Excerpts from A Mother Is an Intellectual Thing

DEVASTATION

The mind tries to both wall and unwall the self. This I know. I've understood its method as a means to interpret the world, while simultaneously protecting from the violence and chaos that comes with that interpretation. There is little that can be done if one wishes to live accurately and wholly. Pain, eventually, gets in.

Hence, devastation.

The first time I knew devastation, it was not my own. But I understood it, even at age eleven, as a kind of obliteration of the present. A man had gone into an elementary school in Scotland and killed sixteen children. What was there, would never be there again. In my child-mind, it was incomprehensible. But I remember days later, on a chilly March morning, filling my mittens with rocks in the school-yard. I will hold these in front of me, I thought, if a bullet comes flying.

I did comprehend, even then, that the world can take everything away from you.

"Devastation" derives from the past participle stem of the Latin devastare: de-meaning "completely," vastare meaning "lay waste," "empty," "desolate." When someone says, "that is devastating" what they feel is that suffering has been put into motion. I have my own definitions of suffering:

"plunged,""going dark,""constant delay,""an endless reproduction,""a slaughterhouse,""wearing burning clothes in a burning world,""everything, because, nothing."

Roland Barthes defined suffering as the impossibility of being comfortable anywhere. He wrote this in his mourning diary, after the death of his mother. I imagine him shifting in his chair as he wrote it. The chair transformed, now just a stiff object, a hard shape, to which his body would no longer conform. Chair no longer a chair.

My mother is still living, though she is gone from me. A different kind of death, where possibility could exist. But, instead, it looks like this:

Old Latin: Extraneus (not belonging) > Medieval Latin: Extraneare (treated as a stranger) > Old French: Estranger (a stranger) > Modern English: Estranged (what I am)

I am the adjective, as it is happening, in perpetuity. Is it easier, knowing she is alive, that she walks around breathing, her body somewhere on the earth and not in it; in a house, being, where I will never again be?

I also cannot find a chair to sit in.

On November 4, 1977, Barthes wrote: Around 6 pm: the apartment is warm, clean, well-lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother. He has this realization nine days after his mother dies. He is sixty-two years old.

This provokes a memory:

When I was ten, our bunnies had babies and had babies. The mother bunny rejected them, pushed the babies out of the cage, and so my mother took them inside, fed them with an eye dropper, and tried to keep them alive. But they all died. They needed their mother.

(That she desired to mother others, is a sentence that makes itself dark to me.)

I am my own mother. I feel, as Barthes still felt at sixty-two, this kind of devastation.

His ability to see the value in suffering is what draws me to him most. He said, My suffering is inexpressible but at the same time utterable, speakable. The very fact that language affords me the word "intolerable" immediately achieves a certain tolerance.

And then, I live in my suffering and that makes me happy. And, Anything that keeps me from my suffering is unbearable. And later that same day, I ask for nothing but to lie in my suffering.

The writing happened in bursts the year after her death. Barthes kept this diary, writing down thoughts and discoveries, not more than a page, a small collection of words. Bewilderment at what's sayable about the unsayable. It's an example; if it's all you have, you can learn to love your own suffering.

I see it now, from where I am. Devastation is when there is no going back.

DERIVATION

I assign myself to a mountain...