Eyes Off Focus // Lauren Davis
Lauren Davis wraps up the month guest editing her series “Writing About the Living.”
How many times have I sat across from my therapist and said, Yes, but my mother? As if my life is still dependent on her body? As if any additional rejection from her now would cut the breath out of my lungs? I have given myself permission to write whatever thing needs to be written, and to worry about the question of publication later. Inevitably, I find myself with a poem that thumps about at the fringes of my working manuscript, begging to be shown to the world. No, I tell it. You will ruin me, because you will ruin her. One would think the umbilical cord was not a metaphor. I have spent days obsessively googling my mother’s name, finding the same photo of us on the internet—the one where I have just had eye surgery. She stands with me and the doctor, a man who years before had also slit her eyes. I am the only blurred figure, everything else in focus. My head tilts back. My lids, barely open. I appear crazed, wrong. Ghostly. I hope that each time I return to this photo, I will think differently. I will find some spark of beauty, some kind word I can speak to myself. But here I am again, judging this woman who looks as if she is falling backwards into her mother—the one with the bent smile. Do I tell everyone the truth? Do I even know the truth? Whose truth is it? Are there two truths? While we are at it, how about three? The truth I hold onto is so slippery I do not dare print it for the world to question. Instead, I write around it. I circle and circle. I stuff a piece of it down a character’s throat. I hide a touch of it in a final line, like a splash of baby’s breath. If you blur your vision a little, dear reader, maybe you will see that moment when I knew, finally, what was true. I have found no moral code that can inform all of my dilemmas around privacy, except Shakespeare's lines in Hamlet: "To thine own self be true. And it must follow, as the night the day, / Thou canst not then be false to any man." Tomorrow, the way I approach privacy may change, because tomorrow I may understand the world differently. I am okay with that. But for now, I flit around the facts, telling piecemeal the thing that broke me. I do not protect my mother in this. Instead, I protect myself. Do not misunderstand. I want to tell the truth. I think of Theodore Sturgeon’s More than Human, and its wrestle with humanity and morality. He writes, “Logic and truth are two very different things, but they often look the same to the mind that's performing the logic.” He also writes in the short story “Baby is Three,” which eventually became More than Human, “We don't believe anything we don't want to believe.” How many truths have I turned away from because I simply could not hold them within my loose fists? Have I followed logic’s provocative sashay right into the woods—the grove where light can’t filter in? I can confidently say that many people would cheer if I made myself a little fort beneath these trees. They would love if I befriended each rodent and toadstool that lives here. To claim they are invested in a mythology does not ring true, because the mythology stories I know are full of lust, lies, betrayal, incest. War. These persons are not the ones I write for.I need the truths of others to help me speak my own. In the epilogue of Chris Forhan’s My Father Before Me—the memoir where he tells frankly of his father’s suicide—he says:
I choose not to be silent. This book is a consequence of that. I have learned—I am still learning—how easy it is, out of fear or out of habit, not to speak directly or honestly, how easy it is to evade conflict by addressing it sideways or not at all….
And here I go flitting at the borders of my reality. But Forhan, it is so much safer, warmer here. I want the best of both security and sincerity. Or I think I do. Caitlin Bailey writes in her debut poetry collection Solve for Desire, “In the world / we were meant for: the ghost of our loss and what comes after.” When I write, I write this ghost. It shimmies through the halls of my poems, out of the mouths of my fictional characters that I prop up like marionettes. Yes, the little wooden lips are theirs, but it is my voice that seeps out, my false accent barely a ruse. What comes after the ghost, though, I await. Here, at the edge of my last sentence, my truth pants, patient and ever-present.
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This month at The Town Crier, we have heard from a range of writers exploring the question of writing about the living in the digital age. And through their struggles, stories, and convictions, we can gather that there is no one way to approach the issue. How wonderful it would be if some formula were available to us with which we could know for certain our actions are justified and right. But, of course, there isn’t. I have been honoured to bring you these voices. May we never stop examining our motivations, our actions. Moreover, may we never be silenced.
Lauren Davis is the author of Each Wild Thing’s Consent (Poetry Wolf Press). She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and her poetry, essays, stories, and fairy tales can be found in publications such as Prairie Schooner, Automata Review, Empty Mirror, and Gingerbread House Literary Magazine. Davis teaches at The Writers’ Workshoppe in Port Townsend, WA, and she works as an editor at The Tishman Review. Visit her at LaurenDavisPoetry.com.
