A Glass Essay: Reading Anne Carson post-breakup

Abstract

A Glass EssayReading Anne Carson post-breakup Sarah Chihaya (bio) In the last week of june 2018, I got unexpectedly dumped. During the month that followed, I did the only thing that felt right: I read Anne Carson's long poem "The Glass Essay" every day. I had come to Oxford to teach a summer class as England endured a historic drought, and the sun shone heartlessly, beautifully every day. Every morning I woke up, ran around the park, rushed through a shower and a coffee, and ascended to the upper reading room of the Radcliffe Camera, one of Oxford's extravagantly beautiful libraries. I would claim my favorite desk, with my favorite graffito ("LIBIDINAL COMMUNISM") etched [End Page 23] in its wood frame, and lean back in my chair, staring up into the rotunda's scrolled dome. Then, once my mind was blank and still, usually around 9:25, I'd open Carson and begin. The poem starts: From the first time I read them after the breakup, these lines laced me into the poem good and tight. "The Glass Essay" is a complex structure, holding two disparate elements together in a surprising balance: an intimate meditation on a romantic breakup, and a critical reading of the life of Emily Brontë. The poem immediately became the frame I required to shape the posture of my hours. I needed to read it to stay upright during the day and to stay lying down at night. I too know that slow, cold drip down the spine because I'm a bad sleeper; at 4 a.m. I'm always either going to bed or suddenly starting awake. But the main point of identification was so obvious I didn't even bother to note it: I was going through a breakup, and "The Glass Essay" is indisputably the greatest breakup poem ever written. (Don't try to argue with me on this.) The urge to reread flowed out of my desire to sink further into the poem and its speaker and remain there, a desire that in turn flowed out of the deeper, inane desire (Carson's, my own) to sink further into the memory of the departed lover and remain there. On the cusp of dark and dawn, I would lie in my narrow bed and try to memorize the whole thirty-eight-page poem. I never got very far, but certain lines snagged in my mind. The moments that really cut were where the language is plainest, most painful: "His name was Law." [End Page 24] I can hear little clicks inside my dream.Night drips its silver tapdown the back.At 4 A.M. I wake. Thinking of the man wholeft in September.His name was Law. The name of the man in Carson's poem puzzled me every time I read it. I wondered, always, what I was supposed to take from this solemn pun. Was "Law" his real name? Is it a name at all, or is it a talisman, perhaps a command? I knew I could seek out answers or speculations from other readers, or perhaps even by emailing or speaking with the writer, as other scholars of contemporary literature might. But I didn't then and still don't want to. I prefer to stay alone with this poem. This yearning for a lost lover named Law raises a question: Is to be loveless to be lawless? If Law equals love, then is love—when requited, respected—the thing that keeps us in line, restrained and civil? Certainly, both loss and longing are states of emergency, outside the law. Perhaps to be with Law is to be governed by him, or by desire for him. Or is it the opposite? One brief moment in the poem seems like it might offer an answer, but then flatly refuses to: The man who fractured my heart that summer, and cleanly broke it later on, was also fond of speculating about love and freedom. For someone who talked and wrote a lot to friends and strangers, he didn't put much stake in the verbal as a mode of emotional honesty. Looking back, I...