Of Loss, and Dreams, and Roland Barthes
Last night before I went to sleep I was loooking at The New Yorker, and I read a piece called "A Cruel Country," which is recently translated excerpts from Roland Barthes' journals when he was mourning his mother's death in 1977. The little introduction mentioned the "intensity" with which he mourned his mother, but I was not prepared to be drawn into that intensity--and sadness--as I was. The observations were stripped down, honest, excruciating, expressing that sense of abandonment that death brings with it. And, of course, it didn't hurt that they were written by, as the introduction expressed it, "postwar France's greatest prose stylist."
The last entry is one where Barthes quotes a letter from Proust written in 1907 to Georges de Lauris, whose mother has just died. In the letter, Proust assures the recipient that once the first shock of grief and loss has passed, a time will come when he will feel his mother's presence again, in a comforting way. This is the quotation: "When you are used to this horrible thing that they [that is, the days when his mother was alive and they were together] will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible."
As I was making breakfast this morning, I was thinking about that quotation and wondering, is that really true? Or always true? My own mother died 22 years ago when I was 30. It was sudden--cardiac arrest--and in many ways I feel like I am still coming to terms with her death. Sometimes I have a sense of peace about it, but more often when I feel her presence, I feel guilt and sadness--guilt that we didn't have a better, closer relationship, sadness that she is not here anymore and that she missed seeing a lot of things come to fruition. I also feel, simply, a longing for a time when I myself was younger and had more possibilities and when our family, even with whatever problems we had as a family, was whole. These longing have become connected to my mother's loss.
So, as I was thinking about all of this about an hour ago, I remembered that I had a dream last night about my mother that radiated out, as dreams do, to all kinds of other preoccupations of mine. I feel impelled to write about the dream, so it does not get lost. This seems as good a place to write about it as any--but I'll understand if you move on at this point. Other people's dreams can be tedious and baffling.
With that elaborate preamble . . . .
In the dream, I was looking at a note my mother had written to me, something that I had supposedly found among her things. I knew she was no longer alive (one doesn't, always, in dreams) and I think I had looked at it before. In fact, I was filling in words that seemed to be hard to read--or in some cases I thought I knew better what she was trying to express than she did. So I guess I was editing her note, bringing my professional life (I am an editor, in one part of my professional life) to bear in the dream.
The content of the note was that she hoped the guy I was seeing was treating me well and/or that things were going okay. There seemed to be a subtext that maybe this was not the case. At one point, she seemed to be saying that she and my father would "say something" or step in in some way, except that my father ("your father," as she always referred to him) had become so close with the guy. (And here was one part where I wrote over her words, either because they were garbled on the page or because I felt I had a better way of saying what she was trying to say--I wrote something about my father "identifying" with the guy, or having a strong bond with him.)
In the dream, it seemed that the note was in reference to a man I had been seeing in my mid-20s, about four years before my mother died. In real life, there was nothing at all for them to object to about him. We were well suited to each other and he certainly didn't treat me badly. He lived in another city, though, and that was hard. And then, when I had been with him for about a year, he died, violently, in that city, the victim of a homicide. I won't write too much here about my shock and grief over that event, but it was profound and lasting. The part about my father being "bonded" with him seems to me to connect to a moment, in real life, when I was leaving to go to this man's funeral (in yet another city, where his parents lived), and my father saw his sister (who I was close with) for the first time since it happened. He took her hand and said something that I didn't hear. Later, she said that my father had told her he loved her brother.
Here, the dream gets kind of meta. I am in the present, showing the note to one of my friends and analyzing it. My friend is being critical of my mother's stance in the note, saying that she is being overly negative or protective, inventing problems where none exist. But then I defend her, saying, no, you can look at in another way, she wanted to help, but she felt hampered by my father's attitude (and at that point, it's not clear in the dream what particular situation the note might be referring to).
Then there's another scenario about analyzing the note, and this gets really odd. It turns out the note is written on the back of someone's PhD diploma (not mine, although I do have a PhD). There is a picture on the diploma, of a very pretty, happy-looking Latina (!?) woman, maybe mid-40s. I remember thinking, I'm sure this woman wouldn't be too happy to know that my mother used her diploma as a piece of scrap paper. Then, there's more, I discover that part of this document is a long letter from this woman, a testimonial to my mother, who inspired and taught her, and even, it seems, was on her dissertation committee. Then it seems that my mother has had a whole scholarly career, unknown to me, which I am then discussing with a bunch of academics or people related to the academy (publishers, deans?) at a long table where we seem to be finishing eating dinner. It could be at a conference, perhaps, except there is a white tablecloth, so it seems like we are in a restaurant. Leaning across the table, I say to a woman opposite me, with dramatic vehemence, "My mother didn't even have a BA. She had an Associates' degree. She taught reading as a paraprofessional in the New York City school system." (Which is true--and also something I had happened to mention recently--the last part, what she did, not that she did not have a four-year degree--to a guy who lives in my building who is a teacher in a middle school in Coney Island, which is the area where she worked. I was chatting him up a bit, I will admit.) Anyway, back to the dream, as best as I can remember, it seems what I am expressing, or feeling, is wonder or admiration that my mother could have written articles and sat on a dissertation committee, but also a kind of indignation that this went unrecognized, or perhaps that I hadn't even known.
Lots of layers in all of this--and different interpretations are coming at me thick and fast as I write--but they all have to do with particular facets of my life or what is going on now and are a little mundane, not the emotional heart of the dream or of this post, which was somewhere several paragraphs back.
