Someone Traveling

© 2011 by Jane Nicholson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 10/07/2011

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3479-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3478-4 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-3477-7 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011916221

Printed in the United States of America

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This book is printed on acid-free paper.

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Contents

Preface to Someone Traveling

Afterlife

Gravity and Levity

Psyche: A Poetics of Awkwardness

Lovelorn

Corpse

Homebody

Someone Traveling

Encounters with the

Natural World

When You Were Young

Preface to Someone Traveling

Someone Traveling: I have borrowed this name. It appears on a photograph of three Native American men; the two others are named High in the Sky and Sound of Eating. I found the name while visiting the George H. Brown, Jr. Museum on the reservation in Lac du Flambeau, Wisconsin. And by and by, I realized that I had kept that name. Then I read something attributed to a Makah woodcarver that ordains each of us to honor and keep our names so that they will be good to have in future generations (Telling the World, 1996). Though I pinched my good name, I will hew to the woodcarver’s way of seeing things as best I can.

It seems that the last rightful owner of this name was an early twentieth-century Ojibwe man. Most likely, he was given the name. It may be that Someone Traveling’s relations saw a future of traveling for him. Or on his birth day, a visitor portended this traveler’s name. Then again, Someone Traveling might be a name acquired later in life, during a vision-quest. There is ceremony in the name and fatefulness, too, I think.

Some of the fatefulness is the stuff of history. I have learned that many Native American names recorded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were taken down by folks whose command of Algonquin languages was slim (and whose chutzpah was not). As it is, then, the names were often as not inaccurately translated; the names might be mangled or just plain wrong. The name I have borrowed may just as likely have its origins in a Bureau of Ethnology worker’s slip-up as in a family naming ceremony.

I dwell on something else though: the name has two words to it, the kernel of a narrative. I like the anonymity of the first ingredient, someone. And the perpetual motion of the gerund, traveling, is appealing. I also like the name because it feels like a made thing. Writing is about making something. In the same way, the travel I write of here is sometimes ordinary and literal, and often metaphorical. Dream-travels and imaginings of many sorts have me leafing through consciousness more than an atlas. Writing is also a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants sort of thing. It is made up of hearsay and personal experience, as well as the hoarded bits learned of in more formal ways. It occurs to me how oddly fitting it is that I wear a hand-me-down name for doing the cobbling work of writing.

And because writing, like traveling, is making tracks, the moment when I set out has its importance. As in many tales, I was urged to leave home; something was at stake. Indeed, I was sucked out of my refuge. I preferred to stay in, to shelter myself against the intrusions that bore down on me, but it was not to be. I should have foreseen that the aftermath of an act that was sudden, violent, and public would itself unfold publicly.

On November 1, 1991, my husband was murdered in his office at the University of Iowa. Five others died that day by the same hand. If you had asked me to imagine that my husband were to be murdered, I would have shown you astonishment, perhaps exasperation. Because of the love he and I shared, because of the man he was, it would not have seemed reasonable to me that his life would be taken violently. Because of the love we shared and because of the man he was, I did not doubt that the world was to be loved whole-heartedly, though we brook its imperfections. And so, I knew before that acts of killing make us wonder about the order of things. No matter who has died, killing forces us to wonder, each and every time.

Face-to-face, planned out, executed murder is horrific, and it is one of the unparalleled things to face up to in this world. And so, how unearthly and yet how worldly to know that murder had touched us and separated us. There was much to face. Two friends were murdered among the five others. And yet this catastrophe was public and, principally, newsworthy. But, who died? They were beings who belonged deeply to others—six intimates died.

All those dead and one maimed for life… and the death I heard of last was the killer’s. Somehow, on November 1, I did not hear of his fate. And, truly, that last bit was unbearable, too. More death did not seem to right anything at all. How could it? Later yet, I learned that he had planned his own death first of all. For, he would not have killed so many lightly. Angrily and wrongly, but not lightly.

In response to the violence that touched our lives—his and mine, I began by shutting down some systems and unleashing others. There had been balance within me and it survived but wholly other. In a moment it was rearranged from a calm and steady fluctuating to a management of equal and opposing forces. I rarely dwelled in a pooled mixture of neural chemicals. I was usually either dead-numb or hyperalert.

For some time, life and I opposed each other openhandedly. I was hoping to test my love of life in private; I might have thought I would simply stay in, always. Long months after his loss, I might have told you that I did not even suspect that the future would materialize. In this state of mind, I jousted with life’s insistent invitation to set out anew. I jousted with it in terms of timing, route, perspective, disposition, and motivation.

I am someone traveling who has set out to tell stories, so to have the grain of a narrative in my name prepares me for my work. Nevertheless, writing—never mind writing about the self—is tricky. Cathartic, isn’t it, they’ve asked me rhetorically. Believe me, I have engaged in many cathartic experiences while grieving and I am grateful beyond words for each of them. Why, then, is writing one’s life stories not so cathartic as it is risky? It seems to me that on the way into the heart of the matter, we see again exactly how we have been licked and blown and all-ways shaped into the person we are to be. Add that to what we’ve consciously strived for. These opportunities to view ourselves crop up, decorously or rudely. And so, it is rare to be prepared for such glimpses of the self. Isn’t it pretty much the case that when we re-see ourselves in memory, there is a forgotten detail, wanted or not?

