Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Ruptures or Shutdowns are, Eventually, our Fate

What do I know now? I have lost what I feared all along I was losing, seeing plenty of warning signs, but I waited to see it through. Now I know...this much, and it feels...this bad, and it can only be true that a new period of adjustment will follow, in the knowledge that all over the whole wide world tragedies do hit so many of the most wretched souls in multiples. The earth seethes with the shock and bereavement of all manner of beings, human and non-human, even less noticed than tainted seepage oozing from hidden underground flows.

We almost never read about the evolution of the pain suffered after news stories have covered kidnappings and murders or cases of ravaging disease--how the survivors briefly escape from it and then return, the reconciliations within the mind, the stages and their triggers for fresh starts made for better or for worse. What if there were a separate news bureau devoted to victims' and families' outcomes in the years following after high-profile crises? More usually this is the stuff of private diaries, autobiographies and therapists' notes or even fiction, where it's ever recorded at all.

But in my case I'm talking about heartbreak, much more routine than murder and mayhem. 

O the love relationships that each of us may have sanctified based on rosy conclusions reached and savored like the most exquisite marbles, all in our own private minds! And the writers who have written that they knew a fellow person's thought, could just see it, knew absolutely what would come next, when the fulfillment of that knowledge owed itself instead to well-imagined guesswork. There is no science of what people will do, or how things will turn out in the end, after so many lesser, day-to-day conclusions.

If we felt sure that we read someone's heart, saw the delight in it that corresponded to our own, then noticed it recede or learned that we misread the face and the words, how are we ever to ascertain the degree to which our intuitions about the loved person or the potential for fulfillment as a couple were wrong, or how much the obstacles to a shared future lay more in ourselves or in the other person? And are we safe in trusting our intuitions about new love again?

In  July 1990, another agonizing time, I wrote this poem about the lasting power of infatuation, called  
A Panorama of Loves:

   Stars! Near, immense stars, far, far sown--
   each one, unknown jewelwork of hovering starlets--
   each a beloved, replete in its majesty.
   Forces do breach and strew them, bursting them
   from within, sometimes, off through the gape of stars.
   One star may dazzle another, but does it escape and flare,
   star of its own fate, or smother itself in strange starfire?
   Shooting-stars flee across ages of waiting space--
   breathtaking traces unfurl through their wakes, decades long.

   ©2012

Some time near that same date came this other poem, Grief: The Exile:

   The old boat rises,
   and settles, its timbers controlled by
   the waves that divide them and nails that uphold their oneness.
 
   Why hast thou left me to rupture away from thy pillar?
   Thou couldst have hefted me loose long ago, with thy hand
   unsnagging my anchor.

   The old boat straggles,
   and wallows, the stub of a rope floating
   hopeless to anchor me ever again.

   ©2012

Blessed are a long memory, and better yet a time out sharing between intimate friends, for dicing up and scattering the thoughts that humiliate us or freeze us in a place we'd best be moving beyond. Blessed every bit as much are the tricklings of well-being when we least expected them and can't account for them: thoughts of space and opportunity, or realizations that we pre-grieved for a while so this latest, really, came mostly as plain old heart-ache rather than shock.

Blessed are old, timeless things--how many can this industrializing world maintain, unwittingly or determinedly?--since they reliably gave comfort when sought. The sore thoughts may be at bay now but raw pain, its special loneliness, won't leave till sometime--I trust--we notice that it has departed the way a body ache has healed and gone; we suddenly observe that we haven't been suffering that thing lately.


 

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Wednesday, April 17, 2013

On the Wing...Compensating as Best we Can

It is true, just as written in a 19th-century medical encyclopedia I remember browsing many years ago in the Irwin Library's Rare Book Room at Butler University down in Indianapolis, that the best antidote for sorrow is a change of scene. Sorrow, of course, is a broad outcome of our common inability to see so many situations fully for how we got into them and can get, gradually, out again. Sadness also comes from the expectation of loss, and all the echoing loss we know will follow afterward. Eventually the person has to acknowledge being self-entrapped in circumstances not right for the long term, and must own being powerless to do anything about it other than break away with a full complement of still more painful regrets. So the answer, fully endorsed by the antique medical reference with its long-winded title and subtitle, for me was to head off to Minneapolis. An invitation to attend a concert down that way had been timely.

It felt a bit thrilling to hit the freeway and car-power my way through jurisdictions southward, after driving only streets, state roads and a few bits of semi-urban freeway all the weeks since January...to visit another friend at her art gallery in the farming outskirts of the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area...then land at the rooming house called the Alamo among other sturdily decrepit houses edging up to Dinkytown, all the while beguiled away from the thoughts that had been leading me between eddying ponds of doubtfulness. Older history would catch me up once I exposed myself to it; here was this concert over at Sundin Music Hall in my former St. Paul environs (see bachsocietymn.org) with six men and six women pronouncing old Latin and Hebrew texts embedded into the musical scores of J.S. Bach, Heinrich Schutz and an Italian composer, Salamone Rossi; what an embroidery, a labor, of lives and learning, discovery and re-discovery. These ancient languages, intoned in harmony by people still sleek-faced with youth, in an age when we communicate more and more in acronym and other computer-driven code. What work, what agelessness, an exhibit of things worth keeping when so much background from their time has crumbled away and shed both its poisoning and its nourishing properties.

