April 2022

Speaking of Which

Question mark.

The word Mystery is just as fraught as Nature and harder for me to resist. I’ve never been able to point to Nature, but with Mystery, at least, I can gesture jazz hands in the direction of the space over or around a moment, object, person, collection––to highlight the apparent lack of concrete explanation for its impact. Still, this raises certain questions about various assumptions I’ve been making about the readily available explanations of some other phenomena.

Recovering Nature

What’s in a name?

Sure, you can try to recover it, as you say, carefully filming this walk into woods, but consider the violence of a name. Nature, as in outside, as in opposite of this separate, sanitized, self-satisfied sanity. I am not fit, perhaps, to hold it on my tongue, so unrefined is my palate. Sure, this is one way to defend your dominion. No one can touch you. No one can touch the finery of such an idea whose hands are still furred with dirt.

Notes on Form

Old tools in a fallow field.

There is an exuberant history of forms to be found in these fields, compelling a witness to show how surfaces of knowing can be tilled with the tool of some adopted custom or cadence which, once discovered, can be carried solidly as a birthright through corridors of memory still in blueprint.

The challenge is measure, balance––and the joyous enterprise pains with enthusiasm, the center of any nascent art.

***

Inspired by and using borrowed phrases from the introduction to The Making of a Poem: A Norton Anthology of Poetic Forms by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland.

Something with Feathers

Smiles from the threshold.

After the body, winking branches point to cloud faces and birdsong heralds their parade. Here is a frame for the living, and in it, more seeds than there are numbers.

Far from immaterial, this breathes syllables of flesh and leaf, spore and wing; limbs and their memory, and without these containers it would be everything all at once like water to a fish, synonymous with life’s self, but we are creatures bent on naming.

We make nests of words to offer as a frame for warming the babies, so that when the known perimeter breaks––by degrees and then completely, they might recognize in our heat, the beginning of something, and stay.

Fieldwork

Harvest visions in springtime.

How ripe we are, they say, winking infinities in the mirror room. These generous pumpkins, the gentle humility of gourds opening doorways. What is in there? No one asks but you waited, and they told you, forever.

Remember the bright spots that the lantern first let in? They made you dizzy with their terrible splendor, left you spinning back flat against the ground, hang on. You did, and now you speak of these strange strangers like a sister, whispering they saved my life. You throw gatherings to honor them, grand galas for their coming out. Careful, you tell your visitors, they can be a bit much.

***

Inspired by the work and biography of artist Yayoi Kusama.

Encounter in the Desert

The hermit to the artist.

You thought you were learning to live, kid? Sure, if you want. Live it up. But look around. See these rocks? And beyond? What’s next? I tell you, it isn’t another commission and you’ll be going empty-handed. Think I always dressed like this? I had clothes, finery. But what for, here? I get it, though. Look at me, even now. One hand clutching the rock, I can’t help myself, but look out there. Name one solid form.

Leonardo Da Vinci’s Jerome in the Wilderness

I can’t either. Are you on the lion now? Sure, but put your hand here. Feel: fur, warmth, body. Breathing, just like us. Dying, too. Not soon, I hope. I named him Leo, actually, but don’t let it go to your head. He’s not a symbol of courage or danger, just a fellow creature I met along the way. He was suffering, too. You’ve probably heard the stories. Sure, I pulled a thorn from his paw, but it wasn’t what they make it out to be. Poor guy was almost passed out from the pain when I got to him. It was infected, he had lizards in his mane. Now we’re friends and he waits with me here. We walk together when we’re not on these rocks. Sure, you can come.

Why are you here, anyway? Let me guess. You think if you can study the extent of my torment, you can be ready for it. Let me tell you, night after night the dancing girls would come visit as I slept, to mock my restraint. They still come, but I’ve lost most of my vanity by this point, so the torture is less.

So now what? It’s a long walk back. Where’s your horse?

***

In honor of the birthday of Leonardo DaVinci (1452-1519), today’s post is in an imagined voice of one of his subjects. DaVinci worked on St. Jerome in the Wilderness toward the end of his life, and the painting (which hangs in the Vatican) was never finished. DaVinci appears to have been in a difficult time in his life, in part related to a sexual scandal, and also because his worldview was shifting with age. “I thought I was learning to live,” the painter wrote in his diary around this time, adding, “I was only learning to die” (from Liana Bortolon’s The Life and Times of Leonardo). In this light, I can only imagine that St. Jerome’s hermetic life in the desert may have been of special interest. An apocryphal story about Jerome features him pulling a thorn from the paw of a lion.

