Diary: Kathryn Davis, Bardo
Reading Joy Williams’s story, “Chicken Hill"
She didn’t know what had possessed her to participate in such a thing.
We don’t find out until the second sentence of “Chicken Hill” that the name of the person who didn’t know what had possessed her to participate in such a thing is Ruth. The name gets slipped into the second sentence as inconspicuously as the name of the biker bar where the “thing” happened that this Ruth participated in. In fact, even as it diverts attention from itself, this opening sentence of “Chicken Hill” is a miracle of withholding, Something possessed an unnamed she to participate in an unnamed thing. It’s easy to forget that this is where the story starts, just as it’s easy to overlook the deft use of past perfect—“what had possessed her”—that Joy Williams sneaks in.
By the time we get to the second sentence it’s as if we think we know who Ruth is, what Ruth is, maybe most importantly where Ruth is when she is thinking this thought: that’s what fiction makes us do, that’s its elusive force, that it can make us think it’s safe to assume Ruth is someone, somewhere. Even if we don’t know where that somewhere might be, it has to be in the same town as the biker bar, though probably in a less alarming part of it. The story, with the blithe assumption of forward motion that characterizes narrative and human life, is underway. The thing Ruth attended was a memorial fund-raiser for a little boy named Hector who was run over by a sheriff’s deputy. The details in the opening paragraph are plentiful: Ruth puts thirty dollars toward funeral expenses in an empty terrarium, she is given a plate with a tamale on it, someone outside is providing pony rides. All the trappings of the material world, and yet.
The “Time Passes” section of To the Lighthouse constitutes a transition between two things—it is, in this way, a perfect example of what a transition is generally thought to be. There is one material thing (the Ramsey’s house on a Hebridean island on the day of the trip to the lighthouse) and there is another material thing (the same house years later after Mrs. Ramsey’s death), “Time Passes” providing the means of getting from one of these material things to the other. The section is pure transition, yet it depends—quite literally, like a bridge—on its two abutments. Whereas “Chicken Hill” is nothing but transition. “Chicken Hill” isn’t taking us from one place to another; “Chicken Hill” is creating the illusion of motion in stasis.
It seems that Hector’s death was Hector’s fault—he ran into the street against the light. Ruth believes his father will find no satisfaction in suing the sheriff’s department, but she is never going to return to the Barbed Wire to tell him. “Going there had been one of the last journeys she had taken, though, of course, she did not know this at the time.”
The marvel of this story is the way it tricks you into thinking you know where you are (in the real world) while at the same time stealthily undermining the real world’s underpinnings. Even as early in her career as “Preparation for a Collie,” back when Joy Williams was a young woman in her thirties and often mistaken for a realist, the grim reality of a particular household—with its mother named Jane and its father named Jackson and its five-year-old boy named David, its cereal bowls everywhere, “crusty with soured milk,” its pancake mix and hot air register, its pound of thawing hamburger and its can of Drano—ultimately owes its existence to whatever it is that Jane whispers in Jackson’s ear, “something so crude, in a tone so unfamiliar, that it can only belong to all the time before them.” All the time before them.
This is the thing unheard, these are the words unread, the ones on the folded note Mrs. Muirhead asks her daughter Jane’s friend to hand to Mr. Muirhead that he swallows without reading in “Train,” another early story. These frail substitutes for the longed-for passageways out of the material labyrinth most often prove useless.
In the early stories the preferred conduit is frequently a child: poor, sad David, refusing to look at his mother while simultaneously “dreaming of looking at her” as she prepares to poison the family collie; poor, angry Jane watching her grown self arrive in a snow-covered coat to tell her child self that she’s “never lifted a finger” to help her. Many of Joy Williams’s stories have been provided with “an animal within to give its blessing,” most frequently a dog—the one tied to the pilings beneath a house or the courteous dogs of Cornwall that are not as hard-working as the dogs of Wales, the enormous Newfoundland on a ferryboat with a head that looks “warm and moist and tremble(s) slightly, like something baking,” the drowned German shepherd who used to leap up, all fours, into his girl’s arms when she’d say “Do you love me?”
By the time of “Chicken Hill,” though, written when Williams was seventy-one, the neighbor girl with the filthy pink backpack who so deftly plucks the word “provenance” from Ruth’s gaping mind is less conduit than cohabitant, and Ruth’s five beneficent dogs suddenly “vanished as though they’d never been, along with their bowls and beds.”
“Thomas Aquinas said that friendship between humans and animals is impossible,” the child tells Ruth, to which Ruth replies, “That’s idiotic. I’ve never heard of anything more ridiculous.”
