“We are in the midst of reality, responding with joy.” — Agnes Martin

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Agnes Martin, art, chapel of the chimes, death, Garden of Memory, George Steiner, Heidegger, painting, summer solstice

A year later and I am back visiting the dead, this time questioning the responsibility of putting new life into the world.

Weaving in and out of the crypts and private chapels, the walls are lined with vessels holding ashes, shelves holding caskets, and the letters of names. It takes a strain of my imagination to fill-in the entire arc of a life that now sits in mostly forgotten urns, placeholders. Once behind the names were fleshes of personality, interactions that effected causality, relational change, consequences in the environment, impressions on the psyches of others — and then they were gone. Except for a spot in a tiny little box aside thousands of others, now also mere words.

(Painting, “Tremolo,” by Agnes Martin, 1967.)

This year, it struck me that the cast of musicians performing here and there among the dead were stand-ins, intermediaries. They attracted hordes of the living into this solemn place on the longest day of the year to challenge the human aloofness towards the dead, to weigh the untranslatable meanings behind those words. With mixed success. Even though evidence of death towers on all sides, our finite narratives and rehearsed terminal endings at the end of every sentence — we remain distracted from our own dying.

We committed to one dark grotto of those born in the early 1800’s. A professional cellist sat inside with her laptop and synthesizer. Sometime while she was tuning her cello and tapping on her laptop, it dawned on us that she was in high performance. The ambiguous noises were experiments against the classical instrument’s boundaries: a stutter and screech here, a falling note there, a computer’s response, and the cellist’s retort. When she finished her “tuning” performance and nodded her head to applause, we understood that the provisional and dissonant duet between cellist and computer highlighted the aleatory relationship between existence and not-existence — and was indeed beautiful music. As Steiner says, art reminds us that there is something rather than nothing, only by virtue of grace.

The scene seared into my heart the ruminating words I had read that day of my dear friend’s husband having only days to live. They were going down their road until a few weeks ago, their life was sideswiped by illness and overturned into a tragic twilight. At home in hospice care, they are surrounded by friends and family who improvise themselves into a blanket of love and support for his last moments. There is no score or predictable soundtrack here. Nor, as Pamela says, is this life a dress rehearsal. But at best we merely hear the music at all.

(Painting, “Trumpet,” by Agnes Martin, 1967)

My friend this evening and I jest that it is just as much the beauty of the performer as it is the melodic tunes (amidst many dissonant-sounding experimental musicians) that has drawn a thick crowd into side room of the columbarium. Sitting on the stone floor in vulnerable elegance, she plays odd, unrecognizable instruments in classical improvisations. And we, the living, over a trickling fountain lined with pertly pink and red impatiens, “watch” her fill the space of the eternally invisible with unseen timbres and undulating wavelengths of passionate percussion. When she breathes into a bamboo flute with an electronic lung holding a previous refrain to which she responds in turn, a strange but pleasing chorus emerges into a rhythm of labored breath, a futile and yet beautiful resuscitation.

(In the stairwell from one chapel to another, we overhear a woman remark that this is what people from the rest of the country think Californians do everyday.)

But the true entrance into me does not occur by that willful anticipation of art, just as much as predicted words here do not alight, but sink. Instead it happened when an unexpected noise entered the back of our music-filled worship. It announced the entrance of a young, disabled girl with the cognition of a child ten years younger. She burst into this delicate space, hugging a 3-foot Barney and two teddy bears, and proceeded to march directly to within inches of the musician. The performer was startled but without missing a note, welcomed her softly with her eyes. And the girl of a strange grammar, much to my held breath’s relief, plopped herself front and center with no further histrionics. While the music pulsed along, the girl’s father sat down in the back, occasionally waving a connective hello to his girl. But she is now entranced by the familiarly foreign music, playing seriously with one of the bear’s ears — because afterall, this is about our ears.

And I, the helicopter parent, who constantly restricts my exuberant son in a cloying distrust and tiresome fear of violating the perceived comfort of everyone around me, orchestrating him here and there so as to fit who-knows-what expectations, I succumbed to this scene. Yes, a carnival of existence among the backdrop of non-existence, of Nothingness — but mostly of trusting surrender. There in front of the dead, the distracted living, too — and because of the little bit of life under my domain that is there despite me — my heart busted itself into tears.

