Vulnerability Study
By Solmaz Sharif
your face turning from mine
to keep from cumming
8 strawberries in a wet blue bowl
baba holding his pants
up at the checkpoint
a newlywed securing her updo
with grenade pins
a wall cleared of nails
for the ghosts to walk through
I found this poem in the poet Luther Hughes’s newsletter, which is a monthly-ish curated batch of poems. (I often discover new poets to enjoy in his newsletter, and you will too.) In this poem, each stanza dares you to make eye contact with the image before moving on to the next. We’re so often told to hide our weaknesses, to be afraid of such fragility, and this seems like one of the many myths of American exceptionalism that the pandemic has people question. So I’ve decided this edition of Notions & Notes will explore the bravery and variety found in vulnerability.
I recently read Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway for the first time. I don’t know why it took me so long, but I’m glad that I read it now when I can relate to the existential questions at the heart of it. For some reason, this line stood out and I wrote it down:
“…it is the privilege of loneliness: in privacy one may do as one chooses. One might weep if no one saw.”
Over one weekend this winter, I watched all three of the Richard Linklater Before Trilogy. It was swoony escapism at its best and had me dreaming of wandering city streets without a plan, chance encounters, clock towers. I am still thinking about my weekend in the world of these films, about the narrative approach, and the humanity of its characters. However, this scene and this song, in particular, I keep coming back to. It’s a perfect study in the unspoken.
Joyas Valadorus By Brian Doyle
I first read this short essay in a writing class taught by E.B. Bartels and haven’t stopped thinking about it since. I would put the whole thing here (it’s brief), but I’m afraid you wouldn’t read it, and you really must read it (or even listen to it). For now, read the last paragraph and let your heart break a little.
“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman’s second glance, a child’s apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words I have something to tell you, a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother’s papery ancient hand in the thicket of your hair, the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”
I have the honor of having a sandpiper tattooed on my ankle by Sue Jeiven. She’s a feminist punk pioneer who has been open about living with terminal cancer (read about her life in the above link). The Met Museum recently shared this video in which Sue shares how the art at the Met gave her the support she needed during her cancer struggle. Her story is included with two other moving stories. Watch them all, or just start with hers at 3:15.
Some of her words hit a chord for me, particularly as I’m now accompanied by her art, my sandpiper hopping along with me wherever I go:
“Whoever carried that around felt exactly like I did. They were sick. They were scared. And it got them through.”
[Connecting to a piece of art] “ends up making a bigger picture of who you are. I’ve got a way to feel better if I need it because when I’m in the Met, I’m not alone.”
Who We Are Now
This collection of photographs and oral histories about surviving the last year strikes me for how intimate and individual the stories are while still belonging to a much greater whole, caused by our participation in the collective.
“People have found themselves close to life’s deepest questions, those forced by an apocalypse. Questions about how we live, how we suffer, and how we make meaning of our short time here on this earth.”
Perhaps we’re all still grasping how we’ve been changed by this year. In the interest of vulnerability, I’ll share that being forced to pause my life helped me see how much I’d let work define me. With the time I gained from not driving to forty different houses and schools each week, I walked, cooked, wrote, and generally spent a lot of time inside my own head. Somehow, I became less lonely during social distancing—I met my neighbors (mostly through my dog), had long walks with friends, learned to find my own company could be enough. Feeling personal peace has mixed with overwhelming rage and grief at what I see in the world: billionaires’ soaring profits soaring, police assaulting protestors, climate change accelerating (read all of those links too—rage is important). This quote from a person in Milwaukee particularly resonated: “The pandemic has forced me into the present. It’s the meditation I never wanted but have come to appreciate. That said, last week I kicked a hole in the bathroom door.”
Natural Architecture
While I’ve been thinking about vulnerability for this issue, I’ve realized what a paradox this particular human emotion is. Vulnerability takes an enormous amount of strength.
Sometimes the most fragile things are also the strongest.
I’ve been hoping to find an oriole nest on my morning walks and started thinking about birds’ nests as architecture. Sharon Beals’s photography is a good way to see why. Here are two of my favorites.
But we’re surrounded by structures built by animals, birds, and insects that are surprisingly strong and fragile at the same time. I found a copy of Animal Architecture by Ingo Arndt in a used bookstore a few years ago, but here you can have a sample of it for free online. It reminds me to keep my eyes open.
Silence Is So Accurate, Rothko Wrote
By Diane Suess
Accurate like an arrow without a target
and no target in mind.
Silence has its own roar or, not-roar,
just as Rothko wrote “I don’t express myself
in my paintings. I express my not-self.”
A poem that expresses the not-self.
Everything but the self.
The meadow’s veil of fog, but is veil self-referential?
Already, dawn, the not-birds alert to what silence has to offer.
The fog, one of Rothko’s shapes,
hanging there in the not-self, humming.
Mikel, before he died, loved Rothko most.
When he could still think, he put his mind
to those sorts of judgments.
If I pull the fog away like theater curtains, what then?
Sadness shapes the landscape.
The arrow of myself thwacks the nearest tree.
Fog steps closer like a perpetrator or a god.
Oh. I’m weeping.
Tears feed the silence like a mother drops
into her baby not-bird’s open beak
some sweet but dangerous morsel.
If you haven’t seen the seminal 1991 documentary Paris is Burning directed by Jennie Livingston, then just find a way to fix that. It documents the culture of underground ballrooms and a community of New York BIPOC queens, as they make space for love, artistic expression, and dreaming beyond society’s brutal limitations. It’s beautiful and tragic, especially in the context of the political apathy for the AIDS crisis and now widespread appropriation of their artform by white and wealthy performers.
To welcome vulnerability is to have compassion for society’s vulnerable people, to listen to their stories, and to fight like hell to protect their lives from this dehumanizing system and culture of consumption that we all live in.
Below is a clip of Dorian Corey, a house mother who died of AIDS a couple of years after the film was released
“…then you think you left a mark on the world if you just get through it. And a few people remember your name. Then you left a mark. You don’t have to bend the whole world. I think it’s better to just enjoy it.”