I know memory now. I know it because I could not find mine and I know it because I have trolled it relentlessly (not always consciously). I know the recall of a memory as an event. I reshape my memories in recall. Why did that occur to me just now, we ask? Or we calculate: this memory suits this story. As we write the memory, we connect it to other events, which amounts to garnishing it. Or we focus on one aspect of the memory, and we carve away at it in ways that both authenticate it and disturb it. As I look out the window at a stand of giant pines from day to day, they are sturdily the same, but my notice is attracted to different ones. That is the way it is. And that is the way I recall memory: different pines stand out. I acknowledge that now and then I seek an essential self in memory, but she isn’t there. She is more likely called up in the remembering self than the remembered self. So, in these ways, these personal essays—whose point of departure lies in a particular instance of loss and grief—are very different from writing of myself. Such a thing would be my journal—a thing that exists and that I wrote at the time, not subsequently.

And yet I write my stories as I. Writing stories of the self, I seek solidarity. When I write of self and loss, I seek solidarity. We all know loss and know what comes of it. There is misplacing, misunderstanding, and forgetting. There is also sickening, dying, and killing. I have trembled at the recognition of my unpreparedness for this sort of experience which strips us naked. We lose more yet before we begin to accrue again as we hold on to what we make out of loss. There have been tears and snot, embraces and silence to fill void upon void and to all that I add these essays.

We are mostly internal beings; we know the personal, intimate things like breath and fear more deeply than we know air and neurotransmitters, their objective correlatives. Yes, it seems likely to me that a person in loss has plenty of company just when she feels quite alone. The I is intimate. The I is intimate and whispers always to you and you and you. This might be Echo’s fated call. Or, this might be the call that hits its mark.

A spider’s thread connects two trees across a distance of ten feet or more. How did the spider fly from tree to tree? When I spied this near-invisible strand, I spied a mysterious thing. It was something I would have called him out onto the deck to see. And one of the preposterous things I imagined as I stood there alone was that the thread was supporting the two trees. Moments later, a dragonfly—a being well-equipped when it comes to eye facets—failed to regard the thread and tore it apart in flight. Perhaps the dragonfly never felt the thread; or perhaps the thread clung to its wings for weeks—a gossamer accessory or something itchy that perturbs flight. That’s what rupture is like. Sudden. Clean, not so much.

Though most rupture is not as violent and notorious as murder, rupture is commonplace. To heal, to continue in any way or shape, is to correspond with the world. At any given time, there are so many beings patching things up with the world. As for me, I had many helpers. Friends, colleagues, family, and then all the new acquaintance. How did the kismet to meet healers come my way on the heels of calamity? I met these particular others, the keepers of the arts of mind and body, and they compassionated with my disorientation in grief. And yet we shared the view that it was uniquely my day to be lost and then to turn and move along.

I have here the body and the world that are the same ones we loved in. The world I stepped out of is alive for me with helpers known and unknown—starting from the first instant—jerry, ellen, abby, susan, patty, charles, vibs, karl, kate, a busful of mourners, mark, paula, paul, fran, amy, david, tom, dan, ralph, colleen… and all the fellow travelers I met along the way since then. A cocoon has been woven from this line of names. I sense how I am tangled together with many whom I do not see any more, separated by the miles they once traveled to be with me yet still connected by food they prepared for me, by the timbre of their saddened voices, by their need to reconcile rupture through friendship. All of these duties were performed quietly in an often loud world. I know this has sometimes been nearly too much to stomach. Thank you for steadfastness stronger than your grief or fear or outrage. Thank you for acts of connection and relief.

Afterlife

My husband met death at four o’clock on a Friday afternoon. He was sitting behind his desk in his office in the Physics Department on the University of Iowa campus. A graduate student whom he knew to be agitated, stepped through the doorway, pointed a .38 Taurus semiautomatic pistol at him and fired. Twice.

Less than an hour later, my husband’s colleague calls me. He is someone I know quite well. I do not quite recognize the severe calm that governs his voice. It is not at all his usual tone with me. For a calm tone it is awful. In a distant mental place, I have already sorted things out: to expect something—but not the worst. On Friday, November 1, 1991, the colleague’s familiar voice intones a levelness that is beyond calm. The voice states, He’s dead, Jane.

He’s dead, Jane. He says it again and perhaps again; I think the repetitions are meant to overcome the distance between us. He reaches me in Tulsa where I, too, am in the profession of teaching. Later I realize that he called just ahead of the five o’clock news.

His tone of voice stays with me. I realize that it was suffused with stiffness about to break in his throat. Like his voice, my brain has stiffened. Like the practiced, strained quality of his voice, my brain too hides something from me. This is not my right mind,