“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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O birds, I’ll sing to myself, you’ve carried/me along this bloody voyage,/ carry me now into that cloud/into the marvel of this final night. — Jim Harrison

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art, birds, birdwatching, death, Jim Harrison, nature, poetry, Pontormo, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, tragedy

I own a caged bird made up of thousands of serious marks by several colored pencils on paper, framed. None of it is particularly bird-like except the woman I know who applied each one. I met her in a room in an institution in my grandmother’s country. She was one of a group who spent their days in an art room. When one of them began hitting his head and shrieking, I asked my colleagues to leave and I sat down and started drawing birds, too. The silent making in that space brought us all back home. Eventually their caregiver tapped me on the shoulder and said, we knew you were coming from far away. We have a song for you. They handed out instruments to each other and stood in a circle around their art desks and starting singing, loud enough to carry into the clinically sterile halls outside. I clapped my wings and let their foreign calls delight me, until an older man who could sing but not speak wrote on his dry erase board: Ask our visitor to sing a song for us.

If I sing these words about you, you stay alive with me. If I craft these scenes from our past here you still are in them. Humans, by dint of language, are the only beings capable of a future conditional tense. It enables the birds to sing in the daybreak after the night of our death, and we hear them. And the more sensitive, by the size of the eyes of the bird, the earlier the song begins. And the more comfortable and active they are in the dark, from where you also emerge.

Little ink bird, by Summer Lee, 2020

At some point in their circle of death the birds turned towards me and they told me matter-of-factly you had been taken. Gone. Right from the middle of me. The swaths of memory that made you part of me flew out of an absence and circled themselves over and over as clear as today. Some sort of compensation for the violence that I will never see or talk to you again. I would also learn that someone took something from you when we were young that wasn’t theirs to take. It stole parts of your life increasingly, until you were gone. We were born right across the street from each other. Now I am living and you are not. This song is my deepest apology.

Some of the most beautiful birds in the circle know me through intimate, timely words over incredible distances. At the moment when I thought you were most gone, it was as if you were sitting across from me. In her knowing, the beautiful poet bird just then wrote: somehow when they leave the body, they become closer to our hearts.

And yes, these songs fall out like feathers, like when at the end of one morning, the birder opened her car door to leave and told me the lump was cancer. That same day I held Magnolia Warbler who had been found struggling on the ground, and in my hand he shrieked a distress which was the call that there is unfathomable suffering without the consolation of reason.

One morning of those 43 mornings in a row, before the other birders arrived, there at the edge of the puddle was a bird I knew well and would make me famous to other birders for the week. How funny since he was a common bird to me, Varied Thrush, from a dark path along the reservoir near my west coast home. But here, he was a long way out of range. The place I often find myself. Who knows how these specialists drift thousands of miles from their homes, how this tiny bird managed to cross over the Rocky Mountains. Surely alone. We are birds along a life-long commute of thousands of miles. These words are the apology when one goes off course.

Thank you to our parents who let us little kids out to play together hours on end, often into the darkness. Thank you to my mom who visited him a few weeks before in the hospital, to remind him he was not his diagnosis. Though the tattoos of darkness were adding up on his body, there is always the light of possibility for all our self-inked narratives to be not true.

After the 4 hours a day every morning I spent with these birders, the migration season was over. It reminds me of the moment I left that institution where the caged birds sang and made art for their entire lives. A part of me stayed behind to keep drawing birds. But along a corridor on the way out, a mother was visiting her son. He sat alone from the group flatly staring out a window, and she was petting his head, preening him with all her loving attention.

The birders leave because the birds move on. The last bird spotted was an emerald blur of a tiny hummingbird that was late for the cold air. It hovered over our heads just long enough for even the slowest of us to register and then it zipped away into the invisible. 

“Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.” Jim Harrison

Detail of Deposition by Pontormo, 1528

“I could never have come to the present without you / remember that / from whatever stage we may again / watch it appear…” WS Merwin

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Annunciations, art, birds, birdwatching, death, Gadamer, philosophy, poetry, St Cecilia, Summer Lee, WS Merwin

The birds come and go here just as Fox Sparrow does in his homecomings and disappearances back on the West coast. Just as truth and beauty migrate out onto another unreachable continent when trying to reason with them. Why can’t you stay here to remind me, I ask through my binoculars. Just once. Their wondrous plumage and secretive calls draw us out from the smallness of our shelters, out into the rainy forests and sometimes in communion with each other, the alive and lonely. This year all the rarest of ones flickered across my field, even a tiny, crystal-blue Cerulean Warbler that spends most of his time too high for anybody to see. A Hooded Warbler touched down too, in a darkly flooded forest where he normally does not, just for two days. Then they leave and we are alone again. Maybe that’s why I told a beautiful woman birder that I saw the rarest bird, when in fact I hadn’t seen it at all. Something about the mix of her beauty and shyness, and something about me being mistaken and humbled. But maybe that bird is still there in our minds, more glorious and hopeful than if we had even seen it.

(Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia of Music. Sculpture by Stefano Maderno, 1599.)

What if this wave of unrelenting and invisible death was actually a grace. Except of course for the poor and vulnerable who always die for our sins. All while I suffocate in the safety around me in the anxiety that it’s never enough. Like when I impatiently told her she just needed exercise when in fact she was just about to die, swollen with failed organs, failed also by my insulated stupidity born of fear.

One time out in the twilight of a chaparral migration, stranger birds gathered in a circle. And even more strangely invited me. They had gathered in order to die. But being birds, they had to first learn how to die through song.

I listened. And of course cried too, as one does even at a stranger’s funeral. One sang of her young daughter who died suddenly. And when the mother’s song entered the abyss of dark and permanent grief, her daughter would come sing to her, to the point where I could almost hear it too. I still don’t want to know if it was an apparition of the psyche or from the other side, because it’s the same place where my own grandmother speaks to me.

This mother had brought with her the chaplain she had met in the hospital. Yes, there is always a bird there, even if we don’t believe, and here she was in the body of a middle-aged, white woman wearing a collar. The chaplain sang to me too, as I worried about my own son treading a difficult path through life. As she warbled, we all sat crying for ourselves and for that mother. Her song was about just being there at the right time, reminding us that our bodies know how to die when it is time.

But the timing of the young daughter’s song, as well as this chaplain, was uncanny. Like the little 9th century bell in Rocamadour that rings when there is an incontestable miracle. Not all pilgrims who have climbed on their bloody, tired knees to that church will hear it. But I can hear that birdsong from that circle of death, even if they are on the other side of the earth now.

Through all the hatred to be had of insufferable humanity, its never-ending range of evils, these migratory birds continue to love me well through certain people, strangers even. Just through their words. Through the poetic words they send me, calls to the heart that rain down on me in dark, muddy forests. In poetic words, there lies the impossibility of their birdsong — as impossible as it is to hold truth and beauty too — that living is through learning how to die. One word at a time, one song, risking itself into unreachable silence.

 

“The greater miracle of language lies not in the fact that the Word becomes flesh and emerges in external being, but that that which emerges and externalizes itself in utterance is always already a word.” Gadamer, Truth and Method.

“That of a bird floating on the wind without moving its own wings, that of a bird which is flown by the wind.” Zeami, 15th Century

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art, birds, Czeslaw Milosz, kite, Lorenzo di Credi, Love, poetry, spirituality, St. Francis, Summer Mei Ling Lee, Zeami

It’s a flagrantly irreverent kite, as it dances a silly jig back and forth, fancy-free and a mile high in the gray sky. Shadows of swallows and swifts dart all around, you can’t much see them but can feel them hurling by just inches away.  All this high above a green river, slicing through a narrow forest, carving into the dead center of city. Just a concrete bridge, an updraft, and an insect haven for the evening hunger.

Yes but I’m not happy, he says in broken English, laughing only a little. Because even though it is a plastic-blue-Walmart-superhero kite, this is serious.

You have eagle eyes, he adds, as I point out to him where in the forest the string has hitched itself. Although I side with the runaway kite, mocking his owner, finding communion with the disinterested birds.

His little boy is concerned as his father sternly reels the string in, the father with one eye on his little boy “Vincent!” who might at any moment fall off the unrailed bridge to the rocky riverbed below.

A gray hawk does some stoic surveillance and disappears. Then a noisy plane above it.

