Nonduality, Laugh Clap, & Oak Ridge Mutant Music

Celebrating Shenandoah's 75th Anniversary Issue

“Nonduality” by Acie Clark reminds me of an idea my poetry is always chewing on, and which I have a hard time articulating, not because it’s a new idea, it’s a really old idea, or an old question, an old conundrum, one that religion has tried to answer, and philosophy: Where is the self located? And if you’re willing to trace that question back to its inception, where does one end and one’s mother begin?

In the spring she lives among the cattle.
In the field, her hands mark the line between
mother and calf, her arms the limit, hers
is whose life this life leaps through, ...

(emphasis mine)

In the first few lines, in quick but steady succession, the mother figure goes from living in the youth of spring “among the cattle” to a symbolic actor (her hands “mark the line”) to an anti-boundary, a vessel: “the life this life leaps through.” In this way, the mother is doing things (she’s birthing a calf!), but she isn’t seen to be doing things, if we get her perspective, it is maybe in her witness of her arm as the end of her limit. The arm is a line— but the line is also touching, connecting. And in his title, Clark has asked us not to focus on separation, so I never think of the mother figure in “Nonduality” as a specific woman, one who has herself had opinions and sex and found herself pregnant, though of course, if there is a woman in a field helping a cow give birth, she is also a specific woman with her own story, and probably her own womb— it’s just not what matters most in this stanza. What matters most, I think, is that we see her emmeshed with the field.

The ending of “Nonduality” is a gut-puncher, but I also relish the lines “glass and blood of what/ she knew to know before she was herself.” Let me turn to “you,” now, the way Clark does in the final couplet.

How can you know something before you know yourself? What can you know better before you know yourself? What can you know better in the womb than you can know outside of it?

In Orbital, Samantha Harvey’s novel that I had the good fortune of reading in my book club this week, readers are privy to one of the cosmonaut’s dreams. He describes his sense of knowing himself before meeting himself in the world:

I decided to be an astronaut when I was in the womb, Roman’s saying to a roomful of people. Before I was born, when I was taking in oxygen through an umbilical cord, when I was swimming weightless, when I knew infinity because I’d recently come from it, that’s when I decided to become an astronaut. And the people in the room start laughing and clapping as if he’s told a joke, when in fact he’s todl the plainest truth he knows. All the same, he feels exceptionally happy. His mother and father are in the room, clapping along, and behind them Anton….

It’s a gorgeous dream, a dream of your“plainest truth,” a dream of being encouraged by those you love despite their incapacity, maybe, to fully understand your plainest truth. That laugh/clap combo helps beget exceptional happiness because it is a response of deep knowing, the kind of knowing that also allows some unknowing to lovingly sneak in. I like this gif rendition of the laugh/clap, featuring Brazilian singer Day Limns:

Lastly, in an act of deep knowing, I want to bookmark Jeannine Hall Gailey’s “When You Grow Up in America’s Secret City,” because I grew up in one, too. Maybe the same one, if I’m reading the “Cades Cove” reference correctly. Jeannine, I have nightmares about being nuked in Oak Ridge’s Taco Bell drive through. Because, this is the America I was conceived and birthed in: one that values secrets more than the plainest truths:

.... We can’t ever trace
the whole truth, the blood cells, the mutations,

there’s no telling. The outline, the outlier.
The music of mutants. One less lie and liar.

Thank you to Lesley Wheeler & Beth Staples and everyone at Shenandoah for putting this issue out in the world. I really needed it this summer. Thank you for including one of my poems.

Thank you to Washington & Lee for supporting this editorial community during a stupidly trying time for the arts in the US.