The silence between writing or artworks can get pretty heavy. And yet somehow, it’s not the kind of silence I need in these hectic and mundane days. My mind gallops through the same old terrain of ideas. Since I’ve already been circling ideas of beauty, untranslatability, absence and presence, memory and rootedness, I’ll post a poem that cuts to the heart of it, and yet leaves more to wonder. And hopefully a portal to wander through. As Eleanor Ross Taylor writes in a poem, “wandering is the only way out of this place.”

Peter Quince at the Clavier
Wallace Stevens

IV

Beauty is momentary in the mind —
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.

The body dies; the body’s beauty lives.
So evenings die, in their green going,
A wave, interminably flowing.
So gardens die, their meek breath scenting
The cowl of winter, done repenting.
So maidens die, to the auroral
Celebration of a maiden’s choral.

Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings
Of those white elders; but, escaping,
Left only Death’s ironic scraping.
Now, in its immortality, it plays
On the clear viol of her memory,
And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Today’s Advice: “Just be an eternal question mark: what…? why…? how…? And remember: that you can’t find the answers is an answer in itself. It’s you, all the life in you, straining to break out. Dive into an endless maze of wonder and surprise, then you too will have no end, and can exist forever. Everything is strange and undefinable. Let it dazzle and confound you!” Ionesco, “Exit the King.”

Even though I blame it on the lack of interiority from the flurry of holiday functions, the mediocrity of my last few posts has me cringing. So what else to do but follow the muse and hope I do better!

I found a moment of decompression yesterday evening and was brought to an inner stillness previously lacking. I was driving down the familiar, twilight-hued 101. The pinks, fading indigos, and a slash of crimson here and there glowed from a fallen sun, sliding behind my coastal range, the same tapestry of treeline that has greeted me my entire life.

Poignant was this deep familiarity, this love of my rootedness to this land. Even more stirring was that this was the backdrop for my visit to a friend whom I’ve known since kindergarten,  my diehard playmate and childhood best friend. My visit was to celebrate and greet her beautiful, newborn, baby girl — at the same hospital both our parents first saw us come into the world, and the same hospital where I saw my father as he left it.

Heidegger got in grave trouble waxing philosophically of the value of rootedness to a homeland during the time and place of Nazi Germany. But during moments when a ghostly memory waves at me when I jog the same reservoir trail 20 years later, or driving by the field of my first kiss, I see a glint of his insight.

Not all of these ghostly guests are pleasant, as visitors of all sorts are welcomed in the boardinghouse of life. Before the holidays as I was amassing gifts for my family, I drove by the exit to a man’s house where I had once visited to pick up used toys for the battered women’s shelter. Though neither of us wanted to catch eyes, as he was loading my car, we glanced each other long enough that he blurted out a recognition of me from my childhood. Instantly I remembered him, the regular referree from my high school basketball games. It was a moment of good memory, nostalgia almost, a hiatus from an excruciating exchange between the two of us.

But the greater narrative took back its hold: He was relinquishing toys to me, but also hopes and dreams and a connectedness that belonged to his only two grandchildren — recently murdered by his severely depressed daughter, struggling in an abusive relationship, who then tried but failed to kill herself. This stoic authoritarian of a man of my childhood was now a fragile spectre, I imagine battling existential and personal demons I myself could not survive. And we both knew his swollen eyes needed a solitary, private release, between he and his god, if there was one left. I was his unwanted memory, as he is now mine, and I couldn’t leave him fast enough.

Bachelard dedicated a long text to the memorial, but his emphasis was that our memories can takes us to a place larger than ourselves.  Back at the old familiar hospital, it’s almost like Bachelard stood over me holding my friend’s baby, only hours old on this prehistoric planet. He describes my inner reality, that place, or box he calls it, where I drop yet another memory into this native life: “In the box are the unforgettable things, unforgettable for us, but also unforgettable for those to whom we give our treasures. The past, the present and a future are condensed here. And so the box is the memory of the immemorial.”

Today’s Advice: “These fires have such a power over our memory that the immemorial lives dozing beyond the oldest memories awaken within us at their flame and reveal to us the furthest countries of our secret soul.” Henri Bosco, “Malicroix.”

The clear, winter skies gifted us a tenderly glowing, faintly slivered moon the last few nights.  And however arbitrary it is, the end of a calendar year provides a sense of ritual in which one can memorialize. And then forge silly little promises to oneself regarding food intake (in is more fun than out), physical activity (does swearing count?), less swearing (a deeply personal cause), and f’ing career goals (find one).

Somehow these resolutions rub up against a world that has its own plans. A world of uncertainty and doubt. In a class on Greek Tragedy, I showed my professor some artwork that used frail materials. Though he has dedicated his life to language, he is nonetheless economical with it: He stated dispassionately, “Fragility is a necessary condition for something in the future to arise.”

