Serena Solin

What is the worthy form of perception? 

The worthy form of perception is final writing. All writing moves towards this end, whether it knows it or not. Yet there are and always will be strains of refusal of finality. In revision, one pens in “more,” “not yet,” question marks.   

The baby is, long before he has form. He inspires quick and sure writing. I know he will close the circle, that seasons will never be what they were before. I hear his father tunelessly singing and sense that song will soon be inaudible from beyond the perimeter of all previous experience.   

Events beside the loss of children have inspired sure writing. Evenings after novels. Quiet holidays in empty cities. Raging landscapes, ancestry. Descent. These plaintexts carry no formatting and no typography. No prosody, no line. Gesture and geometry are possibilities in other minds but if they come before the word, they are ornamentation. Writing is signage carved in stone intended to point the way, only as regular as the inexperienced bricklayer’s line. Eventually it is time to put away old strategies of composition, including curation, and to write from the string of unfurnished rooms.  

The last writing is an immortal child. Terrible in its infancy, it never grows, never sings. It leaves the realm of human contact, or the realm of human contact leaves it. In its liminal state it subsumes mathematics and I begin calling it intuition.  

Shorter writings. Crystal passes the threshold for what can be considered alive. Chips of obsidian flake from the wall of the mine. The last writing is born alone under a wedge of moon. But it was abandoned long before that.  

Anguish is foreclosure.   

* 

What passes through the web and falls into the abyss?  

On New Year’s Eve I forget to wear a real jacket. B and I, freezing, stand on the porch discussing what to do about the abandoned car. Tickets line the windshield like orange confetti. We have reported it at the precinct twice. We have made numerous calls and joined the neighbors in speculating about the woman who left it, young and distressed. The police say that if it is parked illegally, they will come. So we push the car just a few feet into the adjacent no-standing zone, report it again, and leave to join the festivities. When we return in the new year it is gone, like it never happened, someone else’s vehicle already parked in its place.  

* 

We are driving in Staten Island at the end of a late winter morning—B, his cousin, and me. We stop for a heavy breakfast at an Italian restaurant. The cousin’s only love at this moment is boxing. He has recently won an important match and must be riding high, though it is hard to tell. After weighing the menu, he says that he will have pasta and compensate by not eating anything the rest of the day. B and I also have pasta. I out-eat even the boxer. He is twenty-four, maybe twenty-five. The two of them would not fit on one side of the booth, so B sits next to me. 

We have come to see a stonemason we will shortly learn is closed. We are also hoping to see the turkeys that haunt the tri-state area like the dinosaurs they replaced. B asserts that they can fly, that powerlines bow beneath their weight, that they encircle dogwalkers on corners and seek revenge when wronged. One road loops Staten Island like a belt, and when we leave it to go up a hill in search of broken stones and winged predators cutting enormous silhouettes against what’s left of snow, someone honks, to remind us where we are.   

Returning from the stonemason, we do see a turkey, not a flock, just one, tottering behind a woman in a pink jogging outfit who has also seen it but is not afraid.  

* 

Pregnant in the backyard of B’s parents’ house, I am beginning to struggle to cover my new shape. Spring has wetly descended, turning the soil black and bringing out the mosquitos early.   

My son’s cousins—the nephews—are four and six years old. The big one thinks the world is apprehensible, while the little one knows that it is not. The younger shares none of the elder’s eagerness to sit on a lap and “drive the car” up and down the block. Left behind, I name the trees of the yard to the little one, and when I can’t identify, I number the points and say the colors of the leaves.   

He and I know there is a snake in this grass. Others doubt; we are in Forest Hills between the stables, parks, and cemeteries; who would believe that walked dogs, backyard mechanics, and landscapers would leave a place for a snake to hide? Why would the rabbits stop to snack so confidently, so vulnerable in the dew? Nonetheless, we are sure. Neither of us have seen it but we are afraid.  

The presence of the nephews makes the baby twist in my belly, ready to leap up and play.  

* 

Spring, warmer than springs before. I am returning from brief abscondment to a more northeasterly state. I am so pregnant it is hard to drive. Someone describes this as my last solo excursion but I find this silly, as I am already not alone.   

I narrate the journey stupidly to the baby. A rest stop is a bathroom with a store attached. Motorcycles are beautiful but the people who ride them are not. Music is a way of recalling scents, scents are memories, Emily is a friend from the Midwest relocated, and Mark is only her new partner to us because we do not visit often. Delay, distraction, and detour are permissible when your father’s not around, so we pull off at the third beach advertised.   

