bernadette on love

Bernadette on refusing to know what one means:1

I’m refusing to know what I mean

On truth:2

Doesn’t everybody know everything or not, please let me know

On quiet mornings:3

I learn from the rigorous laughing of love to be more quiet in the morning especially if the dismal streets unearth a hideous memory of death, I’ve gotten so used it I’m sorry I said that.

She quotes Chaucer, Parliament of Fowls,4 whose narrator “knows not Love in deed;” he’s only read about it in books. But how else should one know it?

I “learn” from love – a “rigorous laughter” which makes room for silence – but not by example. Example ≠ analogy. Love is not fiction, but, like narrative, it may well “create time where there was none.”5 An element of belief is required. As I’m drawn in, I assume it. I place myself into it; it precedes me.

So when I write of love I write of   6

Again, we are not exemplifying, but analogizing; drawing lines, making lists, arranging things into a recognizable disorder. Love does not foreclose or specify. It is not, but to write about it is.

cited

Chaucer, Geoffrey. Dream Visions and Other Poems. Edited by Kathryn L. Lynch. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007.
Marcus, Ben. “On the Lyric Essay.” The Believer, 2003. https://benmarcus.com/writing/on-the-lyric-essay/.
Mayer, Bernadette. Midwinter Day. New York: New Directions, 1999.
Nao, Vi Khi. The Italy Letters. New York: Melville House, 2024.

notes

  1. Mayer, Midwinter Day, 22.↩︎

  2. Mayer, 24.↩︎

  3. Mayer, 36.↩︎

  4. Chaucer, Dream Visions and Other Poems, 97.↩︎

  5. Marcus, “On the Lyric Essay”, by way of Nao, The Italy Letters.↩︎

  6. Mayer, Midwinter Day, 90.↩︎