“At times of unhappiness, when my uselessness has become brutally apparent to me, and all musical language seems to be reduced to the result of patient experiment without anything behind the notes justifying all the effort, what then can one do but seek one’s true, forgotten face, somewhere in the forest, in the mountains, on the beach, in the midst of the birds? … The birds are the real artists. They are the true originators of my pieces.”
How’s that for a nickname? It’s what Simone Weil’s high school classmates called her (among other things). In French it’s l’impératif catégorique dans les jupes.
This is Jim Meskinen doing impressions to a passage from Richard III. Watch for George Clooney!
Mathew Crawford, a fellow student of mine, asked me to collaborate with him on an art project. His three-year-old son Isaiah died of leukemia only a few years ago, and in one of the first conversations I had with Mat, he told me he was at Duke in order to figure out how it was possible that the experience of caring for his son during that last illness had been both the most horrific and the most beautiful experience of his life. Mat is a photographer, and he said he had a photograph of Isaiah that, he felt, captured some of the power of the experience for him. For the collaboration, he printed this photograph for me on watercolor paper, and asked me to begin with that background and interpret freely. Our goal was to make visible a small piece of what he meant when he wrote the following, in a longer piece reflecting on his son’s illness:
“The image is etched into my memory: it is very late at night; my son’s heart tethered to a totem pole of pumps, bags, and lights; his face swollen with fluids, distorted and strange; he is half asleep and so am I; he sits on the potty for so long, his eyes half shut, I am afraid he might fall; nothing “special” happens; no one says anything profound; just a swollen son and a tired father looking at him while leaning on the doorjamb. Yet in this strange and horrific context, I experienced something on the face of my son. I know no other word to describe it than beauty.”
That passage and the photograph itself were my beginning point, and the images below are part of the series that resulted. I chose birds to pair with Mat’s words and with Isaiah’s face in several of the images because the bodies of birds in flight say so much to me about strength and freedom and also about fragility. A house sparrow’s heart beats four hundred and sixty times a minute. Life is condensed, in birds, in a way that makes its preciousness and its tenuousness harder to ignore. It is not an accident, I think, that Jesus chose sparrows in order to tell us of God’s particular care for each of our fast-beating lives.
The series is meant to stand as one piece, and its title is I Know No Other Word.
I Know No Other Word, Leaf
I Know No Other Word, Gulls
I Know No Other Word, Pigeons
This is a powerful essay on what it means to be human, and what it takes to be capable of seeing people as human even when madness or suffering have made them appear, to most of us, like something less than humans.
[by Sharon Olds, from The Dead and the Living]
Deep in the night, I would hear it through the wall—
my father snoring, the great, dark
clotted mucus rising in his nose and
falling, like coils of seaweed a wave
brings in and takes back. The clogged roar
filled the house. Even down in the kitchen,
in the drawers, the knives and forks hummed with that
distant throbbing. But in my room
next to theirs, it was so loud
I could feel myself inside his body,
lifted on the knotted rope of his life
and lowered again, into the narrow
dark well, its amber walls
slick around my torso, the smell of bourbon
rich as sputum. He lay like a felled
beast all night and sounded his thick
buried stoppered call, like a cry for
help. And no one ever came:
there were none of his kind around there anywhere.
A week or so ago, in a car in the dark just before I got dropped off at my house, Lauren Greenspan (who’s a fellow student of mine) quoted to me these lines from Hardy:
“Your eyes on me were as eyes that move
Over tedious riddles solved long ago”
She said she’d read the poem at the beginning of the end of a relationship, and known exactly what Hardy meant; I knew exactly also, and have not been able to get the lines out of my head. It is an awful experience to feel as though someone sees you as a solved riddle, a mental game that was once interesting and mysterious, and has now lost its charm.
Tonight I looked up the full poem, and it struck me a little as Philip Larkin sometimes strikes me — when, for example, he says things like, “Until I grew up I thought I hated everybody, but when I grew up I realized it was just children I didn’t like” — so toweringly misanthropic that I feel the overpowering urge to giggle. Particularly the lines
“The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die”
in Hardy’s poem feel self-consciously excessive. Not that I don’t believe he felt them; I’ve felt things like them. But something makes me think that (in the midst of his despair) the corner of his mouth was twitching just a little when he titled the poem:
Neutral Tones
We stood by a pond that winter day,
And the sun was white, as though chidden of God,
And a few leaves lay on the starving sod,
– They had fallen from ash, and were grey.
Your eyes on me were as eyes that move
Over tedious riddles solved long ago
And some words played between us to and fro –
On which lost the more by our love.
The smile on your mouth was the deadest thing
Alive enough to have strength to die;
And a grin of bitterness swept thereby
Like an ominous bird a-wing…
Since then, keen lessons that love deceives,
And wrings with wrong, have shaped to me
Your face, and the God-curst son, and a tree,
And a pond edged with grayish leaves.
Thanks to Erin Penner, I have discovered the poet-philosopher-violinist Jan Zwicky. Lilacs are my favorite flowering bush, and I loved this poem:
Lilacs
Restless, I walk out in the evening
to the old house, to the patio around the back
where the old lilacs bloom.
this is a surprise, for I would have said
I do not like this place, would not
come to it by choice:
the peeling lattice on the south side,
the crumbling cinder blocks that once made
a failed sort of fireplace on the east.
the pad was small, but even so
you have to pick your feet up not to stumble
where the concrete cracked.
The lilacs lean across the south-east corner,
blocking the walk.
If you asked my sister, she would say
it never happened, but I remember that
one spring we tamed a bumble-bee
when it came in the afternoons to feed.
She denies this now, of course,
or would, refuses any salvage, claims I’m inventing
if I say there were moments when the sun came out
like her hair in the shadows of the leaves, heavy, like cream, cut
blunt as a spoon, her small teeth
as she laughed up at me, the bee
humming in my palm as she stroked it: and though I
think hope may be a better guide to the past than despair
I now doubt, too – these lilacs
are probably thick with insects in the afternoons, it’s
ridiculous to think we might have sat inside them safe,
you’d have to be careful, merely brushing by,
not to be stung. When you think of it
she must be right, because why else
would she deny it, and I bury my face
as I might imagine leaning into sea-foam:
cool, explosive, the way her hand
when it touched me could unlock the bone under its skin,
or how the drowned must feel,
rising through themselves from the ocean floor.
This is my friend’s seven-year-old son singing an Irish song called “Cheer Up, Ye Saints of God”:
Cheer up ye saints of God
There’s nothing to worry about,
Nothing to make you feel afraid
Nothing to make you doubt
Remember Jesus never fails
So why not trust Him and shout
You’ll be sorry you worried at all
Tomorrow morning.
No, it’s not the newest scandinavian mummy slasher film; it’s cardamom crisp-bread from Ikea.