Recently I have been pleading don’t shred Mommy on your way out and please be normal despite that glass of wine, but the beach is no place for begging or prayer or even conversation with the unborn. The beach is for standing a safe distance from the water, nudging the baby with a pushy hand, thinking myself a rather poetic silhouette, swollen in my short brown dress and sore from the weight, observing the simple structures of restrooms and signage, listening to the soft chatter of an older couple as they pass, envisioning a hearty dinner and dismissing it immediately, as there is no room inside me for anything but my son, who I don’t know yet is my son—in short, a stopover, a long instant of tans and blues that are only gradients of grey, which is all he knew of life, the only sounds low voices and rushing.  

* 

Bruised and bleeding, I shuffle from the hospital doors to the parking lot and am grateful to take the elevator, though B’s car is parked just one level up. The car is the same as I left it. I am vexed not by the trash on the floor in front of the passenger seat, but by the layer of important documents, which triggers an urge to file so deeply rooted in me that for a moment I forget that our son was born yesterday, and that he is going to die.   

I choose the place we go. When we arrive to find it closed, I choose the second place we go. It is almost midnight on Long Island in summer; teenagers emerge from the gas station with slushies and bags of ice and disappear into the darkness; water towers. We are moving at an incredible speed relative to the traffic we are used to. It takes us only fifteen minutes to travel almost twenty miles. No lights in the houses.  

At the diner, the faces of more teenagers, inaudible behind the glass window, select silently from a display of gelato. It is difficult to open my legs far enough to climb out of the car. As I work out how to do it B is concertedly not watching. I shuffle so slowly I get a good look at every car in the lot. By the entrance there is a black pickup, American, 2009 or ’10, clean (we are in the suburbs) but not too clean, with the license plate FEAR HIM. Check that out, I say to B, who has also seen it but is not afraid.  

* 

Where does the soul reside?  

Early on one knows what kind of parent one wants to be, at first through medical ethics. The sex of a child is ascertainable just ten weeks after conception because if it is male the mother’s blood will read male, or one can request redaction of that information. This is among the happiest qualities an unborn child can impart—not the sex itself, but proof of physical change, chimerism.  

“The space of the page is finite,” writes Drucker, but the page is not the field of writing. Typesetters say that typesetting is ten percent type and ninety percent space. “The advantage is to ‘place’ the thing, instead of it wallowing around sort of outside, in the universe,” Olson writes of the soul. The thing must be placed if it is to be shared. Set type reiterates centuries of orthodoxy even when it is broken and masterfully or experimentally remade, so too the soul and all it is capable of thinking.   

But the child was not meant to be shared or embodied. When they say his liver or his kidneys, I brush it off in disbelief. Some writing never departs from the margins. The worthy form of perception is his warmth against my breast and the cardinals people begin to notice when someone dear to them has died.  

* 

When my son and I leave our home on the journey towards his grave, home, this “uncommon place,” undergoes no physical or spiritual change. There is no question of returning to the house where I grew up, though it is just an hour’s drive away from where we bury him on a Monday morning. “At bottom I have already undergone the test of my own view of life,” Nietzsche, age thirty-five, writes to his friend Peter Gast of his migraines. “I shall not come to you myself… there are states in which it seems to me more fitting to return to the neighborhood of one’s mother, one’s home, and the memories of one’s childhood.” After the funeral, my sister, two friends, and I flee the city along up Route 1 into the gnarled wrist of Massachusetts. We could be mistaken for any sedan of New York women on vacation. The muscles I call on to stand me up and sit me down regain their power, and within a few days, all the aches and pains of pregnancy go away. 

It is the weekend of the Fourth of July and the weather is drizzly. The colors of sand and sky are the same. The house we have chosen could be called yellow on any other occasion. The four of us move through shopping at the town store, cooking seafood, washing dishes, driving, buying booze, rising early, all in seamless revolutions. I had planned to bring the baby on this same trip later in the summer but had made no real arrangements for it. I had not truly believed that it would happen, that we would put the baby in his oversized hat—and indeed, in his short life, he is only ever outside for a few moments.  

When I return without him, home is the same as it always was.  

