And, to round out the giving of words, I’ve been meaning almost all semester to write about this, one of my favorite poems:

the Camrbidge ladies who live in furnished souls

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds

(also, with the church’s protestant blessings

daughters,unscented shapeless spirited)

they believe in Christ and Longfellow, both dead,

are invariably interested in so many things—

at the present writing one still finds

delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?

perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy

scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D

…. the Cambridge ladies do not care, above

Cambridge if sometimes in its box of

sky lavender and cornerless, the

moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy

[i carry your heart with me(i carry it in]

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in

my heart)i am never without it(anywhere

i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done

by only me is your doing,my darling)

                                                      i fear

no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want

no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)

and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant

and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows

(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud

and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows

higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)

and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

As long as I have started for myself this trend of sharing quotations, I thought I would share a poem with you guys.  I’ve been writing on the blog in hints and whispers about how much the arts have meant in my life, and how much writing, in particular, has made me the person I am, but I have not shown you at all what I mean.  Words have been everything to me, though I think I have said that before, and poetry has often been the only way I can struggle through myself toward truth.  So it seems, with the semester officially done, that it’s high time I post a poem I wrote.

The Cacophony of Wonderment

What, in the dark, is all this cacophony of wonderment,

all this gathering-forth of majestic things, rushing out to meet the dawn,

to call like gulls upon the edges of the world, to memorize

in slow arcs and simple dives,

the contours of the thoughts spun out beneath the light and strung starwards?

What, after all, is all this legacy of dawn and daylight,

what mystery to us, who live beneath the hours of night,

transfixed, perhaps, by the starlight strong of afternoon, unknown,

what is any of it but questioning laid to sleep before the loam and atmosphere.

For we are cursed things, cared-for, wearied and riddled with the weight of

all the agonies we cast.

The storm is come, the wind a battered voice against the brightness of the things before,

and all the world is cloaked in cold and salt spray.

We will turn again to tunnels, deep dry places beneath the earth

where we are safe from the menace of the monstrous skies,

beneath the arching of the resting-places made our homes.

But for today, let us behold the bounty and fullness of our lives, the highs and the lows, which bear witness to our being alive, beholding them without too much theologizing, but with simple gratitude.

-Buddy Stallings

The priest at my church runs a blog, and a few weeks ago he closed one of his posts with this.  Coming from him, it’s a theological statement, one about how we should live our lives, the gratefulness we have the ability to carry in our hearts.  But I think it’s a beautiful assessment of the world, whether or not it is taken with a religious perspective in mind.  With the semester’s end, I find myself looking back at the months we’ve passed, and, even more, looking forward to what is to come, and I am full with what Buddy Stallings calls “the bounty and fullness of our lives.”  I like this, that we can be so aware of all the things we have, regardless of the pitfalls and troubles we are living in the midst of.  I like that we are able to see through to light, if we push hard through the shadows.  That, really, I think, is an enormous part of why we have art.  Which is not to say that art is always about good, always about illumination.  Sometimes its very purpose is the dark and the shadow.  But I think a lot of art has the ability and the intention of increasing our sense of the world.  And that, I think, by its very nature, must “bear witness to our being alive.”  We live in the fermatas and the brush strokes, in the joy between the letters on the page.

I, along with a rough dozen other Macaulay freshman, have spent the last two months working on the exhibition of Snapshot photos that went on today.  It was a very amateur show, and it did not look like it was curated by professionals, but it’s something that I think all of us ended up being proud of, if only because of the amount of time and care that we dedicated to it.  I think the event was scheduled terribly, because finals are looming so close, which made both the work of curating and, for everyone else, actually attending, much more of a challenge, and I know a lot of people didn’t make it, but I just think that the entire concept behind Snapshot is an interesting one.  Which is not to say that I don’t understand why people grumbled about having to go–I probably would have, too, if I weren’t one of the curators.  But what emerged from the meetings we had was really interesting–I began to see the places where people’s passions began to overlap with the work they were dealing with.  Because I am a writer, I wanted to deal with the interaction between text and photography, so another curator and I ended up making one exhibit wherein we wrote poems inspired by photographs and paired them together, and on my own I built an accordion book in which I literally layered photographs, on transparencies, over the text of a poem I wrote.  Another project, which was nixed due to a really unfortunate logistical twist of fate, involved the relation of an image of dance to the snapshot images.  One show paired microscopic images with the snapshot pictures, thus uniting biology and photography, and architecture students curated exhibitions involving their own focus of study.  In one, manmade light imitated natural light, and in another, the manmade elements of the photos were cut away, so that they only lined up if you stood in the right place, and, if you stood elsewhere, the separation between manmade skyline and natural environment was emphasized.  In a third, all the photos of bridges were lined up so the bridges connected into a single long span, and in a fourth images of crosswalks were attached in a circular panorama, which the viewer stood inside of.

This is really inspiring to me, this ability we have to unite different spheres of our lives, even in something as small and as simple as the Snapshot show.  It gives me hope, too, that we will continue to do new things, that we will continue to live and make the world exciting.  And I think it makes the experience of the world more beautiful, if we are able to find the things we are passionate about in seemingly unrelated circumstances, if we can pass our daily lives in excitement and in awe.

