Brittanica.com defines existentialism as “any of various philosophies… that have in common an interpretation of human existence in the world that stresses its concreteness and its problematic character.”
I dipped one toe into philosophy in college and found the water too cold. I go with the secret to the Universe being the Buddhist answer: “Chop wood, carry water.” And, obviously, 42.
Here’s some concrete, and my small friends performing the problematic character of How Everything Changes and Multiple Things are True.
St. Augustine wrote, “If you find that you are by nature mutable, transcend yourself.”
If you find you don’t know why pigeons are glorious, I recommend Boston-area fabulous-writer-performance-artist Michelle Tea’s “Pigeon Manifesto.”
A dear friend of mine once said, “There are two types of people in the world: those who don’t think cars have faces, and the rest of us who just don’t understand them.” So there that is. I know where I belong.
The dramatic scene that instantly came to mind, and this is as weird to me as to you, is the execution of Anne Boleyn in the wonderful series Wolf Hall, based on the late Hilary Mantel’s historical fiction. I know, I said it was weird, but to me this is an emotional crowd scene. Watch an excerpted version of this scene. Then watch it with the sound off: do you see what I mean?
If you don’t, I then refer you to the wise artist and writer Miriam Schulman. “To be an artist is to identify connections in the world and help people see the world in a different way. That’s what art does….learn to embrace your inner weirdo…”
I love the way the scene focuses on just a few consistent faces, all of which express a different experience of the event. And around them, the suggestion of expressions we almost see or can’t see: one featured actor behind them even covers his face with his hands. Nice. In the center of it all, the remarkable faces of Sir Mark Rylance and Claire Foy (Girlfriend’s going to be a Dame. You know it and I know it.)
Also flowers. Just flowers, exactly what they are. Meaning nothing but themselves. I’m not the first writer to feel that succeeding at what Schulman says means pretty much failing at this other important experience of life. No one said “Both things are true” was going to be easy. Excuse me now, I have to go sit meditation. For real.
Kintsugi is a Japanese art that shows that broken things are whole, and whole things are broken. When repairing pottery, artists seal the cracks with lacquer laced with precious metal, creating lines of silver and gold in the piece. As the Wikipedia entry puts it, Kintsugi “treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.”
I find the endings of flowers so rich in form, shape, color, and beauty. They sometimes make the best “headshots” because they have the most expressive faces. As with Kintsugi, these roses from the Kelleher Rose Garden, in the Fens in Boston, MA, show off golden lines inside destruction.
If you want to sing some Leonard Cohen right now, please go ahead.
If these were characters in a play, they would be profoundly alive in their quiet acceptance that loss and beauty exist together. Uncle Vanya in flower form. And that it’s all quite ordinary when we notice it.
Taking pictures on walks has become a practice to decompress after work, and to take a breath and experience the world in moments. When I sit down after a walk with coffee and look through the photos, I see my love of theater bubbling up. The images I love best are either what I call “headshots” or “scenes”: close-up pictures of plants that seem to show a character, as actor’s headshots do, or small groups of plants that seem to have a drama going on.
Sometimes I look for what I think of as “flower constellations” when I take a picture. They’re the same practice, I suppose, adding a human element to something that isn’t human, the way people put figures and stories in the night sky. What’s really interesting to me is that it wasn’t originally intentional, so I felt as if I’d seen myself from outside when I realized what I was doing.
Creativity isn’t always planned. One of my writing teachers, of blessed memory, told a story once of being praised for a repetition of imagery in one of his short stories that he no idea he’d done until he got the compliment. I never forgot his combination of creative pleasure, acceptance of the praise, and laughing self-depracation in admitting he had never seen it himself. I learned a lot in the MFA program about Creativity that day!
I’m a little wary about the whole thing because I don’t want to see only what I impose on nature and not the things themselves. I’ve been writing about that lately: it’s where creative practices and Buddhist practices have to negotiate. And I hope illuminate each other, but I know also fail each other sometimes.
So this is the first image, very simple one of a Boston Public Garden tree on a day of turbulent clouds. They seem to reflect each other. That’s either all about the Oneness of Things, or it’s King Lear on the heath, shouting his rage and grief into the storm that reflects them. Or both.
It takes “cherry pickers” going up and down and a lot of hours. They do a beautiful job for the winter season. During sunset, it’s otherworldy. In the evening twilight and the blue hour, all glow. In the darkness, pretty fierce. Blocks of creativity.