What instantly came to mind was that each moment, like the one right here, has to give way to the next moment, like the one right here.  And each moment started to feel doubtful. And then I felt naked to the world in my artwork’s inadequacy to convey this. So we sat in the “swaddling band of darkness,” overtaken by a semi-awkward silence because it was all too much to bear, really.

It is human nature to avoid fragility and its attendant vulnerabilities. But every moment of word-failing beauty, every curling ache from a chance encounter with a beloved arises from a mystery – not the known.  And certainly not from the expected or because I resolved of it.

Who knows what this next year brings? No one. Thankfully. Beautifully.

Today’s Advice: “To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances for which you were not to blame. That says something very important about the condition of the ethical life: that it is based on a trust in the uncertain and on a willingness to be exposed; it’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.” Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness

During a past art school critique, a professor declared in a sermon-like rant that the whole world works to shut a person down, close one off. He said that the artist’s job is to remain open, resisting that closing down with all of our being.

It’s a more difficult task than it sounds, as cynicism is a close neighbor to analytical thinking. And any time I think I know something, or expect something logically, as is irrevocably my human nature to do, I am not truly open to something being otherwise. And god knows, it is often otherwise.

Today is winter solstice, and a creative person can get pretty giddy with all the metaphors spawned by the idea of the darkest day of the year. It makes me recall an essay in a book titled, Findings, by the Scottish poet Kathleen Jamies. In it she takes us on an inclement dead-of-winter trek to a 5,000 year-old tomb, named Maes Howe, built under a grassy berm in the middle of a remote Scotland field. With Neolithic technology, Stone Age people of the area fashioned a soundless, light-less, insulated stone cavern to inter the remains of their dead. But during the few days around winter solstice, this dark place of the dead was designed with such engineering (and a sense of poetry) that “a beam of the setting sun shines along the passage and onto the tomb’s back wall.”

Just when I think I can relish all the freely flowing metaphors of her descent into this place, Kathleen Jamies stops me. Because just as it might be improbable to find a ray of sunlight in a place of utter darkness, a place of death, during the darkest days of the year, the poet discovers yet again, otherwise.

Upon arrival at Maes Howe, she finds the would-be dark, ancient tomb fiercely lit up like a glaring fluorescent laboratory, by surveyors and restorers working with science-fiction’ish technologies, inch by inch, to restore the cracking stone cavern from the deteriorating effects of modern tourists.

After this turn of modern events, a post-modern metaphor arises. She explains, “We have not banished death, but we have banished the dark…. And by the light we have made, we can see that there are, metaphorically speaking, cracks….We look about the world by the light we have made, and realize it’s all vulnerable.”

And still, it remains our task to be open, cracks and all — and I pray, perchance, to find beauty.

Today’s Advice: “If people become cut off from the love of beauty, that sabotages their love of the world and increases their willingness to compromise it.” Elaine Scarry

By the light of generosity of my dear friends who have provided me with a luxurious country retreat this week, I very ironically have been thinking about difficulty. Trust me, I can hear a collective sigh whenever I post a writing with a dark, depressing edge. I, too, want to be delighted in childlike miracles, the warm answerability of a long held love, the tendrils of anticipation between new acquaintances, and always, the wonder of birdsong. It isn’t because these joys need the unutterable darkness from which they arise ( they do). But from a life relative to the world as being almost gluttonly possessed of inordinant security and privilege, I have come as a foreigner upon an atlas of a difficult world.  And I have some questions.

Who doesn’t imagine a strange land and wonder, at the very least, could I survive there?

Under a leaf-less oak tree cradling a singly, grey, lost feather, I read George Steiner’s essay, “On Difficulty.” He is not necessarily focusing on the difficulty of horrifying experience which to repeat myself, I, in my blessedness  have been writing about like a weatherman who has never felt rain or wind or snow on his skin. Rather it is the difficulty of some writing to be understood, penetrated, particularly a type of closed-off poetry which Steiner endeavors to philosophize.

At the heart of his essay, though, Steiner considers a difficult poem whose unspoken context becomes the difficulty itself.

Elsewhere Steiner once agreed with a writer who penned, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” adding himself that “The world of Auschwitz lies outside the world of speech, as it lies outside reason. To speak of the unspeakable is to risk the survival of language.” Yet in his essay on difficulty, he turns to the poetry of Paul Celan, Auschwitz survivor.

Largo

You of the same mind, moor-wandering near one:

more-than-

death-

sized we lie

together, autumn

crocus, the timeless, teems

under our breathing eyelids,

the pair of blackbirds hangs

beside us, under

our whitely drifting

companions up there, our

meta-

stases.