“As the shrine of Nothing, death is the shelter of Being.” — Heidegger

(Agnes Martin’s last painting, “Untitled,” 2004)

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“One can never pretend to comprehend completely –: that would disrespect in the face of the Unknown that inhabits — or comes to inhabit — the poet; that would be to forget that poetry is something that breathes; that poetry breathes you in.” Paul Celan to René Char

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art, death, Leigh Hyams, painting, Paul Celan, poetry, San Miguel de Allende, Stephane Mallarme, teachers

Since I was the youngest by 3 or 4 decades, my traveling companions were relieved it was me who, drained from travel and the stifling heat (and a sip of the local margarita), interrupted pleasantries to declare that I might pass out. Our host for the week escorted me to the warm cement sidewalk of a dirt street outside the humble restaurant and waited until the cool breeze of the desert night revived me. She asked me polite questions, mostly trying to ease my embarrassment, but also to indirectly resolve how it is that at not even 30 years old, I had become close friends and travel companions with a cadre of women in their 60’s.

The babel of barking dogs woke me the next morning, which was after the night of dreaming she came to hold me. Somehow, the dark sensuality of this woman a half-century older did not alarm me.

In the morning painting session, I start with images and colors I have known before, but they don’t cooperate. As I paint canvases full of utterly conventional crap, I find myself at the edge of tears. There in the shade of her turquoise and pink adobe courtyard, tendrils of bougainvillea cling to the walls closing in on me, mocking my vulnerability and failure — like the stuffing has fallen out of my bra and the world sees me trying to put it back.

She sees the paintings and since I cannot dare the gracelessness needed to throw them over the fence,  I wish for once they could tell a lie. She moves like a dancer around them and critiques them with the fists of a boxer. I am politely mute, in turn, hating my own politeness. I want to hate her but she is just the conduit.

(Painting by Leigh Hyams)

Plus, San Miguel de Allende overwhelms my sensitivity. I know why the dogs bark. All of them trying to simplify and drown out the brightly jarring colors, the incessant music from blocks away, the dead heat, the spirit voices, the craving for something other. The unreachable ocean.

The next night I dream that my neighbor’s contractor tears out my yard. All my cherished plants are missing, upturned soil exposes eviscerated roots. I experience an abyss where there once had been logic and rationality. Before hitting bottom, I wake to the pre-dawn storm of bird songs.

My dream is clear to her. She tells me in deep tones and direct terms that this unknown is the place where I want to be. Because of this and the buzz in her words, I start crying as she speaks, releasing all the tears that started bubbling in the courtyard. Tears that were neatly packaged screams against my mediocrity, my mundane banality, my safety. Tears that were cages holding a fearful but overgrown child wanting out into the wilderness. My painter friends look on tenderly, thinking it is because I’m sad. But I am beyond sad or happy, I am approaching otherness.

They think she is only speaking to me.

She says, this crying business, as if to be disdainful and compassionate at the same time, is something that only artists can understand.

I would return years later for an extended time considering the small city, my being in the midst of fertility treatment, and the lack of communication to my home from this gritty, foreign country. I was prisoner again to my own painting in her light-drenched studio, but she was a gentle and stern warden. We had many conversations here and there, aside a parade of indigenous costume-wearing tribes, over breakfasts in teeming gardens, after a dip in the local mineral springs, and hopping along the cobblestones incongruently filling the roads.

Sensing her increased frailty and watching her meticulous devotion to a series of sparsely charcoaled paintings of local ruins — to me obvious elegies to past magnanimous accomplishment — I asked if she was questioning her mortality. She, sitting in the improbably verdant backdrop of a sumptuous, water-filled courtyard garden gleaming in desert light and singing heat, answered with a smile, and maybe a slight disingenuousness: not anymore than I always have.

(Painting by Leigh Hyams)

Some mornings new art books would appear at my breakfast table, always with unspoken pertinence. I loaned her my copy of Mary Oliver’s recent Evidence — a book of searching poems comprised of terse words around what cannot be buried, even spoken, after a loss, or death.

So I can imagine exactly how it was when she died a few weeks ago. Her bed is overlooking her wildly tended garden. She is arms-distance to her favorite art pieces ranging from profoundly poetic to those with playful certainty, and those, maybe her favorite, continually in serious questioning. I can see the washed out colors of early Mexican spring, feel the light-headed air of the high altitude aggressively dancing with the dust lifted and levitating in her richly alive, medieval Latin city. And I hear a liturgy from the birds of her neighborhood, of course, taking over the tinny brass horns droning from distant radios. The birds alone can accept that someone who loved life so much should have to leave it.  As a consolation, when dawn breaks leaving an emptiness for the rest of us, they send jewels of ephemeral birdsong down to earth to adorn her.

