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Blurred Visions

Self; not self. You learn to stop wondering about which is which like you learn to accept how it is customary to call the thing you have: one life. How strange, the way that this phrase is stressed, as if it’s a limit.

There’s a moment, and it goes so quickly that it’s easy to miss, when you think you know who you are. The reason, looking back, was that you were not thinking about it at all. You simply were there, doing what you did in the manner that you did things. For example, drinking from a garden hose in your underwear, or writing a five-act musical for Rocky, the elementary school janitor, on the occasion of his retirement. Or showing up on the blacktop before the bell rang for the start of a third-grade day, after any break longer than two weeks, wearing an accent you had acquired on some imaginary voyage to a distant land. Here a brogue, now a drawl, now something approximating the outback.

“blur” by lee on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivs 2.0 Generic License

Around the age of blood, this changes, and it is no longer considered sufficient to simply make things up as you go; one must have acquired something distant, something not already possessed. You’re not sure what it is, but you understand that the time has come to go out looking and stop pretending that you know what you need. The point, it seems, is to listen. Others know exactly what you need, especially men, who have no shortage of ideas as to what you ought to do. It will be decades before you learn to categorize such professions of wise-seeming advice into the file of “Men explain things to me” (Thank you Rebecca Solnit, Sheila Heti).

But it’s not just that. It’s in the way you look, like you’re practically begging the world to explain something to you.

Sometimes you stop, staring, and think, “Here is something.” You think this because you are wondering and because whatever you are looking at is indeed something. It’s enough anyway, to remind you back in the direction of something that you almost thought you knew. But it isn’t that, not exactly.

The nuns had a saying for missing things. “St Anthony, St. Anthony, come around,” they chanted, over the lost items. It gave the frantic seekers something to do while they looked.

One lives.

For the Birds

“i hope i die
warmed
by the life that i tried
to live”
–Nikki Giovanni

**Image:** Regent Honeyeater by Michelle Bartsch on flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.0 License

The regent honeyeaters of Australia have been dealing with a serious problem. It started in the usual way––with their massive disappearances, caused by habitat destruction; but this is a different problem, one left to those remaining. Apparently, there aren’t enough mature birds around to teach the young males to sing. The new guys are doing their best, imitating the songs of other birds and sometimes improvising here and there, but the females of the species are listening for some very specific notes. If she doesn’t hear them, mating season can’t go on as usual. The problem is raising alarms among ornithologists worldwide. One solution is to bring some birds in on a sort of contract basis, like visiting professors. Early trials of this method are promising.

Humans have a hard time resisting the impulse toward anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, and most other inclinations toward turning a given fact about the natural world around something applicable to human behavior. As one, I can’t help thinking about all the time we’ve ever wasted teaching anyone anything except with the impulse toward song at the center. Doing or not doing this becomes a matter of species survival. Maintaining protected spaces for development and nourishing of song becomes a matter of fundamental security. Maintaining an ecosystem in order to ensure that an emerging song, when it finally surfaces, will not be drowned in a constant din of noise, becomes a matter of painstaking vigilance, as with the protection of any species of newborn life, anywhere.

Live at the Apocalypse!

Let’s go! someone said, meaning to the apocalypse. I thought it was coming to us.

Let’s go! someone said, meaning to the apocalypse.
I thought it was coming to us.

Sure, but let’s meet it.
What do we bring?

Whatever you want. Everything! But you may have to check it at the door.
Will there be snacks?

No, just a single unrestricted feast.
Dress code?

The less, the better.
What else?

Bring every ending, every lilting note of your unuttered cry––
What about the pets?

Well, obviously the dog comes with.
And the cat?

You know cats. I suggested this morning and she just gave me a look.
Like, “Again with this apocalypse?”

I think she’s probably done a few already.
What about the sleeping arrangements?

Have you been listening? Who’s sleeping?
Will there be singing?

At first, only silence, and then, there will only be singing.

In the Weeds: First Lessons in Classification

The opposite of weed is welcome: meaning, someone is asking for or seeking out the thing. Because someone is always seeking out the thing other than what is abundantly here.

