Meaning-makers in transit.
It wasn’t like each word was a moving train on schedule to a given destination, the challenge a matter of timing the jump. We thought our losses happened in our leaps from one to the next, like keys falling from sideways pockets.
But words themselves were the vessels, and they held their own gaps within them, and us too, but only tentatively, like so much loose change. So we were always falling out, into sky.
Holding beyond reach.
Near the end, you explained that something strange was happening. You had grown accustomed to a powerful presence. One day, without explanation, it left. What followed had more force but no face. You called it sound.
Later, people wondered if you were letting go or just beginning something new. But even when a body means to hold, so much of what happens slips through.
Before you left, you painted reminders. You pulled us into its rough color. You said, listen.
***
Inspired by the sound paintings of Anne Truitt.
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.
By the weeping wall.
Near the wall of weeping stones there are reminders. So much happens beyond the light. One day, someone decides that the wall deserves more of our attention, and we gather nearby. In the process, we leave parts of our lives in wrong places.
–––A full basket of laundry, for example, in the middle of the hallway in the courthouse; a bucket of dishes in the fountain of the business park. Someone thinks, why not? and we get to washing them and now all we need is food. Someone calls their cousins to bring the grill. It is suggested that here is not the place for that, and the suggestion is collectively ignored. Unbuttoning his shirt, a guard offers tables. They’re inside, he tells us. Groups bring them out.
We cover them with cloth, candles, decorative plates, bottles of liquid, prayer cards, poems. Now that we have altars, the musicians begin. Once we have music, others arrive. Now we are a large circle by the weeping wall. A naked child runs laughing to the nearby ducks, outstretched hands and fingers splayed. An official story has ruptured before its conclusion and it falls in the center of our circle, bleeding song.
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.
With Constantin Brancusi.
Those who tried to know you called you an escape artist, but your sculptures embodied pure presence. What presence, though? Something just beyond.
Here is prayer. Here is torment. Here is the gate of the kiss. Here the sleeping child, beginning of the world. Here the torso of a young man, boundary maker. Here is the eye. Enter.
You worked the substance of your bronze, polishing an intention. Let there be light. All my life, you said, I have sought only the essence of flight. You positioned your bird to catch the sun.
Some thought it was a tongue of flame, the point where fire becomes spirit. You said only that your task was to unite all forms.
When asked what moves you, you said, love. In this, you saw a light stronger than sun. Being loved matters little, you said. The purpose of a life is to give and give it continually, with all the strength of being.
Until? Until you are beyond this state of being. Until you are something else.
Like a bird? Someone asked. And another, like light? You replied only, like any One that contains all forms.
***
Inspired by the life and work of Constantin Brancusi. I spent time this morning with this article by Sidney Geist in Notes in the History of Art: Brancusi’s Bird in Space: A Psychological Reading (Spring 1984).
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.
With Abel Selaocoe.
Common knowledge says that you may do one or another, but not both: be a cellist or singer; a section player or master of ceremonies; a body traveling outward, or a body returning. But you say, all of the above and all at once.
Someone watching you with listening ears might hear a suggestion, that the answer to the question about finding home has something to do with floating above some commonly accepted boundaries.
What guides you, then? The voice, you said, guided by the music, will do what the body cannot imagine. Its music begins in deep time, the voices you draw from those listening become threads weaving us into its fabric.
Where now? We wondered. You offered a future, but to find it we have to go back, you said, way back to where the long-departed hold the seeds of another time. When you hear the music you will know, you said. It is singing you home.
***
Inspired by the music of Abel Selaocoe and the process he describes in this New York Times article, “Abel Selaocoe Finds a Home in Improvisation.”
On the question of how to respond.
A common complaint of today’s sighted: I can no longer bear to look. Someone proposes the role of the artist as scribe, as ear for the abused, writing backward into the dream, imagining that if one speaks the horror aloud, another might be released. From what is uncertain, but any horror is magnified when suffered alone.
The sounds a body makes in distress are the sounds it holds before language. Where pain shatters language, perhaps it is still possible to pick up the pieces, assemble some makeshift wordhouse again. To the challenge of yes but is it true, the only answer is a reminder back to an earlier truth about the basic needs of a body. One is shelter.
***
Inspired by Philip Metres’ description of the work of artist Daniel Heyman and others in response to torture.
Dreams in motion.
We can’t help ourselves, making languages and stretching limbs, stretching the language of our limbs. Done with demonstrating, now we suggest. Can you see us? If so, this show is for you.
The winds sweep our loves into rage and down the power lines until renewal floods again. Our prayers melt into play, a precise improvisation in real time, and we emerge from cocoons of private anomalies onto this collective stage––bending to remain unbent by those who cannot recognize a deliberate dance because they are trained to see only the march.
Fly, turn, arabesque, we fling mustard seeds into the bags at our waists, wasting not an ounce of what we saw beyond the veil, behind the curtain where they thought they were keeping us, while we were only waiting for our cue. Yes, we are still here.
