Walking dully along
I struggle with this time of year and have in the past called the feeling I get from it ‘the horrors of spring.’ It feels like an aggressive push /pull between winter and summer and one gets the sense it is a precarious time for nature, as it is for us humans. Enter this weekend’s truly great piece from the NYT on WH Auden’s sublime Musee Des Beaux Arts. A meditation on what we mean by ‘attention’ and its implications and responsibilities, especially with regards to suffering. Thoughtfulness and the absence thereof, perhaps never more wrenchingly described in another Auden poem The More Loving One , seem a fitting subject just now, and so here are three slightly, but not too much related, thoughts.
As an exercise recently I started thinking about assigning physical properties to the conceptual- Resistance for example, for me having having a metallic quality combined with the movement of an underwater bubble - the fragility of bubbleness coupled with a sureness in it’s inevitable upward trajectory. Attention would be dark blue, almost black with the flicker and glow of a lit candle or maybe better, the light from a film projector. Maybe it’s Auden’s ‘total dark sublime’. It’s an image I would like to make.
Part 1.
I can’t quite remember what it felt like to be 10 years old. I remember my dad making a fuss about it being double digits, I mostly just remember the general sense of being in a rush to get to whatever came next. I always wanted to be older, wanted to see something new, wanted to be somewhere else. I don’t think I was so much an early acolyte to the cult of busy-ness so much as I was experiencing deeply rooted fomo. Yesterday, my son was counting all the coins he had in his possession in the hopes of convincing me that he had enough money to buy a new video game. As he was distracted by sorting, I thought I might be able to squeeze in a real question and I asked him, “How does it feel to be ten?” He saw through it immediately and just laughed and shook his head at me. Then he said, “It feels nice because I have a nice OLD mom that let’s me call her OLD.” He’s not wrong to tease me, and to ignore my question, the last two pandemic years easily translate to about ten normal ones- added to the general acceleration of time that happens when one turns forty- that’s real right? Of course it is. But temporal ‘oldness’ aside, kids are no fools and grownups deserve to be mocked for asking a small questions and expecting big answers. Fair enough. It feels to be 10 how it feels to be 10 and if I’ve forgotten then that just shows how hopeless I am really.
Part 2.
The Hours of Jeanne d'Evreux, Queen of Franceca. 1324–28, Jean Pucelle . On view at the Cloisters.
I felt off balance for much of my time in college, I didn’t take the classes I really wanted to until too late, I didn’t make quantity of ride or dies that others seemed to make. I didn’t take Amherst at it’s word and follow my bliss or whatever until my senior year. In any event, better late than never because last semester of my senior year I signed up for a class called The Art of Beholding, taught by Joel Upton. As with the Bruegel from the Auden poem, the class was ostensibly about art of the Medieval ages, but actually, crucially, it was about the sacred time-space between painting and viewer, which is of course is also known as, paying attention. The image above of a truly tiny illuminated book has continued to be a touchstone for me ever since. When I think about what first drew me to art making this was it -the possibly of an encounter with something wondrous, along with permission, the requirement really, to sit and look. To let something wash over you and work on you was the gift of that class, a skill that was fairly shocking to realize was actually a skill to be learned and practiced, and not just with art .
As I get older, I often think about how, as the Irish poet John O’Donohue noted, “no matter how mature and adult and sophisticated a person might seem, that person is still essentially an ex-baby. And as children, we all lived in an imaginal world.” This image is that for me- a page from tiny illuminated book, a precious object, made for a princess. Now on a counter behind glass, behind stone walls, high up in the Met’s Cloisters, it is quite literally a book of wonder, magic and possibility, this image in particular depicting among other things, a girl, later a mother, in her house being visited by an angel while another angel lifts up the house she’s in to transport it halfway around the world. (If you think I’m overstating… ) Yes, there is a medieval manuscript convention happening here whereby time is being compressed and many stories are happening at once and yet, plainly, it’s a house in flight. Wouldn’t that be wonderful, angels lifting up your house and taking you somewhere else, somewhere safe. As someone who has felt some version of homesick for one reason or another most of my life, it is a comfort. A childish thing to imagine, but again, ex-babies all.
Part 3.
And finally another poem, also on the subject of attention.
David Whyte- Everything Is Waiting for You
After Derek Mahon
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.