“Art brings the finite and the infinite, the visible and the invisible, into coincidence.” Takeyoshi Nishiuchi

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Annunciation, birds, Fra Angelico, language, Summer Lee, Susan McMane, Takeyoshi Nishiuchi, Young Women's Choral Projects

The greatest injury to Fox Sparrow might be that scientists are trying to build a mechanical bird to replicate all he can do. But what a consolation it is that they can’t yet fathom his genius — that when he moves just the toe of his wing, he can change the direction of all his feathers, just so. How he can make his feathers stick together with a force greater than Velcro and then separate them at will. Not to mention his song.

And their song. The mystery that all those technical elements can create a moment completely liberated from them.

(Here is Where We Meet, by Summer Lee, 2017. Cyanotypes, fabric, wood.)

There was a time when the mystery itself was worshipped. And that painters knew the impossibility of capturing it, but their religion was to try, for hundreds of years. But in these days, even though no one now can say exactly how a word becomes flesh, we are fed so much technical explanation about this material and that, the biography of that painter and historical event. Circular tales plunging us into neurosis. What else is neurosis but the inability to cope with uncertainty. And the delusion we can ward off any risk. They knew then, as it goes, the angel arrives even if Mary turns her head.

If ever you have held dead Fox Sparrow in your hands you also know that nothing else could suffocate life more than the self-congealing words we wrap around it. Even if it is, and it always is, to try and comfort.

Fra Angelico made a point to put the fallen Adam and Eve leaving the garden in the same scene as the Annunciation. He knew the word can separate, but also in the same scene obliterate all back into the messianic. Caroline’s poems do this many times a week. And maybe that’s why I tire you, to set out so selfishly about here with words from time to time. To remind myself, the truth and untruth of language.

To remind myself that no one can explain how the paint in my watercolor pan can bring Fox Sparrow to me. And how Fox Sparrow can leave just like that, just because I wrote it here.

Mary, in an economy of words we can’t fathom today, said,

Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.

Let me greet all such incursions on my cautionary house of being with such grace. To find repose in the pain of resignation. Not a lazy resignation, but at the end of intense searching, like that for Fox Sparrow. I have read volumes on his kindred, and created innumerable treatises on all the possible places he could be when he isn’t here. Some dark and treacherous, like facing decisions I must make for my child, the lightning-lit rain pelting Fox Sparrow as he embarks in his night flight home. Some of his places are as light-filled as the clouds of Veronese, overlooking restless humanity. And sometimes as majestic as the vanishing valleys into the boreal forest I will never visit. Most of all, it’s the perch on the thin wire weirdly placed in that painting. Where he peers down on a woman who has been greeted by an angel, telling her that her life is about to be changed by no fault of her own. And of course Fox Sparrow knowing what we don’t know: that we are all fallen. And that a word could turn into flesh, spirit into form, and save us.

Right now Fox Sparrow is under my feeder scratching the dirt in this humble coastal yard in front of my house. The more hungry he is, the closer he lets me. To see his black eyes see me, see this place, that somehow guided him here to me. Back to the emptiness.

The YWCP chorus, directed by Susan McMane.

“The luminous ruins.” – T. Nishiuchi

Tags

art, Joos Ven Cleve, language, Photography, Summer Lee, the birds of San Pedro Valley, tragedy, words

“These words feel as if two waves of water meet each other, his and now mine, and collapse — but they sometime even obliterate, they are definitely torrid and some of mine are too fucking little, too fucking late. True to the man and what he taught, though, they are luminous even as they are tragic. And so unbelievably, painfully, precious now. Because I just thought there would be more. When really there are none.”

The whole writing is here:

http://thebirdsofsanpedrovalley.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/the-luminous-ruins-t-nishiuchi/

(My photograph of Lucretia’s veil, from Joos Van Cleve’s painting, 1525.)

“Things I cannot speak of are not for the ear.” — Monsieur de Sainte Colombe, “Tous Les Matins du Monde.”

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art, healing, Itzhak Perlman, language, music, Tous Les Matins Du Monde, violin

As children we sometimes rode in his vintage BMW. There was often silence in the presence of my reclusive, stoic father, but his car was always filled with classical music, teeming with the lilt of violins played by ghost-like hands on imaginary stages only alive in the mind’s eye.

But tonight I sit in the intimate presence of an expert and his violin. Without wires and speakers and road noise, nor the dynamics of a vast symphony hall, by luck (privilege is also luck) I am inches away from the source. Unmediated.

The result of animal hair vibrating against metal strings over the opening of a lacquered, wooden box, it is also the most complicated of unspoken languages, the full range of human emotions and unarticulated impulses, all coming through a man who has painstakingly practiced his craft for over 50 years. Neurons, muscles, the electricity of infinitesimal choices of movement, invisible wavelengths and the receptive ear. Music. And like the best art, it is much more than that.

It is the ultimate of hubris that I might try to write about this experience. As Marin Marais utters in the culmination of Tous Les Matins du Monde, this violinist’s playing is “A refreshment for those who have run out of words.”

