Essay: Painting Flowers
1.
On a clear, October morning in 1960 I was hammering scraps of wood because I believed with sufficient attention I might actually build a lobster trap. That’s the kind of child I was. Seeing only colors I knew myself to be altogether impractical.
2.
The idea of practicality is antithetical to the actions of the soul. "Take this in remembrance of me," said Jesus, handing his disciples nothing more than torn bread. No wonder the New England Puritans ran away from this Anglican-Catholic rite.
If you worship practicality you will not get fed sufficiently. You will make sturdy furniture and you will vigorously elaborate a culture that despises young people.
Young people are always trying to taste things they don’t properly understand. That’s a fact.
"This is my blood, drink this in remembrance of me."
3.
Belief is impractical if you allow it to remain so.
4.
This is a fragment from one of my notebooks--of a poem, left unfinished, written in 1982.
I was living alone in Finland at the time. I woke early one morning and in my blindness and delirium thought I was seeing a corpse hanging from a tree.
I make out the thin figure
of a corpse in the upper limbs,
"the color of horn."
I’m alone, gritty with sleep,
I make him out. The frozen
Shape of a man/who has a thirst
for leaves. He flourishes
as I wake.
Given that –
"we tread bounds in a region of frost,
viewing the frost."
The "we" is what I am. And still, the frost
(??)
I was thinking of Wallace Stevens. I was lonely and seeing things incorrectly.
I was also impractical: seeing that man as the tree itself and not as a figure of betrayal.
That is the essence of faith whether you have the vocabulary for it or not.
5.
The aesthetic economy is no small thing. A true story: someone introduced cats to a French village where formerly there were no cats and those cats ate the mice. In turn the bees flourished. (Mice eat bees, particularly in winter.)
The bees pollinated in greater numbers.
The flowers were beyond description.
Then Monet painted them.
Monet, who could scarcely see…
6.
Not very long ago I heard a boy jumping on discarded bedsprings on a Chicago sidewalk. He was making a stripped down music from solitude and trash. It was the song of a woodcutter’s axe in the empty woods. He saw me listening. He noticed my guide dog. He sensed an audience. He threw everything he had into making rare music with ruined steel coils and shoes. He was releasing invisible spirits into the morning air of Wabash. Avenue. The music grew out of his blood. I’m guessing that if you’re a sighted person you’d have driven right on by. Or maybe you’d have crossed to the other side of the street if you had been walking there. But I heard the maddened dancing for five full minutes before moving on.
7.
At first I thought the effect was obscene. He was simply calling out the furtive and metallic protests of forgotten trysts. I thought of a bordello in the wild west. I laughed at the salty bravado of the performance. Then I saw flashes of light. The coils were rising and compressing in timed measures. My blind eyes could just make out the glint of his instruments. In turn I began to listen to what this dancer was really doing.
The broken springs flashed like the undersides of leaves.
I was like a sailor on a distant ship. I could see the maritime flash of his lantern.
In turn I saw that his bed springs were tuned in harmony with the sky and the local trees.
The dancer was saying all kinds of things.
His feet were rattling and whistling.
I’d never heard anything like this before.
The dancer was offering his ragged memories to the damp air of the street.
The dancer was offering his ragged memories to the damp air of the street.
I saw the sparks and heard the 16th notes; the 8th notes; the sparks of his dance dropped like stones from a bridge…
8.
I was feeling lucky just then, alone with my guide dog, the two of us having been on an ordinary walk.
A gold leaf was spinning down. A red maple leaf was floating on water. Flashes of sun ran across the June river.
The dancer’s shoulders and hips dipped and high notes leapt all around him.
He was dancing at the epicenter of the early light—that overcast sun that always hangs in the mornings above Lake Michigan
.
Then he was in an island of trees. Low notes came suddenly, the notes were signifying a bent path. The way forward was harder for some reason. The dance had taken a darker turn. I could tell this was now a steep narrative. Somehow he’d figured out how to make the springs sound like a tuba. Then he made the metal groan like a cello.
And then hammers were flying. Again there were sparks of light from the bed. The high notes came like whale songs from some migratory coast.
For a moment I thought about Marsilio Ficino, the Renaissance man of letters who remarked that “beauty is just shapes and sounds”. Hearing the Chicago
dancer move across the secret world of a homemade dance—a “found” dance—I thought that Ficino left out the weird and lovely human and animal volition that lives behind the shapes and sounds. I also realized again much as I did when I was a boy that when you stand still you can hear the unexpected music and light that comes from living and walking in shadows.
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