Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (59 page)

In writing about
Out of Mind
, I have tried to convey what an expansive and visionary book it is, in contrast to the grim expectations readers must have as they pick it up, knowing (from the blurb) that it depicts someone’s descent into dementia. Bernlef helps us to see that our last chapter might be a grand tally of sorts, in which all the scattered pieces of our lives enter into a strange dance. The cost of this plenary spectacle, with the past gliding into and out of the present, with our current scene becoming unreadable, with everything stable going topsy-turvy, is severe, for the proprietary uprights of self, time, and space are radically loosened, are shown to be fictive constructs that will, under enough dissociative pressure, give way. This is a bracing if destabilizing portrait of old age and dementia, for it pays homage to the dimensionality of a life and reminds us that our tidy picture of present-day order—“I” am stable, the others retain their form, life behaves—can exist only at the expense of all the rest that is swept under the carpet, consigned to oblivion.

In this book, oblivion fights back. And we learn that it never was as quiescent as we had thought. The human heart is our longest-lived organ, whatever the cardiologists might say, because it stores the emotional data of a lifetime, and those data pulsate still, live still. In dementia, it retakes center stage. Bernlef has to have been powerfully influenced by Proust, even though there is no paradisiacal celebration of involuntary memory, for the two writers share a sense of the vertical monumentality of all lives and of the staggering drama that takes place when lost time enters the scene with all its shattering power.

One finishes this book with an enhanced sense of human feeling, even of human thought. “Insanity” is the term that applies least here. At no point does Maarten yield to true despair or true chaos. Things lose their names, but he never stops being the scribe, tagging and assessing what he sees and feels, factually describing the hotel room we know to be his bedroom, the old face with brown hair and smooth skin we know to be his wife’s. The world jumps out of its skin, yes, but the demented one keeps tallying what he sees. Yet it would be misleading to close my discussion on this ultimately upbeat note. Bernlef is too unflinching not to render the gruesomeness of dementia’s corrosive effects, and in a striking phrase Maarten defines the exit drama he is being forced to act out: “This body is pressing me out. Like a turd I am being pressed out of myself.” For all the splendid mind work of this tale, there is an equivalent amount of sheer body work, carrying out its wreckage. Soma rules entirely by book’s end.

Maybe it does. Maybe the body finally exits all fictions, all definitions, all significations. Those of us who have looked carefully at the very senile, the very demented, must wonder if this is not our universal end stage, a freedom on the far side of self or meaning. Yet even there, who is to say whether the heart might be conducting its final dance? Bernlef’s novel will be remembered most for the rich poignancy that inheres in the story of Maarten’s descent into dementia. That poignancy derives from the spellbinding mise-en-scène of an entire life in time, of a man’s far-flung memories and experiences now reshaping themselves into a new constellation of striking beauty. Maarten loses his citizenship in the present and thereby loses his wife, his children, and much of his self to boot. But the extended coordinates of his life are stunningly graphed into a new, emergent form, one over which he has no control whatsoever but that writes his life wonderfully large. All the feelings that have ever animated him—desire, longing, fear, regret—take over the final act, tyrannically rescripting everything, erasing “him” in the process. There are worse ways to imagine our last chapter.

And there are better. As grand as it is to have the fuller temporal warp and weft of one’s entire existence become visible and finally interwoven in the tapestry of dementia—and it is grand—there is no solace for Maarten in this. This story closes with a man burning all his bridges—actually burning them, as he tears up family photos and burns them—while feeling a particular aversion and horror for the strangest figure of all, the one who stares at him in the mirror. It is hard to imagine a more thorough form of exile, of
Geworfenheit
. That is why Maarten’s memories of the distant past are so moving, for they are the possible anchor of his life, the affective structures from which he began, the structures that actually composed the person he was, and there would be a certain poetry and justice in having him return, at life’s end, to their fold, to reclaim himself in his entirety. But he does not. Instead he waits endlessly for his life’s winter to finally cease, for the anonymous and formless white murk that ensconces him to yield to some kind of clarity and form. Looking out at this barren landscape, close to the end of his voyage out, Maarten thinks homeward: “I must be near the sea now. Then I can follow the shoreline and cut across the beach to our cottage where Mama is sure to be getting worried. Maybe Pop has already gone out to look for me. I want to be found. I want to go home.”

