#emma aylor

The book is dedicated to her partner, Craig Arnold, who disappeared while hiking a Japanese volcano in 2009. One of my favorite poems, “Aubade,” reads:

I woke in a gold dress, you, in jeans.

Morning filled wine bottles in the kitchen.

Fine mica glitter of fish scales and salt.

Outside, it was quiet.

You said, That went well, don’t you think?

Sun behind you

I kissed the hold in the light and said: Yes.

Her second collection, The Logan Notebooks, came out last year, and converses with Love, an Index in many ways—in its relationship with other texts (Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, most frequently, as well as contemporary poets), its humor, its concepts changed in repetition, its charming candor—and, as I’d hoped for, its attention to daily love.

Many of Lindenberg’s love poems remind me of a line from the poet Ilya Kaminsky; he writes, in Dancing in Odessa (which I reviewed here in 2012), “Lord, give us what you have already given.” Lindenberg’s poems hold the same quiet commotion of awareness, of both her luckiness and her sadness, of what she has lost and gained.

This complexity of thought—the ability to hold different ideas out in each hand, palm open—is, I think, what makes Lindenberg one of the most adept love-poets I know. She moves easily between profundity—“You’ll find someone else, Sara says. But all I want is to see the same landscape a thousand times and never repeat myself. To know the difference between white and white”—and the domestic, little divine—“The evening we spend trying—replaying the Internet video—to learn the steps to ‘Thriller.’ Barefoot on a linoleum floor under a naked bulb, between a deep exhausted laugh and a swig of purple wine from a box, I realize I don’t feel alone.”

The Logan Notebooks, like its predecessor, commits itself to the exploration of whole messy strata of emotion. In “Improvisation (Distortions),” a poem focused on love’s loss and gain, Lindenberg writes:

This one book claims the author

is dead. But I don’t want to be dead, I want my naked foot to feel heat

in the dirt of this grass-bald yard. I want to sit without fidgeting

in the wild silence of grief[.]

In smashing the idea of authorial distance, Lindenberg crouches down to us, holds out a hand, and does not shy from her experience. She is alive, wild, warm.

Lindenberg’s elevation of the daily to the sublime works particularly well in her new work, which largely records her life in a new place—the titular Logan, Utah, something westward, big sky and new land underfoot. Poems called “The West” and “The Real West” compare the wests of Lindenberg and her guy (this is how Lindenberg refers to him—“my guy”). Her west: “I’m thinking about these things in the car, rocketing across the same Nevada wasteland where, at thirteen, my father taught me to drive. It’s studded with brothels and un-blown-up bomb-testing sites. My guy says, Yeah, but. You didn’t grow up in the Real West.” And his: “A church without a cross on it. A church with a cross and a statue of Our Lady. Our Lady of the Desert Passage. Our Lady of the Wildfire. Our Lady of the Snakeoil Salesman. Our Lady, Pride of the Penitent. Our Lady of the Snows. Our Lady of the Unknown Variable. Our Lady of the Birdsong. Our Lady of the Beggar’s Ball. Our Lady of the Green Glass Sea.”

Lindenberg’s west is a place of radical rebirth coupled with daily lives, of burn-it-all-down head starts and the road stretching straight off to elsewhere:

Sometimes, driving down the West, you’ll come to a place along the road where everything is blackened, soft, and you can still see tattered remnants of flame. They do this periodically to clear out the duff, to keep conditions from becoming catastrophic, to make room for some new not-yet-thought-of thing.

There is a new element in Lindenberg’s work of collecting the visible quickly—a sense that time is running out. Lindenberg refers several times to blindness as a quick metaphor, but in “Things That Are Hard to Describe” (modeled, as many of her poems styled as lists and paragraphs in this book are, on a chapter of Shonagon’s Pillow Book), she describes her fear:

I wake in late winter dawn, open my eyes to find there’s something there. This has happened before, the black smudge and speckle of a hemorrhage in the vitreous. It blooms slowly across my view. Ink-leak into oil. How do I explain this so he’ll understand? Bats flap in my face when I try. I know what’s in store—the needle slides into the open eye, then the suddenly underwater look of everything when the drug goes in. I worry that someday a curtain of retina will tear itself down across the apron of my sight and leave me alone backstage. I could get all wrapped in the folds of that panic.

