“The Infinite Cage” — Joron

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art, bird watching, birds, birdwatching, death, Home, memoir, migration, nature, painting, philosophy, Photography, poetry, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, words, writing

(With a few words in a note to me, she tore open the blank space here, and asked me to write again. Her gesture brought tears, in both senses of the word, and so it starts with tears — because it involves breaking the icy river, the cowardly reluctance to thaw it, to think it isn’t always flowing underneath.)

(Santa Croce ceiling bird.)

Beauty, Nathan reminds me.

What of my small experiences wants words to land them here. What birds would touch down from untouchable sky in order for me to see them, count them, photograph them, devote myself to them.

Because now these birds seem wild and unbelonging like the work that sits months waiting for me in my studio.

Last week we made a strange reunion of local birders on the back porch of a stranger’s house, to peer over a fence into the neighbor’s yard to glimpse a young Summer Tanager eating desperately at the feeder. He was undoubtedly wayward and far from home territory because of the onslaught of coastal storms. We were welcomed into that space and to each other, with only a quick mention of the mass shooting that had happened the day before shattering our small town. Then, the bird arrived, and as Eva describes, we wandered into the center of the circle of wonder. Summer Tanager was the greeting.

How often I delude myself to be disconnected from it all. And as Eva exclaims more loudly, impatiently, because the most obvious is the most difficult — we are always in the circle of wonder, never outside it — and we can indeed find center. Never by our own narrow volition, but by wandering.

(Red Phalarope by Summer Lee, a pelagic bird brought inland by storms, 2023.)

But I want words for those birds, those moments — not the ones where I tenderly helped unclench his fingers from the hospital bed, or the impatient coldness I can turn towards my own children, or how exhilaration smothered grief when driving away from her hopeless apartment for the last time. Not for the woman who rocked her body in prayer before every beautiful dinner she served and told me, this is not the life I expected for myself. And even still, not the gift of my children’s joy that persists despite me, or how I can burrow into the surrendered miracle of my new, unexpected lover.

Somehow there should rather be words for the Virginia Rail that crept out from its perennial hiding place to the spot below the window of my car. And how we caught eyes, one being welcoming another.

The people in that odd backyard meeting, with undoubtedly their own sufferings and joys, would understand. The Virginia Rail is basically all we talk about for hours and hours, even though long ago and long gone — until the next improbable Beauty arrives. And of course, those far away but close to my heart who send me words fluttering down from the sky, out of nowhere perfectly on time — thank god they understand too.

(The Virginia Rail. January 2023.)

In these birds, these words, these friends, I know is the paradox of faith, and how it takes care of us by destroying us.

I will taper down this roughly thawed cascade of words to say that 77 unique species of birds have visited my yard in the 20 or so years I have lived at this home. And I wonder about what I missed in the times I drifted away. Once a group of us chased a vagrant Dusky Warbler across a field of dried fennel, a man’s long camera lens thunking against my head to capture the bird, preventing me from photographing it well. The bird flew off confused, and we stayed to celebrate, for me the 560th species. A bewildered boy next to me scanned over the expanse of chaparral and said, just think how many dusky warblers might be out there and we would never know.

(The Dusky Warbler)

So maybe in my silence, where words haven’t been, is a backwards way to acknowledge some secrets. Not about the “yoke of perishing” we come into being with. More like finally seeing the Prairie Warbler next to the local sewage plant. That time, it took minutes to see his yellow light darting in the scrub, when the year before I spent weeks, thousands of miles away, to no avail. How some things will always escape, even as I am coming closer and closer, and reveal secrets of me that are unknown to myself even. Dufourmantelle cautions, mystery is not an enigma to be solved but prayed to, and truth is only a veil.

“Endure, o mystery of being, so that I might pull threads from your veil.” – Wislawa Szymborska

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“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.)

Be faithful Go

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Adam Hathaway, art, Emily Hughes, faith, George Steiner, journey of a photograph, Karen Hathaway, Photography, Summer Lee, Zbigniew Herbert

Art, even with its inward mystery, and maybe because of it, has a way of illuminating. Here is my contribution to this wonderful collaborative project.

Read about it here:

http://journeyofaphotograph.com/2013/08/17/be-faithful-go/

“Nothing lovable is eternal or sempiternal or deathless…. But the poem is bright.” – Leo Strauss

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art, Leo Strauss, Olivier, Photography, poetry, Rineke Dijkstra, William Blake

I found myself awakened to the point of tears today in front of a work of art. Despite the onslaught of art in which I have been exposed to in the last few years, you’d think this would happen more often. But the instances when art suddenly uncoils something within, melts a mundane frozenness, or leaps me into a moment of being – unfortunately, these moments happen less and less.

But today, I stood in front of a series of photographs by Rineke Dijkstra, and tried to hide the welling up that seemed so awkward and inappropriate in a sterile, brightly-lit museum environment.

We are of a time when photography is so facile as taking your phone out of your pocket and clicking it, and so mechanical as to overlay an algorithmic alteration to a photo with the push of a button, and so ubiquitous that even my mother (a monk, no less) captures and broadcasts photos of her grandson on her slick iphone.

