Against collapse.
A single wanderer creeps from a hollow to the wild purple bloom, the yellow cluster, to fall asleep, pollen-drunk in what I like to imagine as a kind of ecstasy. But I don’t know how long he has been at it, looking for the others, reading the air for the compass dance to bring him home.
The volume of shadows.
Two trees, one real enough to be seen, another seen well enough to last the length of a dream. But neither can ever become real. This from Hannah Arendt, and now the alarm can’t wake me.
The sun is visible one moment and then less so in another but indicates nothing of sorrow or regret. It offers shadow. We see by the shadows. We measure them. Once, someone considered their lengths, prone to stretch and collapse, and asked, what do they mean? A decision was made. These mean Time.
Numbers were assigned to the lengths, etcetera, etcetera–– but some of us here, so often delayed as measured against a standard pace, retain some skepticism about these systems. Of their presumed inviolability, a separate matter from their usefulness.
Trees cast long shadows and are associated with knowledge and wisdom, and yet standard practice rejects the idea of arboreal sentience. In a world bent on speed, stillness so often gets mistaken for stupidity.
But only in stillness do certain questions show up. What is the length of the water on a face, bearing witness to the beginning or the end of a life? And the volume of this shadow of the solitary pilgrim on the long road in late afternoon?
I still don’t know. But speech is an act of making concessions. Consider the first lessons of any language not inherited. Standard practice begins with the basics for moving through a landscape: Hello. My name is. What time is it? It is an o’clock. How are you?
The last of these is the least amenable to explanatory language, wanting only touch and smell and song.
***
I came across Arendt’s words in an epigraph to Ann Lauterbach’s Spell. My italicized presentation in the opening lines is a paraphrase.
A video reading of this post appears here.
What trembles.
Consider all this a precursor, the artist was saying, to work in another medium. I wanted to begin with some questions, she told us. I was talking to a friend, she said, as I am now––and the friend, these friends, had certain questions. These questions encouraged me, she told us. To keep looking, you know. With these hands.
I was trying to make something, to see it. There is a way to thread a map of layered memories so that knots are formed at the points of collision. There is a way to see the knots as what hold the web together.
Of course, they won’t hold still, so it is not clear yet, but I can see how the tendrils of these maps might thread together, suspended in ropy intricacy as though in branches above us. How we might assemble beneath the canopy, looking up.
It would be so much that we would have no choice but to return to a preverbal state with sounds and textures and smells and a sense of being in one place expanding out and then back between carryings, and no one can ever describe what happens in this state, when the tremble of memory is soul.
Our tumbled shards.
sounds called what we would not say
until the shadows in our ears besieged
our remainders we screamed
for their release but they stayed
laughing into our wet faces
we could not see them
or our faces where we stayed
the stank breath of death rot
creeping through our breaths
stopping the songs
we meant to sing
of how we flew
after scratching our snakeskins
we were removed and outside
we could not hear the songs
in the street as the dragon still
spread the photos called
our monsters out
to hush them back
Time ran off
we had the babies’
toothless mouths looking back
lining their faces in half-moons
on our beds and with them looking back
we kited from the cells anchored
by the buds of lost mothers in our teeth
to one day fit ourselves back
into homes we had once carried
on our backs before we left
the sea
before the after
we left it
back there for the
sea
On what is good and lost.
One theory is that you know you have arrived when you can get yourself good and lost without worry over getting home. This assumes no one is waiting for your arrival, or the meal you would make, or the rent––difficult to pull off in a given day, and yet in the suspended space of making what we make, I suppose it happens all the time. But just as I am starting to think, here is something, I am back to thinking of the birds falling from the sky, whole flocks of them discovered in the aftermath––but also once a snowy owl, living, in a tree near the local library, and the punk defiance of the tiny nest that once appeared on the electrical box, and the lizard that looked back as we crouched to see him beneath the cabinet, the cat and I, and maybe the point is only to lose the trepidation over being fatally human––into a wider web, woven of strands this limited sight is still unable to detect.
The shape of things to come.
You seek to make art as event, not product. What happens, you wonder, when you open clay with found objects? Here is a sweater between God and your mother, and here, another mouth. Open, your hands whisper, open. Now an old bus shelter, fused glass. Look.
What is it? someone wants to know, in an unintended effort to avoid the long look, the absorption into the blobby forms that melt and lean into one another, a gathering of materials in various stages of becoming.
And what else are we, but these bubbling amoebas, opening and melting and falling endlessly into each other, in defiance of the neatly angled forms we keep meaning to hold?
***
Inspired by the work of Jessica Jackson Hutchins.
Anchoring breath to breath.
If time is the rhythm of a group, breathing, consider the befores an inhalation. When tomorrow comes, we will exhale; and again, and again.
How different this is than the model of the pointed arrow, to pierce the next flesh of its landing.
If time is the rhythm, it is now, an anchor point that moves nowhere, holding the beat of our breath.
When despair is beside the point.
What is needed now is a bravery reason can’t summon, a hope that persists beyond all rights to it; a solemn acknowledgement that our despair is none of our business.
The greater the possible effect of our actions; the less we are able to see it. When senses become myopic, only imagination will do. It seems our capacity for fear is too small, outstripped by the magnitude of the moment. How strange, to need the courage to be frightened; to frighten thy neighbor as thyself with fearless, stirring fear. To understand how fear for is distinct from fear of.
Camouflage, once needed to hide from an enemy, now prevents the actor from knowing what is being done. Strip meaning from language and the lie no longer needs a disguise.
Let us remember, repeated frustration does not refute the need to repeat the effort. Every new failure bears fruit. Instead of deferring to experts, may we collectively interfere with established pretenses of expertise.
What would happen, one among us asks, if you dared to make yourself as big as you actually are? And what could happen, echoes another, if we do not?
***
Inspired by (and with borrowed phrases from) the philosophy of Günther Anders.
Notes for a community chorus.
Like this, she said, hands open, singing. Gonna let it move me, she sang, and we followed, fingers splayed and pressing into the space of the circle we made with our attention. Now stir, she said, and we did, and it stirred us up.
Let it come, she sang. We laughed, cried. Feel this, she sang, and by then we couldn’t help ourselves because our centers had shifted to the space between us, and it was this that we pressed with our open hands. It was into this that we poured our voices, surrendered our attentions––
And we held it like that, stirring and singing together, here. Something shifted, and we went with it.
Life, she sang, let this life.
The artist makes room.
Your aim was an art that would not behave as art. While dying, you made your untitled rope piece, layering industrial latex like paint over string and wire suspended from the ceiling. It resembled a decimated fishing net after a storm, or the work of an overworked spider gone mad. You welcomed unseen others into a shadowy space, inviting us to attend to what crawled, flickered, and flashed. You did not specify how long to look, or where. How is it possible, we wondered, to feel so in the way in a mostly empty room?
Touch, you said, and meant it. Who could do that now, with all the insurance? Come in, you said. But try another door. You left it to us to find it. There are other openings, you said, and more hollow spaces than we were accustomed to noticing.
What do you know? One skeptic asked and you said Nothing.
***
Inspired by the art of Eva Hesse, and by Mignon Nixon’s article “Eva Hesse Retrospective: A Note on Milieu,” (Spring 2003 in October).
