earthling Archives

Waters

In the intertidal zone.

After time and weather have eroded a vision to sand, its attendant body may be found standing with wet feet in the remains, facing the invisible tide. There is substance here, too, but no name. We pour our loaded attempts to define it into the sea and she absorbs them, one after another metaphor, including this one now, until it becomes possible to say that the one with their feet at the edge of a lapping wave is actually long gone, adrift––waving, or not, and we hold cupped hands above our eyes, saying back and forth, Look, look out there, squinting.

Dust in the Wind

Ecodrama with hero.

It’s a long road from dust to dust, and our restless hero, so often distracted by the next extraction, so quickly forgets. Besides, it’s not extraction, he would say, but acceptance of what is freely given––to those with the knowhow to harvest. And what fun, what wonder, what delight! And he’s not forgetting, not really, when there was nothing to remember in the first place, nothing he saw or knew beyond his shadow, how dramatically it would drape across the hills as the sun moved west, as if to affirm the fated nature of his progress, manifesting a destiny of unquestioned portent.

How often destruction looks like nothing more than the repetition of what is easy and familiar, especially with a hero onstage. How often the bodies long buried, though silent in their active vigil, are missed, such that if anyone were to ask about the presence of a place, an answer, if there were one, might be simply, nothing.

Not until it is dust again, or desert, will the dramatic music cue his memory back to what he always knew, himself at the center of so many adventures––and then to take his place in the most dramatic lighting, on the craggiest-looking rock it is still possible to sit on comfortably, elbows on knees and head in hands, to emit the hero’s cry, ragged with disbelief at such sudden and terrible misfortune.

Abracadabra

That was something.

How rarely anyone says, Now watch it disappear outside the performance of magic, and yet. This flame, once so bright, now gone. Where did you last see it? We can wave a hand, but can we name it? Right here, sure, but it wasn’t exactly touching the fuel. Neither was it not touching.

Maybe this is why we speak of the states we are or aren’t in, as if this being were one of these, firm and four cornered for collecting projections, as if they were shells on sand.

Clunk. In goes another. But what is the sound of disappearance?

Nighthawks

A tribute to Edward Hopper.

To show this felt presence, the undiscussed ghost, you let a part stand for some concrete whole, which stood in for the imagined whole we had once dreamed to approach, when the choir sang, Nearer. My God.

Consider your figure at a gas station, far from history, community, from any sense of connection to any other moment in time. There is no house, no other human being, not even a passing car in the frame. No trees live here, only this undefined scrub of the beyonds, leaning away. We can hardly see what he does.

Another, flanked by the shadows of buildings in a boomtown, far from any landscape, the hoe replaced by the rake. His action like a still, somehow the stuff of a life, but what is it?

Here is a particular American bleakness: the cold light, harsh angles, a mechanized blandness, a puritan stiffness of rigid self-containment, waxed fruit shining in a bowl, at the center of an empty room, beside the stylized body in space. We are far from her, and she is far from herself.

***

Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) Linda Nochlin’s description of the work of Edward Hopper in this article, “Edward Hopper and the Imagery of Alienation” (Art Journal, Summer 1981). Citing an observation by Brian O’Doherty, Nochlin highlights how “the alienation that viewers feel in Hopper’s pictures is not the simple alienation of human beings from each other, but of individuals from themselves.”

First Knowing

What powers may be.

There is knowing before proof, before language––a well of strength,

and a voice. All humans are creatures first, and does the oriole argue

for song? Is the song her testament? No, the song is what she is

singing, because she is.

For us, of course, sensation is not enough. But it is a useful power,

this measure between chaos and the beginning of self. How tragic

it would be, has been, may still be––when knowing is limited to

what can be readily explained.

Beyond what simply is, what is it that matters? This is not about

what is done, but how. Not ends but means. If there are no ends

but this, imagine the meaning of a life, this fullness.

Here is a power born of chaos and from it, music moves, and through

its force, a body may learn its dance. What songs are missed when

this is muted, what unimagined means, and into what might we

pass, from this dark hour?

***

Inspired by Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” published in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. And birdsong.

At the Shore

A conversation in the interim.

With the tides coming and going, finding the hidden treasure is often a matter of patience.

Which ocean?

This mind, or whatever you call it. There’s something I am trying to recover.

So now what?

Now I wait.

Hmm. It doesn’t look like you are doing anything.

