It’s the juxtaposition between the imagined world I’m invited into and the inescapable physicality, the near-vulgar materiality of the thing—“the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect” as Josef Albers would say. The piece is Looking Up at House by Stanley Lewis: all canvas-gash and warping stretcher, rusted screw at the top right, globs of paint straining towards sculpture. The piece even refuses the comforts of a frame to tuck away its unseemly fraying edges. And through all this stir and rending, I sit at that bench, still among the green and the sun and the play of shadows. How is it that I can feel the air at my face? That I can hear the breeze thrumming at my ears?

I’m reminded of Michael L. Klein writing about Witold Lutosławski's string quartet, another piece riveting in its physicality: "What we need to do to get along in our daily lives is to remember to forget the 'radical discontinuity' between organic life and the symbolic order that imposes a structure on it. But sometimes you forget to forget. You confront a small compulsive gesture or tic, a slip of the tongue...which condenses all you had to forget so that you can swim in your everyday certainty."

There's a structure we construct and then superimpose on the world to help us make sense of it, to navigate its wildness and chaos. But there are moments where something disrupts our notions of order. The whirl and swirl of wild creation rattles our shudders and makes our houses creak. The "forgetting to forget" evident in Lewis’ brush and Lutosławski’s pen seems more like a refusal to forget. It's a refusal that doesn't just remind me of the wildness 'out there', but the wildness 'in here'—a beautiful wildness that is intrinsically human, an untamable essence. How could it be otherwise for creatures made in the image of God?

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The piece is Café Müller by the German experimental choreographer, Pina Bausch. She describes the work of locating the emotional core of the piece, saying, "the tiniest details matter!"

In this case, those details were the direction her eyes were looking…behind closed lids.

I am compelled by the hiddenness of things: those invisible forces that exhibit glacial-strength power in the organization of our individual and collective experience of the world—the webwork calculus that instructs the surge of a wave or the peel of a planet around its sun, the dark matter of an interior life, the strata of histories that arrange our relation to one another.

I’m beguiled by movement, particularly in the natural world, but the most acute beguilement is why movement happens in the first place. Here, again, Pina’s words are all resonance: “I am not interested in how people move, but in what moves them.” It’s the mechanics describing the dances of atoms and the organization of light to earth to wood to fire back to light. It’s the undisclosed power of a bruised ego or the tidal force of one who knows they are loved. It’s the meanings concealed behind words, behind an eye glancing down or glancing up. What leads to betrothal or adultery; what compels one to stoke an insurrection and another to volunteer at a soup kitchen. What are these unknowable higher-order patterns that elude every mathematic?

Marilynne Robinson, a particularly keen cartographer of the hidden spaces of human psychology, touches on something in Jack, the story of an achingly beautiful courtship set in 1950s America between Jack, the wayward son of a Presbyterian Iowan minister, and Della, a respected school teacher and the daughter of a Black Methodist bishop. A cemetery in the dark hours of the morning would not seem the most romantic of settings, but it becomes a gentle and safe garden for an interracial romance beset by pressures societal, familial, religious, and internal.

"Sometimes I feel like we've just been living on hints. Seeing the world through a keyhole. That's how it would seem to us when we looked back."

He nodded. "That's how it seems to me now."

She had leaned down, cupping her poor toes in her hands, cheek on her knee, facing him in the dark. There was an odd loveliness about it. Why did he think she seemed content? He believed her eyes were closed. Had my heart an unbroken string, your touch would set it trembling. He had almost penciled that into her book, then thought better of it. It wasn’t a very good line. Trembling doesn’t really have three syllables. And touch. What might she find suggested in that word. I will ruin this, he thought. I almost did, writing in those words, before I even imagined it would happen. I never would have imagined. If he touched her face now, ever so lightly, things would be different afterward. That's how the world is, touch anything, change everything. Caution is needed.

