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When is a pilgrim like a photograph? When the blend of acids and sentiment is just right.
Anne Carson, "The Anthropology of Water" (170)
The pilgrim, as a devotional practitioner, blends physical exertion and deprivation with spiritual contemplation, mortifying the body in order to exhilarate the soul. Practising another form of devotion, the traditional elegist contemplates the grief of corporeal loss in order to reach a spiritual consolation. Movement towards elegiac consolation is conducted through a trope of seasonal change that implies infinite renewal, a pastoral symbology of resurrection through which the poet and the lost beloved are offered up to immortality. In Anne Carson's "The Anthropology of Water," the elegiac prose poem from her 1995 text Plainwater: Essays and Poetry, the narrator's pilgrimage to the medieval Christian shrine of St. James functions as a quest for viable mourning practices, framed by the narrator's attempts to read the father's body and speech through his dementia from Alzheimer's disease. The text considers the difficulties of male-female relationships (filial, sexual and fraternal) as these relationships are presaged, and often precluded, by the father-daughter relationship. The daughter's relationship to the father is explored as a parallel to the pilgrim's relationship to the saint, he who inspires the pilgrimage and the contemplation; for Carson's pilgrim, "Love is the mystery inside this walking" (145).
Carson begins "The Anthropology of Water" with the father's contention that some truths are "as obvious as a door in water" (119), and so sets up the paternal function as both "obvious" and revelatory, positioning the father as bearer of Aristotelian logos, rational speech (Glass 128). But this debilitated father has lost the capacity for rational speech; Alzheimer's-related dementia has "released some spring inside him, he babbles constantly in a language neurologists call 'word salad.'" (Plainwater 120). This stream of indecipherable speech suggests paternal knowledge codified by divinity as well as by disease: "Father had always been a private man. Now his mind was a sacred area where no one could enter or ask the way" (121). The father remains beyond the reach of the narrator's love, even as she strives to read him as an untranslated (and ultimately untranslatable) text that will not yield to traditional consolation. The father figure haunts "Diving," "Thirst," "Very...