“Art is not for.” Sam Hamill about Morris Graves

Tags

George Kahumoku Jr., Hawaii, Hi'ilawe, memoir, nature, poetry, Sam Hamill, slack key guitar

Tonight, the poor bloke handsomely dressed in traditional Hawaiian cloth and lei, as it is every night, blows a conch to the delight of the hotel guests and their cameras and then runs with his burning torch from tiki lamp to tiki lamp across the expansive plantation style grounds. My incredulous son and other children giddily in tow. Every night it has been a new person, always Hawaiian though, and some are more obliging in this cultural fetish performance than others. But each one has warmly facilitated my son in lighting at least two tikis (because he demands more than one), bless their hearts.

Stunning is the island landscape, illuminated by torchlight flickering in the tradewinds.

Such are the moments of artistry in Hawaii, never untangled from its colonial past and its current economic conundrum as tourist industry.

In any given hotel and restaurant catering to this particular area, there is almost certainly to be incredibly talented live musicians, plucking away at a slack key guitar, soulfully singing the Hawaiian traditional opus, mostly written to keep names of places, plants, fishes, birds and cultural knowledge — a dying language — alive.

(Kalopa State Park, nature preserve)

I was already bruised after just hearing the wistful “Me ke aloha ku’u home o Kahalu’u,” (with love for my home Kahalu’u). Kahalu’u is a gorgeous beach almost smothered by concrete hotels and hordes of sunscreened waders, food trucks, and signs saying please do not step on the coral, please do not feed the fish. Even as I am counted among the island’s outsiders, I stopped to listen to these two men sing delicately and lovingly their version of ku’u home. Who isn’t bereaved of changes to the land?  They sang this elegy in an empty restaurant, empty besides a handful of waiters chatting amongst themselves, one sunburned couple watching basketball on the bar TV, and sentimental me in my bathing suit waiting for my to-go order.

Later when I entered the lobby of our hotel, where I’ve been annoyed by the constant presence of people since we arrived, a pang of a familiar melody filled me as it filled the architecture. The lobby lanai, full of well-dressed, shiny guests enjoying a cocktail and chatting amongst themselves, frames a view across the ocean where a faint silhouette of Maui dissolves into cloud. But what made me stop was yet again, another vulnerably sincere, Hawaiian slack key performer there in the skyline. He was playing not for the sake of the distracted guests unaware that this particular song, Hi’ilawe, extolls a site they probably snapped a photo of today; not for what is probably a paltry salary; and not for me mouthing what words I knew in appreciation for his performance, for the artful moment.

I hid in the adjacent stairwell hearing the last bits of the song until he transitioned to his next (I imagine to avoid the awkward silence between songs), and then I exited underneath the patio out to the courtyard. As I walked away, the musician ignored his audience as they ignored him and turned out over the balcony, looking for me below. I looked up at him and put my hand on my heart. As he strummed out the beginning of his next song, he smiled knowingly and nodded his head — a private, unseen gesture in a place of all places to be seen. Our eyes were on Hi’ilawe — an artful moment because it was completely gratuitous.

Hi’ilawe

George Kahumoku Jr.’s version of the song on YouTube, and its hula:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8kpNAIBRIw

Translation:

All eyes are on Hi’ilawe
In the sparkling lowlands of Maukele.

I escape all the birds
Chattering everywhere in Waipiʻo.

I am not caught
For I am the mist of the mountains.

I am the darling (a toy) of the parents
And a lei for the necks of grandparents.

The fragrance is wafted from Puna
And lives at Hi’ilawe waterfall.

Tell the refrain
All eyes are on Hi’ilawe.

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“We are creatures of a great thirst. Bent on coming home to a place we have never known.” George Steiner

Tags

George Steiner, Hawaii, history, Kealekekua Bay, Manini Beach, memoir, nature, post-colonialism, Wordworth

A kitchen oven structure, a plastic outlet plate, and other remnants of a home are a haunting sight on the bottom of the ocean floor of Kealakekua Bay. Ke ala ke kua, the pathway to God. The wreckage lies off the shore of Manini Kapahukapu beach, a sacred gathering place for ancient Hawaiians. They deemed the site a place of healing, and it seems since time immemorial this place has been in need of healing.

Hard to find, the beach’s grassy flat is surrounded by lush foliage, and its ocean shore is crusted over with almost black, unforgivingly sharp lava rock. Across the calm bay, an odd white, stone beacon of a monument commemorates Captain Cook, who landed at this Hawaiian village amicably at first. But after the entanglements of disease and colonial politics and cultural misunderstandings, he was murdered at that spot, in plain sight across from Manini.

Of course it is odd that there is no monument there to honor the dead Hawaiians that once occupied the present day ghost village and Heiau, now overgrown by bird-filled plants and trees, the true natives of the area. Besides the monument and a plaque now in the tide waters of a rising ocean stating, “Near this spot Captain Cook met his death,” there are only loads of snorkelers by boat and kayak swimming among luminescent coral forests. The reef is growing less and less pristine, inversely to its popularity. On an unmarked spot there in the turbidity of ocean water lurks one of our wedding rings, a frightful loss at first, but now a fitting, romantic homage.

