A Home at the End

“Home-made, home-made! But aren’t we all?”

—Elizabeth Bishop

1. Come From Away

From 2019-2022, I lived in Mi’kma’ki, the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, also known as Halifax. Nova Scotia is a province known for its native, black, and Acadian history, its natural beauty, as well as abundant opportunities for meaningful work, building community, outdoor activities, and living a healthy life. Known as the “home of the long tides,” Nova Scotia is a peninsula 360 miles in length, surrounded by four bodies of water: the Atlantic Ocean, the Bay of Fundy, the Northumberland Strait, and the Gulf of St. Lawrence. A narrow passage on the northwest, the Chignecto Isthmus, connects the province to New Brunswick. Its geography and location, together with large, ice-free, deep water harbors, have all been key to the province’s economic development; while larger than Denmark (although smaller than Scotland, after which it’s named), its average width of 80 miles means that most cities and towns are near if not a short drive from the sea. 

Nova Scotia is also the birthplace of Elizabeth Bishop, whose childhood home in Great Village is open for week-long writing residencies. I stayed there twice. Like the often withholding and critical poet, Nova Scotia is a province that is notoriously difficult to get to know if you aren’t from there. Immigrants and residents who weren’t born and raised in Nova Scotia are referred to as “come from aways,” and that fact, coupled with the chilly East Coast temperaments I encountered (akin to Britain in formality), made my first few months into a rather awkward transition, as I attempted to meet people other than my partner, or at least talk to them, with the open friendliness I’d learned growing up in the Heartland of Ohio and cultivated while living in places like Wisconsin, Texas, Chicago, Paris, and Hawaii. I moved to Montreal in 2014 after marrying a Canadian man, just before receiving my PhD in English. Nine years later, separated from my husband, I moved to Halifax with my new partner just as the pandemic hit. 

Undeterred by the skeptical responses I had thus far received from residents, I redoubled my efforts to meet people and make friends—to understand the culture and actively participate in building a life there—only to be rebuffed repeatedly, by nearly everyone I met (neighbors, bartenders, baristas, employers, and friends of my partner). After three months, I was still actively trying to understand why I couldn’t make conversation with people in Halifax other than members of my French meet-up group (also reserved to the extreme, though in French), when COVID-19 hit. My already-shrunken social life evaporated, as my partner was gone now for long hours every day trying to keep his restaurant afloat with take-out and delivery. 

Like most writers, I turned to reading and writing to fill in the temporary vacuum of free time, determined to finish a memoir I’d begun, and a new book of poems. I began my immersion with the collected poetry of Bishop, whom I studied intensively in the Vassar College archives in 2017 during a National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar. My concerted “drive to the interior” over those three years was bookended by her wonderful poem “Questions of Travel,” a rhetorical lyric of self-questioning, whose second stanza begins:

Think of the long trip home.
Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?
Where should we be today?
Is it right to be watching strangers in a play
in this strangest of theatres?

The poem simultaneously repudiates and celebrates the wonders of the world, as distinct from the mind’s ability to conjure them. As I read and re-read it, I asked myself what the driving force behind the last two decades of my life had been. Leaving Ohio at 18, I had rarely visited since except for major holidays and the completion of my MFA at Cleveland State in 2009, a decision prompted by my mother’s declining health. Yet I remained as conscious of Cleveland, and Ohio, as a culture and lived imaginary, as I did of Halifax, a city that continued to befuddle me while I transitioned into near-total isolation. 

Place-making, deixis, and cognitive mapping are what poets do, if they can be said to “do” anything. Poems choreograph these territories through image and metaphor, music and sound, but also through the vividity of lived experiences and relationships. Already deeply suspicious of technocracy, internet culture, social media, and online networking, I knew my only real option was to resort to email, Zoom, and online communities, but I soon grew exhausted by feelings of disconnection and anomie, and my partner, who’d only known me previously to be an outgoing, pro-social person in Montreal, was alarmed by my depression, exacerbated by issues I was having with my medications, drinking, and lack of employment. I soon grew silent, except for occasional posts, and my third poetry collection, Any God Will Do, published in February 2022, appeared then seemed to disappear off both my radar and the world’s like a blip in the night, causing me to doubt myself, my writing, and my choice of genre.

I continued to spend time with Bishop rather than the one-way mirror of the screen. She herself had the experience of being a “come from away” during her 20-odd years living in Brazil, writing:

What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?