Recently, I was by the window reading, and crying over, and loving, a short story by Elizabeth Graver called “The Mourning Door.” In past times, wealthier folks, who waked the dead at home, would have such a door in the hall or parlor for the coffin to exit. It was used only for that purpose, so the living and dead didn’t share doors. In Graver’s beautiful story, the mourning door is up high on the wall of the narrator’s new old house, so that the coffin could go right down into a waiting cart.
I was reading with coffee, just before dawn, as I like to do. I looked up eventually to see what sunrise was like that day, and saw a bird near my window, sound asleep on a long branch of the maple. You know already, yes? Yes. Mourning Dove. It was rounded down and completely still, just a couple of feathers ruffling in the light wind every little while, against a sort of pale, melony sky.
A story I happened to be reading. A bird common to my neighborhood. That’s all. Except there I was, saying “mourning door, mourning dove.” The Universe is all One, and funny little random things happen all the time. In an important sense, nothing happened. But I loved that the word echoed, and I put the experience in my mental pocket. Beautiful.
Also a little creepy. If I were a character in certain old novels, this would be darkly typical. All you English majors know the tree Rochester proposed to Jane Eyre under was struck by lightning that very night. Inner stuff manifesting in the outer world was a given, back in the Romantic period. And a college professor once called me a “pre-post-Romantic” for a reason.
Buddhist teachers have explained that when we look at a tree, most of us don’t see the tree. We see ourselves looking at the tree. It’s one of those things that, once you experience yourself doing it, you get it. I had refused to accept it before that, cradling wounded pride in my Nature Appreciation. Now I not only know it’s true, I’m not ashamed of it. It’s human, and no one is trying to shame anyone, just trying to open our sense of what is what.
Read up on Buddhist philosophy if you’re curious, but my point here is that the story and the bird exist without me, unconnected by my experience at that particular time, not in reality connected by that word. Obviously. Indeed the bird cares not what our language paints upon it, as one of those old Romantics might have declared, as some buff-colored dove warbled by. And yet. It’s also a fact that two things with “Mourning” in their names showed up exactly together, against a lot of odds.
A tree that falls in the forest when there’s no one to hear it does not actually make a sound, because sound exists inside ears. I was here to see these two things, so…what? And: I was here to see these two things. So what?
As the young Danish man, who may or may not have known his own mind, said, “That is the question.”
Winter highlights one of the Boston Public Garden’s fabulous trees, within the creativity of landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted. And I don’t take a bad picture when I concentrate. (Or when I absolutely don’t, but there’s no halfway.)
That is the side of a building, that I’m sure has a name, at Jamaica Pond in Boston. It’s pavilion-like and used for music, events, and sitting quietly. The art installation, made of moss, is one of a series: an earlier quotation was by, and celebrated the 200th birthday in 2022 of, Frederick Law Olmsted, famed landscape architect. His art was my refuge during the Covid lockdown, as some of us in Boston had the privilege (white, geographical?) of freedom and spirit-sustenance in his parks.
The line above is by Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of our New England Nature bigwigs, another person whose work has mattered in my life. The installation artist is being elusive online, but it may be Heidi Schork and Jerome Jones, who created the earlier one(s). Schork directs the Mayor’s Mural Crew in Boston, and I love my city just a little more because this group exists.
There’s a lot of art coming together in this spot, is what I am saying. The moss itself included.
I’m enjoying the book Olmsted Trees right now. Greenberg’s photos focus on the massive trunks of FLO’s park trees throughout the country. Honestly, if you haven’t seen it, your coffee table has not yet begun to live.
Below is another photo from this first week of the year, another work of Boston artistry in another work-of-art park. It was a foggy, chilly evening, and damp underfoot. Being able both to feel and see the air in that weather opened up a sense of airspace and spaciousness that surprised me in the best way.
Begin 2023
trying to see
Creativity!
Surrounded by trees, Jamaica Pond in Boston offers a lot of driftwood and branches for the creative builder. Strucrtures like this one have been popping up in area parks pretty regularly since the start of the lockdown in 2020, but this is the first one I've seen in the water. Scale is tough in this shot, but I could just about stand up straight in it were I inclined to wade in January, and I'm about 5'4".
I don't know the creators, but if anyone does, please comment!
Adding my own favorite of the photos that I took today, winterberry at the pond.
Happy New Year!
The Creative (Almost) Full-Timer 