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Christien Gholson's Blog Entries
I don’t know when I first discovered the celebration of Dia de los Muertos, but it seems now as if I've always celebrated it, was born into the tradition.
Day of the Dead is a Mexican Holiday that takes place on the Catholic holidays of All Saints’ Day (November 1) and All Souls’ Day (November 2). There is probably a connection to an Aztec festival dedicated to the goddess called Mictecacihuatl.
One of the traditions is to build a private altar honoring those you’ve known who have died, using sugar skulls, marigolds, and favorite foods and drink of the dead. There is also a visit to graves - eating, drinking, and talking with the dead.
John Berger once said in a conversation with Michael Ondaatje (Lannan Foundation Podcast): ‘What makes us human is the ability to live with the dead.’ The dead are all around us. How is it possible NOT to see them?
At the beginning of October my book of loosely connected prose poems, On the Side of the Crow, was released here in the UK by Parthian Books.
Oddly enough, considering the current occupation of Wall Street, a narrative thread running through a number of the poems in this volume contains the character of Mae Sistore - a mysterious revolutionary who was, perhaps, the catalyst for a silent revolution. Throughout the book, people are crowding into the streets of capitals across America - without signs, without slogans. An occupation of silence.
No one seems to know what they want. No one in authority, that is.
I was in the United States for the past two months, from mid-July to mid-September, helping take care of my father, who was dying of cancer. He died in late August. In my time, I have known people who died of cancer, and have friends who have gone through the daily process of dying with loved ones, but I have never gone through it so intimately myself.
When I say 'the daily process of dying with loved ones’ it is because I think dying is rarely done alone. The person dying obviously lets go of that last breath alone, yes, but the entire process - the tending to the feed tube, constant attention to adjusting the pain controlling narcotics, the cleaning and bandaging, and, more importantly, the words said here and there, the final stories told, the sitting in silence, the living in the paradox of wanting them to die quickly to alleviate their suffering while still desperately wanting them to live one more good day, the deep sorrow and the final letting go (for both the living and the one who is dying) – are all included in one person’s death. A form of death is going on for everyone who knows and cares about the person dying - whether they are sitting at the bedside or living a thousand miles away.
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Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’hierarchies? And even if one of them pressed mesuddenly against his heart: I would be consumedin that overwhelming existence. For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.
Rainer Maria RilkeDuino Elegies
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror. I first read those lines twenty-odd years ago in a one room apartment in an empty Victorian slum house in Jacksonville, Florida. A raccoon and her babies lived in the empty apartment above; a white rat that was probably, once upon a time, someone’s pet, used to slither in through a hole above a curtain rod, slide down the curtain and eat all the crumbs off the floor; and one zillion roaches lived behind the walls, making the bathroom walls writhe and shimmer at night. When I first moved into the place I made the mistake of turning on the bathroom light in the middle of the night, naked to the horror of all those roaches scurrying, scuttling, and scattering over each other – on the ceiling, across the walls, into the bathtub, down the sink drain... I can still hear the sound they made – something like one thousand wet crow feathers thrashing against an aluminum grid.
Memory is an empty Greek restaurant on a Tuesday night. The cook and his brother, the lone waiter, are about to close when a group of five cousins walk through the door. The cousins haven’t seen each other in years. They are all in town for a family reunion. They live in huge cities that have so many Greek restaurants they never bother to eat Greek. Now they desperately want Greek food and this was the only place they could find in the phone book. They all have fantastically loud staccato laughter. It makes the waiter wince. He wants to go home, talk to his wife. Five years in the Midwest and listening to English all day still exhausts him. The cousins don’t bother catching up on each other’s lives. They’ve heard the news through the grapevine. One’s recently divorced. The one who used to paint now works for an insurance company. One has a child graduating from high school. Some of them haven’t seen each other since high school. The one who used to be so serious – always writing about loneliness & Buddhist concepts of the void – her husband was killed by lightning last year. Now she has no time to be serious. One’s a raving alcoholic, though she thinks that part of her life has been kept a brilliant secret. Everyone else knows and doesn’t care. Instead, they tell jokes.
Last week I gave a reading, along with two other novelists, at the Hay Festival. When it came time for questions from the audience, a girl of about nine or ten directed a question at all three of us: “What was it that inspired your books?” What I liked about the question was that it was not asking what inspired us in general, where we got our ideas, etc (Harlan Ellison, at the beginning of his career, when asked where he got his ideas, would say they arrived every month from a mysterious mail order outlet in Peoria, Illinois), but, as I interpreted the question, what was that thing, that moment, on which the rest of the story was built. What immediately came to mind was a moment ringing bells in an Episcopalian church in downtown Philadelphia. Which is odd, because the novel in question, A Fish Trapped Inside the Wind, takes place in a Belgian cement factory town. Stranger still, I’m not Episcopalian. Or even Christian. But there it is.
At the end of our first day in Paris, sandwiched between the Louvre in the morning and wandering down to the Champs de Mars in the evening (to hang out, watch the Eiffel tower lights slowly brighten as the sun set), we went to the Pantheon. I think our original reason for going was that we wanted to get a view of Paris from the upper dome. Or maybe we needed to pee. I can’t quite remember now. When we got there it was about forty-five minutes before closing time and the escorted trips up to the dome had ended for the day.
We were in Paris in mid-May, staying at a one star hotel on Rue Monsieur le Prince, just around the corner from the Jardin Luxembourg. One of those places where you basically check in and they leave you alone until you check out. The woman who runs the place was nice, a bit haggard (since she and her husband are the only ones running the place). When we walked through the reception room door on the first floor, she gave me a look alternating between mercy (for the naïve foreigner) and suspicion, those dark eyes used to the routine –watching so many people walk through that door, day in and day out, while the city endlessly swirls and churns on the streets outside.
Many years ago I lived on the top floor of a three story brick building on Rising Sun Avenue in Northeast Philadelphia. Because of a bus stop directly below the kitchen window, diesel soot endlessly dusted the kitchen ledges, the sink, the already dirty dishes stacked next to the sink. Every fifteen minutes people gathered at the stop. The bus came, they boarded, then the bus let fly a dark balloon of diesel soot, and disappeared.
The old man who lived next door – Charlie – was deaf, so his television was always turned up full blast. The TV was positioned against my bedroom wall. When I first moved in I tried asking him to turn it down. “What?!” he’d shout through a crack in the door. “Could you turn it down?!” “What’s the sound?” I’d try again: “It’s too loud! I can’t hear myself think!” “You miss your sink?!!” “No! No! Think! Think! I can’t hear myself think!” Bad vaudeville in a dark hallway. After a couple of months of this he stopped answering the door. What to do? He was probably living off a pension and too poor to buy a proper hearing aid.
The woman who lived in the apartment below was a nurse who worked nights. Sunday was her day off and she’d make brownies, inevitably trudging up the stairs in the late afternoon, knocking first on Charlie's door, then mine, explaining how she’d made too many and would we like the extras? Charlie always answered her knock.