"All this time I told myself we were born from war-- but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence-- but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it." (231) This is one among thousands of lines and images and paragraphs I could have chosen from, but I think it captures the emotion that Ocean Vuong evokes in his writing. Every writer, and especially every poet, is said to have a certain emotion they return to-- maybe something even deeper than an emotion, something like a facet of the human condition that particularly obsessed them. For Vuong, that seems to be the fact that life exists in a space of loss and the limitation-- of language, love, tenderness, knowledge. We aspire to these ideals purely because we can never fully attain them. But I think what Vuong does is that he opens up a profound and gorgeous meditation on the possibility of hope in such a space of loss. We are not the fruit of violence, but the fruit that remains unspoiled after having passed through violence. And in having been borne of beauty, we become briefly gorgeous-- or at least he and his loved ones become briefly gorgeous through his consciousness of their beauty.
I usually don't finish books front-to-back anymore. Either they're too good and I can't bear to let it "go to waste" or they're not interesting enough for me to read all the way through. Usually, and lately, my problem has been the former. I'm pretty much always operating from a place of scarcity when it comes to beautiful things, even reading. I think if I like it too much, I will use it up and waste it, kill it. But this book taught me the ubiquity of beauty, the way it sings everywhere in the most quiet and unsuspecting of places. Beauty doesn't have to be scarce. Vuong makes the most stunning tapestry out of memories and people in his life and gives them a second life immemoriam.
So inspired, so satiated. I feel so full. I think the book, in many ways, is still a question, but it tests out some answers and I like where he ends. It's really one of the most gorgeous things I've ever encountered.
I'm still a writer, however, and despite the satiation of having read a beautiful book, I still have to tear it apart just a little to understand it better, and perhaps even reproduce it myself. Vuong says himself: "... beauty has historically demanded replication." (138) So let me create a space for that replication, and perhaps a kind of knowledge through Ocean Vuong's writing.
One of the most beautiful and profound passages in the book (and now, ranked among my favorite passages in literature) is in the beginning of the book, where he discusses loneliness and the eye. Here it is:
You told me once that the human eye is god's loneliest creation. How so much of the world passes through the pupil and still it holds nothing. The eye, alone in its socket, doesn't even know there's another one, just like it, an inch away, just as hungry, as empty. Opening the front door to the first snowfall of my life, you whispered, "Look." ... You're a mother, Ma. You're also a monster. But so am I-- which is why I can't turn away from you. Which is why I have taken I have taken god's loneliest creation and put you inside it. Look.
Of course, I took out the part in the middle with the scene of them going to Costco and the flammable jacket and the meditation on monstrosity. But still, the idea of the eye being the loneliest creation of god is interesting, but only because Vuong makes it so: he points out that each eye will never see its sister eye, and that the whole world passes through it while it holds nothing itself, both qualities which make it "hungry... empty." And then he says he is putting his mother inside an eye, and urges her to look. His mother, who does not speak English, to whom he wrote this massive epistolary novel, and is urging her to just look.
Vuong's ideates all his passages in this way, toggling between a philosophical point, a scene or a memory, a beautifully-written meditation of some sort, then returning to the memory. He is a master of abstraction and also the architecture which makes it compelling-- which is to say that he knows how to make an idea come to life. Loneliness is the eye. The monster is his mother. Except he puts his mother in the pupil and now it is no longer about loneliness, but about beauty, about love, about a kind of seeing that only language-- even in its futility-- can do. He gives us anything-- an idea, mundane facts about opioids or butterflies or buffalo, a scattered family history, a panoramic of a New England street-- and makes it devastatingly specific, real, and, briefly, as Vuong would say, gorgeous.