Authors: Lynne Segal
Many of Tóibín’s other narrators in
The Empty Family
are, like their author, apparently unattached middle-aged gay men who, when not immersed in work, landscape or other aesthetic pleasures, are often regretful and lonely. They know life is about the accumulation of losses, yet it remains exhilarating and laced with desire despite and sometimes because of its solitude,
abandonment and regrets, as the protagonist in the story of the book’s title reflects after choosing to return, as Tóibín has, to build a house in the place where he was born:
And all I have … is this house, this light, this freedom, and I will, if I have the courage spend my time watching the sea, noting its changes and the sound it makes, studying the horizon, listening to the wind or relishing the calm when there is no wind. I will not fly even in my deepest dreams too close to the sun or too close to the sea. The chance for all that has passed.
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Once again, in this story the narrator’s thoughts are addressed to a former lover, but his gaze is outward, watching the waves which seem to mirror the ironies of human existence, and our time in the world: ‘all lifted possibility, all complexity and rushing fervour, to end in nothing on a small strand, and go back out to rejoin the empty family from whom we had set out alone with such a burst of brave unknowing energy’ (32). And here we find another, somewhat different and gentler meaning of melancholia, one evoked in Dürer’s memorable engraving,
Melencolia I
, which depicts an awareness of the inevitable risks of the imaginative spirit and enquiring mind.
What I have gained and tried to convey from reading so much of this literature on mourning and sorrow is a better understanding not just of the inevitability of the tragic in life, but also a sense that loss is not simply an experience to be surmounted but rather an event to live with and, when circumstances and capacity enable it, to share with others. Some of our later life will hopefully be spent evading loss and misery. But some of it will surely entail trying to find more of the right words, rehearsing new and better ways, to engage with and comfort one another
for as long as we can, as we experience the anguish each of us at some stage will face and continue to live with, right up to death itself.
Disobedience and Dissent
There are quiet personal ways of reflecting on one’s past, feeling one’s age and facing the future. There are also noisy collective ways of observing the present, feeling one’s age and challenging the social marginalization of the elderly. The two are not necessarily incompatible, though they usually tend to pull us in opposite directions. Finding gratifications in solitude and learning the strengths to be gained from rethinking one’s ties to the past, right back to the beginning, might help us when confronting the difficulties and disregard often encountered in old age. It brings to mind once more Walter Benjamin’s concept of memory as an ever-changing repertoire of possibilities rather than any faithful registering of events, whether reappraising the significance of history, its losses usually buried in notions of conquest and progress, or simply looking back over any long life.
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Nevertheless, whatever our reflective inclinations, the chances for taking risks and courting danger do not always pass with youth, any more than serenity or withdrawal necessarily comes with age. Writing about the history of gossip, the American literary critic Patricia Meyer Spacks points out that over the centuries older women in particular have proved valuable as resisters, feared for their disobedience, anger, outspokenness and general non-conformity, even if they have more often been mocked than appreciated in the role.
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It is not hard
to flesh out images of ageing truculence, but whereas gossip is more likely to be a favourite tool of the relatively powerless, older people’s dissidence sometimes emerges from voices that have remained influential over the decades. In her sixties, the scholar and writer Carolyn Heilbrun, for instance, advised women to use any seniority they might have to take risks, make noise and become unpopular.
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Her compatriot, Adrienne Rich, who died in 2012, certainly agreed. Born in Baltimore in 1929, Rich was a poet and writer whose early and continuing literary success made her not only widely acclaimed as ‘one of America’s best poets’ but also recognized in old age as an influential dissident voice.
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To the very end neither her poetic timbre nor its political power ever weakened, but rather expanded and intensified. In her eighties, Rich often spoke of, then occasionally retreated from, her high hopes that poetry might prove a useful tool in struggles for social change. In an interview in 2011, she mentioned again that the words of poetry, which say more than they mean, and mean more than they say, can ‘act physically on the reader or hearer’, in their ‘abruptness, directness and anger’.
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At her most optimistic Rich felt that ‘in a time of frontal assaults both on language and on human solidarity, poetry can remind us all of what we are in danger of losing – disturb us, embolden us out of resignation.’
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Nevertheless, especially in her late life, Rich’s optimism was always balanced by equal amounts of pessimism, fearing that ‘some North American ears have trouble with poetry’ because of the general ‘whirlpool of disinformation and manufactured distraction’.
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Quite right, and not just in the USA.
Along with other ageing radicals, Rich hated the harsh drift towards what is usually summed up as ‘neo-liberalism’
in the social and political life of the USA over the last three decades, with its unbroken commitment to private enterprise and its hostility towards welfare spending, as fiercely articulated in her collection from the 1990s,
Dark Fields of the Republic
.
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Witnessing the inequality accelerating ever since the ‘Reaganomics’ of the 1980s, Rich reported losing much of her former critical confidence that social movements might manage to push the USA into becoming a more democratic and peaceful country, one able to confront its many oppressive legacies.
