Modernism or modernity, one or the other of them, taught us to abhor the cliché. To resist the comfort of periodicity, to suspect sentiment on cue. And duly we detest the 14th of February and refuse to be charmed when six year olds produce mother’s day cards from classroom assignments. Emotion can be manipulated, manufactured even; it is perhaps wise to be aware of this. But I have begun to suspect that the subconscious is far more difficult to train than our minds and that it feeds off a moss-field of regularity and cliché and simple moisture and sunlight will do the trick anytime.
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It has been six months today since my mother died. Emotion has lived on the surface of my skin during this period. I cannot say the overriding emotion has been grief; there have been times when I have felt I might burst from love or pride or gratitude or loneliness. Other times, I have been hard-pressed to classify what I have felt to beyond anything more find-tuned than plain emotion. And all of this has found release through remarkably unclogged channels in tears. I have cried a lot; copiously, instantaneously, summarily, methodically and on occasion uncontrollably. It has got a point with me where far from being surprised or embarrassed by these tears I have at times failed even to notice them till I contacted the moisture on my cheek or noted puffy eyes in the mirror.
One of the subsidiary exercises in all this crying has been to study what occasions it, or what the usual triggers are. I find that these triggers are very usual indeed - beauty, courage, music, children, kindness, renditions of love and clothes. Other than these, surprisingly to me – dates. Apart from a few birthdays I am not very much in the habit of remembering dates.
But I found myself (without having given it specific previous thought) unmitigatedly emotional for the entire day when our parents’ anniversary passed us by recently. This surprised me somewhat, like I said, because I had never really marked the day particularly, and neither had my parents.
Today again, I am brittle. What does it matter that it is six months to a day? What causes this heightened awareness? Do we subliminally need to mark time? To know when to tie knots, create nodes, lock segments and release new selves?
On days like these I like to have some hand-holding and when I reach out and find a hand it is nice.
I found this today.
All the Difficult Hours and Minutes
by Jane Hirshfield
All the difficult hours and minutes
are like salted plums in a jar.
Wrinkled, turn steeply into themselves,
they mutter something the color of sharkfins to the glass.
Just so, calamity turns toward calmness.
First the jar holds the umeboshi, then the rice does.