He pulls the string harder and the place in the tree where it is stuck is made clear, revealing our finite and diminished existence. Now caught, the kite flails against certain death, surrounding leaves torn away and falling. It occurs to me this $20 kite battle means something to this man, when my kids lose toys daily without notice. And how this battle now means the world to me.

Suddenly one of the yanks frees the kite from the branches and it soars up again into the sky. He releases a shout of victory like a knight who has slayed the dragon. He retreats back into the city with his child, kite following closely like a dog with a tail between the legs. I laugh.

Then just when the whole sky seemed too vast to embrace our little drama, tiny stabs of rain give their acknowledgement and I start to cry. A mote of beauty in this world. Yet under the same sky where children were torn apart in their school bus by our bomb. The same day the sky gathered the river, made a clearing, and uttered our silently grateful birds.

(Detail from Lorenzo di Credi, The Virgin Adoring the Child, 1490. British National Gallery)

——

Love by Czesław Miłosz

 

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

(Detail, Follower of Joos Van Cleve, St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata, 1530. SF Legion of Honor)

Welcome home to un-home.

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art, birds, Chicago, Chinese Bone Repatriation, death, Fra Angelico, Home, immigration, Marie Howe, migration, philosophy, poetry, Summer Lee, Summer Mei Ling Lee, The Annunciation

Non Omnis Moriar

The first bird I met here was half-dead. A Cape May Warbler, my first ever. It had collided with a Chicago building like thousands that do every year. It stood frozen still on the rooftop as I toured the 11-story, urban school for my son, as if warning me of the impending experience there. The Cape May is one of five million migrants and dwindling, but in this season, they still show up as clouds on weather radars every evening as they take into the darkness and as they rest to feed by sunlight.

They must survive the buildings, but also the endless Midwest miles of recently invading soy and corn fields, where there is ironically no food for them. They trace along the lakefront, which is where I found my cathedral among the starving and vulnerable. This church is simple, and the faithful are sensitive souls as they gently but enthusiastically ask me, did I see the black-throated blue warbler over there?

It’s true that in the end love is why. And also, as she crystallized in fragile words, nothing brings so much pain as love.

A third of the first shipment of bone boxes from the United States back to China were empty. Most immigrants back then wanted to be buried in their ancestral homes. They were also not welcomed here. Despite vast impoverishment, the family associations made arrangements to clean the bones and ship them on a 30-day ocean journey via Hong Kong, from where they would be delivered into China. The empty ones were soul-summoning boxes, when their were only names, when bodies could not be located. Something had to migrate home.

Some never made it back. Some are stuck in transit, in boxes in a storage house in Hong Kong, where they opened an empty one for me. When I saw it, I cried uncontrollably. And when I came to, I remembered Faure’s requiem.

Some are still waiting in my hometown, like my great grandmother. And here I had thought the Chinese village name on her tombstone was for biographical purposes only. When in fact, like so many others, it is an unkept promise of a more final return home.  No matter how many children they birthed and raised on this soil, the burial here is temporary. Address labels with no postage, the stone mark of their villages is a question mark of an eternally unanswered request, beseeching unwitting visitors, please take me home. The village name, possibly of a village that doesn’t exist anymore, is a way the dead stay alive. Yes, never dead if your progeny visits and honors you. After all, if someone remembers you, you still exist. But here it is not ancestral worship either, just an endless restlessness for homecoming.

(The Annunciation, Fra Angelico, 1425-6)

The neighbor in Chicago to the right voted for Trump and the grumpy one on the left asked to take down my bird feeder because it was bringing woodpeckers to her yard. I never saw a woodpecker at my feeder in California, who knows why not, but there are four kinds here. You wouldn’t understand what it is to stop feeding the birds of my home. There is no one now to track their yearly changes as well as their disappearances. To no longer hear their version of truths about migrations and the space they know between heaven and earth. So I set out to ask the strange birds of my new home.

It is cold and rainy as I hold my camera up to these birds. We join together in the hopeful uplift of these visitors, knowing also they won’t be here much longer. And I realized maybe this is the reason I was brought here, and why I must now live between two homes.

