‘I am restored to myself’
A journal post-suicide finds new purpose in family, nature and well-loved authors
‘THE WIND IS RISING: EXCERPTS FROM NOTEBOOKS 2003-2008’
Atalaya Press (2022, 156 pp.)
The melancholy narrator of this journal has returned to
his erstwhile home in Arroyo Hondo in winter 2003 after a suicide attempt in Mexico. He
has come back to find something like redempton.
At age 63, when this notebook opens, with a life of nonprofit work behind him, deep in debt, overweight, arthritic, his teeth stained and hair yellowing, the narrator is a busted-up version of
his previous self. Returning to lick his wounds, living in the house he once
shared in happiness with his young family — he is now dependent on his ex-wife’s kindness — he feels much like “January in New Mexico, a dried-up heart, but a heart nonetheless.”
Mostly solitary, with a new dog companion called Cora (short for Corazón),
he ruminates, reads his favorite authors, sits by the Rio Hondo, writes in his journal, watches the light. The light proves a revelation: “Always the light, the agent of the present.”
He has to decide to live again, in the present. And this high desert landscape of his childhood summers, with a troubled mother and an aloof psychiatrist father, then later the happy home of
his marriage to Phaedra from the early 1970s and two children, now grown, will allow his resurrection, as it were:
“This landscape, constant and fluctuating, is my foundation. Forty years
here, a loyalty of sorts. For better or worse, we belong to each other. The question is not whether this place is
beautiful. The question, or rather, the answer, is that it is mine. I belong here
because it is here that I was symbolically born and am most alive.”
First, however, the narrator has to decide to want to live again. He recognizes that embracing a simple
life, working on the new town library, tending to the house cats and aged mare in the field, and doing mundane chores, is authentic. He is tired of being
self-absorbed, egotistical, “an overly conscious thing.” He knows he must
simply watch the seasons change and “stop struggling and experience life with a measure of calm.”
His companions on this decisive journey, besides the memories of his
sensual youth, his travels and love affairs — all tinged with both sadness and joy — are the authors he has grown
to love over a lifetime of intensive reading. Montaigne, Cioran, Li Bai, Tu Fu, Stendhal, Pascal, Madame de Stael, Unamuno — they are all by his side at
this tipping point, eager to lend their wisdom, their own experience — all “who wrote out of a necessary desperation.” Valéry lent his words to the book’s title: “The wind is rising … we must try to live!”
Author and poet Jim Levy has been a late bloomer in his own writing, making up for lost time with a furious
publication schedule, most recently the memoir co-written with Phaedra Greenwood, “Those Were the Days,”
and the collection of literary essays “Chekhov’s Mistress.” He is unflinchingly forthright in this journal, a flawed, tender voice.
Death, and specifically suicide, is a favorite subject of many authors, the
unquenchable answer to the great question of life — “There is but one
freedom, to put yourself right with death,” he quotes Camus. But suicide
is also a temptation, and, despite a vow he made to his daughter not to try it again — he swam far out from the coast of Oaxaca, high on pills and alcohol, threw away his glasses and
swallowed sea water in order to drown — our narrator admits, “I have a taste for it now.”
He also resists the familiar urge to flee. “Let’s be frank, I am a man who wanted it in the mouth — bread, rum,
tit, life — so why should death be any different?” he wonders. “What was once appetite for life is now appetite for death.”
What torments him is the sense of being “superfluous,” the fraught
relationship with his mother (chainsmoker, alcoholic, “a modest woman diminished by her husband’s disdain”), as well as the unsettling indifference
he feels toward his father, whom he mostly despised — wanting to be a very different kind of father to his own son. A good listener. He has been.
Finding rhythms of life on the high desert revives him. Visiting his mother’s
gravesite at the base of the old cedar tree, and sometimes, while listening to reggae music on his MP3 player, he dances. He grasps that time is hurrying by, and change will always come.
“I listen to the river, lift my face to the sun, open my nostrils to the valley, and I am restored to myself, accept the commonness of my situation, and find
in it a perverse rightness,”