Lindenberg understands what cannot be spoken, though poetry may well be our best way of getting at it. In a poem named “Things That Lose by Being Written About,” Lindenberg’s notes toward the subject become, in fact, greater by their accumulation:

Pulling out a sweater that still smells of last winter’s perfume. The sound of a slow-moving river. Being a woman, which is fairly easy as long as no one’s around. . . .

A strange desire to touch embers in the fire pit. They wax orange when you blow on them, like recognizing something as true.

Lyric, which is a kind of defiant logic and moves like a crowd. The crack of ice melting in a glass of rye. The strident scent of conifer. Any idea of home.

The items themselves may be lost in the writing, or at least hard to touch, but the whole coheres; the poem stands stacked, more than itself. In contrast to those who find poetry inapplicable to their own lives, Lindenberg finds it a learned language (or one born in each of us) towards which we all move. “It’s not hard,” she writes. “Poetry is nobody’s / native language. Or the only one.” And later, in examining “Poetic Subjects”: “My friend says we never write about anything we can get to the bottom of. For him, this is the place arbored with locust trees. For me, it’s a language for which I haven’t quite found the language yet.”

Towards the book’s end, Lindenberg places a poem called “Insects,” an associative piece relating multiple scenes from her life. This final paragraph-stanza follows, summative of The Logan Notebooks and of Lindenberg’s collection of work as a whole:

In his library, he had framed glass cases holding many species, pinned to white paper in order of size. Beetles, spiders, butterflies and moths, scorpions and crickets and bees. Splayed, labeled. He called that “his collection.” I guess this is mine.

According to its author, The Visionist took ten years to write; the time taken comes through in the book’s tightly woven research and in Urquhart’s careful rendering of each 19th-century voice. Its pleasure is in her pure skill—words that glisten through thickets and simple dresses, as connective and tactile as rough palms placed flat on planks. Just on the first page, as part of a prologue set sixty years after the novel’s action, Sister Charity says:

It is not uncommon, when one is young, to think that life is simple. In my case, I reasoned, it would require little besides discipline and effort. If I labored well, worshiped, confessed, and shunned all carnal desire, my soul would find sure and brilliant its path to Zion. . .  But if we are to be sincere, then we know that we are not made for perfection. However we may try to fit the pattern, it pulls and bunches like a poorly sewn waistcoat and we exhaust ourselves with the fruitless smoothing of seams. I know something of this struggle, and now that I am old, I realize that my youthful presumptions about the way forward were based on a fundamental misunderstanding: I thought life was simple because I thought I was simple. On both counts, I was mistaken.

In its concentration on two distinct female voices, The Visionist primarily places itself as a novel of girlhood—the girl as agent, and the connections made between young girls cast as the most central to their lives. Polly, whose mother brought her and her brother to the City of Hope after they fled their burning farm, was grasping, helpless, before she made her radical action: “These were night thoughts, she knew, the kind that come when sleep will not, the questions no one can answer, least of all a young girl in the dark.” On her arrival, though, she is heralded as a Visionist at the first Sabbath Day Meeting. We first hear of the Vision from Sister Charity’s point of view:

It was then that I heard our labors to be accompanied by a strange noise, a moan so mournful and otherworldly that I felt sure a sudden wind had come up round the corners of the meetinghouse. As I ceased in the dance, I looked upon my fellow believers and found that they, too, had stopped to listen. . .

Surely no man or woman could give voice to such a pure translation of misery. We were in the presence of a warning spirit, one who had something of the gravest importance to tell us.

Then, I saw her.

Who could have imagined such a transformation? The new believer, standing apart from the rest, swaying with eyes closed and fists clenched, dancing—a slow, mournful shuffle—alone in a sun-soaked spot. . .  I can only say that the sight stunned every believer in the room into stillness. But her song—its sounds spoke of suffering without ever sinking into words. In her wails and cries resided all the Earth’s pain and sadness, yet she appeared so radiant, like an angel warrior delivered into The City of Hope to help us fight against the doom she embodied.

