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To Carry You

With LJ Roberts.

Your grandmother showed you to knit. She learned from the mothers who fled the wars. You stopped and kept living until you got to where words were no longer enough. You found fabric again and made poetry.

You knit your beloveds into your world, an ever-expanding family. You knit the foreground with the background and layered the threads of one body among those of the next. Then the sky, the earth, a hand, a bench. You showed us all webbed together.

It’s one way, you said, to transcend human forms––or rather, our limitations in seeing what they might be. Here is a box of light, you say. And here is a space for the others.

I want to carry, you tell them––you with me.

***

Inspired by the work of of LJ Roberts.

Lessons in Looking

The shape of a vessel.

There are worse things than realizing your inward destitution, she said. Such as not knowing it. Take a good look at your own insignificance, she said. In the center you’ll see a tiny seed. And what is that, but the beginning of joy? 

It’s too bad you are utterly useless, she said. But if you sit a minute with the horror of this, you might just find a rich kind of peace. I mean, at least now you know it, and can move onto the real stuff.

Nobody expects the soul’s poverty to be its only fortune, she told us, but there it is anyway, and only by understanding this utter emptiness can anybody begin to hold anything worthwhile.

To the Future of Time

A prayer for the babies.

In an era where it often seems like time itself has run out of time, when the experts of the moment loudly proclaim the absurdity of a continuance far beyond now, where an ever-expanding past narrows as it passes through us and into a vanishing point in the space once reserved for a future, it seems we are long overdue for a sustained effort of radical courage and love.

What if we dared to breathe it wider, this space before us, for children so far ahead that we can’t even go around calling them ours with the same clenched fist that pulled us into this point?

May this coming evolution be one of dreaming forward, not for ourselves and the empty achievements we’ve learned to wave like flags into battle in the days of permanent war, but for the absorption of these husks of selves into a greater all, and for the delicate hearts still far from being breathed into their lives.

***

Notes while reading Toni Morrison’s stunning essay “The Future of Time: On Literature and Diminished Expectations” as it appears in her essay collection The Source of Self-Regard

Field of Possibility

The shape of things to come.

You seek to make art as event, not product. What happens, you wonder, when you open clay with found objects? Here is a sweater between God and your mother, and here, another mouth. Open, your hands whisper, open. Now an old bus shelter, fused glass. Look.

What is it? someone wants to know, in an unintended effort to avoid the long look, the absorption into the blobby forms that melt and lean into one another, a gathering of materials in various stages of becoming.

And what else are we, but these bubbling amoebas, opening and melting and falling endlessly into each other, in defiance of the neatly angled forms we keep meaning to hold?

***

Inspired by the work of Jessica Jackson Hutchins.

Inside Out

Placing ourselves in space.

These solemn geographies our limits, and yet. We persist in aiming to be where we are not. If the first myth was of some beyond outside, the next was that it was assembled of infinities––in defiance of the limits that confront us at each breath.

What creatures are we, to be embedded with impulses to defy our own natures and nature itself?  The first way we did this was to presume to give her a proper name, capital-N, and place her outside. 

After that, we would not recognize what breathed against the window, fogging the glass through which we meant to keep an eye on her wild beyonds, out there.

Little Dream Bird

Questions of memory.

Now, where is the little dream we had before the fire? Thoughts like this always precede those of flight. There was a little bird among us before the fire, jumping from shoulders to heads and one arm to the next, like we were branches. Which of course we were, although we never noticed the tree. Do branches, usually? There are none to ask.

Anyway, you would think the tiny bird would have been the first to vanish, but it wasn’t. I can see it now as it was near the end, bright body against the dark. As if waiting, with a question. We left and the bird did not follow and then came a long road. It is the same as this one. I think I hear it, sometimes.

Renunciation

On the daily work of living.

There is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing unusual or heroic to celebrate in this way of being, because there is nothing to point to: no award, no arrival, no legacy. All of it is nothing, only ordinary work. And who doesn’t dream of freedom from this?

Except. If the people you love are in it, too, how will you continue to love them except by connection through this daily toil? The grind, my father calls it, and he is right. It grinds us from our husks, makes of our once-proud autonomies something else, something worth offering only because it is transformed. 

This is what makes it possible to say here, take this bread. Dearly beloved, it is the body I surrender, for you.

***

The italicized opening line is from Thomas Merton’s essay “Renunciation,” in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Elsewhere’s Space

A meditation on making.

There is an elsewhere here. It breathes in the margins of activity and swims among the vessels of the plans we forever work over––arranging the sails of this one and that one, checking our courses and whether the knots will hold. Elsewhere is indifferent to all of this, or else amused.

Elsewhere can’t hold the music she holds if she keeps the door open for every cacophony that presumes to invade. She thrives in forgotten spaces and in dreams that dissipate before we can fasten them to words. Her only allegiance is to the country of lost countries. There are no flags.

Without Elsewhere, there is no one here. How may anyone name this central element of a life after the moment of recognition that it is not yours at all, but something possessed entirely by some other out there, in that nowhereland between continents, beneath these vessels, behind these words and all things seen and named; arranged and rearranged?  

But even this final recognition of futility offers no freedom from the impulse toward making the worlds we keep creating as offerings, tempting her unmaking, her not-naming music, her long-shadowed disappearance of all that seems. 

On Writing

What it’s worth.

Overheard: Yes, but what can writing even do in a world? Or with one, for that matter? 

Other than explain, it might make a likeness. Or dream a new one. Or transform.

Most of us have glimpsed the silvery back of something flickering beyond time and space, entering and exiting with continual unpredictability, why not the pen? 

If the beginning was the word, where is the continuance, except here, in this ongoing fraught attempt to dream it forward, repair the torn fabric of the cosmos through which we slipped from something elemental into something else? 

What else does one do, but stitch new wings for some eventual return, word by word, and keep a record in the meantime––of how we fall?