Reynolds Price's "Back"

Thoughts on this life.

Back

A whole quarter’s silence—
Flesh-colored tunnel with sanguine walls
No time to speak of pain or fear,
No extra breath (and no real
Fear: fear is the luxury
Two years behind me,
A bourgeois comfort like overstuffed chairs
Or flannel sheets and pain
More nearly a bore today
Than the acid agony that blanked all March).
So life, an apparent road ahead
With what seem trees and sky for walls
And natural light. So work. So this.

from Poetry, April 1988

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I have my mom to thank for this one. She recently sent me an unexpected package. In it, among other things, was a beautifully bound copy of a short novella — Back Before Day — by Reynolds Price, whose work I had never read before. I read Back Before Day, a touching, painful story, one that reminded me in its rhythms and language of the prologue to James Agee’s A Death in the Family — “Knoxville: Summer of 1915.”

Back Before Day closes with this haunting sentence:

Fine as it sounded, he understood he was bound for day and the rest of a life that would be as strange as this dream or any, though harder to bear.

And, in Agee’s prologue, he writes:

All my people are larger bodies than mine, quiet, with voices gentle and meaningless like the voices of sleeping birds. One is an artist, he is living at home. One is a musician, she is living at home. One is my mother who is good to me. One is my father who is good to me. By some chance, here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth, lying, on quilts, on the grass, in a summer evening, among the sounds of the night.

Who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth. I think of that line often. Because it’s true. And because it’s beautiful. And I think of that line now, as I write this, because of today’s poem. The title, “Back,” almost certainly refers to a tumor that was found in Price’s spine in 1984. After multiple surgeries and the tumor’s removal, Price was paralyzed in the lower half of his body and bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life.

In his memoir, A Whole New Life, Price describes this poem as “the first daybook poem” he had written in many weeks. It was written in the midst of multiple surgeries to remove his tumor, and in the aftermath of a fall that happened when he leaned too far back against his wheelchair. The chair tipped over and sent him backwards onto the ground. There, too, is another way to look at this poem’s title. The word back does not just refer to a part of our bodies. It refers, too, to direction. And not just physical direction, but temporal direction. The fall backwards, yes, but also the fall back into a different period of recovery, a period Price had perhaps already thought himself past. And so already, with just the title alone, the poem finds itself working within the multiple dimensions of space and time. It’s really special when a poem does this — when it can exist among multiple planes of access and attention at once.

If you take out the parenthetical that makes up most of this poem, it reads as follows:

A whole quarter’s silence—
Flesh-colored tunnel with sanguine walls
No time to speak of pain or fear,
No extra breath.
So life, an apparent road ahead
With what seem trees and sky for walls
And natural light. So work. So this.

I’ll return to the parenthetical later. But when I look at the poem this way, it presents itself as a kind of math problem. The first half is negation, and the second half, roughly, is what remains after what has been negated. The result of negation, in other words. And what is negated? Not time entirely. Just time “to speak of pain or fear.” Not breath entirely, just “extra breath.” And what remains? Well, life itself. Which is not entirely promised or real, but is “apparent.” Is the seeming “trees and sky.” The seeming “natural light.” Is this.

I came across this poem after searching through Price’s available work online after reading Back Before Day. When I read it, I read it again. And then again. I was struck by its immediacy, by the way that phrase “So life” just occurs bluntly, not out of nowhere or out of nothing, but as a surprise of grace or generosity. It is neither resigned nor hopeful, given the context. Maybe it is resolute. But I don’t know if resolute is the word, either. I think such a phrase — “So life” — is the result of a simple acceptance. An acceptance that this is life, and that life contains so much that is real and so much that seems real. The phrasing is repeated twice at the end of the poem:

So work. So this.

Here, too, is more acceptance. I don’t read these short sentences as hallmarks of steadfastness so much as I read them as calming things. I read them in the same way that I read the parenthetical at the heart of the poem:

(and no real
Fear: fear is the luxury
Two years behind me,
A bourgeois comfort like overstuffed chairs
Or flannel sheets and pain
More nearly a bore today
Than the acid agony that blanked all March).

Given the context of this poem — that it was written after the recovery from a fall that occurred in the aftermath of surgery — these lines, and especially that phrase “fear is a luxury,” show the way that loss changes our perception of our lives. The way that loss clarifies previous uncertainties, and renders new things certain. Pain that was once probably terrifying becomes “nearly a bore today.” Indeed, I’m struck by a moment in his memoir when Price writes about his pain. He writes of the feeling after undergoing many rounds of meditative biofeedback:

If you ask me to rate my pain on the one-to-ten scale at any moment, I’ll quickly turn inward, watch the height of the blaze and give you a number somewhere between, say seven and nine—almost never lower. But it’s you who’ve made me watch the fire and gauge it. Left alone with my body and mind, I’m no more focused on pain’s existence than you’ll be focused on the word hippopotamus at any moment unless I tell you not to think the word hippopotamus in the next thirty seconds.

When it comes to this passage, I’m drawn less to Price’s power of the mind and more to one statement: “it’s you who’ve made me watch the fire and gauge it.” It’s a striking statement when considered with the way in which Price describes his process of biofeedback, which involved him imagining the parts of his body in pain as shapes dissolving into a point of light, until he turned a switch, and those parts of his body disappeared into the darkness. What was left in the light remained. There’s something almost too beautiful about that image, too metaphorical. It doesn’t feel real. But it feels special, in an honest way. It makes me wonder how often we are in control of what we light within ourselves. How often we are asked to shine light on the parts of us that are in pain. How often the parts of us that are seeking the light are left out of it. And how often we make people watch and measure and gauge the fire of pain inside of them rather than some more beautiful thing, some kind of light. How often do we do that? I know I probably do it often — return people to their pain, rather than their light.

