May 2022

Velocity

Odyssey in color.

How could an artist not dream of painting the cosmos? It moves like glitter in ink. No less than a moving image would do for forms that would never submit to stillness. I only hoped to mirror some small impressions of their vast choreography, like rubbing a leaf to honor the tree whose form has become synonymous with shelter.

The running bodies, ray after ray. To give chase, you tilt the lens, use the widest aperture there is. One form explodes into the next. Now the limbs of frost, extending down like the appendages of seraphim, mycelium networks from the heavens in real time, and now the globes of jellyfish forms, collapsing parachutes of color and light; now rain falling up on the sidewalk––no, stardust, or maybe the minutes among us––watercolor aftermaths of the painter’s brush, baptized.

The living floods us, exploding symphonic spectrums raining light, catching the curves of a body––of time? Gravity, maybe, or the skin of an upturned face, the blooming leaves of this collective soul, haunting our future forevers all the way back to conception. Sometimes we can’t help making comparisons between these forms and what we know of irises, and who can blame us for being yet unable to resist the temptation of looking into that which might be, forever looking back?

***

Inspired by the short experimental film, “Velocity,” by Vadim Sherbakov, which the artist describes as “a colorful journey through uncharted cosmos.”

Blur

In memoriam.

It has been said that the fade of memory is a symptom of decaying sense. One loses the outline, the detail, over time. Color washed into water, the old forms oceanic, and yet. A blurred thing may be as particular as anything sharp. For some of these, the blur itself was the essence: reflection on water, the texture of sky, your life. Don’t make this love a bullet or a blade, and I won’t reduce its music to a marching drum.

For some, all learning is the remembering of what was already present in a soul before the dark days of sharp derangement before our bodies spilled into the soil. My brother’s blood is not your warpaint and my mother’s cry is not a call to your next battle. Wait.

When sense becomes senseless, let me blur with you, brother, that I may learn your life in concert with my own. Let the blood-drenched soil bloom until some new music comes. We are all out of tune. Teach yourself to us, again.

Playing Time

With the angels still untrained in walking.

The artist used the scraps of the day to dance angels on his fingers. He wanted his son to have playmates free of history, open to unknowns, without the knowledge that cultivates fear. Here is the glost of a scarecrow, here the electrical spook. Once upon a time this was a napkin, but now it’s Mr. Death, live on a shoebox stage, fielding questions from all sides. The wine cork becomes the old man, the devil is a ringed glove, and the monk wears a luchador’s mask.

Let’s play, he told the child––animals playing comedy; tragic heroes dressed as children playing proud birds. Make the cat a bull for the land where the only constant is that everything is constantly morphing into something else.

Watch the big eared clown, ecstatic with the solemn poet and the absolute fool. Only the fragile are powerful here, arms up to highlight where their hands might be, in display of delight: Look, no hands and nothing to hold! They will dance as soon as they wrestle, these angels, and every blessing is also a wound.

***

Inspired by this article about the hand puppets that Paul Klee (among my favorite artists ever) created for his son.

Plea

From a branch over unknown waters.

If I am to be severed from my first attachments, make me a bridge between relief and this emerging specter, too terrible to name.

Let me accept what may follow this request, including instructions for rooting this body as an anchor in what it dreads––or else I am no link, just a floating possibility.

Let me brace against what may yet be, extending out over the dark deep, to this unknown shore: the craggy, silty, boggy knot of its broiling terror.

Lend courage to this limb, that I may hold. If I am far from the tree, let my spine be the crossing from the land of none to the place where it might yet be.

From Ashes

We all fall. Together, we rise.

I’m not much for stories about myself, because they are just not as interesting to me as other observations. I come from people who prefer song and talk of the unseen world. We’re not into airing, as the saying goes, the dirty laundry.

But here’s one. I left school on a stretcher this Tuesday. I’ve been a teacher for almost two decades, but this was my first time as an ER patient. The fainting thing is somewhat familiar, but it has only happened one other time on campus, and that was ten years ago, in a different time, and Nurse Nancy reluctantly let me walk away against her well-meaning protests, after I drank some juice and spent thirty minutes flat on the cot in her office. I am used to the black spots in my field of vision but still bristle at the embarrassment of being so publicly vulnerable. It happens from time to time since I was a child, sometimes after some upset, and sometimes not. This week’s event would have been in the category of “not.”

