Indivisible new edition Read online

  Copyright © Fanny Howe

  This edition © Semiotext(e) 2022

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher.

  Published by Semiotext(e)

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  Cover Photograph by Reynaldo Rivera

  Design: Hedi El Kholti

  ISBN: 978-1-63590-155-9

  Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. and London, England

  d_r0

  Indivisible

  Fanny Howe

  Introduction by Eugene Lim

  semiotext(e)

  Contents

  Cover

  Introduction by Eugene Lim

  In the White Winter Sun

  Through the Eyes of the Other

  A Crackle of Static

  Sewing Wings for Swans

  The Hindu Orange of the Fruit

  Two Sides of a Crib

  The Light over the Heavy Door

  A Vault with a Red Stain

  Wishing around the Edges

  The Glass That Grew

  None Can Go Beyond

  Tense

  Sneak Away to Meditate

  Introduction by Eugene Lim

  In Indivisible we are given, in deft sketches or in the blooming brushstrokes of live watercolor, delicate and intimate portraitures: Tom, the grumpy once or future monk; Lewis Jones, an African-American journalist crippled by hubris; Lewis's long-suffering mother Mimi; Libby Camp, the white wild-child seeker bestie born into wealth and eventually constrained by terminal illness; and children, variously foster or ill or feral or blind. On its first page, we meet our guide through this purgatory, Henny, as she imprisons her husband in a closet.

  It will take most of the novel to figure out why McCool is in there—but the book's path isn't the traditional one of staggered suspenseful reveals. Our road in Indivisible is under a different jurisdiction, that of dream and memory.

  Furthermore, this is not a concoction made up of surrealist cinema's shocking collage or even one made from new wave's endless dizzying jump cuts. Indivisible is a different kind of dizzying—more tender and a deracinated state nonetheless imbued with earnest feeling. It is the weightless, windless fall through personal history where one's vision is directed by feats of association, by the determining charismatic gestures and the indelible personalities of those we have loved, of enemies, of those who have owed us, and of those we have owed.

  After we meet McCool in Henny's closet, the novel spirals back in time, not into the expected looping history that explains how these characters arrived at this point, but instead through a fractured remembrance of a particular cohort living lives through frantic American decades. If there is a general direction to these episodes of memory, it is the erratic zigzag trend from innocence to experience, the insidious ineluctable fading of youth into brittle-bright autumn. “The generation is everything,” the poet has said. “No one else but your generation goes through that fertilization process together in time.”

  For the generation that had a post-war childhood and that came of age during the long ’60s, race and class were, as now, heavy forces. Fanny Howe daybooks those struggles—the heroism and the hypocrisies, the forced martyrdoms and ubiquitous banal evils. It may be too early or reductive for comparisons to 2020, but of the momentous earlier year, Howe, born in 1940, writes, “In 1968 the contradictory forces behind the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement came to a head and my generation embodied the conflict and attempted to find synthesis and progress.” Moreover, here is Howe writing not about the Black Lives Matter protests of recent years but the Black Power movement's effect on her own generation:

  It's an old story by now—how Black Power forced individual whites to see themselves as unstable and isolated social products, people who were at the end of the line and who were not the transcendent and eternal beings they had been raised to believe themselves to be. In those days it was a terrible blow to a mass ego. Whites, without even knowing it, had been getting away with murder.

  Beneath its spectacular and tragically recognizable generational crises of race and class, there is also another vibrating energy: a life-long practice, study, and enactment of mysticism. These are the two forces that animate Indivisible, that are its sky and ground. On one side, the cage of history and perhaps within that—as William Bronk once put it—the cage of age. On the other, the liberating and paradoxical consolations of the Absolute, of that which is both particular and general, both in the moment and simultaneously perennial.

