On Angels and Agency in Pierson’s Self-Narrating Poetic

 

Reading Aide-Mémoire, and recognizing Ruth Roach Pierson’s lived profession as a historicist, one might imagine Pierson‘s narrator as a wizened female angel looking as though she’s about to move away from something she’s fixedly contemplating. Her eyes quivering (21) as they stare (“no longer wide-eyed / and silky brown” [15]), her wings spread, her face (“skin / falling in folds like a stranger’s clothes” [71]) turned toward the past. Where we might see raindrops collecting “on the underside of branches,” she sees something “bud-like, upside-down and out of season. False tears” pantomiming real tears past, one more likeness in the obscuring “mesh of likenesses” piled upon the wreckage of the gauche “self of the night before” (all from “The Marrow,” [11]). She would like to stay and awaken from the dead the “husband [she] betrayed” ⁽35) or a colleague, though she “hardly knew him, liked him less” (59), or even “you” (35), and dig through the wreckage of these dead relationships to find “the nub, the marrow of the thing” (11), buried beneath. But “a blast of wind” (11) has caught in her wings with such violence that she can no longer close them. As the wind rages, “[m]orning dissolves // into afternoon, [and…] the bare-limbed tree shudders free of rain” (11)—rain that was her handle on real tears long dry. She is irresistibly propelled into an “afternoon” (11) to which her back is turned, feeling already “like a square bracket stranded / at the end of a line” (58), left only with the despairing wish for the power to, of her own agency, “cast off”(11) that self which still shapes the “habit of mind,” 11) or cover it as snow has the “power to cover” (10), recognizing that if she doesn't, the world, despite her, will cover both the self she’s describing and the self that’s describing, “shunt [her] onto an Abstellgleis,” (21). If this occurs, she fears nature will ambush her “[e]very body part, / every brain cell” (21).

 

All of which is to say one might cast Pierson’s speaker in the image of the angel Walter Benjamin describes in his sixteenth thesis “On the Concept of History.”ⁱ But Pierson’s highly personal literary avatar is not Benjamin’s angel, whose affection for the world, coming from a genuinely detached perspective, has a magical quality. The charmed objectivity of detachment breaks down in Pierson’s poetry under the weight of an anxiety rooted in the author’s recognition of her autobiographical embodied and mortal presence in a still affective world, and in her own authorial continuity with the old “gauche” self on whom she’s looking back. The self she fancies to discard in “The Marrow” is not only a rendering of Pierson’s own past self, but, inescapably, of her full self­, past, present and future-potential.

There is a present and potential “Ruth” in this poetry. Confronted with the suicide of a teenager (“someone with the whole / phantasmagoria of life left to live, / but who lacked / the conviction” [49]), the poem’s speaker is reminded that she’s alive and still in the world. She recalls a dying friend’s request that she “live a little life” (50)ⁱⁱ for him, and later, inquires for the conviction to live in herself. She asks, in her final poem, “What to live for, if not / to do?”(83). In response, she observes that “Even the vita / contemplativa is a doing of sorts” (83)—an observation warranted by the concreteness of the labour-product in your hand, of Pierson’s writing. She resolves to redouble her efforts to constructively synthesize all of this contemplation, meditation, remembrance, to take up a stick of chalk and write “words and more words” (84) on the blackboard as an active form of doing in the world, and publish them in book form, and then (deservedly) have them stamped with a shiny “Finalist the GGs” sticker, which in turn deserve to be picked up with curiosity and read.

 

But, if we’re serious about questions about responsiveness and responsibility like the one posed in “After the Flower Show” (67)—

—then I wonder if the doing of the vita contemplativa can be considered to be really adequate. Despite its overt assumption of a male “actor,” I am drawn to refer to Benjamin’s sixteenth thesis, in its entirety:

That Pierson’s narrators engage in a pageant of self-memory and self-inquiry indeed shows self-awareness, but self-awareness isn’t control and agency. But then, who has that kind of control? I wonder if Pierson would think anyone did. And if she didn’t, I wonder if she’d say. And if not, maybe she is writing Benjamin’s angel after all.

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

 

ii Fight the urge to read the word “little” as opposed to “big.” Context makes it clear that that was neither his nor her intention.