Every time now we have tried to raise ourselves above the opposite animals by claiming singular possession of some school, now we have been humbled in any other case: Language, it seems, is not ours alone, neither is the usage of instruments, neither is music. Elephants grieve, octopuses keep in mind and predict, crows maintain grudges.
Maybe sooner or later this too can be snatched from us, however for now there appears to be one tumult of being pulsating within the human breast alone: the capability to be sorry, to really feel the soul-ache of regret because the penitent previous fangs the flesh of the current.
stay with regret, make of it a catalyst for creation, is what the philosopher-artist Maira Kalman explores in her small and splendid e-book Still Life with Remorse — a group of miniature essays, poems, and painted vignettes reckoning with regret by means of Maira’s circle of relatives story, punctuated by glimpses of the lives of a few of her muses: Leo Tolstoy, Clara Schumann, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Henri Matisse.
Defining regret as “deep remorse implying disgrace, implying guilt, implying sorrow,” Maira observes that “in nonetheless lifes and interiors there have to be a specific amount of regret lurking among the many bowls of fruit, vases or flowers and objects scattered in regards to the room.”
Rising from the pages is the intimation that reminiscence is the nonetheless lifetime of dwelling, that whereas regret could hang-out the psychological photos of our recollections, we are able to discover in it an event for magnificence, for artistic vitality, for defiant pleasure.
Opening with an allusion to that immortal line from Anna Karenina — “All joyful households are alike; every sad household is sad in its personal means.” — she considers the half-life of sorrow throughout generations:
Comfortable households,
Sad households.
All the identical, proper?
Ach. ach. ach.To start
You might be born.
To an extended line of ancestors
who’re lengthy gone
however nonetheless yell or whisper
in your ear
within the depths of night time.
A sport of phone performed
from one technology to the following.Garbled and confused.
Glimmers of sunshine.
Misunderstandings.
Errors.And now, right here you might be.
With those you like.
Or those you don’t.Those you can’t stay with out.
Those you wish to smite.Those that have upset you
or betrayed you. Those that have
been kinder than you deserve. And
the type ones who inevitably die.
And go away you feeling very a lot
alone. They’re what you may have.And if you happen to assume, at any given level,
that you recognize what’s going on,
you might be sorely mistaken.And but.
With an eye fixed to the sophisticated marriage of Sophia and Leo Tolstoy (so completely different from that of Anna and Fyodor Dostoyevsky) — the preliminary mutual infatuation, the 13 kids, the selflessness with which Sophia transcribed all of Leo’s writings, the mutual resentment of the tip — she writes:
When making an attempt to grasp why human beings do what they do, a fog descends.
The verse to which Mahler wrote music turns into a quiet animating refrain for the e-book:
Darkish is life.
Spring is right here.
The birds are singing.
From the non-public tales — her grandparents killed within the Holocaust, her father delivering milk as his cowl whereas working for a Palestine liberation underground, Kafka’s troubled relationship with his own father, Clara Schumann’s tenacity and her tender unclassifiable relationship with Brahms — emerges a common lens on struggling, regret, and redemption, shining a sidewise gleam on what makes life value dwelling regardless of the just about insufferable brunt of being alive.
Your loved ones.
My household.Your regret.
My regret.All the identical, proper?
Huge skies stuffed with regret.
Oceans of regret.
However sufficient.There ought to be merriment.
And good cheer.
Good tidings. Properly wishing.Tables laden with meals.
Youngsters enjoying.
Gathering of kinfolk.Like Clara would have needed.
Seeing the perfect.
Forgiving the worst.If there may be regret,
let there be a restrict to regret.
A approach to shake off the heavy weight.However how can we make this occur?
How to do that?Darkish is life.
Spring is right here.
The birds are singing.Within the strangeness of life, LIVE.
Couple with “Antilamentation” — poet Dorianne Laux’s antidote to remorse — then revisit Maira Kalman’s great Women Holding Things and her illustrated love letter to Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein’s love.