Polly’s power, though, comes from her past, and is more centered in trauma than in belief. The visions, she realizes, are those she once used to spiritually escape her father’s abuse:

“You will tell me, please,” Elder Sister Agnes said, “what happened earlier.” . . .

“I am not wholly certain, Elder Sister,” Polly answered. “I hardly remember it, though it was just hours ago. I think back and . . .”

Polly paused, her mind flooded by the memory . . .

“You think back and . . . ?” Elder Sister Agnes prompted.

Polly kept her face purposefully blank. How could she tell this woman that she had not seen anyone’s devil but her own? She had envisioned something nobody in this peaceful place could understand.

“I hear only noise, smell only smells, and heat . . . that’s all I feel until . . .” she continued.

“Yes,” said Elder Sister Agnes. “Until?”

“Until my angels come,” Polly answered. Then my soul is taken away from that which frightens me and I . . . escape.”

Polly’s devil comes to her, yes, the past which she must run from; however, in her are also the angels, and the power to escape. She, like Shiva, holds the destruction and creation of her own world.

Though Polly’s Vision is memorable and important to the majority of the believers in the City of Hope, it is most crucial in its ability to connect her to Sister Charity, who has been assigned as her roommate. After that first Meeting, Charity is hopeful and radiant: “No one had ever before gazed upon Polly with such unguarded devotion.” Polly finds that this kind of love is the ultimate miracle-action, more important still than visions or faiths of a so-called higher plane: “Polly realized that earlier, in the pale gray dawn, Sister Charity had performed no other miracle than to bathe her in love. Such a small thing, yet how it had changed the world.”

In fact, love seems to be the attendant faith of the novel despite its focus on a religious community; whereas spiritual faith depends on “tiny gestures . . . protected from the disturbances of a world [the believers] refused to acknowledge,” love is an arbiter of radical empathy and transformation despite these disturbances. We see this when Polly wishes to deserve Charity’s attention and faith: “Then she looked up and willed the angels to her aid. Please, she pleaded silently. Please deliver me from my past that I might deserve this one person.”

Belief, in fact, is cast as a sort of privilege; when Polly meets Elder Brother Caleb, she thinks: “He lives his beliefs . . . as enthusiastically as he lives his life. Had she ever lived hers with anything but survival in mind?” And it is more complex than simple devotion. Charity’s test of faith throughout the novel results in a doubt that creeps upon her based on the complexity and fallibility of what it is to be human. She mourns for the easy faith of her younger years:

Why can I not be the girl I was when I heard the music of my beliefs in the whirl of the spinning wheel, the boil of the distillery cauldrons, the crisp cutting of medicinal pills? My blessings and prayers I once counted in every stitch, for oh, did I sew my soul into the seams of our city! I was both dust and broom, sheep and yarn, grain and bread.

Yet we are not left alone for this failure of faith; where the divine fails, our feet on the ground and our connections to one another provide something newly sufficient. As Simon puts it toward the end of the novel, “one cannot sing the ballad of a single life.” These interconnected existences are in themselves a kind of grace.

Emma Aylor: Women operates on that continuum of fiction-to-non that has characterized many recent and notable works—Sheila Heti’s How Should a Person Be? and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being come to mind. It’s also a novella that recognizes its own existence; just in the first few pages, for example, the speaker acknowledges both her audience and the book’s upcoming publication. How did you classify Women during the writing process? Did it change form as you sank further into it, or has it always been intended as a novella?

Chloe Caldwell: Last fall I went to Jamaica with Elizabeth Ellen and three other female writers for a vacation. We were all to bring something we were working on, with plans to do a more laid-back version of “workshopping” each other’s pieces. So I brought “Women,” which was not “Women” at the time, of course. It was like three pages of raw anecdotes. I remember being in my bedroom at the villa we were staying in, sitting on my bed. She was sitting in her bedroom across from mine—both of us had our doors closed and we were reading one another’s work. She was texting me how much she liked it. Sounds cheesy but she believed in it and saw something in it from day one. She “got” it.

I kept working on it and sometime in January or February she gave it another read and decided she wanted to publish it. She’d wanted to publish something “like it” and was interested in publishing a novella. My piece fit that bill because it was too long to be an essay and too short to be a novel, thus, a novella.