But I will just say I am grateful to Roland Barthes for his beautiful and heart-stirring writing that drew me into my thoughts and feelings about loss, and to Richard Howard for translating these fragments (always remember the translator!).
And, thank you, dear readers, for being out there somewhere.
The last entry is one where Barthes quotes a letter from Proust written in 1907 to Georges de Lauris, whose mother has just died. In the letter, Proust assures the recipient that once the first shock of grief and loss has passed, a time will come when he will feel his mother's presence again, in a comforting way. This is the quotation: "When you are used to this horrible thing that they [that is, the days when his mother was alive and they were together] will forever be cast into the past, then you will gently feel her revive, returning to take her place, her entire place, beside you. At the present time, this is not yet possible."
As I was making breakfast this morning, I was thinking about that quotation and wondering, is that really true? Or always true? My own mother died 22 years ago when I was 30. It was sudden--cardiac arrest--and in many ways I feel like I am still coming to terms with her death. Sometimes I have a sense of peace about it, but more often when I feel her presence, I feel guilt and sadness--guilt that we didn't have a better, closer relationship, sadness that she is not here anymore and that she missed seeing a lot of things come to fruition. I also feel, simply, a longing for a time when I myself was younger and had more possibilities and when our family, even with whatever problems we had as a family, was whole. These longing have become connected to my mother's loss.
So, as I was thinking about all of this about an hour ago, I remembered that I had a dream last night about my mother that radiated out, as dreams do, to all kinds of other preoccupations of mine. I feel impelled to write about the dream, so it does not get lost. This seems as good a place to write about it as any--but I'll understand if you move on at this point. Other people's dreams can be tedious and baffling.
With that elaborate preamble . . . .
In the dream, I was looking at a note my mother had written to me, something that I had supposedly found among her things. I knew she was no longer alive (one doesn't, always, in dreams) and I think I had looked at it before. In fact, I was filling in words that seemed to be hard to read--or in some cases I thought I knew better what she was trying to express than she did. So I guess I was editing her note, bringing my professional life (I am an editor, in one part of my professional life) to bear in the dream.
The content of the note was that she hoped the guy I was seeing was treating me well and/or that things were going okay. There seemed to be a subtext that maybe this was not the case. At one point, she seemed to be saying that she and my father would "say something" or step in in some way, except that my father ("your father," as she always referred to him) had become so close with the guy. (And here was one part where I wrote over her words, either because they were garbled on the page or because I felt I had a better way of saying what she was trying to say--I wrote something about my father "identifying" with the guy, or having a strong bond with him.)
In the dream, it seemed that the note was in reference to a man I had been seeing in my mid-20s, about four years before my mother died. In real life, there was nothing at all for them to object to about him. We were well suited to each other and he certainly didn't treat me badly. He lived in another city, though, and that was hard. And then, when I had been with him for about a year, he died, violently, in that city, the victim of a homicide. I won't write too much here about my shock and grief over that event, but it was profound and lasting. The part about my father being "bonded" with him seems to me to connect to a moment, in real life, when I was leaving to go to this man's funeral (in yet another city, where his parents lived), and my father saw his sister (who I was close with) for the first time since it happened. He took her hand and said something that I didn't hear. Later, she said that my father had told her he loved her brother.
Here, the dream gets kind of meta. I am in the present, showing the note to one of my friends and analyzing it. My friend is being critical of my mother's stance in the note, saying that she is being overly negative or protective, inventing problems where none exist. But then I defend her, saying, no, you can look at in another way, she wanted to help, but she felt hampered by my father's attitude (and at that point, it's not clear in the dream what particular situation the note might be referring to).
Then there's another scenario about analyzing the note, and this gets really odd. It turns out the note is written on the back of someone's PhD diploma (not mine, although I do have a PhD). There is a picture on the diploma, of a very pretty, happy-looking Latina (!?) woman, maybe mid-40s. I remember thinking, I'm sure this woman wouldn't be too happy to know that my mother used her diploma as a piece of scrap paper. Then, there's more, I discover that part of this document is a long letter from this woman, a testimonial to my mother, who inspired and taught her, and even, it seems, was on her dissertation committee. Then it seems that my mother has had a whole scholarly career, unknown to me, which I am then discussing with a bunch of academics or people related to the academy (publishers, deans?) at a long table where we seem to be finishing eating dinner. It could be at a conference, perhaps, except there is a white tablecloth, so it seems like we are in a restaurant. Leaning across the table, I say to a woman opposite me, with dramatic vehemence, "My mother didn't even have a BA. She had an Associates' degree. She taught reading as a paraprofessional in the New York City school system." (Which is true--and also something I had happened to mention recently--the last part, what she did, not that she did not have a four-year degree--to a guy who lives in my building who is a teacher in a middle school in Coney Island, which is the area where she worked. I was chatting him up a bit, I will admit.) Anyway, back to the dream, as best as I can remember, it seems what I am expressing, or feeling, is wonder or admiration that my mother could have written articles and sat on a dissertation committee, but also a kind of indignation that this went unrecognized, or perhaps that I hadn't even known.
Lots of layers in all of this--and different interpretations are coming at me thick and fast as I write--but they all have to do with particular facets of my life or what is going on now and are a little mundane, not the emotional heart of the dream or of this post, which was somewhere several paragraphs back.
But I will just say I am grateful to Roland Barthes for his beautiful and heart-stirring writing that drew me into my thoughts and feelings about loss, and to Richard Howard for translating these fragments (always remember the translator!).
And, thank you, dear readers, for being out there somewhere.
posted by Sarah Sometimes at 12:05 PM
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