498
PARTISAN REVIEW
suffering?/ ... that my luck/ Lay in my fate; that, before I became
ill,
my
longing/ For a hook was, in fact, a kind of suffering ..."
In
fo at Night,
Laurie Sheck locates us somewhere between
the
Garden of Eden and the Apocalypse.
10,
who like Ganymede is visited
by
Zeus, represents our attempts to make sense of a world that is fragmented
and imperfect, but whose wholeness and perfection seem attainable, either
through one's memory of such a place, through the innocence of one's
childhood, or through the promise of love.
10,
then, is that person who
asks in
"10,"
"Where is the girl who dreamed of being held? Where is
the
girl who felt as she walked into a standi Of narrow trees made white
by
frost (or did she dream?) -/ ... that she would come, if she just kept
walking long enough,! to arms that would hold her and take her in?! 1
remember and do not remember being her."
The condition of innocence preceding Io's seduction and transforma–
tion into a cow is what she remembers and, at the same time, cannot
re–
member. But this uncertain state is what she believes to be perfection.
What she cannot see, though the reader can, is how one form of her vic–
timization is replaced by another, and so a darkness inheres even in our
so-called memory of a wholeness or unity. The result, as she writes in
"10
in the Wind Ongoing," is "There is no single world," or, in "The
Basilica of San Francisco," only "the mangled beauty of the world." But
Sheck's attempt to restore a wholeness is obsessive and tenacious, despite
her yearning to accept the imperfection of our mortality on its own
terms. In "To
10,
Afterwards," she writes, "I suppose you are weary now
of remembering,! that being mortal you want to convince yourself you
belong/ to this earth, and are anchored to the earth by love."
Although Sheck's overriding vision of humanity is characterized
by
pain and hurt, loss and grief, she finds respite in the hidden world, the
realm of the unconscious, where dreams and the images of art originate.
The cave paintings of Lascaux offer Sheck inklings of the prelapsarian
world, where fear, hurt, shame and death do not exist. "In this cave of
separateness," she writes in "The Red Cow at Lascaux," "in this animal/
silence, the cow leaps ceaselessly,! its red skin blazing its bones.! It is not
afraid.
It
is not afraid of human/ touch, or the movement of strangers."
The cow which allows us to entertain a moment of innocence is, never–
theless, a victim of human imperfection, since it will be slaughtered, and
". . . like an unhealed/ wound, its red flesh goes on/ burning, its red
flesh/ cannot stop burning."
For most of
fo at Night,
10
is an adequate figure of exiled wandering
and bewilderment whose encounter with Prometheus is a portent of the
worst kind of retributive enslavement. But at the end of the book, as
if
needing a figure more conclusively tragic than
10,
who at last was colo-