Sometimes, in an effort not to forget that it exists, I label the bag [SLIDE 9]. Agamben would say I’ve not yet moved from undergoing –the incessant postponement of the deed—to undertaking. I need your help! And that’s why I’m here, to ask you, if I may, to help me to determine if there is something to study as an unplumbed form and the terms I’m still roughly sketching for its reinvention.

Reaching into my bag, I retrieve some initial ideas: “Timeless Dwelling moves out from what I don’t assume and hope not to conclude, but which I admit to being troubled by: the prospect of a possibility that we no longer study anything at all. Because alongside sleeping and especially dreaming (see Jonathan Crary’s 24/7)/in a culture that is sleep-deprived and dream-averse, (I wonder if) study too is a mode of existence fast fading, the effects of which we can’t afford. I went on: Currently, I’m interested in four emphases: [SLIDE 10] the transformation that an object undergoes once submitted to a form of study; the “student” subject that precedes or emerges as after-effect of study; the space that a form of study creates; and study’s time or duration, terminable or interminable. Giving myself over to a nonexistent literary form—the “study”—as spur, I will pursue companionate verbs (to read, to examine, to meditate upon, to magnify) alongside a raucous up-ending of study’s presumed locales (dusty attic spaces or privileged alcoves that anticipate men in leather bound chairs).”

My students and I do a lot of thinking together about what exactly would be entailed in inventing a form (rather than treating form as arbitrary or writing in a formal void); in reappropriating a form; or, in plumbing the depths of an antiquated, forgotten or lost form.

How do you invent? [SLIDE 11] You identify the personal or cultural need for the thing (its politics); you ask yourself why it is calling to you. You eke out interlocuters (earlier traditions of the form or its adjuncts) or identify uncommon influences. You theorize it—what do you want for it to do? You devise a set of directives or constraints. You tempt yourself toward composition, with an eye to your rules and an openness toward play.

 When you’re inventing a form, there needs to be a degree of self-consciousness; when you are playing the chords of a well-worn form, there does not.

Invented genres rely on personalized origins: There’s that type of study I yearn for in a phrase my immigrant grandfather would use to describe an early morning activity: ‘to inspect the garden.’ I know what it is to follow the call that combines noticing with roaming, tending with attending, passive pleasure and surprise with lordly purveying of what one has made, most of all at a pace that is exceedingly slow, in which time is replaced by shapes of tendrils and hollows, of leaf and furl and breeze.

Under the aegis of (ancestral) inspection, my study’s tempo is necessarily adagio; my studies will be short: no tract, treatise, opus, or dissertation (I’ve already written one of those even though I occasionally have nightmares that I never really did). They’d be minimalist without being miniature.

In the case of my other books, I sought the form or devised the form that the book needed to take given the problem it was addressing or question it was pursuing; form followed content, content dictated form; in this case, form would dictate content: I cannot tell you in advance what this book will be “about.”: objects that resist the gaze of study? I cannot know and that’s the challenge of it.

            I could give myself directives: create a list of sentences that go [SLIDE 12] “every x (fill in the blank) is a study of y (fill in the blank), and thus edge closer to what all can happen in study’s name. I can give myself a goal: literary etude: a form that marries a quiet, inward turning practice with exuberance. Will the same operation yield different results? Will I study what’s insistent, what’s unusual, or what refuses my attention? Should I intersperse the work with portraits in the tradition of Barthes’ biographemes, or of students, not MY students, not the students who I know and love, but students where and how I choose to notice them?

To each STUDY, its own KOS (Knowledge Organization System). [SLIDE 13] A study might need to be its own Warburgian library whose classification system and uncanny juxtaposition of texts could be bearers of new worlds to know and to love. Study: a genre that reconfigures genre as such; a meta-genre: the study as a search tool in a heretofore nonexistent classification system; a library that is perpetually re-arranged.

In music, the study already exists, as well, in art; why not in literary practice?  [pause here for the murmuring of a footnote, introduce a biting of nails: Maybe literary studies DO exist and I’m all wrong about this. What are Lydia Davis’ tests of grammar’s logic if not studies?; or Gertrude Stein’s experiments on attention; the rhapsodes that are Bernard Cooper’s Maps to Anywhere; Robert Walser’s microscripts; Zadie Smith’s Intimations; what is Georges Perec doing in returning to the same place day in and day out in his An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris? Surely, the fruit of his experiment is a study.]

