“R: An Aftermath,” by Jeneva Stone (Poetry ’07)

Poetry alum Jeneva Stone recently had an essay featured in the New England Review. Read an excerpt below:

R: An Aftermath

But after Q? What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance . . .  Qualities that would have saved a ship’s company exposed on a broiling sea with six biscuits and a flask of water— endurance and justice, foresight, devotion, skill, came to his help. R is then—what is R?
—Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

ABDUCTION

The act of being taken. Away, perhaps.

In Greek mythology, abduction precedes violation. For example, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, woman after woman is removed from a place of safety and transported elsewhere for violation, by ship or chariot, sea or land, or the ethereal machinations of the gods. Blossoms and baskets are dropped by these maidens, life interrupted.

The Metamorphoses are tales of violence and resulting human change: to trees, to animals, to birds. When I read these tales as a young woman, I imagined transformation as both punishment and safety. When the gods shape-shifted a person from human to nonhuman, it might be punishment; however, that transformation made further violence less likely.

In fact, on the cover of my college edition of Metamorphoses, a Duchamp-like figure of a woman, geometrical, transitions to a tree with roots as feet and leaves as a bower of curled hair. She has become impenetrable.

I thought of the myths as having a sequence:

1. Abduction
2. Sexual violation
3. Transformation

Sequences radiate clarity. They can be interrupted, or, perhaps reversed. I’m comforted by these mathematics.

Alphabets have sequence, too; however, language itself isn’t constrained by its origin in order. Words are formed by disorder, and translation reorders that disorder further. The Greek verb viasmós collapses the concepts of abduction and violation, as does the Latin verb rapto. It doesn’t matter if English separates them.

Word, body, mind. I can separate these pieces of experience, aligning them with abduction, violation, transformation. But when I open the cover of Metamorphoses, on its heavy paper backing is inscribed a room number with the name of the dorm I lived in the second semester of my junior year.

Body, word, mind: These collapse.

Read the essay in its entirety here: https://www.nereview.com/volume-41-no-3-2020/r-an-aftermath/