The first half of the year—my pregnancy—is dominated by rain. After the summer an historical drought, then winter begins in earnest. Texts I once found complex and gorgeous drain to their skeletons and then to their rivers, repetitions and spaces between words and grafs. In typesetting, orphans are lines marooned at the bottom of a page, while widows are alone at the top. A cruder way to remember is that orphans have no past and widows, no future—and the cruder way is always more memorable. “Have I made it clear what kind of task I proposed myself in this book? … It certainly is too bad that I had to obscure and spoil Dionysiac hints with formulas borrowed from Schopenhauer, but there is another feature [which] seems even worse in retrospect… my urge to hope when there was nothing left to hope for.” Nietzsche, who had no children, revises his first book with the advantage of hindsight. He prays that God’s absolute truth is something else. Traversing the mind of another requires the memorization of constellations which are mnemonics for stars, but if all maps are partial, so is navigation.     

* 

How does one accept life in a universe of chance?  

How does one know it is a universe of chance? Isn’t everything we marvel at equal proof of a universe of design? For a shining moment this last question seems thrilling and important, and just as soon it becomes clear that there is hardly any difference.   

The news makes its way to me that the rules of baseball are changing again. Pitch clocks, bigger bases, pickoffs, infield shifts, each team starts with a runner on second base after the tenth inning. Constraint writing. Minute changes have unintended effects. The days fill like a scorecard, coded notations in pencil. Sometimes I am up to bat, then I am in the field. The Mets are eliminated and then the Yankees. The voice of the crowd rises feverishly, people in the bars holler at the televisions and pound their fists, but I can only dimly hear them from deep in the outfield where cicadas are screaming.   

In school I encounter the notion that writing is an imposition on the mind’s prelinguistic sensory and emotional capabilities. I read that this has been studied and can be seen glowing on magnetic images and in child psychology, something “behind” writing that is capable of purer subjectivity, something that experiences more fully and expresses itself in speech, music, and movement, something writing tries and fails to access and convey. Writing is associated with logic, law, power, and depersonalization, and the implications are grim. The usefulness of writing is not questioned, but I sense a desire for a more flexible mode. Had I been my mother perhaps I would have danced my lost child. What would history be in puppetry, mime, programming language, or batik? What would he sound like in theremin; what would he look like in flower? Had he lived, perhaps I would have known. But in writing he becomes more like he was. The feigned distance, the disappearance of anything that looks too much like us into letterfit and ligature, suits him. He becomes not his first name and not our surname, which he never knew, not his parentage nor his circumstance, not even his sleep and what came after. On the page he is each of his potential selves lived to fullness and struck down.  

Infield shifts. I stare at the word “bed” and remember the precise moment I stopped recognizing the word from memory in its bedlike shape and was able to hear with my eyes the sounds the letters made. Which one of those understandings was “reading”? Before I understood phonics, was “bed” a different thing? No, it was what it is now: the place where I am shown possibilities before waking into a world less strange, but darker.   

* 

When does language become more than the word?  

Before the baby, I spend the summers at a park that lies at the intersection of two main streets which, despite this, tends towards invisibility. Almost every day these summers, B plays pickup basketball, I read, and then we get drunk with the handful of men who have become friends over the years. I love the park because it is not a scenic place. You may have been there yourself and never known. The summer before the autumn I fall pregnant, all July and into August, I lie on the bench with my purse as a pillow reading Susan Howe’s The Birth-mark: Unsettling the Wilderness in American Literary History. “A poem can prevent onrushing light going out. Narrow path in the teeth of proof. Fire of words will try us. Grace given to few. Coming home through bent and bias for the sake of why so. Awkward as I am. Here and there invincible things as they are.” 

The following spring, heavily pregnant, I drive past the park a few times after work, the same purple pair of B’s old sneakers swinging from the lamp post as they always have. It is not much as far as fields of dreams go, I apologize to my belly. It is technically within the five boroughs but outside what most people consider New York. The rushing sound is the highway, not the ocean; homeless people sleep here. Here and there invincible things as they are.  

From Howe I learn that around the time of the Antinomian Crisis—October 1636 to March 1638—Puritan anxiety about salvation reaches such a level that a New England woman throws her infant into a well so that she can be sure that she is damned. Anne Hutchinson, around whom the Crisis circles, visits Boston women in her “Childbirth-travells, wherein shee was not onely skilfull, but readily fell into good discourse with the women about their spiritual estates.” I begin to understand that the law of the land is that no law is binding, especially on the birthing mother, the first defector. In this series of images, I do not yet see myself.   

When the time comes, I choose for my son the cemetery between my house and the park. The narrow pathway.  

