writing Archives

Sea, Woman

Conversation at land’s edge.

After we dream, we will meet by the shore.

Sister, do you see me? Let us be counted among the living.

Then we will dive.

When they come to eat our images, they will repeat the old power play. They’ll try again, to douse our bodies in shame.

Hah! As if to punish us with a bucket of cold water! We’ll wave and smile, go back down.

But sure, we can read the signs. It won’t be long before they make their vengeance into law. It is decreed, they will say, as prelude. Then comes the next mandate about official attire.

An old story. I bet these petty tyrants could use a good dive. But they are too afraid, so they clutch their precious trinkets to their chest and pretend to avert their eyes. It matters very much to them, what we wear or do not wear.

So complete is their exile from any land, they relinquish their only birthright: the primordial cave of their mother’s body, the original canal of first passage, the ripe breasts from which they first tasted their own lives, where the membrane between worlds remained transparent, and the mountain of her form was the first ascent to some wider vista onto what might be, an impulse now degraded into mere collection of images to be held in place of first sight.

How are your eyes today, sister? Good, and look! Your skin has healed!

It is clear today, let’s get the boats, go back to that spot, remember? There was more than we could carry in our nets!

I will get the others. We will take the boat. When you see it is good, we’ll go back down.

I see you, woman.

It is good to be seen.

Let’s get the others.

***

Inspired by the Japanese ama, as photographed by Iwase Yoshiyuki and described (with stunning images) in this article. Many of the ama lived in communities with other women, supporting themselves and their families comfortably by diving for abalone, sea urchin, and seaweeds. Many women dove well into their nineties. The business was lucrative through the 1960s, after which it suffered the effects of climate change and overfishing. Chris Lee describes some of these issues in this Zenbird article.

Composure

Stage notes.

Sure, we are torn, but hold. Affix time around space, anchor it with the choreography of story. Knot the fabric so that a dancer’s shadow will cohere to the face of a witness. This is a movement, repeat.

Couple the lines of these bodies. You’ll need a strong adhesive. Consider music over time. Notice the architecture. Unless a body dances with the contours of a space, it cannot speak to a room. This means working with the furniture, the squeaking floorboards, the windows. Observe textures. How solid are any of these parts, and what are the sources of light? What are the colors in this space, and how does each sound?

How do you bind a sense of intimacy to one of staggering separation? When you learn this, you will be falling into each ascent, and then you will know you are dancing.

***

Inspired by the opening chapter of The Viewpoints Book by Anne Bogart and Tina Landau.

Liquid Cats

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.

Thoughts on a Train

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.

In Our Time

Among the living.

Sometimes, when it was hiding in our homeland, we would feel its aftermaths in succession, running our fingers along the seams of cracked earth. Means for making meaning, ever mutating, make new forms where the formers are buried. We move soil to make room for our dead. Seedlings, too––even then.

We could not call it war until we survived it. In the meantime, it was living. It was diapers and babies, earaches and crackers and someone still had to milk the cows, walk the dogs, and soak the beans overnight.

What did you do? They will ask us later. Possibly we will forget by then, how we folded laundry and clipped toenails. How sometimes, even then, someone would show up with a cake, and someone else would find plates. We would pass slices one at a time, among the living.

An (expanded) video version of this post is available here.

Waving

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.

Poet of Things

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.

Minor Challenges

Interrogations at terminal velocity.

First, a threshold. Questions about the roots of things tend to call common sense from the jury box to the witness stand. Being may be what knowing apprehends, but answer: can you point to an essence outside knowing? Yes or no.

No further questions, Your Honor.

Recess. Outside, cellophane angels drop into boxes. Here are the signs. We’ll attach them like armor, with the same duct tape used to silence those objecting to being objects of study.

Bells again, wait. We were at a threshold, trying to begin––what, though? And were we calling it? I’ve lost––the engine’s speed has thrown me back again, and as for the thread I meant to follow, before the angels and the tape, where now?

Hello, Stranger

For the love of seaweed.

There is the familiar arrangement of well-known symmetrical forms, the sort that draws comments of Cute, and Beautiful, exclamation mark. These are not that. Slick like raw meat, covered with film over knotty, bulbous appendages, they were dubbed the useless class of botanists. Perhaps it is the fate of things deemed useless, to be collected by fringe enthusiasts, who pressed them between paper, offered collections as gifts. They would sell them during the first world war, to raise money for wounded soldiers, and this is one of those things I can’t stop thinking: how when a continent was immersed in mechanized violence on a scale unprecedented in human history, some responded by collecting delicate specimens of fragile ocean life, to press between pages.

***

Inspired by Sasha Archibald’s Love and Longing in the Seaweed Album in the Public Domain Review.

Among Ancients

Old growth wisdom.

The Pando, a trembling giant, is the oldest living organism on earth––also the largest and most dense, its name means I spread, which it does over one-hundred and six acres.

How old? I wondered. Some date this clonal colony back 80,000 years, a moment that roughly corresponds to the first known human burial. This seems significant.

There is a woman who travels the earth photographing the old trees. Time is the trunk, she says. Notice the split, she says, pointing to one of the ancients. To accommodate the storm.

She looks and looks. In each careful frame, she watches the old souls, how they shape the light. Making a record, she says. Lest people forget who they were, in the event of further collapse.

In their presence, she finds a reminder. There is still grace. There is still beauty. There is something and it’s made of grief but also beyond it, and it is still here.

***

Inspired by this article on photographer Beth Moon’s quest to photograph ancient trees, and also by this articleabout the world’s oldest clonal colony of aspen. I learned about the earliest known human burial here.