LIMINAL SPACE

BY TRACY SCHLAPP

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden
Joni Mitchell, Stardust

Ricky Fay’s Stardust pays homage to Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, as he pens an affirmation filled with the contradictions of this life:
I am.
Hopeful and helpless. Connected to every ethereal being and utterly alone.

This poem is notably different from Ricky’s usual fare of boisterous stories that animate a boyhood of missteps and adventures, siblings and laughter. His voice directs the traffic, keeping a slew of narrative details and sidebars flowing — his prose verges on, but never reaches cacophony — which may best way to illustrate the experience of living in the Fay household. By contrast, Stardust is spare and exacting, as if the very connection to self will be lost if too many words are spoken. I am is the mantra, it is the backbone. A previously published story, An Overwhelming Sense of Security reflected against the surface of this poem reveals the chasm forged by prison. There is the younger Fay moving through the world, attending family events, and now the man in midlife writes from the space between: free to write, but not to live freely. A prison sentence redefines all relationships, most crucially to a sense of self.

Last session, Whadi asked if he could have another hard copy of the PonyXpress chapbook On Love to send to his daughter. He wants to encourage her writing. Connecting to the Natural World acts as a bridge (a prayer) to close the physical and spiritual distance between them:
Separated by space and time,
fragranced by the remnants of scented oils

Whadi writes of the garden of fragrance, and I think how scent fills the void between the physical and memory. I am reminded of distance measured in time past, as I recall the light scent of the lotion I rubbed on my baby’s body every evening after her bath.

These two poems brought to my mind an article from The Atlantic by Alan Lightman “Transcendent Brain” published December 5, 2022. Alan Lightman occupies the enviable space of being a physicist and a writer. The piece defies a hurried summary, instead I recommend it, and leave you with this excerpt that I found enormously comforting:

“As our nation and our world have become more polarized in recent years, the dialogue between science and spirituality has assumed greater and greater importance …There is very good scientific evidence that all the atoms in our bodies, except for hydrogen and helium, the two smallest atoms, were manufactured at the centers of stars. If you could tag each of the atoms in your body and follow them backwards in time, through the air that you breathed during your life, through the food that you ate, back through the geological history of the Earth, through the ancient seas and soil, back to the formation of the Earth out of the solar nebular cloud and then out into interstellar space, you could trace each of your atoms, those exact atoms, to particular massive stars in our galaxy’s past. At the end of their lifetimes, those stars exploded and spewed out their newly forged atoms into space, later to condense into planets and oceans and plants and your body at this moment. We have seen such stellar explosions with our telescopes and know they occur.

If, instead of going backwards in time, I was to go forward in time, to my death and beyond, the atoms in my body will remain, only they will be scattered about. Those atoms will not know where they came from, but they will have been mine. Some of them will once have been part of the memory of my mother dancing the bossa nova. Some will once have been part of the memory of the vinegary smell of my first apartment … If I could label each of my atoms at this moment, imprint each with my Social Security number, someone could follow them for the next thousand years as they floated in air, mixed with the soil, became parts of particular plants and trees, dissolved in the ocean, and then floated again to the air. And some will undoubtedly become parts of other people, particular people.”

Song of Myself, 51 Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892)

The past and present wilt — I have fill'd them, emptied them.
And proceed to fill my next fold of the future.

Listener up there! what have you to confide to me?
Look in my face while I snuff the sidle of evening,
(Talk honestly, no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.)

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too late?

Happy Valentine’s Day to our subscribers and sending our best wishes to Amanda and Devere as they crossed the wall this week. | TDS