53 Thresholds.
On October 27th, in the immediate aftermath of his mother’s death, Roland Barthes wrote: “As soon as someone dies, frenzied construction of the future (shifting furniture, etc.): futuromania.” He noted the way time had shifted.
Brandon Shimoda wrote by honoring “the grave on the wall,” and paying tribute to his loved ones by enacting the Japanese rituals in which their spirits could have recognized themselves:
There are, traditionally, two graves: the burial grave and the ritual grave. The burial grave is where the dead are buried. The ritual grave is where the living go to visit the dead. Sometimes these graves are the same. Sometimes not. The ritual grave could be divided: where the dead were born, where the dead died, anywhere, in whatever form, the dead may be perceived and remembered. An altar in the house of the living, a stone in a graveyard, a painting in an alcove, a book.[1]
Two graves involve multiple thresholds.
[Since my mother’s sudden death, all the world is connected across time and space in the reflected place of her. The Romanian rituals assume shape in the gaping silence that capitalist death relies upon, the planned obsolescence, the non-productive attentions of grief outsourced to therapists. At the risk of repeating myself, I must add that there is not enough money on the planet to survive what the U.S. does to its ghosts.]
In a different book, at the confluence where two rivers meet the Danube, Reiner Kunze waits for Mireille Gansel, his translator, in a borderland that becomes home after he is forced to flee the German Democratic Republic because of words, verbs, that inconvenient relationship with words known as poetry.
As Gansel wrote of the Kunze in Translation as Transhumance:
On this borderland, he dug and planted one of the fragile sequoia sapling that his friend Alexander Graf Von Faber-Castell had brought back with him from Canada, dreaming they would grow into trees that would defy all temporal and spatial borders for a thousand years, acting both as witness to the enduring power of nature and as resistance to insane human threats. On this same borderland, the poet planted a young linden tree with broad leaves, the variety that soars like a canopy and for centuries has sheltered the memory of so many legends and songs and an entire part of the life of the ordinary people of his country.
Like any poet building a home outside their homeland, Kunze planted a linden on the borderland between the past and the present.
What grows in the shade around the transplanted linden sapling is a hybrid temporality, a presence that resembles the hybridity of the transplanted poet.
In botany, “transplanting” is the process of moving a fully germinated seedling (or mature plant) and replanting it in a permanent location for the growing season.
My mother explained transplanting as she moved a blackberry shrub closer to the house. “You, me, and your father are transplants,” she said, “but your little sister is a seed.”