On the way back my Minneapolis-based friend and I came through another forecast snow squall as we traveled up two-lane Wisconsin 35. Temperatures were a degree or two above freezing; nearing the town of Siren, I felt the little car skidding even at reduced speeds and joined the few other drivers crossing up through town at a creep. Slush lay over the pavement and could be expected all the way along the seventy-some miles remaining till we reached the Twin Ports and my apartment. But highway treatment must have been applied past the town of Webster, where we abruptly left behind the slickness to continue along shining wet blacktop like a beacon the whole rest of the way, no other traffic in sight amid the white-out that swirled on all sides. Once to the right I saw the orange breast of a woodcock wheeling up-over startled, wings triangular, mission his own version of safety. In enough regards the scene out our windows could have been November or December except for the long white light of a spring evening, blizzard-beset, lingering towards its own strange dusk. Far to the sides of the roadway there were likely the season's first red-winged blackbirds and maybe a meadowlark or two nestling in the sogginess, knowing how to wait it out. This is a winter that through a sequence of big snows seems to beg to be remembered. And we've been needing that moisture.

Here at home a winter's piece of work is done, an image as much about weirdness as it is about repletion, or maybe about what happens when we take on more than our bodies or unique nerve networks can bear. But the overweight hummingbird is in his element of blossoms, baggy nectar-pouches as shown, and hasn't collapsed yet. Everything is still beautiful. Right now I strive to believe that half of all anticipated troubles are never met with, because although they lurk, we refuse to go face to face with them, and instead act so as to ease the preconditions, and so something else which might be the best of all outcomes eventually takes place. The pain of coping must relax, intensify, relax and transform into other states of mind.







Thursday, April 4, 2013

Good Friday...Any Friday and An Expedition

Good Friday is traditionally a Christian day of mourning the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, though as a person like me raised amid Christian teachings loses sight of the rites celebrated in churches, a holy day is liable to take on personal meanings of the hour or day, connected loosely if at all with the sacred meaning.

On Good Friday 2013 I had decided to take advantage of thawing weather and head north into public land beyond Ely, Minnesota, the habitat of spruce grouse and source of the setting I'd been painting around a spruce grouse drawn from a photo I shot in Lake County two and a half years ago. Passing up through national forest along Highway 2 I sighted my subject bird, the spruce cock, in the roadway doing as his kind will, eating grit to help him grind up food; he has a crop, full of sand and pebbles, instead of a mouth full of teeth.

The encounter, it pleased me to think, boded well for the artwork that would continue from the top of that cliff I traveled toward, 112 miles north of Duluth, where snow would be likely trickled away to expose some of the surface I intended to paint. But by my arrival, no trails had been broken other than by deer in the campground I needed to cross, and my snowshoes sank laboriously at each stride. Sometimes a section of snow as big as a bathroom floor would cave beneath my weight and whoosh downward, releasing air with an industrial-sounding blast from hollow spots way down under. A few times the snow crust barely crushed underneath me. A beast of burden, I continued, seeking a sitting place on top of the rock dome where at last I found my necessary conditions, with roots of pines exposed on pinkish cliff.

Sorrow, mostly a private matter, accompanies me lots of places these days. There are various helps for it but one of the best, and of course not in my estimation alone, is huge country too inhospitable for alien plants or much industrialization/urbanization to expand their reach. Here is the home of the wild beasts and specialized birds still left on earth, and sorrow might well arise merely from thoughts of the earth so glutted with humankind that these very places like the rest become infested with ourselves, our roads and our mandate to develop every resource in or on the ground. 


It is natural to hate sorrow and fear everything that might give rise to it, experienced in different ways by different people. Yet sorrow persists and recurs, accompanies folks everywhere in low-grade, residual or full-blown intensity, offset with our work and contemplation. Sorrow gives rise to corrective courses, new chapters but also illness, which makes way for branching off and innovation by those personally or indirectly affected. Sorrow challenges our lives the way competition, seismic upheaval and disease challenge the trees at root level. We go into the wild and see what the trees have done by way of response.


We go back out into the streets, or, if we have the option to do so, we linger at those places deep in vegetation dead and alive, where we build something hidden, as we see it, from other people. We know ourselves sufficiently torn down by our choices and those of other people that we will make our creation manifest when the good hopes brought back in us somehow, through days and nights characterized by that forest, the heavenly bodies belonging to everyone and the drama of all events determine that the time is ripe.

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