But among my people are silent musicians who had no such openings during war, invasions, immigration, mundane necessity, to sit where I am tonight.

The performer himself has been crippled by polio, and so easily could not be sitting where he is tonight. In the perfection of interpreting for composers hundreds of years dead, there lies the unmistaken inflection of his own living voice, informed by the circumstances that make their mark onto one’s life. Like the unique gesture made by a painter’s hand. His talents are undoubtedly mending the frays of pain, those tears in the fabric of human survival, passed down to him by his own people.

Because I know this is a healing and that it is in the realm of the miraculous. Music, as well as miracles, come to life on the necessity of the present moment. For over two hours, I am tethered to present tenses by unpredictable sounds and melodies, by the sight of his hands dancing impossibly up and down the strings. I am tied there until the end of his last performance, a composition he knows by heart and displays the utmost limit of his skill, of all human ability.

When he finishes I break inside and experience a pronounced loss because it is over, as are all the circumstances that culminated into this one evening — there with my mother weeping at the greatness of it all, our backs to the thousands of other audience members behind us, their wounds closing even if they don’t know it. I am greeted by an acceptance that this will never happen again. Even more, all of this could so easily, more likely even, not have been at all.

As it turns out, the night of this impossible recital happened to fall on my father’s unrealized birthday. If alive, he would have turned 80 years-old. And in his quiet way, he would’ve been healed most of all.

“Music exists to say things that words cannot say. Which is why it is not entirely human.” — Monsieur de Saint Colombe, Tous Les Matins du Monde

“You were my death / you all I could hold / when all fell away from me.” Paul Celan

Tags

"The Gaze of Orpheus", "The Instant of My Death", art, death, Derrida, George Steiner, language, Maurice Blanchot, Paul Celan, poetry, Summer Mei Ling Lee, World War II

It is hard to know what this thread is, as it weaves through my recent travels. The only way to understand it more is to start about here.

Because, Blanchot says, in order to write, one must be already writing. “One can only write if one arrives at the instant towards which one can only move through space opened up by the movement of writing.” He writes this in reference to Orpheus, and that Orpheus needed music to descend to the underworld to rescue his love, a precise metaphorical homage to artistic creation. As it happens in tragedy, the moment he gazes at his beloved, he loses her, but experiences perhaps a moment of freedom: “[He] frees the work of his concern, frees the sacred contained in the work, gives the sacred to itself, to the freedom of its essence, to its essence which is freedom (for this reason, inspiration is the greatest gift).”

That is why a particularly masterful work of art recalls the fact that it could not have been — if we are vulnerable enough to let our art be art, let our hearts be touched, and to sense the present moment. Steiner is particularly fascinated with art’s ability to give presence to that which is absent and profoundly otherwise: “The arts, and music above all, give to man the freedom from his otherwise mortal city.” It is where humans can “surpass their condition.”

Blanchot, as with Paul Celan, knew Orpheus’ gaze in his own life, and both had stood within the “breath-turn” between absence and presence. Towards the end of his life, Blanchot wrote this letter to Derrida, who deeply understood occupied France:

“July 20. Fifty years ago, I knew the happiness of nearly being shot to death.”

As Blanchot was removed from his home by soldiers and placed in front of a firing squad, he experienced a “feeling of extraordinary lightness.”

Blanchot writes of the man who experienced this moment, “He was perhaps suddenly invincible. Dead — immortal. Perhaps ecstasy. Rather the feeling of compassion for suffering humanity, the happiness of not being immortal or eternal. Henceforth, he was bound to death by a surreptitious friendship.”

Blanchot, a stand-in for Orpheus, penned this “Instant of My Death” from the stance of a young man’s testimony, a fiction that is the leap of literature, one step removed from his own life. Perhaps he did so because it had been posited since classical Greece that the image of the thing is more beautiful than the thing it represents. But likely more so because he used his art to go to the depths of this underworld experience, the shadow-side of being human.  So at the moment of writing his death — as if Orpheus might describe it in 3rd person narration — at the moment he gazes back at Eurydice, he is free.

Tonight, I sit in my midnight bed, reading-lamp dim, and I hear the the approach of husky breathing that is my son, who turns his inhalations to exhalations without self-consciousness yet, who has ambled out of his bed and his room, guided by slivered lines drawn through sleep-puffed eyes, one hand viced to his blanket. He is just awake enough to know the path to my bed, and he is asleep before I have finished picking his warm, softly surrendered body up into the bed next to me. His breathing returns to the quieter rhythms of sleep and I wonder what impulse wakes him and directs him to my company. Years ago, during a particular grueling time (though there would be worse yet), I woke myself yelling for my mom. Calling for her as if she was down the hallway, like a child needing rescue from a bad dream. The impulse for words that call out for salvation is deep, even as I know that my faith in words, in salvation also, is constantly asunder.

“(At every turn, language traps us within the labyrinth which we are calling on language to elucidate).” George Steiner, Grammars of Creation.

(My recent installation, “Saigyo’s Moon.” Projection of flying birds on eggshells.)