Eastover
Review by Walter Cummins
Despite the seeming implication of Chris Arthur’s title of this, his tenth essay collection, he is not seeking an existential generalization about an abstract ontological question but rather exploring what living means for particular people at a particular time. Arthur is far from solipsistic in this quest. His concern is not limited to asking about the singular nature of his own living, his unique life. Instead, he wants to know what being alive is or was like for people in general, some his contemporaries, some who existed many centuries ago. Even beyond humans, he considers creatures like the tiny goldcrest birds and what it means for a human to connect to their life patterns. The words of John Muir explain his inability to limit his subject to himself: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” Being alive is a collective experience.
To demonstrate, Arthur employs a method fundamental to all his essays—he starts with a seemingly small particular and expands it to its full significance though a combination of research and speculation. For example, the collection’s title essay begins with Arthur contemplating a 1958 photograph of a young Swedish boy with a horse and noting that he was the same age as the boy that year, feeling “a kind of fugitive companionship,” but realizing that what it means to be alive is “knowing that in the end there’s no image that can catch life’s likeness, but simply the extraordinary reflection of our experiences looking back at us through the mirror of our consciousness.”
“Splinter” reveals something fundamental and crucial about Arthur in his quest of this book. To be alive for him means caring about other people and what being alive means for them. His examination of their circumstances may reveal a truth about them that he alone grasps, that may have escaped the person he thinks about so deeply, whose situation is a splinter that festers deep under his skin. Those situations considered in these essays explore empathy for a young woman haunted by the Holocaust, a long gone Japanese prostitute in a city then named Edo, neighbors on a street in Wales, children surrounding him in a class photograph. What it means to be each and all of them, how such a variety of human beings confront the specifics of their existence. Arthur is a seeker who wants to know because their lives are inseparable from his: “In putting words on a page, in crafting my sentences together, I’m hoping to better understand—to mark and celebrate, commemorate—whatever aspects of my time here happen to catch my attention. To explain, for me, what it was like to be alive.”
Contemplating the forgotten Picts who 1400 years ago occupied what is now Arthur’s home in St, Andrews, Scotland, and who used the area now called Hallow Hill—a microcosm of the world—as a burial ground, he wonders what the people of then share with those of now, He asks of a young woman who died of leprosy, her remains discovered in a cist, “Is there any trace left anywhere in the universe that would correspond to the ‘I’ she thought of as herself?” Or is she, like we will eventually be ourselves, “rendered into the anonymous building blocks or matter, lost utterly and forever?” He also wonders in the context of an insolvable puzzle, if there would be any similarities in how the way the woman saw the everyday world with the way he does.
“A Lament for Tama” starts with a seemingly peaceful and idyllic Japanese print—one of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo—that hung on the wall of a girlfriend, Katie, of the author’s youth as an illustration of what she took to be a pleasant view, especially with a white cat watching a flight of birds with Mount Fuji in the distance.
In fact, the painting depicts the room of a prostitute in Edo’s—later Tokyo—red light district, with the grim and seamy reality of Tama’s situation occurring offstage. She was one of thousands of women trapped into a world of exploitation as children, perpetually in debt and effectively imprisoned, usually dying of disease in her twenties, her body dumped into a common grave. The shocking contrast with Hiroshige’s print and Katie’s assumptions when she chose it to hang deepens the sense of pain for what it was to be alive for Tama.
The essay “In Transition” takes a different approach to the ongoing changes of each human life when Arthur considers his class group photograph of twenty-five boys and girls at age seven with their teacher in what was designated their Transition school year. Two of the group have already transitioned to death, but all were in the midst of an ongoing remaking. Arthur cites David Hume’s statement that humans are in “permanent flux and movement,” adding that our visual identity is constantly changing in photographs, identity “a kaleidoscope of shifting states.” But beyond that class photograph, the existence of those depicted could be traced back to “a tidal wave of precursors” behind the momentary grouping of the picture. Ultimately, to be alive is to be caught up in the flow of ongoing change.
“Learning to See Goldcrests” in one sense is a celebration of life itself in the description of the hearty endurance and thriving of these tiny birds: “They are something incredible that invites amazement. Like so much that we don’t notice, this one small bird contains a multiplicity of things within it.” At the same time the essay is an example of what it means for Arthur to be alive as he observes and celebrates the world of which he is so much a part. Being fully alive as a human is a recognition of all that we connect with and a realization that our being is an aspect of a multiplicity.
Arthur’s final essay, ”Benchmarks,” addresses death—“The massive fact of nonbeing envelopes us; a seeming infinity of nullity surrounds the fragile ephemera of consciousness.” He quotes the memorial plaques on benches in his town’s Botanic Garden and realizes that “… we’re part of one story, the human saga, written on Earth in the syllabary of individual lives.” Ultimately, that is what it is like to be alive.
