Light While There Is Light. Keith Waldrop
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itself—to be no more than clowning in an attic full of junk. But Keith Waldrop’s verbal and visual collages are, above all, eerily beautiful.
Keith Waldrop has said in a number of places, among them this book, that he has little imagination. He must mean that his organ of fantasy, i.e., of invention of something out of nothing, out of the void, is undeveloped, for what could be more creative than his power of uncovering, by juxtaposition and combination, the secret properties of things? He also says that he throws nothing away, that, having no imagination, he is stuck with memory—he has only memory, or maybe memory has him. Thus one of the novel’s finest passages:
My imagination is poor. In my dreams, for instance—where one would suppose wishes can be fulfilled without hindrance—if I dream the events this account describes, they are not usually changed, but in what should be a world nearer to the heart’s desire, they play again, just as I tell them here, exactly as already experienced. It is as if despairing, even of imaginary improvement, I contrive instead to set my affection on the damned world, this very world, as it was and as it is.
I too put Light While There is Light at “the top” of Keith Waldrop’s work—but then, I’m a sucker for narrative, its willing slave. On the particulate level the novel has the richness of the poetry—the ghost-laden sentences; the juxtapositional ironies, moody beauty and sly jokes, of beautifully made collage; and also, since Keith Waldrop made it, there is everywhere that sense that a vast library is dissolved in the ballast water and is somehow stabilizing (or unstabilizing) the vessel. But what Light While There is Light has that the rest of Keith Waldrop’s work does not attempt is, simply, extended narrative. Poetry (this is my defect, I admit) I can pick up and put down. What I can’t escape, once I am pulled into its clutches by sufficiently interesting prose, is narrative. Light While There is Light is a vehicle carrying human cargo that moves achingly through time, taking me with it—and I want to be taken, I want to be entertained, in the raw etymological sense of that word, lifted out of my time into the novel’s time, until it kicks me out in the end, because I need to understand what happens to these characters. Chief among them even as he hides among them, unique, irreplaceable, and one of a kind, is the narrator Keith Waldrop himself.
Jaimy Gordon, 2012
1 “Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop Interview,” Jivin Ladybug, online at mysite. verizon.net/vze8911e/jivinladybug/id53.html
2 Of course, some books listed under poetry in Keith Waldrop’s bibliography feel like prose because they are prose, discontinuous, floating in pieces, framed in white space, but formatted as prose nevertheless—like about four-fifths of the charming Silhouette of the Bridge (Memory Stand-Ins), 1997.
3 From the second book of Transcendental Studies.
Opal Mohler, my mother, with her parents
(Leeton, Missouri).
I
I’ve read many stories of revenants and apparitions, but my ghosts merely disappear. I never see them. They haunt me by not being there, by the table where no one eats, the empty window that lets the sun in without a shadow.
Few memories give me a sense of my childhood—perhaps, later, more will surface. Among those few is the darkened room from which proceed my mother’s moans. This is not a particular moment that I remember; it is the background of many years, nearly all my early life. She moans for so many reasons that it will be difficult more than to suggest their range. Probably I am ignorant of her most exquisite pains. I know enough not to make light of lamentations.
Sometimes I could get her to play the piano. She sat at the battered old upright, her eyes shut, picking out what she could remember of a Chopin polonaise or some cheap waltz from 1920. And then—what really moved her—“Brilliant Variations,” by someone named Butler, on “Pass Me Not” or other hymn. I was fascinated by the way she kept her eyes closed. To glance at the music, just as to read a paragraph of print, gave her migraines.
I knew, of course, the words to the hymns she played, and, whether or not I sang them, they sounded in my inner ear, even through Butler’s brilliance.
Some day the silver cord will break
And I no more as now shall sing
Ghosts gather in such lines.
But O the joy when I shall wake
Within the palace of the King.
It is not for her that I write this. She is dead, safe at last, out of all relation. I can recall, still, what she looked like at particular times, how she moved in certain spaces. But little by little she fades, replaced by an unsubstantial description somewhere in the memory. Best to make it as definite as possible. All we remember, finally, is words.
“I was always so weak,” she said. “My heart.” She held her throat between thumb and index finger, which is how she took her pulse. “When I was sixteen, the doctor said”—an unaccustomed pleasure in her voice now—“I shouldn’t ever have to work, I was made to sit on a velvet cushion.”
She taught piano while still in high school. (How little I actually knew her, her life extending back into the blank before my time—when I was asked for details, after she died, I put down a wrong place of birth.) As my father studied law and then went to work on the railroad, so she went to the conservatory, graduated, but then, fleeing her parents, married and, as they say, had children.
It was not my father that she married—he came later. I have two pictures of her first husband. In both of them, the left arm is in a Napoleonic position, as if he were holding a glass in front of him, but the hand is empty. “He posed that way,” she told me. “He was proud of his wrist watch.” He showed up, years later, with a second wife named Bessie, a sad-faced, decent-seeming creature who apparently kept him with her, and under control, by means of small but frequent doles. He was then (I mean, at his re-entry) a barber in Hot Springs, Arkansas.
My mother’s favorite image was that of the church considered as a great speckled bird, which she took as a simple parable. Alien down here, humiliated and despised, the saints would eventually, at the Rapture, soar. Her favorite color was green, signifying restfulness. She maintained that a room with red wallpaper would drive one crazy.
She grew up in Missouri, an only child, but moved with her parents to Redmond, Oregon, where she went through high school. Whether she was in fact content there, I have no way of knowing, but certainly ever after she looked back to those days as a lost happiness and Oregon as paradise. Just a few years before her death, when she realized, not only that nothing had turned out right, but that there was no longer time for any good to come—no horizon left for any miraculous rescue—she began to retrieve what memories she could of Oregon. There were many eligible young men in Redmond, though her parents were watchful. If she stayed out too late, her mother in a fret sent after her. Her father, mild but dutiful, would seek her out, take her home. When her affections settled too firmly on a certain Lindsay, they took panic, packed up their things, and fled with her back to Missouri.
My mother’s high school graduation picture
(Redmond, Oregon)
At Nebraska Wesleyan Conservatory of Music
But Lindsay came again to mind, and one day she wrote him at his old address in Oregon—this must have been in 1972. He not only got the letter, but wrote back. And what he wrote was that he had never married but had waited for her. I was stunned when she talked, not altogether coherently, about going back to Oregon, to marry Lindsay.