I first read Wave of Blood in February. Then, I could feel the winter, but not its cold. What I felt instead was warmth: the warmth of knowing. The overwhelm, even, of knowing. The knowledge I had was the nearness of a destiny; that I was on a certain path; that I had a specific future ahead of me; that I could change, still. That winter, for me, meant the nearness of a destiny.
Once, that same February, I read these lines from Wave of Blood to someone who inhabited many of my thoughts during that season. I held the book against the table of a bar, sticky with echoes of beers and patrons long gone who had, perhaps, had tried to ascertain truth via poetry:
The history of love is hard
To write because it is made
Of the same intestinal pulses
That all bad things in this
World emanate from — the sparks
Of desire and mutual recognition
I had chosen these lines on an unexamined whim, which I know now was really my own awe. Reading these lines, I felt mutual recognition; reading these lines out loud, I felt those very intestinal pulses stir in my body. There was little more honest on the matter of aliveness: Anything I needed to know existed not outside of me, but inside. The task ahead of me was to stretch my intuition—that sacred content inside my body—into language.
There must be a reason why the language of Ariana Reines moves me in such a primal way. I have tried, over months, to articulate some intelligible way to describe the magic spell of her words. As it turns out, language fails you occasionally. Perhaps that is why Wave of Blood stirs my soul—it does not seek sense. Somewhere, I believe, language can both astound and fail. Language astounds because it fails, because much of what renders us alive refuses to fit within the confines of language itself. But Reines revels in this chasm. She has a grand hope for the beauty of language. Her work is written from the “edge,” from the periphery of shame, of sex, of vanity, of freedom, of hope; far enough from the core of their contents to be able to admire them as a compassionate, authentic witness. Wave of Blood, in other words, dares to speak about truth.
When we begin Wave of Blood, Reines is adrift in her ocean of grief, trying to find an anchor in her naked truth. In this moment of agitation, three circumstances stir within Reines: her mother’s suicide, Reines’s acknowledgement of her own father after decades of estrangement, and October 7th. The order is given, but does not matter. Time moves in waves, as Reines says. The past is such a wave, an opaque companion. “Freud says the recent past is the most difficult time for a person to recollect,” Reines writes. “I thought it would be a worthy exertion, therefore, to face and sort through the particular anguish of the recent past—which is also the present.”
Fittingly, Wave assumes a circular form. The book is neither exclusively poetry nor prose; it's a vulnerable assemblage of thoughts, which appear on the pages of Wave in spirals and dreams and images. Her lens narrows and broadens; Reines is examining herself, but also where and who she’s arisen from: “I am trying to figure out how to be American and my mother’s daughter.” Reines had taken care of her mother, who had suffered from schizophrenia, since the departure of her father in Reines's early adulthood. Reines's mother was the child of her grandmother and the man who helped her escape the Holocaust—not her grandmother’s husband, who had been killed. “The slaughter of my grandmother’s family describes the shape of my family’s suffering,” Reines writes. Suffering is never discontinuous, and so much could be attributed to her mother’s suffering. Hitler, Reines names. Israel. “Judaism, smashed to smithereens.” And more: “The couple form in twentieth-century heterosexuality, psychiatry, late capitalism, the immigrant experience. Inherited trauma, spiritual homelessness, dread of the state. The limits of science. Survivor’s guilt. The murder of god. Materialism.”
And then there is Reines herself. “I am also at fault,” Reines writes. “The first sentences I ever wrote—ever in my life—were sentences against her.”
Later, she discloses: “I wrote that I hated her and I wanted to kill her.”
Anything about truth must be about evil. Reines tries to excavate and examine her own evil, the same hateful edge that existed against her mother, the same seed from which war—between mother and daughter, between peoples, between worlds—grows. Her mother, Reines believes, had never left the war, considered spiritually: “She stayed inside it, and therefore, so did I.” All the while, Reines is haunted by events of October 7th, and the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Images of dead Palestinian children haunt her. She is stuck at her phone, witnessing murder and death endlessly on a screen. Friends ask her to sign onto seemingly amounts of letters and petitions. She is more than disgusted or pained or sorrowful; she is paralyzed, entirely.
“'I am not doing enough' is how I ate / Away at myself when Mom was alive, but poets / Have no right to metaphor in such a slaughter,” Reines writes in a poem. All around Reines is the question of “doing”: Had she done enough for her mother? Is she doing enough for Palestine? What should one do when the world is breaking, and how?
Paradise Lost offers Reines clarity. Her transcendent lesson from Paradise is that of free will: that people choose their fates; that we can reflect upon ourselves, because we are “endowed with hearts and bodies and minds.” In spite of our pain, we can choose to hope; we can choose to imagine deeper futures. And more, or, perhaps, as an extension of our freedom: we have imagination. “Paradise Lost has reminded me how fundamentally heroic a compassionately imaginative act can really be,” Reines writes. Paradise is “a miracle of the imagination,” one which has been “steadying” for Reines as she witnesses death all around her.
When we live in a genocidal time, we forget why and where we hurt; we begin to live in existences steeped in mire of anguish, guilt, pain, and unhappiness. But the problem of living, Wave of Blood nearly suggests, is a matter of ascertainment. A person must locate where her individual's pain lives and dare to feel that pain, or else risk that pain sublimating into something more vicious: cruelty, vindication, greed, lust for power and punishment. Hurt begets hurt; war begets war. “Do what costs the most,” Reines writes—she attributes this quote to Simone Weil, although I can't tell if she's cheekily invented this quote and attributed it to Weil, because I otherwise can’t find the quote anywhere. But this must be the “doing.” You must feel what hurts within you, because otherwise your pain becomes your evil—becomes your war. You must feel what's uncomfortable, or else capitulate to despair and guilt. The doing is the overcoming.
Reflecting upon the act of reaching out to her father, a man she likens to the Devil, after decades of silence, Reines writes: “It’s almost pitiful: to acknowledge the proportions of one’s own sorrow.” But acknowledging her own pain reminds Reines that she has freedom, that she has confronted her truth, her suppressed desire to be loved by him. “Small as it is—it is my world.”
A line from Wave that has nestled itself in me: “The heart, at present, has become a taboo.”
“It’s very important, I’m noticing, for me to speak and share from an embodied place. It gets very easy to abstract and judge in this moment, specifically and precisely because it is so horrifying. It’s very hard to stay inside the heart,” Reines says before a reading; she begins most readings by reminding her audience of the relationship between the body and language.
To stay inside your heart, to always act from inside your heart: This is a way to survive.
No action of feeling—of your truth—is inconsequential.
What is a feeling if not an echo from the soul?
Imagine, Reines suggests, you have a hazelnut in the palm of your hand, like Julian of Norwich. Alive here is creation, contradiction; an entire universe. Your own universe. It would be simple to squander such a small thing. To know what to do with it is the work of a life.
“As if love / had the intelligence to save love,” Reines quotes from a poem by Sara Miles.
A history of love is hard to write, because all around it lives the war.
A history of love is hard to write, because love longs to be witnessed.
But we all begin somewhere.