Yet, Dikjstra’s meditative work solicits something missing in the accelerated onslaught of photography everywhere else. It is found in a realm of expert photography that cannot be mechanized and is all too elusive – the expression of an untranslatable but no less palpable human interiority creeping out from under a futile veneer. And such excision and study of this interiority necessitates a compassion for the subjects but also recalls one’s own vulnerability – places where we don’t admit that we could use compassion towards ourselves. This is Dijkstra’s poetry. As my friend said to me on the way out of the exhibit, you don’t think this is photography, her work transcends the photograph.

But that is not the main reason I was so moved today.

Within this series taken over 3 years, bearing witness to what time does to a young man entering adulthood, there are flashes of atemporality — 8 images sliced out of time and forever frozen in the present tense. Moreover, if you come to love him, like I did, you can sense something unchanging, a steady center at battle with the hard world. The minimalism of these works makes plain what he so arduously introverts at each point in time — plaintive lips curled to the edge of a cry, a stoic brow hovering over deeply questioning eyes, cheekbones hardening over the softness of youth.  I am delivered to a heart-rending moment when one opens to the particularity of his experience and rediscovers qualities that are irrevocably and universally human.

How could I not think of my own son, and not mourn all that has already passed and changed in him? How could I not grieve that one day I will not exist to see him and his evolution? That even as much as our lives are intertwined now, there will be a great deal of his life unfathomable to me, completely unreachable. How could I not be flooded by the pain of loving something so fickle as a life – and so overwhelmed that if I didn’t push it back a little, I would be a blithering mess, in a sterile, brightly lit gallery of the MOMA. It was a moment in the day-to-day delusion that all remains safely the same, when I am suddenly awoken to the inescapably temporal. And from there, flowing in the rhythms of temporality, I can come to relish one exquisitely measureless, timeless beat.

Today’s Advice: “He who to himself binds a joy/Doth the winged life destroy/But he who kisses the joy as it flies/Lives in Eternity’s sun rise.”  — William Blake

Today’s Issue: “Do not count on death — on your own or on universal death — to found anything whatsoever, even the reality of this death. For it is so uncertain that it always fades away ahead of time, and with it, whatever declares it.” — Maurice Blanchot

Tags

Blanchot, Francesca Woodman, Heidegger, memoir, Mortality, Photography

A friend treated me to the MOMA exhibit of Francesca Woodman’s photography today. Her photographs are emotionally grueling as much as they are poetic and otherworldly — a startling oeuvre for an artist who killed herself at 22 years-old. Amid her reckless vulnerability, guileless experimentation and the prescience of her deadened gaze, it’s hard not to notice clues of a yearned-for redemption. Therein her photographs lies an openness to the other that occurs in a blinding blast of exterior light, a haze of translucent corporeal form as it moves during long exposure, and the compositional beauty of shapes in a beauty-less squalor. When I encountered the images which captured her in a morbid dance with her dead grandmother’s belongings, I heard instantly the song echoing in my own heart: my own missing grandmother.

My grandmother and I saw each other completely and despite this, loved each other wholly. It also helped that she spoiled me unabatedly, but that’s the providence of a grandmother. She has been dead almost 15 years, but her absence is as fresh as it was the moment her eyes beseeched mine in her final suffering — the moment I abandoned her, glancing away in my callow inability to reckon the totality of loss.

She bore only one son, who bore only two daughters — and the Lee lineage, with now dead branches of ancestors from roots undoubtedly in antiquity, is a felled tree. Yet she loved her grandaughters not just all the same, but perhaps even more so because of her own experience as a female in an overvalorized patriarchal prison of a culture.

Two years ago I bore a son, who, because of circumstances way outside my grandmother’s understanding, will carry the Lee name.

A year ago, I was putting my then 7 month-old son to bed. When I entered the bedroom, a portrait of my grandmother caught my attention in a way that doesn’t occur with belongings one lives with for years, photos and mementos that over time become as invisible as they are fixture. But on this night, her photo struck me as having a new punctum, that this old image existed suddenly in the present tense — a realization that my grandmother had been of life, incredibly overwhelming the sum of the lifeless ink and paper that represented her as such.

As quickly as that photo caught eyes with mine, I put it aside, and put my son to bed. As he fell asleep, a shadow whisked down the hallway outside. I assumed it was my partner, and when it was clear that it wasn’t, a primitive fear prevented any deep consideration and propelled me out of the bedroom and upstairs like a child fugitive of the dark.

When a rationality returned, I returned to check on my sleeping boy, and when I drew near him, I took in a startling sight — a security blanket had been tucked under my son’s chin, his arm embracing it, with the blankets wrapping him in the way I had left them. Incredulous, I sought my partner for what would be an easy explanation: Did you cuddle his security blanket under his arms?

What are you talking about, I’ve been up here the whole time.

When I showed her the sight of our son, somehow having found his “lovie” left nowhere near his sleeping body, tucked in his arms like only a loving guardian would do, a shockwave of love and gratitude for my grandmother flooded in, just as an equally terrifying openness to the utter unknown seized me — the magnitude of an untranslatability — which would never let me speak of it again.

Today’s Advice:  “And yet – beyond what is, not away from it but before it, there is an other that occurs. In the midst of beings as a whole, there is an open place. There is a clearing, a lighting… This open center, therefore, is not surrounded by what is; rather, the lighting middle itself encircles all that is, like the nothing we hardly know.” — Heidegger.