The most interesting thing about Mr. Holmes, and Ian McKellen’s performance in particular, is how full of feeling it is. This has been a feely time. One of Mary’s ex-clients died last week and Mary was a trainwreck. Prostrate with grief is kind of an understatement. And later, describing it to me, as though I hadn’t witnessed it myself, she said, “I was only out from work for a morning.”
No. That’s not what happened. That’s not how it was.
Grief and magical thinking.
While I read H Is for Hawk, I lived through the magical thinking of the author. Her bipolar conviction that all was well, or all was disastrous, when clearly neither was true. A woman orphaned. A woman mothering a hawk.
My son is away for two weeks, and every day I think: Chop Wood, Carry Water. Work. Work to scaffold the day. My love for him is the routine of care: wearing my voice out reading to him; laughing at nothing for hours; the sound of his footsteps.
It’s only two weeks.
Grief and magical thinking.
I watched two quail stand on fence posts in the morning light. They were stately in their stillness. These birds that so often forget they can fly, or remember, miscalculate, and smash into the fence. A little later they herded their young around the yard. The chicks puffy and round as planets. Loved in that atomic, blundering way.
Love Sorrow
Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,
what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so
utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment
by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,
as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.
-Mary Oliver
