The Unfolding

In 2000, Anne Carson’s older brother Michael died unexpectedly in Copenhagen. It took two weeks for the news to reach Carson, a Canadian-born classicist and poet, because Michael’s widow couldn’t find her number in her husband’s papers. Michael had run away from home in 1978, and he and Anne had spoken a half-dozen times in all the years since. After his death, she began to construct a notebook of memories, or, as she puts it, “an epitaph.” It is a curious word—usually it refers to a commemorative inscription on a plaque or headstone, but Michael’s ashes were scattered into the sea. The notebook itself is that headstone; now published as “Nox” (New Directions; $29.95), it has the squat gray aspect of a stone tablet. It is also a personal, and deeply moving, meditation on the contours of absence.

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.

Translation, the act of renaming, is clearly crucial to Carson’s method of coming to grips with loss. The first page is a yellowing, blurred poem in Latin: Catullus’ poem 101, an elegy for his brother, who also died on a distant shore. (To achieve the yellowing effect, Carson soaked her typescript of the poem overnight in tea.) Most of the left-hand pages that follow are given over to lexicographical entries, defining each word in the Catullus elegy. The right-hand pages meditate on the difficulty of elegizing a brother who had disappeared from Carson’s life long before his death.

Despite the inclusion of personal details, “Nox” (Latin for “night”) is as much an attempt to make sense of the human impulse to mourn as it is a story about a lost sibling. In poem 101, Catullus writes:

Carson, whose quite faithful rendering this is, wants to memorialize the dead, but she also wonders why she does—why we feel the need, as Catullus says, to speak to silent ashes, to assemble trivial remnants of a lost presence. Nox is also the Roman goddess of night—perhaps the oldest of the Roman deities, the mother, by many accounts, of sleep, fate, and death—and in Carson’s elegy Night becomes a kind of elusive character, with whom the mourner repeatedly attempts to engage. It’s as if to look Night in the eye would be to understand the tangled relationship between character, fate, and memory.

Carson’s first entry in “Nox” displays a characteristic combination of the lyric and the gnomic: “I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains a plain, odd history.” Elegy and history are akin, Carson notes, and she invokes Herodotus, the father of history, as her guide. Herodotus considered history “the strangest thing that humans do,” she observes, in part because history can be at once “concrete and indecipherable.” That’s certainly true of her brother’s.

Michael was a troubled boy. The family moved a lot, and he had difficulty making friends, always trying to hang out with older boys. (There is a photo of Michael, at ten, standing beneath a tree house; the three boys in it have pulled the ladder up after them.) He didn’t do well in school; she did, and he took to calling her “professor” or “pinhead.” Somewhere along the way, he began dealing drugs and he ran away to avoid going to jail, after staying with Carson a few days (and leaving cigarette butts everywhere, even in the frying pan, “sunny side up”). He travelled through Europe and India on a false passport, “seeking something,” sending occasional postcards. He wrote once, to say that he had fallen in love with a woman named Anna who died suddenly; he married at least two other women. Carson includes a fragment of a letter by her mother asking Michael for an address where she might send a “box for Christmas.”

The details are affecting, but she doles them out sparingly. “Nox” shifts between the analytic and the lyrical. Even the lexicography turns out to be surprisingly complex and moving (dictionaries hardly being tearjerkers, as a rule). The entries read like litanies—words you might utter as a stay against panic or darkness—and when you look closely you see that Carson has messed with the Latin examples, introducing the word “night,” creating atmospheric little prose poems of the translated phrases. Here’s what we get under the word aequora (aequor, aequoris, neuter noun):