Keeping Loss Close

When I first read this tweet around Thanksgiving, it struck me. Bettina's so right, I thought. People around me are all bent out of shape about the travel restrictions due to Covid, and they just don't get that plenty of other people have been dealing with this kind of stuff all along. And I'm not one of those "people" who "don't realize." I realize. I have memories of being in Lebanon visiting family walking with my mother to a phone station to make long distance phone calls back home. I’ve been evacuated, rushed through the passport line, stuck at the border. I’ve also been a passenger on endless-feeling airplane flights since before I can remember. I’m a pro at not really being able to explain to people what it was like in the other places I knew...Bettina is so right—us diaspora kids, third culture kids, were the original Zoom-ers; we had pods before that was a thing; we wondered if it made sense to travel based on what we couldn’t wholly comprehend, and then we did or didn't but we carried on. Unlike everyone who doesn't get it...

And after I saw the tweet reposted a few more times, I kept nodding along as I scrolled but also I started to wonder...why this sense of us and them? Just like we all come from the same place, isn’t it true that we are all diasporic, all immigrants, all parted from our origins violently? Yes, and also not necessarily...If this year has taught me anything it's that truth isn't just about what's here, but about knowing it, about saying it, if only to yourself at first, but, also, as you get braver, as your trust grows, to others too.

I think of a certain point of conversation that I've gotten to occasionally with my therapist of many years. This is the point where I'm feeling guilty, saying I shouldn’t be complaining about whatever I’m complaining about because there are people elsewhere who have it so much worse. Now, when I say this, I’m thinking about Lebanon where I haven’t been for nearly seven years now and I won’t be able to go anytime soon...and now, I'm thinking about COVID, and how it's happening to so many people everywhere, around me, even, but just like when I was young in Lebanon, I am safe, privileged, lucky, unscarred. I think of my therapist saying, "Complaining? Your pain is real, your grief is real"--even though she would never say it that way, so obvious and straightforward, too easily dismissed by me, who, as my therapist and I have both come to see, uses self-dismissal to difficult ends, and often.

I've been trying to write this post for many weeks, wondering what I can say that feels like it matters. Christmas has passed, and Lee and I are away from home--a trip that involved much worrying over for one
so close by, so "easy" in other times we wouldn't have even thought to come here. I am writing these words as I stare out the window of a small apartment over someone's garage at a pasture where a pair of donkeys graze in the winter sun. It is a vacation of sorts, a retreat at this darkest point of this formidable year, a time to be both deliberate and free, to empty the mind, the heart, and also to feel, to think. And I think, for me,
diaspora and travel life has meant dealing with a lot of connection and disconnection and often being unable to really be present with who is in my present, while worrying about who's absent--who I've lost or who I've left behind, what the future will bring, who else I can be, who else I can meet... The fact that "home" has always been so fraught has given it a sense of meaning and elusiveness that will always be with me, though I know I'll keep feeling it differently, as long as I persist in feeling...

There isn't much to do but drive on the swerving roads around here. The landscape is at turns sloping and flat, alternating farmland and woods, the low sun is beautiful. Lee is my captain and our tiny car feels like a boat, until it is a conduit when we park, get out and walk on pretty paths along the rivers and streams, through the sleeping trees until my hands get numb. My body tricks itself into feeling empty, worried, hungry, and I try to think of what it is that's wrong, what I am missing, what I have lost that I, in my way, retain. The gratitude I feel is grief sometimes too, my gratitude is simple and complex.

And yet..."Your pain is real, your grief is real." This year I have lost friends and heroes to disease, to self-sacrifice, to age; I have lost people close and distant I will never know, I have lost versions of myself, lost friends, lost enemies, lost chances, lost time, lost places I might have called home... I suspect this year has brought many of us closer to our own diasporas...closer to the pain of what we might think of as loss but might be more like longing. And it is by sounding these losses, keeping them close that we sail on.

Keedysville, MD

Party Poem

This poem I wrote in late 2001 keeps knocking on my brain, especially the line: "There is mute difficulty in having a light heart, in writing a poem..." Can't believe it's still saved on my computer... A little context: I wrote it the week after 9/11, for a poetry class I was in. It was the fall semester of my Senior year at NYU, and Elaine Equi was my teacher then. She had us write one poem every week with a certain theme. The theme for that week was going to be “parties” and she said we could stick to that or write about what had just happened. I guess I decided to write about both. I’m not sure how I decided that or what was happening then, but I do know what’s happening now. Last night, Lee and I had dinner with his parents at an ancient inn in a tiny town in Western Massachusetts. The people who served us wore masks, and we wore ours until we started to eat the amazing food they served us. We talked about the recent elections, and the strangeness of aging, and we sat under this candelabra.

