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The Long Becoming

With Christian Wiman.

When they asked the poet how he became one, he said, I’ve been wondering.

The assembly waited for more. There were follow-up questions, a discussion about certain ineffable qualities: a sense of life brought to bear in language. A sense that the density of life’s layers may be represented with a clarity of expression. The importance of having a capacity to suffer; to know and express grief without making a shrine to wonder.

Then the poet asked, what do you believe? If you don’t believe in poetry, you can’t write it. He tried to explain what happens when suddenly everything learned will no longer do; how over time, an original wound may become the site of roots for a larger life.

But how? They pressed, and he repeated, I wonder.

***

Notes while reading Christian Wiman’s Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2004, Copper Canyon Press).

Reading in Space

Across time.

A question for the author: how do you want people to feel when they walk into this book? She answered by blackening a number of pages, then adding windows. If you stood before the words in the sunlight, they would curve across your body like cats.

The best part of the book, she answered, is what I don’t understand––also, the suspended moment when a page is turned; the wait between words, as especially what they do not say.

She invited the doubters among us to put our fingers in the wound between voice and image, and again between voice and word, between voice and speaker, the speaker and her intentions, and we were beginning to get a sense every page brought with it another wound.

Every page revealed itself by slicing us open, and we fell to the floor to collect ourselves like autumn leaves to our chests, a gesture of remembrance for all we had yet to imagine we were.

Between decay and emergence, these open windows. And from window to window, the broken skins between space and her time.

***

Inspired by the work of Lynn Xu, whose debut exhibit And Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Moonlight is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary art in Tuscon, Arizona.

Imagine

When despair is beside the point.

What is needed now is a bravery reason can’t summon, a hope that persists beyond all rights to it; a solemn acknowledgement that our despair is none of our business.

The greater the possible effect of our actions; the less we are able to see it. When senses become myopic, only imagination will do. It seems our capacity for fear is too small, outstripped by the magnitude of the moment. How strange, to need the courage to be frightened; to frighten thy neighbor as thyself with fearless, stirring fear. To understand how fear for is distinct from fear of.

Camouflage, once needed to hide from an enemy, now prevents the actor from knowing what is being done. Strip meaning from language and the lie no longer needs a disguise.

Let us remember, repeated frustration does not refute the need to repeat the effort. Every new failure bears fruit. Instead of deferring to experts, may we collectively interfere with established pretenses of expertise.

What would happen, one among us asks, if you dared to make yourself as big as you actually are? And what could happen, echoes another, if we do not?

***

Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) the philosophy of Günther Anders.

Angels of History

A prayer for the real work.

In the dark of the valley, the sense of an emergency was the beginning of an understanding that we had none of our own––not yet, except in the wild beat of the drums where we gathered in the streets. The gods of progress, long disgraced, continued to shout. We pounded the drums against their noise, and our hearts awakened, to dance in revolt against their empty reasons.

There is an angel among us, pausing to awaken the dead. But a storm stops his wings. Though he turns his back against the future they call progress, the storm blows him into it.

Let the future not be the vast emptiness and us the supplicants of soothsayers. May our knowledge of time be an act of remembrance, our concept of work what we do in service to creation and not as slaves to the death engines of progress. Give us the courage to recognize the narrow gate in every second and be moved.

***

Inspired by the moment at hand and by Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History.” In this essay, Benjamin vividly animates the context of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.

Ordinary Noise

The role of contrasting elements.

In art, dreams are realized––and the worst, not to be measured or weighted, but lived. Counting may follow, anguished measurements in the unflinching face of midday, when anyone with living ties to memory is susceptible to affliction by the pretense that all is well and as it seems, amid the noise of countless machines, distracting from a vast hum in the background.

This is why mornings and evenings are so much kinder, because the dominant noises are more obviously birds, revelers, and other wild sounds, none of which pretend any allegiance to standardized notions of good sense, which routinely kill without making any noise beyond those that have become so ordinary and expected, they may easily go unheard.

Preparations

Into the dark.

Some would go for the quick thrill of a familiar spectacle, but you did it differently, pointing a lens toward endurance. Only the unthinkable is interesting, you said, and who could argue? Sensing the dark did not change its darkness, but it was possible to train at walking forward in it, bumping along.

Well, you reminded. There has never been a time when this was safe. We took off our shoes and entered.

***

Inspiration: Franz Kafka’s writing, particularly when he writes about “the Holy of the Holies” in his fragment Wedding Preparations in the Country.

Morning Tide

The arc of a reach.

After inhaling doubts baked in a furnace with a hint of daylilies,

after the rhino leaps the river, tracing the shadow of the ark

below vapor currents tailing the new doves behind the sun,

its palpable flare a rising mirror of sublimated hopes, someone

at the other side of the banks dares to stretch wide palms––up,

and again, as if to touch the hem of a garment and be healed.

Late and Soon

Lost expressions.

I wanted to show our restoration after the storm, how to wear the sun before a burning bush. Until now, time was near. The time is now, you whispered, and I said soon. We don’t see it when it goes, not time and not the storm. Now, soft things move nearby, and a strange bird makes declarations, something with emphasis, and although time is no longer soon, we remain strangers to the idioms of anyone who manages, in the soft light between the gale and the rest of our lives, to fly beyond its reach.

The Book

What lies in wait.

There is a door to another world, ready to slam shut against this one; a weapon to strike against foes in this one; a secret criminal, trespasser, spy––smuggling ancient maps, nourishment, and provocation.

There is a tower, a lighthouse, a boat.

There is a jealous hymn over still waters, ready to bite; a scheming deceiver, and all of it is true.

Hold On

A Monday reminder.

The challenge of Mondays is that so much that seems possible when a body is freed from certain daily obligations––traffic, work schedules, emails, meetings, bells––suddenly seems to slip away. It’s a tragic feeling, one I routinely brace for every Sunday afternoon into evening.

I am constantly having to remind myself (every Monday, and for the rest of the week) that the other part of the challenge is to find a way to grasp those ephemeral beauties again and hold them close––even while running in worn shoes, unlaced, in the cold rain, on a sore knee with a sense that it will be some time before you can stop again.

To hold and keep holding, this is the challenge. Like it’s your life, as the saying goes. Because, of course, that is exactly what it is. And although it has a way of coming into such sharp focus on Mondays, it’s really the challenge of a lifetime.