Only The Bones

Alana Garrigues

this peculiar incident

this life

this

one

life

sacred burst, resonant hum

bubbles

bubbles

bubbles

between the silence

the silence between

the silence between.

the silence between…

everything began so quietly…

everything began so quietly?

i fill pages and pages with ellipses

three dots that ask

‘can you hear what i cannot speak?’

three dots that drift off— away—

an invitation to imagination—

the relation in between

in between the conversation—…

bodies move: celestial

bodies move: animal

bodies move: water and words and wings and fins—

bodies move

in cosmic waltz

we were made to dance…

were we made to dance?

shhh.

let’s allow the silence.

breathe in.

can you feel it?

so much breathing out in this life, so much spinning and twirling and holding on and holding tight… phew!

it leaves me aching for soft,

slow,

singular.

aaaaah.

i breathe the trees.

the mountains, the seas.

the air—

can you see it? the air?

shaking skyward in the heat…

quivering mirage.

opaque veils hugging spongey soil,

barely risen from cool, damp earth.

the air is not invisible.

is the air invisible?

birds sweep past

in v’s and triangles

in massive throngs of unified beat

turning my head, my attention, my eyes,

turning my dreams

all the way from

here

to

there

from

there

to

here.

who leads them?

who is lead by them?

sometimes i watch them,

crowded together, seated

on power lines, in trees,

on huge bare patches of concrete

and they look content in the chattery stillness,

a closer view.

but then, always, they rise…

let us return.

let us come back.

where shall i begin again…?

where it all begins…

breath.

singular, synchronized, unified, one.

breath speaks life.

the universe arrived, it is said, in one. big. bang.

[did it now? once upon a time, it was also said the earth was flat. once upon a time, it was also said the sun rotated around the earth. once upon a time, it is still said that man is the most advanced creature, the pinnacle of life’s expression. but, let’s say it is what we believe:]

bang.

puff.

ding.

sacred vibration.

energetic resonance.

do you hear the first bell?

what of silence in the beginning?

what of noise?

what of pops and pauses and beats and rhythm and shhhh…

what of light?

what of bursts, of stars gathering together, of stars spreading apart?

what of space and spaciousness and outer space and inner space?

what of planets, one and then another,

what of formations of rock and gas

what of assembly, small gatherings of planets, batched agreements to circle a star,

pods into solar systems into galaxies into uni|multi|verse

[or was it the other way around? universe into galaxy into solar system into planet?]

what comes first… expansion or contraction?

[really, though, don’t trust me… i wasn’t there. {sure, some ancient part of me was there, but I wasn’t there.

wasn’t i there?…

i don’t know how it works. welcome to the co(s)mic opera i’ve imagined… eyes glazed over as science teachers spoke to me with biblical conviction of the evolution of an entire multi-planetary, multi-galactic existence, while i nodded and pretended to comprehend, pretended to agree, the nape of my neck dreaming up all the ways they might find themselves wrong… an upheaval of fact, sent to the annals of fiction or mythology, something for future generations to laugh about… ‘how primitive the 21st century beliefs.’

i’ve always liked magic stories better….]

anyhow, back to the communing of planets and stars…

over time, life assembled… mimicking the stars, mimicking the planets:

trees and dust and particles and fish and birds and octopi and mice and ants—ants! ants whoe build entire institutions! methods of transport! colonies, palaces, tunnels, rituals for the dead—and crows!—crows who bear gifts and hold grudges!—and flowers and leaves and clouds and deer and bees and butterflies, and yes—yes, also humans—

life assembled in groups

life, hungry for more life, gathered information:

how to survive,

how to love,

how to hate,

how to want,

how to claim,

how to dream,

how to amass,

how to grieve,

how to destroy,

how to create

and passed it on,

encoded through the generations…

and yet!

and yet!!!

even after all that…!!!

and yet…

it still comes to feel…

we are only one.

alone.

shhhh.

when you tune in…

do you hear it?

the original ding?

ashes to ashes.

dust to dust.

still, i fuel up my car on the memory of dinosaurs—

only the bones remain.

only the bones remain?

Interview by L. Valena
April 25, 2023

I can't wait to hear about your process. Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

Yes, I can! I received a piece of music. It was three-ish minutes long and I think it was called “A Peculiar Incident.” I listened to it several times, first just letting it wash over me and then sort of analyzing it. I found three really distinct pieces to the music that were threaded together. As I began to understand that, I started seeing all sorts of meaning in each of the three pieces, how they play together, and how they change depending on where they are in the piece. There were also long moments of silence, which I guess could be a fourth element to the music.

That’s cool. What did these different pieces say to you? What were your first feelings about them?

I often sit with ideas of art and poetry in terms of stillness and movement. The silence was obviously one type of stillness, but also it opened with these dings that reverberate, that felt very circular to me, very internal, very interior. Then there was almost a waltz element, which felt like human interaction, very dance-oriented, kind of a social, person-to-person thing.

And then another element was these violins that moved from one side of my headphones to the other, through the ears, through the head. That spoke to me a lot of big nature, the movement of birds, wind, the earth, these connected things that are way outside of ourselves. There was this stillness of the circular part, to the violin movement that would go through, which was almost an uncontainable shape. It was so big and there was so much movement. The relationship between these elements was really fascinating. I loved listening to the music.

What happened next, after you formulated these thoughts?

After I first listened to it just to get acquainted, I set it aside. I thought, “I'm responding to music! I don't know what I'm going to do!” I also felt in awe that somebody could create a piece of music in two weeks. That blew my mind, totally shocked me. Then, coming to understand it was really this series of mark-making I did in a journal. Really loose at first, and then mark-making over the mark-making. I started actually measuring out the amounts of time in each section, and the silence. That's when I started getting into those relationships and I actually found some little pieces that weren't exactly part of those forming the silence, the circle, the dance, the wind/air-type movement. I initially thought I would do a mark-making thing. I was thinking of those accordion books, but I didn't know how I could translate it fast. I would want to take months with this to really pull it apart and play with it.