I felt certain she understood an existential loneliness that surpassed chosen solitude, and the exuberant, libidinal excesses of this descriptive poem about travel suggested she’d also known the joys that come from direct encounters with the world: the trees figured as “noble pantomimists, robed in pink,” the ear echoing with the sound of “sad, two-noted, wooden tune/ of disparate wooden clogs,” and the “primitive music of the fat brown bird/ who sings above the broken gasoline pump/ in a bamboo church of Jesuit baroque:/ three towers, five silver crosses.”

It matters what you call a thing. And the right words in the right order can change the world. The outsider consciousness I developed upon moving to Canada in 2014 reached its peak during those three lonely and difficult years. I couldn’t see, until I moved back to the U.S. in 2022, that it was also a gift. 

2. Into the Great Unknown

What happens when you begin to extrapolate outward, from your lived experience (whether interior or exterior) to your region, home or adopted country, world, and cosmos? What might such a larger, and longer, view of life and art make possible, and how might such reflections have a curative effect against feelings of dislocation, displacement, and loneliness, particularly when we consider the fact that our very bodies are composed of exploded stars?

While many Canadians travel to the U.S., not many Americans travel to Canada, so, to wit: Nova Scotia is one of three Maritime provinces. Together with the easternmost province, Newfoundland and Labrador, the Maritime provinces (including New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island) constitute Atlantic Canada. The Mi’kmaq, Maliseet and Passamaquoddy people are indigenous to the Maritimes, while Acadian and British settlements date to the 17th century. Comprising ten total provinces, Canada is a democratically socialist country that leads the world in many ways, from universal health care to environmental regulations, to support of the working poor, the unemployed, vulnerable populations, and artists. The Canadian Council for the Arts’ annual budget hovers at $500 million, compared to America’s National Endowment for the Arts budget of $200 million, and America is nearly ten times the population size, with 332 million inhabitants versus Canada’s 38 million. During the pandemic, generous economic relief was provided to those residents whose incomes were affected and who were unable to work (whether employees or self-employed) through the Canada Emergency Response Benefit and the Canada Recovery Benefit. Recent endorsement by the governing Liberal Party represents a serious step towards establishing a permanent national basic income in Canada.

Of course, Canada has its own long shadow of genocide, colonialization, and slavery, among other settler, globalized, late capitalism ills. In June 2021, over 700 unmarked graves at the grounds of the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan were discovered; a few weeks earlier, 215 remains were found at the site of the former Kamloops, B.C., residential school. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report into Canada’s residential school system estimates that 6,000 Indigenous children taken from their families as part of Canada’s inculturation policies following confederation may have died in the 150 residential schools run by the Catholic and Anglican churches from the 1880s to 1996. In June 2022, Pope Francis made a week-long “penitential pilgrimage” to Canada and issued a historic apology for the Catholic Church’s cooperation with Canada’s catastrophic policy of Indigenous residential schools, saying the forced assimilation of Native peoples into Christian society destroyed their cultures, severed families and marginalized generations, with aftershocks still being felt today. 

Canada is one of ten countries that occupy North America, a continent often referred to as “The New World.” The seven continents—along with 326 million trillion gallons of water, 71% of the earth’s surface—constitute planet earth. While tech utopians like Elon Musk and other multibillionaires are intent on colonizing Mars, Earth is still, to our knowledge, the only planet that supports human life and civilizations. If it is destroyed or annihilated, soon or in the future, by the toxic greed, consumerism, and recklessness of humans seeking only pleasure, profit, or increased population growth—false triumphalism of transhumanist tech titans with their empty rhetorics of freedom, emancipation, and democracy—future generations of our 200,000 year old species of Homo sapiens won’t have an earth that can sustain them.

Our current epoch (the unit between a period and age in a geologic time scale, classified based on Earth’s strata and fossils) is the Holocene Epoch of the Quaternary Period, which began 11,700 years ago after the last major ice age (the Anthropocene Epoch is an unofficial demarcation of geologic time). Multispecies feminist theorist Donna Haraway rejects the term “Anthropocene,” preferring to conceptualize this epoch as the “Chthulucene” to more aptly and fully describe the ways in which the human and nonhuman are inextricably linked in tentacular practices, or what Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari called rhizomatic learning. The Chthulucene, Haraway believes, requires sym-poiesis, or making-with, rather than auto-poiesis, or self-making. And Franco Berardi believes our epoch is defined by the “absence of epoch,” in a post-Fordist economy of socially homologated labor wherein, as Sianne Ngai says, “the very concept of the ‘aesthetic’ has been perhaps irreversibly changed under the hypercommodified, intensively informated and networked, performance-driven conditions of late capitalism.”