Yeah. But remember those seeds we planted?

I love those trees! It’s amazing how they went from––

Yeah, but before all that, remember? After we planted, it looked like nothing. Root growth always does. But the tree won’t take if it doesn’t happen.

Wait. Is this about the ocean, or tree growth?

I’m mixing metaphors. It’s about learning to wait when you are trying to make a thing happen.

Got it. What’s happening now?

First Flights

Tracing the texture of a dream.

Here is a book of time, someone told us, to translate a voice in the heart of the sky. It reminded us forward to the hour of the story inside the essence of the dream through which we flew to the beginning of the word on a current of makers.

Sighing creation, we ran, particles of ourselves in waves at the shore, piling sand into a world we could live in, and we admired the work of our hands until the tide took it back.

We borrowed the insights of distant lightning to hold back the night, and with wet hands we peeled the dawn to eat it raw, dew dripping from our laughing chins.

Reverb

Sound bodies.

Break in two directions, a fork in the tuner. Between the moment and knowing, this ear: feather, canal, chamber, drum, window. It sounds.

Like? The echo of a summons, an access, a mode, rooted in another rhythm.

––No, not another. Also, here. One sighs out sound through saxophone, another finds what already is, moving hands over strings, keys. Also, hear: wing against air, what enters and exits an alley, the joint between the next step and the road.

What mediates the muttering storm over a body but the tools it makes or finds? All that shatters can also pass: through a body’s channels, into some semblance of harbor–– to these ports of ear, skin, breath. To dig is to become bodily implicated in the soil, mind and mud continually passing through one another, folding into braided bars of birdsong and the cadence of calls back and forth between creatures in and out of doors.

Here is the universe in a time of rain, a song line from the crown to the roots, alive with noise.

***

Inspired by Mary Pinard’s article in Interdisciplinary Literary Studies: Alice Oswald, Voice(s) of the Poet-Gardener: Alice Oswald and the Poetry of Acoustic Encounter, particularly Pinard’s reference to Oswald’s “echo-poetics.” The italicized phrases above come from Oswald.

Muttering Thunder

Music lessons with the rake.

The poet likened gardening to an act of listening. Poets are known to do a lot with the old gardening metaphor, and she resisted this. Nothing was like a garden, not really. Not when you waited. Not when you took its music on its own terms. She called the rake a dew’s harp and her favorite instrument. The method for playing it meant finding what was already there, which is the opposite of working it into something else.

***

Inspired by the work of Alice Oswald, particularly The Thunder Mutters: 101 Poems for The Planet.

Earthling vs. Surrender

Earthling may not know why she is waiting. But sometimes it’s like this when the only thing to do is sit and be.

In this scene, earthling doesn’t look so hot. It appears that earthling is just very tired. Always seeking, always questioning. Always trying to figure things out. Earthling gets like this from time to time. They are good at getting things done, but sometimes the thing to do is something else. Earthling is stubborn and sometimes gets tunnel vision. On such occasions, wise woman may visit.

[Enter wise woman. She finds a bedraggled-looking earthling, walking in a dazed manner like they have forgotten what it was that they meant to do. She approaches gently, waits for earthling to notice. Earthling is preoccupied, so wise woman speaks first, placing a gentle hand on earthling’s back.]

What do you do when the walls are breached, defenses crumbled, when strategy is suddenly a moot point?
I shall defend!

No, listen. I just told you that your lines of defense are gone.
Oh. Then I shall get away! There are lots of alternatives. Just look at this list!

It’s silly to run at this point. Where would you hide, you and your long list?
Well, then. I shall rebuild!

Sure. Maybe, but you’re still without walls for the time being, aren’t you?
Sigh. Damn, you’re right. Well now what?

Just wait.
And?

Sit.
And?

Listen.
That’s not very much. I prefer lists. I like to cross things out, one by one. See? Post blog, get groceries, send that email you don’t want to send, check that email you don’t want to read, remember to run, walk, or swim in body; remember to call, remember to read for restoring of soul, remember to sit so as not to forget point of connection between body and soul, mind and everything else; remember to remember, remember to forget.

Dear, just stop.
Stop what?

Doing.
Doing what?

No, just stop doing.
And?

I already told you. Just wait.

[Earthling may not know why she is waiting. But sometimes it’s like this when the only thing to do is sit and be. She’s practicing.]