It was also cold and rainy when I found him at the nearby cemetery in an unmarked grave. The Hong Kong assignment led me to review my grandmother’s INS interrogation from 1925. In it, her father describes burning the documents of her oldest brother at his gravesite. To erase any reminder that he had died in Chicago, the year before in 1924, at the age of 21 of a sudden illness that is of poverty. The confused clerk looked at me strangely, the white lady who presented his romanized Chinese name, but soon enough they found him on a hand-written map. Minutes later, the groundsmen took me to a field and paced off the coordinates — and there in the middle of fucking Chicago, I had found his bones.

She said, it’s as if I had to become displaced to find my family.

(In my imagination my grandmother’s family experienced one Chicago winter because thank you god they quickly moved to San Francisco.)

And if you have ever uttered a word thinking your dead would hear, you understand the birds. And you also know that all real happiness sets you on the edge of loss. As Judith and I ended our two hour phone call, a Cerulean Warbler flitted across my driveway. It was here and gone so quickly, it exists in the realm of doubt. But somehow my grandmother knows I am listening.

____________________________________

ANNUNCIATION

Even if I don’t see it again – Nor ever feel it
I know it is — and that if once it hailed me
it ever does–

and so it is myself I want to turn in that direction
not as toward a place, but it was a tilting within
myself, as one turns a mirror to flash the light to where it isn’t — I was blinded like that — and swam
in what shone at me

only able to endure it by being no one and so specifically myself I thought I’d die
from being loved like that.

— Marie Howe

“…wherever gods are in flight.” — Heidegger

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art, birds, Dylan Thomas, gods, Hieronymus Bosch, illness, Laurence Hemming, Marguerite Yourcenar, Martin Heidegger, poetry, suicide

“No god can be held fast by a mortal: but the poet may, in stillness, bring to a stand the passing-by of the god, by speaking what the god has given him to speak. The poet in stillness, stills the nearing god.” — Laurence P. Hemming on Heidegger.

The gods are in flight.

Heidegger wrote that, and he also wrote that they can be near. But they aren’t here. I don’t know if he meant it in the sense I have as doubt is my glass darkly. But somehow his words prompt my own. But who can write into the unknown without just a few glints of necessary faith.

Heidegger’s fugitive gods were certainly about his pessimism about our modern forgetfulness of being. He also wrote that gods need the hearts of feeling men. And I remember how my heart lifted at the return of the Fox Sparrow to my yard a few days ago, as he has the last several autumns. Last winter, a new pair joined him, bringing an unprecedented three fox sparrows scratching below the feeder. How they knew to join him, and his flock of Golden-Crowneds, I will never know. Where the other two are this year, I am not sure either.

(Detail of Hieronymus Bosch Painting, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” 1501)

My body is still betraying me, caging me in illness, the remorseful price of an early hope-filled pregnancy. The gruel involved in what were once rote tasks is also a block to the muse. Who in pain can muster an openness to offer hospitality to the unknown. Pain asks when, when will it be over, and in that way is anxiously future-oriented. Pain rarely wants to be at home with itself in the present moment — the moment of stillness needed to still a nearing god.

(Detail of Hieronymus Bosch Painting, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” 1501)

Like my birds, the gods need my heart in pain, and in glory. And I need them and call them back. One of my last of dwindling tools are words. But the permanency of words, the dispelling of mystery, can keep them at flight also.

And half of my grammar is unavailable to me. Not just because I am sick, but because it was a grammar we shared — and he took it with him into the underworld. An underworld I glimpsed with him and am terrified of. And like his ashes bellowing out of the crematorium a few days later, inhaled into my head with unspeakable dread, those words have broken up and are dispersed into a fading language I am not sure I have faith in anymore.

(Detail of Hieronymus Bosch Painting, “The Temptation of St. Anthony,” 1501)

A friend eulogizing the author Marguerite Yourcenar said, “God has loved me very well through certain people.” Breaking out from the dread is the light of gratitude for those certain people. To see each other completely and still love. Not easy because we take flight ourselves, we look away. But there are those people who have come to me and are the beacon for gods I may never have known, except that they are near, in flight, rising in flocks startled by these predatory words.

And it is in the dark, the extending nights, when Fox Sparrow migrates from his remote, unknown breeding place, following an ancestral path. He does not go gentle into that good night.

