Category: art

Exile

Remembering home.

It’s hard to imagine now but try. It was fields of gold. There was nothing like it. It was a paradise, the flyers announced, with soil rich as chocolate. There would be peace in the valley, we sang, and believed, and we had the wheat to win the war. Then came the suitcase farmers, to make a killing. They didn’t come to live, just to buy the land and the machines to work it. 

They bled it dry. What followed looked like vengeance, except that the killers had already fled. What was left was those of us still working by foot and horse, to get by. We’d sing on Sundays, still, and our spirit shall sorrow no more. By and by, we gave up trying to keep dirt off the children’s faces during the week. They’d spit and it would look like they’d been chewing tobacco.

Suddenly, the sky cleared up. Hallelujah, we said, to witness blue again. We washed the children’s faces, went to church, even packed a picnic. But then, in the afternoon, it got suddenly cool. You could see a cloud in the distance, dark and low, rolling in on itself. The birds took off. When it rolled over us, I looked for my own hand. I brought it up and even when it touched my nose, I still couldn’t see it.

After that, people stopped asking each other, where’s your home? It wasn’t polite. The answer was scattered all over, and it wasn’t the one that any of us wanted to give.

***

On this day in 1935, the Black Sunday Dust Storm swept across the panhandle region of Oklahoma, Texas, and surrounding regions in the U.S. Sources: Remembering Black Sunday, Smithsonian Magazine, and the photographs of Dorothea Lange and In the Sweet by and by Hymn Lyrics and history.

Tell Me, Neighbor

Feeling a wound.

The fact that it is so difficult to express is what complicates, and in these complications, sometimes art. In its invisible geography, the felt experience of any other tends to flicker, then disappear.

Like fireflies, or a faulty bulb? Like meteor showers?

No, not like any of these.

It breaks your metaphor, doesn’t it?

It breaks.

A choice, then: the astounding freedom of unsight, or the weight of witness.

This body, take it. It has never known certainty, the first sound a cry, shattering words.

***

In her profound The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry writes, “When one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to have the same remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth. Or, alternatively, it may seem as distant as the interstellar events referred to by scientists who speak to us mysteriously of not yet detectable intergalactic screams. . .”

Composure

Stage notes.

Sure, we are torn, but hold. Affix time around space, anchor it with the choreography of story. Knot the fabric so that a dancer’s shadow will cohere to the face of a witness. This is a movement, repeat. 

Couple the lines of these bodies. You’ll need a strong adhesive. Consider music over time. Notice the architecture. Unless a body dances with the contours of a space, it cannot speak to a room. This means working with the furniture, the squeaking floorboards, the windows. Observe textures. How solid are any of these parts, and what are the sources of light? What are the colors in this space, and how does each sound? 

How do you bind a sense of intimacy to one of staggering separation? When you learn this, you will be falling into each ascent, and then you will know you are dancing.

***

Inspired by the opening chapter of The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau.

Liquid Cats

What happens on a page.

When it comes to inking a cat, there’s no telling what will happen. 

The long brushstroke of a tail; paint bleeds a fluid form, feathered fur.

Sometimes, the shape of a body can only be defined by where it isn’t.

***

Inspired by this article about Endre Penovác’s watercolor cats.

Hello, Stranger

For the love of seaweed.

There is the familiar arrangement of well-known symmetrical forms, the sort that draws comments of Cute, and Beautiful, exclamation mark. These are not that. Slick like raw meat, covered with film over knotty, bulbous appendages, they were dubbed the useless class of botanists. Perhaps it is the fate of things deemed useless, to be collected by fringe enthusiasts, who pressed them between paper, offered collections as gifts. They would sell them during the first world war, to raise money for wounded soldiers, and this is one of those things I can’t stop thinking: how when a continent was immersed in mechanized violence on a scale unprecedented in human history, some responded by collecting delicate specimens of fragile ocean life, to press between pages. 

***

Inspired by Sasha Archibald’s Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album in the Public Domain Review.

