“Song leads us home to where we have not yet been.” — George Steiner

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ancestry, art, birds, China, George Steiner birds, music

As the intensity of morning light increases, it signals to different species of birds when to start their morning song. Each bird is prompted to sing by its own special light.

When I visited China, I had in hand my grandmothers INS interrogation which detailed the few belongings they had in hand when they left China, as well as the several dead, young and old, they were leaving behind. In it, she also recounted a gold ring her father had brought to her from America that she lost. I would inherit this reminder of impossible frugality like a mistaken familiar voice in a crowd. As my own trip wore on, I was accumulating breastmilk that I pumped every few hours for relief, but also so that I could return home to nurse my child.

After dumping a heartbreaking amount of milk in China, I persevered the survival of a small frozen stash of milk through five cities (via ferries, taxis, subways, three domestic planes, and a train, all between four separate hotels) and finally across the Pacific ocean home.

(Photo of pouring my breastmilk off the Great Wall of China, 2014. Summer Lee)

This trip symbolized the means of how an artwork based on my grandmother would come to be exhibited in the region where she was born. And soon, it will enter the permanent collection of that museum, as if I were the unwitting intermediary to repatriate her bones.

Several years ago, I was contacted for a potential exhibit at a university a few hours from my home, a show which took years to come to fruition. Finally this last week, during the same time my grandmother’s piece is in China, the show opened, and one of the paintings chosen for this exhibit is a watercolor of my grandmother’s husband, my grandfather, who was born in the same unlikely town of Stockton, where the university exhibit is located.

I don’t know if birds have homes, but I imagine they are more at home in the state of homelessness than I am, singing on account of the light, as much location.  In this winter of coincidental homecomings for my grandparents, I have become unhoused at the bird feeder of my yard. After so many years, a grasshopper sparrow, a spritely, smaller-sized, streaked sparrow, who was committed to my feeder winter after winter, has not returned. I will never know why, and I have no bones of his to return, nor an understanding of where his song might be.

This dawn chorus is ever a changing one.

(Photo taken by my friend, of where the restored Great Wall meets the ancient wall, 2014)

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“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

“Language simply ceases… The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.” George Steiner

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art, bird watching, birds, George Steiner, music, nature, Rilke

The outskirts of Tahoe National Forest. I followed the early morning mists of little winged bugs along the edge of a forested reservoir, a small cohort of Audubon’s Warblers chasing them also. With a mind galloping through what if’s and what-nots, I sat next to their cathedral, a half-dead tree once under the water line. Its branches stretched arthritically out towards that which feeds it but also puts it asunder. One by one every species of woodland bird worked its way out of the dense pine forest to that diminuitive tree. They would land with a pause, flit a little, perhaps taking a careless bug in this gathering place, then sail down below to the stony water edge. They were singing me stories of wretchedness, of betrayal and harshness from those who didn’t believe they know better. They described predators with only few survival skills who violate their homes, even when their bellies are far from empty. But they also sung of the little joys of sunlight, improbable births, childlike pauses, and cool reservoir water. Fiercely aching nights and warm morning updrafts. And times when every species and variety of plant and bug is available, and times when their children grew silent in the cold. Warblers, nuthatches, wrentits, chickadees, flycatchers, a few I didn’t know, and a rufous sided towhee — the little delicate species, the singers. My favorites. For years this lasted. I have been devoted to them.

Someone once said that birds remind him of an existence before human civilization, of times outside of wars, laws, buildings. Before human suffering and its impulsive response of further suffering. But these birds were not solely of the sweetness of summer, though they had the resilience and the evolutionary wisdom to live as if that was all they knew. Because today it was summer.

(A photo from my studio, by Shae Rocco).

It seemed my birthright to make an offering. Give something, though those little birds of course needed nothing. Steiner reminds that art is free, gratuitous, not for anything, so much so that every artful creation calls forth an awareness that it might not have been. So somehow turning this moment into a drawing or even writing seemed superfluous, like a scarf around Rilke’s torso. And it is.

