Threshold

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Either you will

go through this door

or you will not go through.

If you go through

there is always the risk

of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly

and you must look back

and let them happen.

If you do not go through

it is possible

to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes

to hold your position

to die bravely

but much will blind you,

much will evade you,

at what cost who knows?

The door itself

makes no promises.

It is only a door.

~ Adrienne Rich

I have long been a reader of Rich’s work, although somehow I had forgotten this poem (from 1972) and yet remembered many others. I always felt her poetry like a stab in ribs, even though I often read it while nursing my daughter. (Why?) I can’t remember which book I was reading during that time, however, which seems odd now looking back. Also odd is how I never saw the poet as wife or mother, always as a bold writer. At some point I used some of her writing, essays, in gender studies classes, never considering her as a person. However, that’s not the point of what I’m trying to say here, which is something about the uses and confusions of doors and their ways and which explains why I’ve included this poem.

A book is shaped somewhat like a door, we all know that. It goes open and shut, like a door, too. Is a poem door like as well? I wonder. Why did this particular poem open up to me at this particular time? I ask, and know I need an answer, knowing that answer might never come.

We all have doors in our lives. Doors with promises, doors without. Doors that allow us to enter, others that either keep us from doing that or shut us off from doing it (entering) again. Many doors we take for granted and never really notice until we lose the key, or lose what lives or lived on the other side. (That might might be another story.)

Rich’s poem, over half a century old, is different now than when it was written. It’s very title, which frames it, hurts, like a knife to the mind. Somewhere in memory a book by Arthur Schlesinger also appears and is painful. The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society (1991) always made me angry because it discussed how immigrants left or should leave everything at the door, while Rich’s poem, two decades earlier, had been thinking about the true meaning of that threshold, from the person’s perspective, not the nation (America). Rich was far more accurate than Schlesinger, but of course now that entire perspective of immigration has been skewed by tasers and masks and ankle monitors. Slavery renewed. (A story too painful to tell.)

What or who is an immigrant? Does passing over a threshold make us all immigrants in some way? Yes. Why do we take that so lightly, then?

I don’t want to be on either side of the door now. I want to be the door. Or do I? Because I have no idea what a door is, nor what its frame means. (Rich’s The Fact of a Doorframe was supposed to clarify that for me but did not. On the other hand, I fully understood when she wrote the verse your bloodstained splinters and thought it might be all right to feel sorry for the door without an identity and undeserving of being stained in that way.)

Before I continue, let me go down a rabbit hole (as HCR calls it) and consider whether the abyss into which the famous, frightened, frightening Alice tumbled was, in fact, a door. It certainly was a threshold, but did something slam shut behind the wondering girl? (By the way, why do some of the participants in the famous files seek female characters from fairy tales for company? What portals do they enter, what looking glasses attract them? What lines are being crossed and erased?) Fairy tales and Alices have always scared me, and unfortunately I know why. Horror does not make me feel fear, but fairy tales are far too close to reality.

Back to the topic of doors, I actually am not fond of opening or closing them. Too much lost (or found) when one does that. Even disappointment can occur, because too much can happen. The door might protect or defend, but it can also imprison. That may be why I prefer to let sleeping doors lie - lie in both the sense of not moving, of resting, as an animal might do, and lie as in not telling the truth, perhaps making one think there’s something good behind them, on the other side, when there’s nothing but sorrow waiting.

Nevertheless, I adore doors, adore them as objects that are not meant to be purchased and taken home as a souvenir. Doors in Ireland, in France, all over the world, all sizes, shapes, and hues. Doors made of any material imaginable, even surprising ones. The point in time when constructed and installed - I’ve read the earliest may be from Egyptian pyramids - is very important. My favorites are probably from the medieval period or the Modernist era, I think. Castle doors are a bit overwhelming, but some I’ve seen in Saint-Cirq-Lapopie or Bastavales or Nepal or Guatemala are quite alluring. Intimate, twisted, looking for a loving glance. France might be the best country for door contemplation, but don’t overlook Santa María de Melón or Toques, even little San Fiz de Solovio. Never mind the Porta Santa of the cathedral in Compostela; it’s been ruined by the eyes of too many invaders from the land of Stupid Tourism. 

I’m perfectly happy to stand and watch a door that is closed. My reverence is for the thing itself, not the innards of its building. This leads me to the final part of my treatise on doors, their frames, and their role as thresholds. 

The word door (not puerta, porta, pórtico or any other word but the one in English) always leads me back to a house on Main Street in a village whose name I choose not to mention but do remember, much as Cervantes did, not wanting to admit the memory of that place.

This door is around two centuries old, maybe more, although the thin rectangle panes of old glass make it seem younger. The panes were once covered with gauzy curtains, held taut by metal bars top and bottom. The curtains became dingy and couldn’t be washed, even by hand, they were so fragile, so one day they simply disappeared. (That revealed a dim hallway with another door.) This outer door was a nondescript color, maybe of reddish varnish, but the coating was so cracked it looked mosaic. It had never worn a different color and the coating couldn’t have been removed. I could never figure out if the door was made of wood or metal, but hoped it wasn’t the latter. The handle was eternal, strong and with a tongue atop the grip that any thumb could fit into. It was never going to break; it also never had a key, although on the other side one could slide a bolt, which nobody ever bothered to do.

It was unlikely that any immigrant ever opened that door and stepped over the threshold. Immigrants were not supposed to live there, and the door was not supposed to be locked. The world was not dangerous and everyone was welcome. Keys and bolts were not needed.

One day I closed that door for the last time, without the key it never had, knowing the space behind it it (3,000+ square feet) was not yet empty, although it would be, soon. I closed it, then stood back just far enough to fit it in a photograph, which I took. I don’t recall any tears; maybe they were frozen inside me, in the summer heat. Somehow I managed to turn my back on that door, at once adored and despised, then left. Forever.

I no longer can find the photograph and hate doors more than ever.