Shapes of Grief
Below the Soil in Will Arbery’s "Evanston Salt Costs Climbing"
Y’all: following my latest post on the subject of silence, my friend JC (read her writing here) lent me her copy of Joy Harjo’s An American Sunrise . There, in a poem titled SINGING EVERYTHING, Harjo gives voice to precisely the question I was gesturing at — with a brevity and clarity that, to recycle a new phrase, put the breath back into me: “The guardians of silence are the most powerful. / They are the most rare…”
The following is a sort-of review of Will Arbery’s “Evanston Salt Costs Climbing.” I say “sort-of” because I am trying to push back, in this piece, against what I see as the tendency of criticism to dissect works by changing their shape. This is, in other words, a humble attempt to think/feel alongside Arbery, in his chosen form, and as much as possible on his terms…
CHARACTERS:
BASIL – male, Greek, salt truck driver, 50s
PETER — male, Evanstonian, salt truck driver, 40s
MAIWORM — female, Evanstonian, public works administrator, 50s
JANE JR. — female, Evanstonian, volunteer, 20s
(All italicized passages are the work of the essayist.)
SETTING:
Evanston, IL
TIME:
Three Januarys
2014
2015
2016
PLOT:
Winters are getting colder in Evanston, and the cost of road salt is climbing. Public Works Assistant Director Jane MAIWORM has a solution: permeable heated pavers. These subsurface gadgets melt snowfall, absorb runoff, and avoid the environmental harms of salt toxicity. But they will put salt truck drivers BASIL and PETER out of a job. PETER is depressed and struggling to grieve the death of his wife. BASIL is hiding from his past. MAIWORM’s stepdaughter, JANE JR., is a child stuck in an adult’s body. MAIWORM knows she can only do so much, so fast. And the winters are getting colder in Evanston.
ESSAY:
(It is a cold morning when MAIWORM bursts into the break room to find PETER and BASIL finishing their coffee. MAIWORM reads out loud a local newspaper article on the rising costs of road salt. She is thrilled to be mentioned by name. But PETER feels that the journalist has missed the real story.)
PETER. They should write a thing about what’s it like on the roads, with the salt.
BASIL. What do you mean what it’s like?
PETER. Like about what it’s like out there when we’re salting the roads.
BASIL. No one wants to read that. We drive, we salt. The end. Stories gotta have…like, pull.
(Pull. BASIL is right, and wrong. Stories gotta have pull. But he’s kidding himself if he thinks that his and PETER’s daily expeditions are untouched by the tug of dread: PETER admits that the sight of his own daughter depresses him, and he can hardly look his wife in the eyes. BASIL is eager to dispel PETER’s sadness.)
BASIL. …today will be better. Hahaha, but. You know we’ll have good times in the truck.
PETER. True true true true true.
BASIL. Are you still feeling sadness?
PETER. A little. I can’t help it. Are you?
BASIL. No.
(BASIL says this with defiance, a little wishfully.)
PETER. Thanks for trying to cheer me up but it takes a while to sink in. My toes are cold.
(There it is: PETER’s sadness. Or is it just the temperature?
The truth is that physical sensation and emotional experience both live in the body. They are easily confused: happiness for warmth, sadness for cold. Who’s to say that all these feelings about the climate aren’t just physical sensations? What’s the difference between physical sensation and emotional experience, after all?
But PETER is too cold to be consoled. And BASIL is not having it.)
BASIL. Peter, are you asking me to go down into that feeling with you?
(There is a definite direction to the dread everyone senses: downward. The way of salt and snowmelt.
Indeed, it’s all down: the weather is getting fiercer, but there’s little mention of sky in this town. All the action takes place on the ground — or more accurately, beneath it. That’s where the dead are, for one thing. MAIWORM tells her stepdaughter about last night’s dream.)
MAIWORM. It was – oh gosh, sorry but, to be honest it was about the dead. All the dead. They were rising up in a blurry chorus… It was scary.
JANE JR. …well now I’m gonna have nightmares about that!