I go to a fellowship group every week with college students from all over the city, and while our primary purpose there is to have teachings and Bible study, you cannot meet once or twice a week every week with the same group of people without cementing some kind of a community.  A fair number of the kids in the group are artists, in some form or another.  Some of them go to fashion school, or Tisch, and a surprising number go to Julliard.  This has, in some ways, been immensely intimidating.  I can think of few things more impressive from someone of my own age than knowing that they got into Julliard.  That speaks of a level of skill and dedication of which I am in awe.  But it has also just been really interesting, to get to meet people who love so much the thing they have dedicated themselves to, and who are so ready to immerse themselves in their passion.  It is more like going to a school so populated with engineers than I would have expected, being around all these artists–the sense of purpose and the amount of work tend to be the same, though the societal expectations of the paths are extremely different.

It’s made me think, being so often around these people, how daring it is to pursue the arts.  I know a harpist, a pianist, a ballet dancer, a cellist, and an opera singer.  And I think it is incredible, the amount of training they are putting into the development of these skills.  But what I truly think is remarkable about these people, who are as in love with their arts as I am with writing, is how open they are, and how eager, for other people’s passions.  Last week, my friend Bobby, who is an opera singer and a senior at Julliard, played and sang for me a number of short pieces he’s been working on for a performance coming up early in December.  Last night, I showed him some of my poetry.  There were more intersections between the two than I would have thought.  We were each dealing with our own kind of craft, we were both interested in sound and verse and vocabulary and definition.  It was incredibly exciting, to talk about art, and listen to someone else talk about it, in a way that was personal and immediate and passionate.  I think the connection between our interests has been the most obvious, because his music is in some ways directly wrapped up in language, but I’ve found this connection with a lot of my friends.  And that’s made me think a lot about the way our culture looks at different areas of study.  There’s a lot of emphasis right now on STEM careers.  And I think STEM careers are exceedingly important, and that people can be just as passionate about them as I am about the arts.  I don’t want in any way to belittle the importance of engineers and doctors.  But I also think these other areas are important.  I watch the arts in every form fading from our schools, especially our public schools, and that makes me extremely sad.  There’s so much purpose and so much joy in art, and, further, art has, in my life, become a bridge.  It has so often, especially recently, been a way for me to communicate with other people, a way for us to understand the places in which we are the same, the things that matter to both of us, and I’m incredibly grateful for that.  In part, this is just the inspiration of Thanksgiving rubbing off on me: I want to bask in the things for which I am grateful, and to be grateful more often than I am.  But it is also a realization–I have been, in some subconscious way, pushing away from the arts.  I figure that I love math, and I love science, and that somehow compensates for my real passions.  Because I do love physics, and calculus, and I’ve been interested in learning about just about everything for just about as long as I can remember.  But I don’t want to think that the arts are something that needs compensation for, not after all they have done for me, and all, I think, they have yet to do.

This is something my Julliard friends have figured out.  Perhaps what they’re doing is not altogether practical, but part of what they’re learning is how to apply it.  They’re learning the passion and the practicality of their trades.  And I think I’ve learned, from them, that this is what matters to me as well.  Doing the things I am best at, and care most about, in some way (what way I am not yet sure) that has applications in the world, will do far more good, for myself and for everyone, than pretending I can live without these joys.

I think it’s hard to grasp a modern opera, because our culture is not one that is at all supportive of opera as a genre.  But I’m not altogether certain that internet relationships, cyber bullying, and falsified identities are any less suitable for an opera than death, love, and tragedy.  Does it really make more sense to sing about war or demise or true love, or are we just more used to it?  I’m inclined to believe the latter.  There was also a note in one of the reviews about chat rooms already being rather dated.  That struck me as odd, referring to an art that often centers on members of the aristocratic elite set two or more hundred years ago.  Chat rooms are certainly dated, but I don’t think a modern opera has to have accuracy to the second, especially when it refers to actual events.

I also think the opera was quintessentially British in some ways that made it a little bit odd.  The darkness of the stage, the stillness of the actors, and the clipped nature of the dialogue was all extremely reminiscent of British television to me, and while I enjoyed it, it is its own brand of entertainment, one that I think takes getting used to.

There were a lot of things I really liked about the opera: I thought the set design was intriguing, I thought the graphic projections were beautiful, and I thought the movement of the story from past to present was really interesting.  But what I really loved about the opera was Muhly’s compositions.  Most of all, I was entranced by the instrumental complexities that accompanied the action.  It was an extremely modern kind of music, but I think Nico Muhly’s manner of using dissonance and tempo is breathtaking.  It conveyed to me a lot of the sense of movement present in interaction with the internet, as well as a feeling of the contemporary landscape of the disjointed connection between people who may or may not really know one another.  Grace came to the opera because she saw a collaboration between Sufjan Stevens and Nico Muhly sometime last year, and we’ve both listened to Muhly’s music since then.  One of my favorites of his pieces, at the moment, is Part III (The 8th Tune) .  The video there is not extremely important, but it does do a pretty good job of conveying what I find most important about the piece, which is its movement, the way Muhly uses a lot of different sounds really quickly to convey rapid motion.  If you have some time, I highly recommend listening to the album Drones.  It shows what I think was most breathtaking about the opera: the shifts in mood, not only between pieces, but also within the fabric of a single piece, that were so suggestive of motion and stillness, anxiety and moments of calm.  That complexity of sound was what elevated the opera for me, made it so utterly worthwhile, for all its possible faults.  So perhaps I really loved Nico Muhly, and not Two Boys, but I eagerly await any other opera he might compose.