`Certain Moments Will Never Change'

In November of 1904, during his first visit to the United States in 20 years, Henry James, all alone, visited “that unspeakable group of graves,” as he called them, where his parents and his sister Alice were buried in Cambridge Cemetery. The scene, as described in The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, is desolate and heartbreaking:

“Everything was there, everything came; the recognition, stillness, strangeness, the pity and the sanctity and the terror, the breath-catching passion and the divine release of tears. William's inspired transcript, on the exquisite little urn of Alice's ashes. William's divine gift to us, and to her, of the Dantean lines—

“`Dopo lungo exilio e martiro
Viene a questa pace—‘”

William James took the lines for their long-suffering sister’s epitaph from the Paradiso, Canto X, lines 128-129: “And she, from martyrdom and exile, came to this peace.” The essa – “she” – Dante refers to is actually the soul (feminine in Italian) of Boethius, the sixth-century philosopher, author of Consolation of Philosophy. James’ notebook entry continues:

“took me so at the throat by its penetrating rightness, that it was as if one sank down on one's knees in a kind of anguish of gratitude before something for which one had waited with a long, deep ache. But why do I write of the all unutterable and the all abysmal? Why does my pen not drop from my hand on approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past? It does, poor helpless pen, with what it meets of the ineffable, what it meets of the cold Medusa-face of life, of all the life lived, on every side. Basta, basta! x x x x x”

We remember John Marcher in James’ 1903 story “The Beast in the Jungle.” He visits the grave of May Bartram and for the first time awakens to his “arid end” and perceives “the sounded void of his life.” I knew most of this late in the winter of 1993, when I visited the Cambridge Cemetery, in Cambridge, Mass., to pay my respects to William and Henry James and their family. The day was sunny and cold. Much snow had melted but what remained had refrozen, and the brown grass was crunchy. I felt an overpowering sense of history and loss and gratitude as I stood by the graves of the writers who had helped form in me the capacity to feel the very emotions I was feeling so deeply. It was a Sunday morning like any other. In memory it remains a crystallized Jamesian moment, “approaching the infinite pity and tragedy of all the past.”

All of this returned to me Wednesday as I was reading a poem by Donald Justice, “My South,” which is preceded by the lines from James’ notebook beginning “But why do I write…” and concluding with “Basta, basta!” Justice’s poem is a four-poem sequence, the second of which is a sonnet titled “At the Cemetery”:

“Above the fence-flowers, like a bloody thumb,
A hummingbird is throbbing….And some
Petals take motion from the beaten wings
In hardly observable obscure quiverings.
My mother stands there, but so still her clothing
Seems to have settled into stone, nothing
To animate her face, nothing to read there –
O plastic rose O clouds O still cedar!
She stands this way for a long time while the sky
Ponders her with its great Medusa-eye;
Or in my memory she does. And then a
Slow blacksnake, lazy with long sunning, slides
Down from its slab, and through the thick grass, and hides
Somewhere among the purpling wild verbena.”

The other quotation preceding “My South” is attributed to “Q. Compson,” that is, Quentin Compson, who, at the end of Absalom, Absalom!, says, “I don’t! I don’t hate it! I don’t hate it!” “It,” of course, is the South. Justice, born in Miami, Fla., denied he was a “Southern poet” but he returned with regularity in his poetry and prose to the Florida of his childhood, the nineteen-thirties. He was, in fact, our great poet of memory, of cherished nostalgia. Here’s what he wrote in the poem “Thinking About the Past”:

“Certain moments will never change nor stop being –
My mother’s face all smiles, all wrinkles soon;
The rock wall building, built, collapsed then, fallen;
Our upright loosening downward slowly out of tune –
All fixed into place now, all rhyming with each other.”

How many layers of memory, one within another like matryoshka dolls, have I described in this post?