seen and unseen Archives

flightless

& unseen

Kitty recovers, and so do I. It’s the last week of school, a time of dizzy rush underscored by reflection. I think about endangered creatures. One among these is the flightless parrot of New Zealand, the kākāpō. Who, according to Māori legend, is a protector of the land. And I am thinking about the children.

A system built for speed cannot see the slow one, who never flew. Who, when hunted, knew to freeze. I think of her, now camouflaged in shadow—an endangered hush—now subjected to another survey. Intended to express how well we care.

But a check mark is not shelter and a rubric offers no refuge. How many shine like saints in the chill grasp of their handlers, being measured for extinction while staying faithful to their flightlessness?

I’ve learned not to trust anyone with a grand plan because I once had one, too. Now I only want to shelter who still lives. To protect a child’s right to become what they will, even if that becoming looks like myth, even if they call it pest.

I don’t know what school is, only what it is not. One metric involves how well a person can pretend to be a person deserving of award. But that is not the work.

The work is learning how to become, and some of the brightest know better than to obey.

Do it. Don’t ask. Shut up. Or we’ll fail you and humiliate your mother.

And in other news: Kids Fail Critical Thinking Tests.

Marcos liked to talk to old people. Liked to hear their lives. He couldn’t focus on any task that felt designed to domesticate his wonder. The first act of a critical mind is refusal.

Consider the ones who vanish as portraits in negative space: Now you see me. Now I disappear.

Now I am a vase, now I am two people kissing. Now neither. Now both.

You thought your five-minute survey could find me? Think again.

Ask me who I am before I speak.

Ask as if you believe I might not answer.

Ask as if you know the form of your asking matters as well as your question.

There is much I have not said. Not yet––and no, I do not plan to fly.

I live close to the earth, as I am, in these shadows, or I die.

The Invisibles

Here and now, unseen.

There are plenty of us floating around, unborn beginnings. We are translucent sacs, blooming bodies like the bells of see anemones. We pull substance into us and release, moving in a way reminiscent of flight but not birds, of flight but not planes, neither Icarus falling nor hero triumphant. We are the unrecorded.

Still Waters

With cat.

In the early morning, an hour for the dust, your altar, your black eye, long since healed, the ridge of the once-purpled nose still visible in certain lights. That weather is over now, moved elsewhere, but still you come to sit with it.

This morning’s sounds are birds and the laundry room just outside the door, and dogs after a passing truck. The phone rings at an odd hour and familiar panic crashes like a wave. But it is nothing, a pocket dial.

And yet, it means something to gather these nothings to the chest and hold. Either because unless I still do this, I am nothing––or because I am essentially nothing, and it is good to be among my kind. Probably both are true, but I don’t get to know.

So, I sit here with these nothings and now here the solid weight of this cat pouring herself into my lap, to hold and be held. She is someone, this cat. She won’t do this with anyone else. I think she likes that I am good at disappearing, too––into the bed, the chair, the book, the music, birdsong. And, when interrupted––gone.

She is a great teacher the art of emptying the form, so that the liquid of something else may come in. I have spent enough time with the form itself, testing its limits to see what it will take. A lot, it turns out, but for what? When those limits finally cracked, I felt something else move in. It will not be named so it is nothing, and here we are now, these insubstantial breaths our sum, and the sum of us nothing, too.

On the Lag

Transmissions among us.

A day of midnights, and we wanted the endless blue. We waited for the bodies to walk from the graves and when they did, we saw them as flashes of what we could not explain, would not mention. We were watching for bands of jays. We wanted, walking at the lake’s edge, escape. Escape! we said. Wild, we said, Untamed! Aspirational declarations, we did not know their substances and heard the dead sometimes like voices between sleep and waking. They offered up secrets, but we had yet to learn their language, smug visitors that we were, proud of our rage, our escapes, our untamed hungers. The rest was late and deep and went on mostly unseen.

Before Sky

When a bird

How often I wish I could tell you about this exquisite bird in such a manner that you might know her, too. She was here before me, before the shattering. Bird is an inadequate word in this context, but I use it because it approximates a reference to a creature with a beak and feathers. She was much larger than I am but bowed her magnificent neck to meet me at eye level. I wanted to look into those eyes endlessly. This seemed like an indulgent and selfish response to such an offering, so instead I started numbering her feathers. I recognized that this was likely an impossible task, especially for someone of my limited intelligence who lacked training and had neither tools or methods beyond the steadfast attention that had long been a symptom of what my elders gravely suggested was a somewhat outsized and possibly obscene capacity for devotion. One, two, three. . . I was at 13,426 when abruptly interrupted. An official voice demanded to know, What are you doing? but I would not turn my head from those undulating wisps. I meant to keep my count. Other things were shouted but I ignored them, meaning to hang on.

