Painting by Paul Vesely

Singing A Bird’s Song

Begin.

Never ask where a call ends

and a song begins.

Before the sediment of the west

pulls down the sun,

sing until your feathers burn.

So you have only five notes:

try purity of tone.

Sing the weight the moment

of a single branch can hold.

Don Welch

There’s is much to be said about purity of tone, about singing the weight the moment of a single branch can hold. I’ve seen this truth play out in many ways, through many means. The painting above gives testimony to the weight of a single-haired brush and the purity one can find in the remarkable tone of oak and paint.

My husband paints ducks. With the tiniest, finest brush imaginable. One stroke of oil paint at a time, each stroke laid lovingly beside and layered purposefully upon others until a mallard drake and hen take shape. He knows the anatomy of a duck: the particular way a wing looks folded or in flight, the just-right green and iridescence that plays around the neck, the browns that hunker down into the brush, and the watchful, wary eyes. There are no details he misses as he works from blank oak to duck.

Here is a love that passes understanding for most of us who can appreciate a fine piece of art–a creature so keenly captured in paint–but who cannot begin to know or feel the very essence of all that makes a duck. But herein lies one paradox of purity: in its singleness, it speaks largely. Paul understands this, for his ducks take on the weight the moment of a single branch can hold. And yet, they take on a larger life that speaks of beauty and movement and instinct.

Native American poet and journalist, A. D. Posey, writes: At the end of your story, you get down to the purity of it all. It’s like distilling something. In a world gone macro, a world in which most move quickly, washing theirs and others’ lives with broad strokes, the distilled thing has become increasingly rare. To get down to the purity of it all? This would suggest that there is something precious to be found in distillation. And sadly, many have turned up their noses at such work, preferring instead, the quicker, easier work on the surface of things. The purity and depth to be uncovered with single-haired brushes is foreign to such folks.

When you can only sing five notes, however, for some, purity may give way to obsession. Yet another paradox of purity is this: that the love of a single thing or person can be both wonderful and terrible, both life-giving and life-taking. In Old School: A Novel, Tobias Wolff writes:

Had he learned nothing from all those years of teaching Hawthorne? Through story after story he’d led his boys to consider the folly of obsession with purity – its roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self.

Purity’s roots sunk deep in pride, flowering condemnation and violence against others and self? Such is Alymer’s love of Georgianna in Hawthorne’s “The Birthmark.” Alymer is an older, reclusive scientist–clearly not ideal husband material for the young and beautiful Georgianna.  Her beauty is nearly flawless, but for a tiny hand-shaped birthmark upon her cheek. Alymer is fortunate to win her hand in marriage. That is, until he comes to regard her birthmark as a slightest possible defect, a visible mark of earthly imperfection. 

Preoccupation with his wife’s imperfection leads to obsession. Hawthorne writes:

. . . he [Aylmer] found this one defect grow more and more intolerable with every moment of their united lives. It was the fatal flaw of humanity which Nature, in one shape or another, stamped ineffaceably on all her productions, either to imply that they are temporary and finite, or that their perfection must be wrought by toil and pain.

And so it is that Aylmer, armed with obsession for purity and devotion to science, offers to remove his wife’s birthmark, her fatal flaw of humanity. Out of love and unwavering belief in her husband’s scientific prowess, she consents. Ultimately, Aylmer prevails, and the birthmark fades completely. But so does Georgianna. The death of his now-perfect wife leaves him awestruck and alone. Hawthorne leaves readers with this insight into Alymer:

Yet, had Alymer reached a profounder wisdom, he need not thus have flung away the happiness which would have woven his mortal life of the selfsame texture with the celestial. The momentary circumstance was too strong for him; he failed to look beyond the shadowy scope of time, and, living once for all in eternity, to find the perfect future in the present.

Alas, to find the perfect future in the present! The pursuit of purity demands a profounder wisdom, a wisdom that, tragically, Aylmer and Adolf Hitler did not have. Their eyes were locked on the perfect, Aryan future, and in pursuing this, they forsook their hearts for their heads. Committed to a single purpose, they pushed towards a pure ideal, leaving lives in their wake.

