The last week of the Big Sur Residency, the beginning of the end. We are in the second day of the first winter storm. My companions today are rain, clouds, wind, the mountains, a sycamore tree, near naked of foliage...and David Bowie. "Ground Control to Major Tom...eat your protein pills and put your helmet on, commencing countdown, engines on..." I am sitting in the warm studio, eating graham crackers, drinking coffee and trying not to acknowledge a creeping sadness that this time has so quickly passed. It is almost unbearable, the comfort of solitude, the illusion of safety, the freedom to bare your secrets, open all senses and make art out of it.
Gifts just keep coming to me here. Not ten minutes ago, I glanced up from my work to see a rainbow, moored to the canyon floor, its arc practically at eye level. It was gone before I could capture the image, replaced by a downpour, leaving me wondering if I'm not going Kerouac on myself, hallucinating it.
There are many literary references in stories about Big Sur to people hearing music that has no discernible source. I admit I've heard the music. I think it is the drumming bass of the ocean waves hitting shore, combined with the whistle of the wind, birds and bees, crickets and crows, but I'm not sure. I am reading a novel called The Memory Keeper's Daughter. There is a conversation that takes place between a father who is a photographer and his teenage son. Against his father's wishes, the boy wants to become a musician. The father, also a doctor, shows his son a photograph he took of a human heart, which at first glance, looks like the silhouette of a tree. Musing on the mystery of perception, he says, "Sometimes I think the entire world is contained within each living person." They are standing in a darkroom and as he sends a flash of concentrated light through the enlarger, slips paper into developer and finally into the fixer, he tells his son: "Photography is all about secrets, the secrets we all have and will never tell."
The son responds: "That's not what music is like...Music is like you touch the pulse of the world. Music is always happening and sometimes you get to touch it for a while, and when you do, you know that everything's connected to everything else."
Another gift I recently received came by email from Erin Gafill. It was this poem, written by Marie Ponsot, Tom's favorite aunt-poet. Now I am giving this present to all of you.
A Rune, Interminable
Low above the moss
a sprig of scarlet berries
Soon eatened or blackened
Tells time.
Go to a wedding
as to a funeral:
bury the loss.
Go to a funeral
as to a wedding:
marry the loss.
Go to a coming
as to a going:
unhurrying.
Time is winter-green
Seeds keep time.
Time so kept carries us
across, to where
no time is lost.
-Marie Ponsot
I'm cranking up the volume now. "....This is Major Tom to Ground Control. I'm stepping through the door and I'm floating in a most peculiar way. The stars look very different today."
Are you all still with me?
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1 comment:
Great writing babe. you r so gifted. That song gives me memories of our honeymoon so long ago, yet it in some ways feels like yesrerday..love
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