That is not, the voice insisted, real. I heard a click of metal.

What followed was not feathers, but sky. What ghosted through it has no pulse, no blood, no song. There is no after here and nothing to save by the counting. Only this continuance. I am rearranged inside it, but I cannot tell you how. I thought the words would appear at the end of that count and if it did not end that I would live inside the action of keeping it––forever, with no need for language beyond what was passing between the count and that vision in pieces. Now what.

In the Grasses

In the deep

Do I live? The question a reaction to certain ideas of the empire, on really living, as the saying goes. As promoted by the feathered peacocks, the shining kings, the swaggering killers. To whom the fieldmouse is prey or pest, and the whale is a mythical metaphor, a catalyst for the next heroic quest. But these sisters listen low to the ground, tending the dens where the babies wait, and swim beyond the senses of the sonars. Here are lessons in the art of going missing for entire seasons, keeping the camouflage close, and the beloveds closer, in the shadows of the seizing empire, feeding the budding bodies of the dens and depths beyond detection.

Life is something separate from announcements. And yet, what else are these words penned in the quiet (for now, it is early) room with the sleeping cat and the waking birds outside, in the moments before its time to give it all over to the tending of the mouths that come and go, the littles and the broken, the invisibles. Sometimes they are unsure if they live or will keep living. Sometimes I want to announce for them, into each: Live, live, live! These eyes get weary sometimes of the announcing I.

And yet, we live.

Occasional Speech

Long gaze, rolled tight.

On occasion we would notice it was possible to feel nearer to the ancient untouchables of distant tongues, then know them out of reach. Was there a time when the myth did not begin with broken parts? We could not say, knowing only heroes against horizons, shells shattering into light then back to dust––but first, another genesis. And then, and then––

Head on bed of moss before battle. Song. Oceans rising into dream without rest, yet the eyes still lift. Up and out they go, flying off.

But it was possible to learn to wrap the long gaze tight in folds of worn cloth while folding what was freshly scorched from the machine, to bring them up again to sort among the boxes and all still left unsaid between unseen and seeing.

Beyond Notice

A tribute to the unseen.

I can accept appearances without keeping them up, without submitting to your notions of their perpetual preeminence. Call me what you want––and this, too. I can absorb any label because I hold none with any pride. Some create awe, sure––like living, like mother, like still here––but this is an awe for what is given and just as easily removed, that I get to witness for the time being, this fleeting now, swelling in all of its fullness, even when the bulk of any presence, any matter, any one of us at any time––is entirely unseen.

Mother Wisdom

Reflections of the unseen.

To revise knowing itself, inverting worlds without end, you passed your liquid form easily between solid and mythic, seen and unseen, sacred and profane, in constant devotion.

First there was the Word, and you transformed what they took as given into what was not yet understood, with such deft agility that you were forbidden to teach. You continued invisibly to your invisible audience, understanding that your censors didn’t know how to look.

You saw no Eve, only Ave, and in her humility, no mortification, only the merit of a queen reigning over wisdom, co-creator with creation, who became a bird when needed for the purpose of the miracle.

You watched her fool the imagists, passing their censorious eyes by assuming the appearance of a vessel, passive and waiting for another will to be done, and you put a pen in her hand, beheld wisdom running from the fonts at her feet, made her dean of the house of intellect, reigning over the archangels, the non-humans, the insignificant wonders everywhere.

***

Inspired by the life and work of Juana Inés de la Cruz whose legacy defies categorization, except as representative of one of the most brilliant visionaries in recorded history.

Shadow Pictures

Hidden faces, inkblot revelations.

We saw them everywhere: the dragonish clouds, the roaring vapors, the faces in the sky. We found them in tea leaves, in spilled milk, on the unsuspecting canvases of our grilled cheese.

So much hides in an inkwell. We invited its contents out, dripping the unknown essences onto our waiting pages. We folded, pressed, and looked, and there they were, looking back. It comforted us somehow, to contain them, this bestiary of the invisible, the known unknowns.

***

Inspired by the blotograms of Justinus Kerner (1786-1862), made “decades before the Rorschach test laid claim to this form” as well as John Prosper Carmel’s “Bottentots and How to Make Them” (1907)––both of which are described in this article on inkblot books. And, of course, by the cloud-faces.