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Williams - When women were birds : fifty-four variations on voice

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Williams When women were birds : fifty-four variations on voice
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The beloved author of Refuge returns with a work that explodes and startles, illuminates and celebrates
Terry Tempest Williamss mother told her: I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you wont look at them until after Im gone.
Readers of Williamss iconic and unconventional memoir, Refuge, well remember that mother. She was one of a large Mormon clan in northern Utah who developed cancer as a result of the nuclear testing in nearby Nevada. It was a shock to Williams to discover that her mother had kept journals. But not as much of a shock as what she found when the time came to read them.
They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful cloth-bound books . . . I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It too was empty . . . Shelf after shelf after shelf, all of my mothers journals were blank. What did Williamss...

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Also by Terry Tempest Williams Finding Beauty in a Broken World The - photo 1
Also by Terry Tempest Williams

Finding Beauty in a Broken World

The Illuminated Desert

The Open Space of Democracy

Red

Leap

Desert Quartet

An Unspoken Hunger

Refuge

Coyotes Canyon

Earthly Messengers

Between Cattails

Pieces of White Shell

The Secret Language of Snow

SARAH CRICHTON BOOKS Farrar Straus and Giroux 18 West 18th Street New York - photo 2

SARAH CRICHTON BOOKS
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Copyright 2012 by Terry Tempest Williams
All rights reserved

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint excerpts from the following previously published material: The Judgment of the Birds by Loren Eiseley, from The Immense Journey , reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc.; Why Birds Sing by David Rothenberg (Basic Books, 2005), reprinted by permission of the author.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Williams, Terry Tempest.

When women were birds: fifty-four variations on voice / Terry Tempest Williams.1st ed.

p. cm.

ISBN: 978-1-4299-4282-9

1. Williams, Terry Tempest. 2. NaturalistsUnited StatesBiography. 3. Women naturalistsUnited StatesBiography. 4. Mothers and daughtersBiography. 5. Mothers and daughtersPsychology. I. Title.

QH31.W626 W55 2012

508.092'2dc23

[B]

2011047161

www.fsgbooks.com

The author would like to acknowledge Ann Mudge Backer and Surry Maine; Annette and Ian Cumming of Jackson, Wyoming; and Beatrice Monti della Corte and the Santa Maddalena Foundation of Donnini, Italy, for writing sanctuary.

Contents

ANN MUDGE BACKER

Muse

Picture 3

LAURA SIMMS

Story

Picture 4

LINDA ASHER

Translator

Picture 5

ALEXANDRA FULLER

Voice

Picture 6

ALL THOSE WITH WINGS

What if there were a hidden pleasure

in calling one thing

by anothers name?

RAE ARMANTROUT

Birds, birdsBehold them armed for action, like daughters of the spirit

On the white page with infinite margins, the space they measure is all incantation.

ST.-JOHN PERSE

I

I AM FIFTY-FOUR YEARS OLD , the age my mother was when she died. This is what I remember: We were lying on her bed with a mohair blanket covering us. I was rubbing her back, feeling each vertebra with my fingers as a rung on a ladder. It was January, and the ruthless clamp of cold bore down on us outside. Yet inside, Mothers tenderness and clarity of mind carried its own warmth. She was dying in thesame way she was living, consciously.

I am leaving you all my journals, she said, facing the shuttered window as I continued rubbing her back. But you must promise me that you will not look at them until after I am gone.

I gave her my word. And then she told me where theywere. I didnt know my mother kept journals.

A week later she died. That night, there was a full moon encircled by ice crystals.

On the next full moon I found myself alone in the family home. I kept expecting Mother to appear. Her absence became her presence. It was the right time to read her journals. They were exactly where she said they would be: three shelves of beautiful clothbound books; some floral, some paisley, others in solid colors. The spines of each were perfectly aligned against the lip of the shelves. I opened the first journal. It was empty. I opened the second journal. It was empty. I opened the third. It, too, was empty, as was the fourth, the fifth, the sixthshelf after shelf after shelf, all my mothers journals were blank.

II I DO NOT KNOW WHY my mother bought journal after journal - photo 7

II I DO NOT KNOW WHY my mother bought journal after journal year after year - photo 8

II I DO NOT KNOW WHY my mother bought journal after journal year after year - photo 9

II I DO NOT KNOW WHY my mother bought journal after journal year after year - photo 10

II

I DO NOT KNOW WHY my mother bought journal after journal, year after year, and never wrote in one of them and passed them on to me.

I will never know.

The blow of her blank journals became a second death.

My Mothers Journals are paper tombstones.

I am fifty-four years old, the age my mother was when she died. The questions I hold now could not have been comprehended when I was a woman in my twenties. I didnt realize how young she was, but isnt that the conceit of mothersthat we conceal our youth and exist only for our children? Itis the province of mothers to preserve the myth that we are unburdened with our own problems. Placed in a circle of immunity, we carry only the crises of those we love. We mask our needs as the needs of others. If ever there was a storywithout a shadow, it would be this: that we as women exist in direct sunlight only.

When women were birds, we knew otherwise. We knew our greatest freedom was in taking flight at night, when we could steal the heavenly darkness for ourselves, navigating through the intelligence of stars and the constellations of our own making in the delight and terror of our uncertainty.

What my mother wanted to do and what she was able to do remains her secret.

We all have our secrets. I hold mine. To withhold words is power. But to share our words with others, openly and honestly, is also power.

I was aware of the silences within my mother. They were her places of strength, inviolable. Tillie Olsen studied such silence. She writes,

Literary history and the present are dark with silencesI have had special need to learn all I could of this over the years, myself so nearly remaining mute and having to let writing die over and over again in me. These are not natural silenceswhat Keats called agonie ennuyeuse (the tedious agony)that necessary time for renewal, lying fallow, gestation, in the natural cycle of creation. The silences I speak of here are unnatural: the unnatural thwarting of what struggles to come into being, but cannot.

We hold these silences as a personal crucifix.

What is voice?

Picture 11

I will say it is so: The first voice I heard belonged to my mother. It was her voice I listened to from the womb; from the moment my head emerged into this world; from the moment I was pushed out then placed on her belly before the umbilicus was cut; from the moment when she cradled me in her arms. My mother spoke to me: Hello, little one. You are here, I am here.

I will say it is so: My mothers voice is a lullaby in my cells. When I am still, my body feels her breathing.

III

L IMINAL . A threshold. My body between worlds. This word returns me to my original state. I am water. I am water. I am sea cells evolving to a consciousness that has pulled me upright. Walking the wrack line on a sandy beach, I pick up shells, a whelk, a cowrie, a conch, each a witness to a world we cannot see until we touch it, hold it, bring it to our ear and listen. The invisible world can speak to us. In this vast, undulating ocean, we are cradled. The waves carry us like the rise and fall of the melody of mothers. So much of who we are originates and remains here in salt water. I pick up another shell and listen

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