Loquacious: "Contingency" by Jennifer Bowen Hicks

Loquacious: full of excessive talk : wordy (www.m-w.com)

Loquacious is a "wordy" series that revels in language. Read more essays in the series here.

I love the mind and words of today's guest writer, Jennifer Bowen Hicks. Jen and I met in grad school, but it wasn't until my final on-campus residency that I spent much time with her. As I got to know her through her writing and our conversations, I came to respect her superb ability to think deeply and surprisingly about any number of topics. Jen has a lovely depth of spirit filigreed with a wry sense of humor. During a lecture she gave at VCFA, I found myself laughing aloud in a quiet room as she dead-panned some hilarious lines. (I briefly worried that I was being inappropriate until she thanked me, in an aside, for laughing at the joke.) As you'll see in her essay below, her mind makes fascinating connections and leaps, and her exquisite use of language seamlessly weaves together the various strands.

Contingency

By Jennifer Bowen Hicks

It's not the loveliest of words. It's not enamored, an Eastern Iowa hillside, open palm of a word with hints of amour. It's not malevolent, a word that's prettier than it ought to be. Contingency with its starched "t" smacks of paper stacks that have been nine-to-fived by a silk tie guy who knows Facts and enforces them with a red pen. Contingency both forebodes and plans; it's helpless and hubris. It's ________ in the event of____________, unless of course, _________.

If it's true for teenagers, it's also so for words: birds of a feather flock together, and contingency hangs with the likes of budget and contract and public affairs. Think: cost-benefit analysis, emergency medical plan, custody arrangements. I hate these things.

More to the point, I dislike uncertainty. Maybe it's because I was born into contingency, weighing 4 pounds and whimpering with my sad set of lungs. From the first breath my life was contingent on the next good breath (as all lives are, I suppose). Because tomorrow seemed tentative, my Catholic grandmother arranged for bedside baptism as a contingency against hell. I tell this story mostly for drama, because I turned out to be not half-dead, just a smaller than average screamer who needed her diapers cut in half until she could grow into them. But that pause! Before my mother and grandmother knew I would survive, they must have suffered joy mixed with trepidation. Hello, wail in the pitch of a brand new you, and imagine in that same greeting as far as anyone knew: Goodbye.

Maybe it's part of the bargain for every living-dying creature on this planet, but I feel I've spent my life saying Hello-Goodbye. My biggest complaint against new people and places is that they’re one too many, another one to lose. My parents divorced at an early age, and I never saw my father again; I never attended the same school for more than two years; my husband and I have hopped around the country so much we can box up a house and say farewell with our grumbling eyes closed. Now when I find a new friend, a knee-jerk dread enters simultaneously beside my delight. Will we move again? Will they? When my sons make me laugh with their dance moves or a funny joke, I feel equal parts joy and sorrow. What will their leaving look like someday? How final will it feel? Hello-Goodbye. My heart, in other words, makes contingency plans for losing what I love, even as I love it.

Poet Christian Wiman says contingency means "subject to chance.”"To me it means, "subject to change." A quicksilver state of unknowing. The electric second of quiet just before a dog bites. Wiman, who is dying of cancer, says, "Christ is contingency." Though I'm not Christian, I'm startled by the grace and courage of this assertion. The charged stillness, just before the shattering—in that waiting? —a holiness?

"What you must realize," Wiman says, "what you must even come to praise, is the fact that there is no right way that is going to become apparent to you once and for all." Wiman's contingency, inextricable from love and faith, is that there is no contingency.

Instead of reluctance, for a split second with a book in my hand, I allow awe. When Wiman's contingency tugs at my heartsleeve, I feel a flash of reverence. Wiman's contingency—just a word after all, a vessel—is imbued with a new spirit, his own. Such is the miracle of language. Post-Wiman, contingency, catches the corner of my eye as a container of light-refracted glass, less dog-bite pause, more grateful gasp. Wiman, facing his own death has been reborn before he’s even died, into a word. Contingency holds a piece of this poet who now labors in me, sanding softly the contours of my deepest aversion.

Dirk Wittenborn says, "We are the sum of all people we have ever met; you change the tribe and the tribe changes you." This surely also must mean, “We are the sum of all words we have ever read; you change the words and the words change you." Wiman redefined one word—less shirt-and-tie, more light and paradox—and that word might just alter me. Hello-Goodbye: exactly and wow. Whether Christ is contingency I can't say, but I do believe while we're planning in semi-darkness for the sun to rise or cease—on a relationship or a market share or a day or a life—we can access permanence through our words. Our contingency against contingency is language itself, that humble tomb that holds so many births and resurrections.

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Jennifer Bowen Hicks teaches with the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. Her work can be found in journals such as The Iowa Review, North American Review, Defunct, and others. She's received support from the Minnesota State Arts Board for her prison work and is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize nomination, a Susan Atefat Arts and Letters Prize, and a Loft Mentor Series Award in Creative Nonfiction. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota where she rears two children, too many hens, and occasional prose.