“I’ve said before that writing is the writer’s revenge against circumstance … Suddenly it seemed possible that there could be an imaginative life that co-existed with what was, at that point, considerable pain”
– Louise Glück in conversation with Yvonne Green (PN Review, vol. 37, no. 2, 2010)
Introduction: ‘Dementia’ and its Discourses
In my chapter (Saunders, “A Guest in My Own Home?”) for the forthcoming book edited by Teresa Casal and Ana Raquel Fernandes,1 I wrote about how the ‘home’ of our own bodies can turn strange through illness or injury or assault. I was writing at the time of the Covid pandemic when so many of us were feeling frightened and disturbingly separated from each other and our own selves. We did not ‘belong’.
The following year my husband and life-partner was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. The disease is a bewilderment (in its fullest sense) of the mind as well as a pathology of the brain, and so the person’s sense of reality and of him/herself is often and without warning placed under threat. The shift from certainty and stability to a troubling uncertainty and precariousness also leaks into the mentality of the person’s caregiver—think, for example, of the woman in Dasha Kiper’s book (60), who says it is her, not her husband with dementia, who is the crazy one. So, compelled as much by desperation as by curiosity, I have begun to think about how I might attempt to integrate our drastically changed lives into my work, which is a mixture of research and poetry. I need to impart some meaning to what sometimes feels an overwhelming re-alignment of what ‘belonging’ signifies, in our relationship and in the wider world.
For some initial guidance in this inchoate project, I turned to the idea of reflexivity: the assertion of the validity of ‘using our selves in research’, as Kim Etherington subtitles her book, which she tells us is: “based upon the notion that we are constantly changing and developing our identities, and that they are never fixed … [the] full use of reflexivity … [is] an exhilarating and terrifying experience” (15, 19). Writing reflexively about the actual experiences we are living through is indeed a challenge, most especially when those experiences possess the radical capacity to transform and trouble our taken-for-granted lives.
One of the starting places for me is my growing awareness of the limited, negative and medicalised language with which Alzheimer’s disease (and other degenerative neurological diseases) is written and spoken about. I suspect that this way of talking about ‘dementia’ tends both to breed and to conceal a fear: the fear of what is assumed to be creeping unreason, breakdown and eventual dissolution that could affect any one of us as we grow older. It is a language that serves, amongst other things, to distance, to keep at bay, the existential subject. The consequences of this are far-reaching. In her chapter, Chiara Battisti cites Rebecca Bitenc’s view that “[t]he dominant cultural construction of dementia in the West is informed by cognitivist notions of personhood … By defining personhood on the grounds of rationality and cognitive capacity alone, people with dementia become non-persons” (Battisti 180).
We can counter our own tendency to be drawn into such reductionist conceptions by recognising that “[s]ubjectivity, what it feels like to exist, is so profoundly different from what we can observe scientifically [from a person’s behaviour or the pattern of electrical impulses in his/her neurons] that the two realms can’t even be described in the same language” (Kirsch). For me right now it feels important to try to contribute to re-humanising our conceptions of the subjectivity, the mind and life, of the person with Alzheimer’s disease. And so I want to explore, with colleagues, how ‘dementia’—the D-word—is, and might be, alternatively portrayed. Together I believe we can find ways of extending and deepening the discourse so that the personhood remains visible2 and honoured.3 My preliminary ideas take their inspiration from the book by Cristina Garrigós in which she writes that literature can “address questions that cannot otherwise be answered” (1) and—quoting Tess Maginess—“teach us to read both critically and imaginatively; to engender a kind of knowledge and wisdom which, though it might not make us happy, will help us to see under the surface, to see humanness in all its searing, ironic, hilarious and threnodic complexity” (7). Garrigós writes movingly and convincingly about the ways in which Alzheimer’s disease and people experiencing it are portrayed in various fictional contexts.
