The Light of the World | Elizabeth Alexander
Perhaps tragedies are only tragedies in the presence of love, which confers meaning to loss. Loss is not felt in the absence of love.
Each of us made it possible for the other. We got something done. Each believed in the other unsurpassedly.
In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard. But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, “There you are, my love.”
“Don’t forget to feed the loss” (Mumbo Jumbo, Ishmael Reed) refers to offerings made to guide us through life.
Cradle song (Jason Moran, on artist in residence)
Art replaces the light that is lost when the day fades, the moment passes, the evanescent extraordinary makes it quicksilver. Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light, but always knowing that the day brings new light and that the ocean which washes away all traces on the sand leaves us a new canvas with each wave.
Survivors stand startled in the glaring light of loss but bear witness.
This is the context in which I meet Kathryn. For these last months she has downs of times asked, how can I be helpful, at home, in the studio, in my office at school.
So now, day after day she comes here with two huge iced coffees from Dunkin’ Donuts, one for her and one for me, and goes up to her station, puts on her earbuds, and cheerfully downloads the music for hours in a row, working her way through each box, learning this man she never met but who she now knows through his paintings, his space, his music, his family: everything he left on earth.
Rilke “The Book of Hours”
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.
Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.
Give me your hand.
When we met those many years ago, I let everything happen to me, and it was beauty. Along the road, more beauty and fear and struggle and work, and learning, and joy. I could not have kept Ficre’s death from happening, and from happening to us. It happened; it is part of who we are; it is our beauty and our terror. We must be gleaners from what life has set before us.
If no feeling is final, there is more for me to feel.
“I wake up grateful, for life is a gift” Ficre
“Oh beauty, you are the light of the world.” Derek Walcott
Beauty is the beloved, and beauty is beauty itself, in its natural form and as made.
Now I look back from forward. Something is fading, not the memory of him but the press of memory, the urgency of writing, the closeness of him. He is somewhere in the atmosphere, but also not. He is fifty and I am fifty-one. He is smiling in the green backyard; now his garden does not grow at all. He is a photograph in the living room; he is, for the moment, still.
But he was always still in a certain way, a North Star, a compass, who was loyal and predictable. I must have needed that; I used to joke with my mother that if my father said he would pick you up at ten and it was ten-oh-one, you’d know he was dead, he was that punctual, therefore that reliable. My parents never don’t call back, don’t reply, fall off the map, check out, and neither did Ficre, ever. Even in our worst moments, he was central, there, rooted at home, and in us.
I never once doubted him, because that is how he made me feel. So I walk forward knowing I was loved and therefore am loved.
I wonder if memories are finite, which is why I keep writing them down. The basket of remembrance has three sides; one is open; can it tilt and spill out? Nothing more goes in the basket, my life with Ficre is over.
Except it is not. Except how I keep coming to know him again and again in the paintings, and in this writing, and in my mind. Traces are everywhere and unexpected.
And so the story ends, or pauses, for as we know it is all one long story.
