Light (Part 1)

from childhood

They

Next to me, bounding up the wooden steps through the cypress grove, my cousin Alyssa seems otherworldly in their beauty. Tall and athletic, one side of their head buzzed short, half-Korean and half-white, they stand outside of categories. At the party, where everyone wore white and blue, they wore burnt orange and a green stone necklace from my grandmother, a head taller than the women.

I strain not to write “she.” In my mind, she is a she, which is fine with them, they say, though they prefer they. I struggle to match her self-image with my image of us from our youth, running barefoot through the gap in the fence that separated our backyards.

What good is this incomplete, outdated vision? Does it belong on a page, imprinted as if it were fact? How can I even speak of Alyssa to Alyssa? To my mom, who is undoubtedly disturbed to learn that Alyssa doesn’t fit within the Christian mold? And to myself, struggling with the linguistic bind of “they,” the blurred line between one and many?

The question is, when does seeing interfere with the living? Like sonar into a pod of dolphins.

—

The dead, too. My grandmother passed away a couple of years ago, and it seems to me that Alyssa is the best link to her. They resemble each other, eerily at times; not in appearance so much as in demeanor, their smiling eyes, light hands, and ready, gentle humor.

Grandma lived with Alyssa’s family when they were young, in a dark and magical redwood forest. (At least it seems so in my mind’s eye – rays of light shining on a black-and-white cat, a mask of Medusa.) They used to cook with each other in, I imagine, relative silence, mannerisms flowing invisibly from old to young.

Beside the path, Alyssa puts her nose in a wispy plant that looks like a pile of smoke. “Fennel,” they say, bringing it up for me to smell. Alyssa takes the time to know these things. Of all of my cousins, they put the most effort to stay in touch. They will be stopping by Aunt Helena’s – a woman whom I’ve forgotten, like much of our family.

As we round the hilltop, I wonder at this void.

—

Across the bay, the backyards we used to run through. Their father Hahn still lives in one of the homes. He’s my dad’s younger brother. When Alyssa was growing up, he would frighten them by saying he would die young like our grandfather (“croak” was his word for this). Now, in his late 50s, he keeps saying he’ll move to Thailand, but we don’t know if he will.

That’s all I can say. How could I face him, having made him into some Portrait of a Lost Man? I’ve already said too much.

Them

At the Guggenheim, I ask Shifra, a writer and former professor of mine, why write at all?

Oh, she says with a surprised smile, In order to live… in order to make sense of things. Although at this stage of her life, having finished the manuscript of a memoir, she hasn’t been able to write much.

The memoir, Lopsided, is based on a series of portraits after her mastectomy, which were drawn by her friend Carol. “It was just hard to see myself as I was,” Shifra writes in an early draft. “Carol saw me with more compassion and clarity than I could see myself.”

The two of them had a falling out over Shifra’s ambivalence toward a few of the drawings, which she expresses in her memoir. But how could I possibly love all 30?

Who’s to say which representation started it?

—

At 68 years, Shifra’s memoir is now making inroads with a publisher, a process that is new to her. She left graduate school to take care of her sick brother, to be a mother, a wife. But Shifra kept writing, early in the morning. She never wrote while her children were napping – she refused to think of them as interruptions.

I sit on this image of her, insulating her writing life from her home life, like a second family that can’t know of the first.

Is it true, that artists have to work at an arms length from “Them, the people”? George Oppen raises this question in Of Being Numerous (a poem that is as moving as it is condescending, as if spoken from a mountaintop). In it, he portrays the artist as a kind of shipwrecked sailor:

To dream of that beach

For the sake of an instant in the eyes,

The absolute singular

The unearthly bonds

Of the singular

Which is the bright light of shipwreck

This “bright light” – what is it worth? 

Light

When I was young, I was drawn to dark corners.

I would follow the sound of water into the ravine. By the shaded riverside, I would roll over the wet stones, too young to be disgusted by the bugs and salamanders that lived there. I watched, and I was happy to watch. They were unconcerned with me and my impulse to excavate their world. Yes, they writhed in the light to find new corners, but they accepted my intrusion as a natural event.

What was I looking for there? The same thing that I looked for intruding onto a blank page, marveling at the strangeness of what I made and accepting it as natural. I rarely looked up from what was on front of me. “Oblivious,” as my family would often say, blind to the world around me.

But the world wants you to know it. As an adult, I’m suddenly awake to the people beside me, my family, my Aunt Helena whom I’ve forgotten, these people who fled their world in Korea so that I could sit here with a blank page. What can they tell me about this place in which I find myself, like a salamander in the light?

—

Marcus Aurelius writes of a sunbeam entering a dark room:

That’s what the outpouring—the diffusion—of thought should be like: not emptied out, but extended. And not striking at obstacles with fury and violence, or falling away before them, but holding its ground and illuminating what receives it.

In this sense, the reason for writing is simple: I prefer to open the blinds rather than shut them. I’m searching for a way of speech as gentle as a ray of light. 

I want to look down at my paper and see a world, illuminated, that shines into my own. 

Materials

Still, some corners have a fury and violence of their own.

In the same backyard of the home where I grew up, next door to Alyssa and Uncle Hahn, there was a small patch of woods. Down the hill was an old overgrown greenhouse full of rust-covered paint canisters and old shovels and broken glass, cracked plastic and wooden planks set on the ground to walk over the mud that would build up there in the fall.

We used it as a storage shed. My dad is a real estate man, and materials from his work life would flow into the construction of our home: white sediment, stacks of boards of wood, translucent plastic curtains and blue tarps, wheelbarrows filled with rainwater, rooms filled with discarded razor blades and crusty dead flies.

And there were the strong, quiet men with hands caked in drying cement and plaster.

Around the back, a patch of clovers. One day, leafing through them, I came across a 4-leaf clover – and next to it, a 5-leaf! I closed them in a dirty yellowed book, which was either thrown away or demolished along with the garage I left it in. It could have been a dream.

—

What I didn’t say before, what I’ve come back to say, is that Alyssa’s home next door was once ours. It has exchanged hands two times since then: once to Alyssa’s mom Lisa, who sued her ex-husband and my dad and is now estranged from our family, and once to people I don’t know. (Maybe more times. I also don’t know where Lisa lives now; she wants to keep our side of the family in the dark. The last time I saw her, years ago, I hugged her and it was as if nothing had happened.)

As for the place that’s still in the family, it is unrecognizable. Uncle Hahn lives there with a woman whom he has split up with and her two children with big shiny eyes. The neat grass field is now an overgrown patch, filled with pioneer weeds and detritus. A bench press and a pull-up bar sit next to the barbecue, all misaligned. Unswept redwood leaves, carcasses of construction equipment, all scattered.

They split up, in part, because he promised to refurbish the home and could not. It has never been finished. I don’t think it ever will be.

—

Is all of this unspeakable?

It may be true, as Alexander Chee writes in How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, that

The story of your life, described, will not describe how you came to think about your life or yourself, nor describe any of what you learned. This is what fiction can do—I think it is even what fiction is for.

I wonder, for the first time, if fiction is a necessary step to free myself – and maybe my family – from paralysis. Shuffling the elements of my life to the point of non-recognition, so that I can read them like tarot cards. In another essay in the same collection called “The Querent,” Chee writes about what he learned from reading fortunes, carefully observing the reactions of his subjects:

The only mirror to be found in the cards was something that could show me the possibilities of the present, not the certainties of the future.

Fine, leave the future in the dark – but to see the possibilities of my life laid out, flat and vivid, on a table…

Or can I sit with the facts themselves, face-to-face?

✤

» Read Part 2

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