Writing at the Edge of Time - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

Writing at the Edge of Time

Bonnie Marranca

Writing an editorial at this juncture of American life is a daunting

tarea. Simply to rant about the degradation of culture, political cor-
ruption, spiritual bankruptcy, and the rise of far-fight nationalism
is to duplicate the already prolific commentary on these themes. I would rather
write about the quality of human spirit that the life and death of Sam Shepard
offers as a model from the last months of his life. Reprinted in this issue is the
first piece he ever wrote for PAJ, en 1977, which was decided on as an homage
after his death last summer. The December 4, 2017 New York Times article by
Alexandra Alter, which details Shepard’s struggle to finish his last book, Spy of
the First Person, appeared just as the proofs for the new PAJ had arrived.

It is profoundly moving to read of his life since the diagnosis, en 2015, of the
dreaded Lou Gehrig’s disease. Here was a man who thought nothing of driving
cross-country whenever he wished, who rode horses, a man always on the move.
As physical debilitation took its toll, Shepard kept on writing even after he no
longer had the use of his hands and arms, by recording the text, and when he
could no longer do that on his own, dictating the book. His sisters transcribed
the text. His old friend Patti Smith was there to help edit and shape the book.
The publisher includes a note on this loving effort at the end of the volume. I
recall that years ago Shepard helped his friend Joseph Chaikin carry on working
after his stroke. There are important lessons to be learned from the enormous
courage Shepard, immobilized and losing all powers of control, demonstrated
in doing his work any way he could get it done.

Shepard is someone who wrote long-hand in notebooks. He used a typewriter.
The PAJ Publications archive includes a few of his letters hand-written in pen-
cil on yellow legal paper. He took the time to respond to queries and politely
answered them. He personally conducted the business of art even in the seven-
ties and eighties.

PAJ 118 (2018), páginas. 1–2. 

doi:10.1162/PAJJ _e_00402

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At the end of his life Shepard showed fortitude and more wisdom than anyone
ever knows he possesses. A private man, in his movement between memory
and the urgent present, he allowed a fiercely personal portrait, even though his
book is not a memoir, but something like a metanarrative that involves one
male character watching another through binoculars. “Why is he watching me?
I can’t understand that. Nothing seems to be working now. Hands, Brazos. Legs.
Nothing. I just lie here. Waiting for someone to find me. I just look up at the sky.
I can smell him close by.” Shepard remained devoted to the writer’s life, cual
exists in the real world and yet creates a reality beyond it. He brought the same
lyrical self-consciousness of his dramatic characters to an understanding of his
own existential condition, looking at it from the outside and the inside. In one
of the plays of his that I have most admired, Acción, the character Jeep describes
his attempts to keep himself together: “You act yourself out.” The vulnerability
of the male character was always there in the intimacy of the human voice. En
the recent obituary of the writer William Gass, I was reminded of his belief that
sentences have souls. Shepard himself was always soulful and well understood
the ontology of the sentence. He honored his commitment to a certain set of
values and lived out the writing life.

In these distracted, troubled times, occasions sometimes present themselves
when it may be necessary to take the time to honor exemplary acts from the
lives around us that bring to our understanding of the world the eschatological
imperatives. In his final text, Shepard left us a record of how he did that, as a
man experiencing life and as a writer chronicling it, through a dialogic process
that serves as his last testament. Sometimes when grace touches one, life and
death and art can seem inseparable.

2  PAJ 118