writing Archives

On the Bridge

Portraits in courage.

Waiting, somebody asks, what will happen when the silence breaks? When the sirens come, so does this announcement: turn off the lights, gas, water. Take what you can. At the window of the train, a hundred Pietàs. Close up on camera, the most hunted among them is refusing his chance to escape. We are here, he says, both reminder and call. Here, Our weapon is truth. This is our land, our children, our country, he says, and we will defend. Civilians run to the wrecked tanks in twos and threes to pick up armor. The defenders are on the bridge. The attackers are coming soon. The living pass the dead, over the river. The bodies need collecting. The holes need repair. Certainty? A grandmother laughs. That’s only for the dead, she says. And then, as if remembering, she crosses herself, and says an inaudible prayer.

***

With love for all who are persecuted by greed, tyranny, and war, especially the people of Ukraine in this historic moment. A prayer for your safety, peace and continued courage. May every witness to your example take heart, and offer it to others in your name.

Go Down

Waiting in the dark.

When it came time to hide in the cellars again, in that dark damp we all feared, some would not go. One of the grandmothers said, I’d rather die in my perfectly decorated flat. Whatever moves in the dirty basement she will not enter, it does not scamper like the mice in the attic. What moves here is slow like the drips from the faucet. There are candles, flashlights. Faces glow against the screens before them. Some close their eyes, try to sleep.

Do they dream? Fitfully. The cellar dreamer knows that the walls of the cellar are buried walls, with the entire earth behind them. Tell me, where is the fear that does not become exaggerated? The cellar becomes buried madness, walled-in tragedy. When they say take shelter, we wait.

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The grandmother’s protest is a reference to Nika Melkozerova’s recent guest essay in the New York Times. Other italicized lines are from Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space.

Guidelines for Composition

For the floating worlds.

The idea is to liberate an artist’s power by saying, here are some patterns to work with. Here are some methods, and these can be learned. Sure, you can copy the old masters if you want, but this can be demoralizing, especially early on. Consider instead the play and placement of contrast, and the pictures of the floating world: eagle above dragon, forest among Atlantic cumulus. See them. Over time, an artist will better arrange lines and masses and it may become clear why the term “composition” is too limited. You can spend years studying the science of perspective, anatomy, history––and still manage to miss the essential element, Beauty. As in music, begin with simple exercises. Group a few lines harmoniously. Proceed step by step. This is how an artist’s power grows.

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Inspired by (and using phrases from) Arthur Wesley Dow’s Composition (1905), as featured on Public Domain Review.

Truth and Mystery

Creativity and dark ecology.

The other day I found some much-needed encouragement from one of my favorite living philosophers, Timothy Morton, in All Art is Ecological. With characteristic wit and verve, Morton observes that while the bend of the authoritarian machine is toward capital-T truth, the bend of an ecological society (of the sort that must begin to emerge if we are to survive) is toward a much more sublime, surreal, and shapeshifting state, of “truthiness” which necessarily elevates that which cannot be grasped. They have not said this (yet, anyway), but the strong suggestion through this reader’s lens is that pretensions toward capital-R real, like capital-T truth and capital-A authority, are necessarily lies. Someone whose every attempt at telling an honest story completely evades clean lines, take heart. As Lorca observed, “Only mystery allows us to live, only mystery.”

Winter Gestalt

Whispering landscapes.

Story of ages, these quiet ruins now submit to the embrace of twisted oak limbs. What solitude erupts through the ghosts of former sermonizers when somber winds replace old battle hymns. From twilight to light on this reticulated branch, snows drumming winter suddenly stop. What music now?

***

Loosely inspired by the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), whose work has been credited with capturing “the tragedy of landscape.” He is said to have inspired painters such as Dali, Rothko, and Munch. His Moonrise Over the Sea is reported to have inspired Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

Enigmas of Entanglement

The ties that bind.

If loving begins in recognition, then practice reading one another is an essential beginning, and a sincere effort demands that some limits be placed on noise. One of the effects of oxytocin, the bonding hormone, is to turn down the static so the neural signals––of, say, the smell of another’s body, or a distress cry––can come in clearly, which calls to mind some old questions about trees falling in the forest, and the health of forests and one another. If a cry happens and no one hears, what are we? Any loving observer, beholding another’s vivid hues, exquisite detail of sparkling eyes, wonder of resting face, music of laughter––will tell you, mystery. Only mystery.

***

Loosely inspired by Bob Holmes’ recent Knowable Magazine article, “Oxytocin’s effects aren’t just about love.”

Compass and Compassion

Reins, range, and possibility.

Considering the freedom of a given will, one might ask, which is it: from some impediment, or into some possibility? But here’s a tired habit again, the old insistence on one or the other: acting in nature vs. enacting Nature, and never beyond reach from creation, enduring the fractals of a multiplicity of loves, and the wounds a body learns to bear for their sum, ever toward some abundance of seeming opposites unveiled, this vast body assembled from so many shattered shards.

Opening Address

To the morning assembly.

Cat––

Bed, I––

Coffee, I will.

Sink, please help me.

Pillow, will you stay here?

Wonder, find me again in this haze.

Hope, flood through this dark space.

Heart, pay attention, keep watch, and remember.

Head, stop trying to lead and figure. You tend to get in the way.

Feet, hold still while I find the ground. Then get moving and lift me across.

Water, wash my tired eyes, these shadows beneath them.

Pen, carry on and continue to follow these invisible lines, trust the moving hand, however clumsy and dumb, though it keeps dropping the hold.

We are here today––

Begin again each time it loses the thread, and it is always––

We are here today to––

Dearly beloved.

We are gathered here to

meet these beginnings.

Probabilities

And other directional challenges.

If Dali’s thin silver spoon with its offering of arrested time can bend around a dark mass and still hold; if Magritte’s mountain can levitate and Chagall’s village can highlight the illusory nature of common words for direction: above, below, top, bottom––then there really are no end of possibilities for how a given story may move, fictions of today, tomorrow, and yesterday only rooted in the old habits, which are sometimes shorthand for myopia, and we could hardly help ourselves when it was still possible to paint time in a straight line and call it real.

***

Inspired by “Weightless Forms, Gravitational Forces,” Ch. 23 of Leonard Shlain’s Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light.

For Courage

An invocation.

Not fearless but moving through peril––not undone by it but doing. To draw from the reservoir that sustains any worthwhile action. To examine danger well enough to draw its portrait, and still move against it. Instead of blocking ears against its detailed threats, to answer them. To resist the urge to reel toward relief. To recognize impending death and continue to grow; witness destruction and dare to love; recognize enforcement of silence and dare to speak aloud. To refuse the given stories and unfurl your own myth, replacing willingness to die with courage to live. To bear the agony of doubt and raise it like a torch, toward some new beginning.