Tanglewood

“When a man in a forest thinks he is going forward in a straight line, in reality he is going in a circle, I did my best to go in a circle, hoping to go in a straight line.”

                                                                                         - Samuel Beckett, Molloy

Vasilis Avramidis, "Caretakers," 2012
140x100cm, oil on canvas

When you were a kid, did you ever dream of running away to live in the forest? To get lost? To go wild? To grow up? Would you be one of the beasts, bold and ferocious? Or another kind of creature, small and nestled spindly-legged in a bed of petals and thorns? Would you nest among hidden branches, migratory and ready to fly, collecting treasures only to leave them behind? Or would you plant yourself firmly in the dead leaves, sprout roots, nurture fungi in your shadows, and drink from what was hidden, always going deeper?

According to J. Crews in "Forest and tree symbolism in folklore," many cultures believe that trees function as "receptacles for spirits or souls." No wonder the forest can bring such company, offering fodder for so many childhood imaginings.

Yet the nature of the forest--and of the tree--is double-edged. The forest can be blinding, dense and frightening, endless and beguiling. The tree, though rooted, stands alone, often condemned to never touch another of its kind. Do we really wish to grow these kinds of roots? How do we know exactly where to cast our lot? At what point does the magic engulf us?

A lovely and painful song about what it means to decide to grow (roots) through love is "Tanglewood tree," by Dave Carter.

Tanglewood tree

Source

Love is a tanglewood tree in a bower of green
In a forest at dawn
Fair while the mockingbird sings, but she soon lifts her wings
And the music is gone
Young lovers in the tall grass with their hearts open wide
When the red summer poppies bloom
But love is a trackless domain and the rumor of rain
In the late afternoon

Love is an old root that creeps through the meadows of sleep
When the long shadows cast
Thin as a vagrant young vine, it encircles and twines
And it holds the heart fast
Catches dreamers in the wildwood with the stars in their eyes
And the moon in their tousled hair
But love is a light in the sky, and an unspoken lie
And a half-whispered prayer

I'm walkin' down a bone-dry river but the cool mirage runs true
I'm bankin' on the fables of the far, far better things we do
I'm livin' for the day of reck'nin countin' down the hours
I yearn away, I burn away, I turn away the fairest flower of love, 'cause darlin'

Love is a garden of thorns
   Love's garden of thorns, how it grows
And a crow in the corn
   Black crow in the corn hummin' low
And the brake growing wild
   Brake nettle so pretty and wild
   And thistles surround the edge of the
Cold when the summer is spent
   Dim dark hour as the sun moves away
In the jade heart's lament
   Lamenting a lost summer day
For the faith of a child
   Who nurtures the faith of a child
   When nothing remains to cover her eyes?
My body has a number and my face has a name
   My body has a number, maybe my face has a name
And each day looks the same to me
   Each hour like each hour before
But love is a voice on the wind
   This longing is a voice on the wind
And the wages of sin
   She cultivates the wages of sin
And a tanglewood tree
   In a tanglewood tree




Yet the tree is not only of this earth. It is also of the sky: "The medieval Cabbalists represented creation as a tree with its roots in the reality of spirit (the sky) and its branches upon the earth (material reality)" (Crews, 43). So we are not condemned to suffocation. There must be other ways to grow.

Blue Christmas tree

The twisting of roots is only one kind of entanglement. Perhaps as humans, we must follow not the roots under the earth, but the entanglement of all that surrounds us, the entanglement of the stars:

"Quantum entanglement is one of the central principles of quantum physics, though it is also highly misunderstood. In short, quantum entanglement means that multiple particles are linked together in a way such that the measurement of one particle's quantum state determines the possible quantum states of the other particles" (read more here).

Apparently, this works across time as well as space. We are deeply entwined, yet this is not an overgrowth, or a distortion of something that was once comforting and beautiful. It is our very nature, and it is how we survive.

So if we look skyward instead, and grow our roots toward the heavens, will we find ourselves less tangled? Will the space that is not nothingness, because it is different from black holes, fill us with the room to breathe? Will the divinity of the stars anchor us as we stretch to understand how we connect? I cannot imagine we would be so different from the rest of the universe that we could not trust this. Whether we call it faith, spirituality, love, or just following our nature, it is in this expansive tangle that we root in each other, the earth, and the stars, all enmeshed in that which we cannot see.

"For there is hope for a tree,

if it be cut down, that it will sprout again,

and that its shoots will not cease." 

