I have thought about this excerpt for nearly three years now. It is so beautiful and, for me, true.
Part of you thought: Please don't look at me. If you don't, I can still turn away. And part of you thought: Look at me... And though you were grown up by then, you felt as lost as a child. And though your pride was broken, you felt as vast as your love for her. She was gone, and all that was left was the space where you'd grown around her, like a tree that grows around a fence.
For a long time, it remained hollow. Years, maybe. And when at last it was filled again, you knew that the new love you felt for a woman would have been impossible without Alma. If it weren't for her, there would never have been an empty space, or the need to fill it.
-Nicole Krauss, from The History of Love
So after blowing my students' minds (probably for the worse) with our discussion about deconstruction and the complete unreliability and instability of language, that bit above came to mind. And it made me think about the infinite potential that spaces/gaps/absences allow--they allow room to grow. Emptiness demands to be filled and we must create/invent things to feel at home in the spaces left by absence, loss, etc. Krauss argues that people (interpersonal relationships) can do this. Foer argues this, too, but he also argues that language--a new kind of language, one without the baggage of our current language (thanks Patricia), is necessary. So he creates new punctuation systems (see the brilliant "A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease"). He imagines new fully functional typefaces--he wants to see active readers engaging with and (if necessary) creating an active language--language that embodies the life it is trying to describe. Though it may be a futile act (we can't ever describe what we want) there is a strange beauty in trying in the face of futility (i.e. Sisyphus). It is why art matters, why books, and poems and everything that humans create (including other humans) matters. And why teaching students difficult texts matters. A whole lot.
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5 comments:
Amen. And what a lovely thought, that. I love "emptiness demands to be filled."
my favourite quote from "the thin red line" is "if i do not meet you in this life, let me feel the lack." the lack of something, someone is often the most potent emotion and expression that we can have, even if it is also sometimes painful... it's a hard query, whether to accept negative/empty space as it is, or to search for something to fill it. can we be content without filling such spaces?
by the way this also reminds me of one of my favourite paintings ever. i'm posting it right now.
I remember junior year of high school when Mr Waller tried to teach us deconstruction. "We still haven't fully gotten to the complete chairness of the chair people!" And we all stared at the bald cynical man trying to teach us this idea into our empty heads.
On another note I think something I have been thinking about for a long time has been the loss of the ancestral homeland in our society, a place, a land that we know and are deeply rooted to. There are costs with transcience
amy, i am so infinitely touched by your dedication to exposing that which you love to your students, and for doing something that matters so much. i love the idea that there is a "strange beauty in trying in the face of futility." this is something that i am trying to work towards every day when i begin a new painting, and something we all are working towards in one way or another every morning when we open our eyes and recognize we must begin again.
and that concept of emptiness, as related to instability - a friend shared the idea with me this summer that pain hollows out our hearts so that they can be more deeply filled. i think in that moment of hollowing, in the process of deconstruction, there is a seemingly underlying sense of futility, but i believe so fully that we must recreate that strange beauty and hold on stronger to the faith that art, books, poems, and creations really do matter a whole lot.
i love you so much, dear amy. thanks for sharing a passage from this beautiful book (which, also thanks to you, i have cherished reading.)
i had forgotten how this changed my life. and what it meant to me. rereading it now feels like a sacrament.
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