From the outset, conversation between the old woman and the seven-year-old child is odd (“I would like to draw you in plein air,” the child announces), becoming increasingly strange (“Death’s got the bit in her teeth these days,” Ruth says in response to the child remarking “you’d think she’d taken a bullet for a senator or something” about the crowd size at another child’s funeral, this one her classmate), and finally, completely disoriented, destabilizing (“I believe,” the girl says “and it saddens me to say this, but I believe we’ve come to the end of our options here”). Where O where is this here where we are? What is happening?
Many things have occurred. Ruth has gone to the memorial fund-raiser. She has sat on her veranda eating a tuna sandwich. The child from down the street has come calling, not just once. Ruth lives in a neighborhood that contains solar panels and a gully that is more like a ravine and a Toyota and a little breeze and a bar of soap and a bowl of cereal. She has a memory of herself when she was the age of the child from next door, sliding down Chicken Hill on a piece of cardboard. “Chicken Hill, Chicken Hill, what a place! The world!”
“O, you, with your mind far away, thinking that death will not come, / Entranced by the pointless activities of this life, / If you were to return empty-handed now, would not your life’s purpose have been utterly confused?” So the lama is instructed to address the deceased person in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “O (name of the deceased)! Listen carefully!” The deceased person is in the Bardo, a place that is pure transition. The lama is reading to the deceased from a text that has been printed from hand-carved wood blocks on wide, narrow sheets of rice paper and carefully wrapped in cloth.
In the Bardo, narrative seems to happen but doesn’t. You think you are eating a tuna sandwich. You think you are washing a filthy pink backpack with a bar of soap. We’re in the Bardo all the time. That is, once we’re born we’re in the Life Bardo, and when we begin to die we’re in the Dying Bardo, and after that we’re in the Death Bardo, at which point we make our transition back via rebirth into the Life Bardo, having experienced “co-emergent delight” in the meeting between sperm and ovum announcing passage out of that state of bliss, fainting into unconsciousness. Finally, emerging from the womb and opening our eyes, we will have turned into a puppy or something and are back once again in the Life Bardo.
We’re never not in a Bardo. We’re never not in transition, even though the way we tend to think of transition is from one place to another place.
When I was a high-strung child of six, seated in one of the two family wing chairs with the family dachshund in my lap, I would frighten myself by thinking about the afterlife. My experience with death had been limited to family pets and one not-especially-beloved grandmother whose face I had stolen a look at in her open casket even though I’d been advised not to. You could tell, looking at a dead grandmother, that whatever had kept her alive was no longer there, just as you could tell, looking at the family dachshund, that whatever kept it alive was there in abundance. The idea of having your life drain out of you like air out of the inflatable wading pool in the backyard was terrifying. Rouged and powdered, your eyes marbles, there you would be lying, flat on your back. You had been somewhere and now you were nowhere.
What I used to think was this: I would die and then I would go to Heaven. A huge relief! Heaven! I would still “exist”! The details were tricky, though—wings and a halo, walking on clouds—none of that seemed especially desirable. Worse, there was the “forever and ever” part.
Maybe it was better than it seemed, the wings and halo, the clouds. Maybe being there was better than anything I could imagine. But surely there had to be an end to it. Nothing goes on forever. A day could have good things in it or bad things in it but at the end of the day you got to go to sleep, the day was over. That is, the thought of reaching your ultimate destination and being eternally stuck there was like going to hell.
The Bardo is not like Heaven. The Bardo is not Eternal Stasis. The Bardo is pure transition. The Buddhists say it’s also all we’ve got.
In the Bardo you can be on your sled headed down Chicken Hill, a dangerous place to go sledding. It’s called Chicken Hill because it ends at the road and the road, as Hector found out, is a place that kills. Ruth can feel “the purity of its cold core and see the slick ice shining” just as she can feel a tightness in her chest and her esophagus constricting when she eats that tuna sandwich, “as if the splendid and courageous giant of the oceans were rising in horror, disputing what had been done to it, and why should it not …” Things keep happening in this place of transition, it is not clear when or if Ruth has moved from the Life Bardo to the Dying Bardo, and thence to the Death Bardo.
“You can’t live a life that’s no longer your own,” Ruth thinks, “which was a truth that surely didn’t apply only to her, for many must feel they are living lives that they no longer inhabit, just as sometimes the tears you shed seem to come from the eyes of another.”
There’s no jumping off from the place where the story ends, just as there was no place the unnamed she jumped into at the beginning. The Bardo is pure transition. The Buddha says it’s all we’ve got.
Kathryn Davis is the author of eight novels, the most recent of which is The Silk Road, as well as a memoir, Aurelia, Aurélia.
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What a beautiful--and helpful--essay. Thank you.