“Toute chose sacrée et qui veut demeurer sacrée s’enveloppe de mystère.” Stephane Mallarmé

(Painting by Leigh Hyams)

“Why then do we not despair?” — Anna Akhmatova

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anna Akhmatova, art, funeral, Jay DeFeo, painting, poetry, The Rose, Women

The incense burns itself into the sinuses and forms a memory of her passing and these funerary rituals, so that for at least a few days, the smoky smell is a remembrance of a being who is no longer with us. The fading smell is the inevitable process of honoring a person we eventually can’t remember often enough. Indeed, memory is one way to ease the constant anxiety we future-oriented, unsatiated beings live with. We just can’t hold on.

So instead another image wants to write itself here in the space opened up by writing, by memory.

(Painting, “Dove One,” by Jay DeFeo, in the SFMOMA retrospective)

In an orange jumpsuit, he sits across from me in a dingy jail interview cell. He is young, tall, strong, and mentally quite unstable. So in my callow role as his caseworker I make sure to stay arms length from the emergency call button, and closest to the door. It doesn’t help that his movements are abrupt, his voice loud, and he can only speak of fighting others, sometimes even aliens. Ju-Jitsu moves, karate techniques, kicking and punching and more threats of violence. Not towards me, though. He just wants me to hear him, I begin to understand, but attempts towards conversation provide only bizarre digressions that stubbornly return to more Ju-Jitsu talk.

It’s our third such meeting, and I bring my colleague, for safety, yes, but also because I want a witness to his instability and any insight as to why I was making no real progress with him. This time, I decide to just listen, leave my intentions and fears with my colleague sitting in quiet interest next to me.

As usual, he begins his intense litany of karate stories, of people he once punched and kicked. But suddenly, in a moment I’ve only since experienced as artistic inspiration, in a moment of self-forgetting, I have joined him. His language appears to me as a simple story-telling code. And just as I am about to weep at his stories of years in foster care and institutions, at his outpouring of traumatic recall, my colleague breaks her silence to remind him that violence is not ok. It is then I realize I had slipped into his world without her and she does not understand the code. Her words transport me back to where he is that man so strange, intimidating and inaccessible to me. To everyone.

Like the moment I stopped planting seeds in the shelter garden because a Korean resident wants to show me using gestures how she and her family had crouched under tents on their farmland in the rain, when they lost their home to war. And how our gardening together healed something, I will never know.

And how it is that a vast canvas holding 1500 pounds of gobs of oil paint and the aura of 8 years of creative toil, can also yet contain in a breath-turn the most fragile, most unearthly of passages. The same fragility that recalls the image of a woman finding refuge from military invasion inside a temple. She is mortally injured, parts of her body are missing, and it is there she nurses her baby.

In my mind she will stay there like the sentinel that is Jay DeFeo’s Rose standing guard over us. Because if you have followed me this far, you also understand she must, no matter how painful it is.

In the metaphor of gift-giving, there exists no stronger, no more difficult example.

Fortunately, there are easier exchanges, like the smiles of my friends, my fellow colleagues, as we chant together in the incense cloud hovering over Tu-Minh’s mother’s funeral. These are the same faces that appear to me in memories of my own family funerals. That some people are so indelibly present, heart-burstingly present, in the reel turning out life events.

Such is the mark of women drawn to a certain kind of work, how to describe it, I’m not sure. Yes here I’ve made some words for it, but they don’t hold, like the leaves of paper money falling behind our funeral procession into the winter wind.

And the miraculous comes so close
to the ruined, dirty houses —
something not known to anyone at all,
but wild in our breast for centuries.

— Anna Akhmatova

P

“Believe in the holy contour of life.” Jack Kerouac

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art, Heidegger, Jacques Prevert, painting, poetry, To Paint a Portrait of a Bird

Pour faire le portrait d’un oiseau

— Jacques Prévert

Peindre d’abord une cage
avec une porte ouverte
peindre ensuite
quelque chose de joli
quelque chose de simple
quelque chose de beau
quelque chose d’utile
pour l’oiseau
placer ensuite la toile contre un arbre
dans un jardin
dans un bois
ou dans une forêt
se cacher derrière l’arbre
sans rien dire
sans bouger…
Parfois l’oiseau arrive vite
mais il peut aussi bien mettre de longues années
avant de se décider
Ne pas se décourager
attendre
attendre s’il faut pendant des années
la vitesse ou la lenteur de l’arrivée de l’oiseau
n’ayant aucun rapport
avec la réussite du tableau
Quand l’oiseau arrive
s’il arrive
observer le plus profond silence
attendre que l’oiseau entre dans la cage
et quand il est entré
fermer doucement la porte avec le pinceau
puis
effacer un à un tous les barreaux
en ayant soin de ne toucher aucune des plumes de l’oiseau
Faire ensuite le portrait de l’arbre
en choisissant la plus belle de ses branches
pour l’oiseau
peindre aussi le vert feuillage et la fraîcheur du vent
la poussière du soleil
et le bruit des bêtes de l’herbe dans la chaleur de l’été
et puis attendre que l’oiseau se décide à chanter
Si l’oiseau ne chante pas
c’est mauvais signe
signe que le tableau est mauvais
mais s’il chante c’est bon signe
signe que vous pouvez signer
Alors vous arrachez tout doucement
une des plumes de l’oiseau
et vous écrivez votre nom dans un coin du tableau.