MAIWORM. But then it became about heated permeable pavers… I feel as though they’re coming. And one day, acting upon the orders of the dead, they’ll rise up from the ground and wrap around us until we – anyway. Just a dream. Just a little nervousness.
(MAIWORM knows better than anyone that the ground is the site of highways, and plumbing and heated permeable pavers. In other words, it’s the site of infrastructure — the hidden stuff that structures our lives.
The ground is also where we bury our dead. And the dead, like heated permeable pavers, are hidden. But are they a kind of structure? Do they shape the lives of the living? When they return to haunt us, do they come in the name of chaos or of order?
And the infrastructure that promises to save us from climate catastrophe — will it conspire with the meddlesome dead? Can our future resist the persuasion of our past?)
MAIWORM. …and do I trust a road like that? A ground like that? With little secret characters underneath it?
(Point taken. If you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet, you can’t trust anything at all.
Speaking of violated trust — in the salt truck, PETER’s and BASIL’s dashboard heater seems to have broken. This is news so distressing it can hardly be real.)
BASIL. It shouldn’t break, it cannot break
PETER. It broke
BASIL. No way, fuck no. The cold has entered my heart.
(BASIL is being goofy. But there’s a depth to this melodrama, and a hollowness to his laughter.)
PETER. The cold has entered my heart. It’s minus thirty.
BASIL. Thirty below. Hahaha.
PETER. “Feels like.”
BASIL. “Feels like.”
PETER. Feels like thirty fucking below.
BASIL. Hahaha “feels like,” fuck
PETER. Hahahaha.
BASIL. (Hyper-articulated.) Hahahahaha, ha ha! Ha! Oh fuck, and an uh and an uh and a haha.
PETER. (Hyper-articulated.) Yes fuckin ha and a Ha and a Ha and a Bunkfuck
BASIL. Hahahaha
PETER. Hahahaha FUCK laughing.
BASIL. Hahahaha.
(Much of BASIL’s and PETER’s friendship transpires here, at the edge of comprehensibility. There’s an intimacy in their nonsensical language that comes from long hours spent together behind the wheel. Much of what’s between them goes unspoken. And what they do say out loud…)
PETER. Butta time. Suppa time for us. Butta time.
BASIL. Butta time.
(…is intelligible only to them, the origin of its meaning lost in the pile of days and days and uneventful days.
So, there is intimacy here, yes – but there is also distance. Between the two of them, in the empty cupholder space that ought to be heated by the dashboard fans, hangs an utterly incomprehensible grief. Language fails to express what they are feeling. Thus, the comic insufficiency of the phrase: “feels like.” They are united in their isolation. So they laugh, and take what comfort they can in private phrases.
Sometimes they tell stories. BASIL recounts a dream he had, about his grandmother, his yiayia, in an old-flowers dress and a purple hat: she is leaning against a tree. She is dying. She calls to him for help, but he tells her to GO AWAY. He is afraid of her.
Suddenly, he finds her standing before him. Their bodies merge — he recounts this with lots of groaning, and some laughter, at the absurdity of it.)
BASIL. And then.
I’m on the ground. I feel an incredible heat, from inside me. I am the heat. Okay, and I see that it was my yiayia, that I am my yiayia, and I am dying, and I am on the ground, and I am looking at the little boy who’s me, who’s also dying, and saying he’s sorry, saying I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
And the city is burning, or freezing up.
(What terrifies BASIL is not that he will always alone; it is that he can never be alone. At the end of the day, BASIL is bound to his grandmother. They are the same body. They are, in fact, the same person, endlessly accompanied.
There is no generational escape from the burning cities, and the frozen roads. The yiayia experiences these climate disasters through BASIL. BASIL experiences through his yiayia the shame of having left her descendants a world in flames.
Perhaps this is why the dead rise to torment the living: they are returning the favor for inflicting upon them all our pain — our pain being, ultimately, theirs as well.
Despite these dreams, BASIL pretends not to understand PETER.)