However it’s designated, protected, honored, or defiled: the earth is our only home. Earth is one of nine planets (if including Pluto) that make up our solar system, the gravitationally bound system of the sun and the objects that orbit it directly or indirectly, formed 4.6 billion years ago from the gravitational collapse of a giant interstellar molecular cloud. 

Our solar system hangs suspended in an outer spiral arm (the Orion Arm) of the Milky Way galaxy, 26,000 light-years from the center. Astronomers today estimate that there are more than two trillion galaxies in the observable universe, and as many as an estimated 1×10²⁴ stars: more stars than all the grains of sand on planet earth. Many of these two trillion galaxies have supermassive black holes: black hole Sagittarius A has a mass four million times greater than the sun. These trillions of galaxies, black holes, and stars, held together by gravity, are embedded in huge haloes of dark matter, thought to account for 85% of the matter in the universe. Its presence, yet to be observed directly, is implied in a variety of astrophysical observations, including gravitational effects that cannot be explained by accepted theories of gravity unless more matter is present than can be seen. Lastly, the universe contains all space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. In various multiverse hypotheses, a universe is one of many causally disconnected constituent parts of a larger multiverse, which itself comprises all of space and time and its contents, and all possibly existent universes: consequently, “the universe” and “the multiverse” are essentially synonymous as terms. 

Telescoping out from the self to the cosmos (and beyond) is a redeeming, humbling exercise. For me, it has the power to restore a sense of dignity, purpose, and meaning to our fragmented lives. It grounds me in a deep appreciation not just for the awesomeness and sublimity of nature, existence, and the astral plane, but also for the human body and materiality. 

Dialing back to Elizabeth Bishop’s life, another touchstone that helps ground me. Bishop lived in her childhood home in Great Village until 1917, when she was taken back to Worcester, Massachusetts, her birthplace, by her paternal grandparents. This happened after her father’s death and her mother’s removal to a psychiatric facility (an upheaval that resulted in serious illness). The Great Village structure itself is unassuming: a two-story, white Classical Revival style farmhouse purchased by Bishop’s maternal grandfather Hibbert McLellan in 1874, that sits close to the village’s main road, and is flanked from behind by acres of pasture. Facing the house is the rural village’s highest elevation, the spire of St. James United Church. While both my visits to the Bishop house were bookended by illness (the tail end of my first Covid case, and the flu), they both were also characterized by my immersion not only in my teaching responsibilities and literary production (scant, because otherwise occupied), but in the historically preserved house itself, as a living artifact. 

The roof leaked puddles onto the kitchen floor when it rained (the same kitchen that inspired Bishop’s legendary poem “Sestina”), a roof the Elizabeth Bishop Society is reluctant to replace because it was originally constructed by her Uncle Neddy, and much of the modest yet tasteful décor and furnishings remain from when Bishop was young. What struck me most poignantly during my visits was how the house and material objects inside seemed to vibrate with the energy of Bishop’s developing consciousness, historic time, and also the traumatic events, such as the mental collapse Bishop’s mother Gertrude experienced on the second floor, that Bishop witnessed and wrote about in her short story published in The New Yorker in 1953, “In the Village,” which opens: “A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over the Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever . . . The scream hangs like that, unheard, in memory—in the past, in the present, and those years between. It was not even loud to begin with, perhaps. It just came there to live, forever—not loud, just alive, forever.” 

I couldn’t sleep in the master bedroom upstairs (choosing instead the parlor room couch), so electric was my sense of grief and trauma upstairs, made more eerie by the dark red carpeting that reminded me of a scene from The Shining, and Elizabeth’s preserved, closet-sized bedroom. Both my exploration of the house, and the antique store around the corner, were “haunted,” thus; not in a bad way, but in a way that made free enjoyment of the time, and writing, impossible, so strong was the feeling that the trauma Bishop experienced there still lingered in the walls, whose peeling wallpaper bore testimony to a now-distant era, one whose grief was suspended, mid-air.

From the stately grandfather clock in the parlor, to the shallow tub and trickle of water that had to be coaxed from the faucet, it was during my visits there that I made the connection between a poet’s childhood and the objective correlatives she discovers for it later in life, and also between a free-wheeling imagination (able to dismiss the energetic traumas of the house and absorption in the Cornell-like preservation of each significant object) and the weight of history: which is to say, between cosmic light and matter’s gravitational mass, densely surrounding me.

