Still Sundays

April 10th.

Venice, Italy.

the nature of Nature and us. art & the energy of the artist. “What will survive of us is love” from Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin. Dedicated to my brother Zain.

 

 

If you would like to know what Still Sundays is about, please take a quick gander here and just read the third paragraph. Thanks.

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Stillness on a Sunday in Venice is occupied and not readily available. Every street to stillness was closed off. A Sunday strike. Something I was not expecting despite my travels. I have written “Still Sundays” and worked on other fiction while traveling (despite challenges like time, family, technology) but today was abuzz with static electricity.  Where is an antenna to adjust images into words? I looked for a magnet which allows thoughts to find words without much success all day.

I don’t plan what I write on Sundays. There is no agenda. I stare into the horizon made of stillness and drink the mysterious fizz of champagne thoughts I can’t normally afford.  Sometimes it is one strand that takes everything out of me and other Sundays I am tossed many yarns and I don’t quite to know how to knit them together. But I do know it requires immense concentration to meet stillness. It’s some kind of god and I need to be prepared even if there are no answers. When I am very lucky I am served with the crème de la crème of stillness on a Sunday. I wasn’t very lucky today until later into tonight after dinner.

If it is a must that I write, it is equally a must that I hunt stillness. It is not about noise around that distracts but space that can serve as a medium to reach that stillness. Here and there we found empty streets that were stone quiet but too much shade and without a place to sit and write. Other places were pouring with tourists and those without tourists were closed because it is a Sunday and not everyone wants to share their Sunday.

I wonder if one day I won’t either.

It had to get Stygian this Sunday in Venice in order for angels of stillness to arrive so I could slip into the swimsuit of words. My experiences are beginning to feel too fleshy.

But here I am—I do like a good swim.

Is it still sunday?

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Earlier this week I received an email: I hate to be the bearer of bad news but thought you would like to know the judge you clerked for passed away. I am sorry. See below for funeral services.

That is all it said.

 

I distinctly recall the day I walked into his chambers for an “interview” although I had already officially accepted the offer.  Black skirt suit and heels that made me even taller than I already am. He had my curriculum vitae in his hand—“not the first time I am reading,” he assured me—and he said that he was impressed by my background in social justice work. I told him I was impressed that he was impressed given most judges preferred a corporate background. We laughed. I was distracted by the art in his office. I asked him if I could get up and walk around. He smiled and nodded. I walked around his office and asked about the paintings. He painted! They were his! He asked me if I was an artist. A con-artist, I wanted to respond, I am covered in a suit in which I can’t recognize the self behind all this hard work to be where I am now: an enviable position.

“Maybe law is an art too.”

“Living with honor is the highest art,” he replied, “and law can be that too,” he said.

“Why law?” the judge then inquired.

“It is a powerful tool to change the status quo.”

“Always ask—for whom—change the status quo for whom?”

“Yes, of course,” I said.

 

He was quite handsome, brilliant, and in good health at the age of 74. He had already received two three-year extensions to continue serving beyond his 70th birthday, the mandatory retirement age for judges.  Despite having presided over some high profile cases, among the law network and neighboring community, he was known as a gentleman first, judge second.

He died at the age of 77 this April of “unknown” causes while I was walking around taking photos of eighty-year-old men in Nicolosi, Italy.  I was surprised when I felt tears brim over while drinking my caffè macchiato later on in the day after I had learned of this news in the morning.  I didn’t develop as close a bond with him as is expected between a law clerk and a judge (the dynamics of this particular courthouse didn’t allow for that; I had to work with another for most law decisions) although I really enjoyed working with and for him when I could.  I didn’t know why I cried other than the obvious reasons.

Today while walking around in Venice when a man told me, “There aren’t very many truly good people in the world,” I understood why I had felt the loss to the extent I did. The judge I knew was a very honest man and worked very hard to do everything he could to make honest decisions. One very honest human being is no longer with us and that makes me sad—we desperately need honest people, especially men, especially in the field of law.

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I explored Mount Etna in Sicily during this trip to Italy.

Marco Rojas, my yoga instructor, often repeats during class that earth is a space of dualities. This terrain is a constant back and forth between opposites. “And that so is our nature. Or is it?” Are we made in the image of earth and therefore ignore the mirror that shows us our reflection? Is this why we treat earth the way we do?

We have evolved. To what?

If integration of our dual nature is transcendence then love is the glue that dismantles what stands between. Can you love yourself enough despite who you have been and may never be? Yes, even you who hide beneath the pretentious display of some deformed love that isn’t quite loving? And yes, even you who accept yourself without giving and receiving? And yes, even me?

We are like volcanoes: we hurt ourselves as much as others when we explode.

I am humbled by nature’s dominion over us. That being said, I am as awe-inspired by human relentlessness to build again and again and again and yet again.  We are a reflection of our planet: earth doesn’t quit, neither do we. We are falling apart at the seams; we will figure this out together even for those who don’t care. The tree doesn’t ask for an admission fee from the plant that needs to grow under its shade. Some plants grow in shade but they grow too.  So we must become trees for those plants that don’t care for the light.

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I have been around so much art and history in Italy that I can barely contain this eternal reservoir of centuries. Art for art’s sake that can stand the test of time must begin with a sketch of time at hand.

Our disassociation from who we are and what we create—this cognitive dissonance which allows us to separate the artist from his craft when we so “appreciate” or “support” without regard to the energy of the source hinders art that may stand in time. Our definition of art for art’s sake is: me. Whose story are you telling?  To a real artist all stories are personal yet none are about him or herself.

We can’t even allow ourselves to think ourselves capable of creating something that will last long after we are gone because we are so hungry for some approval—any approval—an approval that often lasts as long as “like” or “retweet” or “post hit” or acceptance by some fellowship / award / grant that you didn’t even know existed until you applied.

What are you really hungry for? Take a bite. The world needs you to digest yourself.

Granted things are not easy—we don’t have churches paying our bills to create frescoes to honor some Higher Authority but our problems our still within the spectrum of challenges faced by many before us.

I don’t know when we fell asleep to dream dreams that aren’t even real. A real dream feels very real. So real it becomes a memory.

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I dreamt last night I woke up in an empty Venice and all I could smell was the scent of lavenders and the perfume Coco Mademoiselle by Chanel. I wasn’t scared because I knew everyone was still inside and would remain so until I was done walking around. I was walking around sun glazed cobble streets and walls with salty colors.

All very opposite of the hectic crowds I woke up to this Sunday morning. Is there a merchant of Venice that can sell peace?  Would anyone buy?

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An individual, let’s call this person Metropekalina, saw a photo of me while sleeping and commented: “What a beautiful photo. You look so peaceful. It’s like resting while in motion.”

It’s nice when someone can see you when you can’t see yourself doing exactly what you have been trying to do.

Metropekalina is honest.

The Universe maintains balance even as it expands.

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On April 8th, 2011 before going to sleep I concluded most of us would ask the magic fairy that has all the answers “why” and not “what next?” We only care about the future to the extent we can understand our past. We don’t understand much.

 

I leave this Sunday that is touching Monday with the following words from Philip Larkin’s poem “An Arundel Tomb” that I do understand very clearly:

Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

 

Today’s stillness would not have been possible without my brother Zain.

~a.q.s.

 

 

Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin

Side by side, their faces blurred,
The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd —
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.