These heartbreaking final utterances seem those of a child permanently lost, lost in his own psyche that can no longer keep shop. The mind has not so much deteriorated as exploded, wrecked all notion of a cocoon where one might nestle, safe. Home must mean: body plus mind, housed together, “on the same page”; but that precious contract, that covenant, which almost all of us take for granted, has been breached. The oldest romance of all is the link between mind and body: here is the marriage, the union, that matters most. Dementia ruptures this bond, despoils us of this elemental home. We “open out” into time and space. The world of senility resembles nothing so much as a secular, emotional, but utterly alien form of Last Judgment: all your days and works are there, you are the sum of your parts. “You” do not endure, but your heart does.

I want to be found. I want to go home
. That is, I have come to believe, the ground-zero longing, the final injunction, that most profoundly parses our experience of growing old: to go home. I say this because, once again, I recognize it as the recurrent tidings of my dreams. They are always the same: I am back in Memphis, where I was born, Memphis, which I left in 1958 but which has demonstrably never left me. That’s where I lived from birth to high school graduation, at which point I left the nest. In the dream I seek a cab and give the driver the address: 3912 Walnut Grove Road. That’s where I grew up, where my dead parents are waiting for me. As I approach the house, it begins to dawn on me that no one is alive, that the house belongs to someone else, that I can never go home. Then, awake, I remind myself of something that never ceases to amaze me: I never think of 3912 Walnut Grove Road in my daytime consciousness. Moreover, I’ve lived with pleasure and connectedness in France, in Sweden, and especially in Providence, Rhode Island, and Block Island, far longer than I lived in Memphis as a child and teenager. But I never dream of France or Sweden or Providence or Block Island. And deep inside my psyche, locked in a room to which I have no key, is an elemental certainty that 3912 was home and that I can never get there.

There is nothing overtly about old age itself in these dreams. But how else to assess them than as some elemental, stubborn, undeniable reminder that my entire adult life is histrionic, a charade, existing in borrowed time and inhabiting borrowed space, while 3912 is rock bottom, where I belong? How can this be? I’m fine where I am. I’m at home on my range. Or so I think. Only at night, now that I’m moving toward the far side of things, does a voice tell me otherwise, notifying me that I am adrift, that there’s a place I must be when it all comes to a close. I cannot help seeing those dreams as a code language for my end stage. Is there, at journey’s end, a home base? Perhaps home is the inevitable target of old age: not so much whether you can stay in your house but whether your body and mind continue to house you. Dementia signals expulsion of the worst kind. Where do you go, inwardly, as you go down? Must we all end up finding that our bedrooms are hotel rooms, that our bodies are not ours, that our loved ones are only silhouettes standing in for buried others? I do not like to think about what must be coming, what must be waiting in the wings, but that is perhaps why
Out of Mind
so moves me in its portrait of descent: it respects the dignity and sheer scale of the last exit.

Very often in literature fathers must, as we have seen, either exit or be murdered. They wage war with their children. We call this the generational conflict about power that is both culture’s and nature’s plan. What about mothers? Racine’s Phèdre is a mother, but you’d hardly know it, given her passion for her stepson. Strindberg muses about bearded women in one play and puts the crone Polly into a cage in another, so that she can gaze at her statue while ignoring her real daughter. Faulkner’s plot arranges for the menopausal Joanna Burden’s head to be cut off. Mother Courage is in the harness, by herself, at play’s end, with nary a child left. None of the texts we’ve discussed shows us what we know to be central in life itself: a woman who can be both mother and lover, who can balance libido with nurturance, who can meet the challenge of time as bravely and fulfillingly as Hemingway’s Santiago did. Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
does all these things.

Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen, died when Virginia was a young adolescent; her father, the noted British intellectual Leslie Stephen, died many years later. Virginia wrote that her father’s continued life, with its incessant craving for approval, would have altogether smothered her own. I suspect there are many grown children who share her sentiment: the death of our parents is at once awful and necessary. We’ve seen versions of this ever since
Oedipus
and
King Lear
. But there are few of us indeed who then go on to re-create those parents in a work of fiction, writing them from the inside and endowing them—especially her—with a richness that is unrivaled in our literature.