Except that spending time in prone reflection while being too dizzy to do anything else allows time to wish for better answers to some of the questions asked earlier.

Like, when did this start?

Um, as far back as I can remember––but not often.

When did it start getting worse?

Oh, December, maybe? Could be 2016, hard to say. There was a lot going on.

I made appointments, eventually. I think maybe there’s a thing going on. . .with my heart? I wrote in the online field, feeling determined at the time––but later, foolish. Each time, as the date approached, I cancelled. Because Omicron, because there were no subs, because maybe it was just age. Because who did I know that wasn’t hurting?

The young people I meet daily are refugees of war, survivors of generational poverty, internment camps, and institutional abuse––and they are brilliant, glorious, showing up daily with radiant displays of quiet courage. I learned yesterday morning that one these students, a recent arrival from Ukraine, has just made the cheer team. I want to tell you about the glow of her face when she shared this, but lack the words. I got the news after she finished writing about the time when she saved a tiny kitten from a tree.

We are all this kitten sometimes, I think now. Near paralyzed with terror and in need of rescue.

I cannot think of anyone I see regularly who isn’t working daily against a state of near collapse. Okay, I can think of a few, but we are constitutionally so different that they are hardly valid comparison points. They would not have fainted when they learned about certain horrors of human history, past or present, and they are infinitely cooler than I will ever be. They would not be seen shaking, sweating, or crying in public. Then again, what do I know? I always think I’m alone until I fall apart after trying not to for an extended period of time. Each time I have publicly collapsed under some private grief, so many generous others have shared similar stories that the abundance of company often left me stunned with wide-eyed gratitude.

My people are practically made for liquefying, which might explain the low sodium levels and chronically low blood pressure. We cry with our whole bodies, nonstop. The Irish ancestors called it keening. The women would carry the laments in their bodies and pass them to the next generation. When they keened, they were like birds, like chimpanzees, like horses reared on hind legs, shrieking. They were forbidden to own horses of a certain value as they were forbidden to read, and the keening was known to incite such passions in the hearers that it was outlawed. To be clear, we laugh this way, too, and love. And celebrate the babies.

After my release, my siblings and I had a few laughs trading stories about who among us had passed out when and where and how dramatically, and who had emphatically halted the calling of an ambulance for lack of health insurance at critical moments. My daughter made me a bracelet to wear as a reminder: Mom, you gotta tell people sometimes. When this is happening. So, I am practicing.

It’s so much, isn’t it? — being human now. I can barely keep up, except by knowing I am not alone in this overwhelm. The moments just before I am lying on the floor feel barely distinguishable from this year’s daily version of dizzying overwhelm and heart-crushing grief.

Why bother sharing this, except for Mom, you gotta––? Except to note that sometimes all that is needed, to regain consciousness, is a moment of rest and oxygen? Except to underscore that sometimes I wish that instead of a moment of silence we might have a moment of wild shrieking, arm-waving, wing-flapping lament, drenching our clothes until we are all on the floor in solidarity with our dead, before we rise again, into something we’re not able to become until we stop what is happening right now. Except to honor the loving reassurance of those who came to my aid, who helped me when I could not see, and to remind myself and anyone who may need to hear this now, how during any given life, moments like this make all the difference.

Thank you for being this difference. It is truly a matter of life over death, love over hate and despair, and sight over the moment when everything goes dark all at once.

Love and light, onward.

Hold

Notes in the dark.

In a dark room, a tiny flame is enough to live by. All it takes to extinguish it is a momentary deprivation of oxygen. Snuff out, they call this. Here is why it matters: to carry these little lights out: small, steady, slow moving, especially into nameless places that look like nothing. None of us, not one, can light ourselves. This is what it means to keep watch.

What are you doing?

Keeping.

Keeping what?

Watch.

For?

Life.

What is the point?

The living.

And when I can’t see it?

Still, the living.

I can’t today.

Then wait with the dead.

And do what?

Wait. Keep the candles lit.

This Mourning

Still life with children.

Overheard, in the garden: Peter, put your sword away.

Now is the time for your attention.

If this to be a becoming, you cannot hold your guard.

It is impossible to bend into another body

while remaining upright. Hold another.

For what?

A dark hour. Then, keep holding. Wait.

***

In mourning, we unknow ourselves.

This is not an affirmation,

not a possibility or an idea.

