For here was one who argued as if “with a hammer”—the very weapon to counter those years of enforced passivity as a quasi-Christian conscripted into an adult world of piety in which nothing was clearly explained, nothing was sincere, and all was obscured; my sense that the elders of my world were conspiring to convince me, as a child, and as a young person, of “beliefs” in which none of them believed, even as the pretense was This is the way, the truth, the light. Only through this way shall you be saved.
To counter such smug pieties, the devastating voice of the philosopher—What is done out of love always happens beyond good and evil.
As a freshman I lived not in a dormitory but in a less costly “cottage” on Walker Avenue with approximately twenty other scholarship girls, all of us from upstate New York. (We were “girls” and not “young women”—in age, experience, appearance. This was an era when “girls” were under a kind of protective custody at universities, subject to curfews that male undergraduates did not have. It is an accurate description of the “scholarship girls” of Walker Cottage that none of us minded in the slightest that we had to be back in our residence by 11:00 p.m. weeknights—we had nowhere else we’d have preferred to be than in our rooms, studying.) My room was a single room, cell-like, sparely furnished, where I could work uninterrupted for long hours; for the first time in my life, I was free of the surveillance of my parents, however benevolent this surveillance might have been. And I could work in the university library, until curfew, at the long oak table that seemed magical to me, surrounded by shelves of “little magazines” I came to revere and even to love; I wrote by hand in a spiral notebook, sketches for fiction, outlines, impressions, which I then brought back to the residence to convert into typed pages. Stories, novels—even poetry, and plays—hundreds of pages of earnest undergraduate work that I would not have known to identify at the time as “apprentice work”—much of it discarded, some of it reworked and refined into the stories that I would submit to the writing workshops I took at Syracuse and that would eventually appear in my first book, a story collection titled By the North Gate (1963).
If I open that book, composed and assembled so long ago, it’s as if I am catapulted back into that era—I can shut my eyes and see again the oak table in the library, the displayed magazines on both sides; I can see again the room in which I lived at the time, the plain table desk facing a utilitarian blank wall.
As the Lockport Public Library had been a sanctuary for me as a child and young girl, and a hallowed source of happiness, so the Firestone Library at Syracuse University would be its equivalent, if not more, in my undergraduate years. Over all, Syracuse was a young writer’s paradise: my professors Donald A. Dike, Walter Sutton, Arthur Hoffman, among esteemed others, were brilliant, sympathetic, and unfailingly supportive. (Disclosure: Not once was I made to feel, by any of my professors, that as a young woman I was in any way “inferior” to my male classmates. However, it did not escape my awareness that there was but a single woman professor in the English Department and no women at all in Philosophy.)
If the university library was a treasure trove to a word-besotted undergraduate like myself, it was also, I suppose, a little too much for me. My memory of my workplace is of a labyrinth so dimly lighted—for stacks not in use were darkened: You had to switch lights on as you entered the aisles—as to inspire hallucination; here was a universe of books, overwhelming and intimidating and seemingly infinite as a library in a Borges fiction. One could never begin to read so many books—it invited madness just to think that each had been cataloged and shelved. Each had been conscientiously written!
One day, I would convert some of these experiences into prose fiction—quasi-memoirist fiction, titled I’ll Take You There. But not for decades.
“Seventy cents? Seventy cents?”—it was a shock to me to receive my weekly paycheck for the first time, to discover that I wasn’t even earning a dollar an hour but, after taxes, considerably less. My pride in attending Syracuse University and working in the library was undermined by such reminders of how desperate I was, or how naive.
When, after the first check, I expressed my dismay to one of the librarians for whom I worked, the woman said curtly: “It’s the same for all of us, Joyce.”
Yet I had no choice but to continue at the library. It has been the mantra of my life—I have no choice but to continue.
