For a final paper in my intro to lit class, I have to choose two texts and compare and contrast them...not hard, right? The difficulty comes in that there are so many lovely things to choose from...I'm pretty much sold on Aimee Bender's "The Rememberer" and am leaning towards Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" for the second text, but I'm having problems fleshing out the ideas or main points for the paper...so here are random thoughts. :)
"The Rememberer" is a woman's story of the last month of her lover's life. Instead of dying from natural causes, her lover, Ben, is dying because "reverse evolution." The short story depicts the unnamed woman's struggle to deal with Ben the lover, the ape, the sea turtle, the salamander. As she watches her lover die in pieces, she clings to memories, lessons, normal habits--anything that might "bring him back" into her life. In a poignant self-realization, after seeing Ben as a salamander in a glass baking pan full of water on her cupboard, she finally says, "This is the limit of my limits: here it is. You don't ever know for sure where it is and then you bump against it and bam, you're there. Because I cannot bear to look down into the water and not be able to find him at all, to search the tiny clear waves with a microscope lens and to locate my lover, the one-celled wonder, bloated and bordered, brainless, benign, heading clear and small like an eye-floater into nothingness."
In the same way, "Do Not Go Gentle..." also reveals the struggles of a person letting go of one he loves--this time, a son saying goodbye to his father. The son asks his father to struggle, to fight..."rage, rage against the dying of the light." He tells of the lives and deaths of wise men, good men, wild men, and grave men, insisting that his father follow their example and fight to live. In Thomas' picture of the young son pleading with his father, I see Bender's unnamed young woman, dripping tears into a glass baking dish that holds the salamander that was her lover. Grieving. Recognizing the loss and the separation.
In some ways, though their grief draws them together, their method of grieving is wholly different. The son still asks for a fight; the woman realizes that her fight to cope has reached its limit, and it is time to for her to say goodbye.
Another point of contrast between the two pictures of grief and loss is the reason for the separation and death of the loved ones. In "Do Not Go Gentle...," the father is dying because of old age, and he shares mortality with all those who have gone before them, no matter what their personality. In "The Rememberer," the de-evolution process starts to occur because of sadness and an unspoken choice to turn away from the thought that stifles feeling and is so much a part of our world's idea of success.
When one reads these two texts side by side, one realizes that they raise just as many questions about life as they raise about death. What makes a human life successful or valuable? Is it the life-long struggle against mortality? If everyone dies, is it really important to differentiate between those who are wise, or good, or wild? Is it the knowledge and thought that betters the human existence? Is it, as Ben suggests, simply a feeling, living by the heart? At what point is life no longer a life? At what point can life no longer sustain relationship? Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle...," written in 1951, seems to focus on natural death from old age, but "The Rememberer," written in 1998, hints at the controversies and pain in society regarding alziehmers, dementia, depression, and other sickness that would seem to maybe bring loss before the actual physical death.
A reader who reflects upon both of these texts may come to the conclusion that although the themes of death and grief run through both pieces of literature, the texts are different in their portrayal of grief, reason for death, and depiction of life. They are more different than they are similar. However, an over-arching similarity can be found in the profundity of the images used in the texts to depict grief and loss. Bender is quoted as having said that "it's easier to talk about things when there's a metaphor to see them through." In the same way, both Thomas' poem and Bender's short story give readers words to help capture, see, and speak of an experience that truly goes beyond words, bumps us right up into our "limits" of coping, and leaves us with a solitude that is imprisoning. Bender and Thomas' works are an effort to reach out across that expanding, binding solitude and pain and share the experience of living with mortality.
Sigh. At least, that's what these two texts do for me. This is where my theological training comes in--these texts are clear pictures of "seeing through a glass darkly," and the brokenness and separation that we all experience in life practically every day. The brokenness is real...the pain is real...so real that we have to use metaphors and rhyme to capture a glimpse of the depth of our experiences with brokenness...
Whoever said that people are not interested in God? How can they not be interested in God? These pieces practically scream an interest...a longing...a need for God...and a recognition of sin and shame and pain...
