“I believe that books will never disappear. It is impossible that that will happen. Among the many inventions of man, the book without a doubt is the most astounding: all the others are extensions of our bodies. The telephone, for example, is the extension of our voice; the telescope and the microscope are extensions of our sight; the sword and the plow are extensions of our arms. Only the book is an extension of our imagination and memory.”
- Jorge Luis Borges
The sky has been warning it will rain again and this evening the fog is like a warning or a punctuation mark that the space heater will be on tonight. Instead of attending a fabulous potluck with Italian Wedding soup in hand, I was given the gift of several hours of uninterrupted brain space to finish my residency journal for school. Consisting of a 10 page response to lectures or workshops that challenged or encouraged me, I am marinating in my notes.
This evening, I am reconsidering the value of cross-fertilization in the form of friendships bridging artistic mediums. Frank O’Hara spent so much time at the MOMA that he ended up becoming an assistant curator. He befriended painters of the abstract expressionist spirit and even wrote a poem entitled “Why I am not a painter.” What’s brilliant about the poem is that as he describes a befuddlement with how his friend Mike Goldberg composes the painting “Sardines”, he does the same thing poetically that Goldberg does visually. He described his poems as “all-over” poems, just as Pollock described his style as “all-over” paintings. The conversations and collision of ideas permeates his work.
And this leads me to think of Alan. Alan, struggling with all the bravado he can muster to make his dent in the New York opera community, taking the risk to realize his dream. I have often thought how his courage will seep over into my life with its sometimes ambitious goals that seem so unbelievable partly because no one else is pursuing this particular path in quite the same way.
Alan and I spoke over a week ago about the musical “Sweeney Todd.” The gory story features music that enchants and repulses as it draws you in. This night we were talking about the haunting ballad “Johanna”. I commented that I love this song- it always gets drawn out in my mind leaving me to wish that they would sing more of it. Alan begins talking about what’s going on in the musical score to tell the story musically. We agree that we are left wanting more of Johanna just as Sweeney, the judge, and Anthony can never have enough of her.
I remember a conversation with Olga at “Madame Butterfly” late last year where we wondered aloud how spirituality can shape art, how we can allow both to speak to each other as if in dialogue and what the output resembles. We spoke of the sacrifices required to engage our mediums more fully and how life’s paths can take us in very different directions than we intended.
My opera friends and our conversations of craft energize my art. Like Pollock and O’Hara, let the permeation continue unabated.
There was a spell of two weeks where I got an insider’s perspective of me in 40 years. An example might include me walking to a cabinet across the room and by the time I had reached it, had absolutely forgotten the important thing I needed to fetch. Mix in a bout of indecision and you get no action.
I’m a fan of people. And doubly a fan of poets. Imagine a large convergence of both in one fabulous city on the East Coast. No brainer, right? But for some reason it took me weeks to think through this one like a mensa candidate trying to figure out a complex brain puzzle. Then last week it came at me like a rush of wind or a physical imperative- I need to be in New York that weekend. Every muscle, joint and blood vessel sang in unison. And so thankfully work helped make the decision for me. During the daytime, I will be walking a tradeshow floor gathering ideas and the nighttime will be filled with new faces and words. Such a delightful blend really. I leave for New York at 6:30 in the morning on a Thursday to be able to attend one of my previous mentor’s readings in the great city that evening. Then on to couch surfing.
It’s good to know at 31 that things don’t need to fit perfectly in neat boxes but that sometimes you can veer into the wild wooly woods off the interstate and walk a spell. It’s even better when friends accompany. I can’t wait to sleep the sleepless nights of too few hours in New York. But tonight should be easy, thanks to a glass of Petite Syrah. Cheers.
I need to get going and begin reading tonight. After leaving the residency, I feel as though I have taken on the form of a roadrunner. Since Sunday I have read selected poems by Lorca, Jimenez and Araceli Girmay. Poetry of light meets that of desire.Tonight I sniffed out three translations of two Borges poems to tackle and see how the translators negotiate the prose poetics with meanings and words. My mentor this semester is none other than Ilya Kaminsky. He is the right person for me to be shaped after this semester. One reason resides in his poetry that is so full of a humanity that sees all and yet finds something beautiful even in the hardest circumstance. His poems touch me profoundly as does his zest for life and the way he gets me to re-evaluate a situation. I can’t tell him how “Author’s Prayer” makes me cry every time I read it. His humility wraps around this amazing thirst for poetry and reading. He is a great teacher already and I am ready to learn and dive down.
The roadrunner in me recognizes these roads as familiar and yet there is something inside of me different. I am seeing them differently and craning my head deeper into life’s poetry. My thesis awaits and the phone may awfully quiet the next few months. I want to write an incredible paper, but this takes time, brain space, solitude. What a hell of a ride is in store. Really. Can anyone be this well off?
One scene, just one. My office is surrounded by windows. Light sneaks past the slats of the blinds that seek to cut its potency. Big leafy treetops are my view from my desk. I make sales pitches, PR calls and answer questions, all while looking out at the trees. Every year for the stretch of only a few days, they come. Birds of an iridescent red hue, small brown ones with blue feathers on the side, robins with their red breasts and brown circled eyes. They crowd the trees and suck down the berries weighing down the boughs. Often I can see them watching me as much as I watch them. They are intrigued and hop down to a lower branch and a closer view. I am enraptured and think this is as close to Eden as I may come. Their joy and playfulness combined with the abundance of berries transcribes itself into my joy, my nourishment. Can it get better than this?
Walking along patches of snow, my boots clomp into its forgiving mass. The silence is immense and I welcome its cheerful observance of my virgin boots stamping California steps onto New England land. Land- once splendid in its coat of many colors, now shorn to reveal just two. Just enough. White amidst charcoal accents. Charcoal muddying white. And me in my bright burnt orange coat fanning the campus paths like a slow-moving firefly make an occasional third.
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