Party Poem

Confetti vaguely traced the bus’s windshield, skipped bashful along the wind trails across the East River. Misplaced confetti on a Tuesday morning commute as a million white leaves. Memos, faxes, files and leaves. A party invited the world and rocked it in an explosion of sounds and light. It left a million leaves aimless floating and finally falling, steeping in acrid hangover.

This city, a party is life amplified.

A million deaths, like the crisp brown leaves I drag my feet through lately for the satisfaction of sound, are life extinguished, autumn somehow premature and torrid. There is mute difficulty in skipping over streets that ghost a steaming rot, in having a light heart, in writing a poem.

I was born alongside a civil war, artificially nudged to birth to beat the bombs to the hospital. They called it darb, literally, hitting. Confusion hit blood and beauty out of Lebanon through my formative years. To be beat slowly in a country where terror has whispered softly into citizens’ ears for too long, from behind, and also in scattered ways it would expand and scream face forward.

Grey men leaking cigarette smoke, semi-automatic weapons shoulder-slung, brought our car to sporadic halts to peer in oddly and wave us on to heaping watermelon plates and endless cups of Turkish coffee. Nights we were nudged into the house’s womb, safe from darb. We played cards while the edges of the outside world fell away in crumbs. Inside only candlelight, warm and wavering across the queen of diamonds, and adults whispering urgency as background.

The schism between then and now reverberates.

Amplified beats planted feet and pulled them up from the floor in the brimming room where all I could do when I was that drunk was dance and smile and invite the heat that comes from having my body so near someone else’s. On the way home beneath some stars and the new blue, white, and red banners, I disturbed the sleeping leaves.

Amira Pierce

Fall 2001

Teaching Silence

(as delivered at NYU’s 2020 Symposium, Revision and Reform: Teaching Writing Across Borders, via Zoom, on Oct. 23)

Don’t begin your essays “at the beginning of time,” we tell our students, but here I go:

When we first started to teach writing, we didn’t let laptops in the classroom. We made our students write, quietly, as we stood before them.

I miss the silence of their pens scratching on paper, but I chafed at the silence that inevitably came after I asked a question, everyone avoiding my eyes. Learning not to rush to fill in that silence was one of my biggest lessons in those days. I can still almost feel the strain of holding myself back as we shared the same oxygen, the same energy.

Now, we sit before our computers, our screens windows through which we commune. Here, there is another kind of difficult silence, those moments waiting for someone to unmute themselves--this awkwardness between our seemingly silent holograms, this silence that makes us wonder not only if and how we should fill it, but why it matters really, when we are so far away? When it only takes the click of a finger to--

Bodily, we are alone; I am in the front room of my apartment in Bushwick, the actual window beside me leading to the sidewalk, the street, that often distracts, nay entertains, me with its voices, motors, the occasional ambulance bringing me back to the pandemic’s early days when sirens echoed across the city and all we could do was listen. 

How do we allow for multiple possibilities at once, we ask our students? We are here but we are also here. This is the kind of counterintuitive inkling we tell them to be on the lookout for. In class, they practice writing out problems like: if it’s true that silence is an absence of sound, why do we rush to fill it? How can we stop to recognize its fullness? How can we make it useful?

First, we must acknowledge commonly held notions of silence. In her essay, “Silence and the Notion of a Commons” Ursula Franklin denotes kinds of silence. She writes, “there is, of course, the silence imposed by fear or apprehension, its domain ranging from the ‘shut-up-or-else’ to the polite preference not to speak out.” I pause here to ask my students to write about the times they experienced this silence: being silent when you ought to have spoken up, being silenced, experiencing the silent treatment from someone you thought you loved, inflicting it yourself. You won’t have to share this, but please write. They are all muted, looking at me but not at me, and outside cars rush by.

Franklin goes on to describe a kind of silence to make space for and that is “the silence of contemplation; it is the silence in which people get in touch with themselves; it is the silence of meditation and worship. What makes this domain distinct is that silence is an enabling condition that opens up the possibility of unprogrammed, unplanned, and unprogrammable happenings.”

I want to tell her that it’s a real challenge to share this kind of silence when you are using a program, when you are made of pixels. I spend frantic days working to fill all the future silences that might come, by making for students videos, slideshows, typing out intricately worded directions. 

In the evenings, my meditation group which had been meeting monthly and in person for many years has been meeting weekly over Zoom. We sit quietly, our eyes closed, facing each other, facing our screens, for 20 minutes, half an hour at a time. And then, carefully, we talk. 

