Art and creature.
How trust that these before you are who and how they are. How delight in this even when. How weep. How with. How for. How beware the refused grief. How quickly this will turn to grievance. How to object to what might be healed in this where you are. How when symptoms drive you from them. How any altar in this now?
And the long look.
Discarded things were her materials and she gathered them to herself over years. She spent time looking before she began anything that looked like art, but looking was her primary work. Whatever art she made, and she made a lot, came from this devotion. She wondered over these broken-down objects, the ways they had served, the hands that had handled them across time. It takes a special kind of eye to see their beauty. Hers came from the choice she made, to love them. Because of this, she never thought of fixing or repair. She only wanted to handle them endlessly, to celebrate what they had become, to carry them into their next becoming.
And process.
The work lacked boundaries and you could feel the struggle and pressure of its raw force as soon as you entered its space. It seemed to press from the frame. We wanted to know how, so asked the artist about her process. She said, there’s a long time between nothing and something.
***
Inspired by the opening page of an interview I hope to return to, with Marwa Abdul-Rahman.
The long look.
It is an act of devotion, the artist told us. To what we wondered, and she replied only looking. Which, she clarified, is of a different kind than spectating. To look long and well, as she did, was an exercise in love. She watched the neighborhood, noticed what changed. She kept the ancestors at her desk. They watched her and she looked back. They kept up a running conversation in her workspace. She watched the water, announced: it’s coming. It crept up our shores and she watched the water and watched the birds. They came and went, not unlike the visitors at her desk. She looked long and well. She was working out responses to the questions the children would ask, about how to live here now. With these, she went to the water, the ancestors, the birds. And to the other artists she knew. We need each other, I know that much, she said. We stayed with her as the water made its way.
***
Inspired by a recent BOMB interview by Wendy S. Walters with writer Emily Raboteau.
A prayer against destruction.
That space be nearer
and I in it touching you
and we in it held
beyond what shatters
still.
And the life of water.
I rode a bus in the desert and the woman beside me had plastic bags on her lap and must in her coat. My face turned toward the window taking it in––the pleasure of being a passenger, carried. It was a drought year. We passed the scar of a long-gone lake and then the gash of a former stream and she gave a little huff, rustling the bags. Yep, she said, me too. I was too tired to ask, so only nodded. Then I looked out the window again, wondering about the water before it was gone, the lives it must have held until it couldn’t anymore before it gave itself up, back to sky.
Acts of care and grieving.
I have no time to wonder about the purpose of anything, all of which seems beside the point where doing is demanded and I have working hands. No, I never have writer’s block. I love too hard. No time for questions about the rank of the thing, any more than I would ask, are these clean dishes good? This laundry? The fact of dinner or driving to and from? What is necessary for living must happen or else there is death. And when the little deaths of a day accumulate, I carry the husks in a little pouch. If I ever do start asking why, I can take them out, study the way the little exoskeletons catch the light. If I lean back long enough to notice, I will fall asleep within minutes, until the next alarm. Siri, does this count, this constant caretaking? Siri, is this poetry? Siri, I am so tired. I wish something would stick in the gears again and make it stop. But no, that would mean some calamity. Siri, why is it only calamity that can do this and what are we becoming? Where is that pouch, those tiny husks of living forms? I need to see them now, to notice how they still catch the light. These will be dust soon, but there will be more.
Dreaming relief.
I have drifted from the constant goings on around here, these doings that are always a big to-do, but I remain, doing them as needed. This must be what causes such pain at the temples the moneychangers causing a racket in there and I would love to throw them out, but my strength is used keeping on. This must be the pain at the temples, tension of a line drawn taut between where I am and are, am and will, I and we.
Notes for a libretto.
Now let’s try an ocean drama, every character a refracted light, world of enough light to see by, but only sometimes, and not enough to know, where everyone knows only this, our common limit––to be suspended in a what of such magnitude, so prone to sudden shifts, any one of which could mean sudden death, where all live by song and sing by reverberating waves in the space between continents, where the pretense of being an island would never hold, where anyone who tried would be, as the saying goes, laughed out of the water, except that of course there would be no leaving it, only a period of waiting until the waves of that laughter subsided in the dark of a rising tide, in the space before a bass line begins from the balancing currents of these suspended lives.
With Lynn Hejinian.
You disbelieved both borders and endings, knew a word to be something bottomless that drew you in. In one dream, you would write a single long sentence in a day, uninterrupted on a thread of rolled paper, chasing thought down the pier with your thinking hand, its bride. By your constant attention on the grace of shadows, you kept your world lit. Those who knew your light were restored by its nourishment. They found something in its playful dance that made it possible to return, even in the days of death, to the living.
***
Inspired and with collected lines from Remembering Lyn Hejinian (1941–2024) in The Paris Review, which came out in the wake of the poet’s death in late February.