In The Birth-mark, the landscape of New England is crisscrossed with footprints: religious crisis and the scapegoating of women, colonialism and captivity, textual history and public declaration. Savagery and restoration. All of this in the circle of light in the snow cast by a fire. Sojourns outside, forced or elected, can only be understood within this circle, for there is no proof of elsewhere unless someone returns. Before Jackie, it is still possible to avoid negotiating with the concept of the wilderness altogether.  

Then my son slips out. He scrambles away from me and does not return. I see him “transformed—assimilated” as I approach the limit of feeling and am pulled back by the living.  

* 

But who is He? 

A neighbor assures me that all babies go to heaven if they are baptized, then asks, was he? Because my father is nominally Jewish and my mother is miscellaneously spiritual, and because the Ottomans conquered parts of Europe in the violent Middle Ages, my son swims in grey waters eternally or until something, depending how you subscribe. Of this I cannot bring myself to be afraid. Though I wake hot mornings screaming to know where he is, I know where he is, for I decide where he will go when he is still alive, while we are still at the hospital, when we have just been told he will not return home, which I whisper in his ear that I do not believe. O the mothers who don’t know where their children are buried, or if they are. My own mother is concerned with laying him to rest in the shade of a tree.   

I care less about the shade and more about the view, Manhattan hazy in the west, spitting distance from the narrow road I weave on my way to Costco and B on his way to basketball, the most recent neighbor a beloved grandfather with a smooth, dark stone. A hill so full of beloveds, the gravedigger informs us, the only room they have left is for children’s small plots. A niche in the world the perfect size for my boy. Come winter, someone tells me, the skyline will be even sharper in the absence of leaves.   

What is winter when it is July forever? Taking a friend from out of state up to the cemetery, the clock inching dangerously close to four thirty when the gates close, it seems as though we will not be able to visit him, though she has come all this way. I drive poorly. Though we are not far from my house, I am lost among the one-ways. Maybe we should call and ask them to stay open, the friend offers, maybe you should let me give you directions, but none of this is necessary, for when the gatekeeper sees my face she truly sees it and is terribly afraid.   

* 

Another, more distant cousin of B’s asks me how old I think he is. I admit that he is tall for thirteen. In the rearview mirror, his forehead and brow are similar to B’s, the boxer’s, the nephews’, and my son’s. Angled down, as always, at his phone. This is the boy’s first summer on the job, helping his cousins and uncles gut an apartment. At first there was excitement in freedom, in cash, then the realization that work is hard, must be done attentively, and never ends, only pauses. Eighth grade comes before joy in work. He drinks the iced tea I brought him in quick, deep gulps.   

B has run out of patience with the boy. You don’t ‘get’ money, you earn it, he says. The boy is not listening. When we drop him off, he thanks me for the ride and the tea, what a polite boy, I say to B. He doesn’t listen, B complains. At this I can’t help but laugh.  

* 

Where do we find consolation?  

“Labor teaches you how to be a parent,” I read sometime in the winter. “Take your breaks.”   

Between crying jags, I and everyone dear to me smoke a staggering number of cigarettes. All of us had been at the end of our smoking careers. Besides my sister, I met everyone I love by smoking, and in the face of tragedy, everyone I love returns in their true form. We take smoke breaks from holding and admiring him and holding each other in the parking lot of the hospital, then scrub our hands. When we bury him, the men fill his grave, and then B and I smoke after everyone leaves. The ashtray on the back porch, empty for months, overflows, is emptied, overflows, is emptied. I catch sight of B’s mother smoking on the corner and cross the street. I wind up with packs of the wrong brands, unfamiliar colors in my purse and recycling. I am offered long cigarettes and needle-thin ones, pouches of nicotine salt for tucking in my lip, vapes in an array of hues and intensities.   

To escape town, first I go to the beach. To escape the beach I return to work. To avoid work I go to the bar. To avoiding being at the bar too much, I go to another bar. To escape concern, I arrange numerous social situations and dive into them headfirst. To avoid drowning I stay away from water. Staying away from water, sitting on a stone wall marked private, smoking, I avoid looking at children, especially infants. Trying to figure out how not to be morose around children, I look up infant loss on the internet. To avoid reading the repeat loss forum, I open the blank document, which has always been there for me. To escape the eyes of those who have always been there for me, I make shapes in the blank document, crowding its pure white landscape. Its blankness bears no resemblance to the baby, whose face, if I can say this, was a bit overdetermined, his features already so serious, bright and structured as a church with no shadows. The document as it slowly grows is terrifying in its carcinogenic lack of constraints.   

B texts to say he has arrived. I get back in the car. Today it is just the two of us and I don’t ask where we’re going.