January 2023

The Staying Power

A conversation on creating.

She explained that none of this will offer any useful defenses against death, health, or inclement weather. That it has nothing to do with a feeling of faith, that the time to stay often happened when faith was shaken. On the task at hand, she said hold. She said, create.

By way of encouragement, she said no, you will not get over it and no, you will not decide that you can go on.

Why, then? one of us asked. She laughed. I invite you and now you need a reason?

Shaking her head, she turned and walked out, leaving the door open.

Travel Guide

With Hélène Cixous.

To enter the regions where music is the official language, check all baggage. To what destination? It doesn’t matter. It isn’t yours. The bags will not be coming.

To be invited, sleep. When you discover that your hands are deep in the mane of the creature that carries you, do not attack with sharp probes of interpretation. Do not attempt to extract some abstract essence from its living flesh.

Where is the ladder? You will not find it looking up. It only descends.

***

Notes while reading Hélène Cixous: “The School of Dreams” in Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing.

Reverb

Congregation of avatars.

The winged woman sang our songs and told us our stories. When she called, we were waiting to answer, and our voices were unlike we had ever imagined they could sound. We were butterflies, manta rays, fish––circling her in this song. Everything sacred was what we could touch and witness with our own eyes, and none of us could bear to look away. We looked at her. Singing, we beheld one another in that space, in that light, in the place where she called us together, and no one wanted to leave.

***

Inspired by this article.

Homecoming

Notes for the weary traveler.

After the long travel, squandering it all in a distant country, there may follow an arduous journey home. Approaching return, cross-eyed with the effort of owning yourself, the threshold only looks like an abyss, but this step is no step at all. The space is no longer space. You dissolve, along with all the words you might have used to describe this–––no, not experience. Something comes to fruition, and it isn’t you.

***

Inspired by Thomas Merton’s “Pure Love” in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Space to Dance

After the sorting.

The mirror world seems dangerous, you observed. You went in anyway. Some creatures are carried by feeling. Later you made decisions. Such as, breathe when needed. Later, you thought, something needs to be done. About these masks and their attendant griefs. You began to sort through them. It became clear in the sorting, which of these you could leave behind.

Someone asked what you were doing. You said, making room. To see something new, you would need more space. To dance fully inside it, you would need to put down what you carried. Of the dance, you said, it feels a lot like falling.

***

Inspired by the art of Pace Taylor. Italicized phrases are adapted from titles of the artist’s work.

Inheritance

In the land of time and space.

There are those who are so much time, who live primarily by movements through and in and around space. Then there are those who are full of space, whose movements are through and in and around time. Each group has a special way of ordering and knowing the fluctuations of the other. Each is friend, antagonist, and carrier to the other. In their constantly shifting dynamic, these groups are inseparable.

Watch the tree. She marks time in her rings and by the turn and fall of her leaves. The fruits of her body are eaten and carried, stored, and adopted by those who move into and around and through her. They know themselves by these movements and she knows herself by holding them. Notice the wind, whose very being is movement, singing his force through her branches, stretching her sway to his song.

We, the children of Time and Space, are the natural carriers of both traits, and the flux between them plays out within and between us. Now we are winds, now trees; here like a bird, here like the whale, here like the ocean floor, the bed of the lake, where the embryonic futures of our spaces settle until hatching from the cells that hold them still before the swimming.

Encounter

A meeting with the art.

There is the event, what occurs after, and what will be remembered; what is in the frame and what beyond it, who stands beholding, and what presents itself, as composition. The artist tries presenting Time as concrete. For example, here’s a calendar and it can repeat endlessly without naming the century. Following these questions out, and out, and out, she creates a dizzying array of images, depicting a history. The effect is a sense of overwhelm, a sense of being tiny by comparison, crushed by the scope and depth of it all. Some will retreat immediately. For those that remain, there are other effects to come, and one of these is a certain euphoria of spirit, suddenly released from certain presumptions about its individual weight.

***

Inspired by the work of Hanne Darboven.

The Flamekeeper

With Czeslaw Milosz.

You asked how to survive in a ruined world. Your answer was a series of confrontations: with experience, with history, with the paradoxes of humanness. You would hunt these, not to eat but to offer as food upon your return. If writing is faith, how can you do it amidst the screams of the tortured, the imprisoned, the babies? You meant to answer, keeping witness with your pen in the faint light of your constant faith in a city without a name, writing a song for the end of the world. In times of crisis, you said, everyone becomes a poet.

***

Inspired by the life and work of Czeslaw Milosz.

Fellow Creatures

With Elizabeth Bishop.

When you were the giant toad, your eyes hurt to see so much and still be hungry, and it was strange to feel your colors shudder while carrying those heavy sacs of poison, mostly unused.

As a crab you seemed at home in your tough, tight shell. You preferred approaching objects sideways.

As a snail, you were intimate with the great effort of the tiniest movement. You knew the shining ribbon of your wake, and yet complained I am too big. I can feel it.

Some say you were most at home when you were fully estranged, singing a hymn to the seal you befriended because of a shared belief.

In what? someone asked you, and you were quick to respond, in total immersion.

***

Inspired by Helen Vendler’s scholarship on the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop.

Paint Not the Thing

But the effect it provides.

You can see them in Goya: the cannibal Time eating his children, the hooded sisters pointing to the door, bodies swallowed by the earth. In the end, he was exploring the color black, not as an abstract idea, but in earnest, to know its texture. In its light, he found the spirit to move his brush.

Rothko called them performers, the dark shapes standing by, alternately actors and choral elements in a tragedy. Out of the quarrel, we seek some calling into flight. Lorca would wait for the ghost and when it came, let it harness him by his own words.

Oh death. How she insinuates, with her senseless black strokes, some corkscrew in the guts of our continuance. She’ll have your eyes first. Here is the danger in being willing to follow. You become a walking sepulcher across sacred grounds as the somber eagles look on, poised to carve wild chasms through what moves.

What to say on these occasions? It may be this or that, but preferably both. Let only the delirious and lucid speak here. The written page is no mirror, but a way through the hall of mirrors, to these shapes that linger just beyond.

***

The title alludes to something Stephen Mallarmé once wrote, attempting to explain his “new conception” of poetry. I came across this in reference to the work of Robert Motherwell.