I send you this shard of life
It has been an abundant week, far and wide. Daniela sent her voice, her baby's cries, and the view of mountains out of her window near Geneva. Sabine chatted with me first from an outdoor tub and then from a hammock in a flourishing garden in Hengelo. Raymund sent a video of his walk through the alps, with a sudden view of an almost naked Matterhorn. Erin sent a video of a beaver-stalking Sylvia. Nick sent me sights and sounds from the High Line, from Westsider books, from the Natural History Museum, from the buffet car of an Amtrak train. And Mum and Dad brought Norma through my front door, a blessing for my new home. This hamlet in the north east seems anything but remote.
In one of my responses, I stood by the back door looking at newly potted plants. A collection of herbs learning to share space. A proud plum-coloured stem supporting buds about to blossom. A happy geranium, with a tiny splash of cocktail pink above variegated leaves. And a beautiful nasturtium from my aunt's garden. As I tried to describe the colour, I faltered. I knew the word was stored in my brain somewhere, but it felt big, like it was too heavy to uproot. I said aloud that I would send a picture instead, so I didn't have to wrest the word from wherever it lay.
Later, a planetarium blue arrived on my phone. And there it was: cadmium. I send you this cadmium red.
I send you this cadmium red is a project that I first experienced on CD. I wish I could remember who recommended it to me. It was in those final days of optical drives, when my own life had entered a state of breakdown that lasted for some years. I took solace in the letter exchange between the Johns - John Berger, John Christie - and I also took sides. Christie seemed so plainly constrained by the visual; Berger was a living poem. But I found frustration in the poetic, too, craving plain talk from time to time. Almost like my threshold for beauty had diminished. Almost like I was wanting for a direct, visceral engagement. See my colours, feel my shapes. I longed for a back and forth and was also repelled by its predictability. By the style that was so evident and written for each of those characters. I wanted something unpredictable.
Listening again tonight, in one uninterrupted motion, that past experience cascaded over me, free-falling and surprisingly refreshing - perhaps because I could see it clearly. Perhaps because I knew it would wash over me. Water running, rather than pooling.
Berger still has the ability to draw tears. Something about the slight tremulousness in his voice, the subtle lisp. But it's the sincerity, above all. Sincerity without affectation. Berger's is the dialect of a truth longed for and lightly held. Christie was much less familiar - in fact, I had no recollection at all of his voice, and so I'm not at all sure that the voice I heard tonight and the voice I heard in 2013 were one of the same. No matter - his direct courting of colour, his faith in the container of a book, echoes of something systematic and curious - those things I knew.
I found I loved them in a wholly new way. If it were that I had replaced a dance with the poetic for the solid ground of the phenomena we can see, touch, attempt to recreate - that would be no surprise in these new surroundings. But the new love stemmed from a deep understanding, that of the great multiplicity that festoons our lives.
If we're lucky, we know ourselves more than once. We know ourselves through the eyes of those that love us, and are more forgiving of us than we are of ourselves. We know ourselves through affiliations that morph and change, that we must bend to accommodate or deviate. We know ourselves through time, through stories and acts that once seemed opaque and take on a sudden clarity.
This evening, I know myself as both Berger and Christie and as neither - because impulses are not characters, after all. I know myself as needing the ground of a colour whose name I can speak. I know myself as one with the end of day shadows that arrive slowly and not suddenly. Mostly, I know that the desire to pit one thing against another, declare one thing more suitable than the other, or to take sides - that has all but vanished. And in that everything-embrace, I know myself as both a sender and a receiver of shards of life, those that clearly pierce any idea that we are separate from one another.