“Touch anything, change everything”: the world is a tangle of interaction and reaction. Perception, which is about what we can’t see as much as what we can, becomes a particularly challenging factor in the equation of human relationship. Do we know what we’re touching? Do we know what we’re changing? This too, is hidden. Caution is needed. And humility. Gentleness helps.

The etymology of “apocalypse”, by way of Old English, Old French, ecclesiastical Latin, and Greek, is ‘uncover’ or ‘reveal’. It’s notable that a word that benignly began as ‘uncover’ is now synonymous with the very end of the world. That moment when every hidden thing is revealed is the same moment as our undoing. How “apocalypse” acquired such a reputation of doom and foreboding is a question that speaks, I think, to an innate sense that our mortal frames aren’t built to bear the weight of so much knowing. Or an instinctual understanding that the apprehension of hidden things demands a holiness that we lack.

The sages though, kind as they are, do not leave us in a state of dour and anxious agitation. "It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out", which suggests that the playful dance between what is understood and what is obscured is good and right and as intended. But the proverb also highlights an important discrepancy of scale—between the Eternal and the earth-bound. It presses the point that my enthusiasm for discovery is to be set inside a recognition of my limits (the limits of foresight, first and foremost). That hidden thing calling me on to the chase is the very thing that puts me in my place. It is at once invitation and caution—a burning bush beckoning and a warning that I’ve ventured onto holy ground.

The Unknowable exerts its gravity, pulling the string taught between searching and finding, knocking and answering, concealing and revealing.

I become a thin strip of metal suspended between two magnetic poles, discerning a hidden music through infinitesimal variations of air pressure.

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Josef Albers, artist, poet, educator, and theorist, says that a thing is never seen as it really is, a statement powerfully demonstrated by Plate IV-4 from his seminal Interaction of Color. It’s an idea that is as wonderful as it is disconcerting: our own senses are either in on the joke or woefully inept at describing to us the world around. Albers goes on to describe the difference between ‘factual’ and ‘actual’, where factual color is a color in isolation, and actual color is a color in relationship to other colors. Perception is, entirely and always, dependent on context.

The space between the reality of a thing and the perception of a thing is the stuff of both comedy and tragedy, from “Who’s On First?” to Othello. Every 1st-grader playing a game of Telephone, gleefully watching the morphing of language as whispers pass from mouth to ear to mouth to ear, experiences the gap between what is said and what is heard as unmitigated hilarity. I too enjoy the delights of a mismatch between a thing and its perception, but in recent years, I’ve been experiencing the variable nature of perception as a point of anxiety. From the hyper-local level of the familial to the global-political, different perceptions of a situation can flower into an unmanageable crisis.

Context is the gravitational core around which perception orbits. But if perception is context-dependent, how to manage the inevitable contradictions of perception that arise out of every human being’s unique context? Where is there hope for diplomacy, understanding, or problem-solving when individual and societal contexts diverge, sometimes wildly?

Albers describes the origin of art as, “the discrepancy between physical fact and psychic effect.” In other words, the contradiction between what something is and what something seems is how art does what it does. It’s not for nothing that the word “art” is warmly swaddled inside the word “artifice”. The persuasiveness of illusion is invitation and hospitality. I’m called toward an undiscovered country, a new and larger context where I might see with different eyes. Literary critic Cleanth Brooks in The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry extends the idea:

"It is not enough for the poet to analyze his experience as the scientist does, breaking it up into parts, distinguishing part from part, classifying the various parts. His task is finally to unify experience… If the poet, then, must perforce dramatize the oneness of the experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity, then his use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary. He is not simply trying to spice up, with a superficially exciting or mystifying rhetoric the old stale stockpot... He is rather giving us an insight which preserves the unity of experience and which, at its higher and more serious levels, triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern." (emphasis mine)

My most meaningful experiences of art are always those moments where a penny drops and I'm given the gift of an experience unified, of a container in which to put all the things that don't fit together or with anything else. I am reminded of architect Robert Venturi talking about the accommodation of contradictions, and artistic form as the engagement of seeming incongruities. The implication is that moments of cognitive friction are the very place where perspective, meaning, and understanding are nested.