“Oh good Lord, who may escape from these snares?” — The Temptation of St. Anthony

To discover one’s own absence is to discover one’s immortality…

Tags

Agnes Martin, art, birds, George Steiner, mystery, nature, poetry, San Pedro Valley

Another entry for my new project: Here is Where We Meet. http://thebirdsofsanpedrovalley.wordpress.com/2013/07/20/to-discover-ones-own-absence-is-to-discover-ones-immortality/

“When a fox is fifty, it can take the form of a woman. When it is one hundred, it can take the form of a beautiful girl. When it is a thousand, it can speak to Heaven and will never die.” — Larissa Lai

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Adrienne Rich, art, artist's block, birds, Heidegger, Larissa Lai, May Sarton, poetry, The Fact of a Doorframe, When Fox is A Thousand

They left me last week, as was bound to happen.

But back in time, societies marked the first day of spring by the arrival of swallows, the same birds you might see outside your window right now. They cut through the air with imperceptible wing beats, more like the bugs they chase than bird-like. They sweep faster than my camera can focus, weaving invisible flight paths like loose braids in the ways my own memories criss-cross and become farther from truth, but in a way closer to me. And similar to memory, it’s as if one random clear day, they appear out of no where, just as likely as emergent from the ground underneath our feet than arriving from distant lands.

 

The same people believed that a fox could also be an immortal woman who prowls the night.

“When a fox is fifty, it can take the form of a woman. When it is one hundred, it can take the form of a beautiful girl. When it is a thousand, it can speak to Heaven and will never die.”

Our dear neighbor, Chuck (there is no better neighbor for warm mailbox conversation and handyman referrals and trinket-gifts to our scavenger son) has just spotted a fox traipsing along our backyards. Back there, the ceanothus is putting out snowballs of periwinkle blue, its branches forming undulating waves under which birds and snakes alike find refuge. And now this fox. I wonder what she wants to tell me.

(Ceramic snake birdfeeder, by Summer Lee, 2008)

May Sarton has been speaking to me through her journals. She tells me to make an art of solitude, of which I have a lethal deprivation these days. Solitude is not for everyone, she seems to say through her doldrums and delights. You can get stuck with yourself there and self-berate endlessly. But beyond that, there is an expanse that wants to be explored with ink, words, light. Silence.

Heidegger says getting to that place begins with willing not to will. By intending not to intend — which for us humans, hungry for connection and to be special, anxious for security and accomplishment, is pretty fucking hard. And only after that little unlikely step, can an awakening to an inner releasement occur. A lettingness. Gelassenheit, he called it, borrowing from ancient, mystical German text. In turn, through Gelassenheit, we are let in. The most mundane glint of light through a swath of paint on a centuries-old, unknown painting brings me to my knees. Or the tiny yellow feathers of a pine siskin is a sign of god. Or, on the other hand, nothing happens. Like Adrienne Rich’s fact of a doorframe: we may go through, but it makes no promises.

And for good reason, since that mystery is the foundation of being. But I forget. Or as Heidegger says, I fall asleep thinking I am most awake. And during my restless slumber these clear spring nights, the fox wanders through the moon-glazed fields of my backyard, hoping I glimpse her and remember before she changes form again.

So, despite my circulation-squashing chokehold on all trivial things right now — whether to have another child, how to produce an acceptable art piece, how to be a good parent and partner, how to protect wildlife and destroy the gun lobby, how even to slow down bastard time as it mocks my appearance, my memory, my ability to get anything done — I accept that those tiny pine siskins have left my feeder and have gone north for several years, if they return at all. They are faithful to a rhythm older than time immemorial. Not to me. And I’m so grateful.

(Painting by John Singer Sargent)

“The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well… For what comes after the door is surprisingly enough, a boundless expanse full of unprecedented uncertainty, with apparently no inside and no outside, no above and no below, no here and no there, no mine and no thine, no good and no bad… Where I am indivisible this and that; where I experience the other in myself and the other-than-myself experiences me.” — Mary Sarton, quoting Carl Jung.