This profounder wisdom is one that Olympic runner and missionary, Eric Liddell, understood as not crushing the instincts but having the instincts as servants and not the master of the spirit (The Disciplines of the Christian Life). Both Liddell and Henry David Thoreau understood that the master of the spirit was not man, but God, and, as Thoreau writes, that man flows as once to God when the channel of purity is open (Walden).

If you only have five notes at your disposal or you only desire to sing five notes, there can be wonderful, life-giving purity when your eyes are fixed on the master of the spirit. And whether this comes from a stroke of a paint brush or a word, this distillation may reveal the essence of something both singular and universal.

Bring your best eyes and ears, bring your heart and soul. The channel of purity is open for those who will enter.

For Griffin and Gracyn, ages 4 and 8

I hear the first sobs,

but the wind carries them away now.

His head bends into his sister,

and they move—as one child—

toward the school.

It is enough that he leaves

his hat and heart in my hands.

But this!

This promise of return

flies, as it must,

a fierce flag in the space between us.

And his sister who takes him in,

whose hand in his, a small clutch of love,

promises what I cannot:

I am here,

I am right here.

Fifty yards away,

the edges of their silhouette cut me.

This is almost more than I can bear,

this surety that so much life goes on beyond me,

that they will enter the school

and not look back.

For those of us who may be questioning our planks

Good Planks

The old barn lists

in a field of sumac.

The seams of its hull have eased

into a hole on the north side.

But from the south,

its planks are good.

From the south,

it is an ark whose girth spreads wide

across a hillside of milk weed pods and goldenrod.

So it is with you.

Three rows behind you in the theater,

I cannot see your head.

Your back which age has bent into the seat

leaves only a wedge of violet collar

in the fading light.

From the rear, it seems your flesh has given in,

your molecules spilling into and out of this place.

But when I leave, I turn to see that from the front,

your planks are good.

From the front, your hands are small wrens

that hum in your lap,

and your eyes, two bright marbles,

search the room like wild cats.

Shannon Vesely

I knew Rome was burning, but I had just enough water to scrub the floors, so I did what I could.

Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

Wild fires burning out of control, hurricanes ravaging one state and then another and another, nuclear threats, mass shootings–it seems as though Rome is burning. And sitting in my rural Iowa home, I find I can do little but scrub the floors. And pray.

This week, California wine country is burning–hundreds of homes destroyed, lives forever changed, and field after field of charred vines. Black where there was once green. Nothing where there was once something, Scrubbing my floors is not much in the face of such overwhelming suffering and devastation. It’s a diversion, and–borrowing a phrase from Robert Frost–a temporary stay against confusion. Scrubbing floors, folding laundry, unloading the dishwasher, sorting mail–all are small, but necessary means of creating some kind of personal order when the larger world spins mindlessly out of control.

Truthfully, I can look back on so many seasons of my life and say, I did what I could. When I divorced at age 26, I feared that I would drown in shame and regret. How could this have happened to me? Why hadn’t I been able to fix things? What would people think of me now? The flames were licking at my feet, but unlike Nero, I could not fiddle merrily as the fire consumed what was left of my life.

So, I got up each day, went to the college, and taught my English courses. I greeted my colleagues and students with a smile, I came early and stayed late, and I literally put one foot in front of the other. Rome was burning, and I was scrubbing the floor. It was what I could do, it was all I could do.

In kitchens of the bereaved, casseroles line the counter tops. Friends and family often find that they can really do little to comfort one who has lost a son or daughter, husband or wife, sister, brother, best friend or mentor. So they cook in the midst of sorrow. Rome is burning, and the casseroles pile up.

We scrub, we cook and work in hopes that we might lose ourselves–but for a moment–to menial tasks. And though these may seem like acts of great irony and futility, more often they are not. On our hands and knees, a bucket of soapy water beside us, we bend our backs to all that threatens to undo us. We scrub for our very lives.

