If a poem was a person... | On the Language of Silence and Mary Oliver's "Whispers"
MY MIND IS A FOREST: An Autistic Wandering through the Poems of Mary Oliver, Pt. III
CONTENTS || A Quick Note | “Whispers” by Mary Oliver | MY MIND IS A FOREST, Pt. III
A Quick Note
The following is Part III of my essay series, MY MIND IS A FOREST: An Autistic Wandering Through the Language of Silence and the Poems of Mary Oliver. For Part I, an introduction to Autistic Poetics and my letter to Mary herself, click here. For Part II, on synaptic overgrowth and Mary Oliver’s “Landscape,” click here.
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WHISPERS
Mary Oliver
Have you ever tried to slide into the heaven of sensation and met you know not what resistance but it held you back? have you ever turned on your shoulder helplessly, facing the white moon, crying let me in? have you dared to count the months as they pass and the years while you imagined pleasure, shining like honey, locked in some secret tree? have you dared to feel the isolation gathering intolerably and recognized what kinds of explosions can follow from an intolerable condition? have you walked out in the mornings wherever you are in the world to consider all those gleaming and reasonless lives that flow outward and outward, easily, to the last moment the bulbs of their lungs, their bones and their appetites, can carry them? oh, have you looked wistfully into the flushed bodies of the flowers? have you stood, staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers where the birds like tossing fires flash through the trees, their bodies exchanging a certain happiness in the sleek, amazing humdrum of nature’s design — blood’s heaven, spirit’s haven, to which you cannot belong?
MY MIND IS A FOREST
PT III: WHISPERS
How does one name a longing? How does one spot it in the first place, then, without crushing it, catch it in cupped hands? How does one part their thumbs to see its bioluminescent body cast shadows on the creases of their palms? How does one find the courage to call it by its name? To say, I want, I want…
I have not been great at wanting since I was a child; since my yearnings were labeled obsessions, then obsessively culled. Where does one find the heart to be truthful about their wanting? For as long as I can remember, I have envied people who are brave enough to throw open the doors to yearning. My friend Marit writes beautiful music, so lush with longing, so full of what sounds to me like trust the world will hold it. Through a series of weighty losses and unfulfilled hopes, my friend Courtney ritualized her grief, looking it in the face every morning and every evening with tears and kindness. My son Auden, just three, throws his head back and wails his disappointment loud and unapologetically. Yet I feel yearning’s vibration at my edges and I rush to pull the curtains shut.
Few things feel to me more vulnerable than desire. When I told my now-wife how I felt about her for the very first time, it was via text. A. and I were sitting across from each other on the same couch. I looked at the tight weave of its red fabric and floral print. I looked at the wicker rocker across the room, and the sheet of glass fixed within the hull of the wood table beside me, and the word and images on the screen in my hand. I looked anywhere but at her. It was deeply uncomfortable to look away, and far better than the alternative.
Listen. I am an exposed nerve. This is always true, but never truer than when a wanting grips me in the middle and squeezes. It is not the fear of vulnerability but the intensity of it that snags me like a sweater on a doorknob—no, that overwhelms me, a surge of dangerous energy tripping my breakers, shutting down my word center. I want, and I want you to know. I do. But I cannot speak. Can you hear me in my quiet? Can you understand my languagelessness, in a way a language of its own?
Have you ever
tried to
slide into
the heaven of sensation and met
you know not what
resistance but it
held you back? have you ever
turned on your shoulder
helplessly, facing
the white moon, crying
let me in?1
A poem that only speaks, never listens, is not a poem but a sermon. A sermon has its place, certainly, and may even be beautiful. But poetry is innately, necessarily relational. It is words, but also wordlessness. It speaks and it listens.
“Have you ever?” asks our Mary, and my reading body answers her asking with something haptic, tactile, sensual. “Have you ever?” asks our Mary, and from behind my collarbone comes a tug—a tug that reminds me that yes is a feeling.
This is what a poem reveals; something that longs to be heard. It is more than mere metaphors arranged prettily on a page, more than their rhythms and rhyme. It is a conversation with oneself, or with the world, or with the very words being read. This is what a poem reveals: questions just yearning to be answered.
Have you ever been a question that yearns to be answered? Have you ever?
I told you I keep returning to this: “a language that is not a mother, that is not a tongue, do we need to use this to be understood?”2
If a poem was a person, she might be autistic.
Consider this: how a careless reader will see a poem as something gratuitous, self-involved, asocial.3 They believe a poem speaks not with but at. Her rhythms and repetitions are involuntary and meaningless. Her silence is irrelevant. She has a place in the world, sure, but she is not worthwhile beyond as metaphor, as inspiration.
Consider this, too: careless reading yields careless mistakes. It is not a kind of praiseworthy open-mindedness that leads a reader to appreciate that a poem is inherently valuable, but basic curiosity; a simple, essential humility.
If you have ever loved a poem, you have loved her depth, her noticing, her keen way of sensing, her sensitivity, her fixation, her obsession, her attention, her tension, her care. She carefully, gently cracks open the object of her affection, and it crackles like the spine of a book that has waited for years to be read. If you have ever loved a poem, you have understood there is nothing detached about her. Her rhythm and repetition are words. Even her silence, even her silence is, her silence is language.
Of the autistic writer, Ralph Savarese wrote, “a poem’s attention resembled their attention.”4 Poems are monotropic. They have tunnel vision. They look closer, and then closer, and then closer. They memorize the shape of the rose and each petal, of Orion’s studded belt, of their love’s hands, of the crow’s voice, which is made of sharp angles and bubbles.
