Brother Fire

St. Francis' Order was founded eight hundred years ago this year - in 1209 AD, in Assisi.

St. Francis was so crazy in love with God! So was Clare. Both renounced medieval middle-class. She was a young girl who followed him - escaped the marriage her parents set up. She eloped to Francis' chapel, San Damiano, outside of Assisi, cut off her hair and married God. Both undertook a life of keeping their hands empty - burning themselves up for God.

They created twin orders, the Friars Minor and the Poor Clares. Francis turned over San Damiano to Clare, where she gathered followers, and became its abbess. He died in a hut, on a mat on the floor. She lived more and more in seclusion. By the end, she didn't need to leave her cell to attend Mass - it appeared as a vision on her stone wall. Today she is the Roman Catholic Church's patron saint of television.

I think they were lovers. They shared one meal. I love their foolish love affair with the world and the sun and moon and birds and mountains and olive groves. Their unequivocal sense of place in those God-lit hills of Umbria.

Here is a verse of Francis' Canticle of the Sun, as we descend into the darkest part of the year:

"Be praised, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
through whom you brighten the night.
He is beautiful and cheerful, and powerful and strong."

all saints

Turn the tables to November: cool not cold, damp. Trees' hilarious outburst is over. Now, sober rusts and coppers, with a few deep-yellow maples and birches, like the most luminescent Easter egg I could dye, or its yolk. The prayer begins: "Winter, hold me safe till then!" The spice of the leaves - dying both wet and drying - answers, overpowers.

All saints, all souls - I was called back to haunt this spot again! I've found a chair. Life is good for the departed here, nestled in bowl in hillside.

I look up, in The American Heritage Dictionary:

Evocation: "summoning or calling forth; creation anew through the power of memory or imagination - ' calling out'"

Invocation: "calling upon for assistance, support, or inspiration - 'calling in'"

Don't trust something that doesn't smell. City art-making-and-selling - sanitary poison. Thought-tinkered process, packaging, selling, structure for structure's sake, commentary and comparison - death-dealing. Undercuts evocation, invocation, purpose, feeling, how they are the same as the material, the stuff, the movement, the leaves.

the feeling

Don't dance prose.
Don't talk about something else with dance.
The dance is itself. Let it live.
Dance these days - a horror house of mirrors - overefractingly self-and-history-referential. Just make it. All that other stuff about you and your process and your investigations will be there, don't worry.

by the seams

I performed Martha Graham's "Lamentation" in Paul Besaw's Dance History & Legends class this morning. I hadn't spent time with it in since last February, and coming back to it I realize: must understand better what I am doing. I can't just be doing Martha Graham - not to imply, Martha, that you are just anything. When doing a work as famous as this, there is a complex layering of identity and purpose. And then there are the images and movement contained, suspended in the fabric of the work itself. This is fundamentally what to get at - this is what Martha was getting at. The first time around I was just trying to get at her.

So here I am, trying to get into the seams - in the backdoor - down to the bedrock - of Lamentation. I am just beginning, but think Lamentation might be good done on a rock. Or it is the rock. The shapes are like caves, the core is powerful, solid. Skin and rock, seams and fissures, wounds gaping, wounds hidden. Wombs hidden. The first shape, a mound of the dancer, folded on herself by the seams - is a deep purple mountain.

Here is Lamentation in whole, performed by Peggy Lyman.

calves and toes: more than we know

Went to my twenty-year high school reunion on Saturday. We are all still ourselves! Each person's gesture, movement - so familiar. We really knew each other: chemicals, nerves, muscles, skin, and heart. Some more deeply than others, but all more than we know.

But since the last time I saw you - the people I spent twelve physical years of Catholic school with - every cell on us, except nerve cells (the ones that feel and remember) have been replaced. We've died by pieces and replaced ourselves. You can see it: a canniness and a grace achieved - knowing death and birth - along with stray grey hairs and beginnings of wrinkles. It makes everyone look better.

There was so much to hear, report, laugh about, include, omit- it was too much. Wished I could cut out the talk, or turn down the volume, and just watch everyone. Really look - or smell - or touch. And before and after, on my seven-hour drives to Pennsylvania and back, I missed everyone. What comes up is sensory reassessment, revisiting, remembering. All the wantings, not-wantings, gettings, not-gettings - they percolate into the stories I live, now.

This rite is for Kerry - it was so fun to see you at the reunion - responding to your response, from way back!

Here in Vermont it is a speechless time of year. The colors, in perfect disorderly jumble, are clownish, are ridiculous, are laugh-out-loud. There is nothing to do but stand mouth agape - and applaud. The trees are going out, flaming - the trees are dying for the year, burning up. Things die to perform, they die to come into their own. This is a performance to match any performance anywhere in the world. It calls to mind Annie Dillard's quote "any life without sacrifice is a sacrilege." The dying must happen, for the life to be lived.

Breakfast 1977

This week is my brother Donald's birthday! He is only two years and two months older than me, my closest sibling in age. And this year, a particularly auspicious birthday, Donald requested homemade art. So Happy Birthday, my music man! I call to mind that Donald gave some of the first home performances I witnessed - a master of subtlety, rhythm, focus, and consistency at the Byrne breakfast table, back in the day - so this performing-at-home thing is nothing new. All you see here is true.