Category: Wonder

Field of Possibility

The shape of things to come.

You seek to make art as event, not product. What happens, you wonder, when you open clay with found objects? Here is a sweater between God and your mother, and here, another mouth. Open, your hands whisper, open. Now an old bus shelter, fused glass. Look.

What is it? someone wants to know, in an unintended effort to avoid the long look, the absorption into the blobby forms that melt and lean into one another, a gathering of materials in various stages of becoming.

And what else are we, but these bubbling amoebas, opening and melting and falling endlessly into each other, in defiance of the neatly angled forms we keep meaning to hold?

***

Inspired by the work of Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

Elsewhere’s Space

A meditation on making.

There is an elsewhere here. It breathes in the margins of activity and swims among the vessels of the plans we forever work over––arranging the sails of this one and that one, checking our courses and whether the knots will hold. Elsewhere is indifferent to all of this, or else amused.

Elsewhere can’t hold the music she holds if she keeps the door open for every cacophony that presumes to invade. She thrives in forgotten spaces and in dreams that dissipate before we can fasten them to words. Her only allegiance is to the country of lost countries. There are no flags.

Without Elsewhere, there is no one here. How may anyone name this central element of a life after the moment of recognition that it is not yours at all, but something possessed entirely by some other out there, in that nowhereland between continents, beneath these vessels, behind these words and all things seen and named; arranged and rearranged?  

But even this final recognition of futility offers no freedom from the impulse toward making the worlds we keep creating as offerings, tempting her unmaking, her not-naming music, her long-shadowed disappearance of all that seems. 

Holding the Beat

Anchoring breath to breath.

If time is the rhythm of a group, breathing, consider the befores an inhalation. When tomorrow comes, we will exhale; and again, and again. 

How different this is than the model of the pointed arrow, to pierce the next flesh of its landing.

If time is the rhythm, it is now, an anchor point that moves nowhere, holding the beat of our breath. 

A Recollection

Of being held.

When we were keepers of the universe

we would tickle its edges by the tips

of the fingers of our outstretched hands

and we would hold those hands out

as we spun with its edges tipping our

heads daring to be knocked back

until we were flat on our backs

laughing the sky beaming back 

seemed to know us 

and later we. were 

not. so sure.

A Way of Being Free

A lesson in letting go.

Anyone who has ever studied the question with any seriousness, apart from their own self-interest, can tell you: it is attachment that will kill you, and once you let go of those who prey on knowing this, they will stop killing you until it is time to die.

Meanwhile, there is work to do. 

With practice, a body bent on living may eventually learn to avoid what makes them ill. The learning is hard and long, but when it comes it will be real and more lasting than any false promise could ever be, and suddenly you will know that you are finally repulsed by what you have been meaning not to care for.                     

That’s when you know the work of your atonement is done, she said, and you can be done with waiting in the name of humility, and you need not keep waiting for the next humiliation when the lesson takes.

Which is to say, I loved and lost, over and again. Who doesn’t, when a woman, bent on giving it all away? Still, there comes a time when it is clear as the first light of the sun: it is possible, in the end, to be giving and remain untaken, unfettered from the claims of those who would take all you have for their gain, especially when it is your whole life.

It is possible that the path to this understanding is the oldest story ever understood. Nevertheless, we keep needing to learn.

Here at last, live on stage! Ladies and gentlemen, the moment you’ve been waiting for in vain, the opening night of A Way of Being Free! And now, let me die by your satisfied mouths. I remove the breast while the director sleeps, and move on.

Curtain.

***

Inspired by certain projects I once believed in, and the learning that followed. And by Ben Okri.

The Long Becoming

With Christian Wiman.

When they asked the poet how he became one, he said, I’ve been wondering.

The assembly waited for more. There were follow-up questions, a discussion about certain ineffable qualities: a sense of life brought to bear in language. A sense that the density of life’s layers may be represented with a clarity of expression. The importance of having a capacity to suffer; to know and express grief without making a shrine to wonder.

Then the poet asked, what do you believe? If you don’t believe in poetry, you can’t write it. He tried to explain what happens when suddenly everything learned will no longer do; how over time, an original wound may become the site of roots for a larger life.

But how? They pressed, and he repeated, I wonder.

***

Notes while reading Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2004, Copper Canyon Press).

Reading in Space

Across time.

A question for the author: how do you want people to feel when they walk into this book? She answered by blackening a number of pages, then adding windows. If you stood before the words in the sunlight, they would curve across your body like cats.

The best part of the book, she answered, is what I don’t understand––also, the suspended moment when a page is turned; the wait between words, as especially what they do not say.

She invited the doubters among us to put our fingers in the wound between voice and image, and again between voice and word, between voice and speaker, the speaker and her intentions, and we were beginning to get a sense every page brought with it another wound.

Every page revealed itself by slicing us open, and we fell to the floor to collect ourselves like autumn leaves to our chests, a gesture of remembrance for all we had yet to imagine we were.

Between decay and emergence, these open windows. And from window to window, the broken skins between space and her time.

***

Inspired by the work of Lynn Xu, whose debut exhibit And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary art in Tuscon, Arizona.

Morning Tide

The arc of a reach.

After inhaling doubts baked in a furnace with a hint of daylilies, 

after the rhino leaps the river, tracing the shadow of the ark 

below vapor currents tailing the new doves behind the sun, 

its palpable flare a rising mirror of sublimated hopes, someone 

at the other side of the banks dares to stretch wide palms––up,

and again, as if to touch the hem of a garment and be healed.

Small Wonders

Faith and humility.

When you are small, she said, you can move around and between what the big ones cannot. You will never carry much you call your own and can be easily lifted. Whatever comes your way will only be found, and you will not confuse it with something earned.

No hope is real comfort when you will often have to go without it. Same for inspiration, same for confidence. What you want to keep, she said, is what is left when hope and confidence and self-respect are gone. When all the rest collapses, notice: what is here, still breathing?

Accept its life and protect its breath. It is not distinct from your own, only infinitely more vast.