Behind Manini lies a lava field, now filled with a rural grouping of homes, the impoverished ones belonging to native Hawaiians, the gentrified ones belonging to outsiders who either own them as rentals to outsiders, or who visit there just as transiently as would-be renters. I can’t help but want one myself. But that area feels heavy, and when figuring out why, I learned that before there were homes there, the lava field was the site of historical bloodshed. A faction of Hawaiians hoping to gain control over all the islands overpowered a group supporting the disinherited. The Battle of Mokuahai, in 1781, was savage as even women took up arms for their territory and were among the losers, killed by bludgeoning instruments, or forced over cliffs into the lava strewn ocean.

In the center of the bay, a large pod of spinner dolphins rest, swimming easy circuits with their calves. One year we swam out to them. They, being the more fit for sea, and either cautious or curious, found us first. I dove into the depths of the bay as a group passed me, and for the length of a held breath I swam with them, tears filling my swim mask, my hand holding my heart hurting for the beauty still left in pockets of this contested earth. But after a little research, my heart hurt more to know that my presence was detrimental to their rest, to their impending survival outside the bay where they are forced to return earlier than necessary because of swimmers like me, wanting to experience their glory.

Today, I stayed at Manini, and resisted the coral reef at the monument, and the pod of dolphins splashing and spinning on the other side of the Bay. And there is where I found the modern day ruins of a shipwrecked home, dragged into the sea by the reach of a tsunami that just over a year ago, swept tens of thousands of people in Japan out to sea. The same grandmother working there three years ago with her infant grandson, already adept at the ocean, my son then only a shrimp in my belly, was also there today as she is everyday under her umbrella. Folks stop by regularly to hear of what news, I’m not sure. While our sprouted kids played in Manini’s one sandy opening to the surf, she explained to me the recovery taking place in the area. In the eddy where pristine waters meet the machinations of savage American imperialism and colonialism, I hope Manini prevails for all of us.

Glad sight wherever new with old
Is joined through some dear homeborn tie;
The life of all that we behold
Depends upon that mystery.
Vain is the glory of the sky,
The beauty vain of field and grove
Unless, while with admiring eye
We gaze, we also learn to love.
— Williams Wordsworth

“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Wittgenstein, “Tractatus.”

Tags

art, Hawaii, Kilauea, Mortality, philosophy, poetry, silence, Stanley Cavell, Wittgenstein

Almost at the ocean edge, I look back up the hill, over the martian landscape to see the miles of frozen stone rivulets, overlapping and intertwining upon themselves, blanketing anything that ever had been there. It is dark, hardened lava which was at one point molten and seeping from wounds in the earth, crawling down the topography according to gravity, until it slipped into the ocean with a burst of steam cloud.

I cried unspeakably when I first saw this, at Kilauea. At first I thought I was responding to the experience of primeval vastness – a meeting with an uncompromising, prehistoric force. Or maybe because it was humbling to be in the presence of the beginning of land, the birth of earth.

For some reason, this is the image that comes to mind as I ponder why I have inexplicably taken a break from writing here.

At some point my philosophy mentor mentioned to me that it is best not to overwhelm the writings or artworks of others with my own subjectivity. It is a balancing act to read the work of others and engage in dialogue, to make comparative study without projecting too much of my own material and subsequently dampening them. To listen without talking over them.

In the last few weeks I have been reading hyperactively, but in a way also bordering on attention-deficit disorder. From Kierkegaard’s crowd of untruth to Anna Akhmatova’s poetry of personal truth amidst a  crowd of censors. And there is George Steiner’s grammars of creation, eruditely nostalgic for the messianic, and Wittgenstein’s language games of lost faith. I have let the writings of these thinkers run over me, perhaps not unlike the rivers of the slow moving, but nihilistic lava, making its way to a border of another prehistoric vastness – my ocean of ignorance. While the writings have been resonant, elegantly constructed and provocative, they are opaque. And maybe it is best to let them do their work before I attempt to crash in with my callow response, my impediments, my convictions.

In short, to let answerability take the form of silence.  However, for those of us who know the therapy office, the dead end of a conflict, or know the time in front of one’s own intransigent painting or sculpture, there is a silence that is laden with an almost perceivable din, however healing it may be. And then there is a silence of a higher order, of untranslatability.

Schopenhhauer said, “Were the universe to perish, music would endure.” And in the moment of pondering the lava field, where seedlings somehow sprout in rock, and liquid rock in its extension of earth annihilates life — creation meets destruction. Artists and writers might want more to be mediators of where sound meets silence, and form meets formless. Paul Celan’s breath-turn. In the end, if I were in that lava field, facing the force that we all perish by, I may be trivial and sentimental, but I would want to hear Olomanu’s plaintive slack key guitar and the lyrics of a homecoming: “Last night I dreamt I was returning. And my heart called out to you: To please accept me as you’ll find me. Me ke aloha ku’u home o Kahulu’u.”

Today’s Advice: “It is through words that words are to be overcome. (Silence may only be the tying of the tongue, not relinquishing words, but gagging on them. True silence is the untying of the tongue, letting its words go.).” – Stanley Cavell