Let us whisper all we know: You live in exile upon a rolling sea. I have lured many to the rocks.
I’m leaving for Virginia Friday afternoon. On Sunday, I’ll come home to you.
You live in exile upon the dark ocean. I know. I know it.
You don’t need the harbor anymore. I see with diamond eyes.
You are splendid smooth surfaces and other cheeks. You are curves fading softly into distance and rounded lips. There is no here and now with you without crushing absence around the bend. Your secret hollowness will always be untouchable. Pressed, you break and disappear.
I am the bright morning when your heart breaks open. I am silence before mimosa leaves offer their prayers. There is nothing to say when the choice is you or the folds of curved space. I might be any collector if I had never loved cobalt blue. Rest here, and wait for fireflies to find us.
Cut glass. Broken to a width of two microns. A vessel filled with wax drippings and a desert of dried tears. Roadside evidence of ordinary disaster. Bad luck’s dosage instruction. The surface between us and sepia toned children. Maybe we loved them, or our longing is traditional. The brightness of knowing, while there is still time to gently circle back.
The trees were still budding days ago when these structures went up in New Brunswick. Yesterday, I took my camera and walked to work, intent on showing you just how big these things are. The man in this picture is probably a little over six feet tall. By the way, I was entirely surprised by just how fast the leaves filled out, and how hard it was to find a clear shot of this image – please don’t feel frustrated by the sunshine. After the recent storms, the ground still hasn’t dried out. There’s mud everywhere.
I love this image with my whole black heart and some of yours. It stands on the corner of Albany and George Streets, on the lawn of Johnson & Johnson’s interplanetary headquarters. Buildings to the left obscured by trees and my refusal to look at them were designed by I. M. Pei, who probably looks back on that design and wonders what’s in the water out here and how he quit whatever it was cold turkey. Plus, on my walk home from the library, a terrifying parade of slick corporate identi-babes streamed across the sidewalk, flowed across teeming Albany Street and stopped for cross traffic on Nielsen Street. They were talking about hotel arrangements but what I heard sounded like geese honking. They were spike wearing heels on cobble stones. Every one of them had long, straightened brown hair. They were dressed in tight-fitting synthetic suits. I was filled with such revulsion I stepped off the curb and into traffic to get away from them. I had to. I was invisible to them. One actually bumped into me, looked straight at me and was surprised something was in her way.
That’s eight hours from when I snapped this picture at the corner of George and Hamilton Streets. It’s early. The sun dapples the lawn but smiles on the old stone building behind this structure. In theater, a free-standing, three-sided tower is called a periactoid or periaktoi. It’s a good, stable structure offering a stage crew a pile of advantages, the first being no one breaks a foot kicking set supports. One day this week, a strong wind blew off the river, which is about 100 yards behind me in the first image, and a crew blocked the sidewalk on Albany Street with caution tape, lest art take wing and injure the curious.
This line of towers and panels is not far from the one just above. New Brunswick is a small, snug town. Things are close together. Unplanned space looks like broken teeth, except for lawns like this, which create the feeling that these buildings are unapproachable. Most people will not walk up to these panels and examine them. The towers might as well sit in the middle of the Raritan. Ordinarly, I have a problem keeping off lawns and avoiding attractive nuisances but have I mentioned the mud?
Because the sun is low over the river to the east, these panels look and feel bright with possibility. In the afternoons, when the sun has rolled over the leaf canopy and sprawled languidly in the western sky, long shadows like smoke rings vibrate and billow. These images appear through the trees and the shadows, less possibility now than threat, like the growling of an as yet unseen giant cat. We are small and breakable in the eyes of our own imagination.
Something new called the Coexistence Festival raised its banners in New Brunswick over the weekend, and I was thrilled to see all 43 panels. Some are familiar amd many do nothing for me but this one, standing on perhaps the most traveled and photographed and surveilled corner in the city, was the only one that made my heart race. There’s no other place this image would remain intact. Some idiot would feel the need to vandalize it, and that “some idiot” factor is important when thinking about public art.
Outside the library stands a Mary Miss installation that is universally loathed by the faculty and staff. Sometime, I’ll take pictures of it because otherwise you’d never believe a description of what’s out there. In my opinion, it’s not just that it cost the university over $100,000 that makes it a whirling vortex of suckitude. No. It’s bad art. It’s lifeless, it interferes with ordinary movement and restricts simple line-of-sight judgments like, “Hey, what’s that guy up to?” You’ll notice the installation is not featured on Mary Miss’s website – or you can trust me: it’s not there. That is because when we saw the piece unveiled, staff members here stared at the construction project that’d made our lives miserable for some time and said, “Excuse me. That sucks. Get out of Dodge.”
Some people tried to be nice. They said things like, “That naked Emperor has a nice ass.” We have been stuck with this eyesore, which made me appreciate temporary eyesores – though I’ve always liked that one – for at least a decade. I’ve had time to think about it, I’ve weighed the merits of this installation. My feeling hasn’t changed. This thing is bad art, and shame on the committee that didn’t speak up before the money was spent.
I’m not sure what about coexistence merits a festival. That’s like saying, “Hey, let’s celebrate our…um…adequacy,” and reminds me of Tom Lehrer’s National Brotherhood Week. And I’d stand by that assessment that coexistence is a foolish, modest goal except people get all wound up and kill each other for no fucking reason whatsoever. So, sadly, coexistence suddenly looks ambitious, and let’s invite the Indigo Girls and Richie Havens. I’m a little frustrated.
It’s 2007. Two thousand goddamn seven, and some idiot will at least try to vandalize that gorgeous image and those simple words to obliterate the powerful notion that we are all interconnected. Peace, love and understanding just keep getting funnier and funnier.
This song has been on my mind for a week.
I accidentally let myself get very dehydrated Sunday, so I’ve been fighting off a fever for a couple of days. This means when I do my daily “How Many Fingers Am I Holding Up?” even I know I’m wrong. Yet, a fever means I lie flat and think of thinking, which is great indoor-outdoor fun for me, and what I’ve been thinking about is presence and absence in life. I mean, of course I have. Dad died, and with my siblings and Darla in our separate homes, it’s as if I quit some substance I feel leaving my body.
I mean, fuck.
What courses through our bodies is every bit as interesting as what we do with them. Davening is a Jewish practice of praying with the whole body. It is a form of commitment to the moment, apart from all other moments, in which a person – usually a man but not always, anymore – is supposed to become entirely present during the Shema: Shema Yisrael Adonai Eloheynu Adonai Echad..* I couldn’t put my finger on where the Torah described it, though Deuteronomy was a good bet. Siobhan, as surly a wildcat as ever put animal print lingerie to incendiary use, was a Biblical scholar in a previous life:
Deuteronomy 6:4-9 (New International Version) Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society
4 Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God, the LORD is one. 5 Love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. 6 These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. 7 Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. 8 Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. 9 Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.
*1. Deuteronomy 6:4 Or The LORD our God is one LORD; or The LORD is our God, the LORD is one; or The LORD is our God, the LORD alone.
The emphasis is mine, and it’s important; that word is sometimes translated as might. One’s body and vigor mean everything, which makes lovely sense, doesn’t it? Anyone who says you can’t dance with the cosmos is plain misguided. This reminds me of the Whirling Dervishes, described on YouTube as: The Whirling Dervishes are a sect of Islam taught to love everything. The ceremony is so beautiful I can barely breathe. Please go look at the dancers I can’t embed on PIC. I’ve watched this half a dozen times now and when they open their arms, my heart races. Once, I danced in an aisle as Coleman Barks read this poem by Rumi, the Whirling Dervishes’ sufi master, because I could do nothing else.
If anyone asks you
how the perfect satisfaction
of all our sexual wanting
will look, lift your face
and say,Like this.
When someone mentions the gracefulness
of the nightsky, climb up on the roof
and dance and say,Like this.
If anyone wants to know what “spirit” is,
or what “God’s fragrance” means,
lean your head toward him or her.
Keep your face there close.Like this.
When someone quotes the old poetic image
about clouds gradually uncovering the moon,
slowly loosen knot by knot the strings
of your robe.Like this.
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.Like this. Like this.
When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,” point
here.If someone asks how tall I am, frown
and measure with your fingers the space
between the creases on your forehead.This tall.
The soul sometimes leaves the body, the returns.
When someone doesn’t believe that,
walk back into my house.Like this.
When lovers moan,
they’re telling our story.Like this.
I am a sky where spirits live.
Stare into this deepening blue,
while the breeze says a secret.Like this.
When someone asks what there is to do,
light the candle in his hand.Like this.
How did Joseph’s scent come to Jacob?
Huuuuu.
How did Jacob’s sight return?
Huuuu.
A little wind cleans the eyes.
Like this.
When Shams comes back from Tabriz,
he’ll put just his head around the edge
of the door to surprise usLike this.
From ‘The Essential Rumi’, Translations
by Coleman Barks with John Moyne
I’m not sure I believe in God, but I believe in the astonishing beauty of becoming completely present at the right moment. It’s not easy. Life appears to be long and it’s tempting to fall asleep and stay there. If I’ve slept, I don’t want to sleep anymore.
There are many ways to dance. Dance with me.
Poor Impulse Control 