If this is true, then contradictions are not just less threatening, they begin to emerge as a gift, even a thing to be sought out. A contradiction is like a lighthouse that signals danger, but also safe harbor. To be sure, there are unpredictable waters and menacing rocks that require careful navigation, but dry land and home are within reach.

Grace too, is about the accommodation of contradiction. Move slowly, step softly, be patient, don’t disrupt the new pattern that is emerging. I think this is why we are encouraged to “be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry”. Brooks’ new pattern makes room for both the factual and the actual, and the colors grow deeper. Is it naive to hope that we might also see one another more clearly? That we might, impossibly, unbelievably, have a shot at recognizing the same hue, the same shade, the same tint of the same purple?

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This feels right. Almost always, when I finish writing anything, I have no idea how I arrived where I have. The record is gone. I stand holding something that seems to have emerged from air. Drawing on water.

The poetry of this metaphor holds a quiet and visceral beauty. But I also find the metaphor unsettling. It highlights the fluidity of memory, which I’m already anxious about. The inability to hold on to yesterday feels more hazardous than poetic.

Which brings me to water in a different form. Underland by Robert MacFarlane is a book about all of the worlds under the surface (literally): labyrinthine limestone caverns, Parisian catacombs spanning nearly the entire area of the city above, deep-sunk nuclear waste storage facilities, astronomy labs miles below the surface, Norwegian sea caves. There is also a chapter about the glacier at Kulusuk, Greenland:

"Ice has a memory. It remembers in detail and it remembers for a million years or more.

Ice remembers forest fires and rising seas. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age, 110,000 years ago. It remembers how many days of sunshine fell upon it in a summer 50,000 years ago. It remembers the temperature in the clouds at a moment of snowfall early in the Holocene. It remembers the explosions of Tambora in 1815, Laki in 1783, Mount St. Helens in 1482 and Kuwae in 1453. It remembers the smelting boom of the Romans, and it remembers the lethal quantities of lead that were present in petrol in the decades after the Second World War. It remembers and it tells – tells us that we live on a fickle planet, capable of swift shifts and rapid reversals.

[...] Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. Unlike our hard disks and terrabyte blocks, which are quickly updated or become outdated, ice has been consistent in its technology over millions of years. Once you know how to read its archive, it is legible almost as far back—as far down—as the ice goes..."

When you draw on ice, the drawing stays…until it doesn’t. MacFarlane's glacier, like all glaciers, is melting, and so is all of the information it contains. MacFarlane talks also about the weight of the glacier itself, a weight so great—some are miles thick—that the bottom layers, impossibly compressed, begin to fold and slide, distorting the embedded record and rendering it unreadable.

Storage systems (whether part of the natural world or made by human beings) are useful and helpful only insofar as they are consultable. In a 1945 Atlantic Monthly article titled “As We May Think”, engineer and public intellectual Vanaveer Bush describes the need to establish “useful trails through the enormous mass of the common record," which suggests that our ability to understand one another—and even ourselves—is being crushed by the sheer volume of talking, the glacier-scale glut of information.

A dispiriting notion: and I’m often accused of being an optimist.

Perhaps the poetry and potency of Cage’s metaphor is its realism about the limits of our access to the past. Reckoning with the past—and its colossal power in the organization of our individual and collective experience of the world—is critical. But it is also true that our entry point into the world is always the present moment.

Kierkegaard says, "Music has time as its element, but it gains no permanent place in it; its significance lies in its constant vanishing in time." The present recedes as soon as it emerges. Bloom and fade are one and the same. The articulation of shape quietly folded into the silence of shape. Drawing on water. I am nourished with water and baptized with water.

What is forgiveness if not the willingness to create new memory?