But I’d never written a novella before, so I kind of learned as I went. I read lots of novellas and novella length novels while working on it: I read Bonsai by Alexandra Zambra, Loverboy by Victoria Redel, The Lover by Marguerite Duras, Walks with Men by Ann Beattie, The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, and The End of the Story by Lydia Davis, and a few more. These books truly informed my writing of Women. It was really fun and entertaining. Also, funny you mention Ruth Ozeki. Her book, Tale for the Time Being is a favorite of one of my best friends and my mom.

Bonsai is one of my favorites! Women actually reminded me of it—especially the part that says “When Julio fell in love with Emilia all the pleasure and suffering previous to the pleasure and suffering that Emilia brought him turned into simple imitations of true pleasure and suffering.” And I can absolutely see The Lover as an influence on Women.

I noticed a few references to women’s writing as I was reading—the most prominent being Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Anne Carson’s “The Glass Essay,” but also Jeanette Winterson and Maggie Nelson and Rebecca Solnit and so many other of my favorite women writers. There’s the one part, too, where the narrator describes a document she keeps full of other women’s sentences, unattributed, that she and Finn [the love interest] have sent back and forth. The simplest common thread I notice between these women’s works is a sort of legitimization of love-writing—that we can make something that is sometimes dismissed as trivial into a meditation that expands into others’ lives. This is all a roundabout way of asking this: How did you approach writing about something so interior and private and often difficult to express?

Is love-writing often dismissed as trivial? I don’t agree. I know this is a thing that people think and say, but give me a book that isn’t rooted from love? It always goes back to love. Just look at the response to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, a book totally rooted in love.

I see what you’re saying—that my book focuses on it and never strays away from it, there’s no other plot. But I read a lot of books like that, such as the ones I quoted in Women, but also many more. I surround myself with this sort of writing, and the people that think love-writing is trivial, well, I don’t want to know those people.

I knew I wanted to write something that dealt mostly with the aftermath of a break up. Not concrete aftermath, like moving things out of an apartment or who gets the kids on weekends, but the emotional aftermath. How you can look the same on the outside but be utterly changed on the inside and how lost that leaves you.

I was interested in how grief changes you, and I wanted this to be a book about living in the space of grief. The kind that comes from a broken heart though, not a death. But a broken heart is a type of a death. I read lots of books about this. I talk to friends about this. I was obsessed with how people “cope.” Like the part in the book where a friend says you deal with heartache by “comedy and roller skating.” Another friend told me she chewed lots of gum, couldn’t stop. Lots of people jump into online dating. Others drown themselves in books and movies. So, I wanted to explore those kinds of things—things you do that are motivated by grief and confusion.

I approached it as I would approach anything I write. Just sitting down and trying. I often write from the force of emotion. I’m into feelings. Like, as a hobby, ha! I talk about them. I like therapy. So it’s natural for me to write about them as well, you know?

Elizabeth Ellen was a great editor—lots of times I wanted to skip over stuff and she would make me slow down and explain. It is difficult to express these sort of feelings, you are right. So I kept writing about it until I had expressed it to the best of my ability. One of Elizabeth’s biggest notes would be like, “Add two or three more sentences here about this same thing.”

I’m absolutely on your side about that, and I love your point that people say it but it doesn’t necessarily ring true. I think that’s more accurate than what I said.

It seems like the grief process you explore in the book is one that is both caused and healed by other women. The narrator is devastated by a woman, talks to women, grieves with women, drinks with women, sleeps with women, loves and is loved by women. The narrator finds both great comfort and some fear in how well she can see herself in other women—how emotions and ideas are mirrored. Can you talk a little bit about, well, women? Obviously they’re important to the narrative and to its arc of emotions, but I’d like to hear a bit about how you thought about it.

I love this question! You’re spoiling me, because you are really getting my book on the level. Thank you.

