Month: December 2023

O Valiant Now

Remember the ancient tragedies.

Careful, hero. You are sometimes too sure. It may be said that your ancient predecessors, the ones you often mock for their backwardness, were in fact possessed of virtues you have yet to learn to recognize, glutted as you are on delusions of progress. These knew at least––or learned to see (sometimes after the eyes were gone) in the (tragic) end––the danger of confusing what would save with what would destroy. They understood that they were understudies to passions, the lead actors preceding their entrances and following their exits––and how none of the worst crimes could have happened unless they were believed to be good. To go on acting anyway, without becoming paralyzed, in full knowledge of blindness, leaning into doubt well enough to hold loves close. For protection, and to protect.

Neither Happy nor––

But here, happening how.

What would it mean to suspend belief in happiness as universal will? My allegiance is to the wretched, so I stand with the stranger, the exile, the banished. The despicable, the miserable. The sorrowful. And weep in defiance of the engine that would equate my fitness with an ability to maintain a distracted removal of my body from its cares. Let us weep together, and then. Let us join the children that they may not lose their capacities to be awed by the wonders and joys that will nevertheless persist, and must, for our continuance. In these we may delight often in concert with our griefs, as the salt of tears returns to laughing mouths. The range of this chorus of connection will not be boxed, packaged, sold, or theorized into anyone’s ten steps. None of these will hold. Only love. This is not the love of salvation by removal from pain. This is the love of immersion: in shit, and grief, and the stink of bodies, the relentlessness of our collective need, and the tedium and immensity of tending well.

***

The italicized opening line comes from Sara Ahmed, and has echoes across time and geographies, in Audre Lorde, Frantz Fanon, and throughout the Gospels.

The Hearing Shell

Leaning in.

Sheltering at the end of the last song, fingers splayed as weather comes but I want to remember radiance and rescue and first this question: what city is this and if I reach for her hand will she know me? If my mind would return to the gapped flesh of my flesh to mend itself, how far until the next note and will there be room enough? Inside us, to hold it.

Progress in Pipeline

Flow without ebb.

How to stop the rush of current pushing toward––? What is assumed to be an exit from which we can finally fall from this concrete pipe into fresh water, into sunshine, to stretch beneath the dappled light filtered through dripping trees. There is no entrance, only more volume to increase our velocity. How far until light, until water, until air? Our breath, too, is caught in the current so we hold it like our questions, like our limbs to keep from breaking.

Bird Signs

And what resists containment.

Careful to note the care of the thrush at her nest, and her attendant song, we were determined to find joy in witness. Its light would not shine except in grief, and a long record of bird notes reveals that we could scarcely see their winged grace without noting everywhere the flights and visitations of our dead friends. The substance of our trembling was never so vivid as when it flowed from us.

To Begin

With amazement.

Speak to me of ongoingness, of the atmospheric nature of objects, of astonishment; of the vertigo of finding yourself in an image with no context or memory of the moment. Let the speech of the hour open with Stop, let us weep. Let the ruins of the moment leave us pierced, undone with memory. Let the past cut a deluge into now, not to be consoled. That we remember. 

Where is the horse? And the rider. And that time. When we plunged into the cold sea, ready to lose ourselves.

What are you working on?

And why: a rough outline.

It’s an ongoing project, this who. And the question why here, which necessarily brings its entourage of related questions: where is here, what is this trajectory. Why suffer. What beauty. What truth. Remember. Forget. Give it all up. Let it bowl you over again. Try other selves. Notice other suns. Wrestle angels. Demons, too. Hear the chorus. Then the individual breaths. Notice yours among these: now it is distinct, now it blends into the others, now it is missing, now it returns. The work is no good for finishing, but at least the company is lively. What an ensemble. At the end, death calls on each of us, ready or not. Until then, this is something to do.

Not It

And the posture of reaching.

Once it was declared that we were playing hide-and-seek, the first thing to do was call “Not It!” but I tended to be late when it came to calling anything. So now I am out here still looking even though it is way past dinnertime and the others have most likely all gone home. Is this it? I persist, but it isn’t. The words are still all wrong. As consolation, I might aspire to the endurance of the dark star, of sloths and tortoises and the legends of creatures rarely seen in the wild, of the dancer’s posture of reaching for something not yet grasped, of the sense of having not yet arrived. At what, no one will say. The point is that whatever this is, it is not yet, as they say, it.

What Now

The weight of what survives.

What air. What hollow light. What weeps in shadow. What receives. What mind slouches forward to be born a new god? Whatsoever is loosed here will be loosed above. What art, then? Whose? What thunder. What fire. What wrath.

[May this not end on wrath. As it does for–how many now? The count will not hold. Of these, how many too young to pronounce the word.]

What rage, what grief. Whose ears? Whoever has them, what do you hear?

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