Unexpectedly, it led her to read Marx and to rethink some of her earlier visions, noting the uncomfortable fit between the marketing of feminist-sounding solutions to personal problems and a corporate system that mocked collective action as pointless and sterile. Continuously self-critical, Rich noted her own complicity in helping to unleash the ‘demon of the personal’ in feminist celebrations of women’s experience, unaware then of how words of personal liberation could be ‘taken hostage’ by ‘a horribly commoditized version of humanity’.
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Interestingly, it was this which enabled Rich to articulate a new role for the older woman, or older activist, as a ‘passionate skeptic’, someone who could look back through time and help explain the continuities, slides, shifts and inevitable ruptures in radical thought and action across the generations, knowing that ‘one period’s necessary strategies can mutate into the monsters of another time’.
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She still sought meaning in the struggles of the past, never wiping out or disowning them, yet was always ready, she said, to start over again, realizing that looking back one could find that intentions can be rearranged ‘in a blip / coherence smashed into vestige’.
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Recalling her involvement in the peace movements and anti-war struggles of the 1960s, for instance, Rich later talked of their limitations, thinking today
that being ‘against war’ was too comfortable and easy, compared to developing a critical language capable of encompassing possession, deprivation, colonial history and, above all, of asking: ‘Who creates the rhetoric of “terror” and “democracy”?’
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From middle age up to her death, and in diverse ways, Rich thus stressed the need to keep looking backwards, critically, to see the future. Only the older woman can do this, as the title of another poetry collection
Midnight Salvage
(1999) suggests. The long poems it contains are all dedicated to citing the disorders of the present, while also recalling ‘the sweetness of life, the memory of traditions of mercy, struggles for justice … casting memory forward’:
it’s the layers of history
we have to choose, along
with our own practice: what must be tried again
over and over and
what must not be repeated
and at what depth which layer
will we meet others
the words barely begin
to match the desire
and the mouth crammed with dollars doesn’t testify
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In this political outlook, charting and communicating the constant interchange between past and present helps to impede what is experienced as the acceleration of time from mid-life onwards:
Open the book of tales you knew by heart, begin driving the
old roads again
repeating the old sentences, which have changed
minutely from the wordings you remembered.
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Ageing for Rich thus gained significance as a call to action, if only the action of watching, witnessing and waiting, ready to respond to calls for justice, equality and compassion from around the world.
It is possible to criticize a certain passivity and strategic vagueness in Rich’s rhetorical stance of poetic witnessing. Yet even at the best of times, the space for effective political resistance is a fluctuating and problematic one. It makes those who remain steadfastly insistent on the need for a radical transformation of structures that systematically impoverish, harm or humiliate others the most valuable of resources. Pondering her Jewish heritage, for instance, Rich frequently surveyed the deadlock of the historical tragedy of Israel–Palestine, as in her vivid poem ‘Turning’, capturing ‘that country of terrible leavings and returning’:
Her subject is occupation, a promised land,
displacement, deracination, two people called Semites,
humiliation, force, women trying to speak with women,
the subject is how to break a mold of discourse,
how little by little minds change
but they do change.
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‘Breaking the mould of discourse’, shifting old ways of thinking and speaking, was the point, allowing Rich to stress the uses of the oppositional imagination in exposing the follies
and violence, the wisdom and worries, linking past to present. With her stress on the significance of collectivity and cross-generational social bonding, it was also clear that passionate political commitment worked as a form of self-renewal for this ageing poet. What never changed was the determination to resist. Moreover, it provided a possible way of confronting the physical impediments of ageing, and for Rich in particular of dealing with the appalling pain of the chronic rheumatoid arthritis she endured from her early twenties. From the beginning, Rich had stressed the place of the body, and its cultural meanings, in her politics, always alert to the disparagement, and frequent abuse, of women’s bodies. This was first and most memorably articulated in her reflections on motherhood and the maternal body: ‘I am really asking whether women cannot begin, at last, to think through the body’, to make better use of ‘our complicated, pain-enduring, multi-pleasured physicality’.
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But Rich never saw women’s ‘pain-enduring physicality’ primarily in terms of personal victimhood, least of all her own. Rather, she was determined to put her pain to use politically. In a series of poems written in her fifties, entitled ‘Contradictions: Tracking Poems’, Rich asks repeatedly how she can connect her own pain, her own ‘damaged body’, with the pain and destruction she observes in the world:
The problem is to connect, without hysteria, the pain of any one’s body with the pain of the body’s world filled with creatures filled with dread.
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She knows, of course, that personal and political pains are not identical, nevertheless she asks us to consider them together:
| the body’s pain and the pain on the streets | |
| are not the same | but you can learn |
| from the edges that blur | O you who love clear edges |
| more than anything | watch the edges that blur. 87 |
As Sylvia Henneberg also points out, Rich put her personal suffering to work, seeing in it political possibilities allowing her to connect with the sufferings of others, which in turn helped her to escape from herself.
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Or again, as the historian Joanna Bourke notes in a beautiful reminiscence of the significance of Rich in her life, the poet encourages us to see all the unfamiliar contradictions of lived experiences, drawing us ‘into solidarity with other tormented bodies … a politics that refused to be overwhelmed by suffering. That refuses the will to amnesia.’
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