And years later, as a graduate student in English and American literature at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The pressure of graduate school, at least as first-year English graduate students experienced it, was unrelenting: hundreds of pages of reading each week, and these pages densely printed on tissue-thin paper—Old English Beowulf, The Wanderer, The Dream of the Rood, Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, works by Bede, Cynewulf, Caedmon; Liturgical Plays of the Story of Christ, The Castle of Perseverance, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, Damon and Pythias, Second Shepherd’s Play, Everyman, Noah’s Flood. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, witty John Skelton, Jacobean and Elizabethan and Restoration drama and more. Much more. One by one we discovered Sir Thomas Wyatt, and committed to heart the mysterious gem “They Flee from Me” (1557)—
They flee from me, that sometime did me seek,
With naked foot stalking in my chamber,
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand, and now they range,
Busily seeking with a continual change …
The great works of English literature were monuments to be approached with reverence. Unlike my Syracuse professors, these older, Harvard-trained professors at Wisconsin did not regard literature as an art but rather more as historical artifact, to be discussed in terms of its context; there was little or no discussion of a poem as a composition of carefully chosen words. History, not aesthetics. The thrilling emotional punch of great art—totally beyond the range of these earnest scholarly individuals. One might lecture on Latin influences in pre-Shakespearean drama, or influences in Shakespeare, but the white-hot dynamic of Macbeth, for instance, the brilliant and dazzling interplay of “personalities” that is Shakespearean essential drama was unknown to them. If they were explorers, they’d been becalmed in an inlet, while the great river rushed past a few miles away.
Yet, at Madison, I did read, reread, and immerse myself in the work of Herman Melville. For a course at Syracuse I’d read the early, relatively straightforward White-Jacket, and the wonderfully enigmatic short stories—“Bartleby, the Scrivener,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” “The Encantadas.” While still in high school I’d read Moby-Dick—our greatest American novel, which one might read and reread through a lifetime, as one might read and reread the poetry of Emily Dickinson. At Madison, I became entranced by the very intransigence, one might say the obstinate opacity of the near-unreadable Pierre: or, The Ambiguities—a pseudo romance written in mockery of its (potential, female) readers, as if by a (male) author who’d come to hate the effort of narrative prose fiction itself. (It isn’t surprising that Pierre sold poorly, as its great predecessor Moby-Dick sold poorly. Tragic Melville—“Dollars damn me!”) After a few pages of its curiously stilted, self-regarding prose I fell under the spell of the slightly more accessible allegory The Confidence-Man, as well as Billy Budd. I wondered what to make of Benito Cereno, with its perversely glacial-slow pace: In our racially sensitized era we expect that Melville will surely side with the slave uprising, and not with white oppressors like Captain Cereno, but Melville doesn’t comply with our twenty-first-century expectations in this case in which “the shadow of the Negro” falls over everyone—including even the executed rebel Babo.
Writers who are enrolled in graduate programs soon feel the frustration, the ignominy, the pain of being immersed in read
ing the work of others—illustrious, renowned others—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton—Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James—when they are themselves unable to write or even to fantasize writing. During these months of intense academic study when my head was crammed with great and not-so-great classic works, of course I had no time for fiction or poetry of my own (as I thought it) except desperate fragments in a journal like cries for help.
Suffocated by books. Crushed by books. Library stacks, tall shelves of books, books, books overturning upon the young writer groping in the dark for the overhead light to switch on.
From The Lacunae
Daniel Nadler
NOTE. These texts are imagined translations of poems that do not otherwise exist. They are intended to fill invented or actual lacunae in manuscripts of first- to eighth-century CE classical Indian poetry (Amaruśataka, originally in Sanskrit; Kuruntokai, originally in Old Tamil; and Gathasaptasati, originally in Maharastri Prakrit).
____________
43.71
What will you do with these pearls he has given you?
Can you eat them? Can you grind them into honey
and return them to the water, sweeter than they were?
Your neck is not a graveyard for the sea.
So don’t become a ghost
that scares away
the fish you must catch for your parents.
(Amaruśataka 8.9, Sanskrit)
____________
51.30
Who are you going to meet tonight
in the tall grass
where even snakes cannot find each other?
Your bare feet
will be the safest part of you.
(Gathasaptasati 10.95, Prakrit)
____________
28.6
I want to boast
around you, like a horse rearing straight up
in the stars.
But I have nothing to say.
Like the night
when the moon is out.
(Amaruśataka 1.12, Sanskrit)
____________
22.0
My tigers have left me.
I wake too late in the day,
after a heavy rain
I don’t even tie them to anything.
(Gathasaptasati 18.46, Prakrit)
____________
17.15
Between kisses the air is quiet,
like trees after a snowfall. Talking softly, after,
a branch is shaken loose.
