Tag: transcendence

Acrobats

Playing chase.

We knew better than to argue but we couldn’t help resisting certain distinctions between the sublime and the ridiculous, laughter and horror. Awe and dread. It was all of these and everywhere at once, and they scolded us for laughing at the wrong times.

When was the right time? we wondered. But it was always not yet. So much applause everywhere for the questing hero, but our supple forms learned something else in those years. How accepting and bearing what may come might be wild acts of giving. It was impossible to wait, but we loved our mothers.

Ashes, ashes we were all arcs and curves, falling down and back again, swinging between force and grace, dance and non-dance, gravestones and oleander, the bright horizon, and the way it shattered in the spray. Rose quartz and granite, sand. You, and your eyes. We played at not blinking until we lost again, shouting I won!

Careful, the greybeards would say as we ran back out into the cold. You’ll catch your death. But it was our lives we were after and death was the feathered brush at the base of the spine, coming hard and we could hear it at our backs. We played at tagging it into a temporary pause but then it would turn, and we knew.

Run! We called back and forth to each other when the only response was fast as you can.

Time’s Witnesses

Records of cross-examination.

The first thing we grasped was that we were made of one part here and another just outside us. The next was that Time was made of more than one kind of stuff. Now it held us; now it was a river beyond. Now an elaborate ice castle, now air and what flew on it. Then it was in us somehow, overlapping breath but more.

Was it a fabric? Some spoke as though it were something to be measured, conquered, won. But then, some spoke of nearly everything in those terms. Let time no longer be imposed on us, said another, imagining it a medium to be shaped, like clay. Some had a bias toward thinking that the moment at hand was a new Time. For others, the future could not be born without events, and until these happened, none existed that we could name.

There was much we couldn’t name. This was not a beloved idea. Often, it seemed to be measuring us, and while many fell, none of these were Time. 

What the Poem Taught

How not to lose the life of life.

It is autumn, she said. And we are going to die. And we have all this choosing to do, with great stakes. And yet, simultaneously: this beloved, ill; this new child, this sudden bird, this love. How often we keep our thinking separate from what we know. For a simple reason: simultaneous submersion within all sensibilities is unbearable.

So, how to know anything? How to keep the life of life in life? Try not knowing. Try reading below the threshold of interpretation. Try burying the head, leaving only the ear. It is possible to transcend personality and arrive. At a shared physical understanding. These songs were always here to pull us into them and we.

***

The italicized phrase comes from Jorie Graham, whose work inspires this piece.

Homecoming

Notes for the weary traveler.

After the long travel, squandering it all in a distant country, there may follow an arduous journey home. Approaching return, cross-eyed with the effort of owning yourself, the threshold only looks like an abyss, but this step is no step at all. The space is no longer space. You dissolve, along with all the words you might have used to describe this–––no, not experience. Something comes to fruition, and it isn’t you.

***

Inspired by Thomas Merton’s “Pure Love” in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Renunciation

On the daily work of living.

There is an obscurity so obscure that it is no longer even dramatic. There is nothing unusual or heroic to celebrate in this way of being, because there is nothing to point to: no award, no arrival, no legacy. All of it is nothing, only ordinary work. And who doesn’t dream of freedom from this?

Except. If the people you love are in it, too, how will you continue to love them except by connection through this daily toil? The grind, my father calls it, and he is right. It grinds us from our husks, makes of our once-proud autonomies something else, something worth offering only because it is transformed. 

This is what makes it possible to say here, take this bread. Dearly beloved, it is the body I surrender, for you.

***

The italicized opening line is from Thomas Merton’s essay “Renunciation,” in New Seeds of Contemplation.

Service Work

Artistic practice as an act of devotion.

Here is a riddle, one said. 

And who do you think you are? asked another.

Only a servant. He was making films. The answer is unimportant.

Why ask, then?

There is a code in here somewhere. It is the mystery.

Which mystery?

The usual ones: possibilities of transcendence, rebirth, levels of existence. The role of ritual practice.

Such as?

Such as this one. Right now, I am filming a liturgical text. Contemplating the sacred frame by frame, but I am just beginning. He had been at it three decades.

Are you praying, then?

I call it excavation. I am a social worker with a background in archaeology.

But why?

The idea is to resuscitate the present. This is my devotion.

***

Inspired by an interview I read this morning, in BOMB magazine, with the filmmaker Ashish Avikunthak.

Ceremonial Forms

Lessons in morphology.

Had I not known what they were, the artist explained, I would have missed it. He was speaking of Ci Wara sculpture. The word means work animal, he said. Translated through his lens, it was a bicycle, reimagined. 

Examined head-on, the front view reveals nothing. But move with it. They would have appeared futuristic to me, the artist said, of the abstracted animal forms, had I not known their history.

Understood: everything as living. The artist is looking especially closely at the bodies of objects that have been discarded. There is added power, he says, in a ceremonial object. 

A reimagined instrument will play new music. The curves of a guitar body may become the outlines of limbs, ears of an elephant, cut fruit; a piano’s hammers now tail feathers.

The artist raises questions about what happens when the will of an outside force is enacted on a body, insisting some identity.

The artist raises questions about what may happen when the will of any other force is enacted through a body, insisting some other identity.

It calls to mind the phrasings of certain instruments, aimed after midnight into some loving cup, repurposed as an ear––at the suggestion made by another teacher at another time, consent not to be a single being, which some of the latent forms in the body of a vast system of roots might take as a command to go down, while others hear a plea to hold, and others as an invitation to fly.

***

Inspired by the work of American artist Willie Cole, specifically his 2022 solo show, No Strings. I heard Cole speak about the inspiration he took from Ci Wara sculpture in an interview curated by The Met. Also by artist, academic, poet, and theorist Fred Moten, who themed a trilogy, consent not to be a single being, after a line by Martinican poet and theorist Edouard Glissant, bent toward Moten’s purpose.