- Job 14:7, ESV

Sheltering the Wild

"To love is to approach each other center to center." ~ Pierre de Teilhard de Chardin

It has taken me a long time to write this post, perhaps because it touches on the "heart" of things. I want to write about unconditional love, about revelations that allow the connection between two beings to ignite with wild lightning. This is about holding on in the storm, not because we are kind enough to pretend it is not that bad or we don't really feel the lash of the wind in someone else's pain.

Francoise Gilot (French, b.1921), Little Girl with Owl 1960

It is about joining in the roll of thunder, pairing each other's scars like kindling for a warmth we seek, because the wild heart in each of us deserves to be gazed upon with full acceptance. In my most honest love, there is a place for the safe unveiling of brutality.

“To love another another human in all of her splendor and imperfect perfection, it is a magnificent task...tremendous and foolish and human.” ~ Louise Erdrich, The Last Report On The Miracles At Little No Horse

Our centers are full of divinity and light, yes. But there is also pain and fear, rage and hunger. To deny this in ourselves is to feel ashamed of our very natures. To deny this in others, or to judge it as diminishing the other, is to offer a cowardly love. We cannot fully love without the revelation of imperfections. So when we hide our ugliness, we are, in effect, refusing the chance to be known and loved.

Such a shrinking away from wholeness, and its concomitant lack of trust, has dire consequences in all aspects of life, not just in our most intimate relationships (as if this alone were not bad enough). John Warner recently wrote a self-proclaimed "preachy" piece on truth in Inside Higher Ed, entitled "A Column Not to Be Dictated to by Fact Checkers," in which he discussed this phenomenon in today's classrooms (and politics). I found the following excerpt particularly relevant:

Found here. 

"I sometimes read about how the current generation has been ruined by the self-esteem movement, but they can hardly be blamed with their role models, champions who cheat, politicians who lie, journalists who don't believe there is such a thing as truth.

Or a teacher who is worried about looking like a square when he says he believes in truth. All of us are signaling that there’s nothing much worthy of belief aside from our own “success,” our image, and how we’re perceived on some imaginary scoreboard.

These are all forms of cowardice, a lack of trust in ourselves and others, that we will not be judged of value unless we are perfect, if we are anything short of outstanding."

This is not to say that we should parade our scars in some sort of victim dance. But to cover ourselves in "goodness" is a kind of death: “To banish imperfection is to destroy expression, to check exertion, to paralyze vitality” (John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice).

In some way, I approach this topic as a sociolinguist. I know that in language, like in all human systems, attainment of a "perfect" state cannot be achieved except through death (and yes, here, I am mindful of the spiritual implications of this). And even then, what is considered the "perfect" moment is debatable, not to mention a mere abstraction. In language, it is the variation, its very state of imperfection, of dynamic motion and persistent change in a world that never experiences the same moment twice, that allows it to flourish. Languages do not survive despite their imperfections, but rather because of their imperfections. I think this sheds a new light on our lives.

by minimaforms, 2008. “Minimaforms was invited by
Archigram’s David Greene to rethink and evolve his
seminal projects the Living Pod and High-Rise Tower
as part of a show called Imperfect works.” Exhibited at
Mega-Structures Reloaded, Berlin (2008) / Imperfect Works,
London (2008).

"The key to a rational conception of language change – indeed, of language itself – is the possibility of describing orderly differentiation in a language serving a community … It is absence of structural heterogeneity that would be dysfunctional." (Weinreich et al. 1968: 100–101)

A language that does not shift, bending rules and opening itself to "strange" new patterns, is soon a dead language.

On the spiritual question, Lacey Mosley discovered that she could see God's grace best through the lens of imperfection: “I've learned recently to love imperfection a lot because it shines such a big light on God's grace. And if someone has grace for you that's when you feel their love the most and they see you for who you are and they love you anyway.”

When I compare our "imperfection" to the "imperfection" of human systems like language and culture, it dawns on me that there is nothing to be forgiven. It is not that we must love "anyway," but that through this, we love. Through this wildheartedness that is our life force, we understand:

Louise Butler, Journey to Nimbus (2010), oil on canvas

“But those who seek only reassurance from life will never be more than tourists—seeing everything and trying to possess what can only be felt. Beauty is the shadow of imperfection.” ~ Simon Van Booy, Everything Beautiful Began After. 

