From Levertov, Denise. The Stream & the Sapphire. New York: New Directions Books, 1997.
Lament and hope
Two weekends ago I attended the funeral of a baby boy who died two months too early and with one too many chromosomes to be compatible with life longer than it took to look his parents in the eyes and form a bond that will never break. To have this moment of meeting this side of heaven had been the parents’ prayer since they got the amnio results many weeks earlier.
The congregation sang the classic hymn, “Great Is Thy Faithfulness.” The grandfather, a jazz pianist, played his version of “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.” The father, dressed in a gray suit and white shirt, read the few lines of hope in the book of Lamentations’ long lament.
But this I call to mind, And therefore I have hope:The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; They are new every morning;Great is your faithfulness.“The Lord is my portion,” says my soul,“Therefore I will hope in him” Lamentations 3:21-24 ESV
When he finished, he sat back in the pew and the mother, his wife, dressed in navy blue, leaned her head on his shoulder as she did for most of the service. The minister spoke on the Lamentation’s passage, how even that passage of hope is bookmarked by the word ‘hope,’ as if there should be no doubt what the words in between were about. “Therefore I have/will hope.” This struck me as true, that a writer in lament would write the reason for hope but also include not one but two note-to-self reminders that the hope is for the lamenter and not only an abstract principle. A proof of sorts, certainly hard-earned with gasps and tears: If....then. “Therefore I have/will hope.”
The minister said, and I wrote this down, “All of life is a fight of faith.”
Then we stood and sang the hymn, "It Is Well With My Soul."
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Threads, words, beauty: Part 2: Weaving with light
Last week I went to a talk given by Helena Hernmarck, the master weaver whose exhibit I wrote about here on this blog. She showed slides of many of her pieces and told some behind-the-scenes stories of how they came to be. What came through was her pure delight in these creations of hers. Each made her laugh, each had a story, each had a handful of people (and she named them) who had helped make it possible.
She talked about her processes, including how she gets her wool from a specific kind of sheep at a specific family's farm, a particularly lustrous light-absorbing wool, which she then dyes herself. She has done it this way for years and years.
As a writer and not a weaver, I'm alert for pearls I can borrow from practitioners of other crafts and here's one of the pearls from Hernmarck: "What makes weaving with this wool magic is that it allows light to enter in." That's the kind of weaving she does. That's the kind of writing I want to do. Use words that allow light to enter in.
Yes, there were other pearls as well.
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Blank page; starting again
The DVD of the movie “Runaway Jury,” starring John Cusack, Dustin Hoffman, and Gene Hackman, contains an interview with Dustin Hoffman in its “Special Features” section. Hoffman speaks about the privilege of working with Hackman, particularly within the context of one scene in which their two characters have an intense angry encounter. After that scene was shot, he and Gene went out together for a drink, and while they talked they admitted to each other the same thing: whenever they finish a movie they are sure they will never again be able to accomplish another, nor even be asked; that what they've done was a fluke (my paraphrase). Listening to the interview, I was stunned but encouraged. Here were two movie giants who I imagined cruised from success to success without any personal fears or doubts. If the greats can feel this way, there’s hope for the rest of us.
I’m playing around with a new writing project. Not sure whether my idea will turn into anything but the blank pages are in front of me. In light of Hoffman and Hackman's admission, it's not so terrible to have self doubt when looking at a blank page or a pile of random thoughts that need shaping or to wonder if a finished piece is the last before I'll fizzle or am discovered as an imposter. It's just the way it is. In these creative enterprises there are no rules that you can follow, 1 to 10, and be assured of an outcome, and so it may always feel like beginning for the first time.
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The power of a bedside snail
I just finished reading a beautiful meditation on mollusks. Gastropods in particular. The snail to be exact. An ordinary garden snail sustained the spirit of Elizabeth Tova Bailey for one year among many of a mysterious illness, and she wrote about it in her lovely book, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating. Her friend had lifted the snail from the floor of the woods near her home, laid it under a wild violet uplifted from that same woods and planted in a pot, and gave it to her as a bedside gift.
By day, Bailey felt comaraderie with the nocturnal snail who also lay motionless while the sun shone and the rest of the world hurried about. By night, sleep was difficult and she felt comfort in listening to the sound of the snail chewing wilted leaves and mushrooms with its 80 rows of 2,640 teeth and in knowing he was roaming about while the rest of the world slept.
Henri Matisse, The Snail
Of course the book is not only a meditation on snails, but also on the mysterious bond between humans and pets, and on illness and survival.
"Everything about a snail is cryptic, and it was precisely this air of mystery that first captured my interest. My own life, I realized, was becoming just as cryptic. From the severe onset of my illness and through its innumerable relapses, my place in the world has been documented more by my absence than by my presence....Yet it wasn’t that I had truly vanished; I was simply homebound, like a snail pulled into its shell. But being homebound in the human world is a sort of vanishing."
The book’s 208 pages, which includes penciled drawings of snails, gives me new respect for the complex anatomy and physiology of, and surprising historical literary attention to, the common snail. In fact, it made me feel guilty for so intensely disliking the slimy slugs, gastropodal cousin to the snail, that invaded a garden I once had and on which I blamed the garden’s lack of growth. Every night I put out jar lids full of beer to entice them away from my plants, but these efforts of eviction did no good. Still, I remind myself, those slugs didn’t carry the snail's graceful shell with the Fibonacci spiral that speaks of elegance and mystery.
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The rejoicing wilderness
If you've been to the Glen Workshop sometime in the last ten years or so you probably know or have met Father David Denny. A former Carmelite monk. Kind, gentle, and wise. I first met him at the Glen but then got to know him when he was a "chaplain" for a few of the residencies in the graduate program I was in. He and Tessa Bielecki founded and now operate "The Desert Foundation," a nonprofit organization that focuses on exploring desert spirituality and building peace between the three Abrahamic traditions that grew out of the desert.
The verse on their newsletter that arrived last week, and also on their website, is from Isaiah 35:
"The desert and the dry land will be glad; the wilderness will rejoice and blossom."
I'm mentioning it simply to spread the word to any reader here that might have a similar interest to that of Denny or Bielecki. They are always looking for participants or partners, friends of any sort. Their website offers book reviews and reflections, back copies of their newsletter ("Caravans"), and a schedule of classes and retreats.
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Threads, words, beauty
The Grand Opening of ASI's new wing last weekend was concurrent with the opening of a new exhibit, the first exhibit in ASI's new gallery, although the exhibit overflowed the gallery to fill much of the Institute's wallspace in both the new and old wings.
"In Our Nature" was a showing of textile artist Helena Hernmarck's woven tapestries. Huge tapestries. Gorgeous tapestries. All handwoven on a loom.
Most are commissioned landscape designs. Her first commission came at the age 29 years from the Weyerhauser Corporation: "Rainforest," 9 feet by 14 feet. A team of textile artists have learned her techniques and also have pieces on display with the theme "Nordic Forest" as part of this exhibit.
These tapestries, all of them, not just the ones by the master Hernmarck were so beautiful that people were standing in front of them literally wide-eyed and with mouths gaping open. Then there was laughter, smiles. The beauty produced joy in room after room.
I want to go back and look at each more closely, not because I'm a weaver and will try to imitate the technique (although weaving is one of the many things I dream of trying someday), but because it does my heart and mind good to stand in the presence of beauty. And also, importantly, looking at this kind of art, pieces in which you can see every thread placement, which is similar to the kind of painting where you can see every brush stroke, teaches me something I can't articulate about choosing and laying down one word and then another and another to create something bigger than the sum of its parts.
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