Melancholy

Maybe I should join the “cult of melancholia” -

winter trees

A friend of mine said he preferred winter over other seasons because it made him melancholy, like when you love someone and the feelings aren’t returned. “I love that feeling,” he said. “It makes me so creative.”

I keep thinking about this idea, of loving one’s own pain. I remember when I was a child, I was fascinated by my own tears – I’d sit in front of the mirror, weeping, watching my face contort and flush and spill. I had no problem confronting and enjoying my sadness then.

Now, my sadnesses can sometimes freeze me, instead of freeing me to create anything.

Perhaps the melancholy of winter – walking past the park, the mountains completely visible now, their shapes hard and blue – perhaps it exists as a kind of mirror, where I can see my own emptiness and sadness without flinching.

What spurs art in you? Suffering? Joy?

If we welcome pain with the same embrace as we offer love, then we have truly learned to accept life as it is.

And perhaps that’s the main source of the creativity my friend was talking about – biting the flesh of our reality at its most tender place, the vulnerable, undefended softness created by our passions and sorrows -

- and then, in the dispassionate times, when we are calm and cold, we learn to edit.

pen park

today in the park
of moss thickening and fog rising
to the occasion of our grey star
everything falling apart
damply, calmly, without protest
against the frost’s definitiveness

i knew it would be easier to be empty,
the cold offers the comfort
of the hard ground – but what is it

about this desire that it fights
for its own existence so strongly, even
when it will surely never find its
object? giving in, all would be peace.
clinging, the chaos.

though, to be honest, this wanting
under the shameless trees and the crisp moon
on the cusp of a darkness – it is its own solace,
a kind of company to keep,
a warmth between my hands, standing
in for you -

and it will do -
it must, it has to -

taking the park inside…

Autumn Mobile

Grace and Karma: Mix, Match, Mush

I’m a young Unitarian-Universalist.

So I don’t really know a lot about the theology.

I like the idea of not just comparing religions side by side, but of seeing what happens when you intersect them. (Bahai?)

I was thinking about a person I know who really needs some miracles – or grace, I should say – gifts that he doesn’t earn. I believe in the laws of karma, in that I think if you want a friend, for instance, you have to become a friend; if you want gifts, you have to give. But sometimes people just aren’t capable of making those first inputs into the system; they haven’t been trained, they aren’t aware, they’re so low and down they can hardly move.

But grace is a Christian concept. Can it occur within or with the context of karma? What would that look like?

i lack faith and patience
like waiting for a fish
the one time there’s a bite
and i pull it out, wet and frightened and
it’s grace, and i throw it back to
keep the karma going -

Residue for a story

Why little strips of translucent plastic scattered across the ball field – as though a plastic tree had been shedding?

Why a jacket, a sock, strips of cotton, abandoned?

Why this blue bowl, cracked, upturned – left here?

What is the animal control van waiting for?

The old beer bottles aren’t hard to figure – but as I collect the plastic pieces – one intertwined almost lovingly with a leaf – I feel both pious outrage at the litter and confusion and curiosity about its origin -

I recently heard one definition of evil as being “the inability to be curious about the inner experience of another person.” (paraphrase – and I wish I could recall where I heard it) This statement nibbled at me for days.

As I try to learn to describe things as they are instead of defining their meanings (good or bad), I try to use my curiosity and imagination to help me with those descriptions, even if they are guesses – then I am not engaged in the very dull, rote exercise of judging those who have trashed the park, but I am engaging in the life that happens here, which is much more interesting and real.

Here’s my outline to explain the residue:

Perhaps some girl was in a hungry rage to eat all the Cheezits in the package  – her boyfriend ditched her – she tore, crying, at the package, stuffing them down her throat – A man, letting his dog drink from the blue bowl, heard her howls and ran in the other direction, leaving the bowl behind – a boy practicing soccer grew hot from the effort, shed his jacket, accidentally stomped on the blue bowl – the girl got distracted from her weeping-stuffing-face implosion by the graceful soccer-playing boy – the man’s dog gets off leash and chases the boy and girl out of the park, so the man calls animal control…

?

maple trees: two

maple flaring

I’ve not been a fan of maple trees.

How can anyone confess such a thing?!

But their shapes, so easy to identify, seem too easy; they seem like the Sears brand of tree, kind of generic, servicable, ubuitous. The five fingers of their leaves so much like hands, waving around saying “we’re a metaphor! use us!”

I promise, this isn’t a kind of snobbery-induced distaste, though – the Sears/Walmart aesthetic repulses and frightens me – particle board bookshelves terrify -

My parents – oh children of the sixties – stored their heavy books with the adaptable-modular ‘bricks and board’ method – but at least they were real, raw materials -

I don’t mind, in fact I relish, fakeness and pretense when they are self-aware – acknowleding theselves – owning up to their superficiality by making it concretely excessive – drag queens, for instance – taking real to the limit -

When a bookshelf is faked to look ‘real’ with no admitting of the pretense, it degrades the ‘real’ object it is mean to simulate or evoke because it implies that the ‘real’ can be imitated/faked and therefore is, itself, superficial – fakeable – without a substantial value – a stripping of integrity – disconcerting on several levels -

It’s like when I worked at Peebles my senior year in high school, having to dust the “furniture” of the men’s department where I worked – the hollow desks and wardrobes, meant to look expensive, rich, but really just set pieces – if they had lived on a real theater stage, they would have worked – but providing atmosphere to pants and sportcoats cheapened the store and the world they were meant to evoke -

Oh, it’s all so silly. And so is my annoyance toward maple trees.

maple trees: one

unleaffed tree

We go to the park and – oh my goodness – our maple tree is naked.