Though my students and I don’t meditate, we have our rituals, in one of them we slowly read aloud about and contemplate the metaphysics of communication. In “Hope is an Embrace of the Unknown,” Rebecca Solnit tells us that: that power comes from the shadows and the margins,” the quiet places. In “Telling is Listening,” another Ursula, science fiction luminary, Ursula K. Le Guin speaks to us from the grave, she says: “Without silence, pauses, rests, there is no rhythm. Only noise. Significance is born of the rhythmic alternation of void and event—pause and act—silence and word.” It is in this back and forth that we are bonded, LeGuin says, “by the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.” It is by sharing this longing with our students that we teach them to make the space to think, to write, alone, in silence.

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Works Cited:

Franklin, Ursula. “Silence and the Notion of a Commons.” The Ursula Franklin Reader: Pacificism as a Map. Between the Lines, 2006, p. 157-164.

LeGuin, Ursula. “Telling is Listening.” The Wave in the Mind: Talks and Essays on the Writer, the Reader, and the Imagination. Shambhala, 2004.

Solnit, Rebecca. “Hope is an Embrace of the Unknown.” The Guardian, 5 July 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jul/15/rebecca-solnit-hope-in-the-dark-new-essay-embrace-unknown.

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Ideas/Works Referenced:

Gu, Yifan. “The Listen is to Bind.” Mercer Street, 2020-2021. https://wp.nyu.edu/mercerstreet/2020-2021/to-listen-is-to-bind/.

“As a reader, it would be better for me to just get closer to the text and observe and feel directly.”  

“After all, to speak is to blunder. But to listen, is to bind.”

Chang, Ted. “The Great Silence.” e-Flux Journal, 8 May 2015. http://supercommunity.e-flux.com/texts/the-great-silence/.

“The Fermi paradox is sometimes known as the Great Silence. The universe out to be a cacophony of voices, but instead it’s disconcerting quiet. / Hundreds of years ago, my kind was so plentiful that the Rio Abajo forest resounded with our voices. Now we’re almost gone. Soon this rainforest may be as silent as the rest of the universe.”

Childhood Memory

When I was much younger than our students, way before the beginning, one of my favorite things to do was swim to the bottom of the deep end, and listen to the tinkle of the quiet. Why does this remain one of my strongest desires? (Are childhood anecdotes useful as evidence? We often wonder with our students.)

Krishnamurti, Jiddu. On Love and Loneliness. HarperOne, 2013.

“Very few go beyond the extraordinary fear of loneliness; but one must go beyond it, because beyond it lies the real treasure of aloneness...aloneness is something entirely different; it is a state of freedom which comes into being when you have gone through loneliness and understand it. [It is] only then that the mind is completely alone, and only such a mind is creative.” 

Quaker Meetings

Shanghai’s electronic voices

I spent the Spring 2019 semester teaching writing in Shanghai. Alone, in a foreign place, things felt loud. There were electronic voices everywhere. I remember them especially in the dairy aisle of the supermarket, these tiny little speakers mounted on the shelves, yelling at me indecipherably in a language I was only just barely beginning to decipher.

World population growth between 1980 and 2020

In 1980, there were 4.5 billion people on earth, and in 2020, there are nearly 8 billion. [link] In 1980, the Internet was only an inkling, and in 2020, it is what most of us live, breathe and dream. (Statistics are a kind of evidence we seem to think we trust the most, but it is our duty as researchers, as writers, to think carefully about where they come from, how we interpret them, we say.) Since we were born, there has practically been a doubling in the number of mouths and ears here and an amplification of many of those voices.

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Something I regret I missed/forgot:

Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Southern Illinois University Press, 2005.

Marriage of Ocean and Forest

One possibility is that “honeymoon” comes from ancient Persia where literally it meant month of honey, and a bride’s father would provide her new groom mead for the first month of marriage. It is a carefree month of pleasure and celebration, as the glow of new union waxes and wanes. For the month we have been married—the small sphere of personal and work stress ricochets between stresses in the country and the world. We do our best to breathe, to focus on this moment, here. To make the space for that, we took a few days off and drove east to Cape Cod, spent time driving up and down this curl of land that shyly stretches itself into the open sea. We find honey in the marriage of ocean and forest here, the fiery colors of fall against the lushness of lichen, moss, swamp, crashing waves... We share nectar with characters we met, follow paths of nectar, taste it in the fruits of the sea... Worries and stress might be waiting for us where we left them... but we head home sweetened, reset, bonded, buoyed.