BASIL. Are you still feeling sadness?
PETER. Of course. It’s fucking everywhere.
(JANE JR. feels it too. She proposes to her stepmother MAIWORM that they move to Corpus Christi, Texas.)
MAIWORM. Why?
JANE JR. It’s falling into the sea!
MAIWORM. You want to fall into the sea?
JANE JR. Maybe just to get it over with!
MAIWORM. This is our home.
JANE JR. But there’s something wrong! There’s something under everything and it’s making us all want to die! It’s pushing out from under everything and it’s telling us to die and you can’t leave me alone with it.
(Like the dead and the permeable heated pavers and the cold of frozen toes, the dread rises up from below. But what exactly does it come from? Could it be that the source of our dread is the earth itself?)
PETER. You start to understand why oil companies, and you know, gun people, plastic people, pharmacy people and whatever, fight back. Why they try to stay on top. Cuz they’re just people. And they all want to kill themselves.
BASIL. All of them?
PETER. Yeah.
BASIL. Why do they all want to kill themselves?
PETER. Because the world doesn’t need us. Not one little bit. It would be better for the world if we all killed ourselves. The planet would thank us. And we all know it.
(This talk of a vengeful planet is too much for MAIWORM. She’s a Public Works Assistant Director to her core, and she can’t simply sit around waiting for the end to come.)
MAIWORM. I want to wake up and fix some tiny things. A few tiny things. Get up and get to fixing some specific tininess, and then some specific tininess after that, and then our little nervousness will become a little happiness… I think I have to believe that. And now that I’ve felt it, felt what Jane Jr. feels, the thing underneath everything, how big it is – I think I believe in tininess even more now.
(She insists upon this. But BASIL — who disappears below-ground in a moment of stagecraft that literalizes the relationship between stifled grief and subsoil infrastructure and the buried dead — reemerges as JANE JACOBS, the famed urban advocate and MAIWORM’s personal hero. BASIL/JANE JACOBS bears sobering news from Down There.)
BASIL/JANE JACOBS. My dear Jane, no. It’s too late. It’s too late. I assure you. All of us in the invisible world already know it. Invisible cities sustained by the certainty of your extinction. All you can do is discover people. All there ever was was people.
(All we have is people. The ones who came before us, and the ones who will come after us, and the ones who leave traces of their lives in piles of salt and toxic soils and permeable heated pavers. PETER knows this. It’s why he couldn’t stand to look his wife in the eyes before she died. He knows that the source of our consolation is also the source of our suffering.)
PETER. “We’ll get through this somehow.” “Yeah. Don’t worry.” “We’re all in this together.” “I love you.” “Fuck don’t say you me.” “Why?” “Cuz it hurts, it hurts to love you, it hurts to love all you people.”
(In his view, love is nothing more than the sharing of pain. But it is also nothing less. So when JANE JR. says…)
JANE JR. I don’t think I’ll ever find someone to battle the thing underneath everything, when it comes for us, you know?
(…she’s exactly right: she can’t find someone to fend off her dread! But she can find someone with whom to share that feeling.
What is left to us, in other words, is precisely what BASIL fears most: our sharedness. We cannot dispel our fear, or even diminish it, but we can hold it in the company of others.
This notion gives little in the way of hope, but there’s a spare comfort in its simplicity: all we have is ourselves, and each other, and language to traverse the emptiness between us. Everything else is theatrical scenery, plywood garages propped up by two-by-fours and a collective agreement to believe that they are real.
It is this fact alone that saves EVANSTON SALT COSTS CLIMBING — and, indeed, the present moment — from being bone-chillingly bleak. Our humanity, the sum total of it, consists in our ability to feel dread and grief, and to share it, through language, with others. Which is why, when JANE JR and PETER find themselves alone, awkwardly, amid a winter storm, what emerges from the conjoined shadow of their misery is a sort of wholeness.)
JANE JR. Um, do you think there’s something underneath everything that wants us to die?
PETER. 100%. I know it to be true.
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