Exile

Remembering home.

It’s hard to imagine now but try. It was fields of gold. There was nothing like it. It was a paradise, the flyers announced, with soil rich as chocolate. There would be peace in the valley, we sang, and believed, and we had the wheat to win the war. Then came the suitcase farmers, to make a killing. They didn’t come to live, just to buy the land and the machines to work it.

They bled it dry. What followed looked like vengeance, except that the killers had already fled. What was left was those of us still working by foot and horse, to get by. We’d sing on Sundays, still, and our spirit shall sorrow no more. By and by, we gave up trying to keep dirt off the children’s faces during the week. They’d spit and it would look like they’d been chewing tobacco.

Suddenly, the sky cleared up. Hallelujah, we said, to witness blue again. We washed the children’s faces, went to church, even packed a picnic. But then, in the afternoon, it got suddenly cool. You could see a cloud in the distance, dark and low, rolling in on itself. The birds took off. When it rolled over us, I looked for my own hand. I brought it up and even when it touched my nose, I still couldn’t see it.

After that, people stopped asking each other, where’s your home? It wasn’t polite. The answer was scattered all over, and it wasn’t the one that any of us wanted to give.

***

On this day in 1935, the Black Sunday Dust Storm swept across the panhandle region of Oklahoma, Texas, and surrounding regions in the U.S. Sources: Remembering Black Sunday, Smithsonian Magazine, and the photographs of Dorothea Lange and In the Sweet by and by Hymn Lyrics and history.

Sea, Woman

Conversation at land’s edge.

After we dream, we will meet by the shore.

Sister, do you see me? Let us be counted among the living.

Then we will dive.

When they come to eat our images, they will repeat the old power play. They’ll try again, to douse our bodies in shame.

Hah! As if to punish us with a bucket of cold water! We’ll wave and smile, go back down.

But sure, we can read the signs. It won’t be long before they make their vengeance into law. It is decreed, they will say, as prelude. Then comes the next mandate about official attire.

An old story. I bet these petty tyrants could use a good dive. But they are too afraid, so they clutch their precious trinkets to their chest and pretend to avert their eyes. It matters very much to them, what we wear or do not wear.

So complete is their exile from any land, they relinquish their only birthright: the primordial cave of their mother’s body, the original canal of first passage, the ripe breasts from which they first tasted their own lives, where the membrane between worlds remained transparent, and the mountain of her form was the first ascent to some wider vista onto what might be, an impulse now degraded into mere collection of images to be held in place of first sight.

How are your eyes today, sister? Good, and look! Your skin has healed!

It is clear today, let’s get the boats, go back to that spot, remember? There was more than we could carry in our nets!

I will get the others. We will take the boat. When you see it is good, we’ll go back down.

I see you, woman.

It is good to be seen.

Let’s get the others.

***

Inspired by the Japanese ama, as photographed by Iwase Yoshiyuki and described (with stunning images) in this article. Many of the ama lived in communities with other women, supporting themselves and their families comfortably by diving for abalone, sea urchin, and seaweeds. Many women dove well into their nineties. The business was lucrative through the 1960s, after which it suffered the effects of climate change and overfishing. Chris Lee describes some of these issues in this Zenbird article.

Tell Me, Neighbor

Feeling a wound.

The fact that it is so difficult to express is what complicates, and in these complications, sometimes art. In its invisible geography, the felt experience of any other tends to flicker, then disappear.

Like fireflies, or a faulty bulb? Like meteor showers?

No, not like any of these.

It breaks your metaphor, doesn’t it?

It breaks.

A choice, then: the astounding freedom of unsight, or the weight of witness.

This body, take it. It has never known certainty, the first sound a cry, shattering words.

***

In her profound The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry writes, “When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the same remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. Or, alternatively, it may seem as distant as the interstellar events referred to by scientists who speak to us mysteriously of not yet detectable intergalactic screams. . .”

Almost Endless

For a Monday morning.

We all fall from our infinities. These landings have a way of knocking the wind from the lungs. After the crash, there’s a stillness before it begins again. Inhale, exhale.

Loquat, cypress, tire swing. Field mouse, damselfly, dark-eyed junco. Brush rabbit, baby, coyote. All of this before you even find your feet again.

What will you do without your delusions of endlessness? The unbound forever vanished, here is a beginning instead.