What happens on a page.
When it comes to inking a cat, there’s no telling what will happen.
The long brushstroke of a tail; paint bleeds a fluid form, feathered fur.
Sometimes, the shape of a body can only be defined by where it isn’t.
***
Inspired by this article about Endre Penovác’s watercolor cats.
Song over distance.
In the event
that one of us
should slip from
the range of
contact, I want
to tell you that I
did not know if
my voice was
made of sound,
or if that was just
an idea, possibly
unsound, until
you answered.
I still don’t have
a word for the
color of that
last note, but
now I think this
is more likely
about the limits
of any language
seeded
in isolation
than it is about
a problem with
my eyes.
Appeal to the strange bird.
It has been a long journey, and you are far from home. People are talking. They call you lost, straggler, waif; accidental. Wonder.
Not to be contained by any ordinary mob, by what sensitive tentacles did you come, reading, as some say, the whole vault of heaven? What do you see, and why are you here?
Sometimes I think I have wandered so far that I forget my native tongue.
Stranger, please.
Speak.
***
Inspired by Marion Renault’s article in today’s New York Times: “These Birds Aren’t Lost. They’re Adapting.”
Over vanishing worlds.
The cynic will call your nostalgia an ailment, but consider the lost elegance of oaks, the grey slush of salted roads at the end of a snow day; purple ink of handwritten liner notes inside the plastic shell of a favorite mix tape, the pealing chorus of children screaming in chase, hiss of the downtown bus breaking, someone on the blue shag carpet of a den hooting about a bad call over a plate of cheese and crackers, beer, full ashtrays on coffee tables, end tables; world maps covering dents in the kitchen walls, and the way the aunts with their lipstick would be laughing over the salad spinner, at the last attempt of someone’s last date, to do what must have seemed appropriate at the time and a harmony of, I can’t even––over shuffle of silverware and children up and down the stairs like a herd of elephants.
If you hear that again, you’ll know that there will soon be a pillow at the back of your head and not this sideways neck, and no, it won’t sound anything like this dream when it’s over, but you won’t be sick with it either, just slightly jarred the way a body always is to find itself moving at high speeds over steel rails on land almost familiar, with a sense that it is always slipping out of reach before the witness finds the words, and maybe this is the tension the children were playing with, screaming at chase, whenever the it got too close.
A tribute.
When silence is betrayal, when uncertainty mesmerizes, a calling to speak can be a vocation of agony––so rejoice as well, because we are here in firm dissent, a new spirit among us.
No document from human hands can make any of the persecuted less our brothers––sisters, hear their broken cries. They watched us poison water, bulldoze land, and the children run in packs in the street, seeking food for their mothers.
Family, village, land––destroyed. The initiative is ours now, to somehow cease this madness, to be prepared, with every creative protest possible. To challenge the young with alternatives, each by their own convictions.
There is a deeper malady here, and the answer so readily dismissed as weak is love––courageous, relentless against fear.
Let us hope. We still have a choice.
Begin.
***
Exactly one year before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his speech “Beyond Vietnam––Time to Break the Silence” at Riverside Church in New York City. Today’s post is a tribute to this moment, assembled from words and phrases in this speech. Found poetry is one of my favorite ways to listen.
Regarding some equations.
On first introduction to the idea of convergence, it is natural to take an optimistic view. However, in certain cases it is clear with moral certainty that whatever else happens, convergence does not.
Consider subharmonics. Proving their bare existence, we begin with a theorem of our own before beginning any proofs.
Suppose a positive constant, some fixed function bounded by a given. From there, find a local maximum. Suppose the velocity of a given around a stationary point, spinning.
Consider any variable whatsoever, and let it be x. It follows immediately that the notation parallel to that for symbol y is denoted by an alternate symbol.
We are always supposing.
We suppose always,
assume the truth.
***
Today is the anniversary of the death of celebrated British mathematician, Dame Mary Cartwright (1900-1998), who is considered one of the pioneers of what came to be known as chaos theory. This exercise is a collage of phrases found in this paper she published in 1945.
When the ice thins.
After the long search, hungry; after securing the space and leaving the guards, after the long drop into winter shade with your muted heart, wake. Now emerge. Watch as you enter this peril to begin again, your life.
***
Inspired by this article about findings from recent studies on hibernation habits among bears and other mammals, with particular focus on adaptations to global warming.
Eschrichtius robustus
Grey whale sounds in the bell
of its gaze a wide doorway
to ancient lines of unknowns
too abundant to hold and
immune to abstraction.
Infinity accommodates
the witness, its abstraction
a handle to grip. This is
something
else.
Seen at a distance, near the shore.
Not yet. Sea from sky
wrinkles grey. They
neared the wave,
paused, the sky
cleared bars of
white flaming red.
Burning incandescence
became transparent,
rippling until the dark.
Now the light, one
bird, a pause. Chirp,
by the bedroom window,
this blind, blank melody.
***
Virginia Woolf died on this day in 1941. Her writing is celebrated for the layers evoked in her stream-of-consciousness narratives. Her work left a lasting impression on me, and I am eternally indebted to her for illuminating possibilities within language. The above is a found poem gleaned from the opening section of Woolf’s novel The Waves.
For Francis Ponge.
Let’s go to the mute world of things, beyond the reach of the tyrannical hordes and the hordes of tyrants-in-training with their drums set to the old standard, Idea! Idea! Idea! always keeping the beat of self-proclaimed righteousness.
I’d rather listen to the drum before it’s conscripted into the service of some march or another. After that, I’ll go visit with the soap, whose songs are vivid with suds, its cheeky humor always slipping through the grasp.
I speak for no one and would never presume to ventriloquize one of these––or anyone else, for that matter. But I am drawn to their ripe quietude, each like a waiting page, like the open hand of a familiar stranger, inviting the next dance. I am, after all, a creature of language, bound by fate to remake each daily scene one day at a time, and my humble purpose is for noticing what happens at the interface between these winking syllables and these never-ending odds and ends, waiting to be new again.
***
This morning I learned that it was the birthday of French writer Francis Ponge (1899-1988), an essayist and poet associated with the surrealist movement, who famously reimagined the inner lives of ordinary things in his work. I admire the gentle playfulness and generosity of his spirit.
