The End of Beauty

Perhaps it is my research regarding Schnackenberg’s use of thresholds that has me tuned to liminal spaces, but in reading Jorie Graham’s The End of Beauty, she seemed to be dwelling in the liminal. In the beginning, I noticed her tendency to describe objects or features through a binary of black and white or dark and light; however, as I moved through the volume, she seemed to lean into shadow, into that liminal space of what lies in between and the shifting back and forth between. For example, Graham describes the transition of light to dark across the human form:

            We stood there. Your face went out a long time

            before the rest of it. Can’t see you anymore I said. Nor I,

            you, whatever you still were

            replied. (What the End is For)

As the darkness crosses over “Your face,” the speaker not only describes his or her inability to distinguish the form of the “you” but seems to question whether the lack of light has altered his or her understanding of the “you,” unsure as to if “you” is still the same “you.”  Graham returns to this idea later in “Imperialism,” in which the form is shifted by the play of the light:

            Last night I watched your face in the lamplight fluttering—

We were trying to talk—The kerosene was thinning—

You never had your face but something like cleared light then

soiled light

(roiling)

            and on it all—imprint that would not take—eyeholes, mouth hole. There were moths.

 

Again, Graham seems to be questioning the form of the face and whether it defines the person. She then continues with this idea of liminality:

            There was a space across which you and your shadow, pacing,

            broke,

and around you pockets of shadow, sucking, shutting.

 

In this liminal space, Graham seems to ponder the idea of the created body and the idea of shapes and forms. Much like Teresa of Avila who believed in a passive state in which the mind could reach a state no longer aware of the body,  Graham seems to question the relationship between the mind and the body as well as the body’s inability to go where the mind desire to go. For example, in her poem “Vertigo,” the speaker asks what it is that pulls at one, the emptiness at the beginning of the story:

            The mind trying to fasten

            and fasten, the mind feeling it like a sickness this wanting

            to snag, catch hold, begin, the mind crawling out to the edge of the cliff

            and feeling the body as if for the first time—how it cannot follow, cannot love.

 

At the risk of full disclosure, I found Graham’s work incredible challenging, and I am not sure exactly what made it so difficult. I enjoyed the poetic images that she creates in a single stanza comprised of a single phase. While her poems seems to have a narrative, taking me on a sort of linear journey, her descriptions seemingly trivial images, creating a beautiful image despite her attempts not to.  Despite my general confusion, I was able to pick up patterns, repeating images or concepts.