So yes, we must shelter our wild (heart/tongue), but not because it is shameful. If we shelter it, it should be to save it for those who will know how to feed it. What a mess Einstein once was! But he did not shrivel away. And, I would argue, it was this very messiness that brought him to question everything, and to change our understanding of the world. I assure you, he is not the only example.

“You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking.” ~ Marianne Williamson

In disability, our mess is also our greatness. This is not because we are meant as inspirations to others, as some sort of epiphany-producing humanoid object. This is because the mess of disability itself is a question, which is a curiosity, which is a quest, which is a revelation. Love the imperfections, crawl into them and gaze from the inside out, and a rich new world will unfold.

Weinreich, U., Labov, W., & Herzog, M. 1968. "Empirical foundations for a theory of language change." In: W. Lehmann & Y. Malkiel, eds., Directions for historical linguistics. Austin: University of Texas Press. 95-198.

Otherskies

An orange and pearl sky, from the blog red.

Nicola Griffith's world of Jeep in Ammonite is a world that swims in a sky of pearl and tangerine, whose air is tinged with an alien nutmeg warmth. And perhaps just as strange are our own worlds, our eyes that may or may not perceive the same wavelengths in the same way. Indeed, you could be wandering right now under my tangerine sky.

This is just the beginning. We are alien worlds.

Do we not approach each other with that same trepidation that beats in the heart of the anthropologist on a planet with three moons and electromagnetic disturbances? So we say: I do not know how to tread on your land. I do not know what to accept with grace and what may be an unfamiliar poison. My language may babble in an inscrutable stream. I may starve or suffocate without special protection.


And in loving, are we not also this same anthropologist? I want to touch this alien leaf, though strange creatures may bite me. I will adjust my gait to your gravity. I breathe in your nutmeg air, trusting my lungs to the pleasure. I count the stars in this tangerine sky, though the patterns are unfamiliar. Please trust and carry my weight on your earth. 

In all of this, a recognition of shared sentience, of the oneness of us. But the love is also in the unique and strange, in the inhalation of new airs, in the caressing of our cosmic bodies, cubbyholes of history, held in the minute microcosms of our navels. 

Dr. Rob Dunn, in a study on the bacteria in our navels, has found entire life stories hidden within:

The data has since led Dunn to identify the associated factors leading to such a diverse bellybutton microbiome. He tried numerous factors, such as age and gender but nothing was even remotely close. Then came another possibility that seems to Dunn as though it may be the key. He decided to get more information from the participants, including their place of birth and where they had lived as children and beyond. That's when the data almost miraculously came together revealing something that was beyond incredible.

The navel bacteria were related to where the person has lived over the course of their lifetime. The tiny anatomical vestibule was actually a museum of lifetime experiences.

© Camille Seaman, The Atlantic

Dunn wants to see more data before he is totally convinced, but the preliminary data are exciting. "Our bodies are recognizing the universe in so many amazing ways," Dunn tells me. "While the brain fumbles to understand ourselves in our own world, the body is learning to adapt and co-exist with the environment around it. What we experience stays with us like a never ending microbial diary." (more here)

We Are Nature - Multiple Exposure Portraits Vol. II, © Christoffer Relander 2012

Howard Terpning, The Storyteller. From First People.

Even our tiniest places hold so much of us. Imagine, then, what else is to be found in these creatures around us, human and otherwise. What sky monsters lie emergent in your gaze? Does your thunder rumble, swirl, or crack? 

Even in silence, and even on other worlds, we carry our histories, in our eyes and in our flesh. In the way we look to and see the heavens, and in the shape of our storm clouds. So what better way to love than to seek out the stories, or perhaps simply to gaze at someone else's navel for a little while?

The ephemeral and empathy

Les gens ne disent pas des textes. Ce ne sont pas des textes. Ils parlent, tout simplement. Et vite ils oublient ce qu’ils ont dit, qui d’ailleurs ne compte pas : ils n’ont parlé que pour parler ; leurs paroles ne sont que prétextes pour parler nous-même, c’est ainsi depuis que va le monde et ce sera ainsi jusqu’à sa fin. ("Il se souvint du minium", Bernard Deglet)

I am tempted most of the time to believe this, that we are disconnected self-centered insecure beings whom mortality dooms to be pointless and whose very nature of self-as-center allows our one possible contribution beyond this life to slip into the ephemeral. Your words are just an intonation unit of waiting, and at the first hint of a chance to take my turn I will hit the floor running. Conversation as masturbation, not as intercourse. We seek out company merely for self-mirroring validation?