  The central, and literally final, concern of Indivisible is the question of a life's ethics and meaning—its worth—as presented in supplication to an all-inclusive divine (whether by name Krishna, The Great Spirit, Yahweh, or the Tao—the catholic Catholic Howe is open). The question is made crucial for Henny in constant, myriad ways, but particularly as she weighs her responsibility when witnessing complicated crimes—slips of indiscretion, purposeful blindness or distraction, or impulsive acts of barely conscious rage. She was defiant of the corrupt State, surely, but did her unasked-for knowledge implicate her? What were her obligations? How could she prove herself worthy? The answers to these questions remain purposefully spacious, blank, absent. In Howe's work, there are, instead, fumbling seeking, delicate approaches in the dark, and radically accepting states of bewilderment.

  It is with this latter word that Howe has anchored a poetics. In an essay titled “Bewilderment,” based on a talk from 1998, Howe writes:

  The wilderness as metaphor is in this case not evocative enough because causing a complete failure in the magnet, the compass, the scale, the stars, and the movement of the rivers is more catastrophic than getting lost in the woods.

  Bewilderment is an enchantment that follows a complete collapse of reference and reconcilability.

  It is with this basis in bewilderment that Howe moves for me beyond the usual contexts of poetry and fiction. At times in Indivisible it feels we aren't reading prose but rather language that oscillates between aphorism and liturgy, between lines of poetry and prayer.

  Lewis was someone who believed that artists know exactly what they are doing while they are doing it and we fought about this. All artists—painters, poets, playwrights, musicians—were discussed by him in terms of an idea they were trying to express, not in terms of a physical problem they were working through. “I think artists are like blind children on a new campus… More than most people, they trust what they don't know,” I told him in the dark of the car and got no answer.

  Humility with no sense of their own humility is the stuff of boddhisattvas and saints. The writing here argues not for meekness, or not merely, but for a radical surrender, which seems entirely in harmony not only with a poetics and a politics of bewilderment but consonant with the great mystical traditions—whether they be the Sufi, Hindu, Buddhist, or Christian ones Howe scatters references to throughout her text. For me, her ideas of bewilderment echo the famous opening lines of the “Xinxin Ming,” which say, “The great way is simple / Only put down your ideas of better or worse.” In “Bewilderment,” Howe writes:

  A signal does not necessarily mean that you want to be located or described. It can mean that you want to be known as Unlocatable and Hidden. This contradiction can drive the “I” in the lyrical poem into a series of techniques that are the reverse of the usual narrative movements around courage, discipline, conquest, and fame.

  Fanny Howe comes from an impressive Boston family. “There were many women like me—born into white privilege but with no financi
al security,” she writes. Her mother, the Irish actress Mary Manning, started the Poets’ Theater and was friends with Samuel Beckett. Her father, Mark De Wolfe Howe, was a prominent civil rights attorney. But it was the heady mix of intellectuals, poets, and civil rights activists in the 1960s that were foundational and established her sense of her own generation. Early on, Howe worked as a housing organizer for CORE (Congress of Racial Equity). Her friend there, the education activist Jonathan Kozol, introduced her and the poet Bill Corbett to the writer Carl Senna, the son of a Mexican boxer and an African-American piano-playing school teacher. She married Senna and began attending mass with his mother and subsequently converted to Catholicism. When economic pressures and Boston's acidic racism grew overwhelming, the marriage broke up, and Howe persisted as the single mother of their three children. These bare, selected facts of the writer's biography are reflected, amplified, and hidden in the following pages.

  Indivisible is the last in a set of independent but correlated novels collected under a bold title. When asked if anyone had approached her about writing her biography, Howe responded: “No. I feel my five novels in Radical Love are close enough.”

  In the White Winter Sun

  1-0

  I locked my husband in a closet one fine winter morning. It was not a large modern closet, but a little stuffy one in a century old brick building. Inside that space with him were two pairs of shoes, a warm coat, a chamber pot, a bottle of water, peanut butter and a box of crackers. The lock was strong but the keyhole was the kind you can both peek through and pick. We had already looked simultaneously, our eyes darkening to the point of blindness as they fastened on each other, separated by only two inches of wood. Now I would not want to try peeking again. My eyes meeting his eyes was more disturbing than the naked encounter of our two whole faces in the light of day. It reminded me that no one knew what I had done except for the person I had done it with. And you God.

