Kafka, in one of his notebooks, writes of the hopeless longing of the dead. He imagines them lapping up the waters of death because they savour still of the world of the living. The river flows backwards in revulsion, ‘washing the dead back into life’. So it is in life. We are never done with one another. The dead surround us. They knock against us constantly, invisibly, longing to be seen. They are sometimes impertinent, sometimes pitiful, but they are always present. I was reminded of these half-remembered words as I re-read Anne Michaels’ sonorous, beguiling novel, Fugitive Pieces, a sort of extended remembrance of the dead, and in particular the line, ‘It’s longing that moves the sea’. In the book, Jakob, whose family has been killed in the Holocaust, and his protector Athos, a Greek geologist, pour fresh water into the sea, so that ‘the dead may drink’. The living long for the dead just as the dead long for the living. This mutual longing, our inescapable entwinedness, is part of our humanness, Michaels shows. Few people have written as beautifully about the painful, poignant relationship between the dead and the living, the obligations we owe each other, the threads that bind us to each other, the vast, fathomless reservoir of the past that begins at our feet and extends in every direction, far beyond the furthest point we can see.
Fugitive Pieces is a comforting book, in a sense, but it is also a painful one because of where the author directs our gaze and how long she makes us hold it. It is hard to look, where death is concerned. Sometimes it is hard because what we are looking at is the most terrible thing in the world. Sometimes it is hard because the feeling of loss is unbearable. Sometimes we are reminded that we will die, very soon, perhaps suddenly and violently (Michaels shows how a moment of violence can resonate across generations. Who hasn’t touched a scar they never bore?). We know that life will continue without us. Sometimes it is just the weight of the expectations of the dead that presses on us. It can be crushing. Sometimes it is just the knowledge that we have survived while others have not. What would they have fashioned from the dirt running ceaselessly through our fingers? Who would they have loved and who would have loved them? It can be hard for the living because the dead want so much for us. They know we can be so much better than we are. And we are responsible for them. We till the ground in which they lie. I went to a talk this week about the transmission of indigenous knowledge and cultural memory. What happens when the dead no longer speak to us or we cease to hear or listen to them? What happens when someone comes along and tells you your traditional understandings aren’t fit for the modern world, the world they have created and want to impose on you? What do we do when this new world falters or fails or is found wanting? How do we regain these old understandings? I felt sad listening to these thoughts because I knew I could not go back. I had nowhere to go. I wouldn’t know where to start.
I’m often struck by how carelessly we invoke the needs of future generations, as though we knew anything about it. The question has become almost trivial. What do we want them to know of us: that we were thrifty, that we saved when we could have spent? And what will we say we saved? What will we show them? What about our moral obligations? Michaels writes of how ‘good deeds help the moral progress of the dead’. We do good ‘on behalf of the dead’. But the good we do now also puts obligations on those not yet living, people to whom we are ‘the dead’. We want, surely, to bequeath a moral as well as an economic legacy. That is what education is supposed to be for: to turn corporeal beings into moral ones. But we have remade education to reflect the values-lessness of our society. We have an education system that produces not people but workers, that imparts only skills and ladens the young with vast debts in acquiring them. It is as though we have forgotten a time when we were not slaves or servants, human animals yoked to the plough. To die without values to impart to our children, without a moral world to transmit, is a new kind of death we in the west have invented. Its finality is chilling and absolute.
There is another interesting link to Kafka in the book that similarly asks questions of our obligations to the dead. Just as much of Kafka’s work was published posthumously – in his case, against his wishes, by his fried Max Brod – so are the fictional writings, the ‘fugitive pieces’, of Jakob, discovered and published posthumously by a young academic, a child of concentration camp survivors, called Ben. This raises the question of how best we honour the dead. Do we do it by considering their stated wishes – or the lack of them – or do we do it by acting in a way that serves the best interests of the living? Do the dead have posthumous rights to their privacy? Our final obligation, Michaels decides, is to the living. In the end, we honour the dead not by raising statues to them but by living and living well. We should not be consumed by our grief. We should not make the past the template for now. We must resist conservatism and avoid fetishizing the past. There is serious work to be done. That is the message of the book. We are to be hopeful. While acknowledging, respectfully, our proximity to the dead, we are not to heed them overmuch, except in the manner of our living. We are to carry on. We are to live. Continuity is what matters. But we need their words, their values, their love, their culture. We need to feel the pain of our shared history, the fleeting cosmic moment we share.
For myself, I have always felt somewhat rootless. I have struggled to connect, either with the dead or the living. Perhaps because of this I have sought connection in the past through books. Discovering Kafka was an important moment in my literary journey and in my life. I attached great importance to his work and to literature in general, as well as to the transformative emotions they stirred in me. It was as though I too felt that my longing could ‘move the sea’. My belief in the power of books was absolute and pervasive. I didn’t understand that I was navigating country from which I could not return. And it never crossed my mind that in this new country I might not always be welcome. I still recall the snort of derision from my YTS supervisor when, aged 16 and invited to write a report on a subject of my choosing, I chose to report on a German-speaking Bohemian Jewish writer who died in obscurity sixty-odd years earlier. Who did I think I was? I had some nerve, I guess. In the end, I found myself adrift, unmoored, with no destination in mind. That may be why I have always found water-based metaphors appealing. I often imagine myself lying on my back in a small, oarless rowing boat, lost but somehow at peace, despite the vast, impenetrable darkness surrounding me.
I think about the dead a good deal. For a long time, I felt unworthy of them. Some of the time, if I am honest, I still do. I wanted to do more and be better. I think it is because, years ago, I was at a football match and a lot of people died, but I didn’t. I was one of the lucky ones. I got there early. I sat in the stands with my dad, above the terracing where 97 people lost their lives. The loss was awful. And, as if that were not enough, there was a cover-up. The fans were blamed. And their families had to spend decades fighting for truth and justice. They are still fighting. Their sacrifice has been astounding. I admire those people more than anyone else on this planet. For many who survived, it has also been a struggle. Their pain has been immense, yet, in many cases, it has been hard for them to acknowledge it or to ask for help. I would not call myself a ‘survivor’, but I was close enough to understand what it meant. It’s easy to imagine that the dead would prefer us not to continue living, but they do. They really do (ghosts, Michaels writes, whisper to us not to join them but so, when we are close enough to them, they can push us back into the world). That’s how we honour them. It is the only way in which we can honour them. When the Hillsborough Independent Panel report was published in 2012, exonerating supporters from blame, Margaret Aspinall, whose son was killed that day, addressed a crowd outside St George’s Hall in Liverpool. Her message to survivors was simple. ‘Forgive yourselves,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t your fault’. I guess that sounds like not very much, but, really, it was everything. In that moment, it was the whole world.
Whatever its flaws, I have come to attribute almost supernatural qualities to Anne Michaels’ book. It found me through love (or perhaps I found love through it) and love bound me to it. Rereading decades later, in a different life, I found myself moved once more, in thrall to the power and beauty of Michaels’ writing, her amazing fearlessness and the grace that comes with it. It is a book that slows everything down around you. It makes you look. It helps you see things. And that is one of the lessons of the book. When you look long and hard, the world comes alive. And you really do see ghosts.