Upon returning from his grandfather’s funeral, a former student once explained a family tradition. We dig our family graves, he said, and as we do, we work out a whole lot of grief. I remember imagining this young man alongside his cousins and father, thrusting a spade, over and over again, into the earth. And I imagined how these men talked and cried, worked and laughed as the black earth mounded at the top of the grave. In their grief, they dug. It was what they could do, and it was enough.

Recently, along with others from my church, I packed a bucket of cleaning supplies to send to Texas after Hurricane Harvey had dumped feet of rain water, leaving residental areas under water for days. As I sorted the rubber gloves, the clothesline and laundry detergent, the cleaning solutions and dust masks on my living room floor, I sat back and thought, one bucket of help–this is so little. Yet, it was what I could do, and as I arranged the items into the plastic bucket, I imagined who might receive it.

I thought of a family–much like mine–whose photo albums and baby books lay by the curb, damp and decomposing, a family whose brand new sofa was molding in the late summer sun and humidity. From my Iowa home, I could see this family remove the lid from their bucket, take out the supplies, and begin to work. Inevitably, they would salvage little; still, they would do what they could. They would scrub together in a world they no longer recognized.

In Marge Piercy’s poem, “To be of use,” she writes:

I want to be with people who submerge

in the task, who go into the fields to harvest

and work in a row and pass the bags along,

who are not parlor generals and field deserters

but move in a common rhythm

when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

Me, too. I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out. I want to be in the fellowship of floor scrubbers. We may not rise to the status of heroes or saviors, but we will go about those tasks that we can and must do. And we can do this with the knowledge that others are quietly and persistently doing the same.

Rome will burn and burn again, each fire taking our collective breath away. But we will find solace in knowing that we have just enough water to scrub the floor.

Photo: Roscoe Holcomb

Sometimes, just sometimes,
I seem to get on the high lonesome and if you don’t
Know what that old high lonesome is
Just take my advice
And
Don’t ever get on it.

High lonesome eats at you
All the time
All the time
The old high lonesome
Eats at you all the time

Excerpts from On The High Lonesome, 12/27/1943, words by Woody Guthrie

Woody had it right: High lonesome eats at you, All the time, All the time. At least for many of us (most of us, I suspect?), high lonesome is that audible wail in the darkness and that inaudible wail that rolls in the pit of our stomachs in the light of day. It is both personal and shared, and this, perhaps above all, makes it a sound and a feeling that becomes the property of even those of us who are not blue grass or country musicians.  

Author and research professor at the University of Houston, Dr. Brene Brown has spent the past 16 years studying courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy. In her book, Braving the Wilderness, she devotes an entire chapter to high lonesome. She opens the chapter by defining high lonesome and crediting Bill Monroe with what has become a catch-phrase for the distinctive sound and searing emotion of blue grass music. She writes:

Story has it that as a child, Bill Monroe would hide in the woods next to a railroad track in the ‘long, ole, straight bottom of Kentucky.’ Bill would watch World War I veterans returning home from the war as they walked along the track. The weary soldiers would sometimes let out long hollers—loud, high-pitched, bone-chilling hollers of pain and freedom that cut through the air like the blare of a siren.

Whenever John Hartford, an acclaimed musician and composer tells this story, he lets out a holler of his own. The minute your hear it, you know it. Oh, that holler. It’s not the spirited yippee or a painful wail, but—something in between. It’s a holler that’s thick with both misery and redemption. A holler that belongs to another place and time.

A holler that is thick with both misery and redemption. Now, that’s a mighty fine paradox for you. But truth be told, it is precisely this paradox which may best characterize high lonesome: a wail of pain and freedom, a holler of misery and redemption. This is the sweet paradox that takes its place along altar rails as sinners cry out to God and receive the blessed assurance that they are loved and forgiven. This is the sweet paradox of standing in the driveway as your son or daughter (the child of your heart!) closes the trunk, which has been lovingly packed for college or some new home, and leaves. This is the sweet paradox of loving someone who will bless you and break your heart. It may have been born in the hollows of Appalachia, but it lives–oh, how it lives–everywhere.

