Of Messages and Messengers
What if the message were Goethe’s, “Do not hurry; do not rest.” Or maybe the message is from Prince:
“Dearly beloved
We are gathered here today
To get through this thing called life?”
Maybe the message is a bird that arrives. Maybe an angel. In the photograph accompanying this post, you’ll see the waxwing that stopped for a drink in my backyard one evening this week. I was sitting in a chair after taking photos of a whisky glass, my camera on my lap, with my 100mm lens, which is not my default and even that seemed like the luckiest bit of luck. So I didn’t have to move other than to raise the camera and release the shutter, holding my breath.
We are all hoping for good news, good messages, small ones, or at least I am, but in a different way than I used to. I often go back to an essay in Hélène Cixous’s book, Stigmata, about Joyce, Lispector...etc…Cixous say: “Clarice reminds us, after Kafka, that we cannot hope to receive the message; the person who will receive the message must not expect it; if it is waited for, it does not arrive. One cannot have a voluntarist attitude. The message arrives on condition that one does not wait for it, it arrives unhoped for, the goal attained unexpectedly.”
The poem by C.D. Wright about Jean Valentine, beginning with a quotation by Valentine:
“ “Happiness. Beauty. Art.
—That bird seems to like you.
—Yes, that bird knows
there’s not much time.”
She is a dream barker.
She is a messenger.
She flies with one wing.”
From her book Break the Glass, Valentine: “If a person visits someone in a dream, in some cultures the dreamer thanks them.” Tomas Tranströmer: “My name comes to me like an angel.”
Valentine: “You know how in dreams you are everyone: / awake too you are everyone.”
Also Jean Valentine:
I came to you
Lord, because of
the fucking reticence
of this world
no, not the world, not reticence, oh
Lord Come
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground
Lord Come
We were sad on the ground.
We are sad on the ground, but still, our messages need to get out, we writers, we artists, we citizens. I don’t know that we will change this world, but our messages matter, they exist and are relevant all the way into someone’s near future. (“Someone told me / of course my poems / won’t change the world. // I said yes of course / my poems / won’t change the world.” — Patrizia Cavalli
Your art isn’t transmissible over the phone. Poetry isn’t a text message. “Don’t use the phone,” says Jack Kerouac, “People are never ready to answer. Use poetry.”
I’m currently reading Lesley Wheeler’s Poetry’s Possible Worlds, and loving it. (Will write a longer post on it next week if all goes my way). In it she says, “A poem makes a lousy telephone.” Instead, she says, “by reading a poem, you’re entering a transportation device. You interact with the text to get somewhere, but it has a mind of its own and will match its will to yours. Rather than efficiency, you choose a complex, unpredictable experience.”
The message is, Keep sending your messages. Your words are wings; your wings are words. We are living in complicated times. We are living in times where the language and rhetoric of disinformation, propaganda, anti-intellectualism, racism etc are overwhelming. In the recent past, I have thought to myself, what is needed is more nuance. And yes? but also, I was re-reading Rachel Blau Duplessis’s Blue Studio in which she asks, “Can one be rigorous and empathetic? Antisimplistic, but with clean lines? Can one illustrate opacity and confirm clarity at one and the same time? You’d better believe it.” Can we still appeal to the larger crowd out there with a message of community? With a message of doing right? I really don’t know.
The vessel of poetry seems to be the message in the bottle for our times because it’s efficient, because it’s complex, and because it accommodates the new and unpredictable.
I’ll admit that I’m a little tired of being in a state of spiritual distress. In fact, my body has said absolutely no to that for now. Also, I want to enjoy my summer. I want to let the messages arrive. But I don’t want to forget to be attentive to my obligations. Like, what are our obligations to society? What can I continue to do in my three meter sphere of influence? What questions can I ask so that others might also be prompted to ask questions? How exactly do I want to get through this thing called life?
What expectations should we be setting aside so that the messages arrive? How can we set aside our fucking reticence and send messages?
And, to quote HC, the message is…?
A few notes:
— If you had a book come out during the pandemic, you know sales were kind of also sad on the ground….I’d love it if you could help me talk up Everything Affects Everyone. It’s not exactly a beach read, but still, a good summer read? If you could leave a review on Amazon, GoodReads etc, it would mean the world to me!
— My Beauty School on Patreon has gone mainly private. I’m so thrilled by the support of it so far. Consider becoming a patron for a Monday morning prompt in your inbox to get your week started in a thoughtful way that will offer you pockets of beauty to help re-set your soul.
— Lastly: By request I’ve added the header image from my Beauty School to Society 6. Some of the images are available as notecards, notebooks, or the usual fare — prints, framed prints, canvas prints etc.
