When I said I believed in lightness, I wasn’t kidding. Over and over, I return – not to escapism or fantasy or ostrich necks– but to dissolving solidity, breaking up the world’s fixity.
My holidays – as if a wild angel came reeling from the wings and slammed into despair – as simple as reckless laughter, unplanned, unbidden or a piece of hot bread with butter and a shard of salt.
The way of the heart – to be renewed every day, no matter how many times the heart breaks. Knowing that everything can be transformed into something else (see Ovid); that winged
leaps – words in whorls of motion, fugitive emotion — lead to a poem, and person, that seeks freedom.
“A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears,” Gertrude Stein famously said, in a tumult of the senses. She was echoing Picasso, and the motif echoes loudly – as a rose is a rose is a rose — across Paris. Curators and painters, it seemed, are tripping over each other to subvert the common pairing of eye & seeing. Not that appearances fool the eye, but that appearance is a collaborative process and to seize a fuller reality, the artist employs (his mind’s eye) instinct, feeling, whole self, total focus, third eye, mind’s eye. A juju, a mix of intoxication and inner penetration.
For instance, Jean Cocteau recounts Picasso talking about the wife of a half-blind painter describing a castle as he painted it. “…painting is a blind man’s job. He paints not what he sees, but how he feels about it, what he tells himself about what he has seen.”
Sophie Calle, in several rooms of her massive show in the Picasso Museum, questions the nature of seeing by showing us the photographs of “the unsighted”: the last thing people saw before they losing their sight (i.e., a streetcar), and videos of people born blind standing wide-eyed before at the sea for the first time.
Modigliani, in an exhibition at Musée de l’Orangerie, gives us portraits of familiars with filled-in eyes, or two eyes each sporting a different color. Eyes with the holes of masks. As masks, as people with expanded vision that see paradox, each eye seeing in reality a different, conflicting aspect.
And Rothko, after immersing us in color, color, color in a retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, pulls the veil: “I’m not interested in color. It’s light I’m after.” The forty-four candles of Hanukah have been lit and extinguished, and the times are dark. But light comes in many forms. Remembers the watchword: “It’s light I’m after.”
Lightness of spirit! I had been chasing my joie de vivre, wondering where it could be hiding. I had been on the front lines of culture wars, in the trenches, laboring to talk to all sides. I was looking for the seams of illumination. But the heavy load became leaden; I acquired a leaden walk. Even when tamping it down, I felt leaden. Even in Paris, I said this has long legs. The world has long legs and arms, and every armature to invade our spirit.
Lightness of spirit – how? Lightness – how to remember giddiness, a spritz, a throwing off of weight?
I dreamed of a man leaning against a wall. Every time I looked, he had an open passage on his chest, as if his upper cavity were an aquarium. He had waves within him that surged and coursed but never overflowed. Three times I looked, and his chest was still transparent and full of bright water. It was the first night of Hanukkah. Magritte dans les rêves?
Then, with no warning, no reason, no nothing, all that heaviness lifted — oof! gone! — a clear surge of water swept through. It happens. I had to wait to touch the original part of self birthed by wonder. I had been burnishing my list of things I love about Paris and who wouldn’t be grateful, but I needed the bolt of light. Wonder again! The gray weather now still sits on my eyebrows, “la grisaille s’est assise sur mes sourcils,” but my eyes are seeing – the fabulous, in spite of everything. Including. Everything.
Rain in Paris, great whorls of it spinning, falling as knotted string, strung pearls, bird’s nests, gray hair, wire barbed or not, cat gut, old paint brushes, tumbleweeds. Clean your hairbrush, bad curtains in strips, cloud shreds, albumen, cauldrons of bouillon, cassette ribbons, phlegm and tears like liquid crystals. We came to unwind, stifle the contraction of a muscle, ease psychic anxiety, thicken the moment, elevate life from sorrows revealed — drizzle honey, find tea to paint with, wake with, dazzle our eyes, spy, spin words, sun on a surfing bird, its bright wing, soon pink lakes that pool in the clouds, see or imagine them.
Days and days and days. In a week. So many ways to distract self. The annals of avoidance would fill a book of the world. What else could lure me to my closet and sort out my sock and tights, search for runs, holes, for among the mess I cannot find a decent pair of 30 den black tights? And what’s with the long reams of sheets on the ironing board? And good God, a user’s manual? Pinning myself to an online help center and following the steps, in order, one two three, to obtain access to a recalcitrant app? To keep the cesspool of news and social media warp at bay. Also, the inarticulateness of grief.
Then something turns my stubborn head: Emily Dickinson. If it feels as if the top of my head is taken off, it’s poetry, Dickinson said – she knew. Could she have been more articulate about grief in the poem titled after its first line: After great pain, a formal feelings comes—? “After a trauma, stiffness takes over, and in the poem becomes personified: “The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –”
Woh. With such delicacy, Dickinson hovers around the anesthetized parts after the adrenaline wears off. The stony interior that is aware of the magnitude and overwhelmed by the change. Transparent and beautiful, the poem allows a subtle inner consciousness to be spied on, made alive, moved through. Some things are made delicate, beautiful and meant to run, like nylons; others, like poetry, are delicate, beautiful and are built to last.
Trees are shedding their summer hair. What a tiny comb was used for grooming – tufts pile on the sidewalk, bright and seething.
Where were we when we lost our crickets? Softly, softly they left us without a sound, dark-ness falls hard on hard ground, the cushion
they made gone, no love or jangle to soften obsession, cool nights, bombs, part of the ear’s fabric. You can never put the shriek back in the throat of the cricket.
Because I still have an oven, I can bake bread and knock on the crust: a hostage might answer. Because yeast is alive for a short time, embroider my name in your handmade world.
Oh long reams of sheets on the ironing board, I give you my full attention. I give you Simone Weil and Malebranche: attentiveness the soul’s natural prayer Is prayer. Pray, pray. With feet. With flowers, sticks. With undone lips, with murmuring surf.
To not know; to think only about the usual mixed feelings of crossing back to “real life” after a holiday, with tender feet and breathing open pores. To be one of the ravers in the Israeli desert dancing under the starry October sky. To be an observant Jew dancing wildly over Sukkot-Shabbat-Simchat Torah, giving thanks over three holidays celebrating joy, joy, joy, going into otherness – not knowing about the bloody weekend.
I was counting the hours of those in blissful ignorance, having switched off their devices for another kind of communication as one holiday slid into another into another — before they’d have to rejoin those who knew. That sliver of innocence would not narrow and close in the usual way, with a shiver, a tremble as we cross back over the straits — as poet Yehuda Amichai writes, trying to soak it all up before the flute holes close.
From one kind of abyss to another. Strewn with corpses draped like black flowers/on roads, on the tops of cars, in one’s hearts and arms.