In the past, I had allowed music to instruct me: I had taken the two-part invention and translated its terms into a discursive double portrait, a two-part invention in prose, following what I called discursive autobiography (over and against descriptive or transcriptive or expressive autobiography), but the musical etude is different. A composition that makes possible practice; a highly structured series of operations whose aim is to create muscle memory; a piece of music—no matter how sublime—whose goal is for the musician to master technique. Could a piece of writing be equal to such a goal? Could I? I just don’t know if I want my studies primarily to be instructive.

In painting, the study also serves as a type of precedent or practice, antecedent to a larger whole. But what of the still life as study, loosely conceived. Then I could borrow a sense of pure presence; serene and certain and undisguised.

At the origin of my interest, A PEACH. [SLIDE 14] Not just any peach, but those belonging to a favorite still life by Raphaelle [rah-fay-elle] Peale, “A Covered Painting” (or “Fruit Piece,” circa 1819). I had first met Raphaelle [rah-fay-elle] in this painting by his father, Charles Willson Peale, [SLIDE relay from 15 through 20] on a visit in my childhood with my mother to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts; the painting, titled, “Staircase Group,” featured an actual step, yes, a 3 dimensional object appended to the painting’s trompe l’oeil base, that invited my ten-year-old self , why not?, to climb in. At 12 [SLIDE 21], at the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, PA, where my mother also took me, I discovered another artist who would accompany me for years, the gay modernist Lancaster, PA-born Charles Demuth. By 28, steeped in the study of Demuth’s literary illustrations, I realized Demuth’s homoerotic planes clearly had the “Staircase Group” inscribed in them (here’s an example), and I wrote of this at length.

But what about Raphaelle [rah-fay-elle] and his peaches? [SLIDE 22] He’s on the stair with his brother, Titian, yes, Charles Willson named all of his children, male and female, after famous European artists—hoping to inaugurate the American Rembrandt, the American Angelica (Kauffman), the American Rubens. But Raphaelle [rah-fay-elle] was the most profligate of them all, and as a painter, the most original and wild (insisting on making still lives in an era that consigned the form to amateurs). “Fruit Piece” (1819) had long instructed me in what I aspired to in literary nonfiction: I think what I’ve always wanted to do, a la Peale, is to extend an invitation to the irreal real, to make a reader want to touch the surface of the page, knowing it might sting (see the wasp); or to shift an optic from wasp to lowly fly, all the while momentarily forgetting that it’s a version of reality under wraps: its translucent coverlet, a gauzy lens that invites a clarity in what it subtly obscures. [SLIDE SHOW RELAY OF CLOSEUPS, 23 through 26] The wasp and the fly have a different interest in the peaches from one another, just as we have a different interest in the peaches than do they, and Peale’s attention to the quotidian was not lost on me, for what could be more noble a goal for a nonfictionist than to train your attention on a part of the world that we share, the everyday thereness of a there, more real for being subject to swift vanishing: to realize its beauty and your relation to it, and to give yourself the task of trying to remake it in the form of art.

As I contemplated the prospects of a literary study, a different aspect of the work compelled me, quite simply [I was moved by] the deliberateness with which, according to a letter dating to 1816, Raphaelle [rah-fay-elle] Peale had announced how the peach was “that particular fruit upon which he came to concentrate”—and how he had meant now to “have devoted all my time, Principally to Painting of fine Peaches.”  

Maybe I want what Peale had because the idea of an object of devotion, a dedicatee on the altar of my attentions, seems like a comforting prospect. Was Peale studying peaches or was he studying the means at his disposal of their representation? Both. Too often we take the latter for granted; only by paying attention to the form, can we reinvent, can we discover the peach that we did not know was there.

There have been cataclysms in the last decade (in the US, Trump's election and all that led up to it, for example, followed by the pandemic) that have forced me into a kind of "crisis of meaning" state, requiring that I re-evaluate the purpose of my own aesthetic and work in the world: study seems to be my steadying device; careful looking, ethical regard, reflective listening, concentration, staying power—these are the qualities that bring us to these halls today, an existential being-present-to, in the vernacular, a “showing up.” I’m hopeful for study to remain intact.

 

V.