High lonesome can be worn, as well as heard. Recently, I watched Ken Burns’ documentary on the Viet Nam War. It seemed to me that every shot of every South Vietnamese man, woman, or child was a profile in high lonesome.  Here were faces that wore countenances of something not-quite-human and yet all-too-human. Faces like moles that burrowed deep into those places of your deepest pain and took up residence there. Weeks after watching the last episode, I continue to see these faces before I sleep and often carry them into my dreams.

Singer/song writer Townes Van Zandt lived in a simple shack with no electricity or phone and performed regularly in dive bars, sleeping in cheap motels and remote cabins between gigs. For most of his life, he suffered from drug and alcohol addiction, as well as bipolar disorder.  Perhaps his most famous song–one performed by the likes of Emmylou Harris, Don Williams, Lyle Lovett and Mumford & Sons–is “If I Needed You.” If high lonesome needed a poster child and a theme song, Townes Van Zandt and “If I Needed You” would fill the bill quite nicely:

If I needed you
Would you come to me,
Would you come to me,
And ease my pain?
If you needed me
I would come to you
I’d swim the seas
For to ease your pain

In the night forlorn
The morning’s born
And the morning shines
With the lights of love
You will miss sunrise
If you close your eyes
That would break
My heart in two

Here, the shining face of morning with its lights of love lives alongside the night forlorn with a pain that needs easing and a heart that may break. If Van Zandt’s lyrics aren’t haunting enough, listen to him sing them sometime. Stripped down, one man with an acoustic guitar, he pulls you in as only a brother-in-need can do. Come in, he beckons, hurt with me, heal with me, be with me. This is the tug of high lonesome.

Brene Brown proposes that high lonesome can be a beautiful and powerful place if we can own our pain and share it instead of inflicting pain on others. And if we can find a way to feel hurt rather than spread hurt, we can change. Sage, but challenging words. Owning our pain so that we can feel hurt rather than spread it takes real courage and vulnerability. This would require putting on our big boy or big girl pants and pairing them with a coat of empathy. And this would require some serious hollering. The kind that was recently heard and felt in Texas, Florida, and Las Vegas, as voices of those who hurt and those who came to hurt with them mingled, becoming inextricably and forever bound.

Like Brown, I choose to believe that high lonesome can be a beautiful and powerful place that reaches far beyond the scope of any blue grass artist or song. We are at our best when we wail together. The collective response after 9/11 testifies to this.

Sadly, however, our hollers are relatively short-lived. When the dust has settled, the funerals and memorials conducted, the clean-up completed, and the monuments built, we begin to forget that we have shared this hurt. The disasters and tragedies no longer newsworthy, we move on–as we must–but often fail to see that there are those, and will always be those, who are hurting in our midst. Their stories may not make the historical record, but in the Sanctuary of High Lonesome, they should make the human record.

The hurting people behind these stories should elicit the best hollers and wails we can muster. And when they cry,    If I needed you/Would you come to me,/Would you come to me,/And ease my pain? we should collectively respond, yes.

Yes, we will swim the seas/For to ease your pain.

Maps codify the miracle of existence.

Nicolas Crane, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet

One doctor sat at a computer to my left, and one with catheters in my groin on the right. After two plus hours, they worked together to map and zap the places in my heart that caused episodes of supra ventricular tachycardia. Awake during the ablation procedure, I heard the doctors talk to each other in a language I tried–but failed–to understand, felt my heart alternately race and then settle into a normal sinus rhythm as they moved the catheter from spot to spot, and marveled at the technology that allows such mapping and zapping. Though I couldn’t see, I could only imagine the wondrous map of my heart that filled the computer screen. Maps may, indeed, codify the miracle of existence.

Recently, I talked with some friends who recounted their son’s love of maps, how he read them as passionately as one might read a great poem or novel, how he scrutinized them as one studies a classical painting, and how he carried them and collected them as one with treasure. For some, maps  evoke an undeniable passion and devotion.

