Two Imperfect Solitudes Protecting Each Other

A glow rests, trance-like, in her living room chair this May morning. The curtain stirs slightly, her favorite cat passing through it now and again. Ever since my mom’s passing on March 31st of last year, I’ve tried to put our past together into perspective. A daunting task. Much of what “happened” is re-imagined, edited, simplified. The more I try, the more I find my mother, the kind of person she was, elusive. She feels more mysterious to me now than she ever did. The extent of her influence is nigh impossible to gauge. Writing this almost comes across as an injustice to her, superficial as it’s bound to turn out, yet I’m compelled to continue anyway.

In many ways she was what good mothers generally are: supportive and nurturing. Ever since I was a teenager she knew that my passion was literature. She exaggerated the merits of my early attempts, my sweet amateurishness. She had spotted genuine talent there, but she lied also, goading me on, by way of encouragement. This type of gentle nudging and encouragement solidified my commitment to the craft.

As I’ve already suggested, influence is hard to measure. My developing interest in poetry was in no small part the result of her influence. For one thing, a literary artist must read the classics to get a sense of what’s great. The person must read widely. And reading she did. She read a great deal. Something to which I seemed allergic – up to my 13th year. Before I began enjoying to read, I was a hyper child given to a wide variety of physical activities. Aggressive too. I even entertained the notion of becoming a professional tennis player or long-distance runner. I ran around with kids who lived in my apartment complex. Annoyed the tenants, security guards with my noise and shenanigans. Shirked study and homework.

Who knows all that happened to effect the transformation. Observing my mother reading quietly by her lamp had something to do with it. She made it clear to me that growing up she read a lot. She had been a serious student who won a gold medal for academic excellence. She was also a world-class classical pianist who had won international prizes in her youth. I attended her concerts on multiple occasions. So her music, her commitment to excellent performances, her love of reading, all contributed to my emerging interest in literature and books. Her music seeped into my poetry. Her influence, then, was the beauty that tamed the little beast.

Now unlike her I never felt at home with formal schooling. It felt too restrictive. Especially where my private school was concerned. She had sat me down a few times and explained the benefits of good grades and hard study. There’d been a few lectures and pep talks. But that wasn’t really her way. Not primarily. She wasn’t a fierce disciplinarian. Maybe early on she had hoped that her example of academic seriousness back in Russia may itself be loud enough. She understood the power of conversations and discussions. But perhaps, intuitively, she knew that a good example was far more powerful. She’d oversee my progress (or lack thereof) and gently nudge me in the right direction when necessary, having faith in my intelligence. Her brand of strength had something Taoist about it. While she displayed assertiveness and willpower (at times), her power largely lay in a childlike faith in the universe, that it knew infinitely better than her little personal self did. That doing nothing, or non-interference, is sometimes best did not escape her. Suffice it to say, only in university did I become a serious student, later than she might have desired perhaps..

Now this is where things get subtle. She read at home. She rehearsed for her concerts at home. She seemed to feel comfortable being alone. God knows how much she transmitted to me just through her being, her silence, or her sitting still. So the practice of aloneness, this meditativeness, moved me as well. It had nothing to do with isolation or being anti-social. Rather, it proved to be the foundation of self-reliance, creativity, discovery, originality. Oh yes – and the foundation of true connection. To be at home with aloneness, in other words, is a way of being more deeply connected with the world. Our art acquired greater resonance through the practice.

The issue of aloneness goes deeper. Take the analogy of a difficult teenager, a teenager with issues. He falls in love for the first time and his first love reciprocates. Now these sweet lovers have their arguments, no doubt. We all know love isn’t all roses. It can be damn tough and messy. Yet these lovers, being in heaven (at least initially), are apt to be more generous than they would be otherwise, more willing to forgive others or give them the benefit of the doubt. They can overlook the lapses of others more easily. Because they’re just so damn happy. Being happy means being able to see the good in others more easily. Maybe not always, for the young lovers aren’t saints. And like I said, love can be damn difficult too, especially later in the relationship.

Well, the practice of aloneness (or meditativeness) which my mom introduced to me is not unlike the suggestion housed in the analogy. On the one hand, it not only has led to insights, discoveries, but it has generated the virtues as well. Let’s put it this way: the practice of aloneness increases your chances of doing fine creative work, or stumbling onto an amazing discovery. As a consequence, you may well wind up feeling happy and elated, your clarity increased and widened. Meaning also: you’ll treat others better naturally because of your sense of fulfilment, your happiness.

The virtues, then, grow organically, as it were, from the practice. One could take it to be the foundation of ethics too. It’s far more effective than conversations, lectures, or pep talks. Now it isn’t clear to me how deeply my mom went into the practice. She was by no means a sage or saint, but she introduced me to it. We still fought and argued. We still had our anxieties and lapses. Yet we continued with the practice, however imperfectly. That included a commitment to our art and reading on a wide variety of topics. Our love was, in Rilke’s phrase, the way of two solitudes protecting and nourishing each other.