Poetry and ‘Dementia’
Fiction typically enjoins a narrative of some kind; but Alzheimer’s disease has only an uncertain and compromised relationship to narrativity—“[narratives] without sequence or discernible causality” as Arthur Frank (qtd. in Battisti 176) puts it. Yet there is another way of telling it, as Mark Freeman explains: “In a very real sense, narrative was the culprit,” because it can give rise to a debilitating discontent in the person who is hampered “by all the cultural scripts and narratives that permeated her existence” (Freeman 14).
As a published poet, I hope to explore issues of identity, personhood and subjectivity with and through the medium of poetry, as I believe it has special affordances for an engagement with ‘dementia’—not least because a poem has no intrinsic need of plot or story-arc.
To elaborate a little on this: it is evident that ‘dementia’ poses some fundamental questions, psychologically and intellectually, for all of us who are touched by it, such as:
what is the nature and purpose of memory?
what constitutes a self, especially under duress?
how well do, or can, we know ourselves and each other?
is there such a thing as free will if our brains and/or minds are in the grip of disease and deep disruption?
can we live our lives without telling a story about ourselves, without having a story to tell?
what do we owe to life?
If I may generalise for a moment, poetry, unlike medico-clinical discourse, offers a richly expressive capability for working through, or simply sitting with, such conundrums; it can accommodate, even welcome, a certain craziness. Poetry has the capacity to be alongside us in our terror and ambivalence, because of its allusive and lyrical telling of transitions and borderlands, twilight zones and crossings-over, without the need to arrive at answers. It does not need, does not need us, to come to conclusions or find a resolution. In poetry the prospect of dissolution can be alluded to without fear or concealment.
Nonetheless, it is also always going to be a problematic project, not least because the poet who writes or speaks of another’s life-world inevitably courts the ethical dilemma of expropriating someone else’s reality. I shall explore this further through the poetry of Jane Draycott and Philip Gross.
Which brings me to the question of which poets I shall be reading for the series of papers I am hoping to write. There is a large amount of poetry written by, as well as about, people with various forms of neuro-degenerative disease; such poetry is often written by people who have not had the inclination or opportunity to write poetry previously and the poems are typically raw and poignantly expressive of the experiences and feelings occasioned by the illness. For this project, however, I want to look at the work of a handful of established poets who were already known for their poetry on other themes and preoccupations before their lives brought them to this particular subject. I want to use this opportunity to think aloud about the emotional register and spiritual insight of their poems, and particularly to inquire where they take us in relation to accommodating what I call ‘grief-rage’—the psychically-turbulent and word-resistant emotions of many people with Alzheimer’s (and other similar diseases) and their care-givers. Discovering the ways in which poetry holds this emotional storm—contains it, embraces it or holds it at arms-length—will be an underlying theme for me.
In this, my first project paper, I discuss a few of Louise Glück’s poems in the penultimate collection before her death, Winter Recipes from the Collective (WRFTC). Glück does not explicitly locate her poems within the purview of neurodegeneration, yet they are imbued with loss—of identity, of certitude, of a sense of meaning and purpose, of memory, of loved ones, of life itself. The way Glück is able and willing to examine this existential diminishment feels like an appropriate space in which to begin framing what I want to explore.
But, before I look at Glück’s poems, I wish to acknowledge how very sharp the contrast is between my daily reactions (of fury, impatience, nostalgia, despair) to my husband’s illness and my poetic-creative engagement with the wider literary and linguistic terrain of the disease. The irony of this is bitter.
Louise Glück: Winter Recipes from the Collective
What often initially engages our attention, consciously or unconsciously, when we read a poem is the look of it on its page and—if we have a physical book in our hands—the feel of it also. So this is where I begin, with the physical object itself, a handsome artefact, a slim hardback measuring an elegant six by nine inches (the US size for high quality publications). The front of the dust-jacket is a thick creamy-white paper with some Chinese cursive script and a red-printed seal at top right-hand, and the title and author at the lower left-hand, these being debossed. An image of a fluffy chick done in the traditional naturalistic Chinese pen and ink style crouches in the space between. The back cover is blank.
