Mary Oliver on What It Means to Really Care and Her Moving Elegy for Her Soul Mate – The Marginalian

Mary Oliver (September 10, 1935–January 17, 2019) is one of the most beloved and prolific poets of our time — a genius in the art of poetry and a master of its magic; a woman who is not afraid to have wisdom as wisdom. For over forty years, Oliver lived on Cape Cod with the love of his life, the amazing photographer Molly Malone Cook – one of the first photographers The Voice of the Citywith subjects like Walker Evans and Eleanor Roosevelt, and a visionary gallerist who opened the first portrait gallery on the East Coast, exhibited icons like Ansel Adams and Berenice Abbott, and recognized emerging talent like William Clift. (Also, he lived up to his reputation as “the great American Bohemian,” owning a bookstore frequented by Norman Mailer and occasionally working for filmmaker John Waters.)

When Cook died in 2005 at the age of eighty, Oliver looked for a light, however dim, to shine through the hardships of bereavement. He spent a year going through thousands of photos of his partner and unprinted negatives, mostly from the time they met, and Oliver covered them in his own thoughts to survive. Our World (public library) — part commemoration, part deeply moving eulogy for a deceased spouse, part celebration of their love for each other through their creative love. Adapted from Oliver's poetry and prose, Cook's photographs reveal a close thread that united these two extraordinary women – a shared sense of deep life and attention to the world, a dedication to making the invisible of life visible, and above all a deep kindness to all that exists, inside and out.

Oliver – who calls Cook simply M. in most of his writings – reveals in the opening essay:

Although you have known someone for more than forty years, although you have worked with him and lived with him, you do not know everything. I don't know everything – but a few things, I will say. M. had a will and a mind and perhaps a great sympathy for others; he was quick to speak and did not suffer fools. When you knew him he was kind without conditions. But again, as our friend Bishop Tom Shaw said at his memorial service, you had to be brave to know him.

[…]

He was stylish, and he had an old loneliness that nothing could erase; He had a lot of knowledge about people, books, feelings of the mind and hearts. Sometimes he would live in a black box of memories and unanswered questions, then he would come out and play – be brave, and be brave.

Oliver writes about an affair Cook had in the late 1950s, shortly before they met:

He had … a lover who hit him hard; I believe he loved completely and was loved completely. I know about it, and I am happy… This love, and the futility of its end, changed him. In such events we are always changed – not badly, but changed. Whoever does not know this does not know much.

The following year, Cook met Oliver and they lived together, inseparable, for more than forty years. That encounter – which reminds us of the fateful first meetings that made literary couples like Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas or Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes – took place at Steepletop, the home of Edna St. Vincent Millay, where Oliver had arrived the day after he graduated from high school at the age of seventeen and stayed for several years.

One evening in 1959, when Oliver was twenty-four and Cook thirty-four, the young poet returned home to find the photographer sitting at the kitchen table with a friend. He describes their combination with his usual signature beauty to make the point:

When I looked, I fell, and I fell. M. he looked at me, put on his dark glasses, and an obvious measure of self-importance. He denied this until his dying day, but it was true.

Isn't it amazing how the world holds both the deeply profound, and the unexpectedly happy?

It turns out that Oliver and Cook, in their normal lives beyond the Steepletop, lived across the street from each other in New York's East Village. So they started seeing each other “little by little,” and that's how their great love story began.

But perhaps the greatest gift of their unity was the way in which they shaped each other's way of seeing and experiencing the world – an unifying dialogue between their two faculties of being:

It has often been remarked, in connection with my own writings, that I emphasize the idea of ​​attention. This started very simply: to see that the way a swallow flies is very different from the way a swallow plays in the golden summer air. It was my pleasure to see such things, it was a good first step. But later, watching M. when he was taking pictures, and watching him in a dark room, and watching the intensity and openness with which he interacted with friends, and with strangers, taught me what real attention is all about. Paying attention without feeling it, I began to learn, is just a report. Openness – empathy – was needed if attention was to be valued. Such openness and compassion M. he had in abundance, and he gave freely… I was about twenty-two early 30, and I was filled with a sense of my own thoughts, my own existence. I was eager to speak to the world of words – to speak to the world with words. Then M. he instilled in me this deep level of observation and working, of seeing heavenly things visible to the invisible. I think about this every time I look at her pictures, pictures of strength, hope, patience, kindness, vulnerability… We all had our different situations; yet our ideas, our influence on each other was a rich and lasting union.

[…]

I don't think I was wrong to be in the world I was in, it was my salvation from my darkness. And I never gave up – those early signs leading to epiphanies. And yet, yet, he wanted me to fully enter the human world again, and embrace it, as I believe I have. And what a gift [that she] I showed no impatience with my reports of nature, the blue and green joy I found there. Our love was strong.

Losing the love of one's life is something that few have dared to live in public – the most memorable courage is that of Joan Didion – but Oliver brings the darkness of death with his usual touch of light that strengthens courage:

The end of life has its own nature, and it deserves our attention. I do not say this without considering the grief, the anxiety, the many losses. But that's really where a person's character shines or fades.

Oliver ends with a breath-taking prose poem that brings full circle his opening thoughts about not fully knowing even those closest to us – a good testament to what another wise woman once wrote: “You can never know anyone as completely as you want. But that's okay, love is better.”

PAPER

Suddenly he started whistling. Suddenly
I mean for more than thirty years he had never
he whistled. It was exciting. At first I wondered who it was
in the house, where is the stranger? I was up reading, too
he was down. As from the throat of the wild and
a happy bird, not caught but visiting, the sound of fighting
it bled and slipped and doubled back and filled and rose.

Finally I said, Is that you? Do you whistle? Yes, he is
said. I used to whistle, long ago. Now I see I can
he is still whistling. And cadence after cadence he was walking around
in the house, whistling.

I know him very well, I think. I thought. elbow and
here. Condition and desire. Pain and irony. Anger too.
And services. And with all that, shall we begin
do you know each other? Who is this I have been living with
thirty years?

This clear, dark, lovely rider?

Our World it reads perfectly fine – the kind that enters the soul like a deep breath and stays there like an eternal breath. Fill it with Oliver's beautiful rhythm of life and his beautiful reading of his poem “Wild Geese.”