Hope, a thing with pages

Living toward a bookish hope

My book began as a hope.

About six years ago, I was hoping and scared—hoping to write a book I had grand ideas for but that I could only vaguely conceive. Still, I hoped & agonized & wrote, if only a little. My inky hope was scattered in notebooks and fragments of schemas carried in my head.

Where do your words of god and grief begin?

Agamemnon, Aeschylus, Translated by Robert Fagels, qtd. in Maaza Mengiste, The Shadow King, epigraph.

Then, through the valley of death’s shadow I went. I stepped off the smooth-ish sidewalk into unpaved territory—a valley where with an injured brain I could not read, write (without laborious scribbling and painful hands), or remember my neighbor’s name. The days were dark and inescapable because the darkness was within me.

I lost all hope. When the house of your body is on fire, all you want is to climb out the windows. Present, past, and future melded into one, and not in the way that we are instructed to “live in the present.” Metaphors didn’t make as much sense to me any more. If you’ve ever fallen into an overly concretized world from one where every leaf and tree means something else, and that meaning brings comfort, you will know what I mean.

Still, I hoped against hope. Slowly I wrote again.

The book I wrote is not exactly the book I conceived before I lost my hope, but maybe it is the book I was envisioning all along (In some limited, but surely spiritually gifted, ways, I believe it is possible to see the future. Poets often bring us to those vistas in language that strains for the infinite. I have written the future before, describing events that happened to me after I unwittingly put them to paper in poems).

In The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms and Observations, the elements of the book I visualized are there—black and white illustrations I drew myself and poems I wrote to serve as healing balms. My bookish hope is being fulfilled. My words of God and grief are also there, the stuff from the middle where the light of hope was so small.

Inking linocut prints for The Brain’s Lectionary

As I wait for word from my publisher to know when my book will be out, I feel some terror, some hope. I hope the book will be what someone needs in their own hopelessness. If you need to, feel free to borrow some of my hope fulfilled—with crisp pages soon to be fresh off the press—for any project or longing you are holding.

hope, a

thing with pages

Notes interline future days

with turquoise, hummingbirds,

& ancient caves. Here your words

lie yet undiscovered, scrolls and

scrolls, wrapped with leather.

Dig, scribe,

unroll.

Elizabeth Pinborough

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