memory Archives

What Gives

Sighting vessels.

The animal nation waits in the forked branch, scanning the forest floor where we pause to witness the spectacle of ordinary time. Turning to page next, the passage becomes our hibernating dream. Remember when we knew it, our sticky hands clasped and spinning until we fell? This when there was no difference between our center of gravity and our mother’s insistence, out, out!

Now memory, this temple of endless night, shines on dislocated abundance. One of the ships passes. Whose is that? Someone says. We watch. It isn’t ours, but a complicated creature, endowed with a sighing rhythm all its own, and multitudes.

One among us cannot help themselves. They gasp in recognition, and no one can see the thing in the trees anymore. A branch cracks nearby, and then another––like matchsticks, like the tiny bones of our once and future wings.

Barefoot Museum

A hall of dream artifacts.

A basket, a wheel, a shield. A barefoot artist enters. Some ceremony begins, an incantation. A spectacular lizard climbs a tree. Whose eyes have looked through these masks?

Do you have any neutral artifacts? Someone asks, but there are none.

The left side of an angel rests on a table: a single wing, once attached. Someone has painted it recently. It is drying. Nearby, the artist draws the anatomy of a seraph, hollow bones radiating from the spine and feathers like fingers, and maybe this is what you came to see, this simple diagram in pencil––down to earth, a practical rendering in painstaking detail, affirming something that otherwise seems to move in and out of spaces like shadow or the morning fog or your next breath.

The Arch Listener

Artist as audience for the song of the world.

You are drawn to archways, those portals between worlds. You are drawn to the other ones like distant kin, and you sing us into them, always ending with the choral line, remember who you are.

When asked what you are doing, you say trying. Trying how? Like a witch, like a cat, like a fisher––cast, hunt, pull. You say, some have an agenda. But I am something else.

You mean to remember us back to the songlines we forgot. When you hear the world singing, you recognize the call. Pen in hand, you respond.

***

Inspired by the great American playwright Suzan-Lori Parks, and an excellent article by Michael Paulson about the artist in today’s New York Times.

Transference

What we carried when we were listening.

The cities of our arrival, abundant with unknowns, wonders––offered moment by moment possibilities for our annihilation and station after station for our becoming. There was so little we knew, and now we knew it. Knowing we lacked the words, we opened ourselves in these new cities. We became vessels carrying music and walked forward, holding.

Until when? Someone asked. Until the rhythm invites us. What rhythm? said another, and it was time.

The Long Return

Reading bones.

The bone-readers tell a story: how the ancestor of all four-limbed creatures took its first steps on dry land. Here’s another: one day, one of the descendants of those long dwelling on land decided it was time to return. What followed were those familiar-looking progeny: whales, dolphins, porpoises, who seem to hold a certain invitation in their gaze, their play near boats and shores, and we can’t help our awe when we see them, calling Look!

Looking long, some of the bone readers speculate that the swelling in our chests, our voices, our eyes at these encounters is perhaps the product of one part primal memory and another of a longing to believe––that it is possible for someone long adapted to those acres beyond the spectral surfaces that once meant certain death, who has somehow adjusted the senses to account for the cacophony of what batted and chirped, rustled and warbled; rattled in the grasses and the winds––to still hear the call of a migrating pod thousands of miles away and think: home.

***

Inspired by the opening passage in Amber Dance’s article “The Evolution of Whales from Land to Sea.” The italicized phrase above is from this passage.

Incandescence

All that glimmers.

The first rule of mosaic is the play of light. An irregular surface invites its dance. A photographer writes volume after volume in light. It’s an ambiguous form. Are you making or finding?

It’s one of those questions that sounds more absurd out loud than it probably did in a theoretical dream space. Sight is impossible without shadow. Still, there’s a common impulse to drive them out.

As in, are you here or do you remember? Is your home private or in the public space? Same questions apply to your body, your books, your truest confessions, the ones you wrote in light across the faces of strangers that stopped for you. You wrote the same letter over and over again, and each time you picked up your instrument to look, you began with the first light of the world.

Badlands

With Mary Hunter Austin.

In the country of lost borders, where hills squeezed from chaos and sculpted by wind rise over the blue haze of narrow valleys, it is not hard to forget that everything looks closer than it is.

In the land of lost rivers, where dust devils dance, there is so little to love, but try to resist the urge to return. Given enough distance, a body will dream the unimagined help, nearby, within reach of the mesquite roots, heralded by the vivid green of creosote.

It’s easy to wonder who lives here but stick around. You’ll soon learn how it can trick your sense of time, so that you always mean to go, but never do. This is what it’s like in the land of lost travelers, waiting with the legends of treasures long buried in these sands.

***

In honor of the birthday of American writer Mary Hunter Austin (1868-1934), today’s post is composed of images and phrases from the opening pages of her classic, The Land of Little Rain.

Coffin of Light

Notes on shadows in time.

A white screen waits at the drive-in, illuminated promises unknown. Give me the absent past, someone whispers, and a stream of yesterdays flow in. A scene, the bodies in it, may be utterly artificial. Once photographed, they become real. To the tall silhouette waiting in the hallway, absent the rush: sing in praise of shadow in the empire of light.

***

Inspired by the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto and also his Coffin of Light.

Window Mirrors

These growing beyonds.

An old problem: how to phrase

the far-away steeples.

How to abandon a conversation

made of one part memory

and the other projection?

Which time is it now, the world

of memory or the procession

of days marching to the iron-fisted clock?

What grows beyond the window over there,

and who has a mirror?

Let’s shine it by the opening buds, a signal

to ourselves and our aboves:

Look, here.

***

The opening line references Marcel Proust’s recollection of the twin steeples of Martinville.

Memory Shards

In the land of exile.

Once upon a time, when the bodies of the residents of former villages were still warm, so many had lived in homes, among families. After the wars, there was more and more talk of melancholy retrospection, this chronic looking back, this impulse to exhume the buried once upon a time that had so abruptly gone.

The word nostalgia had been coined centuries earlier, to describe the pathological homesickness afflicting soldiers separated from family and village. One doctor wrote extensively to insist that the condition be treated seriously as “a pathological state” rather than “an imaginary malady.” He saw death of a broken heart in the land of exile as something more lethal than enemy fire.

Reading these words, I begin to wonder if I know anyone who isn’t separated from family, who has ever known a village. Surely, there must be someone, but what is the word to name this longing for a place you’ve never known?

***

The doctor mentioned above is Raoul Chenu in “De la Nostalgie” whose insights appear regularly in connection with this topic. I was intending to write about the work of French photographer Willy Ronis (1910-2009), who was born on this day, but his work in post-war France naturally led me here. The word I was wondering about is hireath, of Welsch origin and not entirely translatable, which a student presented to me once as “longing for a place that never was.”