  A gold and oily sun lay on the city three days later. Remember how coldly it shone on the faces of the blind children. They stayed on that stoop where the beam was the warmest. I wasn't alone. My religious friend came up behind me and put his arm across my shoulder.

  “We have to say goodbye,” he murmured. I meant to say, “Now?” but said, “No.”

  I had seen I'm nobody written on my ceiling only that morning.

  Brick extended on either side. The river lay at the end. Its opposite bank showed a trail of leafless trees. My friend was curly haired, bewildered in his gestures—that is, without greed. He said the holy spirit was everywhere if you paid attention. Not as a rewarded prayer but as an atmosphere that threw your body wide open. I said I hoped this was true. He was very intelligent and well-read. He had sacrificed intimacy and replaced it with intuition.

  I wanted badly to believe like him that the air is a conscious spirit. But my paranoia was suffusing the atmosphere, and each passing person wore a steely aura. “Please God don't let it snow when I have to fly,” he said and slipped away. My womanly body, heavy once productive, and the van for the children, gunning its engine, seemed to be pounded into one object. It was Dublin and it wasn't. That is, the Irish were all around in shops and restaurants, their voices too soft for the raw American air and a haunt to me. “Come on. Let's walk and say goodbye,” he insisted. We walked towards St. John the Evangelist.

  “I've got to make a confession,” I told him. “Can't I just make it to you? I mean, you're almost a monk, for God's sake.”

  “No,” said Tom. “The priest will hear you. Go on.” Obediently I went inside. The old priest was not a Catholic. He was as white as a lightbulb and as smooth. His fingers tapered to pointed tips as if he wore a lizard's lacy gloves. It was cold inside his room. Outside— the river brown and slow. A draft came under the door.

  I think he knew that a dread of Catholicism was one reason I was there. He kept muttering about Rome, and how it wouldn't tolerate what he would as an Anglican.

  Personally I think pride is a sin. But I said “a failure of charity” was my reason for being there. This was not an honest confession, but close enough. The priest told me to pray for people who bothered me, using their given name when I did. He said a name was assigned to a person before birth, and therefore the human name was sacred. Then he blessed me. Walking out, I felt I was dragging my skeleton like a pack of branches. After all, a skeleton doesn't clack inside the skin, but is more like wood torn from a tree and wrapped in cloth.

  Outside Tom was waiting and we walked over the snow. “I missed that flute of flame that burns between Arjuna and Krishna— the golden faces of Buddha, and Yogananda, Ramakrishna, Milarepa, and the dark eyes of Edith Stein and Saint Teresa. Are all Americans Protestant? The church was cold, austere. I'm a bad Catholic.”

  He nodded vaguely and said: “But you're a good atheist. Catholicism has an enflamed vocabulary, don't worry. You can transform each day into a sacrament by taking the eucharist. You just don't want to bother.”

  Even the will to raise and move a collection of bones can seem heroic. Only an object on one side or a person—can draw it forwards—or on another side an imagined object or person. Maybe the will responds to nearby objects and thoughts the way a clam opens when it's tapped. “Mechanistic… We really should put more trust in the plain surface of our actions,” I said.

  “Do we have to say goodbye? And leave each other in such a state?”

  “We do.”

  “But first, Tom—I have one favor to ask you.”

  1-2

  Exactly ten years before, during a premature blizzard, I left all my children at home and went to meet my best friends in the Hotel Commander. I did so carrying the weight of my husband like a tree on my back. This was a meeting I couldn't miss, no matter how low I stooped.