Because in this moment I also felt like I might not have been, that everything I’ve done and made might have been otherwise. I felt humble, like the chanters of holy songs, whose talents are free and freely given. So, for whatever reason, because I was perfectly alone, I began to sing. My mom would be excited to know I quietly sang songs from her faith, maybe because that foreign language seemed as intimate and yet dispossessed as the birdsong around me — it contains a hint of something inextricable even as it is unknown. And despite my usual anxiety of needing more, I had a moment of needing nothing, a necessary condition for gift-giving, even if it is song-giving. Towards everything surrounding the birds and all the radiating objects and memories and people I know and knew. And as the scene pulsated, the birds neared me one by one as part of their ritual, into otherwise lethal distances. A Townsend Warbler landed a few inches above my head. After that a Kinglet slid down to the frayed end of a branch four inches from my eyes. Another Audubon’s Warbler almost upon my shoulder. They exerted themselves to me. And so I cease to sing.

” — for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life.” Rilke

And when we imagine wings that come and go / What we see is a house / And a wide open window. – May Sarton

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Bachelard, birdsong, childhood home, dead sparrow, Gadamer, Heidegger, Home, May Sarton, memoir, music

If Goethe is right, and architecture is frozen music, home is a song we have learned by heart.

My friend reminds me that learning things by heart insists upon rhythm, the heartbeat, and that the experience of the present moment is rhythmic.

One beat has to end for the next to begin. And like his favorite piano concerto, we don’t know when this note ends, and there is much tension in the space before the next. And life is marked by a gentle sadness when that moment ends and dissolves into the next moment. That, according to Bugbee, life is haunted by a continual parting. Proust says these moments are connected to places that also don’t exist anymore: “The places we have known do not belong only to the world of space on which we map them for our convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; the memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues, are as fugitive, alas as the years.”

And that was the fugitive feeling I have had recently. First, I was at a dinner where a friend made a lovingly-prepared pot roast. Tomato and herbs infused a slow-cooked meat I’ve not experienced since I was living in my childhood home. The warm, familiar smell wrapped its arms around me as I sat in this modern-day apartment, just as my mother’s filled our evening home when I was a child. The smell invoked something so palpably nostalgic that one part of my self remained in a distant past even as I carried about in the present-tense conviviality. My friend sitting next to me also was piqued by the memories of childhood dinners; someone who I happened to have first met when I was 6 years old. We have witnessed each other grow and shed several versions of ourselves, though there is something from which we struggle not to stray.

It recalls Gadamer’s notion of festival — that there is an enduring in the perishing. There is continually a moment that we wish could be retained, held onto for just another moment longer, even though it can never be. It is a “consciousness of human frailty,” when we are aware of the rhythms of our life and the fact that they end. “Every festive joy, yes, every joy, is perhaps the other side of an inexpressible, unutterable.” And every beat of the heart is inseparable from its opposite — silence; nothingness.

And then I gave into the urge to drive by my childhood home this week. I was in the area, where a chaparral dustiness meets the crisp coastal breeze and tugs at me. As did the autumnally-filtered light of a sun beginning to arc lower in the sky. And there predictably sat the home on the corner of middle-suburbia covered with mature trees and gridded off by narrow streets. The house, like the area, is shinier and more regal than the more humble and equitable times known before Silicon Valley bubbles and exorbitant housing prices. The home was still incredibly intimate, yet completely estranged from me — the current occupants undoubtedly using it in their own way in a sort of betrayal of the past. Because, like everything else, my home had to give way to their home. Like the tightly woven, straw nest that fell off the side of our house a few months ago. Next to it was a darkly stippled egg, intact, but belonging now to the unknown.

The nest fell from the eaves of my new home of the last 13 years. Soon, as with every year, the winter flock of Golden-crowned Sparrows and their one loyal Fox Sparrow friend returns to our feeder. One year our cat in her boredom slaughtered the Fox Sparrow, and after I grieved its dark, hopeless body in my hand, I decided not to slaughter the cat. A few years later, a new Fox Sparrow somehow rejoined the flock. I’ll never know how.

