Position, Heal Thyself

By Eric Foley

Time opens up and takes us in its wingspan and drops us

somewhere. And we are flooded.” (Bloom, 84)

Permiso has me thinking about therapy, specifically the therapeutic role that writing can play in coping with loss and grief. During her reading visit in class, Bloom mentioned a fear of something worse than the pain of loss—pain, after all, can be grasped and at least partially comprehended (apprehended?) through language. The greater fear is entering the “vortex”—a place where a complete lack of feeling prevails, where one feels no thing at all: “The point was not to cry. / It was to avoid the vortex.[…] I kept wishing / for silence in which to feel something” (50). Yet even this lack of feeling or, in the case of the poem from which this excerpt comes (“Magical Thinking, Year of”), a lack of connection with the art about loss that is being re-presented to one, even this can be written about, moved through, made into something that makes another think and feel.

I am intrigued by the cyclical nature of the grief of which Bloom writes, and which her book structurally enacts. Permiso opens with a quote from Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, a book in which naked expressions of the author’s personal grief over the loss of his partner from cancer intermittently appear amidst other pieces on solitude, self, memory, and strength:

MARRIED

I came back from the funeral and crawled

around the apartment, crying hard,

searching for my wife’s hair.

For two months got them from the drain,

from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,

and off the clothes in the closet.

But after other Japanese women came,

there was no way to be sure which were

hers, and I stopped. A year later,

repotting Michiko’s avocado, I find

a long black hair tangled in the dirt. (Gilbert, 19)

Permiso is about allowing these cycles of intense emotion their place in one’s life—not trying to avoid or escape them. Writing can be a way of channeling or processing the intensity—not escaping it, but providing a channel for emotional energy to run along. If the cycles are going to occur regardless of what we do, we may as well give them permission to occur. For the writer, this could mean allowing them their place, observing, and writing about them. But what is their place?

This is where one thinks of Bloom’s other job, as a psychotherapist. Does Permiso contain a kind of prescription for dealing with grief? This may seem simplistic, yet it is hard not to think in that direction, just as it is difficult not to hear from one’s friends and family, after a deep loss, that “time heals the broken heart.” While this may be true, Bloom and Gilbert’s poems attest to the fact that time also breaks the healed heart, again and again.

For this reader, reading Permiso after a recent breakup provided great comfort, in that it detailed a process and position that we must all occupy at certain points in our lives; a position that can’t be avoided however much we might wish otherwise, one that must simply be lived through, felt, and, for those who are compelled or choose to do so, written about. This is a book that asks, courageously, “How far might you go if you finally / stop stopping?”