“I sing the weed that is not weed: the uprooted,
Thornless shape with a scattering of seed
To the cast wind; whose green and gold are mated
in one bloom, healed to one shaken blood.”

– from David Wagoner’s, “An Anthem for Man”

*Dandelion by David Slack on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic License*

The opposite of weed is welcome: meaning, someone is asking for or seeking out the thing. Because someone is always seeking out the thing other than what is abundantly here. As in, there is the prize. Here is the weed.

The weeds are abundantly here, but the prized harvest is elsewhere; there are the treasures, there the celebration. To mean something was to be somewhere Far Away, glimpsed for a moment. Invasive species must have looked like such a harvest, in the moments before anyone figured out what they were.

I learned about this the first time I ever picked weeds–– I called them flowers, then; I didn’t know any better–– that were abundant in the yard. I was barefoot, bending down, starting with the delicate yellow petals of mustard, bright faces turned up, offering themselves.

I dropped to my knees at the sight of them, pulled carefully as close to the earth as I could, taking only three ––a round number, my grandmother’s trinity of beginning, now and ever after, and then––farther from the concrete sidewalk, I found the dancing orchard grasses, their wild heads extending like Fourth of July sparklers from their stems.

I laughed to meet them, and they laughed back, waving in rowdy groups, loitering along the neighbor’s wall, telling raucous jokes and cracking roasts about each other’s untamed manes, each one wilder than the next.

There was one group, they could not be separated; when I pulled near the base where they were cracking up, they all came up. They appeared to be willing in chorus, to join the lowly mustard, and me.

There were grasses toward the wildest corner, which were stronger and thicker than the rest. They were very regal and stately, their blades long and wide, slightly furred. I gathered them, too, for balance and symmetry.

I brought them inside, an offering. It is no fun for mothers when they have to break things to their children, like the difference between the world’s leading lenses and their own.

“Those are weeds,” mine told me, quite matter-of-fact. Still, she graciously accepted, filling a dixie cup with half an inch of water and placing my motley bouquet inside, for display at the kitchen table for the remainder of the afternoon.

The import of these words rolled as quickly off of me as anything else. It wasn’t until much later, after at least a decade of school, that I considered them again, as the first lesson in something about established orders.

“What are weeds?” I had asked.

“They are the plants no one wants,” she told me, careful to add that such prejudice did not apply here, where the weeds were proudly displayed, for a whole afternoon, in the water of a dixie cup.

I had so little practice at the time, with rules for the classification of lives. How some were deemed worthy and others worthy of execution by committee and pesticide. School was coming, and I would have many more opportunities to learn how the living, examined under the lens of the machine, could be sorted and separated into categories of prized and rejected, in ways that could indefinitely keep us from ourselves.

Now when I think of it, I am grateful to be old enough to have encountered the sort of living that makes me understand the way that opposing truths may breathe side by side, like the unnecessary and the desperately sought; like salvation and discarded; like the thing that you meant to get rid of, and the thing that was saving your blind and desperate life, all along, with the calm of knowing what was once, is now, and ever would be, in this world of never-ending limits of what may.

In the Waiting Room

Considering the anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States at this moment I was reminded to return to Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s “I Am Waiting,” which returned me to the hope that inspired this response, this love note to America, for an occasion somewhere between Last Rites and Baptism.

Sparrow by RLGNGNZ on Flickr under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 2.0 License

SPARROWS WAITING
We were sorting the Grapes of Wrath,
waiting for the shift to be done.
Our unrest was everywhere:
flags and chanting; paint and the piercing
of swords into the flesh at the sides of sworn enemies.
When was our Last Supper, and when would it return?
Wonder, we looked for you everywhere, waiting for our numbers
to be called.