Fox Sparrow song

This is the home which presses itself into my son whose foundational memories will be part of the architecture, as the architecture is part of his psyche. And eventually, the most eventual fact of all, my life will give way also. So dramatic-sounding, I know, but the remembrance of which always relates to Heidegger’s astonishment that I exist rather than not, that leads to Hamill’s loving a little bit more, because one of us will die. And the moment when the stars begin to burn through Mary Oliver’s sheets of clouds so that I may write about it here, with words that are little houses, as they dissolve away also. That things come and go, it brings about wonder:

“Celebration … is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder — the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know this. – Martin Heidegger, Polt

“The narrow bridge of art…” – Virginia Woolf

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chapel of the chimes, Columbarium, death, Garden of Memory, Laurie Amat, music, Oakland, summer solstice, Virginia Woolf

On the day with the longest daylight of the year, the Northern Solstice, I found myself surrounded by thousands of dead people. Yes, I am probably over-working the mortality theme of late into an insipid pulp, what with all of its depressing seriousness. But at the columbarium in Oakland tonight, the chapels,  cloisters, and crypts filled with the remains of the dead carried the very alive music of more than 30 musicians, as apparently happens every solstice.

In following our ears to the next musician around each corner, we worked our way through the names of bookended lives lining the niches, hallways and courtyards built almost as an ascending and descending gothic maze. Corners and alcoved places exist for the bereaved to experience a meditative solitude away from others, while the constant light through open ceilings and skylights reminds of an other place, and of human smallness. Tonight, the meditators, the remembering, were music-makers.

Among the more recently interred, an accordionist sat on a metal folding chair in a marble alcove and played accomplished polkas and waltzes and even a French classic — the same song I heard on a lively street behind the Notre Dame of Paris. Then, I sat looking at candy colored tulips in the sunny, cathedral garden, while couples cooed at the river, tourists gawked at the sentinel and soaring architecture, and locals ambled on their itinerant paths to bakeries, friendly meetings, work duties. Such aspirating and pumping accordion music is of a buzzing life, even as it was played tonight among the dead. The borderline absurdity of this accordion music in what is usually a solemn and silent, heart-heavy and self-reflective space was almost sublime. Like the last scene of Life is Beautiful, when the parade of humanity, and a boy full of life, marches out of a death camp.

And there was an incredibly serious experimental piano player, in a long hallway of glass-enclosed rows of urns, pounding and trilling her piano in utter dissonant refrains. Our toddler son was fascinating himself in the gurgling, concrete memorial fountain situated a few feet in front of her, and during a particular dark and howling section of her work, he crooned his neck up to the opening in the ceiling, and sang, Bubbles, Bubbles, Buuuuuuubbbbbbles, as if to commune with the alienating musician and her intentionally awful and emotionally grueling composition.

And of course, the moment of Being. I ducked into a light-filled crypt, where written passages of St. Luke adorn the stacks of shelved lives reduced to a plaque of name and date, a date far enough in antiquity that nothing is remembered of them except their grave marker. There, a welcoming, professionally-attired woman, Laurie Amat, gracefully filled the space of the dead with her operatic voice, lilting and trembling and belting and reverberating against the stone architecture. Her melodic voice ushered me in, but as she faced the places that contained the dead, her audience, I knew that I was superfluous. Her talents were refreshment for those who cannot sing or listen anymore. She was an instrument upon which an aliveness came home to acknowledge, to reach even, the realm of the unalive. It was a remembrance for the forgotten. And it was a reminder that I, like the thousands surrounding me who are reduced to ashes, urns, plaques and one or two mementos left by a dwindling number of adoring survivors, last for just a second on this earth — just like one of her perfectly pitched, honeyed notes as it disappears into the ethers, like the note before it. At first it hurt to let go of all that my self thinks is important, those empirical requirements of the everyday. And yet, the more I disappeared into the moment, I didn’t care that I was gone, forgotten. In fact, I relished it.

“If again we should find if we took a walk with our friend that he is alive to everything — to ugliness, sordidity, beauty, amusement. He follows every thought careless where it may lead him. He discusses openly what used never to be mentioned privately. And this very freedom and curiosity are perhaps the cause of what appears to be his most marked characteristic — the strange way in which things that have no apparent connection are associated in his mind. Feelings which used to come single and separate do so no longer. Beauty is part ugliness; amusement part disgust; pleasure part pain. Emotions which used to enter the mind whole are now broken up on the threshold.” Virginia Woolf