'It Is Pure Absence, No Place, Nowhere, Not'

I remember in high school reading Louis Fischer’s The Life of Lenin (1964), though all I retain of the book is the account of Lenin’s autopsy, following his death at age fifty-two from atherosclerosis. When tapped with tweezers, his cerebral arteries pinged like stone. They were calcified but in his short life Lenin had been granted sufficient time to write some 10-million words and murder more than 8-million of his countrymen -- a piker compared to Stalin, of course.

Dying and death are democratic, the true levelers sought by revolutionaries everywhere. No respecter of demographics, death makes no distinctions. You want egalitarianism? Die. In contrast to Lenin, think of Yvor Winters – poet, critic, teacher, husband, father. In 1964 at age sixty-four he was diagnosed with cancer of the throat. In a letter to Allen Tate the following year he writes:

 

“. . . I haven’t much time left. I am trying to finish a book [Forms of Discovery: Critical and Historical Essays on the Forms of the Short Poem in English, 1967], which will be my last criticism. Last May I had an operation for cancer of the tongue. Too much pipe smoking. . . . No more tobacco, no more liquor. I drink Knox’s Gelatin. I have one more year to teach, and I shall be glad to be done with it.”

 

Winters retired from Stanford in 1966 after teaching there for thirty-two years. That November he underwent a second surgery. He writes to Gus Blaisdell a month later:

 

“It was cancer but the pathologist found it to be strictly in one spot. There will be no radiation treatment, at least for now. My surgeon says that in a couple of years it will probably be possible to control this sort of things with pills.

 

“The surgery was what is popularly known as massive surgery. Most of the muscle up the right side of my jaw and my right collarbone was removed, with most of everything else within the triangle. . . . No pain worth mentioning, because all the nerves were removed.”

 

Two months before his death on January 28, 1968, Winters writes to Blaisdell: “With the glasses, I can sit up and read for short periods; sitting up increases pain without giving me the exercise I need; the pain blinds me, glasses or not.”

 

Among Winters’ students at Stanford was the poet Charles Gullans (1929-93), who was also killed by cancer. In his final collection, Letter from Los Angeles (John Daniel & Co., 1990), he includes “The House of Exile”:

 

“Death is no riddle, not a mere unknown;

It is unknowable--like Nothing, None.

It is pure absence, no place, nowhere, not,

Negative absolute, the unlived through.

It is pure evil, the unspecified,

Unspecifiable in any way

By figure, trope or crude analogy.

Using the oldest magic that we know,

We give death vesture, habit, and a name.

We give it entrance with a golden bough

Or stony lintel and a keep of thorns.

We give it locus and mythography

With skies as blue as  and banal as our own,

And people its dim land with dimmer shades

Forever silent on their distant shore;

Or call it some abstraction of the mind,

Repose, or contemplation, or the good.

In  truth, it is imploded space, a name

Which has no definition and no face.”

 

[See The Selected Letters of Yvor Winters (ed. R.L. Barth, Ohio University Press/Swallow Press, 2000).]