In Crane’s biography, Mercator: The Man Who Mapped the Planet, he profiles the man who created the first map and literally changed civilization. Gerhard Mercator, a 16th century German-Flemish cartographer, solved a riddle that had perplexed cosmographers for so long: How could a three-dimensional globe be made into a two-dimensional map and still retain true compass bearings?

Mercator’s work and vision revolutionized navigation and resulted in the 1569 world map. This new map represented sailing courses of constant bearing as straight lines, a projection that is still employed in nautical charts today. This was a man whose passion for and devotion to mapping the world led to his own persecution and imprisonment during the Inquisition. Yet, this was a map-driven man who changed the way we navigate and see our world.

In his debut novel, The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet, contemporary novelist Reif Larsen chronicles the adventures of T. S., a 12-year-old mapmaker. Larsen writes:

A map does not just chart, it unlocks and formulates meaning; it forms bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected.

For T. S. and others who sincerely appreciate the value of maps and those who create them, maps unlock and formulate meaning. The physician at the computer during my ablation was able to unlock the mysteries of the human heart, that blood-pumping life-giver of a muscle. He could pinpoint abnormal cells. He found meaning in the colors, the lines and shapes of my heart map.

Maps can form bridges between here and there, between disparate ideas that we did not know were previously connected. Think story maps, which begin with a central person, place, thing, or event that takes its spot of prominence in the center. And from this center, bridges burst forth into a spectacle of connections that may have–or may not have–been previously imagined. The map is the thing, indeed. It takes writers and readers from here to there, bringing disparate ideas, disparate people and places together as they should. At the heart of every good tale, there is undoubtedly some type of map. French writer and philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, concurs:

Writing has nothing to do with meaning. It has to do with landsurveying and cartography, including the mapping of countries yet to come.

And what about the largeness of maps, the expansiveness that fills our souls when we look upon boundaries that give way to still more boundaries? For many, a map opens the local to the universal, both literally and figuratively. Its cities and villages, rivers and mountain ranges, its web of fine lines that move with purpose across the page, its scale, its key and compass rose–all proclaim: I can take you there. I can take you anywhere. German writer, Judith Schalansky writes:

Consulting maps can diminish the wanderlust that they awaken, as the act of looking at them can replace the act of travel. But looking at maps is much more than an act of aesthetic replacement. Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits–the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired. Give me an atlas over a guidebook any day. There is no more poetic book in the world.

An atlas, no more poetic book in the world? Seasoned climber and writer for National Geographic, Mark Jenkins says yes because maps encourage boldness. They’re like cryptic love letters. They make anything seem possible. 

For others, like John Steinbeck, a map is neither poetic nor particularly wonderful. He writes:

There are map people whose joy is to lavish more attention on the sheets of colored paper than on the colored land rolling by. I have listened to accounts by such travelers in which every road number was remembered, every mileage recalled, and every little countryside discovered. Another kind of traveler requires to know in terms of maps exactly where he is pin-pointed at every moment, as though there were some kind of safety in black and red lines, in dotted indications and squirming blue of lakes and the shadings that indicate mountains. It is not so with me. I was born lost and take no pleasure in being found, nor much identification from shapes which symbolize continents and states. 

As magnificent and practical as maps may be, I admit that there are times, seasons in my life, when being lost and taking no pleasure in being found seems far more appealing than following a map. Mapless, you can go off-road and surprise yourself with new ventures and adventures. You can think and feel those things that you would never think or feel if you stayed on the road until the map announced that you had arrived at your destination. Mapless, you don’t have to declare a destination at all, and your internal GPS can recalculate until the cows come home. You can just go. You can just be. And if you are lucky, you will not be found–at least until you want to be.

For there are places that even the finest maps may not take us. We chart our own courses, unlikely cartographers in search of these places that are uniquely ours to find. Herman Melville writes that these places are not down in any map; true places never are. Perhaps the truth in these places can never be represented on a map but can only be felt and known. I have been to such true places, and they defy mapping.

So I’m all for maps. And then again, I’m not. There is a time and a season for maps, as there is for most things. Knowing when to map and when not to map, that, indeed, may be the real question.