This is exactly how I wanted the scenario to come across. I wanted to show how sometimes it’s the unexpected people in your life that, well, I don’t want to say “save you” because that’s too dramatic for what I mean, but who come into your life, and they are not the person you expect to get you out of a rut, but over time, or looking back, you see that they have/did/are. They change you, is more accurate I suppose. For example, in Women, that’s what The Female Woody Allen character does. The narrator meets her in a class, and then TFWA emails her, “Hey do you want to go stay in my cabin in the woods?” At this time the narrator is needy from her lover, but her lover cannot provide what she need, even though she THINKS her lover is. So she gets it elsewhere, without even realizing that. And towards the end TFWA is like, “Dude get out of here, you’re miserable.” If she had not said that, how much longer would the narrator have stayed in that city grieving and losing her life?

Same with the online dating. The narrator never finds love with it, but she maybe gets the attention she needs. Or she gets an activity partner. A new perspective. I also think the narrator was using women as her singular resource and the response to that was a multitude of people.

It’s through this that I think the narrator learns you cannot get everything you need from one person—she places a lot of need on the Finn whom she is seeing romantically, forgetting that even though Finn’s a woman, she still can’t provide relief for all of her emotional needs.

You know how at some points of your life—you stop and look around, and you’re like, Woah. My life is not what it was before. My life has become something different entirely. That’s what I wanted to convey about the narrator. She is suddenly surrounded by women in ways she was not before. She was getting what she needed through them.

In my real life, I am swimming in women. Just the other day, after a back and forth with the event planner at Housing Works, she wrote me, “You know so many rad ladies!” because we were planning my book release and I had a gaggle of awesome women who offered/wanted to read with me.

So, I’ll take this opportunity to say, I am SO lucky to have such a posse of women around me. In the past few years, mostly through writing, being a woman who publishes stuff about feelings and hardships online, it has become that way. I could rattle 10 women off the top of my head who I met through writing, who have become an important part of my life. They all support the crap out of me, and I them. It has been so delightful to become real life friends with the women whose writing I admire.

AND we introduce one another to even MORE women. It’s unending!

Have you read this essay “A Particular Kind of Self-care: To A Year of Female Friendships” by Jenna Wortham? My friend Molly Oswaks told me about it. It correlates to what I am saying right now.

Anyway, I am in constant communication with women. We talk about writing, death, hair loss, acne, sex, you name it, all day. We blab on the phone. Binge-email. Text. Meet for lunch, drinks. Go to movies. Go on hikes. Museums. Have sleepovers.

Women and women friends have always been a big part of my life, but as I got/get into my later twenties, I found/am finding a new importance in it/them. They are probably the best thing in my life right now. They are so good to me; they nourish me, and through them is how I learn.

Oh, I loved that essay! I just love The Hairpin in general for writing about female friendships and moms and the kinds of relationships Women also covers—woman-to-woman and made important by that.

I think there’s also something in female relationships that allows a quality I noticed in the narrator of Women and her life—that she finds meaning in opposites, in hybrids, in general multiplicity and more-ness. Like the way she writes about both never wanting to leave her mother’s company and about, a few days later, flying off nevertheless; or the way Finn offers to let her wear one of a few objects of clothing, and she says, “I choose the flannel because I’ve already worn the sweatshirt and the jacket and I like to wear as many different pieces of clothing of other people as I can.” I can see this in The Female Woody Allen character, but I’m wondering if there were any particular characters or plottings you used to emphasize this hybridity and wealth of experience.

I definitely consciously played up the mother character. I read this novel called Loverboy by Victoria Redel while writing Women and it really affected me. It’s about a mother completely consumed by her young son. Obsessiveness to the point that it hurts both their lives. Keeping the child at home instead of letting him go to school, etc. It’s such a twisted and dark book and definitely encouraged me to take the darkness in my book to the next level. Just like, make it really fucked up and painful.

It also gave me the idea to play up the enmeshment between the mother and daughter—so much so that the daughter compares all of her female friends to her mom, looks for her mother in other females since her mother is not around.

I wanted to explore the idea of reaching, yearning. When the narrator needs attention from Finn but can’t get it, she throws herself into online dating other women.

I guess the more females I kept adding to the book, the more I saw how they naturally complemented (or didn’t complement) one another.

I like to think both Finn and the narrator represent dark and light, but they switch back and forth playing who is what at each time. They attempt to balance each other’s obsessiveness—when one is more obsessive, the other backs off and vice versa.