(Gathasaptasati 7.38, Prakrit)
____________
15.24
The moon has gone farming at night
in the soil of your dreams. Tall trees
are growing there, for you to climb,
and the flower I gave you during the day
can barely break through the ground.
(Amaruśataka 30, Sanskrit)
____________
15.34
You disappear beside me in a forest. Walking, I cannot hear
the moment when fewer leaves are crushed, and I speak to you
as if it made no difference that the forest listened in your place.
For you I learned
that what is near us is never what is near us.
(Amaruśataka 30, Sanskrit)
____________
18.0
Do not let the thought of her fill your nights
and the stars
pieces of her.
Come,
we will walk through the streets, and find a table
that doesn’t even look like her.
(Amaruśataka 32.2, Sanskrit)
____________
15.29
Like wooden planks from a broken ship
dashed against great stones,
my words you made into a spectacle
for the whole village to attend. I only meant to tell you
I love another.
(Amaruśataka 30, Sanskrit)
____________
15.32
Your lips are as full as the wound
guarded in battle. Your skin is the color of my eyelids
when the sun passes through.
The sea takes my shape as I float in it,
your hair falls all around you, like the paths of gravity
made visible.
(Amaruśataka 30, Sanskrit)
____________
38.90
You hear the sun in the morning
through closed shutters. As you sleep
the early sky is colored
in fish scales, and you open your eyes
like a street
already lined with fruit.
(Amaruśataka 3.89, Sanskrit)
____________
15.4
The season is yet unlit
by the glint of the sewing needle.
The thread is stored away, the light
is like an unwoven shirt.
(Gathasaptasati 6.24, Prakrit)
____________
28.12
The sun began eating
the parts of the fruit
exposed to air.
What was lodged in dark soil
would stay whole. Until the leopard
digs it up with its paw
and slices away the poison half
with its nail.
(Amaruśataka 1.12, Sanskrit)
____________
28.13
The animals were slowly digging in the mud, and were frightened.
Laughter was the refuge of the weather, and hunger
sounded like water that had nowhere to drain. More water
was found under the mud, digging.
(Amaruśataka 1.12, Sanskrit)
____________
38.1
The birds aglow in yellow do not carry ashes.
What the river carries their talons cannot trap
and even sand slips through. Where the river narrows
ashes splash together, making the shapes they were.
(Amaruśataka 1.11, Sanskrit)
____________
34.15
Cooking under some tress
you must break the salt necklace
and let its white beads
fall into the iron pan.
Rain in the glint of an eclipse.
Your dark breasts grow
darker,
the pan crackles.
(Gathasaptasati 6.85, Prakrit)
____________
21.98
You curse the rain outside your window, believing
that it alone prevents your journey.
Your young lover, at the other end of a sea
suspended in the air
would surely understand.
(Gathasaptasati 18.46, Prakrit)
____________
28.91
The pigment of crushed petals
was smeared along both sides
of the bird’s beak.
But its wings were still limp enough
(Amaruśataka 1.13, Sanskrit)
____________
15.33
The soil guards the sleep
of plant roots. When we pull them
they taste soft like night.
(Amaruśataka 30, Sanskrit)
____________
15.6
Even your words will not leave you
now that they know
that to lighten your b
ody
by even so much as themselves
would remove the balance
from what had been measured precisely.
(Amaruśataka 30, Sanskrit)
____________
28.09
A glacier glows rose pink
from the sun that it encases
in its ice. This is what is told
about time.
(Amaruśataka 1.12, Sanskrit)
____________
98.14
Approach shadows like shallow water
into which you can reach
and touch indigo reefs.
(Gathasaptasati 16.96, Prakrit)
____________
16.13
Brother, don’t look away when she glances at you,
and stop trying to find omens in the syllables of her name.
Go up to her, and say out loud
the name of our father, and if your voice doesn’t break
she may even see something of his face
in yours.
(Gathasaptasati 6.85, Prakrit)
____________
28.10
The man who grows flowers in a field
for lovers to give to one another
is not himself lonely.
He left last winter to see his brother,
and now his field is wild.
He is not kept company by the wind,
and dawn alone does not steady his heart.
All the elements in the mountain pass
make their way into the soil,
but he sleeps at night in a bed
beside a woman, and is as dreamless as a goat.
(Amaruśataka 1.131, Sanskrit)
____________
27.11
On maps the sea carries color.
But a swarm of shadowed fish,