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I'm on my third or fourth read of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. John Ames is remembering when he was a boy, helping his father pull down the ruins of a church after it had been struck by lightning, which collapsed the steeple and set the building on fire. The scene was an ashy disordered mess, with people clambering over the ruins to find anything worth salvaging. The cleanup was made more complicated by the fact that it had started raining, which turned all of the ash to a soup, which then made the work all the more filthy. Everyone working was covered in ash, to the point where one could barely recognize who was who.

John Ames' father brought him a biscuit that had soot on it from his hands:

"Never mind," he said, "there's nothing cleaner than ash." But it affected the taste of that biscuit, which I thought might resemble the bread of affliction, which was often mentioned in those days, though it's rather forgotten now.

It's a fascinating notion, the idea that ash—for all its intimate relation to dust and filth and destruction and loss—is clean. A substance free of dirt or stain. I think about the combination of alkaline and abrasion that has made ash a cleaning agent for millennia. I think about parishioners around the world, once a year, filing towards a priest who will anoint their foreheads with a mixture of oil and ash as a sign of penitence and mortality. I think about the contemplation of one’s own frailty and finitude as is its own kind of cleansing, or maybe preparation for cleansing. (Next time, I should wait longer before washing the ashes off.)

The phoenix rising from ashes becomes a richer image. The practice of cremation becomes both more unsettling and more beautiful.

All that said, Ames' biscuit tasted different. I can't imagine that it wouldn't have a bitterness to it. Ash is still, after all, the remains of fire, the herald of loss, destruction, and wreckage. The bread of affliction is at once nourishment and lament. Ash both stains and removes stain. This seems an important caution against the temptation to sentimentalize pain, a guard against profane speculations about the utility of suffering.

There's nothing cleaner than ash. Uncomfortably applied to my forehead in the shape of a cross on a Wednesday night. Marked ‘clean’ while eating a sooty biscuit.

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Morton Feldman on Philip Guston (and then later on Rothko and Mondrian):

Guston tells us he does not finish a painting but “abandons it.” At what point does he abandon it? Is it perhaps at the moment when it might become a “painting”? After all, it’s not a “painting” that the artist really wanted. There is a strange propaganda that because someone composes or paints, what he necessarily wants is music or a picture. Completion is not in tying things up, not in “giving one’s feelings,” or “telling a truth.” Completion is simply the perennial death of the artist. Isn’t any masterpiece a death scene? Isn’t that why we want to remember it, because the artist is looking back on something when it’s too late, when it’s all over, when we see it finally, as something we have lost?

I confess a certain suspicion (or maybe it’s jealously?) of people who claim a music fully formed in their minds, where the process of composition (or painting, or writing) is simply the task of transcribing what’s already been understood. My own mind is a hum of sounds, but they’re sounds heard distantly. It’s not enough to say that the contours of a sound are blurry—the contours aren’t there at all. It’s all wisps of melody or harmony, there and then gone and then there again. Joan Didion says, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking." This seems right.

The process of writing for me is the process of walking towards a sound, crossing streets and passing parks and bookstores. I scribble notes. Sometimes I take a wrong turn because the sound ricochets off buildings and rowhouses and seems like it’s on my right when really it’s on my left. I scratch things out. It’s a slow process. Eventually though (and always surprisingly), I’m there. In front of the music. Final barline drawn. I hear the music in all its blessed articulation.

Guston’s “abandonment” of a painting though presses against this metaphor, or at least complicates it. The decision to walk away is just as important as the decision to walk towards, a notion that suggests that the unfiltered apprehension of a thing is not without risk. What is obscured or lost if one lingers for too long? It’s possible to cross a threshold: where the reach to see, to hear, to grasp a reality becomes a reach to possess, and in that possession, a loss of the very thing we reach for. Is this why we’re not to look at the face of God?

I am impossibly near-sighted, but sometimes I take off my glasses for an hour or two and the whole world is a Monet painting.

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