I loved the idea of all the women in the book representing different things: kindness, humor, sex, love, friendship… but overall they each represent one thing, which is love, regardless if it’s romantic or not. It’s about how love can come in eclectic, unexpected ways, some unrecognizable as love, but love all the same.

So what’s next for you, post-Women? Are you working on anything in particular at the moment?

I don’t do much writing when I’m doing publicity stuff. I can’t multi-task that way and I’m out of town for the month of October on book tour with Elizabeth Ellen, Mira Gonzalez, and Chelsea Martin. So I’m focusing on Women stuff for now, and doing readings and socializing. Feels like coming out of hibernation after this past year of writing.

But I’m getting another essay collection together, slowly, and would like to write a young adult novel, and a memoir. I’m just gonna keep going! I do have some vague ideas in the works for books but am apprehensive about talking about them on the internet just yet. How’s that for a cliffhanger.

Like many thoughtful kids, I grew up a little morbid—wanted to be a medical examiner; took too-close pictures of dead seals that washed up on beaches in Canada where my family took vacations; was over-interested in the bog bodies of northwestern Europe—and Caitlin Doughty is exactly what I wish I had had then. In her video “It Gets Better, Morbid Kids!,” she says, “People who make you feel bad about being interested in death are doing it because they are terrified of death, and they’re living half their lives closed off to the fact that death actually enhances our lives, and makes it more beautiful.” The message is directed at death-curious kids who are like I was (and, let’s be real, still am), but it applies to everyone, which is one reason I’m overexcited that Doughty has written a book.

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory covers some of the same territory as Doughty’s videos, but the written format allows her to spread out—to tell more stories from her own life, for example, and to delve more deeply into death customs both ancient and current. Doughty’s work is intensely researched, with a bibliography included, and her extensive knowledge of the death practices of other cultures is one of our first entrances into what could be if the West accepted death for what it is. One of my personal favorites (and Doughty’s as well) is Tibetan sky burial, in which the body is laid out to be eaten by vultures, becoming useful in death by nourishing living things. As she explains in a video that covers the topic, “It’s one of my favorite death customs because I think it’s just beautiful. The idea of your body being taken apart and flown into the air in a million different directions is really, really powerful.” Elsewhere, Doughty describes the way the Romans of the first century used milk to wash the bones remaining among the ashes on the funeral pyre; the contemporary Japanese custom of placing the bone fragments that remain post-cremation into urns, from feet to head; the ritual of Brazil’s isolated Wari’ people, who once practiced mortuary cannibalism as a compassionate act for the person who had died; the way the Javanese wash the dead by “holding the corpse on their laps, positioned so the living are soaked in the water as well.”

These customs stand in stark contrast to Western ones. Doughty traces the transition from medieval Europeans’ relative comfort with death to the West’s current culture of death-denial. Embalming, Doughty explains, began to become popular during the Civil War, when the logistics of retrieving a soldier’s body from the battlefield were complicated by their sheer distance from their families. “The situation,” she goes on, “brought out the entrepreneurial impulses of men, who, if a family could pay, would perform a new preservative procedure called embalming—right there on the battlefield. . . . Defiling the body in this way was considered a sin in both the Protestant and Catholic traditions, but the desire to see the face of a loved one again sometimes trumped religious ideology.” The tradition stuck, and brought about what Doughty describes as “an experience I share with thousands upon thousands of other North American children, trundling past a casket and getting this brief, waxy vision of death.” Furthermore, the early twentieth century “brought on what is known as the ‘medicalization’ of death,” by which the majority of Americans no longer passed away in their homes, but in hospitals or nursing homes.

The problem with these customs is not the customs themselves; rather, it is in their motivations—or lack thereof. Doughty writes,

Every culture has death rituals with the power to shock the uninitiated and challenge our personal web of significance . . . The difference is belief. The Wari’ had belief in the importance of total bodily destruction. Tibetans have the belief that a body can sustain other beings after the soul has left it. North Americans practice embalming, but we do not believe in embalming. It is not a ritual that brings us comfort; it is an additional $900 charge on our funeral bills.

