Against collapse.
A single wanderer creeps from a hollow to the wild purple bloom, the yellow cluster, to fall asleep, pollen-drunk in what I like to imagine as a kind of ecstasy. But I don’t know how long he has been at it, looking for the others, reading the air for the compass dance to bring him home.
Art of the possible.
It was a time of redreaming, of finding our way. The old compass was broken. We wanted to learn to make new. It is possible, we reminded one another, to do this.
Where mass death pervades, it contaminates the horizon of the possible. There is a very thin line, in these times, between rebirth and psychosis.
To be reborn in an age of mass death means that you will speak and act in ways not encouraged as you push against the killing, which has its way by silence.
***
These are notes made over a brilliant conversation between Amal Khalaf and Adelita Husni Bey, featured in the most recent issue of BOMB magazine. One point of particular interest to me involved discussion of the work of Italian anthropologist, Ernesto de Martino. The second paragraph is a paraphrase of de Martino.
The sign of life.
From this cocoon
I will burst one day
a healed woman
to carry the babies
inside a new dream.
We will walk
toward the seven
mountains again,
no longer in terror
of Time.
***
Inspired by Toni Morrison: “One looks to history for the feel of time or its purgative effects; one looks through art for its signs of renewal” (from “The Future of Time” in The Source of Self-Regard).
To frame what moves.
The bend of years is partial, a pockmarked continuum of dropped stitches against the fast-forward spit of a seventh-inning pitcher known for curves.
This made us cling: to the bodies of pets, lovers, the photos of children––ours, the ones we had been, the ones we never knew, could not remember, and the new dead.
We could not name our joys, only the pause between days in which we called our exiled silences back home to hang them on loops of the threads we meant to weave back into place, somehow.
My daughter is sleeping, and I want to cup my hands around her face, to frame for a moment what won’t be kept, to hold inside the curve the stillness of an original praise song, the only one with any bearing and still it won’t quite hold. Look at you. There you are. Come here.
The volume of shadows.
Two trees, one real enough to be seen, another seen well enough to last the length of a dream. But neither can ever become real. This from Hannah Arendt, and now the alarm can’t wake me.
The sun is visible one moment and then less so in another but indicates nothing of sorrow or regret. It offers shadow. We see by the shadows. We measure them. Once, someone considered their lengths, prone to stretch and collapse, and asked, what do they mean? A decision was made. These mean Time.
Numbers were assigned to the lengths, etcetera, etcetera–– but some of us here, so often delayed as measured against a standard pace, retain some skepticism about these systems. Of their presumed inviolability, a separate matter from their usefulness.
Trees cast long shadows and are associated with knowledge and wisdom, and yet standard practice rejects the idea of arboreal sentience. In a world bent on speed, stillness so often gets mistaken for stupidity.
But only in stillness do certain questions show up. What is the length of the water on a face, bearing witness to the beginning or the end of a life? And the volume of this shadow of the solitary pilgrim on the long road in late afternoon?
I still don’t know. But speech is an act of making concessions. Consider the first lessons of any language not inherited. Standard practice begins with the basics for moving through a landscape: Hello. My name is. What time is it? It is an o’clock. How are you?
The last of these is the least amenable to explanatory language, wanting only touch and smell and song.
***
I came across Arendt’s words in an epigraph to Ann Lauterbach’s Spell. My italicized presentation in the opening lines is a paraphrase.
A video reading of this post appears here.
What moved us.
And so, we went on, seeking shelter, seeking rest. We were mostly moved by wants––fears too, naturally. We guided our rafts between dangers and needs until the distinctions between shores began to blur.
But sometimes in a quiet hour, there would come a recognition. The want had no end, did it? It was as vast as the sky we beheld at night, and just as impossible to see. It was here and it was forever out of reach. There was nothing to do but move toward it, singing the testimonies of our weaving hearts.
Later, another recognition: nothing survives, does it? No single creature. And yet, we sensed this constant drum at the center of each gathering. Only this luminous moment––yes, even of our death––has any life. We gathered to witness and were moved to move again.
At the harbor.
Over loose chords at sunrise, we watch him still watching the sea. We whisper Go and morning comes, full and fast with its heat. When morning comes, full and fast with its heat, he stays and seals bark over car horns. Planes tear the sky with him still below it.
Horns in his head, below the tearing sky, he always wanted. Understand? To dream himself a god to fall from the wounded sky like a childhood mango––
to fall again
he wanted
from the sky––
But there is no going back how you came in from a drop like that so he will not go back the way he came. But what womb will accept a return? None, but there is room in the belly of the whale.
Here in the belly of the whale shudder boardwalk carts at noon while we whisper, Go as his shadow curls and planes again. His voice still mute, we goad the creatures to pull him back. Birdsong swells toward night––and some relief.
Relieved of his clenched fist, his own song swells near memory while not far away a table is set. But with the beard at his throat, he will not call. With the years in his throat, he will not come. Plane arrows fell daylight as the evening sirens shriek. With evening sirens shrieking enough arrows to end his days, by night we whisper, Go, and we watch him still watching the sea.
Go, pilgrim.
We try again. Then, Come, we call, from the sea. Who will wash you now?
***
Considering Time as a bearded man on a bench by the harbor, I imagined him being watched by his daughters, the Fates, at a distance. Known as the Moirai in Greek mythology, these sisters personify destiny.
Ancestries in spacetime.
The children of Time and Space had questions. These were about certain unknowns and uncertain knowns.
For example. Does this blind spot have to do with the invisible time in known spaces, or with the unseen spaces in measured time?
Well, one of us sighed. I guess you never really know your parents.
Space seemed to be always smoothing her voluminous skirts, welcoming us into her lap or brushing us off, laughing. When she stormed, she raged and we hid, but our shelters were only deeper folds of her.
Time was off somewhere. Running, she said. We wondered if he would come back, and she laughed a quake to cut the earth outside the window. When the dust settled, we would hide there, too.
A story waits.
Against a great sorrow,
the bowed body wonders,
which world, now?
Though we could not
unsee the bars
they only kept
the fleshed halves
of ourselves
while the rest
being story
tended to fly.
Which world, now?
its witness
in a narrow cage,
looking.
Still,
this sky.
With cephalopod.
I mean to tell you about the artist whose paintings, according to some, have a brittle, airy alloverness. How insistent they were, melancholy like the memories of a landscape.
I am thinking about the way that every human eye has a blind spot. How the blind spot, instead of appearing as a black dot in the vision field, is conveniently filled by a process of extrapolation, based on visual information at the border regions.
Taking a break from the paintings, I notice someone at the fountain, playing guitar. I would like to tell you about the poetic arc of the neck, leaning over the instrument, the taut curve of intention.
But I am distracted by thoughts of cephalopods. I have recently read about Otto, the six-month-old octopus at the Sea-Star Aquarium in Coburg, Germany, who was caught juggling hermit crabs. Otto was known to rearrange the contents of his tank to, as the aquarium director put it, “make it suit his own taste better.” Otto made international news for short circuiting the aquarium’s electrical system several nights in a row. It turns out he had learned to turn out the light above his tank by squirting water at it. It seems he did not care for the light.
Octopus have eyes like ours, but no blind spot.
Each arm has a mind of its own, unobstructed by central control. And now I cannot stop thinking about this looming intelligence of the sea, how when we’re not reminding ourselves to fear its presence, we are replacing it with a cartoon caricature.
I want to talk about the art of this cephalopod, the poetry of its symphony of intelligent parts in motion. But between this blind spot and the limits of my language, I cannot take it in.
***
Otto’s story is available here (to Telegraph subscribers). I found it in James Bridle’s Ways of Being––Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence.
