Charlie Rauh: Amizdel (Book Review)

“One tries to cure the signs of growth, to exorcise them, as if they were devils, when really they might be angels of annunciation.”–Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea To receive the world is to allow it to leave a mark. In Amizdel, Charlie Rauh approaches that vulnerability as a practice of attention, gathering a year’s worth of memories and encounters into a record of learning to remain open. His introduction locates a quiet source of strength in the willingness to accept what others offer and to live with the knowledge that hardship may arrive as unexpectedly as beauty. The question guiding this undertaking is how such openness might sustain us through both. Beneath it stirs another, more elusive inquiry into what becomes of the self when its conditions waver at the edge of uncertainty. The book takes its title from Hildegard von Bingen’s word for “armor,” preserved in her enigmatic lingua ignota, or “unknown language.” The indeterminate purpose of that language gives Rauh’s…