There are books one never finishes reading, we keep going back to. Fanny Howe’s latest book of essays, The Winter Sun: Notes on a Vocation, finally arrived, and I spent the night reading, keen on finishing it so that I can go back to page one and read it again. The same can be said of how I feel towards her other book, The Wedding Dress, one I love with devotion. Howe’s books are simply incandescent, of penetrating insight, challenging of belief systems we hold dear but often fail to see through. What amazes is how swiftly and compassionately she can cut through society’s layers of complacent ideas, petrified by years of idle acquiescence to them, and how she does it as would a contemplative in a spiral walk, approaching an idea deliberately and attentive to the artificiality of margins but also honoring limitations, resistance, and delay. It takes a while to get to the heart of a spiral walk, and it requires patience. The mind steeped in a culture of acquisition and immediate gratification will think, What is the point? Silly to find oneself circling and circling towards an end I can see RIGHT THERE and which I can get to LIKE SO, and walk over to it and find itself at dead center. One cannot walk down a spiral path with eyes on the center like some prize. Howe’s essays are long, they circle an idea slowly as would one who genuinely seeks to become its trustworthy intimate and ancillary. Her essays are a long series of collages, humble. Her essays are long and difficult and elegant like a mathematical equation. There are also a lot of gaps, ciphers. Xs that resist the tyranny that can afflict a too-systematic an examination. Sometimes they seem to meander wildly, fly off course, and one wonders where one will land with the wandering. And one lands. Sometimes they are hermetic as though in resistance to the terms set forth by the world and how one must operate in it in order to truimph in it, to be a truimph in it. Her essays ask, How does one approach belief through emptiness, doubt, and mystery? At the heart of the spiral walk there is a radiating-out.
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I love the first poem.
