Lately #8: What Once Was
Hi, I'd like to share a few things I've been thinking about this week, all about what once was, and the shaky act of remembering.
A few years ago, in 2019, I was lucky enough to sit in a theatre at the Anthology Film Archives and watch a memorial showing of a number of Jonas Mekas’s films. Since then, I've thought regularly about Paradise Not Yet Lost (Oona's Third Year), a beautiful diaristic evocation of life in NYC in the 70s as a father and member of a thriving creative community. That film isn't part of the current Mekas retrospective that's currently up at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, but there are eleven others (of the nearly 100 that Mekas made over the course of his life) on a constant cycle. The exhibit is one room only in which multiple floor to ceiling screens play different segments of the same film simultaneously. It's a lot to take in--but eventually my eyes came to rest on one particular scene, and then eventually on another screen, and another, and my ears could tease out the corresponding snippets of Mekas's narrating voice. During the showing of Walden, one of the most powerful of the films on display, a walk in the park plays next to John and Yoko during their bed-in, a family gathering next to Allen Ginsberg discussing the opening of an artistic combine. The effect is deeply intimate, like being in the chambers of Mekas's memory, watching flashes of an extraordinary life. I can't quite stress enough: if you're in New York and are able to get there, it's worth it to see this show. Here's a video about Mekas and his groundbreaking work.
I like when poets write essays, particularly about looking closely at things or visiting far off places. This is a narrow genre, I know-- but the Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie masters it. Two of the standout essays in her book Sightlines are about her experiences with places that once were, but are no longer. In "The Woman in the Field" she writes about a summer spent working on the archaeological excavation of a henge, or Neolithic circular enclosure. Digging with her trowel serves as a mechanism for moving through its history, as well as her own experience as a young woman there, where it was "easy to feel unhooked from time, to be uncertain which era one was alive in." In another essay, "Three Ways of Looking at St Kilda," she writes about the society that flourished on the small island for thousands of years, where the people "grew a few crops and kept a strange kind of wild sheep, and. . . ate seabirds, and seabirds' eggs." This isolated community, west of the Hebrides, was mostly cut off from the rest of the world and lived at its own pace and in its own ways into the 1930s. Industrialization was its death knell though, with its steamships and Victorian tourists seeking "remoteness." Jamie's essay is subtly haunting, charting both the island's history and her own lonely visit to it.
Alex Dimitrov's poems always convey a certain nostalgia, whether he's writing about the present moment or the past or both at once. Here's a favorite:
Some New Thing The best reason to live is that there is no reason to live. I walked to your apartment in the late night. Flowers I didn't plant began to be flowers and I was a color and then I was none. Conrad said, let the train take you anywhere, pass all the old stops. I let the train take me anywhere, I passed all the old stops. With you I liked being nowhere and with you I live nowhere now. The best reason to paint is that there is no reason to paint. Keith Haring wrote that. It could be about us. I go into churches and I go into bars: I feel the time stop. To feel--you can't stop at some point. Not a religious thing. Why on earth or why not. Let's be in a Sunday morning with no complacencies of the peignoir, no late coffee or oranges--all he does is watch the neighborhood dogs getting walked. No one will let you through if you don't walk your own sadness. No one will let you touch if you're a person at all. One summer we walked the entire island of Manhattan, we were our own animal. From Inwood to the water to your small want. And you. You, you, you you can read these lines in any order because I want to leave nothing out and there's nothing here. Words are just words. What I feel I feel twice and risk three of. Some new thing. How there's more here without us at all.
As always, I hope there's something in this letter you'll take with you. If you know of someone who might like it, I hope you'll consider passing it along. Thank you so much for reading.
Until next week,
S
Thank you for sharing these words and links. I love how I learn something new here and how, what you share leaves me "feeling" something deeply.