"exactly to be there, that moment"

on making, listening, grieving, healing & the ritual of creating

As Ted Berrigan lay on his deathbed, Alice Notley said something to the effect of “May the 14 pieces of Osiris be joined.” She describes this in the poem “Point of Fidelity” in her book Mysteries of Small Houses:

when I perform your last rites
sprinkling you with drops of gin & tonic
and saying, “May the 14 pieces
of Osiris be joined together”
We laugh though you’ll die the next day
Eleven years later I wonder
at using such a fiction, a fetish of Egyptian
exactly to be there, that moment.

And I’ve been thinking about how we use such fictions, such fetishes “exactly to be there, that moment.” How we use art.

Yesterday, Elee Kraljii Gardiner sent me a link to a recording of a boy from Azerbaijan singing a preternaturally haunting song. I found it very moving and so was inspired to respond to it. “Exactly to be there, that moment.” I downloaded the recording into software and “translated” the digital file into midi and orchestrated it. Then I improvised clarinet over top to make the piece below. It feels of the moment. That moment. Of this moment. One where I feel bewildered—the world seems mad—and could use inhabiting a song, could use being in dialogue with Elee and with Kenan Bayramli and, for that matter, Alice Notley. I could use, though without having to die, the fourteen pieces of my body to be joined, to be merged with the land. I could use the fourteen pieces of this broken world to be joined, healed.

Below is a poem that I wrote for David W. McFadden when his daughter died. He told me that he buried her on a hill with a beautiful view, or at least I think so. Again, I wanted “exactly to be there, that moment,” that is, with my friend in his complicated grief and his complicated love. And to be there in this mysterious yet fundamental fact of life: our death and the death of loved ones. For me, I am called to listen, but also to speak, to make something, to perform this ritual of making, of centring myself to listen and to be present by creating work. It joins. It heals. Even if we can see the cracks, the joins, the wounds.

I share these pieces here with you that you might feel called to your own ritual, your own moment of exactly to be there.

PLANTING CONSENT 


I carried my tv down the stairs
buried it on a hill
with a beautiful view

by spring a small antenna
sprouted in that place

somewhere under the earth
wispy clouds and the wingbeats of birds

The Porcupinity of the Stars (Coach House, 2010.)