Part of this breakdown between practice and belief comes from the secularization of Western culture; Doughty points out that the “fastest-growing religion in America is ‘no religion’—a group that comprises almost 20 percent of the population in the United States.” It is our responsibility to create new rituals that actually mean something, that are tender and meaningful and help those who have been left in life by the people they love.

This movement, of course, would require that we accept death in the first place. “Death should be known,” Doughty writes. “Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.” After all, 2.5 million people—a group Doughty calls “the necro demographic”—die each year: “We’d probably pay more attention,” she points out, “if no one died all year, and then on December 31 the entire population of Chicago suddenly dropped dead. Or Houston. Or Las Vegas and Detroit put together.” Doughty’s own experiences in acknowledging and working with death were to her “an engagement with reality that was precious, and quickly becoming addictive.”

“When you know that death is coming for you,” she writes elsewhere in the book, “the thought inspires you to be ambitious, to apologize to old enemies, call your grandparents, work less, travel more, learn Russian, take up knitting. Fall in love.” It is, in short, our built-in motivation: something we are born with that makes our birth all the more meaningful.

It is, in fact, simply human. “Some 95,000 years ago,” Doughty writes early in the book,

a group of early Homo sapiens buried their bodies in a rocky shelter known as Qafzeh cave, located in what is now Israel. When archaeologists excavated the   cave in 1934, they found that the bodies were not just buried: they were buried with purpose. . . . We cannot understand what these ancient people thought about death, the afterlife, or the corpse, but these clues tell us they did think about it.

And here is the crux of anthropology, the central question which divides it from primatology even as specialists cannot pinpoint the exact moment of difference: When, exactly, did humans become human? Doughty has a possible answer here. What is unique about us as humans may not be creativity, or intelligence, or tool-making, or civilization: it may be that death, that thing that happens to any animal or plant or protozoa, is something we know is coming.

Yet what is unique to all of us is also what is the same between each of us. During her first job in the death industry, Doughty remembers one day of contrasts and sameness:

One afternoon, Chris and I left the crematory in his white van and drove into Berkeley to pick up Therese Vaughn. Therese died in her own bed at age 102. Therese was born when World War I—World War I!—was still years in the future. After returning to Westwind and placing Therese’s body in the cooler, I cremated a newborn baby who had lived a mere three hours and six minutes. After cremation, Therese’s ashes and the ashes of the baby were identical in appearance, if not in quantity. . . .

Sifting through an urn of cremated remains you cannot tell if a person had successes, failures, grandchildren, felonies. “For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” As an adult human, your dust is the same as my dust, four to seven pounds of grayish ash and bone.

The quotes above are from an advance reading copy and may include some minor discrepancies.

My point is this: Poets are still guardians of the truths of faith, but poetry has less and less to do with the institutions that presume to name that faith. This makes some religious leaders think they do not need poetry, when in fact they need it now more than ever, because within poetry is the same anarchic energy and disabling insight that causes people to seek religion at all. It is the aboriginal energy of existence itself that is missing from most religious services these days. Art has this energy in abundance.

This pairing of art and faith can easily guide an interpretation of Wiman’s 2013 book My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer. So, too, can many other seeming dichotomies that melt into synonyms: human and divine loves; death and possibility; knowable paradox and unknowable truth.

In the book’s preface, Wiman mentions the cancer that initially brought him to faith (and to Christianity in particular). It may be more accurate, actually, to say that his illness sharpened a faith that was already present:

When my life broke open seven years ago, I knew very well that I believed in something. Exactly what I believed, however, was considerably less clear. So I set out to answer that question, though I have come to realize that the real question—the real difficulty—is how, not what. How do you answer that burn of being?

He did not want to “experience grace,” as he puts it in the book’s nominal chapter-essay; instead, he wants to “integrate” that grace, to experience “the poetry and the prose of knowing.”

Wiman’s book is not exactly chronological, but one of the first nodes of being he tackles is love: that is, the interplay between the human and the divine, and what it meant to his spiritual self to fall in love with his feet on this ground. It “was human love,” he writes,

that reawakened divine love. Put another way, it was pure contingency that caught fire in our lives . . . I can’t speak for other people. I only know that I did not know what love was until I encountered one that kept opening and opening and opening.