But no! There is something precious and painful about being near others. We are something bigger, and our empathy, ephemeral, contributes somehow. Floats out between us, within us. I have to believe that. There is evidence presented in the posthumous work of Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, that we are not self-contained in the ways that we tend to believe.

Chally, at her blog Zero at the Bone, comments that, with disability, "I no longer trust that people will stick by me when things get inconvenient, when being my friend gets messy; that I’ll get the support I need." True. But I've been lucky. There are those few who stick around through the mess and still look me in the eyes. So few, these folks, that my gratitude may seem in unfortunate disproportion to the facts. Wipe my ass for free, speak to me in soft languages, and allow me to offer some reciprocation, some comfort in return, when your life gets messy. And there I am, bursting with all of my Leo loyalty.

At the memorial service I attended yesterday, one of these few in my life was among the principal mourners. Front and center. Those who usually see only sourness in her walked single file to greet her, touch her hair, hold her in circumstantially loving embrace. I sat midway back, parked in my wheelchair, the space small and cumbersome. She came back to greet me, touched my fingertips because I moved my arm to reach for her. Gratitude and sorrow a heavy pearl in my heart. My frustration was paramount. I could not wrap my arms around her. So I locked onto her gaze. Not just waiting for my turn to start. Just waiting. Dr. Brennan believed that empathetic reactions were just as real (and reliable?) as chemical reactions: "The origin of transmitted affects is social in that these affects do not only arise within a particular person but also come from without. They come via an interaction with other people and an environment. But they have a physiological impact" (Brennan 2004:3). I hope she was right. That we can touch without touching.

Little things

The fastest velocity is a dead stop. I learned that from Sam Beckett, maybe in "The Unnamable"? I can't remember. But there comes a point when the extreme expression of a quality becomes everything it appeared not to be. It circles around and begins/ends again.

Lately it is magnitude, in my life, that has caught my attention in its paradoxicality. My recent posts have focused on the minute: one moment recorded by a fallible frail memory, one touch of flesh (how do we measure touch, anyway?), one wary root wrapping ever more tightly around a crumbling rock-turned-sand. Of no importance to anyone, unnoticed, unnamed. Yet filling my throat and my soul and spilling out of me as text as the center of some universe I have built for myself. And this universe is not a shabby one; these nothings are everything. To me. Right now. But step back, and they are nothing again. Not visible, not seizable. Forgettable? C'est pas la peine.

"Better hope deferred than none. Up to a point. Till the heart starts to sicken. Company too up to a point. Better a sick heart than none. Till it starts to break. So speaking of himself he concludes for the time being, For the time being leave it at that." Company, Beckett

Our planet, she is magnificent:



Yet she is tiny, humble, nothing:



Nothing, and everything. Love, too, is like this, I think.

Death and affect in the sub-tropics

One difficult thing about living in Florida--over three years now--is my sensation that the roots are missing. Instead, I find myself in a pulsating jungle, where the life and death smell hot and shocking for a Northwestern sapling gone astray. (image, right, from "History & Images of North Florida", Images, D. Penney, 2003") Lizards scurry in front of shuffling feet; armadillos lie, furry bellies exposed, shells cracked and bleeding; irises pop up out of sidewalk cracks; moss hangs orange in the setting sun. Grasshoppers as big as my hand. Owls, hawks and vultures. Spiders. Waiting for the inevitable. Nothing lasting long enough to resist the next hurricane. Uprooted, start again.

The relationships to people, too, here, feel that way. Only after these three years, do I feel roots entangled in mine, have I made connections that do not feel haphazard. (Am I talking about the fibers in Avatar? Maybe.) Yet affect has sprouted from the sandiest regions of my heart; I have better things to do than grow roots in this little landing strip! Even when we know it is all temporary, we can't help ourselves from clinging to the nearest solid bit around.

This week, my friend's young step-daughter died, circumstances unclear. Alone. Death in Florida, and one of my solid bits is crumbling beside me/within me. I hold on by growing deeper roots around the one left living. Holding off the inevitable.

Another recent death, much more distant in terms of relationships but much closer in terms of personal identification, was that of the singer-songwriter Vic Chesnutt. This week, his tune "Florida" feels particularly apt:



Suicide is not for me right now. The balance of affect and intolerability still weighs in on the side of staying around to see what happens, of not blowing away too soon, uprooting lives attached to mine.