  The walk from the subway to the hotel was bitter, wet and shiny. Traffic lights moved slowly on my right, while the brick walls and cold gray trees sopped up the gathering snow. I kept my eyes fixed on the left where dark areas behind shrubs and gates could conceal a man, and stepped up my pace. Lewis and Libby were already seated in a booth in a downstairs lounge. I shook off my coat and sat beside Libby and we all ordered stiff drinks, recalling drunker meetings from earlier youth. I leaned back and kept my eyes on the door, in case my husband appeared and caught me off-guard.

  “Relax, Henny,” Lewis reproved me.

  “I've never met him,” Libby cried. “It's unbelievable.”

  “He's unbelievable,” said Lewis.

  “He can't be that bad.”

  “He is. He should be eliminated. He won't let her out of the house, without her lying. She probably said she had a neighborhood meeting tonight. Right?”

  “Henny's not a coward.”

  “She likes to keep the peace though. That's not good.”

  “I'm going to be back in the spring. I'll meet him then,” Libby said. “And if he's all that bad, I will do something to him.”

  “Henny has a mercenary army of children around her, protecting her against him,” Lewis explained. “They aren't even her own.”

  “Hen, tell me the truth. Do you wish he would die? I'll make him leave you if you want me to,” said Libby.

  A renunciatory rush went down my spine when I saw, out in the lobby, the back of a man in a pea-jacket and woolen cap. Gathered over, I left the table for the rest room, and Libby followed breathless. She was wringing her hands, smelling of musk rose, and dancing on her pin-thin legs in high heel boots that had rings of wet fur around the tops while I sat in the sink, “Was it him? Was it him?” she implored.

  We never found out.

  That was the same night we climbed out the hotel kitchen window and walked up a slippery hill, one on each side of Lewis, hugging to his arms, while the snow whipped against our cheeks and lips, and we talked about group suicide.

  “Phenobarbital, vodka and applesauce, I think.”

  “No, Kool-aid, anything sweet.”

  “For some reason.”

  “J
am a little smear of strawberry on the tongue.”

  “Or honey.”

  “Catbirds and the smell of jasmine and we all lie in a line under the stars.”

  “With great dignity.”

  “Despite the shitting.” “And die.” “Die out.” “I can dig it,” said Lewis. “I can dig it.”

  “But we have to do it all together,” Libby concluded.

  1-3

  There is a kind of story, God, that glides along under everything else that is happening, and this kind of story only jumps out into the light like a silver fish when it wants to see where it lives in relation to everything else.

  Snow is a pattern in this particular story. It was snowing the day of my first visit to the Federal Penitentiary. The ground was strung with pearly bulbs of ice. I had visited many social service offices in my day, but never a prison. I associated prison with sequence and looked around for a way to break out. As a first-time visitor, and in the early moments, I remembered nervously standing with a crowd of strangers waiting for someone familiar to emerge from behind a green door with a big light over it. For each one of us, the familiar person would be a different person, but our experience would be the same. I already know that some conflicts in life have no resolution and have to be treated in a different way from common problems.

  But prison seemed to relate to issues of privacy in ways that were unimaginable to those who had never been forcibly hidden. Simplistically I was scared of being in a jail because it was a space that was unsafe from itself, the way a mind is. But I forced myself, as I sometimes do, to go to the place I dreaded the most—to the place that was so repugnant, it could only change me. Maybe the sacred grove of our time is either the prison or the grave site of a massacre. I have always believed I must visit those sacred groves, and not the woodlands, if I want to know the truth. In this case, I only wanted to see someone I loved and to comfort her by my coming. And surely enough, I did undergo a kind of conversion through my encounters with the persons there. When you visit someone in prison, this paranoid question comes up: Do I exist only in fear? The spirit hates cowards. It broods heavily in the presence of fear. I only felt as safe as a baby when I was holding a baby or a child and so, sitting empty-armed, in a roomful of strangers, watching the light over the heavy door, was a test of will.