AMIE

This is the worst thing I'll have to write on this blog...

I’ve been debating with myself this week about this post. In the end, I need to say something.

Amie, who contributed to LI and whose friendship over the last four years has been one of the important things in my life – Amie died in September.

I learned this at the beginning of the week, and I am still in shock. Supposedly you can tell the weather of centuries ago by sawing down a tree and examining the tree rings – they register all the disasters. I feel like some similar organic disturbance has happened in me since I received word of her death. If you saw me in half fifty years from now and examined the innards, surely some mark, some trace – Amie would love the word trace – will make it obvious that something happened Christmas week, 2010.

I can’t accept her death. Not when, after all the storms she had passed through, she was finally entering into the sweetness of life. I can’t accept this flaw in the structure of the universe. There’s a moment in The Man Who Was Thursday when the hero, Syme, describes the strange sensation of being in a world where everything is not quite right – where the tree seems, somehow, like the back of a tree, and the sky like the back of the sky – when we see that the world really is seen through a glass, darkly. Some people never experience these moments, I think – and some forget them quickly. Amie’s death has opened up that world to me this week, because I think that it is impossible that this could be the world in which Amie died. I do recognize this world. But I don’t accept it – I want to chew it up and spit it out of my mouth.

My friendship with her was impossible. I think we started writing to each other in 2006. I have perhaps 200 emails from her of varying lengths, all written with her mixture of elegance and utter intensity – Amie always pressed as hard as she could against life, like she was trying to force a jammed door. For me, she was an almost perfect email partner – I felt that we were collaborators on a vast intellectual enterprise, for which I really do not have a name. Perhaps it is merely the enterprise to tear down all the blinders between the simple act of putting on a sock and poetry. And we both felt strongly that we were struggling in an evident wreck of a culture that has tried to purge poetry from every pore of its being in preference not to the sock, for that would be simply one of the masks of poetry – but to making it on the cheap and selling it at a profit and skipping the whole experience of putting on a sock. In the infinite web of badly made socks and the human drain of 10 hour days, the world is clearly damned unless of course there are crazy corner souls to save it.

I came to Paris to live with A., in September of this year. I came for A. alone - whether Paris or Nome, I didn't care. However, I fully expected to meet Amie at last. I was so close to her, and yet I don’t even know what Amie looked like – I never asked her for a photograph. I liked our ‘blind’ friendship, I liked being compagnon de route in the night, so to speak. She did too, I think. And when she ceased emailing me, I didn’t know what to think. Amie was never afraid of the large things – but could she have been afraid of meeting me at last in the flesh? That is what I thought.

It never occurred to me to think that she was dead. How could I ever think that?

Two quotes for Amie. One is from a letter she wrote to me. In it, she quoted a favorite passage in Cixous and added a comment:

”’L'orange est un instant. Ne pas oublier l'orange est une chose. Rappeler l'orange est une autre chose. La rejoindre en est une autre. Il faut au moins trois temps pour commencer à comprendre l'immensité infinie de l'instant.”

I remember leaving a hospital in Paris, sitting in a park and eating an orange, the joy.”

The second is from The Man who was Thursday:

“Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe? Why does a dandelion have to fight the whole universe? … So that each thing that obeys law may have the glory and isolation of the anarchist. So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.”