Ovid tells us that tongueless Philomela weaves the story of her violation into a tapestry and by signs conveys that the tapestry should be delivered to her sister, the wife of her rapist. When the truth is unspeakable you say it indirectly; when your speech is taken away other things speak; sometimes the body itself speaks with the tics, eruptions, numbness, paralysis that are cyphers for what happened. In the myth, there’s more gore, and then the sisters are both turned into birds—and in some versions it’s the sister who becomes the night singer, the nightingale. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the fairies call on Philomela when they sing their queen to sleep, evoking maybe the beauty of her singing voice or the ways she’s tricked and deceived as a woman.
Keats’s nightingale is not the mortal victim but the transcendent figure, impervious to human suffering: “Though wast not born for death, immortal bird,” he apostrophizes her. “No hungry generations tread thee down,” and I memorized those lines when I first met the poem, or maybe they just stuck, as so many lines I read then have, as though I was laying down a foundation of those bricks. He thinks of her song heard long ago, of the words that last innumerable lifetimes. She is poetry itself or something that poetry—that the durable wings of words and the ether of narrative they generate—brings us to, a sanctuary and a place out of time. A refuge. A place beyond bodies and the flesh. In Philomela’s case, the mutation into a nightingale doesn’t come in time to save her from rape, mutilation, silencing, and imprisonment, but it does save her from murder, if being turned into something other than yourself is survival.
A book: a bird that is also a brick. I arranged my battered paperback library on stacks of plastic milk crates I pilfered one at a time from in front of the liquor stores when they were closed, and then returned them to where they’d come from when I managed to acquire some wooden bookshelves. My birds flocked, and eventually a long row of shelves narrowed the hallway and half filled the main room and piled into unstable pillars on my desk and other surfaces.
You furnish your mind with readings in somewhat the way you furnish a house with books, or rather the physical books enter your memory and become part of the equipment of your imagination. I was building up a body of literature, points of reference for a map of the world, a set of tools to understand that world and myself in it by reading. Mostly I wandered in books on my own, or read what was given me, an indiscriminate omnivore then, as the young often are with people as well: not sure what their criteria are, what feeds them and what discourages them. So I read what came my way and then learned enough to trace paths through the forests of books, learn landmarks and lineages.
I loved the physical objects that are books too and still do. The codex, the box that is a bird, the door into a world, still seems magical to me, and I still walk into a bookstore or a library convinced that I might be on the threshold that will open up onto what I most need or desire, and sometimes that doorway appears. When it does, there are epiphanies and raptures in seeing the world in new ways, in finding patterns previously unsuspected, in being handed unimagined equipment to address what arises, in the beauty and power of words.
The sheer pleasure of meeting new voices and ideas and possibilities, having the world become more coherent in some subtle or enormous way, extending or filling in your map of the universe, is not nearly celebrated enough, nor is the beauty in finding pattern and meaning. But these awakenings recur, and every time they do there’s joy.
3
As a reader I roamed free. As a would-be writer, it was more complicated. In my teens and well into my twenties, I mostly encountered the literature of heterosexual men, where the muse or the beloved or the city they explored or the nature they conquered was a woman. Throughout my teens, I wrestled with Robert Graves’s The White Goddess, which seemed to have something valuable about trees and alphabets I could never quite extract from its erudite jumble. It’s a book that seemed to assume that the poet’s orientation is that of a straight man to a female goddess; it might have encouraged some young women to smile enigmatically and levy tribute, but I wanted to be a writer, not a muse.
I also struggled secretly against the men around me who were convinced that they were the artists and I was the audience. Young women like me were supposed to exist as orbital figures, planets around a sun, moons around a planet. Never stars. When I was eighteen, one man was so adamant that I was his muse that he inspired in me a vivid sense that I was literally standing atop a pillar; I can still summon up a sense of being stranded in the hazy grayish atmosphere of nowhere. On a pillar there’s nothing to do but stand still or fall. I was happy to listen and read, but I was mutely against being only a listener and reader, though all I could do about that was bide my time and build my work.
I had been clear that I wanted to be a writer since the year I had learned to read, but I hardly ever spoke of this, for fear of mockery or discouragement. And until my twenties I wasn’t writing much beyond what school required, though sometimes what I wrote for school worked out well. I was reading, hungrily. Classics, reassuring books, discomfiting books, contemporary novels, popular fiction, history, myth, magazines, reviews.
There were comfortable books, and another kind of comfort in recognizing my own condition or its equivalents and analogies in others, in not being alone in my loneliness and angst. Sometimes one piece would crash into me: I still have the poem “Never Before” by Philip Levine, from the New Yorker in the fall of 1980 (I clipped Levine’s columns and taped them together into a narrow strip, now yellowed, exactly as long as my arm, with a deeper amber where the tape joins the sections together. It looks like a bandage but reads like a wound).
It is a poem of devastation:
Never before
have I heard my own voice
cry out in a language not mine
that the earth was wrong
that night came first and then nothing
that birds flew only to their deaths
that ice was the meaning of change
that I was never a child
It spoke to me when I was very nearly a child. Sometimes when you are devastated you want not a reprieve but a mirror of your condition or a reminder that you are not alone in it. Other times it is not the propaganda or the political art that helps you face a crisis but whatever gives you respite from it.
Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting was published in the New Yorker in installments the same second half of 1980 and passed along to me in a stack of magazines. The chapters were, like Jorge Luis Borges’s Labyrinths a few years earlier, revelatory. They gave me a sense of how you could mix things, how the personal and the political could spell each other, how a narrative could be oblique, how prose, like poetry, could jump from subject to subject or take flight. Of how the categories were optional, though it would take me another decade to find my way through their walls.
I wanted urgency, intensity, excess and extremes, prose and narrative bursting against the confines. Except when I wanted reassurances. I found both. I lived so deeply in books that I felt unanchored and adrift, not particularly part of my own time and place, always with one foot or more in other places, medieval or imaginary or Edwardian. I had in that floating world a sense that I might wake up or otherwise find myself in one of those other times and places.