Making Art While The World Burns

When it is dark enough, you can see the stars. ― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Are you awake?”

Dad used to whisper that, perched at the edge of my bed, three in the morning when nightmares or pain or the ravages of his own impending death snatched sleep from his tired eyes and frightened mind. “I’m awake” I’d say, sitting up, rubbing eyes.

But I wasn’t. None of us were, back then. We just didn’t know it.

Here’s what sleep scientists say. Sleepwalkers don’t know they’re asleep. They just keep putting one foot in front of the other going heaven knows where, some destination known only in deep shadow crevices of their minds.

There was a woman lived in a place I can only dream of, with a sandy beach steps from her front door and one night she walked out of bed, out the door, right off the little pier where her husband kept their boat tied up, woke gasping from the shock of the cold and the wet but at least she woke and thank heavens for that.

Dragged herself out the lake cold and wet and scared, nightgown clinging to her legs as she waded out shaking, shivering but alive. Sometimes I feel like that’s all of us. Collectively. Stunned awake, like we weren’t expecting the shock.

Some people are lucky enough to have a loved one hear them, get up and gently, gently guide them back to bed so they can wake safe and sound in the morning to the sound of song birds singing in the trees outside the window.

I wish someone could do that. Guide us all gently to safety. All of us. The whole crazy world and everyone in it these days. Sleepwalking.

Some of us still aren’t awake. Some never will be.

The trucks woke me.

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Mama used to tell about the order of things like somehow the world makes some kind of sense but sometimes it’s the order of things wakes me in the middle of the night crying, have to get up go do something, make something with my hands try to forget, try find my way but anyway, mama’s gone now so what does order matter?

Tell you what I mean by the order of things making me cry.

Just an example, but my dear Sissy got Covid and then it was long Covid and then a series of tiny strokes, just the smallest tiniest strokes, little lights sparkling the dark of her mind like sparklers held on a summer night and they sneak up when she’s not expecting like when she sometimes forgets how much she loved me once.

I don’t think I know how to bear that kind of trauma, but I will.

I will bear it. Somehow, I will. We all bear things, don’t we.

The world is a mess.

You know that, right? Don’t need the likes of me to tell you it’s a mess.

My mind is perpetually stuck on what if, like the arm of Sissy’s old record player on a scratched old vinyl album when I was a little girl and she’d mutter oh for heaven’s sake, get off the bed and go move the arm. So we can sing again.

But there’s no one to move the arm because Sissy doesn’t remember so good anymore now. So it just sits on that one phrase over, and over, and over.

What if. What if. What if.

What if we’d done things different?

What if people were more like ants, every ant as important as the next and we all had enough food and a warm place to sleep and what if greed wasn’t in our vocabulary? But we aren’t. We are bees, buzzing in silent hierarchy and wasps callously putting the workers out to die when winter comes. Don’t need you no more, out you go.

And me? I will maybe be one of the workers wasps put out in the cold.

But I don’t know for sure. Maybe I can work a little harder. Maybe I can pull myself up by my bootstraps. Maybe I can write a little more.

And the arm of an old phonograph goes scratch, scratch.

On that one phrase. What if.

What if humanity was more — humane?

What if we all mattered and no one was poor?

What if he’d worn a mask that day?

What if Sissy still loved me?

What if it’s my turn?

What if it’s my turn and what if death gladly paid the coins to buy my soul, then what? Would I die in peace? And I don’t know. But I don’t think I would.

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I wrote a poem for Juhi and then she died. It wasn’t even a good poem, but she was my friend and she asked write me a poem and never forgot she loved me and when she sent pictures from the hospital with tubes in her nose I cried and sent jokes and memes to make her laugh and when she said goodbye my dear, it’s not going to be long now I told her I loved her and then curled up and wept on the cold hard floor.

And then I wandered in the desert but the sand was hot and burned my feet and the nights were dark and full of scary sounds so I ran and sometimes I cried.

But I kept on running because that’s what we do, all of us.

Keep going. Just keep on going. Day after day.

We just keep running and doesn’t much matter if we’re awake or asleep because truth is, sleepwalkers don’t even know they’re asleep. So does it matter, if we’re awake?

I used to dream I was looking for a lion and one day the lion appeared and I said where’ve you been and he said I’ve been right here and he gave me a pail of stars and every time I lifted a star out of the pail two more appeared and I laughed out loud and started laying stars on the sand where the shorebirds run alongside the river in the daytime and all the stars turned into words and here’s what they said…

They said look, the moon is a pat of butter.

And I laughed because it was and suddenly I could see in the dark because words lit my way and I don’t know what it was that I was feeling but when I remember that dream I think maybe? It was happy. That I felt.

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Twenty eight years ago James Cameron made a movie called The Titanic and I think that ship was like a miniature world because everything we know was on that ship.

There was love and hate and sorrow. Pecking order and rich people and poor people who were born to go down with the ship because they were never important enough to get a seat in a lifeboat.

People like me. Born to go down with ships.

I cried at the end when Jack didn’t get on the door with Rose but the reason he didn’t is that it wasn’t actually a door it was a piece of wainscoting from the ship and he knew if he got on, they were both going down so he sacrificed himself.

It was the only way he could give her the moon and the stars.

And in the background, music was playing.

Except the band wasn’t playing “Nearer My God to Thee” like in the movie because life is funny and sometimes, people ask questions out of curiosity, fate comes tumbling out their lips and they don’t even know it. Truth is, before the Titanic set sail, a reporter asked the band leader what he would play in the event of disaster.

Wallace Hartley was the band leader, and he said in the event of a disaster he’d play cheerful music. Ragtime. He said if there’s ever a disaster, he wants to be one of the people trying to hold back the panic. And I thought me too, Mr. Hartley. Me, too.

When the ship went down the band was playing “Songe d’Automne,” a ragtime waltz. And I like to hope some of those poor people born to go down with ships were holding each other gently, and swaying softly to the music.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to this world of ours. I wish I did. But I don’t. All I know is this one thing. Only thing I hang onto for dear life.

I’ll be making art when the world burns. Writing words in the sand.

Get you the moon.

“When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson