Empathy, we argue, is the force behind our capacity to understand works of art. Think of what happens when you are confronted with an artwork. We maintain that, to understand the piece, you use your own conscious experience to ask what could possibly motivate you to make such an artwork yourself – and then you use that first-person perspective to try to come to a plausible explanation that allows you to relate to the artwork. Your interpretation of the work will be personal and could differ significantly from the artist’s own reasons, but if we share sufficient experiences and cultural references, it might be a plausible one, even for the artist. This is why we can relate so differently to a work of art after learning that it is a forgery or imitation: the artist’s intent to deceive or imitate is very different from the attempt to express something original. Gathering contextual information before jumping to conclusions about other people’s actions – in art, as in life – can enable us to relate better to their intentions.
But the artist and you share something far more important than cultural references: you share a similar kind of body and, with it, a similar kind of embodied perspective. Our subjective human experience stems, among many other things, from being born and slowly educated within a society of fellow humans, from fighting the inevitability of our own death, from cherishing memories, from the lonely curiosity of our own mind, from the omnipresence of the needs and quirks of our biological body, and from the way it dictates the space- and time-scales we can grasp. All conscious machines will have embodied experiences of their own, but in bodies that will be entirely alien to us.
There are few books for those of us on the other side of fertility. There’s a whole literary genre, the coming-of-age novel, that details with wonder and reverence the moment in which girls become sexual, and yet both male and female writers have been reluctant to take on menopausal characters. As I entered my own transition, I began reading the whole tiny canon of menopause literature. In Edith Wharton’s book Twilight Sleep, fifty-year-old Pauline Manford is so obsessed with staying thin and avoiding wrinkles that even her daughter compares her to a “deserted house.” Menopausal Rosalie Van Tümmler in Thomas Mann’s The Black Swan thinks her period has come back because of her infatuation with a younger man. On the night of their rendezvous, Rosalie begins to hemorrhage from her vagina, eventually slipping into a coma on a bed soaked with her own blood. The original German title of Black Swan was Die Betrogene, “the betrayed.”
Pathetic. Depressed. Doomed. These examples may seem extreme, but I could not find a single story that did not equate menopause with disease and death. I’m all for darkness, but these stories made me feel hopeless. I’d just about given up trying to find a book that would honor both the physical struggles and the spiritual complexity of the change when I came across Break of Day, by the French writer Colette.
Paul Celan starts a late poem with the entreaty: “NO MORE SAND ART, no sand book, no masters.” That line seems to renounce his first book, “The Sand From the Urns,” and to argue for silence in the face of what is most difficult to bear. (Celan, a Jewish survivor of World War II, felt the concern personally.) It also gives Ariana Reines the title and epigraph for her new collection, “A Sand Book,” which remains in dialogue with Celan even as it updates his themes for the internet age.
Because the night I gave birth my husband went blind.
Hysterical, I guess you’d call it.