Before I became a poet, I smoked a joint. A few high school friends and I were at Strawbridge Lake in Moorestown, N.J. At one point on that sunny, spring, Sunday afternoon, I lay down on the grass alone. My body dissolved into the ground. At the same time, it dissolved into the air. I was earth. I was sky.
An old joke:
What did the Buddhist say to the hot dog vendor?
Make me one with everything.
I didn’t know anything about Buddhism then.
As I was vibrating as earth and sky, a voice said to me, this is what it’s like to die. You will still be here, everywhere, in everything, with everyone you love. The only hitch is that you won’t be able to separate yourself from everything. You won’t be able to say to your mother, your future wife, your future children, your friends, don’t be sad, I’m right here with you!
*
“She was dreaming about the real world that she’d left behind. Only she was still there. Sort of. Everything felt slightly beyond her grasp, like it was happening behind thick plexiglass.”
I know that experience, the main character’s experience in “Nectar,” a story by John Colman Wood, who has recently died. My version of it, however, didn’t feel like it was happening “behind thick plexiglass.” Though the character’s body and brain no longer existed, somehow her consciousness lived on. “[S]he must tell her husband about this. He would be interested in her experience of death, for she was pretty sure, from their discussions over the years, that he thought consciousness died with the body.”
She was killed in an accident “involving cars, trucks, and highway medians.” She and her husband had fought, after which he retreated “as usual to his beloved bees” while she, atypically, got into her car. They had probably fought over money, the one issue, after four decades, that was still a source of conflict between them.
“‘I can spend my money as I want,’ she’d…said. ‘If you don’t like it, I can do it on my own.’”
“‘Then go,’’ he said.
“She left. He turned away, toward his bees.”
Now she regretted those words. She didn’t want them to be the last words she said to him. The story explores her experiences as a disembodied mind, longing to communicate with her husband, who is now a widower.
*
As she considers her fresh experiences as a dead woman, “[t]wo thoughts occurred to her at once: That, being dead, she wouldn’t be able to communicate with him; that a veil of emptiness now hung between them. And that it seemed impossible she was having any thoughts at all. She no longer had a functioning body, let alone a brain. Who or what was doing all this thinking?”
Consciousness, in the fiction of this story, survives. Along with it, longing. “She longed to hold him and be held by him. She saw him lying in their bed. Or was it just a memory?” Longing, questioning, and, if not doubt, then at least uncertainty survive.
My pot-induced experience of disembodiment was fleeting, lasting but a moment. Before the questioning mind could stir, consciousness withdrew into my teenage body, and I rose from the ground and sought to rejoin my friends who were tossing a frisbee. We stood at a distance from one another, just enough space for the disc to sail through the air from hand to hand.
*
I first read “Nectar” in the print edition of The Sun. Ink on glossy paper. Letters on the page, symbolic shapes, visual images that awaken in throat, inner ear, and brain the sounds of consonants and vowels, organized to form familiar words. Crinkle of glossy paper as I turn the page. The embodied part of reading.
Then there’s the voice—the disembodied voice. John Wood is a friend of mine. I can recall the sound of his voice. But that’s not exactly the voice that enters through my eyes and speaks within me from the story’s first sentence (“Later she remembered dying, though she wasn’t sure it was possible to remember something like that.”) to its final two sentences (“She didn’t think he’d seen her, out there with the bees. Or if he had, she didn’t think he understood.”).
We can point to craft elements that contribute to the creation of voice—diction and syntax, for instance—but, in the end, they alone can’t account for the mystery of the experience of a human voice speaking to and within a reader from ink on a page. Call it, the written text, a form of disembodied consciousness.
*
“When she went to lie beside him [in bed], she discovered he was like air, or the idea of air. She moved closer, and then she was inside him.… She expected the usual resistance, the soft settling against his warm body, but then she kept going. She was dark matter zinging through anything it encountered. He appeared to have no sense of her presence, just lying there in the night, maybe asleep, maybe awake.”
*
She was dark matter zinging through anything it encountered. Dark matter: this story, a story. Dark matter: a poem.
*
No, that’s not right. True, it is how Woods imagines the experience of the disembodied consciousness of a wife as she, after dying, tries to communicate with, to commune with, to make physical contact with her still living husband. But that’s not what happens with a story, a poem. The writer may begin with longing, longing for the dark matter of ink on a page to enter the eye of a reader and once having done so to mysteriously transform into something else: a living human voice. A voice that, rather than zinging through, will linger within a reader from the first phoneme of the text to the last. That’s what I experience when I read “Nectar.” And that’s the experience I hope a reader will have with one of my poems.
I see it now. My poems began that day at Strawbridge Lake. I could say that I was stoned. But that’s not all. I was alive. And that’s what I have aspired to create ever since that day: work that is alive. Poems that have the potential, whether I am physically alive or not, to live in you, to awaken life in you. That’s what “Nectar,” written by my dear friend who is, thank God, very much alive, does for me.
Richard Chess has published four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Love Nailed to the Doorpost. Professor emeritus from UNC Asheville, where he directed the Center for Jewish Studies for 30 years, Chess serves on the boards of Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry and Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, where he co-directs its Faith in Arts project. You can find him at www.richardchess.com .