Aloneness. It’s not easy. It can be uncomfortable, unpleasant, and downright scary. For in aloneness we confront the darker aspects of ourselves we may not be aware of otherwise. It requires strength and resiliency. The more common thing is to drown oneself in company - in the same way that people drown themselves in noise because they’re afraid of silence, of what silence may bring to light. In the absence of aloneness, one’s relationships tend to be more superficial and more prone to all sorts of dishonesty and deception. Without it, what one calls “love” is little more than mutual comforting, dependence, and pleasure. Dependence breeds fear and various forms of manipulation. Bottom line: while our practice wasn’t so pure, we understood the basic necessity for it. She managed to forge strong connections with her students, friends, and audiences because of it.

While her virtues and artistic excellence unfolded from the practice, she had struggled, for a while, with perfectionism. One time, about 2 years before she passed, she made that clear to me. I had been overcritical about some literary project I was engaged in, and shared my complaints with her. Basically, I felt that my particular work sucked. (Which also made me hyper-critical about the works of others generally.) I was clearly disturbed. “You’re digging your own grave”, she remarked. She didn’t reveal to me her struggles in great detail (she could be secretive). Still, she did confess that she’d been depressed on account of it. She had seen a doctor for about 2 years.

“It takes the joy out of what you’re doing. It leads to the opposite of what you strive for. You make more mistakes. Then you become even more critical. Of yourself and others. And don’t think for a moment that this is what helps you excel in what you do. That’s what I thought. Hard work and commitment are one thing. Discipline, being on your toes are good. But if you’re a perfectionist you’ll wind up killing what you love. Your art and maybe some relationships. I was like you. I let it go. My suggestion to you: let it go. The world’s imperfect, we’re imperfect. Yet that, in part, reveals the world’s beauty. Maybe when you let it go you’ll find things turning out as they should, naturally. Without so much effort on your part.”

Another thing that stuck with me about my mom’s character generally was her devotion. Notwithstanding her accomplishments, learning, and pride in them, she could be soft, acquiescent in matters of the heart. I remember her in the late 80s when she had been romantically involved with a Montreal lawyer, Julian Chipman. At the time we frequently drove up to his cottage in Oka, about an hour drive from Montreal. A few times he had offered to help her in the kitchen, but she basically shooed him away. She seemed to enjoy cooking for him and serving him. And performing on the piano when he had asked her. This came from a professional, ambitious, strong-willed woman who, in certain circumstances, could be stubborn, adamant, argumentative.

Also, it was all the more interesting to observe because she was arguably more remarkable than he was. So her accomplishments hadn’t gotten to her head. They didn’t interfere with or spoil her ability to love and serve. A teenager then, I was fairly aggressive and competitive. It took me years to cull a lesson from those simple domestic scenes. I learned that it’s possible to be determined, accomplished – yet gentle and loving, happy to serve. I should add, too, that my mom had the uncanny ability to drop suggestions, hints of great ideas, and make the men around her feel it was their own idea. Brilliant.

So what now? As it often happens, a loved one’s deepest influence, or lesson as it were, is unintentional. Beyond what a parent may set out to do, or even consider. It needn’t point to anything specific, concrete, or tangible. Take a beautiful art exhibit: what you wind up getting from it may be inexpressible, nothing you can grasp, even conceptually. Yet the influence may persist subtly, over the years, even though the memory of it grows fuzzier. My mother’s influence is not exactly like that, but there’s something to the art analogy. The grief at her passing hits hard at times. The experience of grief is one of her many faces.

What does grief have to teach? What is its lesson? Nothing specific – except that the world has assumed an almost hallucinatory, hyper-real beauty. A diffuse type of gratitude is felt. Her aura surrounds all things, from the little stone at my door or bird hopping on the sidewalk to all the passersby. It’s as though she were love now – tethered to no particular person or object. It encompasses still deeper reading and writing. As for the grief, it may mellow out into a sweet sadness (to echo Lincoln). It may never disappear entirely.

Nor should it. Many people feel that prolonged grieving is unhealthy and unwise. They misunderstand grief, however. It has nothing to do with the past smothering the present, with an inability or unwillingness to let go. At least it needn’t be that way. Without grief, properly understood, there may be no experience of the aforementioned beauty – just as beauty and ugliness are mutually dependant. Grief doesn’t suggest stunted growth or standing still while life continues. On the contrary, our laughter and merriment can grow more vibrant within the context of grief. A kind of tremendous passion lies within grief. So one could say that my mom presents herself as grief, which carries this tremendous passion of mine.

I’ll close with a poem about our enduring relationship. We had walked frequently on one particular street in Montreal many years ago.

Cote-Des-Neiges Street, Montreal

Softly submerged is Cote-des-Neiges street

in the strangeness of new shops, delight

of couples, in accordion-twilight,

and in absence of stores where we used to go,

a child and his mother 40 years ago.

I feel you gazing at me through the leaves

of a church tree - and from the horizon's

crimson glow, a wound still fresh,

gazing, too, as a window's rose-struck glaze.

I see you in a thousand other ways,

hear the accordion, voice of you,

the accordion growing faint - and fading -

a still more piercing voice of you.

The mind intercedes, a tale ten times told,

offering itself like sagacious gold

to a stubborn, clinging child who half-believes.

But the heart doesn't follow, the heart still grieves.