That is perhaps why I feel in this poem a gentleness, rather than something akin to steadfast determination. It is there in that word seem. It is there in that word apparent. Nowhere in this poem does Price admit relentless truth in the face of difficulty. Instead, he turns toward apparent light. Toward what might seem good. In this way, though the ending of this poem is awash with seemingness, it is also clear. It is full of clarity. Clarity, I think, is often confused with knowledge. It is often associated with knowing something in its entirety. But I don’t think clarity has much to do with that. I think clarity has more to do with accepting uncertainty, and being clear about such acceptance. I think clarity is an act of astounding generosity in this way, because it frees the mind from the very unclear idea that one could possibly know anything. The phrase so life is a clear-eyed statement of the only certainty being life itself: complex, uncertain, full of yesterday’s hurt and tomorrow’s joy, or vice versa.

Perhaps I am thinking of this because earlier this week, I attended my first zazen practice at the Zen Studies Society in New York. I made an effort to do this because I wanted to seek out stillness (and, hopefully, harmlessness) as both a conscious value and practice, rather than to just speak of stillness in arbitrary terms. While sitting (or kneeling, to be exact) and breathing, I was struck by how difficult it felt to simply breathe, consciously, for twenty or so uninterrupted minutes. And, as a result of being aware of this difficulty, I was struck by how insecure I felt. And, then, even further, how hypocritical I felt. And how self-critical. I didn’t think it would be easy, but I also didn’t think it would be so hard. I kept having to recount my breaths, to go back to the first one. My mind cluttered. I thought of pizza, oddly — specifically a grandma slice from this place called Mimi’s. And then I shamed myself for thinking of pizza. And then I shamed myself for shaming myself. It became a long twenty minutes, full of the struggle of trying to swim through the muddy waters of my brain and just return into my breath. When the bell rang to call us back, I felt both relaxed and heightened. Relaxed because of how much I had been breathing. Heightened because of how anxious I had been to do it right, and how slightly enraged I was at myself for having seemed to fail.

I wanted to be more present, as if presentness were a state of constant, solid being rather than, as Price writes, the seemingness and work of this life. The this-ness of life. It is perhaps one of the more complex notions of being alive that different things can offer paradoxical relationships to clarity. Loss might, sadly and tragically, help us clarify some of our values. Luxury, or, as Price puts it, “bourgeois comfort,” might complicate some of our values. All of this shows, at least to me, that our mathematical relationship to life — if there is one — is complex and weird and full of strange surprises. It is not linear. That phrase — “So life” — hangs like one side of an equation, and on the other side is something difficult to understand, even painful, and yet full of light.

I return, then, to Agee’s line:

who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth

It’s a painful line, and an honest one. And it’s special, because it too, like the title of today’s poem, exists in multiple dimensions. There is the dimension of sorrow that is caused by our own individual and collective failures, actions, and inactions. And there is the dimension of sorrow that seems the result of being alive at all. The former sorrow is a sorrow heightened multiple times daily in this world. I just finished reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and was moved by the end of one chapter, where she writes:

Who has decided--who has the right to decide--for the countless legions of people who were not consulted that the supreme world is a world without insects, even though it might be a sterile world ungraced by the curving wing of a bird in flight?  The decision is that of the authoritarian temporarily entrusted with power; he has made it during a moment of inattention by millions to whom beauty and the ordered world of nature will have a meaning that is deep and imperative.

Those moments, when we are individually and collectively affected by decisions of those authoritarians temporarily entrusted with power, are moments of massive sorrow. And then, in the in between, there are the moments of still massive sorrow, but a rather ordinary sorrow. The sorrow of making our way through the ordinary dailiness of each day, affected by the consequentiality or inconsequentiality of our own decisions, affected by the smaller and more myriad decisions of others, trying and sometimes failing to communicate our feelings as we just try to live. The sorrow of having a mind. The sorrow of having a heart. The sorrow of having a body. And the joy, too! But also the sorrow. Who shall ever tell of this sorrow? Is it even possible?

I think again of the poem’s title. There’s a value in our society — a commodified value — that might want this poem to solely be about Price’s physical back. About his recovery. About a kind of hope. To write again. To live again. As if life is solely lived based on the binary of before and after. But I’m drawn, instead, to the temporal meaning of the word back. I’m drawn to a reading of this poem that does not make recovery into some sort of linear thing, that instead sees in Price’s writing a kind of looking-back and falling-back. A recognition of the constancy of pain, but the inconstancy of our relationship to it. The way we try to learn to live with it, and fail, and still try again. I’m drawn to humility, maybe, rather than hope.

And so I hold these final lines close:

So life, an apparent road ahead
With what seem trees and sky for walls
And natural light. So work. So this.

I don’t think these are lines of hope or determination or anything that might be commodified into something that could become powerful, and because of such power, terrible. No, I think these are lines of simple acceptance. So life. So work. So this. I try to return to the present moment. I remind myself that I am alive. I remind myself that you, too, are alive. And I remind myself that you must be full of sorrow, as I am, too. And that we share in this. This work. This feeling. This life. And this light.

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