Domestic Left #46: As falls water
When the dam breaks the water is everywhere, like a sadness you didn’t know you felt, like the tears you have never been able to cry. It washes over your body, your hair, your skin. Your limbs, usually awkward, find their place. Your muscles, usually tense, relax as they bathe in the current.
Your brain, which has been firing a hundred thoughts a minute, unable to stop jumping, is now of necessity focused, not calm exactly, but no longer agitated. Your heart floats just a little. You surrender to the flow.
It is dark and no one else is awake. This only ever happens when you are alone.
I have never been especially fond of movies. I still watch them every so often, even occasionally in a movie theater, and I have immense respect for them as an art form. But the older I get, the more I avoid them.
What bothers me about film as a medium is its overwhelming force, the plentitude of tools a director has at his or her disposal to sculpt your emotional response: light, sound, close-ups, long shots, dialog, music, quick cuts, long pans, landscapes, interiors, winks, grimaces, commotion, silence, humor, pathos, life, death, kisses, tears. And I am just incredibly resistant to turning my emotions over to someone else so completely for two-plus hours.
I admit, this resistance may not be my healthiest trait.
The last movie I watched, thankfully on Netflix, was Wes Anderson’s Asteroid City. I was so overwhelmed by how much I loved the movie, maybe not even the movie so much as its conceit, its structure, its artifice, that I had to stop after 10 or 15 minutes and take a break. I didn’t resume watching it until a full week later.
The film is full of grief and joy and playfulness and rueful irony in equal measure, and as flat as paper. The dialog is stage-mannered to a fault, and bone-dry. And it occurs almost entirely in the desert.
I spent the Covid lockdown in Vermont, and I walked. I walked all over Burlington, along the lakefront of course but also every single street in my Old North End neighborhood, the patch of old-growth forest hidden in the New North End, the swampy redstone quarry tucked away in the South End. I walked to South Burlington to bathe in the pines south of Swift, and down to the Winooski River, lined on both sides with old brick woolen mills.
I had always assumed that the “Winooski Falls” referred to the stretch of the river just east of the bridge, where it cascades gently over the rocks, but I learned from reading the faded historical plaques posted here and there that underneath the water pooled behind the Winooski One dam is an ancient crevice where the river used to leap, a true waterfall.
Although the current hydroelectric dam was only built in the early 90s, the river has been dammed here since 1786, a year after the town of Burlington was established.
When the dam broke, you had just wakened from a dream about a staff meeting in which you had laid out all the reasons why nothing would succeed. You were very convincing, but after leaving you thought better of it, so you went back to give a speech about how, while the odds are long, the work must still be done, and we must find our purpose not in the outcome, but in the setting to it. Your brain believed every word of what you said, but your heart did not.
And you must have returned to the wrong room. It was full of people who were, indeed, setting to the work, but they spoke no English and simply stared at you blankly.
On your way out you ran into two of your co-workers who mock-fisticuffed you, because that is how men greet each other.
Gian Lorenzo Bernini could make marble perspire like skin, ruffle like hair, flow like water. He brought to life the workings not just of limbs and muscles, but hearts and minds. He took a staid, earthbound art form and made it leap into the air, as dynamic as waves crashing on the shore, as intricately cast as the spells of a river god.
He was the boy genius of the Roman Baroque, proclaimed as such at age eight by Pope Paul V. Like his idol, Michelangelo, he excelled not only in sculpture, but in other arts as well: painting, architecture, theatre.
In his time, the seventeenth century, it has been estimated that a full four percent of the population of Rome were artists. Art was utilized enthusiastically by the Catholic Church as part of its culture war with the spreading heresy of Protestantism. Against the austerity of Luther and Calvin the Church’s artists deployed a style that was intense and emotional, using dynamic motion and vivid color and high contrast to make you feel the suffering of Christ on the cross, the devotion of saints and martyrs, the love of Mary for her child.
Bernini designed, among other things, the Piazza San Pietro, the plaza in front of St. Peter’s Basilica in Vatican City, with its curved colonnades that can embrace up to 100,000 visitors. They were designed to represent “the maternal arms of Mother Church,” but to modern eyes, seen from above with our aerial technology, they resemble nothing so much as the forceps used to pull babies’ heads from their mothers’ wombs.
Bernini’s interest in theatre encompassed not only set design but writing, directing, acting, and even the mechanics of stagecraft. Apparently, he once produced a play about the flooding of the Tiber that featured real water on stage, overflowing its boundaries and rushing towards the audience, only to be stopped by a mechanical barrier rising at the last minute.
The last time I was in a movie theater was for a short-film festival. The first film was called “Sunless.” It was about two men in a tiny submarine pushing to previously unknown depths of the ocean. The pressure, of the water on the vessel, of the situation on the men, of the filmcraft on the viewer, was immense, and almost unbearable. I am not sure we are meant to plumb those depths.
After the water has washed over you, after the waves subside, you stare around at the slippery rock, wet and spent, a water-carved sculpture like nothing you have ever seen before, or at least not in a long time, maybe in a dream once, and you remember that when you build dams, you should leave a crack in them.
No playlist this time, but here are a couple of songs I’ve had on repeat recently:
Lincoln Highway by Too Much Joy
From the band’s Facebook page: “The first draft of the lyrics were written as Tim drove his dad’s car west on the Lincoln Highway, delivering it to a purchaser he’d found for it in California. That car was the last of his father’s possessions to be disposed of, after getting him situated in an assisted living facility in Massachusetts — his father had been forced to sell his house after suffering a brain aneurysm and collapsing the night before Tim’s younger brother’s funeral. It was a pretty shitty couple of months.
“Coincidentally, Jay sent Tim his initial demo of the music for this tune while Tim was driving a different car east on the same highway (Tim loves driving that road exactly as much as he despises driving on interstates.)”
I am fully in agreement with Tim on the last point (and look for a post in the coming weeks about, well, driving the Lincoln Highway).
Ora et Labora by King Blue Heron
Last weekend I went to a show of local bands at my regular coffee shop/hipster bar on Pittsburgh’s Northside. I must have been at least two decades older than anyone else there, and because I wake up early and so get tired early, I ended up leaving halfway through the second band’s set.
However, the first band, King Blue Heron, were fantastic — more than worth the price of admission on their own. They write exactly the kind of melodic twangy aching songs that I wanted to be able to write when I was their age. They had released their first single that very day, and I’ve been listening to it constantly ever since. “Ora et Labora” is Latin for “pray and work,” and they introduced the song as being about “how nuns are gay.” It contains the perfect line “I would create the whole world just to hold her.”