“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

Tags

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)

“Threadsuns / Above the grayblack wastes. / A tree- / high thought / grasps the light-tone: there are / still songs to sing beyond / mankind.” – Paul Celan

Tags

A Portrait of the Artist, Ancestors, art, death, James Joyce, Paul Celan, poetry, The Last Poems, There are still songs to sing beyond humankind, war

Despite some eccentricities in his presentation on the phone and his ardent refusal to use any technology, the elderly gentleman asks nothing and offers to help so today I go meet him in a restaurant in a suburb north of the City.

I anticipate that my art is ill-suited for his services, which mostly consist of lining up restaurants and businesses to display art with ungainly price tags. And when I see the Italian restaurant’s orange stucco walls with a range of some-accomplishment to beginner pieces, I remind myself to just see what the man has to offer.

He is sitting in the corner, with a feminine, white, bob haircut coiffed neatly, a large Nordic nose over a receding chin. He is incredibly tall even hinging on his aged frame. He looks straight at me with a pale, wrinkled face holding ice blue eyes. He hands me a form listing the opportunities he gives to artists. I politely decline all of them and tell him that my work in my experience has not been palatable for the average “civilian” (his term not mine). In turn, he explains that society needs art and that an artist does no service hiding out making art privately. Art’s service is to move and connect to other people. I retort saying art is about solitude and that the optimum experience is to stand guard over someone else’s solitude. I am not interested in converting people to a state of interest. Besides my art would be taken as freaky (my word) in the milieu in which he works. He asks why. I explain that lately my work consists of 6-foot, yellow watercolor portraits that are hard to look at. I explain how these works are about my ancestors, being haunted by them but the impossibility of knowing them. And of course it is also about their death, but I admit I have more questions than answers about that part, and art is the place for unanswerable questions. It is not of the stuff that people want to fill their homes with.

Then he argues simply, “But you have the knowledge of who your ancestors are inside you.” And I say, no, the mystery is more important. He agrees and asks if I have time for a story.

He tells me that he was born on a dining table in Copenhagen to a gypsy-blooded mother. He said he was five years old when he was first interrogated by the Gestapo. That year his family under pressure set out to leave Copenhagen to stay with his grandparents who lived in the countryside outside the city. All Danes at that time ride bicycles, he disdains. And they would have to pass on bicycle an SS checkpoint with machine guns pointed over the road.

I said I don’t like where this is going. He paused for me but continued.

He said his father told him he would go first, then his sister, his mother, then finally his father, all in one line. His father told them all to keep bicycling past the checkpoint at least 50 meters before stopping. His voice starts to shake and I realize my hope of a happy ending is dead. My eyes immediately well up. He apologizes. He says this is very difficult to talk about. I say it is very difficult to hear. He slowly continues. He utters that he rode across, then he chokes again and clears his throat. He heard gunfire behind him and he kept going. He is sniffling now and I am weeping openly. He says he rode to his grandparents’ house, familiar with it from previous visits, and arrived to what he calls his friendly oak tree. One, he adds, that has a chimney. I nod in complete recognition, ungracefully smudging tears off my face. He says he stayed for a longtime there at the oak tree until at some point he received a message. He was told that he is now on his own, an orphan of the universe, and that he was also now a genetic placeholder for his ancestors.

—

Encumbered lately by the difficult poems of Paul Celan, I sense in his poetry the excruciating search for the impossible understanding to his parents murder, their lives cut off not far from the place and time of my own storyteller. Celan’s life’s work (and resultant suicide) was the existential failure to make sense of life mediated by language, using that same language in a means to what he describes as becoming silent. Silent like all those he survived. He was tormented, like Hegel, by the fact that words have a way of removing themselves from their meanings. That one day someone could utter genocide and it would be far from what he experienced. His collection of poems is therefore entitled, The Last Poems.

—

Back in this beautiful Italian restaurant adorned with the hopes of artists wanting to touch others and be touched, our artwork — an offering for his family — hung in a silence that was awkward to all but us. He finally breaks it and says to me gently, humbly: I lived it — I know what war means. And at that moment, I glimpsed the entirety of the word myself.

(A still from a recent video, A family portrait projected on falling rice. 2013. See the whole video here. http://youtu.be/IoGln7tNyGo

“Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause.” – James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist.