Wanderlust-Counterpoise

A Literary Travelogue
Full Soundtrack: Spotify / YouTube

Postlude 

(July 2022)
Sultan Khan and Zakir Hussein - Rag Bhupali

Already we are boldly launched upon the deep; but soon we shall be lost in its unshored, harborless immensities.

~Melville, Moby Dick

I’m not telling you a story so much as a shipwreck–the pieces floating, finally legible.

~ Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

The clouds above Bread Loaf are moving through the sky with confident purpose, while I am still, limbs contorted in an adirondack chair with my spine crunched up against the back.  –No.–  I’m static, not still. I’m squirming. I’ve forgotten how to wear pants. For over two years, I’ve been sporting pandemic pajama fashion, and the waistband of jeans now seems permanently oppressive. My ears itch from the mask bands, the black flies are carnivorous, I can’t decide if I’m hot or cold, and a caterpillar just dropped onto my keyboard. I think wistfully of the blue velvet chairs in the library, but I can’t bear the thought of another minute with my face trapped. Outside, no one is breathing in my immediate vicinity, and the wind is dispersing opportunistic pathogens, relegating them to rightful oblivion. Static, yet I am back in the world. A storm is rolling in. I am reading Angels in America, for the third time since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Twenty-five people have tested positive on this tiny piece of mountain, the newsletter tells us; another routine outbreak. The day’s headlines read: “America has decided the pandemic is over. The virus has other ideas.” (Washington Post) “As Sixth Covid Wave Hits, Many New Yorkers Shrug It Off” (New York Times). “WHO Says COVID-19 remains a global health emergency” (Reuters). “Is The World Really Falling Apart, or Does It Just Feel That Way?” (New York Times). We ricochet through it. Right now, I’m squirming because I’m uncomfortable in this chair;  it occurs to me that I’ve been uncomfortable for thirty months. 

I’m living just as the century ends.

A great leaf, that God and you and I
Have covered with writing
turns now, overhead, in strange hands.
We feel the sweep of it like a wind.

We see the brightness of a new page
where everything yet can happen.

Unmoved by us, the fates take its measure
and look at one another, saying nothing.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours


We talk of change, and change fatigue. My fatigue is of a different sort. We’ve had such a striking chance at real change, and we’ve squandered it. We have hungered for patterns of old, even after it became clear that they no longer applied, and we returned to them with zeal the moment we could. We know now that the world can stop and change in a single sweep of virus.  But we have not yet shown that we can learn from this. We have not yet applied the experience of the Great Pause towards a better future for all of us. I am fatigued by our insistence on preserving old entrenchments, when a new world is staring us in the face. 

We would rather be ruined than changed; we would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the moment and let our illusions die.

~ Auden, The Age of Anxiety

Millennium approaches, Ethel Rosenberg tells us, in Angels in America. History is about to crack wide open. It is 1985, and the AIDS crisis is settling in for the long haul.  

Almost forty years later, we are looking at the millennium line from the other side, awash in a new pandemic. Why does it feel like we stepped backwards across the divide? Did we fall through the crack of that history, spinning ourselves out of time, in this period of prolonged existential ambiguity? 

We have forgotten the lessons that we left on the other side. I fear that we are beginning to forget again.

Embarkment

(February 2020)
Ergin Kızılay - Segah Taksim

It is the bewitching hour in deep winter. The sky is pregnant with snow, but withholding. There are rumblings of unrest in the zeitgeist. A shadow is threatening to manifest, to blanket us in its cold embrace.  I can smell it, just as I can smell the snow approaching. I  finish reading The Shadow of the Wind, and am paralyzed by the effervescent beauty in this world of nested stories.

As I walked in the dark through the tunnels and tunnels of books, I could not help being overcome by a sense of sadness. I couldn’t help thinking that if I, by pure chance, had found a whole universe in a single unknown book, buried in that endless necropolis, tens of thousands more would remain unexplored, forgotten forever. I felt myself surrounded by millions of abandoned pages, by worlds and souls without an owner sinking in an ocean of darkness, while the world that throbbed outside the library seemed to be losing its memory, day after day, unknowingly, feeling all the wiser the more it forgot.

Engulfed in visions of dusty books curling around gothic turrets,  I close my eyes and wait for sleep. 

The Antechamber

(Dreamtime)
Cappella Romana - Choral Stichologia (Palaion)

And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

~Eliot, Wasteland

That night, I dream that I am entering the antechamber of the collective unconscious. I approach a set of wooden doors with carvings like those on Norwegian stave churches: entire cosmologies of chaos, chiseled into the relief, charged with the task of keeping the inner sanctum clear of the discord and clutter of the world. I step across the threshold.

Wordscape

(Dreamtime)
Lou Harrison - Suite for Violin With American Gamelan ( Jahla 2 / start at 17:48)

Books are scattered everywhere, tentatively stacked to vaulted ceilings, piled in corners, lining irregular shelves, tumbling from towers. They are wordcrumbs leading to the dangerous houses and secret landscapes that populate our shared  psyche. The collective unconscious is a library. 

Some of the Books fold in on themselves, in kaleidoscopic journeys across the world’s Ideas. Some have been left abandoned, undiscovered, unfinished, blank, smeared, covers torn off and pages ripped out. Some of them seem to…change…as I grasp them. 

Με το μικρό σου δάχτυλο ανακινείς έναν κόσμο.
With your little finger you stir up a world.

~Ritsos, Monochords

The books are mountains, rivers, islands, oceans, marshes, tunnels, skyscrapers, subway systems, houses of worship. They are disrupted and reimagined by earthquakes, sandstorms, tsunamis, silverfish. They are in perpetual motion, in this landscape of the mind, while I am still, static, interrupted. They invite me to join them on their wanderings.

As the book quivered in her lap, the secret sat in her mouth. It made itself comfortable. It crossed its legs.

~ Zusak, The Book Thief
Χώρα I: Plato

Χώρα I: Plato

(Anamnesis)
Maher Cissoko - Kora By Night

Dead, who had served his time, 
Was one of the people’s kings,
Had labour’d in lifting them out of slime,
And showing them, souls have wings!

~ Tennyson, The Dead Prophet

My copy of Plato’s Complete Works is an enormous faded green compendium with my mother’s notes scribbled in the margins of a few dialogues from her early days of studying philosophy. The Dialogues offer an anamnestic detox, a remembrance of what I am when I am not censoring parts of myself to get along with others. They are gifts from the εἶδος, rare glimpses into the souls of thoughts that are rarely welcome visitors at the theater of shadows on the cave wall. 

When your innocent eyes glance
over this confused, beginningless book,
you will see a deep-rooted lasting rebellion
blooming in the heart of every song.

~ Farrokhzad, A Poem for You

In my first trimester of college, I enroll in an Introduction to Ancient Philosophy course at Northwestern University, a planned respite from the psychic oppression of clarinet homework. I summarily reject Aristotle after the first reading. (Aristotle: the Mythwrecker, the Mansplainer, the Original ISTJ.) Plato, however, is a known acquaintance, and I feel the stirrings of a protoplasmic literary crush. 

I am excited to thrash around in his delightful ocean of metaphor, language, and Ideas, but the TA does not appreciate it when I refer to Socrates as a “punk” in one of our seminars, and he discounts in perpetuity any possible future contributions to discussion. The teenage boys in my class climb all over each other to prove their analytical prowess to the world, in highly predictable commentary that reeks of Philosophy for Dummies. The girls (of which there are only a few), never speak in class. For a while, I engage in the blood sport of contradicting the boys, but I tire of it quickly. I spend the rest of the trimester doodling in the back of the class, or at the Chicago Art Institute, foregoing class entirely to sketch the music I see in Kandinsky paintings while thinking about the Republic. Kandinsky teaches me a lot about Plato in those museum halls. Plato teaches me a lot about the isolation of artists, and our role as carriers of myth in cultures that believe they have outgrown it. (Aristotle strikes again.)

I realize during one of these Art Institute afternoons that there is a stark and growing disjunct between the paths I follow to access these ancient texts, and the places that they have landed in our contemporary canons. I know I have veered off the trail, a dangerous prospect, but I sense that the trail is heading towards a dead end; I can feel something else out there, off the path, deep in the trees, waiting for me. Or perhaps, it can sense me, and I feel the rebound as it shimmers around me. I don’t know which way to turn. A profound and torturous writers’ block settles in for the long haul, and I store bits of my essence in Platonic dialogues for safekeeping. 

One day I’ll become what I want
One day I’ll become a poet
Water obedient to my vision
My language a metaphor for metaphors
I don’t speak or indicate a place
Place is my sin and subterfuge
I am from there
My here leaps from my footstep to my imagination…
I am from what was or will be
I was created and destroyed in the expanse of the endless void

~ Darwish, Mural

Every time I return to Plato, I feel the presence of the spectre in the trees. It is getting louder. It is anxious. I think it wants to be written into existence.

State of Siege

(April 2020)
Silvestre Revueltas - Sensemayá

Siege is the waiting
the waiting on a ladder leaning amid the storm

~ Darwish, State of Siege

Those who have not yet been initiated into the secret society of clinical anxiety are often tempted to describe it in terms of the future. Admittedly, the perseverations often show up as unknown and unlikely future prospects (the thing you are afraid of has not yet, and probably will not, come to pass; a sentiment intended to placate the sufferer). But anxiety also exists in a deep, embodied, assaulting present. It is a present that holds time prisoner. 

But all that, too, was not really motion. It was as if the same instant kept presenting itself from different perspectives. Looking at one instant forever doesn’t mean that, as you look at it, time passes.

~ Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

The disordered anxiety that envelops me germinates in the body: every headache is an aneurysm, every tingle a stroke, every flash of vertigo a brain tumor, every hint of heartburn a gallbladder affliction. Lower right pain is appendicitis, upper right pain is liver disease, leg pain is deep vein thrombosis. Every lump is lymphoma, every bruise is leukemia, every bowel cramp is colon cancer, every mole is melanoma. Chest pain, jaw pain, arm pain, nausea–all herald an oncoming heart attack. Yet, I do nothing. (This is the dark side of hypochondria.) I avoid assessment. I read and ruminate and self-diagnose, sometimes hourly. I talk myself down off of the ledge of fear, a coping mechanism I developed in childhood, when every concern was met with an eye roll, punctuated with an exasperated “you’re fine.” I’ve come to depend on that reaction. 

Then came pandemic: a permanent state of siege. 

Someone’s mask slips below their nose. There are unclassifiable liquid droplets on a counter. I hear a cough. I touch a doorknob. The pollen count is high; I wonder if my sore throat is a histamine response or a death sentence.  I spin out into a pulsating, sweating, shaking, fighting, fleeing, freezing creature. Amorphous and scared. Well-worn methods of fear-management no longer apply. Covid is lurking, and not just in my hypochondriacal imagination. My dark fantasies of germophobia are now everyone’s reality.

To some people, I may seem calm. But if you could peer beneath the surface, you would see that I’m like a duck – paddling, paddling, paddling.

~ Stossel, My Age of Anxiety

Before the pandemic, I was paddling. Now I am drowning. Time is stuck, and I am stuck, circling a present that is ripe with the agony of waiting. I keep reading, searching for the way out of the labyrinth. The way out seems to be pulling me…in…

In siege, time becomes place
petrified in its eternity.
In siege, place becomes time
late for its appointment

~ Darwish, State of Siege


Χώρα II: The Cave

(Dreamtime)
Claude Debussy - La cathédrale engloutie (Preludes: Book 1, No. 10)

I am standing in an estuary at the mouth of an underground cave system. A black, oily river flows from a narrow, winding channel, pooling at the mouth of the cave. Silver foam collects where the waves lap against the shore. Stalactites drip a similar, viscous, silvery substance. Gremlins, gray, bald, naked, wrinkly, gangly, begin to climb out of the water en masse. From the end of the river’s tunnel, an orb appears (the color of Neptune, but with rings like Saturn), and floats from the tunnel’s end toward the gremlins. They pause and look up, in worship. A bell tolls. The orb bursts into a thousand shimmering crystals that rain down upon the gremlins, a storm of light. The gremlins sigh, collectively, and dive back underwater.

Storm 

(May 2020)
Billie Holiday - Strange Fruit

You are not surprised at the force of the storm–
you have seen it growing.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

George Floyd is murdered and the country erupts. Again.

Soon, we will move on from the man, and embrace the shame-laden-feelings-fest spirals of remedial professional development for things that should be obvious but somehow still aren’t. Schools live and die on virtue-signaling, and businesses outdo each other with rainbow swag and cheap evocations of progressive slogans, the latest mandatory branding upgrade. “Black Lives Matter” underwear is now for sale. Robin DiAngelo is anointed as vizier to the (White) Guardians of the Temple of the Woke, the Twittertrain falls off the rails, and liberals begin eating their young. Eventually, DEI will become synonymous with late stage capitalism, while young Black men continue to die in the streets. 

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

I come by my cynicism deliberately. My liberal inheritance is, first and foremost, one of independent thought. This has always been a liability, in a culture that can’t figure out how to ride out the embedded contradictions of puritanical complacency and manifest destiny. I resent my assigned roles on the outskirts of these tragedies, and struggle to reconcile the growing space between individual privilege and shared humanity. 

A year later, while reading Homegoing, I am struck by the feeling that the author is speaking directly to parts of me that I did not know until I found them reflected in her words. Several days after I finish the book, she runs a piece about it in the Guardian:  “White people, black authors are not your medicine.”  

She says, it is wrenching to know that the occasion for the renewed interest in your work is the murders of black people and the subsequent “listening and learning” of white people. I appreciate this. Considerable energy right now seems to be attending, yet again, to the learning of white people, centered forever, even in attempts to reckon with the violence of a 300- (or 3000-) year legacy of being centered. The piece is poignant, and heartfelt, and nuanced, all things that belong in contemporary racial discourse. But it is picked up on Twitter as a flashpoint in a hurricane of glib division. 

I wonder whether the possibility of any universal experience is disappearing in contemporary takedown praxis. Are we each to be relegated to the inherited characteristics and canons of our visible forms, newly emblazoned with the scarlet As of embodied politics? The personal is political, yes, and we have not yet acknowledged this to the degree that it warrants. But the personal is also personal. We are more than our labels. 

…and yet…

The heart of justice is truth telling, seeing ourselves and the world the way it is, rather than the way we want it to be.

~ hooks, Teaching to Transgress

Institutions, those great imperfect monoliths that spin platitudes through contradictory praxis, are perhaps the primary constant in (un)civilized history. Change is not a doctrine, it is a battle in fragments. (It is, itself, a labyrinth.) We tilt at windmills, each thrust of the sword a chance to delay for one more day the force of world-eating behemoths of history. 

The myths refuse to adjust their plot.

~ Darwish, Butterfly’s Burden 

Eulogy I: Shock on Shock

(July 2020)
Fairuz - Kamat Maryam

Every year the bright Scandinavian summer nights fade away without anyone’s noticing. One evening in August you have an errand outdoors, and all of a sudden it’s pitch black. A great warm, dark silence surrounds the house. It is still summer, but the summer is no longer alive. It has come to a standstill; nothing withers, and fall is not ready to begin. There are no stars yet, just darkness.

~ Jansson, The Summer Book

A teaching colleague dies 400 feet from his campus house in midsummer, from head trauma after a bike accident. I am in the middle of facilitating an online summer seminar when the email goes out. The students see it, and we pause, the content of the seminar instantly inaccessible, irrelevant, undone. This is not the tragedy we have been planning for. We have been working so hard to live through this pandemic, to live, inside this pandemic; this loss disrupts the tenuous safety net we have built around our online, enclosed summer worlds. Covid is not the only way to die. 

The faculty come together at the site of loss, the first public gathering since closing the school, to wash the blood off of the road and offer tribute. We are afraid to be together. We want to hug but we don’t know if we are allowed to. We are masked, and the loss is masked with us. We are looking at each other as we would look at people in a sepia-tinted photograph of a funeral long forgotten. 

You depart to your country
I die like a drop of sad rain
Upon the faces of the passersby

~ al-Beyati, Three Watercolors

Eulogy II: Music Stands Still

(October 2020)
Trio Da Kali and Kronos Quartet - God Shall Wipe All Tears Away

Fog infiltrated lips and lungs
as if the air were sobbing,
going on about itself, about the cold dawn,
how long the night is,
and how ruthless stars can be.
 

~ Zagajewski, Referendum

The last concert I played was a Mahler symphony, in February of 2020. I don’t remember which Mahler symphony. I could look it up, but the fact that I don’t remember is its own poetry. In conservatory, Mahler is the holy grail. Excerpts can be heard from across the practice rooms, any hour of the night. As students, we dream of playing Mahler the way southern debutantes dream of their weddings. In the intervening years since leaving graduate school, I have played every Mahler symphony except the ninth, some of them several times. (While running the gauntlet of my conservatory days, I imagined this Olympian achievement in the abstract, but never believed it would manifest in the flesh.) Though I can’t remember which one of the nine symphonies I played that fateful February, I do remember not being very prepared for it. I had been struggling to find the will to practice. The parts were high, they made my jaw hurt, I was busy, it was too cold in my office, and it is rude to subject one’s living companion to the practice sounds of Mahler. Unlike the symphonies entire, the practice sounds are not beautiful. They are excruciating to behold. 

I didn’t know then that it would be my last concert. When the curtains fell on the performing arts a month later, I felt a flash of guilty relief, a feeling I locked down the moment I recognized it. I sequestered it in its own quarantine, and slid into the Pause.

Now, it is October, and it seems that the loss has settled in for the long haul. My friends are collecting unemployment, we have all fatigued on online concerts, nobody is watching the composite videos of a hundred cellos playing whatever from their rooms across the world anymore, we’ve stopped posting our practice sessions on Instagram, and musicians, everywhere, are depressed. 

It is as though the space between us were time; an irrevocable quality. It is as though time, no longer running straight before us in a diminishing line, now runs parallel between us like a looping string, the distance being the doubling accretion of the thread and not the interval between.

~ Faulkner, As I Lay Dying

Music is an exercise that disrupts the common relationship of space and time. It spatializes time, and temporalizes space. It is a holding tank for memory, a teleporter. But the sound does not act alone. In this period of stillness and silence, we are missing the scent of music, the breath of music, the rumbling vibrations that flirt with our bodies as they cascade off of the walls and through the caverns of our performance halls; we are missing the risk that can only surface when time and place and bodies and breath collide.

At Bread Loaf, two years later, with the world stepping tentatively out of containment, a classmate will offer a writing prompt while Max Richter’s Blue Notebooks plays in the background. I will freeze in the unsettling soundscape. The prompt does not match the music. The music holds too much. It is one of my soundtracks to the lockdown walks I took along sparse juniper forest trails, and hearing it in a classroom two thousand miles away with the New England humidity pressing in on me is jarring. I sit, my pen suspended six inches above the paper, poised to write but unable to move. I am far away, long ago and yesterday, time and space mingling inside this music. Risk is coming from the wrong direction.

It occurs to me that symmetry and asymmetry is the wrong geometry for describing collaborative risk. That, in fact, risk is shared in a far more dynamic way; risk passes back and forth between us too rapidly to fully negotiate, morphing as it goes, and morphing us as individuals and collaborators.

~ Lehrer, Golem Girl

The risk of being seen, of being heard, of blurring the boundaries between self and other, stage and audience, has been co-opted by another risk. The space of performance itself has become dangerous, and time is no longer a shared fiction. The existential risk of  growth pales against the existential risk of death, which looms large in the foreground. 

The school auditorium, a space still buzzing with electric echoes of memory, is empty. I sit on the stage and look out across the vacant space. I start to cry. Not because I miss it, but because I don’t. 

I suppose it remains, then, that I have been filled by foreign streams from somewhere which have poured into me, through my ears, as into a vessel. But in my stupidity I have even forgotten how and from whom I’ve heard these things.

~ Plato, Phaedrus 

I fear that I am starting to forget. 

Χώρα III: Origin and Abyss

(Anamnesis)
Carl Nielsen - Clarinet Concerto, Movement I and Cadenza

While writing is starting to feel like a carrier of creation, music is still a carrier of pain. The pandemic state pulls forward old scenes of the familiar abyss:

It is a bland and icy Minnesota February and I am working towards a master’s degree in clarinet performance, with one of the world’s most revered teachers. I am preparing Carl Nielsen’s unhinged clarinet concerto, and my teacher asks the predictable, yet dreaded question: “What is the mood of this passage?” He is asking this of a melody as uncertain of its emotional landscape as I am; I shrug my shoulders and curl into myself. I don’t know the answer to his question. Moods don’t have words yet, but I don’t know how to tell him this. He paces in silence for several minutes, and then says, quietly: “You don’t even know the first thing. You are wasting my time, and yours. I can’t teach you anything if you refuse to come prepared. What is the mood? It’s not a hard question!”

It was the hardest question. His disappointment settles deep into my lungs, disrupting the flow of breath that carries the music, but it doesn’t bring me any closer to an answer. 

That night, I get out my thesaurus and label the score to the concerto with hundreds of miniature sticky notes; words upon words that intone the nuances of minute and ever-shifting character changes. Words like melancholic, morose, frisky, facetious, antiquated, unyielding, effervescent. I bring it to him, proudly, the next week. For once, I have done my homework. He looks at it, he looks at me, and he says, “What is this, Melinda?! All I wanted was happy or sad.” 

It was in that moment’s flight between the picture and her canvas that the demons set on her who often brought her to the verge of tears and made this passage from conception to work as dreadful as any down a dark passage for a child. Such she often felt herself – struggling against terrific odds to maintain her courage; to say: “But this is what I see; this is what I see,” and so to clasp some miserable remnant of her vision to her breast, which a thousand forces did their best to pluck from her.

~ Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Several years later, I travel to Ghana to study Dagara percussion music. While struggling to commit a difficult passage of polyrhythmic, pentatonic cacophony to memory, my gyil teacher says, “I think you know it, but the brains and the hands aren’t working together.” This metaphor is a gift, the unifying explanation for so many discrete sources of struggle across so many years of studying, writing, performing, and living. My brains and my hands have always been reluctant bedfellows. The body knows, but it doesn’t share. The brain thinks it knows, but it is easily confounded. In Ghana, the world grows larger, deepening into its contradictions. 

Chasm’s Door

(January 2021)
Lela Tataraidze - Makhkvdia

…until it seemed as if the universe were battling and tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself…

~ Woolf, To The Lighthouse

On January 6, white supremacists and other professional victims storm the capital. The Arab press of Lebanon runs a headline calling it the “Cowboy Revolution.” They are not wrong. 

Eighteen months later, we are still struggling to reckon with this historical fact, in the midst of the origin myths to which we intractably cling. While the damning hearing goes on, headlines start to hint that the Emperor of Fiction might run for reelection, again. I think of how many times in these past six years I have felt sick over the news. I fear that I am becoming another pawn of history; I am preparing to choose how deep into the minefield of righteous revolt I am willing to go, to fight against the advancing totalitarian repression. (Will it even be a choice?)

He responds: You and I are two masked authors and two masked witnesses
I say: How is this my concern? I’m a spectator
He says: No spectators at chasm’s door…and no
one is neutral here. And you must choose
your part in the end
So I say: I’m missing the beginning, what’s the beginning?

~ Darwish, I Have A Seat In The Abandoned Theatre

I struggle with US-American exceptionalism, as I collapse into the dawning realization that I have always believed myself exempt from the darker tides of history, and as I wrestle with the resentment of having to renegotiate that myth. For so many, these stories are not new, and no one has ever been truly exempt. Yet, I wonder all the same if the global scope of these shared crises are ushering in a new era of apocalypse, one that is faster and larger and more insidious than any this world has seen before. 

That even an apocalypse can be made to seem part of the ordinary horizon of expectation constitutes an unparalleled violence that is being done to our sense of reality, to our humanity.

~ Sontag, AIDS and Its Metaphors

Madeleines

(April 2021)
Max Richter - On The Nature of Daylight

And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.

~ Proust, Swann’s Way

I take walks in the woods and begin to smell the start of the pandemic, one year past. I feel the early fear, embedded (forever, now?) in the vanilla-scented pine as it begins to release in the spring sunshine.  

Bea says that the art of reading is slowly dying, that it’s an intimate ritual, that a book is a mirror that offers us only what we already carry inside us, that when we read, we do it with all our heart and mind…

~ Zafón, Shadow of the Wind

I stop reading Proust, because the season is wrong. Swann’s Way is a winter book. It grates against the coming of the sun. After so much darkness, I need more light. Isolation has become tedious.

Will I ever again dance on wine glasses?

~ Farrokhzad

Χώρα IV: Introcosm

(Anamnesis)
Kalimankou Denkou

While plumbing the cache of my childhood in the inner space made louder by lockdown, I remember the early pull of books. I would retreat into words on pages, stories that told my story to me in a thousand different voices, wordscapes that I could explore from the protective stance of abstraction; reading alongside the emotions of others helped me embrace the outlines of my self, emerging. The books I read as a child also served as depositories for my own more difficult emotions; I posted sentries throughout the pages that kept watch over those emotions, while I skulked around the edges of their fortress. Every time a character in a novel cried, I felt that they were crying in my stead, and the burning in my solar plexus that was unveiled to me when I read those passages held unrequited pain and untrammeled jealousy. The characters had access to something that I did not. I followed them around, hoping to be noticed, hoping they would invite me home with them, but too afraid to impose. 

The gaping mouth slit heart from mind. Between the two eyes in her head, the tongueless magical eye and the loquacious rational eye, was la rajadura, the abyss that no bridge could span. Separated, they could not visit each other and each was too far away to hear what the other was saying. Silence rose like a river and could not be held back, it flooded and drowned everything.

~Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

Gerontion

(May 2021)
Djivan Gasparyan - I Will Not Be Sad In This World

…in a wilderness of mirrors…

~ Eliot, Gerontion

The Israeli army attacks the Al Aqsa Mosque during Ramadan. Hamas returns rockets. 13 Israelis and 256 Palestinians are killed, a ratio often repeated across the region’s tumultuous history. I send text messages to former students from East Jerusalem, to see if their families survived the violence. (After half a decade working at an international boarding school, the world’s pain is never very far away.) US-Americans, secure in their homes, discuss fault with fervor. All I can see is faces, real faces, students past and present who don’t have the luxury of choosing which side they are on from the safety of abstraction. I am enraged by the audacity of settler colonialism, as well as the conditions of holocaust that inspired it.

He felt that his whole head had filled with tears, welling up from inside, so he turned and went out into the street. There human beings began to swim behind a mist of tears, the horizon of the river and the sky came together, and everything around him became simply an endless white glow. He went back, and threw himself down with his chest on the damp earth, which began to beat beneath him again, while the scent of the earth rose to his nostrils and poured into his veins like a flood.

~ Kanafani, Men in the Sun

Suddenly, while reading An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, I remember: I am one of those settlers. Mine is a different continent, but a similar story. Our cities are built on more ruins than we can imagine. Jerusalem holds up a mirror, and I see myself through it, standing among the rubble. 

…contemplation was unendurable; the mirror was broken.

~ Woolf, To The Lighthouse

Eulogy III: A Zen Death

(October 2021)
Nanae Yoshimura and Kifu Mitsuhashi - Yui II for Koto and Cello: No 1. Tidal Sound

I borrow moonlight
for this journey of a 
million miles.
 

~ Saikaku, Zen Death Poems

The husband of a good friend dies. I revisit the Zen Death Poems I gave him the week before, nestled in a box with several paper cranes. The cranes symbolize honor, loyalty, and longevity. Japanese folklore grants wishes to those with the patience and perseverance to fold a thousand cranes.

At the wake, the last light of the evening transcends Santa Fe’s peerless legacy of sky painting. Birds trace fractals through the heavens, leaving impossibly conceived geometries in their slipstream, their silhouettes a contrast to the stratified orange effervescence of sunset clouds. There and gone. Forced ahead, left behind, nudged off the timeline. The distractions of minutia shield us from the slippery evanescence of living.

The birds disappear from view, gliding just beyond the curve of the earth, a final horizon that is only where it is because we can’t see beyond it. (In truth, a horizon is nothing. We make the horizon from where we stand. It is our fixed placement that calls the horizon into being. It moves as we do.) Linearity and circularity merge at the boundary; vice and courage entangle. We grasp for what we know when what we don’t know threatens to eclipse all of it.

I say so strange a dreaminess did there reign all over the ship and all over the sea, only broken by the intermitting dull sound of the sword, that it seemed as if this were the Loom of Time, and I myself were a shuttle mechanically weaving and weaving away at the Fates…; and here, thought I, with my own hand I ply my own shuttle and weave my own destiny into these unalterable threads.

~ Melville, Moby Dick

Χώρα V: Paper Cranes

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs II: Oiseaux tristes

A needle is threaded from my tailbone through the top of my head, along the body’s prime vessel. I dangle at the bottom of a long silver thread, and am joined by hundreds of iridescent paper cranes, threaded above me. We are suspended from a branch of a large willow. It is just dawn; a milky fog, sickly sweet, snakes through the willow’s tears. The sky is leaden, with a sepia tint. The thread swings in the wind, and the paper cranes are released, flying off into the sky in angular geometries. I am left dangling, alone. I smell a storm in the distance.

“The” Ukraine

(February 2022)
Letila Zozulia

My students and I are making borsch, stirring the stock. A student from Kyiv casually mentions the siege in the Donbas region and I ask if she has family there. She says, “I used to.” I ask when they left, and she says, “They died. Last week.” She returns to stirring the stock. Later, during dinner, a friend and I sing a Ukrainian song for the students, and the student glows with appreciation for our diction. Correct pronunciation brings so much joy, in the midst of genocide.

What’s Rome? It crumbled.
What is the world? We are destroying it
before your towers can taper into spires, 
before we can assemble your face
from the piles of mosaic.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours 

“The Ukraine” is a dangerous mislabeling. Ukraine is a country, with over one thousand years of independent history. Adding “the” transports the  living country back into the mythic, allowing us to both exoticize it and distance ourselves from it. The Ukraine inhabits a different space than the physical world of nation states.

While smoke ricochets off of buildings far away, phantom explosions curl into my dreams. The news tells me that the elephant in the Kyiv Zoo is depressed. His name is Horace. He is seventeen years old. He is given sedatives while shells fall around him. I wonder how many meals he has left, and whether the people who have stayed behind to feed him are hungry, too. 

The next day, I happen upon an online daily diary of the war: 

Many things have a beginning. When I think about the beginning, I imagine a line drawn very clearly through a white space. The eye observes the simplicity of this trail of movement–one that is sure to begin somewhere and end somewhere. But I have never been able to imagine the beginning of a war. Strange. I was in the Donbas when war with Russia broke out in 2014. But I had entered the war then, entered into a foggy, unclear zone of violence. I still remember the intense guilt I felt about being a guest in a catastrophe, a guest who was allowed to leave at will because I lived somewhere else. 

I am a guest of The Ukraine through these words I traverse, while Ukraine, the real Ukraine, collapses under the weight of history. 

Fire On The Mountain

(May 2022)
Chavela Vargas - La Llorona

Give not thyself up then, to fire, lest it invert thee, deaden thee; as for the time it did me.

~ Melville, Moby Dick

Evacuation. The largest wildfire in New Mexico state history is a quarter-mile from my front door. Flames are creeping over the ridge that hovers above the school’s main structure, a historic castle. The castle is surrounded on three sides, drowning in the smoke of our personal apocalypse. 

I drive away, for the second time that it might be the last time. (Last year, we evacuated for one day. This time, it will last a month.) Infernal evening sky, red sun, smoke curling up and out from Dante’s circles. The heavens are dilating, and I am dilating, pupils too large to accept the light without pain. 

While cooking in exile, I drop wet tofu cubes into boiling oil, and flames erupt. I freeze. Water, fire, ice. The flames lick the ceiling, and as fast as they appear, they are gone. A fleeting apotheosis. 

…We’ve got too little earth
And too much fire. We don’t know who we are.
 

~ Zagajewski, Three Angels

The fire has wiped out legacy homes across Northern New Mexico, homes on lands that have lived in family trusts for upwards of fifteen generations, homes that are rarely insured, with occupants struggling to survive on subsistence farming in a rapidly desiccating landscape and a superstructure of imposed white capitalism. This is not particularly conducive to stability, even without the threat of conflagration.

The Heavens Set Loss On Fire
Irascible homesteads,
spiritual landscapes of conquistadores
who cauterized a first loss so long forgotten
(by most)
that the legacies 
festering in the ashes of progress
witness their coming destruction
with the certainty of an original fall from grace.
Yet, a third conquest has been smoldering
for some time
and shadows
that have lingered for five centuries
curl upwards in new flame
and embers rain down
on unsung and unsprung adobe cuentos.

I wish I could in just one glass
Collect and drink all these clouds;
And climb up a thunder ladder
To reach up and wash my heart with fire.

~ Osman, In Exile

Burn Scars
After the plumes recede
after a welcome–if circumspect–return
after the rain (however brief)
I drink a hibiscus rosewater martini 
and write fire poetry. 
The scent of smoke lingers 
(but it might be my imagination)
and the burn scars
bespeak new trails
in a tired landscape of patterned enervation.

Χώρα VI: Skeletons in the Springs

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs V: La vallée des cloches 

I am walking through a deep brook with ice cold clear water and pools off to the sides. The light is technicolor with a blue-green tint, not unlike the scene behind the secret door in Duchamp’s Étant Donnés at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The air smells of electricity and sulfur. In one of the pools, a cold springs, three skeletons are frozen in celebration, raising gold chalices in a toast, heads tilted backwards, laughing. One is smoking a twig, and purple smoke curls upward. As I walk through the brook, I realize that the rocks I am stepping on are not rocks; they are egg-sized skulls. The aspen trees lining the brook are bleeding from their knots. I hear crystal wind chimes echoing through the grove. 

Great Expectations

(June 2022)
Gustav Mahler - Symphony No 5, Adagietto

The hour is striking so close above me,
so clear and sharp
that all of my senses ring with it.
I feel it now: there’s a power in me
to grasp and shape my world.

I know that nothing has ever been real
without my beholding it.
All becoming has needed me.
My looking ripens things
and they come toward me, to meet and be met.

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

I drive away from Montezuma, released from lingering smoke and ash for a summer filled with words. While skimming the dusty and lush landscapes of I-40 across six states, I listen to Great Expectations, the audio version. This seems to fit, somehow; it is a well-placed soundtrack to a US-American road trip filled with layers of mythic expectations (both met and squandered) that line the highways.

I have always had great expectations, the birthright of being raised in progressive cities with parents and teachers who cut their teeth on politics in 1968. I was baptized in the Church of US-American Liberalism, and was led to believe that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Not only that, but it is my job to get it there. These myths are my inheritance. Martin Luther King Jr.’s well-known quote comes from a lesser known speech, “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution,” that rarely captures the attention of whitewashed celebrations of his legacy. He gave the speech less than a week before his assassination. Half a century later, the revolution continues, but in fragments. I don’t know what it means to work toward justice in a world that feels so shattered, but it occurs to me that no one ever really knows, and our history is littered with noble attempts amidst great uncertainty. We don’t choose the times in which we live, but perhaps we have some choice in what we bring forward within them. 

She who reconciles the ill-matched threads
of her life and weaves them gratefully
into a single cloth–
it’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hall
and clears it for a different celebration

~ Rilke, Book of Hours

ΧώραVII: Preikestolen

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs III: Une barque sur l’océan 

Preikestolen is set in negative film, with black wildflowers lining the field that leads to the cliff. I take a running leap and dive off the precipice, down into brackish water. As I swim toward the bottom, I am surrounded by fist-sized glowing orbs of fire. They get smaller, whiter, and more dense as I descend, until I reach the seafloor, where there are millions, like underwater fireflies. The water is uncomfortably buoyant, reminiscent of the Dead Sea. There is a wooden trap door at the edge of the deepest part. I can’t open it. 

Drawing the World

(June 2022)
Ross Daly - Erotokritos

In Philadelphia, I read Harold and the Purple Crayon to my three-year-old niece at bedtime. Harold is building a world with his crayon. My niece is a pandemic baby, imagination running wild in a world confined to a three-story house in Germantown. I mirror this origin story. In 1983, I was a baby of the AIDS pandemic, whiling away the hours  in a three-story house in Roxborough, a few miles away, reading Harold. Harold and I drew towers together to extend the vertical landscape of the house while the world was burning outside. 

The Tower had a hundred windows, all mobile, and each gave onto a different segment of space-time. Its ribs didn’t form Euclidian curves, they ripped the very fabric of the cosmos, they overturned realities, they leafed through pages of parallel worlds.

~ Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

I think of the story of the Maiden’s Tower in Istanbul. The Byzantine emperor locks his daughter up in a tower to protect her from a prophecy that foretells an untimely death by snakebite. On her eighteenth birthday, a fruit basket is delivered. An asp, coiled within the basket, emerges and bites her. She dies. (Prophecy unlocked.) I stood in that tower, six months before the world shut down, marveling at the glistening straits below. The tower smells like sea salt and fables. 

These days, it seems that there is always an asp hiding in the fruit.

Meeting Sisyphus On The Hill We Climb

(July 2022)
Ani DiFranco - Every State Line

Do you believe we can construct our country out of these ambiguous stories? And why do we have to construct it? People inherit their countries as they inherit their languages. Why do we, of all the peoples of the world, have to invent our country every day so everything isn’t lost and we find we’ve fallen into eternal sleep?

~ Khoury, Gate of the Sun

The United States, the version that we hold in myth, is one that we have never fully attended to in flesh. So much of this country lives in words, images, and symbols, the building blocks of great expectations and convenient fictions that conflate abstraction and empathy in our embodied politics.

But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
It can never be permanently defeated.

Amanda Gorman frames this in hope, but I do not feel it. I feel the deep blow of shattered myth. I cannot reconcile the many versions of my country. I rewrite the Pledge of Allegiance.

The wind blows from an unknown past, and spreads our doubts through the world.

~Kagekiyo (Noh Theatre)

Oceans of Stories

(Dreamtime)
John Adams - Scheherazade.2/I

To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world.

And there are so many stories to tell, too many, such an excess of intertwined lives events miracles places rumors, so dense a commingling of the improbable and the mundane! I have been a swallower of lives; and to know me, just the one of me, you’ll have to swallow the lot as well. Consumed multitudes are jostling and shoving inside me…

~ Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

Our oceans are rising. Our myths are supersaturated. Our stories are flailing in the breaking waves. 

In the absence of live music, I am learning to write again. Writing seems to be an underground passageway between the χώρα (Plato’s holding space for creation) and the world, with the words digging the tunnels. To write from the χώρα is to reject the binary, to dwell in the boundary lands, to reinscribe the borders. 

“Some places have more life in them than others,” my partner once said to me, as we were standing at the Spider Woman overlook at Canyon de Chelly. Some words also have more life in them than others, and when I happen upon them, I feel the same electric charge that I felt while in the shadow of that great sandstone cathedral.

I believe in holding still. I believe that the secrets we hold in our hearts are our anchors, that even the unspoken between us is a measure of our every promise to the living and to the dead. And all our promises, like all our hopes, move us through life with the power of an ocean liner pushing through the sea.

~ Ng, Bone


..but morning overtook Scheherazade and she lapsed into silence…

~ Arabian Nights

Χώρα VIII: Wine and Rust

 (Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs I: Noctuelles 

A pounding, bleeding waterfall is cascading down from the heavens, with pools of pink foam at its base. I walk behind the waterfall, into a small cave, red from sunshine pushing through the falls. The cave smells of wine and rust. A pinot noir sits on a table in a gunmetal chalice, next to a Chinese crystal ball with a silver serpent stand as its base. I drink the wine in one gulp, and a metallic film lingers in my mouth. I look into the ball. I see myself, in a transparent silk-gossamer white gown, spinning through deep space. I lower my forehead to the ball and am drawn through its membrane, head first. I clasp hands with my falling self, and spin with her into darkness. 

Borderlands

(Dreamtime)
Anat Cohen and Trio Brasileiro - O Ocidente Que Se Oriente

…it chooses me as a threshold…

~ Darwish, Butterfly’s Burden

Perhaps liminal spaces descend into us, rather than vice versa. I revel in the χώρα, the borderlands, the third kind, ein sof, the apeiron, the collective unconscious, but I struggle with all the ways I don’t belong. I seek the margins, and then resent them when they settle into me. There is a permanent tension in which I see my work–and my worth–in the service of radical transformation, but I want to be seen by people who fear and begrudge the radical. The radical will forever unsettle, offend, and disappoint. I’m not comfortable with the oppositional nature of the oppositional stance I feel compelled to hold, but radical is, by practical definition, oppositional. 

I feel most at home in borderlands. 
I don’t feel at home anywhere.

A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

~ Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

What does it mean to move beyond the oppositional, into the generative? To throw sand into the bull’s eyes, to reject the dilemma, to offend (and transcend) the binary? To create, to renew, to seek release from the captivity of the familiar?

‘We,’ I cried passionately, must be a third principle, we must be the force which drives between the horns of the dilemma; for only by being other, by being new, can we fulfill the promise of our birth!

~ Rushdie, Midnight’s Children

I am an act of kneading, of uniting and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definition of light and dark and gives them new meanings.

~ Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

I begin to write, to bridge the space between the νοῦς and the ψυχή, a borderlands space that is felt and thought simultaneously. I write to give voice to the χώρα.  

Mythscape

(Dreamtime)
Tinariwen - Toumast Tincha

Καλό προσωπείο, σε δύσκολους καιρούς, ο μύθος.
Myth: a good mask, in harsh times.

~ Ritsos, Monochords

There were myths that were lies and myths made from truth, and often the falsest ones were the most plausible and the truest filled with dragons and gods. Every journey is a crisis, a turning point, a shedding of myths, and mine began with the gnawing certainty that something did not add up. And in a way, this journey never ends, but in another sense, it ends where all great roads lead: to the discovery of voice.

~ Older, The Fire This Time

My myths are quaking and the world is in agony. Do I turn away? Do I wade in deeper? Do I climb the crest of the oncoming wave, always with the possibility that it might collapse around me and drown me?

It is not enough, deciding to open.

~ Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera

I find myself searching for voice with the habits of distance I have cultivated in my decades-long love affair with words that spring forth from the νοῦς. There is safety in abstraction, and I am reluctant to take off the training wheels. I am afraid that if I drop into the mist of the mythos, I may never find my way back. 


Χώρα IX: Heart and Womb

(Dreamtime)
Maurice Ravel - Miroirs IV: Alborada del gracioso

My solar plexus is burning in sharp undulations. I rip open my rib cage, pull out my heart, and hold it in two open hands. It begins spinning, like a top, faster and faster, throwing off sludge in every direction, to reveal an amniotic sac with a squirming creature inside. The sac ruptures, and the creature is a miniature me, sitting in my hands, looking up at me, naked, in terror and awe. 

Χώρα X: Raising the Sparks

(Anamnesis)
Creedence Clearwater Revival - Long As I Can See The Light

I encounter Kabbalah by accident in the days following the wildfire evacuation. I am reading Foucault’s Pendulum, and I see traces of Plato’s χώρα in Eco’s kabbalistic references. A good friend, who has graciously allowed me to sleep on her couch while I wait to hear if my school has burned down, tells me that she studied Kabbalah in her youth, and pulls out a stack of books. 

While the ashes of the fire settle into my lungs, the books breathe out mystery, creation, and renewal. I have found a phoenix. 

Traces of the light adhered to the shards of the shattered vessels. This may be compared to a vessel full of oil. If it breaks and the oil spills out, a bit of the liquid adheres to the shards in the form of drops. Likewise in our case. A few sparks of light adhered. When the shards descended to the bottom of the world of actualization, they were transformed into the four elements–fire, air, water, and earth–from which evolved the stages of mineral, vegetable, animal, and human. When these materialized, some of the sparks remained hidden within the varieties of existence. You should aim to raise those sparks hidden throughout the world, elevating them to holiness by the power of your soul.

~ Matt, The Essential Kabbalah

I remember, suddenly, that there is more magic in the world than these past few years have allowed for. A flash of anamnesis. I am newly flush with the ancient challenge of raising the sparks. 

Prelude

(Before and After)
Αντώνης Κυρίτσης - Πέντε μέρες παντρεμένη

An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of creation.

~ Matt, The Essential Kabbalah

During a day trip to Montreal to visit friends from Morocco, I find myself in a circle of Sufis, chanting. This is not my first time. I remember three years earlier, in Casablanca, arriving at a yoga studio with one of these friends to “check out this Sufi thing I’ve been doing for a little while.” I have no idea what I’m getting into. Young urban professionals are surrounding an old man, their teacher. The women are veiled, but they take them off when they leave the studio. The teacher begins with a lesson, in Arabic. I don’t know any of the words, but somehow I can understand him anyway. This man is clearly raising sparks. I am invited into their circle, to bathe in their chanting. I feel the lift of the chant, wishing I could fit those throaty Arabic sounds into my English mouth. Later I learn that their teacher is the shaykh of the Tijaniyya order, and his visit to Casablanca is a rare gift. 

At the start of the pandemic, this group convened daily on zoom; from my bedroom, I donned the veil, and attempted to chant along, slowly making out the Arabic script of the Wadefa that I was beginning to learn. Eventually it settled into once a week, and I drop in occasionally, when it’s not too early in the morning. My visit to Montreal allows me a chance to participate in full, three years after first exposure. It is electric. 

I stood in the little clearing round the ruined walls. I had immediately the sensation that I was expected. Something had been waiting there all my life. I stood there, and I knew who waited, who expected. It was myself. I was here and this house was here, you and I and this evening were here, and they had always been here, like reflections of my own coming. It was like a dream. I had been walking towards a closed door, and by a sudden magic its impenetrable wood became glass, through which I saw myself coming from the other direction, the future.

~ Fowles, The Magus

I am in Montreal, I am in the digital aether, I am in Casablanca, I am everywhere all at once, in the vibrating Now of this chanting. I still don’t know what the words mean, and I’m not sure that I want to. They mean something outside of language, beyond music, in their contours and cadences. I am not a Sufi, but I am renewed. 

***

Copyright 2023, Melinda Russial

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