3. Return to Mystery

It may seem anachronistic to reflect on the history of the cosmos during the twilight of the humanities and a global pandemic, when neoliberal takeovers have ushered in an era of alienation and precarity and the global commons has been all-but-destroyed by environmental and economic crises. But in the spirit of the awe and wonder capitalism routinely robs then repackages and sells us as a product, consider how people relish saying, when an unlikely occurrence happens, “What are the odds?” 

What are the odds of the multiverse’s existence, let alone our singular existences as human beings? There are a million ways my parents could not have met that fateful day in 1975, a million ways their new relationship could have ended before they decided to marry and create myself and my siblings, millions of ways that my siblings or I could have manifested in another human iteration, given the vast combinatory differences in chromosomal makeup, inherited traits, and genetic predispositions. Regardless of creation’s circumstantial near-impossibility, there never was before, and will never be again, another you. We begin in mystery, and we end in mystery, “but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between,” as Diane Ackerman said—and no one knows where our beings and souls go when our mortal forms pass away. 

So much of the aforementioned multiverse, containing not just all matter, dark matter, and antimatter, but all our thoughts, emotions, ideas, dreams, and possible futurities, remains unknown or at least unobservable to the human eye; too, so much of who I/you are—our selves, identities, bodies, and minds, all diversely impacted by both nature and nurture—are not predetermined or ex post facto givens, but real phenomena that can only unfold, as does the exercise of free will, in solitary as well as sociocultural contexts, over time.

In April 2022, my relationship with my post-divorce partner ended, ceremonially and with great sorrow for both of us. We loved each other, and had survived the pandemic together, while raising two new cats and sharing a new home together in one of the last paradises on earth. While weighing my options for relocation, my mother suddenly entered hospice, in Cleveland: the result of an unsuccessful third brain surgery the previous August and ensuing complications. The choice was made for me. I loaded a Uhaul and moved back to my birthplace in late May to care for my mother, and my father and brother, who were burning out from round-the-clock caregiving. 

It was a harrowing journey. My now-ex partner Kourosh preceded me with the Uhaul, and I flew to the Toronto airport two days later to meet him, with only one of our cats (the other went missing). While waiting for Kourosh to pick me up at the terminal, I held my traumatized cat, who’d flown in cargo and not beside me in the cabin due to a booking error by the airline.

We arrived in Cleveland two days later and after helping me move my belongings into the only Cleveland apartment I could find that didn’t require that I earn three times my rent monthly, Kourosh left, and I began caring for my mother daily in at-home hospice. While initiating the paperwork required by an international move (an Ohio driver’s license alone took two months to obtain), including applying for Medicaid (I didn’t have time to find a job) and SNAP (Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program), I was also desperately trying to find a psychiatrist who would renew my medications. Unable to find one after weeks of searching, I ended up going to the emergency room in an 11^th hour panic and literally begging the ER doctor, who begrudgingly wrote a script.

For the next two months, I tried and failed to balance caring for my mother, who had all but lost her ability to communicate, and had been bedridden without reprieve since April 2022, with my job search and current work as a freelance editor, to say nothing of my relationships. Everything felt impossible. The cumulative weight of grieving the loss of my partner (my third long-term relationship, including my nine-year marriage, that had peremptorily ended) along with my cat Gigi, who had stayed behind, as well as Canada (I’d lived there for almost 8 years as a Permanent Resident), and the imminent death of my mother due to medical malpractice left me wondering if these were the circumstances that would come to define mid-life, and how, if so, I would recover from them so as to restore my faith and gain the strength to believe in life again. Instead of succumbing to the undertow, I decided to finish my Reiki Master certification instead, and with that training and the healing I was able to practice on myself, my mother, and others, I was able to step outside myself, and find a renewable source of energy, compassion, and hope. 

I remained tethered to my reading of Bishop. She never saw her mother again after Gertrude entered the asylum in 1916, and didn’t get a chance to say goodbye before her mother died in 1934, just as she didn’t get to say goodbye to her longtime Brazilian partner Lota de Macedo Soares before Lota committed suicide in 1967. Bishop only published 101 poems during her lifetime. Scholars debate whether she was a perfectionist who wasn’t content with a poem unless it was acutely observed and heavily edited, or had anxiety (evidenced in her voluminous correspondences) stemming from the traumas she endured in youth, about her literary output and expatriate status as an independently wealthy, queer white poet, as her letters to Marianne Moore and her psychologist Ruth Foster attest. Regardless of the cause for her relatively slim collected works (by more prolific standards), Bishop’s verse is singular, painterly, and engaged deeply in the haptics between eye and “I.” Rendering animals (“The Moose”), tender scenes (“The Shampoo”), investigations of self and identity (“In the Waiting Room”), and themes of elegy and exile (“Crusoe in England”) with inimitable yet studied grace, Bishop’s thematics center around belonging, longing, and loss, and she interrogates the idea of “home” similarly as she does “travel”: with unsparing accuracy, whether what’s being described is a “folded sunset, still quite warm” or an “inscrutable house.” 