Autists are monotropic. We have tunnel vision. We look closer, and then closer. We memorize the shapes of the world. We feel everything entirely.
have you dared to feel
the isolation gathering
intolerably and recognized
what kinds of explosions can follow
from an intolerable condition?5
I don’t want to speak too much to the intolerable condition. There is plenty to be said, but I don’t know how to say it. I sense it, I feel it. I hold it in my body. I carry it to term, I deliver, I weep, I nurse. Grief. Perhaps that’s what it is. Humanity is unrivaled in its capacity to creatively impregnate the world with Grief, which then must held with the care and resilience of a mother.
I don’t want to speak too much to the explosions can follow. There is plenty to be said, but how can I? To name some and forsake the rest—silence, as I’ve said, is language. These explosions are symbolic or they are literal. They are crumpled bodies, crushed or weeping, and whether this is a metaphor is beside the point. To suffer is to suffer.
I don’t want to speak too much. Can you hear me in the quiet? Can you understand my languagelessness, in a way a language of its own?
oh, have you
looked wistfully into
the flushed bodies of the flowers? have you stood,
staring out over the swamps, the swirling rivers
where the birds like tossing fires
flash through the trees, their bodies
exchanging a certain happiness
in the sleek, amazing
humdrum of nature’s design —
blood’s heaven, spirit’s haven, to which
you cannot belong?6
Perhaps we cannot belong, or will not, to the humdrum. To the flushed bodies and flashes. To the “certain happiness,” the delight, alight in alignment with nature.
Perhaps we have ruined that for ourselves, demanding, as we do, that those among us who are flowers sing with the same voice as the swirling rivers, which must sing with the same voice as the birds like tossing fires. We are so insufficiently accepting of so-called divergence, so inadequate in our capacity to appreciate discomfort and the wisdom it seeks to share. While the autist is deemed Other for the way our hands line up our toys by shape and color, the neurotypical segregates humanity by the same criteria. While the autist is deemed alien for fusing with the world too much, the neurotypical is deemed earthling for setting themselves entirely apart.
Is there any wonder we have created such loneliness for one another? There is no isolation gathering for the earth-others. Without words to divide, they each find themselves fit snugly within “the family of things.”7
Our Mary asks us, “have you ever / turned on your shoulder // helplessly, facing / the white moon, crying / let me in?” Have you?
If not, why?
How does one name a longing? What even is a longing, if not a let me in?
I remember mornings when I have rolled my body over to hold A., feeling such vivid love that I wish our atoms would merge; not to unbecome ourselves but to become something more than both of us. That we might become the linen against our skin, the cotton of the headboard, the dust on the walls; become the space between the windowpanes and their cobwebs, the corpse of the old spider who lived and died in them. Become the world. I feel it in my blood and in the air, that “the Voices of the I-you-we are many more that those of the I and the You.”8 Let me in.
I feel this yearning like a hum in my hands, a pulse, a spirit. Not only in love, but in everything. Let me become the song in my ears as I close my eyes and dance. Let me become the goldfinch on the feeder, singing to his babies where they sit on the telephone wire. Let me become the old sugar maple in her glory, which is only natural, so slow and unselfconscious. Let me in, I say to the stone and the bay and the flecks of sun shuddering around me. Let me in, I say—yes—I turn on my shoulder, helplessly, and say to the moon.
Is it any wonder now that autistic wanting feels, in a way, dangerous and wild? Is it a surprise, knowing what you know, I feel like a broken tooth exposed to winter air? I lose my language when I am overwhelmed, so of course my longings are silent.
As a poet—and as an autist—I have had to learn to leave the silence in. I have talked right through it at times, diffusing not just the quiet, but the truth and vitality of the longings tucked within it. The margins must speak for themselves. Silence, as I’ve said, is language.
A. has told me she’s learned to stop assuming she can see my feeling with her naked eye. Even A., who knows me better than anyone—or, perhaps this is why she does.
“It’s not until you write a poem and I read it,” she said to me, “that it hits me that a world has been happening this whole time inside you.”
Our Mary, in an interview with Maria Shriver, said she entered into a creative life because, “with words, I could build a world I could live in.”9
With a poem, yes, I can build a world that accepts me, scramble-atom’d, into itself. The roots of a tree in the lobes of my lungs. The soul of my love seeping into the space between my cells. My bare feet in the soil, the soil. With a poem, yes, my relationship to the whole praiseworthy world becomes a language. An autistic poetic.
ENDNOTES
Oliver, “Whispers,” 29, lines 1-11.
Hjorth et al., “Mutating Metaphors.”
To expand: “Allism as a marker, as a concept, then, functions as a mechanism for regarding the neurotypes of the nonautistic—for calling attention to both a neurological ideal and a neurological ideology. Allism’s derivation mimics that of autism, where the Greek autos is meant to signal self, and the Greek allos is meant to signal other. Allism heralds, then, a kind of relationality and privileging of human sociality, much like autism privileges a divergent kind of relationality, one in which sociality is figured as self- and object centered, or wherein sociality isn’t figured at all.” See Yergeau, Authoring Autism, 169-170.
Savarese, “From Neurodiversity to Neurocosmopolitanism,” 200.
Oliver, “Whispers,” 29, lines 15-19.
Oliver, “Whispers,” 30, lines 26-36.
Mary Oliver, “Wild Geese,” in Dream Work (New York: First Grove Atlantic, 1986), 14, line 18.
Anna Nygren and Hannah Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, “Theorizing Autistic Sexualities as Collective Poetic Experiences,” Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture 4, no. 2 (2022): 38.
Mary Oliver, “Maria Shriver Interviews the Famously Private Poet Mary Oliver,” interview by Maria Shriver, O, https://www.oprah.com/entertainment/maria-shriver-interviews-poet-mary-oliver/3
I can't say enough how grateful I am for this beautiful offering, torri. Every bit of it.
Amazing