The whales waited elsewhere,
bleeding oceans back into their ears;
do they hear each other through the current of it?
We wanted to know
what they’d been saying all along
after hellos and we wanted to lie down again
––the lovers, the weepers, the dreamers,
across the Great Divide, our bodies bridges
for the feet that could not believe
unless they stepped across us,
unless they put their hands in the wounds
of their feet in our backs, back to the Lost Continent
they’d been trained to disbelieve   America,
we were waiting for your music for so long
that when you hobbled back to the Dark Tower
your intimations of immortality bleeding out
from stray bullet wounds, your torch arm falling
slack, we couldn’t help ourselves   America,
we circled you, we circled ourselves        no one
was looking, but    we were there; we stood up,
our single bodies    no longer the bridge
it was our hands    Now       we held
them        the shape of us unfastened
from the overpass    ––still, we held,   some
of us       even though        the gaps
of our       form were        widening
our collective        path       an open mouth.
Eye, be on your    sparrow now.    Watch us
as we stand before ourselves

waiting

here.

Seeking Directions: A Cautionary Tale

Once, studying some recurring questions, I encountered a phrase: Be the hero of your own life.

It took me, as it were, by the locks, tugging my scalp. I couldn’t see what it was that was holding me, and it didn’t provide much in terms of useful transport, but it certainly did a lot of thrashing about up there. I was much older when I finally untangled my hair, which by then was starting to fall out. I think sometimes how the arresting speaker probably meant well. It was hard to tell, as he didn’t speak except in grunts, celebratory yelps, and the bridge progressions of various top-100 Jock Jams. Was this a man? Maybe, but memory does interesting things, so when I think of him now, I see the characteristically furry, vaguely hominid Sasquatch figure of an 80’s B-Movie, and he’s wearing a red T-shirt. The phrase was on the T-shirt. There was a company logo on the back. I couldn’t tell which one.

Correction. He did have a few words; he just didn’t seem to string them together into anything that sounded like a sentence. While we were marching, I could make out something like, “Yes, Success! Yes! Are you . . . ready to rumble?!!!”

He shouted the word “Legacy!” in a similar manner, but with a more elaborate percussive element.

And yet––

The attempt at – (what was that, anyway? making an impression? branding? was it meant to be instructive?) whatever it was, would likely have landed much differently on someone less porous, less susceptible to wonder about where her body ends and the next one began. It might have been recounted fondly as one of those turning point events so popular in American films, as in: “I was just sitting there, or dancing in a circle with no discernible ambition and then––Whammo! Blinded by the light and a sudden potent animal heat, I was moved to the summit!”

Of what? One might ask, but this is often wasted breath. If so inclined, it’s probably best to step back and simply regain what breath can be had, given the prevalence of such attacks by the spirited and hairy successful creatures, lauded throughout the land for their immense strength and variety of name brand merchandise.

You can know them by their talk: by their obsessions with legacies, their playbooks of endgames, their hostility towards doubt in all forms.

For a carrier of other bodies, the points of endings, like the points of beginnings, were equally irrelevant and often not even on the map, if there was one, which started either in the branching alveoli, or the ventricles (Which one? Right, left? Upper or lower? And which came first, arteries or veins?) or in the sound of a mother’s heartbeat, or her own, or her child’s, and if most of this is water, where would I find the source? Do I go back to Eden, the four rivers, or further, to some original droplets of cosmic condensation?

There were good reasons to struggle with the question of beginnings, which naturally impacted the question of focus, and, regarding various inquiries around one’s own life, where exactly it was.

A better suggestion, in my case, might have been, Come here. Look ––for example, at the aspen, to notice the unseen roots. I might have been instructed to sit and listen, in good company, which I did ––and I was, eventually, and there wasn’t a hero among us, only a song in the distance and the waiting, and everything that mattered

––underground.

*Aspen Grove – June Lake Loop by paraphulm on Flickr*

The Matter of Your Substance

This is for the quiet behind your words, the songs vibrating in the back corners of your silences, for the shapes you have been noticing in the ceiling after dark; how they move in your nameless mystery. This is for the impulse to close your eyes when you’ve had enough of looking, to find the shadows just as present as the bursts and squiggles of colored luminescence spiraling across the eyelid-curtains after you stop watching.

