Love Affair in the Garden of Milton by Susannah B. Mintz

Author:Susannah B. Mintz [Mintz, Susannah B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Personal Memoirs, Literary Criticism, Books & Reading, Body; Mind & Spirit, Mindfulness & Meditation
ISBN: 9780807175811
Google: f4spEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: LSU Press
Published: 2021-09-22T02:50:48+00:00

PARTING, ACCORDING TO Emily Dickinson, who loved her sister-in-law with a trembling intensity, is “all we need of hell.”

Edward Phillips tells us, in his biography of the famous uncle, that when Mary Powell failed to return to London after a summer sojourn by the agreed-upon date of Michaelmas, at the end of September, Milton “sent for her by Letter; and receiving no answer, sent several other Letters, which were also unanswered; so that at last he dispatch’d down a Foot-Messenger with a Letter, desiring her return; but the Messenger came back not only without an answer, at least a satisfactory one, but . . . reported that he was dismissed with some sort of Contempt” (64–65). Did he fold them ever more frantically, those squares of paper, lined with his ink? I imagine the third, the fourth, the increasing sense of confusion and rage. Where was she? He began to fear an inevitable and horrid outcome, forced to stay married to a person who’d rejected him so outrageously. Such an inexplicable interruption to the anticipated trajectory of their lives! Milton got quickly to work on the first of his divorce tracts, fashioning a whole polemic out of private humiliation (how can we not read that document autobiographically?), taking on the edifices of church and state, smashing the whole house down.

Oru: to fold. Kami: paper. Any origami object will bear the marks of its making: creases down the centers of a wing, through the middle of a head or a tail, like the scars of birth, finger whorls of how it began in two dimensions. The December after my July wedding, I sent crane ornaments to the friends who’d helped us achieve that beautiful day. I wanted them to believe, when they saw their birds swinging there, in a window over a sink, on a Christmas tree, from a filament of fishing line strung from the ceiling, that into every life enchantment might fall. How many still dangle there, origins unremembered—or, in solidarity with me, in protest against an apparently singular act that rent my union, got crumpled at the bottom of a recycling bin? In a plastic bin beneath the guest bed, I still have the piece of paper on which I copied down the texts I read as it dawned on me I was living a spectacular untruth. I also have the marriage vows we wrote, and every card he gave to me that I didn’t tear to shreds. We hold onto the tangible as long as we can. We make these arbitrary shapes the container of our hopes.

When the future I’d imagined with my husband collapsed in on itself, I held fast to certain continuities, to friendship and sisterhood, to my father and the scar that was his broken face, to the faint outlines of folds on scraps of paper held out to me in dreams in which all the colors were inside out and torqued two degrees to the left on the color wheel, saying, mountain folds back, valley folds forward.

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