Diptych: Unpainted Genre Scene with Missing Apple from Frost Will Come: Essays from the Bardo

12 minutes and 30 seconds

*

[SLIDE 27]

From the Notebooks of Rosemary Cappello

 

February 22, 2020

It was a lovely day today. Anthony and I went to the farmers market on the Square and promenaded. Bought apples. I might eat one before going to bed. There were no flower vendors there, though, so I’m flowerless. Well, I have been saying that if one lives long enough, all things happen, and all things are happening to me! What can I say that Charles Dickens has not already said—that it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, and yet, I keep talking.

 

*

[SLIDE 28]

Ah, lunch was divine today, a challah roll with “Abricots Confiture Artisanale des Pyrenees,” an apricot preserve which she bought at this wonderful shop on the same street as her hotel while she was in Paris. Today, scraping the sides of the jar, she spread the last spoonful on her roll, all good things must come to an end.

 

How does a person live on four drops of apple juice? I’d be asking myself this, astonished that my mother had the strength still to talk and move and touch while certain members of the in-patient hospice staff were giving us a run-around, threatening the prospect of my mother having to be moved to “long term care” even when it was evident that her “term” was short. “She could be with us for weeks,” one doctor said, chin perched in the “V” he’d made with his hand, eyes tilted downward as if to suggest a missing pair of reading glasses, upturned brow calculating how to put it to the family: that Medicare would only cover a five-day stay. If I was struggling with a host of competing mental states, wholly internal, his face seemed literally at war with itself, but the terms of the battle were being played out in lands where “families” were not allowed to tread even though we were the footmen and the soldiers and the ones to be counted among the casualties. I knew better than to estimate the limits of my mother’s fortitude. As her loving daughter, I wasn’t actuarially inclined, but the body’s ability to withstand such a prolonged withdrawal of nourishment confounded me.

 The hospital would bring small plastic cups with retractable aluminum lids filled with a half cup of apple juice which we were instructed occasionally to try to feed to my mother using a dropper (not to exceed two or three drops per sitting) or via a stick with a tiny sponge at one end that we would dip into a thimble-full of juice for her to suck on. My mother came to love these final meals, referring to the precious liquid alternately as apple juice, apple sauce, and apple cider. One day in the midst of this terrible starvation, she told me that someday she’d be able to eat again. I wasn’t sure if she meant when all of this was over—in the afterlife—or if it was another example of her survivalist tendency to hope against hope. When I asked her what she would want most to eat again, she said, “an apple.” Does anybody remember that scene in The Night of the Hunter when Lilian Gish opens the small mysterious object, wrapped in a doily that child-John fashions from a napkin before presenting it to her? [SLIDE 29] It’s Christmas, the child has no money, but he spots an apple on the table and makes it into a gift, to which Gish replies, “That’s the richest gift a body could have.” The fullest expression of the depth of my mother’s hunger came in a sentence that seemed to appear out of nowhere: “I want to be an apple and take a bite out of myself.”

How can a person live on a few drops of apple juice? By visualizing; though they call it hallucinating, does the distinction really matter at the end? My mother said her paternal grandmother was in the room.

“What’s she doing, Mom?”

“Oh, she’s in her characteristic pose,” she said with pleasure, “she’s standing at the stove, stirring something in a large pot, a soup or a stew or a sauce. She was a marvelous cook!”

On another morning, she told me that during the night her entire family had come to her —her parents and grandmother, all of her sisters and her brother, and they were “feeding me out of their hands. I was eating out of their hands.” Sitting alongside my mother as she told me what she saw, I pictured it: I thought about the way we feed a lamb or a cat or any other creature who would rather eat out of a hand than bring a paw or hoof to its mouth; I thought about how hands are the next best thing to bowls but better than bowls. I imagined that her family was blessing her.