The openness and space in that love allows the inherent paradox of religious inquisition; in this particular example, Wiman writes, “There is a constant interplay between divine and human love. Human love has an end, which is God, who makes it endless.” Towards the end of the book, he revisits this interweaving:

It is not some meditative communion with God that I crave. What one wants during extreme crisis is not connection with God, but connection with people; not supernatural love, but human love. No, that is not quite right. What one craves is supernatural love, but one finds it only within human love.

This is the messy belief I myself crave, the god in us, or the us in god.

There is also, of course, the god in death. In an early chapter, Wiman expands on Gerard Manley Hopkins’ last words: “I am so happy. I am so happy. I loved my life.” These words, Wiman writes, show that Hopkins had “that capacity of dying into the life that one has loved rather than falling irrevocably away from it.” He expands on this “form of survival”:

I mean something deeper and more durable. If quantum entanglement is true, if related particles react in similar or opposite ways even when separated by tremendous distances, then it is obvious that the whole world is alive and communicating in ways we do not fully understand. And we are part of that life, part of that communication—even as, maybe even especially as, our atoms begin the long dispersal we call death.

Later on, he links this to a snip of his own poetry on his grandmother, whose death in west Texas he had recounted earlier in the book:

And suddenly I am seeing my grandmother again, recalling that habit of mind too attentive to be called passive, too intuitive to be called thought. I am thinking (thinking!) of a presence so in love with life, so in tune with time, that death seemed only to drive her further in:

                  She who in her last days loved too well to lose

                  A single weed to namelessness, in creosote,

                  Blue grama, goatsbeard that is not thriving, is,

                  Amid the cattails brittle whisper whispers

                  O Law’, Honey, ain’t this a praiseful thing.

In the face of death’s prospect, Wiman places the twinned art and faith. Neither of these is a means to some end, but, rather, each provides analogue to the other, a call-and-response that is ultimately more satisfying than one provided by the traditional pairing of theology and belief:

The purpose of theology—the purpose of any thinking about God—is to make the silences clearer and starker to us, to make the unmeaning—by which I mean those aspects of the divine that will not be reduced to human meanings—more irreducible and more terrible, and thus ultimately more wonderful. This is why art is so often better at theology than theology is.

Another paradox, then: in its difficulty and irreducibility, poetry eases a passage. It reduces while not strictly reducing, names what Wiman admits sometimes has “no names.” Indeed, he has no qualms about the fact that art can provide no “true” answers. Truth itself, as a concept, is flawed, he means—an insufficiency under whose terms we must work. (Those terms are compared to those of language, another insufficient thing we must call sufficient in the absence of anything better.) Wiman’s examination of what it means to be Christian, as he identifies, echoes the terms of arguments over fact against fiction in writing that toes such boundaries:

No, to be a Christian has to mean believing in the resurrected Christ, though I grow less and less interested in the historical argument around this: Did a man named Jesus really rise from the dead three days after being crucified in Jerusalem two thousand years ago? The arguments are compelling on both sides, but the whole process of putting faith on trial, the incessant need for an intellectual result, feels false to me. It seems like a failure of vision to even ask the question, much less to get all tangled up in it.

It is possible, in other words, not to answer—and not just possible, perhaps, but necessary to the integrity of the experience.

Wiman does not mean for his book to prescribe others’ experiences. He does not preach. He admits that

I can’t be the man who stands on his belief as on some stark outcrop of rock from which the land is larger, the horizon farther, every path and peril clearly seen.

His book is remarkable in that way: it is highly personal, an answer to one self, that can also encompass all.

A simplified synopsis of the book can come down to a single punctuation mark, and perhaps the most telling way in which Wiman shows the shift in his faith. At the book’s beginning, he copies from a poem draft he says had “fail[ed]” and been sitting for several years:

            My God my bright abyss

            into which all my longing will not go

            once more I come to the edge of all I know

            and believing nothing believe in this:

Ending just like that, the colon and then the breath. He closes My Bright Abyss with this revision of the verse:

            My God my bright abyss

            into which all my longing will not go

            once more I come to the edge of all I know

            and believing nothing believe in this.

—with nothing changed but the addition of that full and grateful stop.