Lauren Groff on Work and Love
This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
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Twenty years ago I was in an accident that resulted in the loss of function and feeling in my right hand. I was a child playing ice hockey. A friend’s skate found, somehow, the underside of my wrist. There was a lot of blood. There was surgery. Years of physical therapy. I’d been, at the time, right-handed. Being young—I was 11 when the accident occurred—there was a chance I could regain some degree of sensation and movement, and over time I did. But from the moment I woke in the hospital it was clear I could no longer claim right-handedness; the surgeon was quick to tell me so. I could no longer move through the world relying—consciously or not—on the dexterity and coordination of the hand I’d entered the world (if that’s how it works) using. The process of switching to my left was not swift, and in fact I would say it’s ongoing. Writing. Brushing my teeth. Using silverware. Throwing darts. What were once tasks performed without thought became, and to some degree remain, little problems to be solved. There was once more or less a single way I picked up a pen, gripped it, wrote my name; and overnight I had to develop a new way, had to experiment with the foreign clumsiness of my left, puzzle toward what felt most right or comfortable. And as I read back over this paragraph, the process sounds very much like an experience of limitation—for years I would have described it this way, having something, and having it taken away. * On the second floor of SFMOMA, on the first wall one sees upon entering the permanent galleries, there hangs a brown-scale painting whose composition gives the impression of splintered wood. It has always looked, to me, like the artist shattered a cello across a hardwood floor and, with the resulting shards, created a semi-sculptural object which they then painted. The artist is cubist innovator Georges Braque, the painting, “Violin and Candlestick” (1910). I inhabit an in-between space, a region between the singular demand of a task—write your name here—and […]
Click here to view original page at Low Poetics: On Cubism, Disability, and the Distance Between the Reader and the Poem
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This week’s story, “ Between the Shadow and the Soul ,” is about a fifty-year-old woman named Eliza who has
The British realist director Mike Leigh loves the term “character actor,” which he uses often and with zeal. To him,