I mention all this in order to place time and death in their proper place here: the mature child evokes the dead mother, and her portrait of Mother—full of wonder and beauty, radiant with love and, yes, power—is itself indelibly stamped by time’s impress, nature’s cruel scheme. Mrs. Ramsay dies in midbook, harshly, in obscene textual brackets, like a casual addendum. In that same chapter, devoted to the wreckage of Western culture caused by the Great War, other Ramsays die too: Andrew the gifted son, killed in Flanders; Prue the daughter, in childbirth. Mrs. Ramsay herself, the novel’s earth mother, senses early on that her children will never again be as happy as they are when young and feels “this thing that she called life terrible, hostile and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance.” Her husband the philosopher meditates about levels of reality, but she, the nontheoretical one, the anima of the family, is the fatalist of the group. Death and undoing haunt this book. Night must come.

But Mrs. Ramsay is the life-giving sun of this book, and like the sun’s, her power is fertile, germinal, felt by all. Woolf presents her gloriously and unforgettably in the round, so as to take the measure of her radiance and aura. One of the most splendid notations comes when she is escorted into town by the book’s young and insecure curmudgeon, Charles Tansley (a houseguest), and he too falls under her spell: “With stars in her eyes and veils in her hair, with cyclamen and wild violets—what nonsense was he thinking? She was fifty at least; she had eight children. Stepping through fields of flowers and taking to her breast buds that had broken and lambs that had fallen; with the stars in her eyes and the wind in her hair—He took her bag.” This is vintage Woolf: this woman’s beauty is a magnet that none resist, and it is powerful enough to transform a drab realist landscape and a fifty-year-old lady into something lyrical and pastoral and arcadian, replete with flower buds and lambs, so ravishing that he must take her bag. People working in the streets stop their work to look at her and pay her homage.

One remembers Blanche DuBois’s fear of the light, her anxiety about the sexual game and the clock that governs it. One remembers Hamlet’s disgust at his mother’s love life. And I’d want to reference Hippolyte’s horror at the hunger that his stepmother cannot conceal from him. Now, Charles Tansley is a foolish boor and nothing can come of his momentary adoration of Mrs. Ramsay, but it is good to see a young man smitten by an older woman, just as it is good to see the older bachelor William Bankes succumb to her aura. All respond to her. Young, old, men, women, children: it makes no difference. This is—this must be—how Virginia remembered her mother.

Gender does not bind either. Lily Briscoe, the book’s spinster artist figure—doubtless the surrogate of Virginia herself—is achingly in love with her, and in one of the most spellbinding passages we see Lily with her arms around Mrs. Ramsay’s knees, yearning to get still closer, imagining inside this woman chambers of mind and heart, figured as treasures in tombs, bearing sacred inscriptions, challenging the lover to read, to understand, to touch, to enter, to fuse with the loved one. Mrs. Ramsay is the novel’s demiurgic figure, its outward-raying sun that illuminates and warms the family, the guests, and the book.

Loved, she also loves. The eight children are evoked with tenderness, each one seen as unique and uniquely deserving, as in the mother’s decision to have Jasper and Rose select her jewels for the evening, realizing that such matters go very deep for Rose, “divining, through her own past, some deep, some buried, some quite speechless feeling that one had for one’s mother at Rose’s age.” What kind of a name do you put on sensitivity of this sort? How many men would be capable of it? It seems entirely right that Lily’s (stalled) portrait of this mother with children would be a Madonna. There is nothing doctrinal in sight, but Mrs. Ramsay’s very being tells us of the nurturance that brings life to fruition, that makes it possible for children to grow into adults. There are so many orphans in this study: Lazarillo, Pablos, Moll, Heathcliff, Jane, Pip, Huck, Joe Christmas; so many unloved children: Antoinette, Benjy, Quentin, Celie, Artie; so many characters who have to make it on their own; so little recognition of the help and love that the young must receive if they are to flourish. Above all, so little recognition that generosity—love as gift, not as hunger—is arguably the single greatest (and unsung) arena for the deeds and achievements of maturity. Mrs. Ramsay serves life in a way that few other older people appearing in this book do: she gives of herself, she seeds.