Today’s Issue: “The opaque and empty opening on what is when there is no more world, when there is no world yet.” (Blanchot)

01 Wednesday Feb 2012

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What a better way to spend a sunny weekend day than to read Susan Sontag’s “Regarding the Pain of Others,” and then to “enjoy” subsequent evenings full of nightmares stemming from her war photography imagery.

What allures me to Sontag is an analysis that concerns all artists — how is art, in this case photography, received amidst the unprecedented onslaught of attention-seeking images and information people are bombarded with.

I followed Sontag eagerly on her beautifully written essay, wholeheartedly compliant to her assumption that it is the consumers, including myself, who are blunted by habituating news of atrocity, and how easy it is for an elitist, educated population in the richest part of the world to become cynical. Yet, she finds, almost fortuitously, there persists images that do not lose their power on the viewer, despite the improbability of such resilience.

Before I could ponder why such images persevere, I happened upon a writing: A speech not directed at the public for its lack of awareness or state of distraction, but rather at one’s contemporaries; other artists, writers and poets — to call them out for being fearful (and therefore meaningless) in a most fearful time:

“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

“He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

“Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”

This was William Faulkner’s speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950, when the number of lives obliterated in the middle of their daily habits were still being counted — the aftermath of the U.S. atomic bombing on hundreds of thousands unarmed, Japanese civilians.

But somehow we need both impulses: Sontag who calls our attention to the suffering captured by art in order to remind us of the atrocities we are capable, sometimes enthusiastically, of; and Faulkner, to take us out of that paralytic grief, to summons everything forgotten in those acts of inhumanity, and despite the heaviness, to lift our hearts.

Today’s Advice:   “To think, to write a poem, is to give thanks for whatever measure of homecoming to Being is open to mortal man.” Steiner on Heidegger

Today’s Issue: Who would not weep for the world?

23 Monday Jan 2012

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Despite diversionary breaks to warm tea or vacuum my studio, I have been staring at my work in mid-progress (to be generous), and to borrow from Heidegger, I am waiting for the thing to thing itself. Others have put it this way: It’s the moment when a painting tells you it needs a swath of red running through it, or a writing shows you the need of a certain word to push the narrative along.  For Heidegger, a thing does more than exist merely for human awareness — that there is a quality about a thing, especially in art, in which a representation of it does not reveal its inner life, an inherent quality that somehows withdraws from human grasp. And we silly artists chase it like a cat after a bug on a string. (Who or what is holding that string is another question.)

So what else is there to do but read poetry, written by another faithful feline servant to bugs being yanked by string — one who happens to write an homage to these “things” I speak of. Somehow I feel as if he may have got it all in his claws, if only for the most fleeting of moments.

Only in Things.

Some days, who can stare at swathes of sky,

leafage and bad-complected whale-gray streets,

tailpipes and smokestacks orating sepia exhuaust,

or the smaller enthusiasms of pistil and mailbox key,

and not weep for the world’s darks on lights, lights on darks,

how its halftones stay unchanged in their changings,

or how turning wheels and wind-trash and revolving doors

weave us into wakefulness or dump us into distraction?

This constant stream of qualia we feel in our stomachs.

The big-leafed plant lifts its wings to greet the planet’s chemistry,

the sun arrives on rooftops like a gentle stranger, rain rushes us

love to love, stop to stop, these veins of leaf, hand, storm and stream,

as if in pursuit of us and what we are becoming.

– W. S. di Piero

Today’s Advice: “I have torn speech like a tattered robe and let words go;

  you who are still dressed in your clothes, sleep on.” Rumi

Today’s Issue: “You who are not kept anxiously awake for love’s sake, sleep on.” – Rumi

17 Tuesday Jan 2012

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I’m now at the dreadful realization that I have squeezed in a little time and space to write and make art, but that I am willfully refusing to. I see clearly what is bubbling up to be expressed, and frankly I don’t want to do it. What wants to exist on page or on canvas touches upon things that I fear are too banal, vulnerable, unoriginal — the list could go on and on.

I could blame it on becoming a parent. I’m already a frighteningly sensitive person, and now my son blows open a new portal of acute feelings, including the most intense pangs of doubt, impatience, and heart-bursting ache for his welfare. I exist like an emotional puff pastry — flakes of feelings falling down onto my messy lap at the slightest jostle. Just a snippet of some violence done to a child on the fading ticker of the corner of the news channel I skipped over on my way to Downton Abbey… and I am on the verge of existential crisis.

And so it is this week, if the muse couldn’t corner me any more, I cross paths with the writings of psychotherapist and artist, Alice Miller.

Her premise is simple: Our culture is violent because we learn not to feel. It seems like old news now, but an insight that is all too ubiquitously relevant: Repressed feelings are a reaction to being hurt, often by parents, and that a child, completely dependent on those parents, must repress them or else be killed by the pain. A numb child can grow into an adult who lacks empathy for others, and in turn inflicts pain on their own children, as well as others.

