The Flower Can Always Be Changing Read online

  When I use the word conspire I think of the etymology. From the Latin, conspirare. Con—‘together with’ and spirare—‘breathe.’

  The flowers give us an excuse to know our feelings. We breathe with them and live quickly and slow and we remember with them. I take one out of the water and run it over my lips and cheeks and replace it, making room, as the others had already expanded to fill the space.

  Hayden Carruth, one of the Beat poets, wrote, “Transcendence is a pushing through the petals of memory and feeling toward the deeper centre of the flower.”

  And maybe poets are winged but maybe they are petalled. Maybe the poets have lips of crimson and fuchsia and plum and saffron. Maybe the poets are the ones breathing and pushing through and waiting. Maybe they’ve removed the mascara from their eyes and are bare and clean. Maybe a poet is anyone who sits with flowers, who watches them open, or not open.

  Maybe what I’m trying to get at is what Ginsberg said in his sunflower sutra, about all of us being beautiful sunflowers inside. Mad and bedraggled, sure.

  The colours drain and a few petals drop. I see one drop. But the other one falls when I’m making tea, my back to it.

  To be alone with flowers, breathing with them, conspiring toward transcendence. This is good.

  My intent, though, in writing about flowers is less about transcendence than it is to simply stay with them. And to come back to them, even when I’ve had to leave off.

  Self-Portrait

  ***

  She was wearing magnificent three-inch black heels and a sophisticated black party dress and her hair was glamorous. I wore a grey sweater. And was too hot.

  The Bird Could Escape

  ***

  Her pink hair creates triumphant vibrations as we walk into the art exhibit.

  We don’t use the word beauty or speak of unresolved empathies or broken or searching souls as we browse a thoughtfully abridged five-hundred years of Italian art.

  We linger over paintings that in a larger center, in a larger museum, might be passed over more quickly.

  I take photographs of the space because I want to remember the colours of the walls, and the way shadows are cast and seem to become part of the frames. I want to recall the reflections of the paintings on the shiny floors, and the way the video installation describing a restoration process reflects blue letters on the glass of an adjacent painting.

  We enter the exhibition space imagining we will go our separate ways. We do but not yet. We’ve both seen the show before but not with each other.

  My daughter is fifteen and one day she’ll look back at the photographs I took of her in the gallery and her hair will no longer be confectionary. I wish I could paint her as she is right now.

  I want to remember her looking at Overlooking a Canal, Venice, 1886 by Luigi da Rios. How striking she is in her pink cardigan looking at the women wearing scarves and one of them wearing a pink sweater.

  Our intention this particular day is to sit on a bench and she is to sketch while I take notes on the behavior of the art viewers. We abandon this plan though and go and have lunch in the museum restaurant where you can see people walk by cold and hunched over, their faces hidden behind colorful knit scarves. We eat fancy mac and cheese and talk about what she dreams of for her future and mostly the fear that she won’t accomplish these dreams. To convince her otherwise becomes as paramount to my existence as her knowing how much I love her.

  There is one woman who visits each painting in order. She doesn’t look at us. She may or may not disapprove of our crisscrossing the gallery and the way we’re ignoring most of the show and taking photographs from odd angles.

  School girls enter the gallery, look at one painting, laugh loudly and flail about, then leave abruptly. Otherwise, we have the space to ourselves.

  My daughter is drawn to Archangel Michael casting a writhing heap of rebel angels from heaven because he looks like a superhero soaked in the fullness of his powers.

  The gesture of the child’s hand in the Madonna and Child, holding the bird casually, but also as a caress, holds our attention. The bird could escape, it’s not tightly held. A symbol of the soul, among other things.

  When she dyes her hair she meticulously mixes the colour in a dish and then applies it with a brush, avoiding the cropped sides and back. It’s a vibrant, delicious pink, and reminds one of my friends of a coral reef.

  We look at paintings with bold blue, and Titian pink, swaths of gold drapery and rich reds, and she seems to belong among them. I feel currents of déjà vu that I dismiss as a memory from a past life or a shard of time or a gilded annunciation we’ve not yet imagined.

  When we leave the gallery it’s into the deep cold and weary, dirt-flecked snow at the long end of winter. The meanings derived from one’s fated destination or present orientation preoccupy me. At lunch, we had talked about those feelings of not belonging in a city or a place, being out of synch with where we live. We deliberate over the weather’s grip on our moods.

  Library Dream

  ***

  To get a library card one must usually produce identification, including proof of residence. But it is deemed acceptable that a person could produce a large painting to show who they are. The library becomes littered with easels and people working determinedly on their canvases.

  The Light is Always Changing

  ***

  I want to feel that art is an utterance made in good faith by one human being to another.

  —MARILYNNE ROBINSON

  At the end of winter and before the arrival of spring, the light returns, evoking tentative and fervent feelings similar to those experienced when picking up a loved one from the airport after a long and precarious time away.