“Our maple tree lost all its leaves,” I say. It’s a tiny tree standing sentry-like, right at the beginning of the park. It’s still got a loop of rope around its neck – like it escaped a hanging. Like it’s been leashed, but ran off, is still running. We always pass it – and the last time we did it was still in the thralls of being fantastic and red red red, belligerently. The stripped sight is slightly shocking.

“Our tree?” My daughter asks.

Her question is apt, and it makes me think yes – no – yes, because we pay attention to this maple tree, we pay a kind of homage, darsan to it, like entering a temple and bowing to the doorway goddesses, dipping our fingertips to the cool edges of a holy pool.

(So many goddesses hold up temples with their bare hands – literally arches carved with their arms – holding everything together- )

Is love ownership? I love you, we say to the beloved. You are mine.

Yesterday I heard the Flamenco singer Concha Buika say this:

“I sing against emotional dictatorships,” she says, “and against the imposition of one person over another, in the name of love.”

Yet, when we love, we make a claim – our love claims – we declare ourselves – and the beloved, she or he, sometimes is treated like a deserted island, a flag stuck through her throat…

But this love we offer this maple tree that makes me instinctively call it ours, it is saying that this tree is within our hearts, an echoing space within the temple has been created, and this is why love and art are so tightly joined, because to worship-adore-just notice and respond to person- object – idea with art-movement – piece is to enter into a conversation in which we are honoring the occurence of beauty with our own attempt to capture – is that the word? – to express our own incited joy -

And this is something like what I told my daughter when one day we were in the park and talking about art, and why people make pictures, and then why do other people want to see them.

Because there is beauty in the world, and we want to reciprocate, and offer beauty in return, a form of worship, an entering into, a collaboration -

what I said was simple, at the time, and perfect; and lost.

No, not ownership, oppression; but yes, a claim. It is our maple tree, because our love for it, our attention, has claimed it as part of our landscape, our inner territory of the cared for, the garden we tend. The inner Eden.

Lord, I get gushy over trees.

Three Pieces

A bite on the radio, that bit me: one street over from our park, a man shot in the chest last night.

Leaving my driveway, two boys in bright red slogan & commercialized loungewearish track suits greeting joyfully middle-aged women swathed in African prints.

The sky starts to ice over, like a windshield.

leaves, leaving

The leaves fall, fall as if from far away…
And through the night the heavy earth falls too,
down from the stars, into the loneliness.
And we all fall. This hand must fall.
Look everywhere: it is the lot of all.
– from Rilke’s “Autumn”

This is what the leaves teach us:

To preserve is not to live.

(someone says under her breath: take a look at a mummy, dummy)

You can’t save them. They fall and fall, ignited colors, red, fuschias, oranges, golds – leaves striped and swirled and pockmarked with the handwriting of disease – my throat constricts with desire to hold them, to consume them into my body, to shallack them, to keep them, make them stay exactly as they are, so over-the-top gorgeous -

but, as a pocket in my pocketbook attests, leaves drain of their color and crumple into papery flakes. The glory cannot be saved.

The art preservationists pipe in at this point, to protest their worth, the aching hours of time they spend restoring and maintaining Great Works of Art, the air so hungry to eat away at the painted genius on the chapel ceilings…

And the monks sifting colored sand into wispy mandalas -

I am enough of a child of the Western World to want to explain why Art exists, why we want it to persist.

Word association takes me to preserves – to canning. My mother’s shelves.

And I think: certainly, nothing we attempt to Keep Forever will. However, like peaches or tomatoes, blanched and prepared to last way past their natural edible prime, we have developed the skills to keep some things for later, for when we need them. Food, of course; art as well – beauty, that is. And experience of.

Not all things. And not forever.

A picture of fallen leaves is a way to preserve their shape and color till and through and past the winter.

Still, the picture itself will fade and follow the disintegration. We all go the way of the leaves.

leaves

But that is life. That is living. Living is change, change includes dissolution, dying. We know this. The opposite of life is not death but stilled life (- a Still Life – art not life? -) preservation – Snow White in the glass case; a frozen cryogenic head; the waxed bagel. Clinging to the version of the thing we love in one form, not accepting it will become another.

Not accepting that the monk, the wind, will take a breath.

And we will feel it. Cool and sure.

And we will fall away.

Seasons Change

I love the Bangles. Rewind to me at 14, and you’ll find me and three of my best friends at Magic Mountain in Southern California, in one of those Make Your Own Music Video studios, belting out Eternal Flame in an exuberant cacophany of swelling adolescent emotion. Don’t laugh at our big hair.

Anyway. I’ve noticed that we – or maybe I should say I – tend to think of Fall and Spring as seasons that lead to other seasons. That is, autumn is getting ready for – leading up to – Winter. Spring is the opening act for Summer. But why?

My theory is that Fall and Spring are more overtly active seasons – they seems restless, windy, full of change. Trees change daily, from nothing to bright somethings, or later, from ubiquitous greens to crazed shades of tie-dye. And in Winter and Summer, changes are much slower, if evident at all. In Winter, it’s cold and dead. In Summer, everything’s limply hot and slow.

Of course, the world never stops changing.

I am trying to change the story in my head about the seasons. I am trying to think of Fall as a permanent condition. Loss, loss, loss. It’s constant. It doesn’t lead to anything else, any resolve, any final kingdom. Or taking the whole cycle into consideration, it always leads back to itself.

How you see it depends on how you tell the story, I guess. Which season do you see as the first one? Which one is the last?