The overall impression this gives of emotional reserve, a quasi-timeless wisdom and deliberate enigma, is confirmed by the title. For the connotations of ‘Winter Recipes’ are conspicuously ambivalent: we could be about to learn how to scrape a thin broth from the root vegetables that grow in stony ground, or else to be comforted and nourished by something warm to wrap around our chilled bones. And then ‘the Collective’ might, in the light of the jacket’s oriental symbolism, be pointing to the Ancestors; or perhaps instead signifying a specific community (but which? whose?); or indeed invoking the collective unconscious, in the sense of generic cultural resource.
Holding on to this ambivalence and opening the book at random, one notices immediately the wide gutters and margins, the large areas of ‘white space’. Turning the pages, one sees the text set in a serif font on a soft creamy-white medium-weight paper (regrettably, there is no colophon giving technical information about the typeface or paper stock). Such features keep the reader at a courteous distance and the effect is again ambiguous:4 is the elegant emptiness a space enabling a meditative engagement with the silence around and beneath the text, a kind of “negative capability” in which to accept “uncertainties, mysteries and doubts”?5 Or is it indicative of the vacancy, the waste land, that encroaches on any writer’s attempts at verbalising experiential realities?
Before I turn to the individual poems, I should repeat that I do not claim Glück is writing about, let alone from, the specific experience of ‘dementia’. I am instead proposing something more oblique: that, in poetry as in dementia, we can detect a kind of ‘presence of absence’, the spectral image as it were of a reality half-glimpsed, looked at out of the corner of one’s eye, simultaneously known and not-known, forgotten but like a dream is forgotten, latent until somehow summoned back from oblivion.
In a paper I wrote a couple of years ago, “Present absences and absent presences” (Saunders, “Present absences”), I gave some examples of “the multifarious ways in which the presence of absence reveals itself” in poetry:
“absence as abandonment, emptiness, loss, omission;
absence as sky-like, infinite and full of potential;
absence as resisting fixity: ambiguity, ambivalence, elusiveness; avoidance of resolution, refusal of reliability.”
What shall we make of the sense of such ‘absent presences’ when we first encounter Glück’s book? Can we infer that the poet herself is able to make a choice about such things, or were the decisions those of her publisher? Whatever the case, the book’s and the poems’ physical appearance are a discreet invitation to read the poetic text in a particular way, with particular expectations, stirring particular associations, memories, sense-perceptions.
Thanks to the internet, we can also hear the sound of Glück’s voice,6 which is neither affectless nor incantatory but instead restrained, contained, almost deadpan, with a little rasp in the throat like a sub-text; sometimes a word will end abruptly, as if the act of speaking has become too effortful. Glück seems to be channelling the poem and its difficult resonances rather than merely expressing herself. Listen to the nerve-rackingly quiet articulation of the final stanza or two of section 3 of “Landscape”— “one match was all it took …//… – the deadness in place already/so to speak.”7
It seems to me that there is a ‘presence’ in Glück’s utterances, which both is and is not her—the voice of the poet within and beyond the person.
To take the idea of ‘absent presences’ a little further, let me return to the paper I wrote, to the point where I noted that it is typical of the photographs I take that they contain vacancies, like a roofless church or blurred reflection (Saunders). I suggested that “[t]hese absences inevitably evoke, or turn themselves into, spectral presences:
impossible not to see with one’s mind’s eye the ghost of that roof, the trace of the thing that once was but no longer is—a way of seeing and being that’s perhaps captured in the Portuguese word saudade;
impossible not to begin (and impossible to finish) filling that infinity with something, even just a floating bluish-greyish aura;
impossible not to look harder or deeper into the infinitely-regressing space and try to seek out its occupants, even though they may be nothing more than traces left by the passage of some itinerant reality.”
I want now to see how far these notions accord with what I think we can read and hear in four poems from Winter Recipes from the Collective; and also to ponder about the presence or absence of ‘grief-rage’.
Four Poems
i. “Poem” (WRFTC 3–4)
This is the opening poem in the collection and it signals that, despite the personal pronouns that predominate from the second stanza onwards, we shall be encountering in this book a poetic that is not so much personal as transpersonal.
A boy and a girl appear in the first stanza, but obliquely, being likened to “Day and night com[ing]/hand in hand”. They arrive out of the blue, bringing no geographic or historical coordinates with them but behaving like universal characters in a folk-tale; they “eat wild berries out of a dish” and “climb the high ice-covered mountain” before they “fly away”. The only other creatures in the poem are the unidentified birds, which are depicted on the dish from which the boy and girl eat, like illustrations in a story-book.
The children are seen again in the sixth stanza, “now … standing on a wooden bridge” from where “they call to us”. What they say, or are reported as saying, is at once familiar and cryptic: “How fast you go”—a declaration inviting no response and receiving none.
As the poem moves forward in its own indeterminate time and space, the children, whoever they are, are revealed to be counterparts to the writer of the poem and her companion. The writer and the other—also undefined—“climb the same mountain” as the children, but are taken by the wind “Downward and downward and downward and downward”. When the children call out to them, their words are muffled by the wind “in our ears”. The children have a house and home, even though their first appearance seemed to find them in the wilderness; but the writer and her companion “are simply falling” as “all the worlds” “go by”: they are homeless, unhoused and forever wandering, as it might be. Each world being “more beautiful than the last” suggests there could be hope or even redemption to be had, until we realise that the worlds are floating or spinning out of reach of the writer as she falls. The effect is not uncanny so much as profoundly unheimlich, unhomely in a metaphysical sense.
The final one-line stanza—“I touch your cheek to protect you—”—leaves us suspended in mid-air too; how is touching someone’s cheek protective? And what danger does the gesture protect the person from? The writer notes only that her companion “hides your head so as not/to see the end”; “Your eyes are closed.” Earlier in the poem (stanzas 3 and 5) the writer has attempted to alter the way things are turning out, by saying a prayer “for the wind to lift us” and then trying comfort the other by singing “as mother sang to me”. These are the prayers and lullabies of a childhood remembered, but understood—even as they are uttered—to be no longer potent in the face of their current aporia. “… you and I/don’t do such things” she says (stanza 2), meaning they don’t, can’t, won’t fly up and away like the children.
The poem’s lexis is modest, unshowy, simple as a fairy-tale; but the language somehow manages to fold into itself an existential enormity, so that the accumulation of fragments—uneven lines that often tail off into emptiness and abbreviated irregular stanzas enveloped in the silence of white space—becomes a creation of visionary, almost apocalyptic, force.
ii. “Winter Journey” (WRFTC 17–19)
A few poems further into the book we are met by a persona who seems to be in the middle of a conversation: “Well, it was just as I thought,”—but then wrong-foots any expectation that we are eavesdropping on inconsequential chat: “the path/all but obliterated.” Which path? Where? Or is this the via smarrita8 with which Dante’s Inferno, the first part of the Divina Commedia, opens? The poem points elsewhere towards that great visionary epic of the soul’s journey: there is a shadowy forest of pine trees; there are dead souls; there is the poet’s need to become lighter, incorporeal; there is a companion whose “presence sustained me”.
But this is not a contemporary riff on a famous old poem just for the sake of it; the journey9 through the snowy landscape is the one into old age, with its obscurities; its flashes of memory usurping, confounding, the present; its nursing-home with cheery nurses and “the advanced cases/… watching television under a sign that said/Welcome to Happy Hour”; its physical and psychic fatigue.
The conflation of present and past may be in the mind of the mother; but it is also enacted in the ambiguity of the poem’s verb tenses. Most of the verbs are in the simple past tense, noting apparent facts, for example, “my sister said”, “The wind blew.” However, in the section recounting the journey back home from Aunt Posy’s, it is not clear whether the mother’s words are being spoken in the nursing-home (where we must presume she now lives) or at the actual point in the past that is being described. To put it plainly, are the reminiscences those of the mother or the poet? We are being challenged to contemplate how memories are created, not merely retrieved; and to wonder about how the journey of life going forwards through time is so different from the journey of that same life travelling backwards through time in memory.
The poem tells us there is a process: “We had moved then/from the first to the second stage,/from the dream to the proposition.” But it does not tell us what the dream was dreaming, nor what the proposition proposed. The stages in the process could be the changes that accompany growing older—“Say goodbye to standing up”. Or they could be purely intrapsychic processes, attempts to accommodate (or reject) the narrative ‘I’ as it tries to tell, or forget, the story of a life.
The characters in the story are mentioned—“my sister”, “the nurses”, “my mother”, “Aunt Posy”, “my friend”—but not described. An ambiguity arises in the use of ‘you’, which could be the colloquial generic pronoun or might refer to the poet’s mother: “the nurses/smiled at you as they passed”; “you could tell/snow was beginning to fall”; “some of you will know what I mean”. It is as if it hardly matters who these individuals are. More potent as presences in the poem are the phenomena of the natural world, the stars, the pine trees and their shadows, the moon, the wind, and the snow, which has transformed the “things that had died along the way” into lumps of itself. This is nature, not as consolation, but as beautiful, unreachable indifference.
The overall effect is of a reverie or fugue interspersed with moments of hallucinatory clarity. When the poem dredges up a couple of anecdotes, it seems to half-emerge from darkness, obscurity, only to sink back into shadow at the end: “some of you will know what I mean”—an enigmatic phrase that withholds the meaning it proffers, and which can be heard in very different ways: as disappointed, for instance, or mischievous, or exclusionary (‘some of you but not others’), or even accusatory.
The themes I alluded to above, of vacancy, infinity, the trace of the thing, the life, that once was, are palpable presences in a poem whose foundational element nonetheless feels like an absence. And absence is, of course, one of the phenomenological aspects of dementia, when a person may go missing from his or her own self, may lose his or her place in the story of his/her life… This is poem-as-allegory, in a dislocated, disturbed and disturbing manifestation.
iii. “A Memory” (WRFTC 39)
The semantic texture of many poems in the book is hard to describe; they are in a mode of address which makes it impossible to separate out emotions from presiding ideas. The ‘feeling-thoughts’, as we might call them, are even more starkly rendered in this poem, which in contradiction to its title does not have the vivid quality of a real memory but rather is an account of how a certain attitude towards life—life conceived of as an imaginary river—ostensibly came to be acquired. It proceeds by a series of declarations, which are not up for negotiation; they are impervious to the reader’s unspoken questions.
For what is the poet’s sickness, “whose origins were never determined”? A kind of weltschmerz, world-weariness, maybe, or the neurasthenia for which modern civilisation is held to be responsible?10 We can only guess. The similarly-afflicted companions whom the poet seeks out are at first “all disguised or in hiding” and, even once they meet, are never described or named. Their conversations, spoken with “a frankness I had nearly forgotten”, are devoid of any intellectual or emotional content as far as we the readers are concerned; and in any case silence was what mostly fell between them.
In the penultimate passage describing—but barely—the riverbank and how the calming effect of the wind in the grass took the poet back to her childhood, the poet seems to be holding out the hope of a nature cure for her soul-sickness. Yet the river of life turns out at last to be Lethe, the flux of oblivion in which all memory of earthly existence is extinguished. To my ear/mind, the poem resolves into a tale of something akin to grief-rage, all the more monstrous for being so quietly told.
