Literature of Yearning
Nimrod’s 2010 Spring/Summer issue is entitled “The Map of Yearning.” The idea of mapping out—explaining, representing, symbolizing—a concept as nebulous as yearning is an apt image for what the best writing tries to do. It’s a quixotic project, a task that can never be fully completed. Almost a paradox, but not quite.
The University of Tulsa’s Nimrod has assembled a collection of fiction and poetry that attempts to delineate the territory of contradictory human yearnings: the yearnings for love, for touch, for all that we can’t know, the yearning to fit in, and the yearning to stand out. Most of the stories in this issue represent yearning through the main character’s encounter with a mysterious figure, someone who draws out the protagonist’s unsatisfied desires.
In Emil Draitser’s “Chekhov on Brighton Beach” the figure of Chekhov makes an actual, flesh and blood appearance in a Russian émigré community in 1970s Brooklyn. He is manifested by the frustrated artistic yearnings of an aging Russian actor, Semyon, whose fierce passion for the theater has been continually frustrated by poverty, politics, and prejudice. Chekhov is a humbling inspiration, someone who used art to propel himself above all obstacles: “rereading his biography, time and again [Semyon] was impressed by the fact the son of a shopkeeper and the grandson of a released serf found the spiritual strength to overcome to crude milieu of his upbringing”.
Even, Chekhov, however, was ultimately cut short by tuberculosis. When Chekhov appears, complete with an invalid’s tubercular cough, Semyon suggests he take the writer to a contemporary doctor: “The visitor burst out in a delightful laugh… ‘Few artists have the luck of having enough time to do everything they aspire to. One should thank his good fortune for what he has managed to accomplish.’” The very condition of an artist, it seems, is one of only partially satisfied longing.
Vocational yearning—passion for a profession—is not as frequently written about as longings for love or human connection, but Draitser manages to portray Semyon’s deep, restless obsession with theater in a way that shows such love to be as natural and deep-seated as any passion for a person: “Theatre! What a remarkable invention!...He even had a secret childish fear: what if everyone discovered what extraordinary joy acting was? They would abandon their boring trades—bookkeepers, drivers, or typists—and rush into the acting profession."
What’s remarkable about many of the poems and stories in this issue of Nimrod is how the more abstract, spiritual yearnings become physical, represented in the flesh and blood. In the poem “Prelude,” Peter Munro imaginatively fuses the speaker’s longings and sense of difference into the imagery of seaside life: “I taught myself to extrude my guts like the sea-star,/vulnerable and deadly and unrecognizable/and the rain veiled it all/and I worshiped the rain." The speaker’s flesh and “guts” get tangled up in physical beings of the seashore, till they are almost indistinguishable.
In Lance Larsen’s poem “Aeolian,” the very words take on physical forms: “Aeolian—if vowels pass/as windows, then surely this word qualifies as the sunniest/cottage in the OED." Larsen envisions “Coleridge’s theory…our bodies equal harps/played by the wind” on the landscape of his own body, injured when his accidentally drives a nail into his foot: “I truly turned harp./Or scream machine…Aeolian—what a pulsing smear/of vowels. Holes in an otherwise solid word."
This image of a nail driven through a foot inevitably recalls the figure of Jesus, the ultimate conception of the spiritual merged with the fleshy, fallible human. Perhaps because the Jesus-figure is such a powerful representation of a longing to be united with a force larger than oneself, this imagery comes up several times in an issue devoted to yearning.
In the Teresa Milbrodt’s story “Holes (or Annotated Scrapbook, Sections Slightly Charred)” the narrator follows her grandfather’s example and gets holes artificially created in each hand, so that she can travel the country as the “The Fountain Woman.” This is motivated by a complex array of desires, of course: a need to be marked, extraordinary.