  I spend a week photographing the same roses from Safeway, a multi-coloured dozen. I have them in a jar that once contained roasted peppers that we bought at Costco that would have been enough for six families.

  The light is low and reaching, direct and brief, and enters my kitchen at a precise angle. Finds the roses. Turns them into glowing wands of colour.

  At about the same time, I’m working on the proofs for my new book and at the end of the week I hear they’ve been sent to the printer. No going back.

  At an art show where a friend has one of her book art pieces on display, which is composed of feathers, antique lace eggs and poetry, I admit that I’m anticipating a negative critical reception based on prior experience. Without thinking about it, I tell her I might prefer negative reviews. Which is a lie, because what I would prefer is that someone interprets the book as an embroidery of light and feathers and maybe a nest.

  I lean into the light, mornings, with my camera, holding my breath as I release the shutter. The light is always changing. And the flowers hold the light differently each day. You can see the utterance becomes more difficult, less aglow, more mysterious as they age.

  How we observe the light changes based on our mood, our capacity for compassion and the depth of our personal and bodily exhaustion. Our experience of light depends on how well we’ve been flattered and cared for and the clarity with which we see ourselves. Light changes as we move through time, through light.

  If I’ve begun to feel the symptoms of compassion fatigue, I take it as a positive sign, since if there is fatigue, there has also been compassion.

  It is a week of light but the rest of life swirls around me, as well. I witness so many approaches to and even failures of compassion, and spend time on the internet reading about types of burnout.

  One website offers advice on casually debriefing, which includes offering a fair warning to limit one’s disclosure and to ask for permission.

  My reserves of compassion are disturbingly low but even I feel for the man who collapses onto a sunbeam in the library foyer after drinking large amounts of mouthwash and the ambulance is called for him. On the other side of th
e glass doors, it’s minus thirty-five celsius. I know he’s okay because he comes back to the library the next day, and my co-worker recalls she once chatted with him at the bus stop about art. Picasso, Matisse, Van Gogh.

  Even depleted I recognize that compassion is a muscle that must be exercised but also, at times, rested. At work, I’m uncharacteristically impatient when someone acts helpless in front of the photocopier and with those who right click when I say left and vice versa.

  Every single day the light in my kitchen is different. The variables, the factors, clouds.

  Light becomes more dear, becomes more intense.

  The sugar bowl changes every day, observes Cezanne, which is a line I keep coming back to.

  My observations of light act as a counterbalance to the rest of life, as a place of repose, but even here I limit my disclosure, refrain from describing the darkness of the room, the wedge of light, the illuminated crumbs I brushed from the table onto the floor before clicking the shutter. I refrain from telling you about the adjustments I make on the camera dictating how much light is let into the lens. All the possible manipulations.

  I talk this out on my blog, and show my photographs of this particular light illuminating these roses of many colours and a reader later mentions Lamentations where it says the Lord’s compassions never fail, they are new every morning.

  I wish to approach life, people, and not just art, in good faith.

  Being human, I will fail at compassion.

  There will be days when I hardly notice the light, the way it changes and once in a while performs daringly ordinary magic tricks on a kitchen table between seasons.

  Empathy

  ***

  It’s easy to practice kindness and compassion when you’re surrounded by kind people.

  It’s a good feeling. I check in with you to see if your burdens prevent you from your path and you recite the poem about what enlightenment is: mistake after mistake.

  What’s interesting is that we can still feel lousy and miserable in a day, still feel sorrow, and experience suffering, at the same time as we might feel that things are lovely. That’s how weird it is to live.

  Perhaps, as with enlightenment, we also move toward happiness, mistake after mistake. Or, feeling after feeling. It seems they all come in their turn, and one perhaps becomes more adept at focusing on, returning to, those little things. Like the bee, we move flower to flower.

  One friend apologizes for her mood, hoping that it causes no harm to my own. I appreciate the gesture because some days my mood is permeable and some days, it isn’t.

  Years ago, early in the morning, I was at the grocery store and ran into someone from the neighbourhood, part of a group of women who had coffee together. We talked about kids and the weekend, and other pleasantly mundane things. When I got home I opened my email and saw a message from her that had been written and sent before our grocery store meeting. It was awful and mean and accused me of being unsupportive. It was difficult to reconcile with the earlier meeting. When I told someone else the story much later they said, you could never be friends with someone like that again. She might go off.

  What were her burdens? Should I have asked for forgiveness? I didn’t.

  In designing a building, one poet asks, should the architect consider the possible fear of heights of those entering the structure?

  When I’m writing should I consider not just the safety of those people in my line of sight, but also their feeling of safety?

  One person makes another feel miserable over the course of a year and then proceeds to ignore them for another year. At this point the person doing the ignoring admits to feeling jealous of the shunned person and apologizes, asking for forgiveness, hinting that feelings have changed, been overcome. It’s easy to offer forgiveness but it’s not possible for the two of them to pick up where they left off, is it? When this is stated outright, a miniature yet telling tirade is precipitated mitigating the wronged party’s regrets.

