Always wants. An attempt to loosen the fibers that seemed to contain the riddle of becoming. From that bonebound island I thought I knew what I was and knowing only wants, dreamed that if I were only more, I might hold those skies, that ocean, and swell to blooming so I could let it all go into the living. I used to imagine you a landscape I might photograph in pieces to print on transparencies, hold the light of you up to your light to translate for you this wonder at your nearness. I remember where we stood above the sea holding hands up into sunset as if to catch whatever heavens might finally rain.
But what do you want, always? What does Always want? I am impatient to know. Please speak slowly.
I lack fluency and miss the nuance of your most important phrases.
Strange angel, admit yourself. The upward reach is not enough where the first teachers are these cave systems writhing, diving beneath these soils, to meet the blind fish in tiny pools, in your undiscovered country still so untamed that it is unafraid to play haunted host to invisible harp. You sing the fine wind plucked from delicate fissures of split rock, and knock again. Come in.
How much floats unsaid between these islands. Yet there are moments when it is all there, a deafening amen, edged in icy light. An incurable fool, I keep setting out on these little rafts made of so few words so poorly bound. I am no sooner afloat when I hear the wind laugh. But the only place for hesitation was that shore.
That meeting space, love, had once been consecrated by our belief in what it was. This is what it means, to sanctify. This power is shared. To make holy. And so, as it turns out, is the reverse. To take the sacred and use it thoughtlessly, out of mind, like any old tool. A resource ready for the taking. Of course, it always is, and any fool may come. But that flame will only continue through active attention. Its desecration is so often a quiet violence. But the effect is total. There you had been, once. Then you were not.
In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.
This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.
And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.
So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong. And, when interrupted––gone.
She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.
The less there is in a subject, the more I can pour into it. And I have a strong feeling that the more objects you use, the less there is in a picture. It’s not that I doubt the object. I doubt the way I paint it. If it becomes about the object, forget it. What matters is what seeps unconsciously from the object. The fleeting character of shadow, the sadness of fall. It is important to forget about what you are doing, then art may happen. Sometimes.
***
Adapted from interviews with the artist, whose “Wind from the Sea” moved me this morning.
If from the blackening leaves of the desecrated tree at the center of a wounded land of murdered angels and blind kings it is possible for new growth to arrive, may it come soon, protected from poison, from burn, from the heavy tread of killing machines. May we learn at this end to be shields for another beginning.
And since it was no good sitting like that, choking in the sweltering attempt at stillness, the youngest among us started crying and the rest joined in. It was wondrous! Lamentations get short shrift in a culture of bucking up and keeping calm but look where that’s got us. We wept until we exploded with laughter and then we wept some more until we were singing. No one had the notes or the words and no one could remember them later. But in that moment, we all knew––by heart, as the saying goes, without faltering. The wingbeat of that hour dawned an owl in the heart of us, to call who? Who? and howl, and the only way to keep on listening was to call back, and we did.
One wonders about official days of remembrance sometimes, to what extent any one of them might serve as convenient cover for a miasma of forgetting that is, if not enforced exactly, afforded by numerous conditions, one of which is the immediacy of other disasters, collecting in such a swarm that they naturally imply a single organism, a looming and shapeshifting singular catastrophe, foreclosing belief in tomorrows.
And yet. Afraid for the living––all of us, I want to remember. The admission feels like a prayer from when my grandparents were living and the top of my head reached only their waists, and there was much to worry about but I had yet to come into full awareness of the idea that the moment at hand was one where the systematic extinguishing of living beings was as common and transactional an operation as real-estate sales. I am not worthy, the prayer went, but say the word and I shall be healed. Adjacent to another prayer, I believe. Heal my unbelief, and both came before the commercially-manufactured wafer was transubstantiated into the body that made all tomorrows possible for everyone, however few so long as we are gathered in that faith, however wavering.
I suppose I remember this now because I am aware that such a day of remembrance suggests celebration but also a sense of something hanging in the balance yet to be resolved. A call, perhaps? To which I may respond or stand in silent defiance, doubting its veracity. My favorite writer on these matters, Richard Rohr, reminds me that “The opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.”
By this spirit, I am compelled to hope against despair, aware that I am not alone in wanting to remember in a room with a vast table from which none will be excluded. In this spirit, I want to remember every tomorrow, especially those newborn flames in danger of being snuffed out for lack of oxygen. To each tentative baby flame I want to whisper, I see you, and this of course is not selflessness but a symptom of hunger, for I am a wretched specimen of a so-called species (I mistrust taxonomies of the living) which after all may undeserving of persistence, and yet I am also a baby flame, not yet fire but not yet gone.
It is summer and I have a break from teaching so I read with the thirst of someone who is crossing an arid region in a heat wave. As so many are. And to what end? I cannot answer but this morning it is Paul Celan’s “The Dead Man,” an early poem written while his parents were being extinguished in the death camps of the last century. I nod my heavy head into its image of a passing wind, considering this life the kite that depends upon it, which can fly only as long as the wind persists and a hand other than its own holds at the other end. The speaker witnessing the poppies near the man’s wormy body, face down in the dirt, notes how they scrape blood from him, urging, kneel now, and drink it in!
Such is the posture that is now. To kneel, cupped hands, amid the collected bodies of this impossible moment as the machine drones on. And yet, the eyes before the single body still blink. The hands in anticipation yet hold. The word, does it come? Even now, can it be said? Perhaps I only move my pen to reenact the waiting for the moment when the body becomes. Tomorrow and tomorrow, heal my unbelief and breathe. Baby flame of we, ignite.
