DWELLING
I have invited six artists I respect to contribute to the current door of Trickhouse, with no restrictions whatsoever, nor any suggestions, as to what they might do. Yet I find strong chords of agreement with what has become an abiding concern of mine, in poems and thought, having to do with dwelling, as that concept contains us in various ways, in the simplicity of living with others in space and time, the humility required of such act, and the responsibility that becomes us all in its inherence.
Here you find occupation, “things that contain us,” and the “entire world of us composed as letters,” for it is also in language that we abide, or perhaps it is language that abides us, impels us, step by step, awake and “In the dream,” a “landscape of letters” which is never enough, for we are never still. And our dwelling is never easy, as we look around at the “realities of human need” which impels poetry and life to its own definitions, beyond “conceptual boundaries established by twentieth-century institutions.”
We never “know what’s going to happen,” as at present, when America “aims gunfire at safety and words.” Sometimes our responsibility is to find what constitutes a present, and even to disturb it, dislodge it, to articulate it in all ways, no matter how awkward, how painful, no matter how we might be “predicting the connective & continual grief."
We wander in our dwelling, “where one should not be” at times, whether by route “of the eyes or by the mistake,” for we are, after all, quite human, and only have so much control, sometimes finding “an astray out lived rite” that consumes us “to the tip of the infinite self.”
But we need to ask, too, questions that back us away from such intensity, like “So because I’m 63 (oops 64) and have a condition I’m supposed to go all decorous.” We all have a condition, we all find “rocks” and “thousands weeping,” but the sheer fact of being here still gives us, at times, the sense that “we couldn’t be more thrilled!” For it’s not just us, rather, as the “Buddha teaches that nothing among them is really ‘I’ or ‘mine.’" We live with others, we rinse our mouths, we do “a good day’s work” and we find “unwinding.”
Then we listen to voices sing, we listen to voices raised with poetry in mouths, we listen to air blowing through horns, saxophones, clarinets. And we continue as we do, dwelling with love and others where we are and where we seek. We are with, and in a world, defining it as we go. I could not be more pleased than to be here with Tenney Nathanson, Maryrose Larkin, James Yeary, Jennifer Bartlett, Andrew Levy, Erica Hunt, and Marty
Ehrlich.
Charles Alexander
17 December 2011
(all quotations above from works in this Trickhouse door, by the artists contained herein)
