I was in Rome when Michael Jackson died this summer. For days, the Caf?? del Biscione blared only MJ. For days, walking through the city, the soundtrack of Rome had been revised. Vespas and football fans and fish vendors beat it for “Beat It.” My own brain cleared space in the Rome Room for the glittery glove. And the Michael Jackson room welcomed Rome into its garret, as well. Suddenly, the memory of playing “Thriller,” my first record, over and over in my brother’s room was placed side-by-side with the memory of my students writing double-dactyls comparing Jackson’s rise and fall to Caesar’s. I read this morning that the glove had sold for over $350,000 and I was reminded of the power that objects can hold, the power of two things being in the same place at the same time, the association that forms.
Hello metonymy, my old friend.
I’ve always been fascinated by this device, though I’m not sure that this fascination leads me to use it any better than the next poet. I like the idea that a relationship forms not because two things (or people) are alike, but because they hung out in the same space (spatial, temporal, emotional, what have you) for a while. Like in the dorm in college. We were all different, but man, were we contiguous. And this contiguity is why we’re interested in people’s stuff, where they lived, what they touched, what sparkly gloves they inserted their rapidly paling fingers into.
And while metaphor has perhaps called dibs as the soul of empathy (“we are alike, so I can imagine your pain”), so too might metonymy factor in. Recently a good friend of good friends was killed suddenly in a freak accident. I’d only met the man once: he was the host for a reading series this summer and I was one of the readers. It’s been hard to know to do with the sadness I’ve felt, which doesn’t feel like mine to own. And I don’t think I would have felt quite so sad had I not had the brief encounter with him this summer. Had I not remembered the way he stumbled charmingly in the introduction I’d written, but which he was reading, about what I’d done on my summer vacation. He got tripped up on the word “tufa,” thinking I meant “tofu.” Two words who sit near each other in the dictionary, but don’t have much in common other than that. Like two writers who’ve never met before.
Way back in the good old days of grad. school I wrote my MFA thesis on Larry Levis and elegy. I was interested in how many elegies were written for him after his death, and how elegiac his own work had been. This might have been expected if his death were the result of a long illness, but it was entirely sudden. I don’t remember if I wrote about the poem “Those Graves in Rome,” but it’s come to be one of my favorites of Levis’ since it’s also about Rome, one of my favorite places. It’s a long poem, so I won’t paste it in its entirety here. But he writes like we walk while on vacation, meandering throughout a city and counting on “and” to hold it and us together. Here is the beginning of the poem:
There are places where the eye can starve,
But not here. Here, for example, is
The Piazza Navona, & here is his narrow room
Overlooking the Steps & the crowds of sunbathing
Tourists. And here is the Protestant Cemetery
Where Keats & Joseph Severn join hands
Forever under a little shawl of grass
And where Keats’ name isn’t even on
His gravestone, because it is on Severn’s,
And Joseph Severn’s infant son is buried
Two modest, grassy steps behind them both.
Years after those deaths Levis:
…stood here with my two oldest friends.
I thought, then, that the three of us would be
Indissoluble at the end, & also that
We would all die, of course. And not die.
And maybe we should have joined hands at that
Moment. We didn’t“
Perhaps this is the point, in part, of travel. To associate ourselves metonymically with a place. And though I certainly can’t stand in for Keats (poetically, or in any other way) any better than I did before standing at the foot of his bed, at the foot of his grave, I have stood where he stood and perhaps this sharing of air will help me to understand the beauty/truth conundrum (or that life/death one) a little better. I am no more like Keats than before, but I like him more.
And which reminds me, I have some seeds from the umbrella pine over Keats’ grave waiting on my kitchen window sill, along with a tiny Vespa given to me by a long-time writing group friend, next to a tiny plastic can of beer (I think it’s PBR) mounted atop a spear for sticking into a cupcake which was given to me by another good friend and which is why I hold it dear.