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.
When we last spoke it was to let you know I wished you love. I meant it, knowing we would not speak again while you were in that life, warring at the end, to defend your fortress.
I hope that when you went, the solace of those trees you watched, with whom you often grieved, gave you shade and took your sorrows. I hope the birds were there too, singing, and that at least one of them gave you a good and hearty laugh.
Love is funny how it moves and feints. Those beams when they come can sometimes be too bright to bear. I hope that in that company, that laughter, that light breached your heavy walls, and took you in. I think it did because I am seeing you again.
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.
Even amid the abundance of that offering, you were distracted by that incessant worry over the stability of your reflection in the glass, thinking that perhaps you could not steal enough to compensate for the original trespass, and it is true, after all, that some suspicions, nursed long enough on themselves, can only find their error by proving themselves correct.
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.
Who are these others, then? Kinship of water lapping at bare feet, the sudden excess gone again, then holding. Gulls in the spray, beneath rain. There are not many of us today, but we gather to feed an infant future, swaddled in cloud and often asleep. That it may grow fat with dream and laugh back at the shapes of our faces before learning to crawl and be caught in these waiting, open arms.
Beneath waving drapes of midnight, these lines draw us out in the swell where the first caught hook leaves the longest scar. No, love. You cannot go back but to the opening or you lose it all to danger us in this work of finding what the cynic masks until mourning song against memory’s loss, by turning heads to the young at the breast to owl until we catch ourselves on trees. No we are not birds we must ask for song first also love and what comes suggests we are light, lighting the eye back to her first sound and the shine that preceded too the open mouth that meant the beginning of you.
Yes, love. Bring what you are. Keep arriving and we will meet them and us and you in time, the world’s children where we gather in your name, still singing.
You asked when. It is now. You will find us by our song. Come out.
All that matters is–––what? Sometimes I cannot hear.
I want the children to be able to dream and breathe. I want their dreams for them, their breath, their dream breath back to them now, the winds restored where they were knocked out like a blow to the back. Sometimes at a birth a child will need to be reminded to breathe, but this is something else.
Sometimes at the death of children a collective body will need to be reminded back to collective breath.
It knocks now. Let some new wind be what this is, knocking back. Louder now. Everyone I see in passing in a workday says the same thing. I need to breathe we say to one another. A body deprived of oxygen will fade. A soul deprived of body will––what? Are these souls knocking about? Something knocks at my temples now. It will not stop. How are you? I ask the children, an opening ritual. Tired, they say. I am so tired.
These are our children. They are not breathing well.
All that matters is what will restore breath. All that matters is protection of breath, of dream. All that matters is rest for these knocking souls. We try to hold the thought.
Another round fires into the space again where we are trying, looking up, to remember a dream. Its noise pours over us like sand into our mouths.
What bears the clock’s repeating to fold a blanket again, soft on the back of the chair where yours just was, what names the length of time to your return? I was and I remember once collecting names and meaning it my mission to hold every noun of a single tongue. I wrote them one by one on cards. How young then with so little time for waiting. Did the project last a year, three weeks, a day? Not until I ran out of cards, I can tell you but you can say I am still at it, minus the cards, minus the gathering––and I’ve slowed. I spend so much more time repeating, turning over the few I have: tongue, memory, hand, fold. Collection, I––You. What bears the name’s repeating, to fold its vowels between lips and hold them as if to absorb a promise till it takes. What names the way a body learns that name is just the first sound of the word that holds the door open for a moment where the flesh of form may enter folding body over threshold to bear time by letting go to gather names as leaves of leavings and the word was to begin and the what was folded wing and when it opened it revealed a new name for the next place not yet known–– I go