***

What is it, then?

To stand in grief with any other,

bodies bowed to collect

what won’t fit in the borders

of any one, is to accept

a constant invitation

to unknow myself.

I was never a beginning

or an end––once or now,

and will never be.

Only we are here.

Hold.

A Love Supreme

With John Coltrane.

I want to talk about you, your ascension, the promise I wish I knew, too beautiful.

Say it.

Say more for the lovers, please.

Weaver of dreams, dripping stardust, you answered time after time, then I’ll be tired; still, insisting, love thy neighbor.

But how deep is the ocean after the rain?

An acknowledgement. Help me to be––compassion. Love.

An acknowledgement: Consequences.

Help me to be––serenity. Dearly beloved, I am a dreamer.

Dearly beloved, something I dreamed last night––

It was sometime around midnight, just after another take of something straight, no chaser, and all of us gathered like someone in love, alternating our so whats with melancholic meditations like someday my prince. It was soft lights and slow dance, and you leave me breathless on a misty night to hear a rhapsody. Lover, come back to me. I Cry!

Tender, it’s a fire waltz, a minor disturbance. It’s this chronic blues, a love supreme.

Call me by my rightful name, I’m old fashioned. I can’t get started. I’m too young to go––

Steady. But it’s all or nothing at all.

Dearly beloved, this is an acknowledgement.

Beloved, this is a song of praise

I wish I knew.

***

Inspired by the serendipitous appearance of A Love Supreme on last night’s random shuffle, the above is assembled almost entirely from the titles of John Coltrane songs. And, of course, by love.

The Missing Magpies

Redefining collaborative research.

Today, there are magpies singing. Loud, proud, and magnificent, you can hear them if they are near you. But there are some who prefer to get away, and I wanted to tell you about these magpies. We wanted to hear them. We were compelled by their song. You can’t hear the complexity of those notes––over three hundred, we estimated–– without wondering about the brains of the creatures that hold them in place.

It is said that these birds can remember up to thirty specific faces. They remember well whomever has caused them trouble in the past, and only attack these one or two people in their region. If the number of people in their vicinity surpasses thirty, they start stereotyping. For example, they are known to be biased against preadolescent boys. They are also known to hold funerals for their dead. Who wouldn’t want to follow? We could no longer settle for mere appreciation at a distance. We wanted the bird’s-eye view. We wanted bird’s ears, too. We meant to track them, record their private exchanges, and publish our findings to international acclaim.

It was a simple device, but it took countless trials to get the right fit. We didn’t want to hurt them. It was tiny enough that they wouldn’t even feel it. It was also impossible for a bird to remove one from their body once it was on. It took our team of experts six months to get these fitted.

It took the birds three days to get them off. They helped each other. It took one twenty minutes of feeling around to find the weak spot, a single clasp at the back, barely a millimeter in length. One clip with a beak and it was off.

So now we can’t hear them. At first, this made us very depressed. What a colossal failure, we thought. But then we began to think that the magpies were making an interesting point, and that we almost missed it, stuck as we were on the lost data. Proud creatures, they wanted nothing to do with being data, but this is not to say that they were unwilling collaborators.

With pitch-perfect humor, they alerted us to an obvious flaw in the design of our study. We were asking the wrong questions, and the worst among these was about how much of their music we might capture.

***

Inspired by this article in the New York Times, “Australia’s Clever Birds Did Not Consent to This Science Experiment,” by Anthony Ham.

Imagined Invitations

From the congregation of stones.

Against the disposable, away from the technofix, certain questions emerge. They are about relearning our being in the world. I heard these from a scientist poet, although she didn’t call herself this. Asked to describe her work, she said listening. She said delight. She called it the work of waiting.

For what, I wondered. She said, consider the reverence of the speechless stone. What would they ask of us, she wondered back, that would allow our admission into their holy communion, and how would we hear them? Perhaps by these skeletons, our marrow singing like well-tuned bowls.

Nothing is single here, she said, and nothing goes one way. I want to wait with her, to learn the reverence of these silent-seeming stones, until their language hymns my bones.

***

Inspired by, and with borrowed phrases and images from Ursula K. Leguin’s Keynote address, “Deep in Admiration,” from Anthropocene: Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, from the Humanities Institute at UC Santa Cruz, a gem curated by David Naimon in the beautiful ecosystem he’s created around his Between the Covers podcast.