So then I sat down and did a word pool and listened. I wanted to see if maybe it wanted to be poetry. What was fascinating was some of those inner bells that felt very peaceful at the beginning of the music felt like a warning later on, depending on what was around them. I looked at some other pieces of art that had feelings of it to see if I wanted to go into some old art and update that, maybe combine mark-making with existing circles especially. And then I walked away from it. [laughs] I said, “It's all still too here. It's too heady. It’s too much in that intellectual space.” But then I said, “I sense it's going to be words and I'm going to be open to that.”

The other thing was I didn't want it to be too referential. I didn't want to say, “This is what is happening in the piece,” and I was finding that the initial mark-making and word pools were feeling very referential. So I wondered, “What sense do I have when I'm listening to this?” The poetry that I do is very freeform, kind of all over the place with free association, so that started to come in. Then the very end of the poem, I don't know where it came from. I woke up with it! [both laugh]

That’s the best!

It was very clear: this is how it ends. I don't know how it relates, but okay!

That is magic. Those are my personal favorite parts of being a creative person, when something just floats in on its own. “Oh, okay! You know what? You're right. I can make that happen.”

Yeah, it was a really wild experience. I don't fully comprehend what any of it means or where any of it came from, and to do it with music that was just instrumental was quite the experience. It really does make me want to play more with music in my writing and art-making.

Oh, that's great news, that's awesome. I always really appreciate when people really answer the call like that. Sometimes it feels like this project almost uses your creative system to make something that is not yours at all. It's really weird! But I think it's really easy to resist that because it feels so foreign, so good job for just allowing it to happen. It's pretty special.

It's an incredible project that you guys put together. And even though I’d said I was open to any kind of prompt, I still thought it would be something in my wheelhouse: visual art or the written word. I don't know why, I'm so accustomed to that. So it threw me for a loop in the absolute best way possible, the way that opens up the synapses of the brain and shows me that I've been living in this bubble or comfort zone and it's time to get out of that.

Yeah. That feeling of expansion is definitely the whole goal. That's the whole thing. So that's great. Speaking of expansion, your piece is just so big, it's so wide-ranging. It feels like you’re grappling with things that are so much bigger than the human mind can begin to comprehend. Is this something that you spend time thinking about? How does this piece and these themes fit into your life?

I was writing a lot of poetry about nature for a while, and I honestly thought it was poetry about nature. I love Mary Oliver, I love the attention and the noticing. And I really truly thought that’s what it was until I came back to poems months or years later. I saw that I was actually writing about life experience through the lens of nature, unaware that that's what I was doing, but seeing whatever was going on inside of myself, outside of the world, and putting that down.

For my visual art I paint a lot of trees, and I was grappling with the question: What am I feeling that compels me to do this? So much of it is that story, that history. So I paint these tree rings. I just find it so magical when I'm walking through the woods, and I look at the rings of a tree that has come down. The story can be read of not only that tree’s history, but also the history of the roots and what was around it and what else was happening in the world.

I do this thing where I look really, really, really closely at that minute detail and I get lost and untethered in the largeness. That’s why that waltz part of the music was the hardest part for me. There’s something in that tension that's in all of my visual art and my writing. I think part of the poem speaks something of contraction and expansion, and without meaning to say it, it shows up, and then I recognize the struggle going on there.

I think it's so easy to get lost in either place, the tiny detail or the largeness, right?

Yeah, I don't know what it is, but it's those things that are out of reach and it's fascinating to try to find them in the impossibility of all of that. I want to try to get you and understand you and pull you out in words or lines, knowing that I never really can. And there's something in that striving, in the joy and the struggle and the getting lost, that I just love.

I feel like that also speaks to how the visual aspect, the way the words are arranged on the page, seems very important to you. It feels like that brings another layer of space into the poem, which adds something different. It points out that there's something we can't even figure out over here and we need to pay more attention to it. It's a really cool way of working.

Thank you, it's cool that you noticed that. I don't really know where things go on the page until I'm putting them down, and it feels like I'm trying to map out where the word appeared in my brain. There's this three-dimensional thing going on where these words are coming from different places and I'm wondering, “Is this a low deep word? Or was it more like a floaty word that I almost couldn't grasp?” And I'm trying to put this three-dimensional perspective onto a two-dimensional page.

Wow, that's awesome. Good for you for even attempting to translate these things! Do you have any advice for another creator participating in this project for the first time?

The more that it's possible to loosen into it, the more possibility it allows for surprise. Part of what's really exciting about this type of project is that being able to respond to a stranger's work, to a piece of their heart, is like this little portal into a world that wouldn't otherwise have been created. You know, if I came into it thinking I'd just do what I usually do in my visual art or my poetry, it would be almost forcing that gift to be something else. Just open up to the gift that's there and allow yourself to be a little lost in it for a few days, and then respond as best as you can, still being authentic and honoring yourself and your process. I think the tricky thing is that looseness, not being too referential, and still honoring that person's work. Be open to what might come.

Call Number: M71MU | M73.gaOnly

Alana Garrigues is an intuitive artist and poet who hails from the Pacific Northwest land of cedar and ferns and now resides among trees of the deciduous sort in Holden, MA. Infinitely curious about the what-ifs, the wonder of life, and the in-between, she spends her time exploring what paints and words and bodies and thoughts can create. Find her on Instagram @alanaofloveandlight or on her website at alanagarrigues.com.