——–

To Paint a Picture of a Bird

First you paint a cage
With its door open
Then paint
Something nice
Something simple
Something lovely
Something useful
For the bird
Then set the canvas against a tree
In a garden
In a grove
Or in a forest
Hide behind the tree
Without speaking
Or moving…
Sometimes a bird arrives quickly
But equally it may take many years
Before it chooses to
Don’t be discouraged
Wait
Wait many years if needed
The speed or tardiness of its arrival
Has nothing to do
With the success of the picture
When the bird arrives
If it arrives
Observe the most profound silence
Wait till the bird enters the cage
And when it has
Gently close the door with your brush
Then
Erase all the bars one by one
Taking care not to touch a feather of the bird
Then paint a picture of the tree
Choosing the loveliest branches
For the bird
Paint the green leaves too and the wind’s coolness
The dust in the sunlight
The sound of insects, in the grass, in the summer heat
Then wait for the bird to choose to sing
If the bird won’t sing
That’s an adverse sign
A sign that the painting is bad
But if it sings it’s a good sign
A sign you can sign your name
Then very gently you’ll detach
A feather from the bird
And write your name in a corner of the painting.

“We never come to thoughts. They come to us.” Heidegger

“Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly. Everything that can be said at all can be said clearly. But not everything that can be thought can be said.” — Wittgenstein

Tags

art, Being, dead birds, memoir, painting, philosophy, silence, susan Sontag, Wittgenstein

In the yard of my childhood home, a robin drunk from devouring over-ripe cherries on our tree, flew into our bay window that must have held an attractive illusory world, so much so that more than a few birds met that hard, bludgeoning reality. And after struggling for air on the ground below, it became still and lifeless. My mother, sensitive to the meekest of life forms, gathered the corpse and her two fledgling daughters for a funeral. A hole was dug, and as I watched the corpse of the bird descend into the dirt void, my mom said words, words of ritual, wishing that this bird would be in peace.

That robin’s life, unlike the other carcasses of animals on roadsides or worse, was made sacred to me, and the abyss into which some part of this bird, the part besides feathers and flesh, inhabited when it was into the ground became the eternal question mark.

My mentor describes the pre-classical Chinese pictogram of sacred as a person standing on earth, on one’s toes, reaching for the sky, the heavens. The sacred cannot be without the earth, the mundane requirements of being human, but it also has the urge for beyond such knowing.

Eventually and logically, that became the case for those beings lying unceremoniously in rotting ditches who by my eyes were not made sacred. And a moment of heightened attention in a car passing by was, and continues to be, my attempt to sacralize, because it feels necessary that we would all be given the mere gift of attention as we disappear.

Finally this week, it was this scene that appeared to me in my own ritualized space of art-making in my studio, where I stared upon the flocks of quiet, often dissolving, single, little dead birds I’ve painted over and over for the last 7 years. After enduring the dissonant if not polite questioning and dismissal from others and myself — amidst a cultural popularization of cute birds on every sundry item available (“put a bird on it”) — I was partially decoded.

And luckily, also this week, I read an essay by Susan Sontag, who fully understands the impulse to make art “towards the ever-receding horizon of silence.”:

“One result is a type of art which many people characterize pejoratively as dumb, depressed, acquiescent, cold. But these privative qualities exist in a context of the artist’s objective intention, which is always discernible. To cultivate the metaphoric silence that’s suggested by conventionally lifeless subjects (as in much of Pop Art) and to construct “minimal” forms which seem to lack emotional resonance are in themselves vigorous, often tonic choices.”

(My painting: “Bird Elegy #1″ (detail), 2012.  14″ x 19” Watercolor on Paper)

But my recent writing/searching has drawn my attention to the fact that all things, especially the experience of love, are of a continual parting. Perhaps that impossible constant attention to that coming and going, the making sacred of every moment and every thing that makes a heartbeat, that presences and reaches into us, and then dissolves into silence — Heidegger’s clearing and gathering and clearing — that is a  glimpse into the untranslatable state of Being.

For now, I can only handle my little birds.

“It seems unlikely that the possibilities of continually undermining one’s assumptions can go on unfolding indefinitely into the future, without being eventually checked by despair or by a laugh that leaves one without any breath at all.” Susan Sontag