*Stellar Nursery in the Rosette Nebula – Nasa.gov*

This is for your still-seeing even then, for the way you knew you could fly like you knew a mailbox could morph into a griffin; a streetlamp into a vine, from which you might swing across a rising river and drop safely on dry land — to wave at your enemies, scratching their heads.

This is for the rippled reflections over water when you touched it for the first time — really touched it — feeling it as babies do: Now it’s a boundary, now you’re breaking through; now it’s a horizon; now it’s swallowing your hand, your knowing screams of “Aaaaaah! Ha! Oooh!” against each splash.

This is for your hand — the speaker of the moment, do you remember? Chubby and sure of itself without even fine motor skills, already fluent in an ecstatic dialect, intimate with joys of pressing itself against what it cannot hold.

For Your Looking Glass

for Jill Tarter, and stargazers everywhere*

Considering how you beheld, before your teeth had grown in, the wide embrace of infinite above you every time you looked up, how you wondered about the possibility that someone on an invisible and hypothetical planet, orbiting a just-visible or hypothetical star, in a possibly habitable zone, might at this moment or in a parallel twin moment, light years away, looking back with its parent, asking, Are we alone?

––and, suspecting not, how you looked and kept looking, sought and kept seeking, ransacked the monochromatic track-lit waiting room where the tired skeptics sat in comfortable clothes–– arms crossed, smirking; reminding them how when you started looking, no one (not one!) had even found a planet ––yet!

–– around any of these other stars; considering the calm with which you pointed out the problem of certain assumptions that the over-confident doubters were always making about the impossibility of your life’s work; about its wasteful utter futility, how you pointed out their blindness to life beyond the water we are so familiar with because it is in us, and the fallacy of assuming that what is not in us may not exist as a viable life, pointing to the wild, raucous late-night parties of extremophiles bubbling over in other impossible places like the cooling liquid of nuclear reactors; how, speaking of stardust and star stuff, we are part of a billion year lineage of its nomadic essence;

how you wandered after and in it, recklessly grounded against the leering jealousy of the waiting-room skeptics waiting for your failure, waiting for your infinite motion to stop, for you to decide to finally let the limits of your present reach preclude your future reaching or to deny the fact that a stretching embrace of what you could not possibly begin to hold was always and still the essential orientation of your organism, and finally admit your discouragement; how, with both feet beneath you, you observed with the same calm how, in a billions-year legacy of wandering out, out, and into this human-ness, your arrival––our arrival–– had happened only a blink ago;

and because you saw fit to remind that if someone looking for proof of the existence of ocean fish were to come up fishless on a first attempt to harvest one, using a twelve-ounce glass, from any of the world’s seven oceans, one attempt per sea, only to decide that fish were nothing more than myths we invent to feel less alone against the ocean’s expanse, that this would be a premature decision––not to mention, a poor survival strategy;

for highlighting the tyranny of light speed regarding the length of time it takes for a signal emitted by one body to reach the perception of another, reminding us that, after all, some of us just read the Antigone of several millennia ago, and what about the aurochs on the caves of Lascaux; what about what we knew before assuming this always-assuming human form, this particular constellation of ancient dust,

assembled just so in this moment, right now; as if to imply that the way to balance your urgency is with equal parts empathy for the speed of the living, for the devastating wait, slow and deliberate as any melting ice cap, of living on a planet that spins a thousand miles an hour;

the vastness of your patience with what you call a primordial mixture of hydrogen and helium that evolves for so long that it begins to ask where it came from and how you manage to understand that now is no time to stop looking, now is no time to stuff our have-beens into our ears, dulling our is-nows and forestalling the conception of our ever-shall-bes

––Thank you, because sometimes I need to be reminded backwards and forwards, and welcomed back again, into a space where I remember how to look, when I am meaning to see.

Jill Tarter is the co-founder of the SETI institute. Her life inspired the character played by Jodi Foster in the 1997 film Contact, an adaptation of Carl Sagan’s 1985 novel of the same name. I was inspired by a wonderful interview with her, in a recent episode of the On Being podcast Krista Tippett.