Sometimes I wondered who had it worse? Was it I or my mother who was suffering what my Catholic upbringing had taught me to call “the tortures of the damned”? When the staff at in-patient hospice finally succeeded in bringing her weeks of vomiting under control, the doctor having explained to me what a complex undertaking it would be, the hardest thing for me to endure was the upshot of the meds making her hungry but unable to eat, thirsty but unable to drink. This has to be one of the worst forms of powerlessness one can experience as a caretaker, and maybe most especially child-to-mother, though I suppose it would be worse if the positions were reversed: children weren’t obliged to nourish their parents, parents aren’t in need of children to help them to grow, but a child might be tasked with comforting their parent or helping in the effort to keep them alive. The situation seemed frankly Biblical, or at least one requiring recourse to a god whose greater intelligence could offer a reason for this hell. I’d described it to a friend as making me feel I was enduring a passion-of-Christ scenario when, really, it’s possible that I found myself facing the conundrum that founds all the world’s religions, the unquenchable desire that is the nature of both humanness, and of its counterpart, human suffering. Eventually, whether human or cat or lamb, there must be a moment when the better alternative is to turn away from the bowl, to consign oneself to one’s death, to resign oneself to being consumed by one’s hunger, to become the apple and take a bite out of oneself.

Around the time of this unbearable hunger, someone took a photo—my niece, Ilia, Hayden’s mother, or Jean?—that shows my nephew, Hayden, on one side, sharing his latest drawing with our favorite nurse, Margie, and my mother and me on the other side: I’m feeding my mother apple juice from the dropper. [SLIDE 30] I came to love this photograph for its double-paneled capture of care: Margie bends, my mom reaches, and I’m catapulted to a dream of my favorite photo of her, June, 1973, reaching with her mouth for a bunch of grapes that she suspends above her while she and her friend, Eileen Spinelli, pose inside a fantasy of their own bacchanalia [SLIDE 31 then, back to DIPTYCH/32]. Margie bends toward Hayden with such a splendid show of interest; she’s be-gloved, she’s working, but she understands this to be part of her work; she bends, she gleans, granting a keen attention while Hayden points to a brushstroke, proud of what he’s tried to picture, intent on explaining it even though he knows as a budding artist that art at its best is beyond explanation. Hayden’s enthusiasm in sharing his artwork in the sickroom lends it a joy that would be missing if someone had photographed me and my mother, alone. It shows living as an adjunct to dying, two tempos with a capital “T” existing side by side.

How does a person continue to perceive things when surviving on a few drops of apple juice? When I showed my mother the photo, she said, “What a beautiful diptych!” How did she have access to this word, how did she have access to anything in her diminished state, or did her access to everything that’s immanent deepen? Did she now have access especially to the right word, the choicest perception, the dream’s unplumbable navel, the most subtly reflected colors on the spectrum that lit our shared world?

[SLIDE 33/BACK TO GRAPES] In those final two weeks of my mother’s life, she moved in and out of startling lucidity; on a few drops of apple juice, she dictated a raucous Facebook farewell to her community of friends, and when, in terrible synchrony, her GP’s father died just a handful of days before her own death, she asked me to convey her condolences. My mother’s doctor’s father had just died, yet the doctor continued to reach out by phone to check in on my mother, and to check in on me, on us. At first, I had texted the doctor that my mother had wanted to write something to her but was too weak to do so. “I don’t think my mother has many more days left to live,” I wrote, “She was just too weak yesterday [to tell me what she wanted to say to you] and now she’s in a much deeper quiet that is hard to rouse her from.” I reminded the doctor that she actually had a visit to my mother scheduled for the thirteenth, and if she wanted to see her to get closure with her, that might be a good day to come, not knowing that this was to be the day on which my mother was to die. Then, an evening came “when I went to say goodnight to my mother and she was more wakeful and she asked me how you are,” I wrote. “I asked her what she might tell you if she were to write you a note about the loss of your father…She told me that she knew how close you were to your father and how much she knows you’ll miss him…She said that losing a father is a terrific loss but you have the sense that you received from him to be a good doctor and friend. Then she asked for me to tell you that she will miss you…And not to forget to drink your applesauce.”

Sometimes I used to try to imagine what it could possibly feel like for my mother to have gone without eating or drinking for so long a time, knowing, like most people alive on this earth, what it feels like in my mouth and my throat if I go just one day not having drunk enough water. Her throat must have felt beyond parched, her thirst, beyond slaking. Her throat was now the throat as imagined by the yogi who was leading a class I had taken sometime in the 1980’s who’d instructed us to assume the “death pose” (Savasana). This version of yoga was so abhorrent to me as a twenty-eight-year-old that it took me two more decades to return to yoga to discover something different and more. As we lay on our mats, face up, he asked us to picture our muscles detaching themselves from our bones, and he placed particular emphasis on our throats which he asked us to imagine as dried-out metal pipes. We were to listen for drops of water falling in slow succession outside of ourselves but beyond our ability to reach them. Or maybe it was that drops of water were falling, one long, slow drop at a time, onto the lip of the pipe, but the pipe was not fully able to receive them. Either he was sadistic, or he was onto something. Do we enter a state more fundamental than hunger, more primary than thirst as we prepare to die?