However, there is a persuasive alternative reading, in a review by John Wall Barger, which tells the river as coming from another source entirely, and evoking “the Taoist concept of Wu-wei, which sees life (again) as a ‘flow’ that requires of us, rather than force, a kind of non-doing. Glück seems to be … reaching toward spiritual clarity” (Barger). This would certainly align with the look and feel of the book as I described it above. One’s sense of the poem’s tonal register perhaps depends partly on how far one is in sympathy with Taoist concepts. Whatever the case, Glück allows herself to perform, and us to witness, a cool detachedness from the small preoccupations of daily life lived in medias res. This is a poetics of reflection and obliquity, even, one might say, a poetics of old age itself: late style made manifest?
iv. “Afternoons and Early Evenings” (WRFTC 40)
The fourth and last poem I am concerned with in this paper opens up another way of being with loss and absence. It has a joyousness about it, like the halo the late afternoon sun casts around things in the material world, making them numinous. These were “[t]he beautiful golden days”, when “the city was at its most radiant”. What comes to the poet’s mind is the wish “to sleep like that again”, as if the scene being described—the “little wine shop with its striped awning” and “a cat sleeping in the doorway”—still has the intense luminous quality of a remembered dream.
The poem is addressed to a “you” who “were soon to be dying”; although we are not told who this individual is, s/he is being greeted with a loving remembrance of times spent together, given with a level of detail absent from the previous poems I have discussed. These phrases, glowing with the glorious fading light of the ‘golden hour’, are almost like gifts that should accompany the dead beloved into the grave, the gifts specifically of a poet.
It seems to me a remarkable coincidence that some of the phraseology in this poem mirrors the account given by Mark Freeman (cited above) of the progress of his mother’s dementia into, at one stage, “the ecstasy of unselving” in which she was “reduced to exaltation, anointed by her very affliction”. Then, towards the end of her life, “there was a kind of quiescence, a simple state of unencumbered, self-less being, just there, in the world … she had essentially become the world, its sunlight filtering through her … until it was all gone” (Freeman 15, 17, 21). I find it very moving to compare those descriptions with these lines of Glück’s poem: “so impressions of the world/were still forming and changing you” and “when we left it was still light/and everything could be seen for what it was”. There is a sense here that the poet as well as the dying beloved is merging with the cosmos, accepting the inevitability of death while embracing all the pleasure that mortality confers.
Even at the end, when “you could not speak” and the poet could not find or follow the beloved, “you were not lost.” Are we meant to infer that the poet’s memorial words will hold the beloved in the eternal present, like Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”? Or is the poet affirming the continuing and indestructible presence as energy of all matter? Well, the point, surely, is not to guess at what the poet means but to accept her declaration, as pointing toward something beyond the visible, tangible here-and-now. It is the poet’s surrender, fully earned by her renunciation of what is merely consolatory, to being in all its modes.
Coda
Glück’s capacity for making herself disappear as a biographical individual whilst sustaining a poetic presence of immense power and complexity allows her to renounce a conventional “narrative of self”, as John Wall Barger puts it and to explore the “mode of self-objectification” noted by William Doreski, which has become the motif of her work at this stage. We might say that in these poems Glück descends into a purgatorial space where the ego has little or no agency, but where the self continues as a flow of dynamic abstract energy.
Notes
[1] I am hugely grateful to both these colleagues in the RHOME (Representations of Home in Literature and Cultures in English) programme as well as colleagues in other departments of Lisbon University, whose work is significantly supporting my own investigations.
[2] The fragmentation of the self is mirrored in, magnified by, the disconnectedness of different parts of the health and social welfare systems from each other, so that there is no single agency with oversight of the whole person and his/her needs and human being-ness.
[3] My husband saw me reading Chiara Battisti’s chapter and asked to read it; afterwards he said that such writings help him to understand and cope with his illness….
[4] Chiara Battisti says something analogous about the graphic novel, as offering “the counterpoint of presence and absence, intimacy and distance” (180). She goes on: “The gutter, the blank space that usually separates one panel from the following one, is the space for the readers’ creative response.”
[6] Available on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWQUMaI3wPs.
[7] For the text of Glück’s poem “Landscape”, see https://www.threepennyreview.com/landscape-2/.
[8] “Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita/mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,/ché la diritta via era smarrita.” (Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I, 1–3).
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.