Memorare

Your remains rest, your remains unfound. You were decorated, wept over; letters said you were tired, found peace of mind, slept with a pistol on your chest.

You fell at Battle of the Bulge, B-17 missing over the Aleutians; survived Omaha Beach, saved wounded, drowned in frozen seas, in training runs over Yuma, in POW camps in Burma. You volunteered after D-Day, 9/11; died at Iwo Jima, on impact, slowly in a trench; underwater, in midair, in the desert; your family searches still. You loved Tennyson, football, ice cream and Clarion Bells before sunset. You sang in the choir, stepped on a landmine, took fire in Kunar Province, in Afghanistan, Camp Sheehan, Fallujah.

The day you went missing, your son was born.

Your remains rest, your remains unfound. You were decorated, wept over; letters said you were tired, found peace of mind, slept with a pistol on your chest. Folded flags met your mothers, fathers, wives, daughters, sons; “Taps” played, then twenty-one guns.

You were in the glee club, physics, wrestling, the relay; long legs remembered, and dimples; a serious side and how you slept in class. You would be an aeronautics technician, a veterinarian, a teacher; practice medicine, take your son to Mt. Whitney, have dinner on the harbor, swim at the pier, return next football season and for Christmas, to hold your daughter for the first time.

You wrote your favorite Wordsworth lines in a textbook, “Grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind.” We gather among remains, looking for more, as the living do, in silent reflection on the unknown of the All that you gave, marking hallowed ground with what we may not name.

Speaking of the nameless, may we remember them too. No sense being stingy with memory, with grief, with all the lost lives that we are taught to call nothing at all.

Image: Memorare – Manila 1945 Monument, Sculpted by Peter de Guzman
Photo by Joal Perocillo on flickr

Sunday Communion: with Bill T. Jones

Many faithful bodies keep holy days throughout the year, in which the day-to-day routine is replaced by a ritual or series of rituals, enacted in a manner designed to return the faithful to the spirit, via some transcendence. Outside of churches, mosques, and synagogues, you can find such abundant enthusiasms at football games, Sunday brunches, ritual meetings of friends, and ritual retreats in studio apartments. I know no other way to think of a creative practice but as an act of faith.

In this spirit comes the inaugural Sunday edition of these notes, in which we will rest and look for someone else to lead. Call it communion, a shared feast, or a chance to wear body paint and cheer for another artist, whose work breathes the transcendence that is as essential as any other basic need, and often more so. This is also the area where environmental hazards, left unchecked, tend to result in extreme malnourishment.

We may not know we are malnourished, slogging along in blind obedience to the dogma of individual production, forgetting all about the day of rest. But sometimes the sabbath comes knocking, and if we’re awake enough to get to the door, we can’t help but meet what will make us cheer, cry, laugh with relief, shouting hallelujahs of “Take Me to Church!” –– if only we look, listen, taste, smell; running our fingers against its jagged grain. Or, as I did when I watched this performance/talk/sermon by artist Bill T. Jones, be awed through a melting face. Does it add to the wonder to know he is the tenth of twelve children, whose parents were migrant workers? Or is it enough to simply know that he is managing to do what he does in this moment, in this environment, with this force and generosity? You decide.

I am doubly grateful because today, a beloved earthling artist shared this video with me in response to yesterday’s post in which one of us, left all alone, was moved by a sudden impulse to dance.

I cannot translate what he is doing here, and if I could, I would have to use only words once deemed too sacred to utter aloud. I was lifted and moved in ways as powerful as any of the most powerful experiences I’ve ever had in any congregation. I will share only this line, which I think for any artist, might be counted as a sacred verse:

“Artists are always fighting the scriptures of their goddamned era! Am I allowed to say that?”

[answers his own question in dance]

The rest, I hope you will see for yourself. Thank you, Bill T. Jones, and the timing of your life, thank your parents; thank you, reader, and I love you for sharing what you see.