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.
Against the dread.
Where terror shattered our speech, there came some who showed us how to make a song with the silences between our words. We listened, and the poets taught us how to meet what was coming. Look, they said. When the enemy explodes the bridge between the beginning and the end of a thought, only the form changes. What was concrete is now a fibrous web, and all of us in it. What was solid is now porous, and like other porous substances, we now absorb what may come. While the enemy creeps its silent convoy, we are here, and as we listen, one among us begins to sing. Soon, our bodies are saturated with song. The fullness is almost too much, but here we are, holding.
***
Inspired by stories like this of people singing while sheltering from attack. And by poets across time and nations, united against war. With love and prayers for the persecuted people of Ukraine in this hour. May you continue to hear one another, and hold.
For the floating worlds.
The idea is to liberate an artist’s power by saying, here are some patterns to work with. Here are some methods, and these can be learned. Sure, you can copy the old masters if you want, but this can be demoralizing, especially early on. Consider instead the play and placement of contrast, and the pictures of the floating world: eagle above dragon, forest among Atlantic cumulus. See them. Over time, an artist will better arrange lines and masses and it may become clear why the term “composition” is too limited. You can spend years studying the science of perspective, anatomy, history––and still manage to miss the essential element, Beauty. As in music, begin with simple exercises. Group a few lines harmoniously. Proceed step by step. This is how an artist’s power grows.
***
Inspired by (and using phrases from) Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition (1905), as featured on Public Domain Review.
Creativity and dark ecology.
The other day I found some much-needed encouragement from one of my favorite living philosophers, Timothy Morton, in All Art is Ecological. With characteristic wit and verve, Morton observes that while the bend of the authoritarian machine is toward capital-T truth, the bend of an ecological society (of the sort that must begin to emerge if we are to survive) is toward a much more sublime, surreal, and shapeshifting state, of “truthiness” which necessarily elevates that which cannot be grasped. They have not said this (yet, anyway), but the strong suggestion through this reader’s lens is that pretensions toward capital-R real, like capital-T truth and capital-A authority, are necessarily lies. Someone whose every attempt at telling an honest story completely evades clean lines, take heart. As Lorca observed, “Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.”
Whispering landscapes.
Story of ages, these quiet ruins now submit to the embrace of twisted oak limbs. What solitude erupts through the ghosts of former sermonizers when somber winds replace old battle hymns. From twilight to light on this reticulated branch, snows drumming winter suddenly stop. What music now?
***
Loosely inspired by the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), whose work has been credited with capturing “the tragedy of landscape.” He is said to have inspired painters such as Dali, Rothko, and Munch. His Moonrise Over the Sea is reported to have inspired Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
What ephemeral forms may expose.
Along the shores of a great lake, often without witness, a northern wind shapes and erases forms in ice and sand. There is a moment when they hold. To bear witness is to be reminded of the pairing of reverence and suddenness, of beauty unexpected because it is so rarely seen, and this because it just as quickly goes, swallowed by the same hand that lifted the veil. Is this a force of time and weather, or their temporary pause? ––as if to call into question all descriptors, all limits, to fit the beholder with a set of melting wings.
***
Inspired by the photography of Joshua Nowicki.
More than a collection of stones.
If history is a cathedral, and the accepted facts the stones, then no expansion of understanding can happen without art, without appreciation for those who been dreaming and revisioning all along as a survival strategy. No offering of new facts, however extensive, will ever be enough to alter old visions, except by nurturing new visionary architects. New material can raise new questions, as in, what can we make of this? –– and, by extension, of us? To offer new stones and call it “history” is a lie of omission. The history is what is yet to be made.
***
Inspiration: In a recent episode of NPR’s Throughline podcast (“Do We Need a Shared History?”), historian Tamin Ansary shared this insight, “History is composed of facts the way that a cathedral is composed of bricks . . . But the bricks are not the cathedral.” This seems like a much-needed observation for our times. I am inspired by those who recognize (as Ben Okri put it) when we have arrived at “A Time for New Dreams.”
And other directional challenges.
If Dali’s thin silver spoon with its offering of arrested time can bend around a dark mass and still hold; if Magritte’s mountain can levitate and Chagall’s village can highlight the illusory nature of common words for direction: above, below, top, bottom––then there really are no end of possibilities for how a given story may move, fictions of today, tomorrow, and yesterday only rooted in the old habits, which are sometimes shorthand for myopia, and we could hardly help ourselves when it was still possible to paint time in a straight line and call it real.
***
Inspired by “Weightless Forms, Gravitational Forces,” Ch. 23 of Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light.
Tracing lines of exile and return, from and to ourselves.
When we first moved into nature, we called it only looking, as with mirrors, but it’s one thing to know this and another to decide to be some deviation from the atmosphere. Ancient builders, considering the return of certain dreams, had sense enough to use the shadows cast by upright poles as tracing lines for temple architecture.
What made the created world less natural than, say, the beehive? On the one hand, maybe it was hubris, but it might have also been the practice of hoarding, to a degree not unlike the mythical cave dragons, those other anomalies.
The question lives in oscillation, tracing celestial lines of sight and we stand, sometimes still as solstices and just as briefly, before pulling back the orbital bodies of our dominion just when they seem to be slipping forever beyond our grasp, and the offerings that follow tend to synchronize with the rise and declination of the countless hidden orbs of shattered once-whole light that some say broke on arrival, leaving a legacy of singular purpose: find it––and this is shrouded, too.
The collaborative process of creative evolution.
I need a new form for this thing I am making. I haven’t found it yet, so here I am watching birds.
The songs of sparrows, apparently, vary broadly in the structure of their final notes, and some will introduce subtle variations with each performance. The songs evolve.
But researchers are quick to point out: it’s not like these bird-composers are free to evolve their songs willy-nilly, in any direction at any time. There are certain constraints, and the evolution of song works within these.
Consider how fledgling birds learn what song is, through imitation. Drift happens primarily during the initial stages of dialect formation, and during the colonization of an island. As songs evolve, so do birds’ preferences when it comes to how they perceive and learn.
I probably don’t need a new form. There is an array of viable traditions. There are possibilities for learning through imitation. But the early birds, before the songs are known and integrated, can’t help themselves. They throw their notes around in every direction. This is how they learn they have voices, and how they might use them. But a voice is not a song. Song is voice in motion, in choreographed patterns, learned in community. We are never as alone as we think we are in what we are making.
So maybe I don’t need a new form, just more practice in call and response.