Among Ancients

Old growth wisdom.

The Pando, a trembling giant, is the oldest living organism on earth––also the largest and most dense, its name means I spread, which it does over one-hundred and six acres.

How old? I wondered. Some date this clonal colony back 80,000 years, a moment that roughly corresponds to the first known human burial. This seems significant.

There is a woman who travels the earth photographing the old trees. Time is the trunk, she says. Notice the split, she says, pointing to one of the ancients. To accommodate the storm.

She looks and looks. In each careful frame, she watches the old souls, how they shape the light. Making a record, she says. Lest people forget who they were, in the event of further collapse.

In their presence, she finds a reminder. There is still grace. There is still beauty. There is something and it’s made of grief but also beyond it, and it is still here.

***

Inspired by this article on photographer Beth Moon’s quest to photograph ancient trees, and also by this articleabout the world’s oldest clonal colony of aspen. I learned about the earliest known human burial here.

Rituals

From one palm to another.

What grows here is an open hand. It catches shade from remaining trees like falling rain. Cup the view, wrap a fragile forever in time, hold. An old ritual: pull back the sun. It can’t be helped, the impulse to pry a closed fist into an open palm, for heat or to signal an invitation. Like, Stay.

***

Inspired by the sculptures of Lorenzo Quinn. And everything else.

Song

Across an ocean in wartime.

As tanks burn near his hometown, the young artist watches, preparing for the stage again. 

A sensation, he will sing Don Carlos soon, against the blinding light. 

The fatal hour has sounded. 

His grandmother is ill, his mother stays. We can hear the shelling, she told him, days before. 

A future full of tenderness. Our days spent beneath blue skies!

He texts her his prayer again, and it is Mama.

***

Inspired by an article I saw this morning in the New York Times, about Vladyslav Buialskyi performing at the Metropolitan Opera while he waits anxiously for updates about his family. The young artist is from Berdyansk, which was among the first towns besieged by the Russian invasion. Italicized lines above are from this English translation of Verdi’s Don Carlos. 

Piercing the Veil

A poet’s manifesto.

“We do not fly, we ascend only such towers as we ourselves are able to build.”

Osip Mandelshtam

When it comes to discussions of art, let’s balance our excitement with restraint. A worldview is a hammer, but not the end. Use it to shape the art. The only pride, for an artist, is existence.

In a poem, the reality is the word, and yet. Consider how signs and symbols so often fulfill their purpose without words. Let’s have the word no longer creeping on all fours, hulking accepted logic on its back. Let it rise, instead, to enter a new age.

The architect must be a good stay-at-home, having genuine piety before the three dimensions of space. To build means to hypnotize space against the dreaded emptiness. Consider the anger of the bell tower, as if to stab heaven.

To love the existence of something more than itself­­––including your own––here is the highest commandment. A poet’s greatest virtue is the ability to feel surprised. If logic is the kingdom of amazement, let us dance to the music of proof.

***

The war in Ukraine has drawn me more deeply into the poetry of one of my favorite living poets, Ilya Kaminsky. I’ve been following his regular updates about the needs and concerns of his family, friends, and fellow poets in Ukraine. At his recommendation, I have been reading Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem, composed during Stalin’s Great Terror. Akhmatova was part of the Acmeist movement,  and this morning, while reading Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa, I came to “Musica Humana” (an elegy for Osip Mandelshtam, a leader among the Acmeists) and realized I wanted to know more about Mandelshtam, and found a translation of his Acmeist Manifesto. This morning’s post collects ideas and found phrases from this text, as translated by Clarence Brown. 

Holding

Our pieces.

The babies are at the window 

of the train, watching the smoke 

rise, and here’s another reminder 

that words are only shards of 

of our shattering selves, collected 

in each aftermath, in pockets, and

in the corners of silence, to be

glued into the mosaics we are 

always making with the bits, and

to give some shape to the next

cry when it comes, whenever

it comes, faces pressing this 

window of whatever that is at

the border of a full breath.