So many times, by my mother’s bedside, I widened my eyes in terror or horror at the sight of what her dying offered me that I failed to understand. Like the time of an early evening edging up to night when a male nurse who had been tending her told me he wanted to moisten her tongue with one of those swabs to bring her comfort. My mother’s mouth was partially open, and he gently introduced the Q-tipped sized sponge onto her lips and gums and tongue, dabbing them. You have to imagine the deep sleep she was in to reckon with the fright of it, because, here, my mother clamped her lips onto the stick and its swab making it impossible, it seemed, for him to remove it. She tightened her mouth around it as if to tell us she still had strength. I was afraid that she didn’t know what she was doing! That she was going to break the stick in her mouth with her teeth, leaving the nurse and me with blood and pieces of plastic stuck in her throat and fresh forms of wounding and pain. This isn’t what happened. The nurse had a technique for shimmying it out; he moved it slowly back and forth, back and forth, until my mother’s mouth opened, nearly smiling; then she released it. Had he experienced this before? Quite possibly. He didn’t seem afraid. My mother, most certainly, was beyond anything like “fear”; she was playing with him in a somewhat sinister not desperate way. I would have said she was “holding on for dear life” to that stick and its swab in her clamping down but the slightly “joyous” tone of the muscles in her face suggested otherwise: she was threatening something, she was teasing, but I don’t think she was trying with all of her might to suck out every last drop. She was commenting on the ridiculousness of the situation. “Please stop torturing me with your promise of apples,” I heard her say. “I’m beyond that now. I’m beyond you. Beyond apples. Beyond both hunger and thirst.”

 

SLIDE 34: THE END

 

Works Cited

Works that I reference herein include: Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Study” in Idea of Prose, Sullivan and Whitsitt, trans., (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985); Roland Barthes, “Lecture In Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, Collège de France, January 7, 1977,” October, vol. 8, Spring 1979: 3-16; Roland Barthes, Sade/Fourier/Loyola, Richard Miller, trans., (Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1971); “The Mood Listener: Barrie Jean Borich Interviews Mary Cappello,” Los Angeles Review of Books (online), November 13, 2016; Mary Cappello, Lecture (Oakland, CA: Transit Books, 2020); Life Breaks In: A Mood Almanack (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016); "Governing the Master('s)plot:  Frames of Desire in Demuth and James," Word and Image: A Journal of Verbal/Visual Enquiry, vol. 8, no. 2, April-June l992, 154-170; Bernard Cooper, Maps to Anywhere (New York: Penguin, 1992); Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2014); Penelope Cray, Miracles Come On Mondays (Missouri: Pleiades Press, 2020); Tatiana Duvanova and Rachel Rothenberg Interview Penelope Cray, The Ocean State Review, vol. 10, no. 1, 2020: 62-77; Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance (NY: Picador, 2007); Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1820-1872, vol. 5 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1911); Mikhail Epstein, the original “Improvisations” Home Page; Philip Lopate, ed. The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (New York: Anchor Books, 1994); Cynthia Ozick, “She: Portrait of the Essay as a Warm Body” in Quarrel and Quandary: Essays (New York: Knopf, 2000), 178-187; Joe Moshenska Acknowledgments in Making Darkness Light: A Life of John Milton (New York: Basic Books, 2021); Georges Perec, An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris [Reprint Edition], Mark Lowenthal, trans., (Cambridge, MA: Wakefield Press, 2010); Robert D. Schwarz, A Gallery Collects Peales (Philadelphia Collection) Paperback – January 1, 1987 (F.S. Schwarz: Philadelphia, 1987); Zadie Smith, Intimations: Six Essays (New York: Penguin, 2020); Robert Walser, Microscripts, Susan Bernofsky, trans., (New York: New Directions, 2012); The Warburg Institute Website, School of Advanced Study, University of London