Trust me I hear the groans from those who know me as overly sensitive and analytical. Obviously, this encompasses my own dealings with my childhood and shaping my son’s childhood, but more interestingly involves the resistance to writing this and avoiding the studio.

I’ve never met an artist who didn’t feel things deeply or who didn’t want to question things, even if it’s the story tickering off the corner of the news screen. And this requires an exploration of the “furthest countries of one’s secret soul,” because, as Rilke penned, the most profound and unique art is borne by those “who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go.” In my silly, little case, I just might have to face the danger of being too banal, vulnerable and unoriginal.

Turns out Alice Miller felt that creative work trumped all the years she practiced psychotherapy. That, as Gadamer agrees, in play, albeit serious play, can we visit places outside of where we were supposed to go, off the paths we were only allowed to go.

Alice Miller doesn’t go as far as I do here; that art opens up a beyond, past the prerequisite and unavoidable acknowledgment of what is true (and often painful) about ourselves and those around us. That if I recall the last time I was moved by music, writing, or art, I was taken to the edge of an experience where I could leap into a moment of not being anything at all.  I could go with art into my very self-most straits, and set myself free.

(And only from that freedom — from my self, my needs, my projections, my ego — can I truly love someone else.)

Today’s Advice: “Only when we learn to transcend our death-bound selves in love, learn to take ourselves not too seriously, do we begin to truly live.” Karsten Harries

Today’s Issue: “I exist as I am, that is enough.” Walt Whitman

09 Monday Jan 2012

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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.”

Today’s Issue: “Love is never finished expressing itself, and it expresses itself better the more poetically it is dreamed.” Bachelard

29 Thursday Dec 2011

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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.”

Today’s Issue: We don’t know what’s going on here . . . We don’t know. Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise. – Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

27 Tuesday Dec 2011

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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

Today’s Issue: “The love of the beauty of the world involves…the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. He who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the world itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before.” Simone Weil

21 Wednesday Dec 2011

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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

Today’s Issue: “Would a bird build its nest if it did not have its instinct of confidence in the world?” Bachelard

14 Wednesday Dec 2011

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For many months now, I have been a casual observer to the persistence of artists and performers who hone their craft, forge an artwork or perform a piece sometimes to a vast audience, sometimes to a handful of people, sometimes to the one or two loyal friends and family. And regardless the vast array of reactions ranging from smothering adoration, superficial approval, rarefied resonance, hasty indifference to despotic criticism, they go back and do it again. I count myself somewhere in this group, and often wonder what is it, this urge, this instinct to communicate through art. My sense is that it is beyond the few instances of resonance experienced by my viewers. As I have also witnessed a deadening to those artists and performers who can’t find solitude away from their audiences.

Izutsu writes in regards to the playwright Zeami, “The person who creates form is lonely, but through his creativity he is able to endure his loneliness. This is because form — though achieving completion through the eyes of others — is originally created by a single individual alone in a place not directly concerned with others. In the process of creating form, the artist must deal directly with something higher than mere others.”

And then I discover a profound example of this enigmatic and unarticulated higher entity, which illustrates what Steiner says is art’s strength to convey — the moments when the “metaphor of resurrection is given its edge of felt conjecture.”

In Seoul, South Korea, a silent, young girl in traditional Korean clothing sits upright in a wooden chair, almost expressionless, directly facing the Japanese Embassy across the street. She is cast in bronze, a public art piece, the emblem of an inner child both resilient and vulnerable to the systematic acts of inhumanity that would come to pass against her being. It is this art piece installed for, and around which, a dwindling group of women, now in their 80’s and 90’s, gathered for the 1000th time to demand recompense for their years as sexual slaves to Japanese soldiers during World War II. On today, the 1000th protest,  the Japanese government closed the blinds to their windows, as they have for the 999 protests before this one, an act needing no further metaphor. This closing off and away of the Embassy deepens the aching beseech of the lone bronze girl, the emotional and spiritual stand-in for the few remaining victims who want justice before they die.

Next to the seated, bronze girl is an empty chair. Does the seat beckon for you and me — that we could easily have found ourselves in such a haunting circumstance, given a few twists of fate? Or is it a place holder for the other little girls, no longer living, eternally at a loss for the obviously inherent and deserved dignity unfortunately absent from so many places on this planet.

Regardless, next to the empty chair, the solitary, little girl will remain motionless and mute as if open to all possibility, but with the deafening presence of her 200,000 fellow victims amongst us in the ethers.

Today’s Advice: “Our nature is to be overcome. (Society does not have to be overcome, but disobeyed.)” Stanley Cavell

Today’s Issue: Love — “And only because it is nearest at hand is it difficult to find.”

09 Friday Dec 2011

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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

Today’s Issue: “Love is such a matter of completion of presence from within ourselves. It is being, understood from within, and this alone, which can make sense of being in discriminable form.” Henry Bugbee

02 Friday Dec 2011

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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