  With other friends it’s difficult to stay in touch. With some it’s understandable, less so with others. I have one friend who I resent because of this; admittedly there is some jealousy involved on my part. She has it so easy, I can’t help thinking. Another person might be looking at me and thinking the same, and yet I don’t feel I have it all that easy.

  In grade four my best friend made fun of my new glasses. She tried to get others to join in and mock me. I couldn’t talk to her for a month and never trusted her again. Nevertheless, I found myself at a sleepover at her house with a few others not long after. As I was coming around a corner, I saw her mother slap her across the face, hard. Knowing this, I still had trouble forgiving her for the way she’d made fun of me.

  This is the way it is. All of these moments and gestures, sometimes getting things right and sometimes getting them wrong. All of us moving from flower to flower.

  The Sublime Minimalism of the Painter at her Acme is Difficult to Replicate in Words

  ***

  Daub Stroke Glissade

  I have rewritten the above at least twenty-seven times. The impasto a startling wave in a calm sea.

  Before Leaving on a Trip

  ***

  Scrub floors. Tidy house. Take bath. File nails. Wash, condition, air dry hair.

  Make sure the last diary entry contains no premonitions of death.

  Precedence

  ***

  Half of my morning walk is spent calculating how much money I’d need to win in the lottery to justify quitting my job so I could spend all my time taking walks and writing. When I was younger the amount would have been smaller.

  My reveries are interrupted by the dog who notices first a jack rabbit mid-change, then two lifelike ceramic cats nestled under a tree in someone’s front yard, one orange, one white. I always stare at those yards filled entirely with stones and not even a single shrub or plant. A little further on past the large, empty, quiet homes circling the dry pond we glimpse the quarrel of sparrows careening through the spaces between. What at first might be seen as a conference quickly escalates to a party as they flock from a short, broad tree, to several recklessly tall ones. The cloud of birds sways in the lanky trees.

  As I walk, I’m thinking how it’s important to keep faith with the work you make and have made. To keep faith with the thread that runs through your life, that force. To have faith in its benevolence, as the artist Kiki Smith has said. Because it’s brought you this far, hasn’t it?

  The thread of your life has brought you this far.

  If intermittently I wish to be more famous it’s only because I also aspire to be more eccentric.

  I had been reading about desire lines, those paths formed off the planned walking area, formed by a wish for a direct approach, to save time perhaps, or to see from another vantage point. In Finland, city planners are said to take note of footsteps in the snow before deciding on permanent paths in parks. At times I find myself walking on desire lines without realizing I’ve done so and some mornings I walk other paths entirely, through fields, through long grass or fresh snow, away from both stated paths and desire lines.

  There should be names for all those detours we take and for the path we forge in the tangled grass alone.

  We’d travelled to New York for spring break and a month later I still find myself walking through The Metropolitan Museum of Art in my dreams. We’d taken our time, as we’d been there five years previous and remembered the feeling of having to race to see everything and the way it had altered our breathing. This time we reminded ourselves to slow down and soak in what we wanted and needed to soak in. And we did.

  But after a week of looking steadily and wondrously at art, and at the end of our second big day at The Met, we were finished off. Spent.

  We bee-lined through rooms where once we had lingered, where our daughter had sat and sketched renditions of Vermeers and Rembrandt
s in her red notebook. We were trudging at this point, senses completely dulled, eyes glazed. We simply wanted out and purposely averted our eyes so as not to ruin what had been an uplifting experience. Our desire to see had been negated by exhaustion. Anyone looking at us might have wondered why we looked so uninterested.

  Back home, I come across what is called The Museum Problem, an exercise in computational geometry that calculates sightlines in an art gallery setting so that the fewest number of guards may be employed to watch the largest space. The problem doesn’t factor in fatigue, boredom, insecurities, fears, text messaging, application of lipstick, pre-occupation with news of the illness of a loved one, adoration of one painting over another, or the possibility of a tiny slip-up in attentiveness.

  I began imagining what paths would look like in a museum if say, the hardwood floors were covered in snow.

  Out walking the dog, I’m often working things out in my head and wish to be alone. So when I see someone a block away, I’ll often find another way, cross the road, or turn a corner, if it doesn’t appear exceedingly rude. In the story of Sir Galahad, the knights setting out on a heroic quest think it would be a disgrace to proceed together. Each must enter the thick forest alone, at a place where there is no beaten path. I think how this might be metaphorically true, but how in real life, we choose paths we think untrodden, though they have perhaps been covered, leaving an invisible tracery of footsteps, some heavy, some tentative, some bold. And so even when we set out alone, there’s company, there’s precedence, from which to take courage.

  I’m thinking of the guard in the museum, her sightlines, and wondering if our responsibility to others could resemble this a bit. That we have an obligation, even, to heroically guard, watch over each others’ paths, desire lines. A greater obligation, maybe, to imagine the invisible tracery of where a soul has travelled.