As I seek to find my own way in my hometown, returned to for reasons of intimate loss, and strive to fit together the seams of my many selves and near-constant dislocations (a new apartment a year, give or take, for over twenty years) with Bishop as my Virgilian guide, I return often to “Questions of Travel” to be reminded that the questions she posed are as pressing today, in our digital age of hyper-mobility, as they were in 1956 when she published the poem. Anti-confessional with an autobiographical slant, Bishop’s work, and this poem especially, are structured as an internal debate, using alliteration, sibilance, enjambment, simile, and metaphor to suggest the perspectival limitations of human experiences, and, concurrently, how vitally important it is pry open the aperture through which we see, and reflect on others and the world. 

Being able to care for and say goodbye to loved ones is a gift. Knowing this, yet wracked with grief and the tumult and insecurity of my sudden relocation, I have tried to practice gratitude while commuting to and from my parents’ house in the suburbs in my broken-down 13-year-old Honda Fit. The future is an unwritten poem, a draft in the drawer. All that is granted to us—and it is everything—is today, a today that recurs, allowing for pattern formation, habits, and history.

This essay references the infinitely expanding and infinitely expansive multiverse, but it could just as easily be inverted—out of all the whirling chaos and established order, ourselves, living in a century, year, day, city, house, desk, and chair—how could it have been? Prevailing theories of the multiverse’s creation ex nihilo, and sentient existence on earth (if one believes in evolution) typically tend, in our age of materialist secularism, to converge on chaos theory. We begin in chaos, chance, and randomness, having descended from apes, and die similarly, whether by natural causes, disease, or accident. Is there a singularity located within a multiplicity? And is that multiplicity multiple, or an aggregate of one? And as to why there is something, rather than nothing: no one knows. But the fact remains that on our all-too-vulnerable planet, among all-too-human humans, the answer could very well be: just because. It is the “just because” that allows us to ask this question in the first place.

There are scientific, philosophical, and religious theories as to how the world will end. I’m partial to Nietzsche’s theory of eternal return, adapted from Indian philosophy and ancient Egypt as well as Ecclesiastes, the Pythagoreans and Stoics: the theory that the universe and all existence and energy has been recurring, and will continue to recur, in a self-similar form an infinite number of times across infinite time or space. While the more negative aspects of a theory of “eternal return” relate to predeterminism (people are predestined to repeat the same events, or make the same choices, over and over again), in a more positive sense, eternal return implies that the uncanny feeling of “déjà vu” we all experience from time to time isn’t just a glitch of the mind or memory, but rather a suggestion that we have, in some sense, covered this same ground before, perhaps in a different consciousness. Freud called this feeling “unheimlich”—the uncanny sense of something being both strange but familiar all at once. 

Why is there a multiverse instead of endless darkness; why are you you and not another; why do you love who you love, and would defend that love, until your dying breath? Idk, as the kids say. “Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point,” said Blaise Pascal. I’ve found a resolution to the ongoing dialectical pulls, so much a poet’s milieu, between subjective and universal, abstract and particular, and yes, between life and death, and the liminal thresholds that echo our long pilgrimages and our returns. 

In 1954, Bishop’s contemporary Wallace Stevens published, two years prior to “Questions of Travel,” the moving poem “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour,” which also interrogates the notion that “the world imagined is the ultimate good,” though through a different set of terms than armchair philosophy and world travel (his: “A light, a power, the miraculous influence” versus an individual’s finite perspective), and one can hear in the penultimate stanza of “Questions of Travel” their mutual wrestling with ideas of leave-taking and homecoming:

Is it lack of imagination that makes us come
to imagined places, not just stay at home?
Or could Pascal have been not entirely right
about just sitting quietly in one’s room?

I like to think of these two poems in conversation when I sit next to my mother’s bed. I sing to her and tell her stories, brush her hair, give her Reiki, and massage her feet, hands, shoulders, and head. Uncertainties continue to rain down, but when I am with my mother, they temporarily disperse. I gaze into her eyes, tell her repeatedly how much I love her, and feel the rhythmic cadence and maternal reassurance of the last two lines of Stevens’ final stanza:

We make a dwelling in the evening air, 
In which being there together is enough.