Category: Wonder

Fly Notes

From a wall in a room with cosmologists.

It was an enviable position, according to some. To be what I was, a fly on the walls in which they met. I was hoping to get out, but made the best of my lot, listening. If I did escape, I was hoping to at least be able to share an uncommon view of the cosmos, but my findings were inconclusive. 

Surely you must have heard something.

Well. They know it’s big.

There’s a start. 

When it comes to origins, they can speculate as to when, but have no idea what, except hot. In recent decades, they have at least become aware that they are only seeing what’s observable to them. One thing that’s really got some of them worked up is about how the further away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving. Away. From what they can see. 

Hmm, and they don’t find this discouraging?

Nope. They are very persistent. It’s adorable, really. And they have all these little naming games and such and can’t help characterizing all the forces with various personalities. Like, they have this one saying they love to repeat. Let me see if I can get it. It goes: Space meeting Matter says, “Move like this!” and Matter, meeting Space, says, “No, curve!”

So now what are they onto?

Mostly a sense that they are missing something. That it’s right there, on the horizon.

In the part that’s moving away fast, or the slower part?

I don’t know. That’s when they finally opened a window. 

***

Inspired by this article. And by the work of  Georgi Gospodinov, which often features sentient flies.

Working With Silence

With Jorie Graham.

Recognize this astonishment, this awe, this resistance to the hurry of speech. Its pressure signals the weight of what language battles. Here is the rupture, the interrupter; partner; opponent; interrogator; monument. Watch it.

To meet it on its own terms is to welcome some erosion. Each confrontation will put an end to the original witness, the one who meant to do the looking, and wrest from her womb a new creature, sharply aware of being watched.

When the word fists stop swinging, held behind the back, and the shouting mouth surrenders to its hold, what emerges? Here are the boundaries between flesh and time, sealed and open, the words we speak and those unspeaking us.

***

The above are notes while reading Jorie Graham’s essay “Some Notes on Silence” in By Herself: Women Reclaim Poetry (2000), edited by Molly McQuade. The italicized phrases are Graham’s.

Bonus Post: Inaugural Video

Notes for travelers in uncertain times.

Hi friends. I am trying a new thing. Often as I do these daily posts, something emerges that tells me it is part of another thing. When this one came up, I decided it was “The Unknowing Project.” Here’s an early iteration. As 2023 unfolds, I intend to do a few more. With love, Stacey.

Storm Photo by Anandu Vinod on Unsplash/ Score: “Alice in Winter”by Azure Instrumental via Soundstripe.

What the Poem Taught

How not to lose the life of life.

It is autumn, she said. And we are going to die. And we have all this choosing to do, with great stakes. And yet, simultaneously: this beloved, ill; this new child, this sudden bird, this love. How often we keep our thinking separate from what we know. For a simple reason: simultaneous submersion within all sensibilities is unbearable.

So, how to know anything? How to keep the life of life in life? Try not knowing. Try reading below the threshold of interpretation. Try burying the head, leaving only the ear. It is possible to transcend personality and arrive. At a shared physical understanding. These songs were always here to pull us into them and we.

***

The italicized phrase comes from Jorie Graham, whose work inspires this piece.

Dear Creatures

For our moments of silence.

We remember. Despite some apparent determination to forget. How you were the first circles surrounding our centers. Oracles, you carried messages, promises. You offered invitations. When we wondered about living, and how––and we were always wondering, you offered by example, some possibilities. Like this, you said, and this. There were so many ways. You embodied each fully, without hesitation. Only when we dared to return your gaze could we know ourselves. We were silent before the mystery of you, and you carried our secrets.

You had your holes and your nests, but we hardly knew where to rest our heads. You leant your bodies to our metaphors, our art. Some say you gave your blood, saying paint. You knew we needed symbols to live. 

We painted and dreamed with your bodies, but one day, one of us got carried away by the power of the symbol in his hand and forgot what he was. He went around in darkness, chanting “I am soul! Soul!” and “Let there be light!” I don’t need to tell you what he thought he was. He thought he had arrived by his words. But we had only ever known you in our silences.

***

Inspired by John Berger’s Why Look at Animals? (1977) in About Looking. And other creatures.

In Defiance of Taste

For the wild uglies.

What crawls and flies far from clean in its joy is often the subject of revulsion, but some forms of rage are raw enough to keep a crawling body painted with mud, and ripe enough with love to offer flight. One held nothing back of substance and much of detail and familiar story lines, to keep each mouthful tasting fully of itself. Eat, she said, there is enough for everyone, but cautioned that some would find at first bite, something raw enough to break the heart. It broke mine, she said, but then came a challenging joy. This angered some, but creatures of the earth are often hated for not making themselves more pleasing, more beautiful, for living just as they are.

Beyond Notice

A tribute to the unseen.

I can accept appearances without keeping them up, without submitting to your notions of their perpetual preeminence. Call me what you want––and this, too. I can absorb any label because I hold none with any pride. Some create awe, sure––like living, like mother, like still here––but this is an awe for what is given and just as easily removed, that I get to witness for the time being, this fleeting now, swelling in all of its fullness, even when the bulk of any presence, any matter, any one of us at any time––is entirely unseen.

Watchkeepers

Flight vigils.

We hoped our mothers would know flight and by extension, us. Each kept our imaginations of her wide wings in the same interiors where we had recorded her laughter. We hoped to read between the lines of her open face, a wild and raucous tale of our future histories, so unlike certain predictions and extensions of the moment. Done with those, we wanted a story for the ages we had yet to become. In secret, we wanted to become the ages––and the aged, eventually. Unsure how this could happen, we watched, guarding her worry, wondering what else she did not say. 

Reverb

Congregation of avatars.

The winged woman sang our songs and told us our stories. When she called, we were waiting to answer, and our voices were unlike we had ever imagined they could sound. We were butterflies, manta rays, fish––circling her in this song. Everything sacred was what we could touch and witness with our own eyes, and none of us could bear to look away. We looked at her. Singing, we beheld one another in that space, in that light, in the place where she called us together, and no one wanted to leave.

***

Inspired by this article.

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