(translated by Michael Hamburger)

Steiner doesnt bother to translate the whole poem into English because much of the double and multi-layered meanings in German are lost. But still, in English, one can grasp a sense of a difficult but profoundly moving statement. But “we cannot say confidently or paraphrastically ‘of what'” exactly the poem speaks about. Yet the untranslatability of the poem, and of all great works of art, is the furthest point at which “the strands of annihilation and survival are equally and simultaneously meshed.” A moment of Being.

Today’s Advice: “and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.” Mary Oliver

I am aware that my recent entries, for the most part, focus on the darker, pain-rendering elements of existence. Maybe it’s the winter, with its thin veils, diminished daylight, and its ability to cleave into my heart a longing for itself — a form of love made truer by its emergence from the improbable, from the place of not-love. Heidegger wrote that pain rends, but also joins.

As it turns out, a good friend pointed me to an essay by Loren Eiseley, “Judgment of the Birds,” which captures the reason I’ve forayed into that which is painful – namely that I’m alive:

“The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.

“The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.

“No one dared attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.

“And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

“The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged. For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence. There, in the clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were singers of life, and not of death. “

Today’s Advice: “So it is as if what this speech bespeaks is ‘already in the heart,’ reflexively authenticating the truth in the speaking and confirming its address precisely to the hearer, namely oneself.” Henry Bugbee

I blame the notion of Heidegger’s Holzwege, or woodcutter’s path, that led me to a dark place this week. Indeed woodpaths, he says, “always lead somewhere – but where they lead cannot be predicted or controlled. They force us to plunge into unknown territory and often to retrace our steps.”

Feeling blocked in my art and writing, I found myself lured into reading about a massacre that took place before I was born, but a massacre of the like that has occurred many times before then, and is one that undoubtedly takes place in our own time, somewhere on this hurting planet. In the particular case I researched, a soldier was questioned in a tribunal following the event, and his testimony seared an image into my heart that is too painful to even write here. But it involved a horrific murder of a boy much like my own son. One boy amidst 503 other unarmed women, children and elderly who also met an unbearable end at the hands of monstrous American soldiers, one of whom could have been, if things went dreadfully wrong, my own son also.

My mind squirms in this pain. It wants to know if there is salvation in death, or salvation in surviving. It asks whether the true horror is being the witness, the victim, or the perpetrator. And it clings to the one small glimmer of three soldiers who tried to stop the killing, and could only save a few – because they were reminded of their own children. It questions why they are only distant lights flickering in so much darkness. And it wants to problem-solve, to push through my artist’s block to show the world this pain so that it might not want to recreate it, even when all seems hopeless.

Then my mom sends me this poem by Joy Harjo, fittingly since Heidegger also writes that only poetry can break open this open place. Afterall, he says, “poetry is the founding of truth.”

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

They aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

Today’s Advice: “The fires and the black river of loss whose other side is salvation, whose meaning none of us will ever know.” Mary Oliver

Last Friday evening, an artist friend and I attended performances at the De Young Museum, featuring an African man playing the kora, a traditional instrument, backed by four men playing different bass and percussive instruments. Their inspiring talent underlined a contagious passion for performance, and I turned to my friend and asked her if she ever felt like she needed to have a concrete talent. We chuckled our mutual understanding, and I added that I wanted to learn how to drum like one of the guys on the stage, with wild abandon, but also with a notably honed, long-earned talent. Later when I went to purchase a CD from the band, one of the drummers accepted my cash with a hand severely deformed from thalidomide. When my friend and I walked away, she pondered if we had suffered some cruel setback or disability, if life was more challenging, that maybe we would discover perseverance not found when life is soft and comfortable.

The next day at a brunch with old friends, I mentioned that I desperately needed to learn a practical skill — something that would equate to something that could be tangibly recompensed, or at least come in handy. The two attorneys and one marketing exec spit out their food in laughter when I explained that is why I wanted to learn African drumming.  But oddly, when their laughter faded, they went on to complain that they had no practical skills. So then I thought more deeply about what this longing was about, but other things took over my attention and I didn’t get anywhere on the matter.

Tonight driving home from my studio, I have a bag of wine bottles. In the dark, I see a woman leaning over a trashcan, fervently sorting recyclables into her cart, so I pull over. She is wearing latex gloves, ill-fitting, outdated clothing, and a hat, and is otherwise alone and defenseless in this rough neighborhood of San Francisco.

She will get 10 cents for a pound of the glass she collects. She maybe has 20 to 30 pounds in her fragile cart, and it is already cold and dark. How far will three dollars get her? Three dollars I mindlessly dropped on a crappy latte an hour before.

When she hears the clinking of the glass in my bag, she turns towards me, and I ask her if she wants my glass. Thank you, she says in her Chinese accent, through missing teeth. She could have been my grandmother. Thank you, she repeats. I see clearly in her was once a vulnerable, sweet, open child, much like my own son. Thank you, thank you, thank you, she says.

Today’s Advice: “And Polo said: ‘The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many; accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.  The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension; seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.’ Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities.