Tag: love

on making

what we mean to remember

I have been meaning to write a note here for almost a week now. It is Memorial Day in the states, which might occasion a purposeful message of solemn remembrance to honor those who lost their lives in service. A day for remembering fallen soldiers, visiting cemeteries, offering commemorative words. Mine would be inadequate today, so I refrain. 

Also in the states, this is the holiday weekend that traditionally marks the opening of summer––barbecues, beach trips, and quite a few celebrations. My love’s birthday, my daughter’s close-friend’s quinceañera, and my brother’s wedding.  In preparation for the wedding, I  spent some time extracting stills from a video slideshow of my grandfather, who died of old age over a decade ago. Several of these photos featured him as a smiling young man in his WWII-era Army attire, complete with wool coat. The photos I had were all black and white. But for him, those moments happened in color.

The federal holiday means schools, government offices, and many other locations are closed today, so for me it’s the first moment I’ve had in almost a week to catch my thoughts in any meaningful way. It’s a chance to nurse a cold in bed instead of rushing to work jacked up on caffeine and Sudafed. And, now that the festivities are behind us, to try to remember what was happening on other planes.

I opened Nelle Morton’s book of essays to a dog-eared page from “A Word We Cannot Yet Speak” to find this line: As fire is known in the burning, not in the ashes, sight is known in the seeing, not in the eyes. This feels relevant in ways I am trying to access through my stuffy head. The essay is about bodily understanding, the kind often maligned for being associated with women and other creatures outside the traditional loci of Western power systems. 

When I opened my notes this morning, I had a sense of wanting to have something to say, but feeling only a dull, achy buzz. Buzz is the name of our cat who has been suffering an ailment that has been mysterious and worrisome in recent days on top of everything else. This morning’s online vet visit offers hope, which is much better than enhanced concern and nothing. 

And yet. I have no meaningful note. All pain, all ache. As it was in the days leading up to the weekend’s events, in no particular way other than how it is sometimes, except that it was time to focus on joy and gratitude for beloveds and friends, for family and love, enthusiasm for the occasion to celebrate together, laughing and sweating and spinning on the dance floor, all I love you! and Don’t go! and You have to stay! until eventual hard-crashing, headache-nursing, morning-after commentary, limpid with excess, a time to acknowledge the sore throat and sneezes are not, as I was claiming earlier, from laughing so hard while responding to insistent protests of,  Stay, stay! Don’t you dare leave!

Now it’s quiet. I try to collect things. I make a list. Back to work tomorrow. Try to remember.  I follow the cat with a warm washcloth, apologizing between bouts of treatment. What was I doing before? With such urgency? So close to something I was meaning to carry through. I was thinking, just a little longer, stay, before it went.

i dream of possibilities

in atmosphere

if cessation of air then
if balloon i can hold it maybe
if i can carry it over
if you catch (if you see me)
if in what happens after that i may remember (that point)
if what pierced was the inlet of air (and not skin)
if remember
if i ask you will you (try please)
if to prevent this you may (show me)
if i am breaking and fear (to remember how)
if whether an alternative (or what?) ever was
if can be helped
if this breaks everything open in the end
if asking you where does that leave me or us standing
if to this question one answer is back to the floating again
if dizzy just remembering that vertigo and
if terrified to go so far and high so fast
if needing help at altitude will there be any or only the snipers again
if alone losing air at that distance will there be others
if so and we burst at those heights will it matter
if skins gone
if breathing
if not something
if i knew i could explain at lower elevations
if i go i need to tell you i have tried before
if i go i need to tell you i am scared
if i go listen i could not speak before of this fright it had more dimensions but
if language would allow i would have shared with others i saw shaking too but
if this is time for turning to another, calling hold
if i or you should try
if what is here
if when is now
if_____then, how?
if i am running out of pen

big top

spectacle, witness, aftermath

The circus men came and went and we listened. As women, we had been raised to believe that some sanctity was possible in the sacrament of attention––that attention, once received, could be enough to transform its object.

They thought we were applauding the show. We were only waiting for them to drop it. The babies were coming with open mouths.

My grandmother taught by example, how even if it hadn’t quite happened in our lifetimes––yet––it might be possible to pull them from themselves by sheer force of love. They had spectacles to offer and we watched. The point, she taught me, was not to feed their illusions but to draw them away from what deluded them, like pulling the host away from the poison to salvage what you can when it becomes clear that the poison has become the central mass. The power of the constant gaze could do this, she believed.

My grandfather was full of wind and she loved into him; it was wartime and every would-be flying man was still charging toward the sun. The war disappointed, but not the rewards that came after if you managed to come out alive; annual parades guaranteed a lifetime supply of empty praise and then with a home of his own and her inside to keep it, he sold used cars, telling stories again and again. She held on and listened, placing his vitamins in a plastic case, ordered by days of the week. 

She listened until she died of a rot too long ignored. She had held it in her gut for years, in silence as we do when we know this is no ways good but knew first to keep looking in love. Not for something coming, but as an orientation. Hope is a posture. Hers never slouched. 

Dammit Bob, she used to say, and I thought the rest of the sentence had something to do with how she wanted him to live already and cut the crap. His best, when he managed to pull it together, was still so much less than she saw in him. He walked around with his toolbox measuring to no end and schooling any woman within earshot on the importance of the level. A child on each hip, she waited until he left to patch the holes in the walls and mend whatever needed repair after he was through fixing, and she nursed the babies and until she died, repeated, don’t get caught up in ideas, they take you nowhere in the end. She was on morphine in the end. 

They said she went peacefully, for living had taught her nothing if not to die well and full of grace. He didn’t last long after his Grace was gone, with no one left to wait for him to come around to living. Then he gave up the ghost of his self-importance and he followed after. What remains are the shadows of a collection of statues, looming. He never grew into them. They are still here.

The Sea of Men

Shapes, shifting

In one account, she is the wine-dark carrier of iron-laden sons to strange shores of inscrutable speech. Often, she swallows them whole. In another, she is moved by strong wind through the night to become a wall. Then she falls and swallows them whole. 

The yet-to-be swallowed write of dreaded creatures in her waters, of her treacherous subtlety, and speculate that what she is keeping from them is surely a clue to their deaths. 

When they get like this, she sighs another tide and wonders with a bright bloom of red, if any of these can remember beyond the tales of monsters and bewitchers, how once she beheld him from below where he stood, looking, and offered back to him the shine of his own face.

Hallowed Passage

Dear friend, with birds

When we last spoke it was to let you know I wished you love. I meant it, knowing we would not speak again while you were in that life, warring at the end, to defend your fortress.  

I hope that when you went, the solace of those trees you watched, with whom you often grieved, gave you shade and took your sorrows. I hope the birds were there too, singing, and that at least one of them gave you a good and hearty laugh. 

Love is funny how it moves and feints. Those beams when they come can sometimes be too bright to bear. I hope that in that company, that laughter, that light breached your heavy walls, and took you in. I think it did because I am seeing you again.

Legacy

With Salarrué.

Like a Polaroid shaken in the light, details of the once-beloved artist emerge. This happens just before the record of his life is erased by time and war. His students remember.

He was called unclassifiable, a sphinx without a riddle, a gentle man uninterested in greatness. He loved invented worlds and claimed Atlantis as his home country.

He loved the people of the land and not its titles. And they knew it.

***

In honor of the birthday of the celebrated Salvadoran painter, writer, and philosopher Salvador Salazar Arrué, better known as Salarrué (1899-1975). Reed Johnson’s 2005 article in the LA Times discusses a recent resurgence of interest in the artist’s life and work.

Sounding Love

Loud and fabulous.

You invited the children to make nametags with your childhood art teacher. You gathered seven thousand and assembled them to read, love thy neighbor.

You responded to requests that had been conditioned out of us when we were younger than these children. Such as, let me wear more sequins, doilies––dolls, too! Such as, why can’t my Tuesday skin be a pelt of dyed furs? Such as, I want to put that gramophone on my head! And tomorrow, may I wear only living birds.

Let the wild things out, you implored, let’s have a rumpus! Then, you dressed your dancers with the care and intention of the samurai preparing for battle.

When you called us together, I thought I loved my neighbor well enough, but my gestures were anemic. I only knew this when you dressed me in a costume of inflatable lawn ornaments, and my neighbor in a rainbow of Fraggle Rock fur, and invited us to dance. 

You amplified the drums and brought others in, and we threw our arms wider in our spinning, to compensate for the weight and momentum of our fabulous suits.

Love louder, you sing, louder now––all in!

***

Inspired by the purpose-driven work of Chicago-based artist Nick Cave, who is best known for his soundsuits.

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?

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